The Crimson Trail

by Eric Red

  When he was finished, Noose looked at their collective hopeful, doubtful, worried faces. “Anybody got any better ideas, let’s hear ’em. Speak up.”

  The five rovers offered no suggestions. All eyes were on him. Joe Noose experienced a sudden profound realization like a fist in his stomach. They all looked to him! Five men were counting on Joe to know what to do and lead them into battle, giving orders for them to follow that meant life or death. The rovers’ lives, the life of their boss and the outfit’s whole livelihood depended on a string of Noose’s decisions over the long night to come.

  Joe realized that he and he alone was responsible for the lives of these five men—six lives, including Laura’s, were in his hands. His entire life, Noose had never been responsible for anyone but himself until now. Up until this very moment, Noose had been a loner, answerable to his own moral code and responsible only for the actions he took as result; now, in the faces of the five wranglers, four of whom had become his friends, Joe saw respect and trust and a belief in Noose as a man. Knowing that they would follow him anywhere was a sobering realization. It meant he could not let them down. So be it, he thought.

  Rescuing Laura Holdridge brought the six men together into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Fate had brought them all to this place and intertwined their destinies and, fates sealed, there was no turning back.

  Moved, Joe Noose supposed he was experiencing what leadership was; being a leader may have been a first for him, but if being responsible for others gave him this much sense of purpose, if it always made a man feel this good about himself, hell, the bounty hunter figured, he ought to try it more often.

  But Joe had a big problem.

  One of the five wranglers was a killer, and he still didn’t know who.

  Tonight would be a bad night to find out . . .

  * * *

  Night fell on the Calhoun camp.

  Beneath the brilliant twinkling stars above in the vast canopy of black Wyoming sky, a silence lay across the immense landscape so absolute it seemed a negation of sound, as if outer space where the stars hung simply extended to earth.

  In that void, the tents of the posse glowed in the canyon ridge with the light of the coal oil lamps within. Silhouettes of the posse were shadows against the backlit canvas, figures of men playing cards, men cleaning guns, men passing bottles of whiskey, and one woman brushing her hair. When she opened the flap of the tent, shadow became flesh as Laura Holdridge stepped into the opening to get a breath of fresh night air.

  The three armed men in dusters and bowler hats positioned around her tent, carrying rifles at the ready in their gloved hands, each snapped a vigilant glance to Laura, who knew their attentions were benign, so she simply smiled and they smiled courteously back as she pulled her coat around her shoulders and sipped a cup of tea. The guards tipped their hats and turned their backs to her.

  The cattlewoman looked out over the camp below the ridge, then over at her cattle in the ravine, the sight of them bringing a secretive private smile to her lips.

  Her perspicacious gaze traveled up and down the canyon searching for the guard patrols; it was so dark beyond the glow of the oil lamps on the ridge, out past the ledge it fell off into stygian blackness. No signal lights, no fires in the basin. If Cole Starborough was making no effort to conceal the presence of his mercenaries in possession of a kidnap victim and stolen cattle, he certainly wasn’t advertising it either. Where was Cole? she wondered; she hadn’t seen him tonight.

  Her plan was working itself out in her mind.

  If she was going to make her escape, she better do it in the next few minutes. When the guard with the handlebar mustache left to relieve himself, the one with the muttonchops sideburns would be alone on duty for those few minutes. He always had the handles of those two honking hogleg revolvers hanging out of his thigh holsters where any damn fool could snatch them. That’s why as soon as Mustache left for one of his privy breaks, Laura would go back inside the tent and blow out the oil lamp. The darkness would conceal her when, after she asked Muttonchops to come into her tent, she grabbed one of his Colt Dragoons and pistol-whipped him—in his temple, where a good hard blow, Sam Holdridge had taught her, will render the biggest man immediately unconscious. Then it had to be quick. Get his other gun. Take his ammo. Tie him up. Use sheets. Gag him. Put him on the cot. Throw a blanket over him. Leave the tent. When the posse next checked her tent, they would not find her; if her scheme worked, they would not immediately think she was missing because they’d assume it was Laura sleeping under the covers. And when later they looked under the covers, they’d find the unconscious guard whose guns she had taken. With luck, she would be away by then.

