The Crimson Trail Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WESTERNS OF ERIC RED

  “Keeps the reader turning pages . . . brilliant. Hanging Fire is indeed a classic Western.”

  —True West Magazine

  “This teeth-grinding, bare-knuckling, swash-buckling adventure keeps readers turning pages. A terrific read. Allow plenty of time to read this. It’s hard to put down.”

  —Roundup Magazine on Hanging Fire

  “Exceptionally fast-paced and blood-spattered. Full of action, overflowing with defiant characters and deadly gunplay.”

  —Lansing State Journal on Noose

  THE JOE NOOSE WESTERNS

  by Eric Red

  NOOSE

  HANGING FIRE

  BRANDED

  THE CRIMSON TRAIL

  THE CRIMSON TRAIL

  A JOE NOOSE WESTERN

  ERIC RED

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  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

  Teaser chapter

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  To John Durdaller, my cousin and my brother

  PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2021 by Smash Cut Productions Ltd.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-4683-6

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4684-3 (eBook)

  ISBN-10: 0-7860-4684-8 (eBook)

  CHAPTER 1

  The cattle drive set forth after the thaw in 1887 with five hundred steers, sixty horses, and twelve wranglers, but after a hundred miles the number of hands had dwindled to nine because the rest had been murdered.

  That’s what ramrod Luke McGraw believed.

  Even if the rest of the outfit thought the deaths were an unlucky string of unfortunate accidents.

  McGraw didn’t believe in accidents and damn sure didn’t believe in coincidences. Three men dead in two weeks was no coincidence.

  He rode beside the herd of cattle moving across the plain still covered with the last snows of winter. He shivered. It was getting warmer, but not by much. Unlucky, like everything else on this doomed trail so far. As he sat in the saddle on Jenny, his big chestnut-brown mare, the rugged cowboy reflected on the troubling sequence of unfortunate accidents that had plagued the cursed cattle drive from the moment they had departed the Bar H Ranch in Consequence, Wyoming, west of Wind River, driving the steers four hundred miles southeast to Cheyenne, on the other side of the state. The herd had to be delivered to the big Cattlemen’s Association auction in just over a month, and the long winter had delayed their departure. Still, they had enough time by the trail boss’s reckoning; covering ten miles a day, it should have been a five-week journey, but the deaths had put them behind schedule.

  First there was rover Ox Johnson, who fell off his horse and broke his neck. They blamed it on the whiskey, for the man was a rounder known to drink on the job.

  Then a week later, driver Jed Wade was gone; healthy as a horse, then one day complains his stomach hurts and next thing anyone knows he’s frothing at the mouth like a rabid dog and five minutes later, boom, stone-cold dead. They couldn’t blame that on the whiskey because Wade was a teetotaler who didn’t drink. And it sure wasn’t the chow from Fred Kettlebone’s chuck wagon that killed him, because the whole crew ate that, and Fred was the best cook anybody had ever ridden with. Snakebite was what some of the outfit were blaming for the cause of Jed Wade’s untimely demise, but McGraw had never seen or heard of anybody dying that way from getting bit by a snake. However, he’d heard tell of some poisons that would do it to you, and Luke’s suspicions were raised.

  Both wranglers got a Christian burial on the trail because the trail boss insisted, even though she wasn’t a religious woman; the great outdoors was the cattlewoman’s church and McGraw figured she wanted to bury her men in the earth under the open sky where she herself felt close to God. The wrangler put no stock in men who refused to work for a woman because Luke McGraw had nothing but respect for Mrs. Laura Holdridge, his boss at the Bar H Ranch. All of the men in the outfit did. Or did they?

  As Luke McGraw sat on his horse, guiding the long march of longhorn steers across the rolling hills, listening to shouts and yips of the eight other ramrods driving the cows, McGraw looked around for Mrs. Holdridge, but she was nowhere to be seen. He spurred his horse and sat tall in the stirrups, seeing two of the longhorns were getting into an altercation and locking horns in the middle of the herd. The combative animals needed to be separated before the outfit lost a steer, because while that would have meant steaks every night for the crew and lots of good eating on the trail, Luke knew Mrs. Holdridge couldn’t afford to lose a single cow, and it was his job to make sure she didn’t.

  A week ago, McGraw took his trail boss aside and shared with her his suspicions that the deaths in their outfit were not accidental but deliberate. She listened attentively and then simply asked, “Why?” And he had no answer, just a gnawing conviction these were not accidents.

