Branded
The Joe Noose Westerns
by Eric Red
NOOSE
HANGING FIRE
BRANDED
THE CRIMSON TRAIL (coming Summer 2021!)
BRANDED
A JOE NOOSE WESTERN
ERIC RED
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
Teaser chapter
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2021 Smash Cut Productions Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
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ISBN: 978-0-7860-4681-2
Electronic edition:
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4682-9 (e-book)
ISBN-10: 0-7860-4682-0 (e-book)
To Anthony Redman
who loves violence in movies
but is one of the kindest people I know.
And to my wife Meredith
and our two dogs, Cider and Eggnog,
the most notorious outlaws in our house.
PROLOGUE
The kid was thirteen, younger than the others, but the only one who had killed a man. His outlaw pals Clay, Jack, and Billy Joe were all between eighteen and twenty-one years old; only one of them, Clay, knew his exact age. The others were runaways but the kid was an orphan who had never known his own parents. Even though he was the youngest, he had size on his friends, and at already six feet stood a head taller than any of the other three. If the boy had a name, he didn’t know it, so Billy Joe, Clay, and Jack just called him Kid. The others knew he had been on his own since he could walk and like them, could handle himself. And the kid was a lot meaner. He hit harder in a fight. The Colt Peacemaker in the thirteen-year-old’s fist was, of all of them, the only hand the gun looked like it fit.
The four youths were robbers, horse thieves, and petty criminals. Over the last year, the motley gang prowled like a scruffy wolf pack across the Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho territories, pulling random crimes and taking down small-time scores. Nothing heavy, kid stuff. Holdups of unarmed civilians the ruff ians happened to encounter were their stock-in-trade. For the three years since they joined so-called forces, the young delinquents had stayed a step ahead of the law, avoiding arrest because their crimes were nickel-and-dime in nature, and law enforcement manpower was stretched too thin over the frontier to bother with penny-ante crimes. Plus most folks made them for kids. Kids with dumb luck. But their luck was about to run out.
Living hand to mouth, sleeping outdoors, roving aimlessly, by spring of 1865 the hooligans drifted to western Wyoming and had the poor judgment to try their hand at something bigger.
Tonight, the gang was moving up to rustling. The four young outlaws had spotted the small Wyoming ranch with the hefty herd of steer quite by chance when they had ridden off a washed-out trail and cut across a plain, trying to make their way south. It had been noon when the thirteen-year-old kid had spotted the stockade full of longhorns through a thicket of trees and whistled quietly for his friends. Clay had the idea first. Jack and Billy Joe said what the hell. The kid just shrugged.
None of the greenhorn outlaws had ever rustled cattle before or given thought to how such a crime might be managed or the stolen cattle sold even if it was managed; rustler just sounded good as a word and the young fools figured they could add it to their list of crimes that would be on their wanted poster one day. When they had one. It was a constant source of irritation to Clay that the gang didn’t have a wanted poster. Nobody knew who they were and Clay wanted the gang to make a name for themselves. Trouble was, they couldn’t think of one. Gangs usually had places or last names as the name of their gang and since the four weren’t from anywhere and none of the boys knew their last names, coming up with a name for the gang was proving to be a challenge.
The youngest didn’t care about making a name for himself for he was amoral and didn’t care about anything.
The kid thought nothing of their crimes. The thirteen-year-old had no concept of right or wrong. Such notions never entered his thinking, or whatever passed for it inside his thick skull. He just did what he did to survive like he’d always done. The boy couldn’t read. Had not had a day of schooling. Had never been in a church. He trusted in his own speed, strength, and violence. At twelve, he had killed a man and felt neither good nor bad about it other than glad it was the other guy who was dead, not him. The kid rode with the other boys because he just kind of fell in with them; he had no feelings about his friends to speak of; in fact, preferred to be alone. The thirteen-year-old was a brute, a rough figure of a human being God had sculpted out of clay but forgotten to fill in the features.
They waited until sundown.
When it was good and dark, the four young outlaws gave their horses a nudge with their spurs. Broke cover as they rode out from where they had waited out of sight in the woods. Drawing their guns, the gang kept low in their saddles and trotted out onto the grounds of the ranch, sticking to the shadows. The place was pretty big. A large buck-and-rail stockade filled with cows. A two-door barn adjacent. A farmhouse on the far side of the corral on the hill. Everything was quiet. The kid looked over the spread in the hazy moonlight and didn’t see any people in the area. Just lots of steers in rows of shoulders and hindquarters and longhorns stretching off into the darkness. One of his friends said something about them having so many cows they weren’t going to miss a few but the kid couldn’t hear or see who said it because he was riding in the rear and saw only
the backs of the others’ heads in the dim. They were riding around the stockade to find the gate and a way to get in, the thirteen-year-old guessed. He just followed the others’ lead, not caring one way or the other.