  The cattlewoman was fuzzy on the details of what she would do after she got past her guard detail, and leaving the tent was as much of her escape as Laura had planned; to her disadvantage, Cole had intentionally kept her quarantined inside the tent the entire time except for latrine breaks, so Laura didn’t know her surroundings. A partial view of the area when they set up camp a week ago was all she had to go by. The rest of her escape she was going to have to improvise: Hide in the darkness, stick to the shadows and find a way out. Anything goes wrong, head for the cattle, hide in the herd. Knowing her way around her cows was second nature for her, and she could play hide and seek inside the herd for days. See how long Cole and his posse wanted to search for her on foot in those steers, in constant danger of getting gored by all those horns or trampled under all those hooves . . . Come and get me, boys, because if it’s one thing five hundred ill-tempered sleeping cattle won’t appreciate, it’s being woke up by strangers pushing and shoving them in the middle of the night. You don’t want to be around the horns of a testy steer, Mister Cole Starborough!

  The one thing Laura Holdridge was certain of was that the only way out of the camp was the same way they came in—the goat trail. But she knew nothing of the machine-gun nest the posse had installed, having been in the tent the whole time, so in her mind all she remembered was just an empty path. The cattlewoman decided to use the goat trail for her hegira, but next to her leaving the tent in the first place, unwittingly walking into the muzzle of a loaded Gatling gun was the worst possible choice she could have made tonight.

  In a few minutes, the mustached thug took his privy break, just like clockwork.

  And Laura went back into the tent and blew out the coal lamp.

  * * *

  On the outside of the canyon, on the other side of the basin where the posse was camped, vast plains stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see, which was not very far since under a fingernail moon the land was preternaturally dark.

  There was movement a few yards from the base of the goat trail.

  A solitary one of Starborough’s men patrolled the perimeter, carrying a carbine rifle and a brace of pistols under his duster. Bored but alert, his boss told the entire posse to be extra vigilant, and since his boss’s boss ran the whole damn cattle business, the sentinel kept his eyes peeled. The posse man stopped and looked around, but it was pitch-black, and fifty yards out visibility dropped to nil. He squinted into the horizon, making out the faintest black against darker black outlines of a far off mountain range. There was nothing out there.

  He heard a crunch.

  Looking down, the posse man saw his boots were wet with gleaming black oil, only to realize it was blood splashing over his boots, his own blood jetting from his throat slashed by a bowie knife then suddenly jammed to the hilt in his heart.

  Looking up, he saw the pitiless face of Joe Noose, the last face he would ever see.

  The dead man couldn’t have screamed if he tried and died soundlessly.

  When Noose jerked the blade free, the goon instantly collapsed because the muscle of Joe’s arm gripping the knife in the dead man’s chest was holding him up. No need to hide the body, it was too dark for anybody to see anything. Briskly efficient, Joe stripped off the man’s duster and exchanged his Stetson for the ma
n’s bowler. He relieved the corpse of his gun belt, which he would no longer need, and buckled it around his waist. The drag of the weight of the twin revolvers in the side holsters felt good, so Joe quick-drew them, one in each hand—twin Colt Peacemakers, oiled, cleaned, and polished—his brand of sidearm. In rapid succession he checked the trigger and hammer action of each pistol with his thumb and forefinger, flipped open both cylinders confirming full fresh .45 loads in both, spun the revolvers closed with a ratcheting whirr, then reholstered them. He performed all this with blistering speed.

  His lips parted, exposing crooked teeth in a savage grin.

  His eyes told the tale.

  It was good to be heeled again.

  Joe reached down and took the Winchester, also fully loaded, then searched the dead man’s pockets, finding two boxes of .45 cartridges. That made it easy. Could use that same ammo for the repeater rifle and pistols both. He shoved the boxes of shells into the deep pockets of the confiscated coat. Noose figured he better grab all the guns and bullets he could lay his hands on at every available opportunity for the battle ahead.

  This was going to get bloody.

  The only question was how bloody.