  The Sharps rifle exploding in cowpuncher Clay Fullerton’s hands two days later and blowing his face off was no damn accident, no misfire like everybody assumed. Fullerton was zealous about his guns, oiling and cleaning his rifle and revolvers every night. He could take a firearm apart and put it back together. Clay’s death made three, and nobody in the outfit really thought anymore that the experienced wranglers’ deaths were accidental. Now everybody was watching their back and looking over their shoulder, sleeping with one eye open, if they slept at all. A few were sleeping in the saddle, catching some shuteye on the trail. A palpable sense of dread had settled over the crew, and suspicion and tension between the men was tightening like a noose. All of the wranglers hated to camp, now fearing getting murdered in their slumber. Everyone
felt safer out on the trail, saddled on their horses driving the herd, with nothing but wide-open spaces around in every direction where you could see what was coming at you.

  The two argumentative longhorns needed to be separated directly; an expert horseman and seasoned cattle wrangler, Luke McGraw skillfully eased his horse into the herd, staying calm though surrounded by thousands of tons of fast-moving steers, their hooves thundering across the tundra. When he reached the middle of the moving mountain of cows, he felt his mare miss her step, so he tapped his boots in his stirrups against her flanks to speed her canter to keep pace with the herd. Then he reached out from his saddle and separated the two moving steers that were snorting and going at one another with their four-foot-long horns. One of the angry steers tried to gore the horse, but it wasn’t McGraw’s first rodeo; he grabbed one horn in each glove and wrestled the head of the cow in the other direction, diverting its attention and using his horse to force the steer away from the one bothering it. Soon, the whole herd was moving smoothly again, torrents of cattle stinking like a river of cow shit rushing past on both sides of his horse. Luke took off his hat, wiped sweat from his brow, and looked at the distant open eastern horizon, the direction they headed.

  It was a long way to go to Cheyenne, their destination where the steers would go to auction at the big cattle show, three hundred miles across hard, frozen tundra.

  With the outfit dropping like flies, the ramrod was thinking they were never going to make it, when a lasso looped over his head and shoulders and jerked taut, catapulting him clean out of the saddle. Luke McGraw hit the ground hard and the last thing he saw was hundreds of hooves coming at his face before he got trampled to death.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Luke was our friend and our brother, part of our Bar H family. We’re going to miss him . . .” As Laura Holdridge said a few words over her late wrangler Luke McGraw’s grave, the cattlewoman was wondering who to send his back pay to, only to grasp she had no idea if the man had a wife or children. Despite her heartfelt conviction her crew were her family, Laura realized she knew almost nothing at all about the wrangler she had employed all these years, or perhaps any of the wranglers who worked for her, for that matter.

  The eight somber faces of her other drivers stood in a sad circle around the grave, as she spoke softly. “He loved the outdoors. He loved animals. Loved animals more than people, we all figured. We hope wherever you are, Luke, that dog of yours, Blackie, is up there with you, because everybody knew how you loved him and how much you missed him . . .” Laura eyed the faces of her rovers, wondering how she really knew any of them now.

  All the lady trail boss knew was four had died on the cattle drive the last couple weeks, and at this rate, all her crew would be dead before they got the herd to Cheyenne. Laura had to get her livestock to market at the cattlemen’s auction. Every cent she had was in these prime steers, and if she did not get a good price for her cattle she was going to lose the ranch she had been struggling to run since her cattleman husband passed away and left her a widow.

  That had been a year ago. She had been on her own ever since, independent minded and self-sufficient, getting by on pure grit and stubborn determination, running a working ranch of twelve men and making a go of it. Laura Holdridge was a Wyoming woman born and bred, hardy and fit, damn beautiful with long blond hair and a well-built statuesque figure that turned heads when she went to town; at thirty-one years of age, the cattlewoman knew how desirable she still was, but there had been no time for romance because running the cattle ranch took up every waking moment. And that’s how Laura Holdridge needed things to be, because she missed her husband, Sam Holdridge, so much she couldn’t bear it sometimes, and running the ranch kept her mind off his loss that had left a hole in her. And her outfit kept her from being alone.

  “Goodbye, Luke.” Finishing her speech at the shallow grave, Laura looked up into the faces of her wranglers circling the plot, hats in hand, forming an oval of mourners. Wearing a poker face, her eyes traveled from one face to the next, then swung to the next face, and the next, observing each of the eight cowboys’ expressions very closely.

  One of her wranglers was a killer.

  The murderer stood five feet from her.

  Who he was, she did not know.

  How could she not know, Laura wondered, how could she not have some clue who the killer was when she knew these hands who worked for her and lived at her ranch, who she saw every day? But she obviously didn’t know them at all, and now she better be careful.

  It was one of the eight, but which one?