The hooves of their horses squelched in the mud. The smell of cow shit was strong.
A slap of a hand on a mosquito made the kid’s gaze snap front as Billy Joe wiped the bug off the flesh of his neck.
The kid grabbed the coil of rope in his saddle, not knowing how to rustle a cow but figuring a lasso was probably part of it.
It was almost too dark to see, but not quite. Resuming his inspection of their surroundings, the kid looked for any sign of people. A quarter of a mile off, the large timber ranch house sat atop the hill overlooking the buck-and-rail cattle stalls. A light burned in a kerosene lamp in a window but there was no movement. He couldn’t see a living soul. The smell of cow dung and dirty cattle hides filled his nostrils. The lowing of the steers was intermittent; sounds of their penned movement covered any noise their horses’ hooves made in the mud.
His friends’ horses slowed.
The would-be rustlers rode up to a gate made of hewn wooden posts with a sign atop the youths would have read as Q-RANCH had any of them been able to read.
Fatefully, the kid regarded the Q letter’s circle and squiggle and thought it reminded him of an upside-down hangman’s noose.
Seeing the flash before he heard the gunshot, his saddle jerked downward as his horse dropped dead beneath him, tossing the kid headlong to the ground.
The thirteen-year-old hit hard but his skull was hard. Busy dodging rearing horses, the kid rolled out of the way to avoid getting trampled as hooves of the panicked animals came down and pounded the earth near his head. Then the boy was dodging the falling bodies of Clay, Jack, and Billy Joe as they got thrown from their saddles. The three good-for-nothing nags galloped off into the darkness in fear.
Before he could get up the kid heard the clicks of the hammers being pulled back on three rifles, very close by. He froze. It was a bad sound to hear from a gun when you were on the wrong end of it. They were all surrounded.
The other boys heard the guns cocking, too, and knew when they were beat, so the four did the smart thing.
They all put up their hands.
Crunching of boots on dirt sounded on three sides opposite the cattle stockade. The steps were menacingly slow and deliberate. The people making them were cloaked in darkness, that deep country dark you can’t see anything a foot from your face.
Exchanging glances, Clay, Billy Joe, and Jack looked very afraid of what would happen next. The kid, acting calm, figuring he would find out soon enough. None of them dared reach for their pistols.
Out of the darkness, the rancher appeared first. A tall and skeletal figure in a weathered leather duster, with long white hair. Hatred and meanness radiated off him. The old man’s right hand was a mangled stump missing three fingers. It looked like an ax had been taken to it once. One of those digits was on the trigger of an immense double-barreled scattergun the left hand braced to his shoulder.
“Get their weapons.” He spat. “Disarm ’em.”
The rancher’s sons, two boys the same age as the gang, appeared out of the shadows, holding revolvers. One was older than the other by a few years, it looked. Both boys were young and raw, but meant business. The older of them reached in and yanked the six pistols one by one from the hooligans’ side holsters, handing them off in turn to his young brother. Neither of the rancher’s sons said a word.
Walking ominously over to a fence post that had coils of rope hung on it, the father unslung four lariats and tossed them on the ground.
“Tie ’em up,” the old man barked.
His two boys seemed reluctant to relinquish the grip on the revolvers they held on their captives by picking up the ropes, but their father raised his shotgun to his shoulder and stepped into position over the hooligans, sighting them down the barrel he moved back and forth aiming at their heads. “My boys is gonna tie you up now and any of you punks move a finger, I’ll blow his head off and the head of the punk next to him. Savvy?” The boys on the ground nodded they understood. Finally, the rancher’s sons put their captured revolvers on the ground, snatched up the ropes, and got to work.
His two sons clearly had experience roping steers and had the four young outlaws bound in just a few minutes. The kid and his friends were hog-tied by their wrists and ankles with their arms and legs behind their backs. The old man’s boys were strong and rough and got their prisoners tied up with ropes quickly. The kid and his three would-be rustler buddies were soon facedown in the dirt, breathing soil. The rancher’s sons had now retrieved the guns they had taken and were pointing them down at the prior owners, fingers on the triggers, looking like they knew how to use them. The boys followed their father’s orders without argument as if he had them trained like animals. The kid thought they looked more scared of the skeletal old man than his friends were of having their own guns pointed at them.