  Noose did a last-minute check of the fit of his borrowed outfit so he’d blend in with Starborough’s men. The dead man luckily had been about Joe’s height and breadth but without Noose’s sheer muscle mass. The clothes hung well on his frame, loose sleeves allowing freedom of movement in the arms for fist and gunwork. The duster was expensive handsome custom leather. Calhoun paid his killers well. Nice coat. If he got out of this alive he might keep it. The hat was not his style.

  Closing the flaps of the long duster over his shirt, Noose adjusted the bowler hat on his head, tipping the brim over his face to partially conceal his features. In uniform, the bounty hunter felt confident he looked the part of one of the posse men, and would pass casual inspection as one of Starborough’s operatives if they didn’t get too close.

  Any of them who got that close he’d shoot.

  Ready as he’d ever be.

  Fifty yards off to the left was the goat trail winding up the steep grade of canyon over the top of the ridge. He knew a hundred yards past the crest, out of sight, lay the machine gun nest mounted with a Gatling gun, the most fearsome bullet-firing weapon known to man. In a few minutes he would meet that gun face-to-face. One wrong move and the gunner would mow him down, reducing Joe to a pile of meat unrecognizable as a human being. Better watch his step.

  Don’t want to ruin the coat.

  Joe looked up at the ridge of canyon he needed to scale to get into the camp on the other side. It was about two hundred feet high, and looked climbable even in the darkness. He saw no other posse men on guard duty patrolling the top of the ridge. Turning his head in the other direction, Noose looked out into the complete darkness of the plains, a solid wall of black. He snapped his fingers, the agreed-upon signal.

  Presently five figures emerged as lighter silhouettes against the darkness, and as they stepped a few feet from him, the faces of Curly Brubaker, Frank Leadbetter, Joe Idaho, Billy Barlow, and Rowdy Maddox appeared. Sweat gleamed across their features. Each man carried a knife in his fist, but were otherwise unarmed. As they stood before him, pumped with adrenaline, Joe cocked his head at the rise, then nodded to the wranglers. You ready?

  They all nodded back.

  Turning, the bounty hunter took off up the ridge, scaling it with great strides, and the five rovers were right behind him. Their leader moved with the silent power of a jungle cat up the gloomy incline, and the others put their hands and feet where they saw him put his, and kept as quiet as they could. The ground was solid rocks and dirt and easy to climb, and in a few minutes the six men had reached the roof of the ridge. There, in single-line formation, they followed Noose’s lead and stayed low, peering over the edge of the canyon down into the camp. The sliver moon overhead would not reveal them to anyone more than a few feet away, so effectively were they cloaked in darkness.

  The canyon basin was also very dark, but the lanterns inside the rows of tents on the ridge to their right, two hundred yards off, bathed the camp in a subdued haze of firelight. Huge exaggerated shadows of posse men with guns moved on the rock walls above their figures as they walked to and fro around the bivouac. The smell of chili and beans and fresh coffee hung in the air.

  Joe pointed at the tents and whispered to the rovers, “That’s where they’ve got Mrs. Holdridge held prisoner. Am pretty sure of it. I’m going to go free her.”

  A gust of breeze from the left filled their nostrils with the tang of cowhide and dung, which drew the wranglers’ attention to where Noose pointed into the darkness across from the tents. There, inside a gloomy adjacent ravine, many big shapes could be discerned milling together, the oil lamps gleaming faintly off rows of longhorns. The herd.

  “While I’m getting Mrs. Holdridge, you boys get to the cattle,” Noose whispered to the rovers. “Get ’em ready to move out. You can’t see from here, but earlier today I saw through the binoculars that the corral where the posse’s stashed their horses is just to the left, a couple hundred feet toward us. When we split up, head there. Steal some horses. Get to the cattle and get ready. When Laura gets there and I fire two quick shots, get those steers moving straight up that goat trail along yonder ridge.”

  Pointing to the far left of the basin there was just enough moonlight to faintly make out parts of the trail leading to the top of the ridge; sections were shadow pools and somewhere out in that impenetrable darkness lay the Gatling gun in the machine-gun nest; but they could not spot the weapon—it lay hidden like a scorpion getting ready to strike.