  Curly Brubaker, Wylie Jeffries, Joe Idaho, Charley Sykes, Frank Leadbetter, Rowdy Maddox, Billy “B.J.” Barlow, and lastly, Fred Kettlebone; friendly faces she knew as well as her own, or so she had thought.

  Most of the wranglers’ eyes were downcast, grieving, in an ill-tempered, dismal mood. They would be taking the foreman’s death very hard. McGraw was well liked among the cowboys and she wondered who would want to kill him. Two of her ramrods, Brubaker and Sykes, met her gaze, then looked away, not like they were guilty, just subservient to her like all the cowboys in her outfit were; she made sure of that, had her crew well trained. As a woman in the West, and a cattlewoman to boot, respect was everything and she had to work twice as hard as a man to get it. But all that said, Laura knew her men loved her, and she loved them right back, because she was loyal to her outfit, they were like a family to her. She paid them well and fed them well and they would do anything for her, she knew. Now she had lost four of them.

  The woman’s heart was breaking, losing Luke McGraw. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t in front of the men. She always had to be strong. Her heart might break, but Laura Holdridge never would.

  They had buried the foreman in a shady copse of white birch trees at the edge of an airy open plain. She had helped dig the grave herself. The crew had voted on the selection of the spot, but the whole outfit knew it was a place of peace and quiet their fallen friend would have appreciated, and in life would have enjoyed spending time in. He would be spending a lot of it here.

  “You boys go on and say a few words now, say your goodbyes.” Taking off her sweat-stained Stetson, Laura heaved a huge sigh, turning away from the grave to face the open plain. The gigantic herd of cattle was standing as far as the eye could see, it seemed, grazing on the tall grass near the parked wagons. The sight of the herd daunted her now. Behind, she heard the soft, quiet words of the wranglers each in turn saying their piece over their departed saddle mate. A few wept. The lady trail boss thought the sadness in their voices couldn’t be the voices of men who murdered McGraw, or Johnson, or Fullerton, or Wade. But one of them did.

  When Laura recovered the trampled corpse of Luke McGraw, what was left of it, off the hoof-trodden muddy plain, she knew he didn’t fall out of the saddle and his death was no accident. The cowpoke was born in the saddle and the best rider her ranch had, and the cattlewoman was no fool. Why didn’t she listen to McGraw when he warned her a week ago? Sometimes she was too damn stubborn for her own good and his warning didn’t make sense to her then, but it sure did now.

  McGraw’s clothes were bloody, muddy rags, so the cattlewoman respectfully removed them from his person for burial. She washed the body and cleaned up his remains, doing the best she could because his condition would have meant a closed-casket burial back in civilization, but this wasn’t civilization, it was the open trail. And it was dangerous, with no law for hundreds of miles.

  She saw the raw rope burn across what was left of his upper body and knew he had been lassoed off his horse. It had taken skill to throw that rope in a moving herd of cattle. Her ramrod Brubaker was a stud with a lasso, but that didn’t mean anything because the other wranglers could also throw a rope, and any one of them could have pulled Luke McGraw off his horse with a good toss.

  That the killer would strike again was a dead certainty, the only question was who was next. For some odd reason Laura Holdridge did not fear for her own life
, having an intuition she herself was not the killer’s target, her men were. Why? She trusted her instincts, but that didn’t stop her from strapping the massive Colt Dragoon revolver under her coat and lately keeping it under her pillow.

  The five hundred head of prime Wyoming beef stood before her scattered out across the plain, giving her bovine looks that seemed to say, Let’s get a move on. It was time for the outfit to get back on the trail. They had to make time. It was over three hundred miles to Cheyenne and the outfit had a schedule to keep if they were going to cross that considerable distance, the whole of the state of Wyoming, and get there in time for the two-day cattlemen’s auction three weeks from now. The murders of her wranglers had slowed down the cattle drive, already costing several days dealing with the burials. Getting the herd to Cheyenne presented an impossible task now there was a killer in the outfit picking off her wranglers, and there seemed nothing she could do about it.

  What the hell was she going to do?

  She knew what she should do. Go to the law. Report the killings. Ride back to the local sheriff in Wind River or ride ahead to the U.S. Marshal, report the deaths, and let the authorities investigate. And the minute she did that, her outfit and the cattle would be detained for an investigation. Guaranteed then she would not make the auction and by this time next year, would have lost the ranch, everything she and her husband worked for, and her men would be unemployed. Going to the law was the right thing to do. But it was suicide for her ranch and those in her employ. She had discussed it with the wranglers earlier in the day before the burial, and they were all agreed to report the deaths once they made it to Cheyenne; it is what McGraw, Johnson, Fullerton, and Wade would have wanted, too.