“Get ’em over to the tree,” the rancher said.
The kid had never seen anybody hanged before.
Tonight that changed.
Everything did.
The tree was big and dead, but it had a long, thick overhanging branch that made for a sturdy gibbet when the old man threw the first coil of rope up around the branch. Then he tied off the rope with a mean yank; one end of the rope was already secured to the saddle of the first horse—all four horses were stupid and easily retrieved from the neighboring creek they stopped to drink at by the two young sons of the rancher—the other end he knotted into a noose. The kid wondered how the old man could knot a rope with the few fingers of his chicken claw of a mangled hand, but he did. The noose dangled directly above the saddle of the first Appaloosa, who stood chewing a carrot.
The elderly rancher finished with the first noose and let it hang, approaching the tied-up boys with a Grim Reaper countenance.
Somebody was about to get hanged.
The kid preferred it wasn’t him.
His friends all exchanged terrified glances.
The rancher’s two sons just looked at their father, keeping the pistols trained on the prisoners.
Instead of selecting one victim to be hanged, the old man threw some coal oil on a pile of coals in a metal brazier with iron cattle brands resting in it. Tossed a match. A hiss and whomph. The roaring uprush of flames splashed a hellish firelight over the scene. Flame and shadows bloomed on the menacing oak tree with the ropes dangling from the branch, empty nooses swinging over it.
The old man turned from the captured boys and didn’t take one to be lynched. Not yet.
Instead, the old man grabbed a second rope. Tied a second noose. Threw the rope over the branch. Then knotted the other end to the saddle of another horse.
Then he made a third noose and tossed the rope over the branch. He tied that to the saddle of the last horse.
The kid’s horse was dead, shot out from under him, and he didn’t know if that was a good or a bad thing.
The minutes dragged on into an hour, the aroma of burning charcoal mixing with the rank stench of urine. The kid could see two of his friends had pissed themselves in terror. One of them was crying, snot smeared all over his screwed-up face.
The thirteen-year-old kid had nothing to say.
But his friends sure did. They were talking plenty.
“—Just let us go! Please! You’ll never see us again!”
“—Take us to jail! Don’t lynch us!”
“—Please don’t hurt us, mister! We’re sorry.”
Sorry for what? The kid thinking the only thing he was sorry about was getting caught.
He knew the rest were wasting their breath anyway. Nothing his friends were going to say was going to get them out of this fix. The kid didn’t care one way or the other. It was what it was. It was going to be over soon—he just wanted to get it over with. The thirteen-year-old felt the heat on his face from the coal
brazier, felt the cold night wind on his back facing the dark stockade, but those sensations were all the kid felt.
“Get ’em up,” growled the old man. He had returned and stood. “That one. That one. And that one.”
The gaunt skeleton of a man lifted a crooked finger on his mangled hand to point out Clay, Jack, and Billy Joe. “Put ’em in their saddles. Throw ropes around their necks.” The two strong rancher boys took the captives one at a time, both sons hauling the trammeled young outlaws to their feet. In turn, they dragged them to the tree and pulled a noose over each of their necks before pushing them by the ass up into the saddles of a horse. The old man had the huge scattergun in the faces of the kid’s friends when the ropes were put around their necks. All the kicking and screaming didn’t save the boys. Two were pistol-whipped to make them compliant and shoved onto their steeds. Moments later, Billy Joe, Jack, and Clay were perched in their saddles with nooses around their necks and all stopped resisting—if they fell off their mounts or their horse bolted, those nooses would break their necks, so none of the boys moved a muscle.
The two nameless sons turned and walked back to the kid, who could now see they were more scared then he was, especially the smaller of the two. Both lads were shaking with fear and close to tears and the kid wondered why, since it wasn’t them being hanged. Four hands took his arms to pull him up.
“Not him.” At their father’s sharp barked command the two sons let go of the last boy lying hog-tied on the ground. The kid looked up at the rancher’s towering silhouette framed against the leaping fire and black night sky, the old man’s face one big shadow, a hole in the darkness looking down on the kid, who couldn’t see the eyes he felt drilling into his skull.