The Crimson Trail

by Eric Red

  Pressed against rocks engulfed by hundreds of surging cattle below on all sides, Laura Holdridge saw she had nowhere to run, no way to escape the cattle drive killer, Frank Leadbetter.

  “Why?” Was all she could think to ask him, her face soaked with rain.

  “I’ll tell you why!” Frank had her under the gun, right where he wanted her, and as Leadbetter leveled the scatter-gun, he told a tale of revenge. He shouted to be heard above the pandemonium of the stampede. “My father owned the land your ranch is built on! Thirty years ago he had a little spread on the exact same spot the Bar H Ranch sits on now! Your husband, Sam Holdridge, stole it, stole my father’s cattle and stole his life . . . now I’m here to steal yours because you’re his wife, the last Holdridge! You Holdridges took my life and I want revenge!”

  Laura listened in disbelief. “You’re wrong, Frank! Sam earned every dollar he ever made! He built our ranch with his bare hands!”

  Frank shook his head in disbelief, just realizing it now. “You never knew who you married, did you? You really don’t know! Reckon it was years before you two met, so he never told you his past! But it’s time you knew the truth who Sam Holdridge really was and I’m gonna tell ya now right before I kill ya!” Leadbetter screamed over the din of the stampede. “Your dead husband ran the worst gang of cattle rustlers in Teton County ’til one day he decided he could make more money owning steers than stealing them and started your ranch! One night Sam Holdridge led his gang of mad-dog marauders in an armed ambush on my father’s ranch and they gunned down my entire family while we were eating dinner! He dragged them out of the house and executed them! Your husband Sam! In front of my face! I was six years old!” Frank Leadbetter shrieked psychopathically in Laura Holdridge’s face, as she cringed from the smoking shotgun barrel he brandished in her face. “Six!”

  “It’s a lie. You’re lying!”

  “You know I ain’t!” The cattlewoman raised her emotional eyes to meet her murderer’s and he nodded, almost sympathetic. “Time to find out what you really are, Mrs. Laura Holdridge, and where you got what you have, and what your name stands for, because your husband’s sins were passed down to you when you inherited the Bar H Ranch, and the blood on his hands is now on yours! You gonna pay for his crimes!”

  “If my husband shot your family like you say he did, how did you survive?”

  “I was in the outhouse! I hid there! Looked through the crack in the door and saw my whole family slaughtered! I escaped but Sam Holdridge took possession of our ranch and our cattle by forging a bill of sale and in them days, nobody bothered to investigate why the Leadbetter family up and disappeared because we was poor white trash and Sam Holdridge was rich! You call yourself a cattlewoman and say this is your herd! Your husband started his herd with my father’s stock he murdered him to get! How can you live with yourself? Well, you don’t have to!”

  Laura saw the naked anguish beneath the feral gaze and twisted face of Frank Leadbetter and she felt shame and pity even as his finger was closing on the trigger. Maybe she did have it coming and deserved to pay for her husband’s sins.

  But the young wrangler needed to keep talking; having kept so much bottled up inside, waiting a lifetime for revenge against the Holdridges, he wanted to squeeze all the juice he could out of it. “It was all part of my plan! Me joining your ranch and working for you all these years was the beginning of my big revenge, and it all ends right now, here on this cattle drive with me killing you because your husband murdered my daddy for his cows!”

  She believed him.

  Filled with shame and remorse for her husband’s crimes, a tearful Laura Holdridge looked Frank Leadbetter honestly in the eye. “I’m sorry!”

  “You are now! Know this!” He grinned savagely. “It was me who killed your husband, took him from you, made you a widow.”

  She choked. With a look of pure hatred, Laura glared through her tears into Frank’s vicious, crazy face and her flashing eyes didn’t blink.

  His cruel grin grew meaner still. “I killed Sam Holdridge a year ago in the same outhouse I had to hide in as a boy listening to my dad and mom and sister’s dying screams! I want you to know it and take it to the grave, Laura Holdridge, and tell your husband while you’re fucking him in Hell!”

  Laura Holdridge spat in Frank Leadbetter’s face.