  “When you hear my two shots you get moving with the cows. I’m gonna be on this side trying to draw that Gatling gun’s fire. With luck, the gunner’ll be too occupied with me to see you coming up behind him with the herd and by then those longhorns will be on top of him.”

  The five faces of the rovers looked nervously at Noose and he saw the trepidation in their eyes, but knew they’d follow orders; it better work, Joe knew, or they were all dead—the desperate plan had a lot of moving parts, and a hundred things could go sideways when it became a fluid combat situation. The posse had them way outnumbered and outgunned, but this was their one shot at this. “You boys ready—?”

  Noose fell silent suddenly, putting up his hand for the men to cease all movement. The wranglers froze.

  All of them heard a crumble of gravel not far below them.

  Joe looked down and saw the shape of one of Starborough’s regulars on patrol with a very big Henry rifle. A clink of pistols on his belt, the squeak of leather bandoliers with rows of slugs. He wasn’t more than fifteen feet from them, coming their way. There was no indication that he knew the wranglers were there, but in a few more steps he was going to trip right over them. Curly Brubaker shot an alarmed glance to Joe Noose, who had vanished.

  The posse man kept coming in their direction; then, when he was five feet from the huddled rovers, he stopped. His Henry rifle nestled in the crook of his elbow, he reached into his duster and withdrew a pouch of tobacco fixings. Pinching some shag onto the rolling paper, he licked and rolled it, putting the cigarette to his lips.

  Then he struck a match.

  The flash of flame illuminated the five men on the ground a few paces away as the thug dropped the match and the rifle came up very quick as he aimed the barrel down at them. The huge figure of the bounty hunter rose up behind him, throwing his massive arms around the head and shoulders of the posse man, one hand on his shoulder, the other on his jaw, pulling in opposite directions as hard as he could, snapping the man’s neck with a muffled crack, killing him instantly, and head lolling loose on his shoulders, he was dead before the match hit the ground and extinguished when the corpse crumpled on top of it.

  Grabbing the dead man’s Henry rifle, Noose chucked it to Brubaker, who caught it. Then Joe pulled the two Colt Navy revolvers from the man’s holsters and tossed
one each to Leadbetter and Barlow, leaving only Maddox and Idaho unarmed.

  “Move,” snapped Noose.

  They split up.

  The bounty hunter took off in a low sprint down the embankment in the direction of the lower ridge.

  Brubaker gestured with hand signals for the other rovers to follow him, and they made off down the dark incline in the direction of the herd. Curly hoped the horse corral was where Joe said it was, and realized as he saw the bounty hunter swallowed in the darkness he would feel a hell of a lot safer had Noose been with them.

  The wranglers made their way carefully along, fumbling through a hundred yards of pitch-blackness, watching where they put their feet, luckily coming upon no other posse gunmen, until soon the ground evened out and they were on the floor of the basin. Ahead in the shadows, the whinny of a horse sounded and the cowhands knew they were headed in the right direction. Fifty yards farther and they could make out the small arroyo where fifteen horses were tethered on rope hitches. But those horses were guarded. It looked like two men sat on the rocks nearby, rifles beside them.

  The rovers stopped dead in their tracks, making not a sound, controlling the rapid breathing from their exertions. Getting past the posse men meant neutralizing them, but unlike the bounty hunter, the wranglers weren’t killers, and knew they couldn’t fire their pistols because it would alert Starborough’s forces. Exchanging glances, they resolved to sneak up on the gunmen and knock them out.

  Holding their revolvers by the barrels, Frank Leadbetter and Billy Barlow dropped to the ground and crawled through the dirt out of sight on either side of the posse men. The gunmen’s boots were a few feet from their faces and the rovers made eye contact past the spurs, then jumped up, coldcocking both goons on the heads with the butts of their pistols hard enough to crack their skulls. With simultaneous grunts, Starborough’s men collapsed in the dirt.

  Barlow and Leadbetter relieved them of their revolvers and their rifles directly, and now everybody had a gun.