  Dripping saliva, Leadbetter socked his scatter-gun to his shoulder, looking murderously down both barrels, ready to blow Laura’s head clean off.

  Fifty yards away, Joe Noose crouched with his pistol on the ground and took aim at Frank’s exposed legs between the passing cow hooves, ready to blow his kneecaps off. Noose squinted to aim but couldn’t get a clean shot—first Laura was in the line of fire, then more steers surged past and their hooves blocked his view.

  Frank pressed the twin muzzles of his shotgun against Laura’s bosom and tightened his finger on the dual triggers and there came a loud gun blast.

  Noose got a clean shot and took it, blowing Leadbetter’s left kneecap apart in a bloody shrapnel of bone and cartilage, collapsing the killer’s leg, but as the screaming gunman fell he pivoted, unloading both shotgun barrels at Joe Noose under the cattle. The legs of a huge steer took the blast, shielding the bounty hunter. As the cow fell, he jumped back before nearly a ton of dead longhorn landed right on top of him.

  Hearing the louder thunder of hooves over the thunder in the sky, Laura Holdridge blinked against the fusillades of blinding lightning and the rain in her eyes. Hordes of rampaging steers surged around the rock formation as she climbed to safety up onto a high boulder. The stone was wet and slick from the rain and Laura’s fingers scrabbled for purchase on the slippery surface. The cattle stampede was danger in its purest elemental form; a primal force of physical animal aggression and violence. A few feet below her perch, row after row of sharp horns meant impalement if she fell. Torrential rain poured, lightning exploded, and the earth quaked under the driving impacts of thousands of pounding hooves and anvil detonations of deafening thunder. Amid the apocalyptic chaos, the cattlewoman struggled to get a glimpse of Noose or Leadbetter, but there was no sign of either of them in the relentless stampede. She closed her eyes, assuming Noose had to be dead.

  Suddenly, a bloody figure leaped onto the rocks below. Frank Leadbetter, mad white eyes in a mask of gore, pulled his wounded body up the boulders out of the path of the stampede. His psychotic gaze was fixed on Laura, the object of his demented fury above him, and the deranged wrangler clawed his way up the rocks toward her like a grisly panther. He had a bowie knife clenched in his bloody teeth. She kicked him with her boots but he held fast to the stones and kept coming for her to kill her.

  Noose could just see the top of Laura’s face above the hurtling heads of the passing cows, higher on the rocks than Frank, who his bullets hadn’t stopped, hidden from view behind the stampede—the imperiled cattlewoman’s expression of raw terror told the bounty hunter she knew she was about to die, the murderous wrangler about to kill her, and Joe had run out of time to rescue her.

  The only chance he had to save her life was get on the other side of that herd, and there was only one way to do that . . .

  He’d have to run through the stampede on foot.

  The rear of the herd was going past him now, the procession of steers thinning, so there were breaks in the cows . . . Joe figured if he timed it right and ran very fast, he could run through the spaces between the cattle, narrowly dodging the horns no doubt—it was about fifteen paces to clear the herd and once Noose was on the other side he’d put a bullet in Frank Leadbetter directly—but once he was running inside the stampede, if Joe’s boots slipped in the mud and he fell he’d be trampled, or if the steers were wrongly spaced during his crossing he’d end up on the horns, a hard death either way.

  A gun in each hand again—firing both the instant he emerged on the other side of the herd—Joe Noose placed his feet squarely beneath him on the ground quaked by pounding cattle hooves to make his suicide run through
the stampeding cattle, every fiber of his body charged with fear and adrenaline as his keen eyes swung up and down the oncoming herd looking for a big enough space between the running steers, until he saw an opening and dove into the center of the stampede.

  Leadbetter grabbed Laura’s leg to pull her off the boulder.

  Then someone grabbed him.

  The massive figure of Joe Noose landed on top of Frank Leadbetter and pounded the killer with his huge fists, breaking bones with each blow. The wrangler spat his knife into his right hand, stabbing at the bounty hunter. The two were locked in mortal hand-to-hand combat on the rocks as the cattlewoman watched them from above. Noose knocked away the knife, seizing Leadbetter by the face, digging his fingers into the man’s eyes and heaving him headlong off the boulders down into the herd below.

  Frank Leadbetter fell onto the horns of a steer that impaled him clean through, bloody tips bursting out of his chest. The killer was carried away with the stampede on the horns of the cow. Joe Noose and Laura Holdridge huddled safely together in the rocks above the massed charging cattle, watching Frank Leadbetter gored on the longhorns swept off in oceans of cattle, his screams fading, dying slow and hard until the steer shook him loose and the broken rag doll of a man vanished beneath the hooves of the herd.

  Noose and Laura embraced.

  The stampede passed as the runaway steers vanished in the distance.

  “It’s over.”

  “Like hell it is,” she replied. “Now we got to get ’em back.”

  * * *

  “Here.”

  Noose looked at the leather satchel Laura dropped in his saddlebag. He cocked an eyebrow at her. “What’s this for?”

  “Partial payment on the bounty. Four thousand dollars cash. It’s yours. You earned it. You found the man who was killing my men. Still owe you a thousand. I’ll pay it to you in Cheyenne after we sell off the cattle.”

  “Much obliged.”

  They rode side by side across the Big Empty. The string of weary steers marched in a long procession in front and behind, now back under the control of the three dead-in-their-saddles exhausted rovers Joe Idaho, Rowdy Maddox, and Curly Brubaker. The tough foreman had survived the shotgun blast as well as the bullet in the leg and was bandaged like a mummy, but still he rode on, the living embodiment of the Bar H motto, Ride or Die.

  “Congratulations, by the way.” Noose smiled.

  “Congratulations?” Laura squinted. “What the hell for?”

  “Cheyenne’s just two day’s ride across yonder mountains.” Joe pointed. “Tomorrow’s Tuesday. You got until Thursday. You made it.”

  Laura nodded absently, lost in herself.

  “That should make you happy, Laura.” Then he saw how upset she was. “What’s eating you?”

  “I’m just as bad as they are, Joe.”

  “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

  “Frank Leadbetter was right. My Bar H Ranch was built on the blood of honest folks my husband murdered to steal their stock and build our herd. This herd. My herd. That makes me no better than Calhoun. I ain’t no better than any other of those dirty rotten cattleman sons of bitches, Joe. Don’t you see? My hands are as dirty as theirs. If they’re going to hell, then I am, too.” Laura’s shoulders shook as she broke down and sobbed, just wept and wept. He let her cry it out until he didn’t.

  “Want a piece of advice, Laura?”

  “Sure.”

  “You want to get philosophical, fine, but do it on your own time because now you got business. It’s like your outfit always says, Ride or Die. Remember what it took you to get this far, the men who worked for you who gave their lives getting these cows here, and it’s up to you to finish the job. Right now, you got five hundred head of livestock you got to get to Cheyenne in two days. You got three tired crew need to get paid, see a doctor, fed a decent meal, a hot bath, and a proper bed. You’re a cattlewoman and you got a job to do.”

  It made Joe Noose feel fine to see Laura Holdridge smile.

  That was what she needed to hear.

  CHAPTER 28

  Laura Holdridge’s cattle drive hit town like a ton of bricks, the herd pouring into the streets of Cheyenne at exactly five past seven on Thursday evening the sixteenth of February.

  Flyers for the cattlemen’s auction were everywhere, advertising it for today. The Bar H outfit had gotten their livestock to market in time.

  Like she vowed she would.

  Like often it had looked like they never could.

  Like Noose always knew she would.

  Joe was damn proud of her.

  Laura jumped up in the stirrups, swept off her Stetson and flagged it over her head at her weary wranglers driving the long procession of cows. “Five minutes past the hour of seven p.m., boys! We did it! Yee-ahh!”

  The outfit tossed their hats in the air and let out a cheer that turned all the heads of the cowboys on the streets.

  So did the spirited beautiful blond lady atop her dusty horse, covered head to foot in dirt but whose bold grin was wide and white, hooting and hollering like a madwoman.

  Beside her, the bounty hunter flicked Copper’s reins and steered the herd, leading the longhorns toward the huge circus-tent arena at the end of the street. He didn’t need directions, he could already smell the cow shit, so he just followed his nose.

  Joe Noose just grinned.

  It was the end of the Crimson Trail.

  * * *

  “Want me to come?”

  “If it’s all the same to you, Joe, I’d like to go alone.”

  Taking a deep breath, Laura Holdridge gathered her courage and stepped through the open tent of the Cattlemen’s Association amphitheater where the cattle auction was underway. The smell of sawdust, peanuts, whiskey, cigar smoke, cow dung, and male sweat was pungent as she walked inside and stood by the entrance. She was finally here. Her stomach felt like it was clenched in a fist.

  Inside, the tent was as big as a circus big top and the atmosphere had a carnival ambience. It was standing room only. The place was packed wall-to-wall with expensively dressed, well-fed cattlemen in suits and cowboy hats and boots, the uniform of the profession. Hundreds were seated in the circular seating around the arena where the auction was being held. The men had come from all across the forty-nine continental United States to buy and sell and fraternize.

  Behind her, through the tent opening, the thundering hooves of her longhorn cattle passed in a lengthy procession on the street. The cattlewoman had arrived. This was what Laura had traveled so far and fought so hard against overwhelming odds to achieve: getting her cows to market. They said she’d never make it and she and her rovers proved them wrong, with more than a little help from Joe Noose—she had to admit she couldn’t have done it without him—but her appearance at the auction was her moment, she deserved it and she savored it. Her bosom swelled with pride of accomplishment and defiance. “I showed all of you sons of bitches,” she muttered to herself.

  The cattlewoman was the only female present in this stag convention, and Laura Holdridge saw her arrival had gotten noticed. The eyes of the crowd of cattlemen were on her, and she experienced the exciting charge of all that attention as now most of the audience of her male counterparts were staring at her, a few mouths agape. The rumble of conversation in the tent quieted to a murmur, as the cattlemen stopped talking amongst each other and focused their attention on the dramatic arrival of the woman standing by the mouth of the tent.

  Laura knew how to make an entrance. What a bigger-than-life epic figure she struck, backlit by the sunset, framed by the procession of her longhorns outside the tent. Her chaps, jacket, hat covered with three hundred miles of dust and sweat and blood, and she hadn’t washed her face or brushed her tangled blond hair, but the swagger in her posture with her chin out and hands on her hips was full of piss and vinegar, as with a bold grin she yelled in her loudest bugle voice, “I made it, boys. Don’t start without me. I got me some cows to sell!”

 
; The entire tent fell silent. You could hear a pin drop. Nobody moved.

  Down in the arena, somebody stood beside the auctioneer and as she felt the acid of his stare, Laura swung her fearless gaze to meet his.

  Laying eyes now on Crispin Calhoun, Laura Holdridge was not impressed. The infamous cattle baron was much shorter that she imagined he’d be, given his fearsome reputation and all the trouble he’d caused her. He was in fact a diminutive man, whose huge mustache and sideburns on his tiny head made him look smaller. His persnickety grooming and too-tailored suit bespoke vanity born of inadequacy. But if his stature was small, Calhoun’s hate was big enough to fill the tent, and every ounce of malevolence in his beady eyes was directed at her.

  Today, the cattlewoman’s hatred trumped his.

  Laura Holdridge strode down the ramp looking Calhoun straight in the eye the whole time, entered the arena, and walked right up to Crispin Calhoun and stood toe to toe. There they faced each other like prizefighters in front of the entire hushed audience of every prominent cattleman in the whole United States. Laura was a head taller than Calhoun, even with the lifts in his boots, so he was forced to look up to hold her blue-eyed stare-down. Laura met the cold fury in Calhoun’s evil eyes and thought she had never met an individual so unspeakably foul.

  He blinked first.

  Clenching her fist, Laura Holdridge punched Crispin Calhoun in the face just as hard as she could, hitting him with a haymaker that knocked the son of a bitch clean off his feet, those fancy boots of his leaving the ground as the cattle baron landed with a big splat in a huge steaming pile of fresh cow shit. He was a little man and it was a big pile. Calhoun sunk into it like quicksand, until excrement covered him completely. His hysterical shrieks sounded like a squalling infant and his flailing arms and legs looked like a baby throwing a tantrum.