Noose Page 10

  Copper went sideways with Noose in the saddle as the stallion’s rear hoof slipped in the soft dirt of the brink of the declination and gravity did the rest. Over they both went . . . man and horse toppled off-balance down the sheer face of the ravine, the horse’s hooves pawing and stomping as it slid down the incline toward the beckoning white-water rapids of the Snake below. To his credit, Copper did not fall, at least at first, and stayed upright on all four legs for about the first twenty-five feet they slid.

  Joe Noose gripped on to the saddle for dear life, looking down, thinking if the toppling horse could stay up then he could stay in the saddle. It wasn’t the landing he was worried about because it was just water below, deep and fast—they were both ending up there in a few moments anyhow and it was going to be wet, but landing in the river wouldn’t injure either of them and they could just ride the Snake a few hundred yards or even a mile or two, then ride out. Everything would be okay if he got lucky and the horse could just stay on its feet a few more yards.

  He didn’t get lucky.

  Luck hadn’t been with Joe Noose all day.

  Copper’s shoe caught a rock and knocked both front legs out from under the stallion and it toppled like a felled tree onto its side. The cowboy saw it coming and threw himself out of the twisting heaving saddle so the horse didn’t fall on him and break his back or neck. The stallion rolled over and over, whinnying, its legs bicycling and pawing the air and dirt as the horse rolled like a log down the long steep slope, kicking up clouds of dirt and brush as it fell toward the river.

  Noose watched his horse go. He had grabbed on to one of the small trees poking out of the ridge and broken his fall but now could do nothing but watch as Copper tumbled helplessly the last few yards and hit the river with a huge turbulent splash, exploding a geyser of freshwater into the air. The cowboy felt the cool spray on his face fifty feet up. Copper was instantly swept downstream in the rapids, bobbing his head above the water, four hooves pedaling in the river as the stallion was carried away. The bright bronze of the horse’s face was easy to make out, gleaming like a gold coin against the deep river blue even though the rest of it was deep brown now its coat was soaked. Noose could see the animal was unharmed—it had made a safe soft water landing and likely wouldn’t drown in the Snake. The cowboy could see all four legs pedaling, so the horse hadn’t broken a leg. Noose was relieved about that. They both could have been killed in the fall, so maybe they did in fact get lucky. Somewhere downstream when the river got shallower, Copper would climb onto the shore and be just fine.

  But it was the last he was going to see of this fine horse, that was certain. Noose clung to the root of the tree jutting from the slope, watching the horse’s head shrink smaller and smaller as Copper was washed away into the spectacular scenery and deep blue band of the stretch of the river.

  The horse was looking back at him the entire time, making eye contact the whole way.

  Damn, that was a hell of horse.

  It was his friend.

  Joe Noose was going to miss it.

  A crumble of hooves above him, a lot of hooves of a lot of horses, made Noose freeze statue-still. It was the posse. He clung onto the tree on the side of the slope, huddling out of sight below it. Dirt spilled down on him. From the shade of the small branches he figured he was likely shielded from view and if he didn’t move and if the damn tree did not pull loose of its roots he might survive. Right now, the cowboy just stayed quiet and listened to the disgruntled chatter of the voices twenty feet above him.

  “—They went in the river.” Butler. “River goes west. Saw the horse for a second fore it went around the bend. Looked like it was alive and kicking. Don’t see Noose. Do any of you boys?”

  “—No. Just the horse—”

  “—Mebbe he drowned. He’ll fetch up sooner or later—”

  “—We need the body. No body, no reward.” Butler again.

  “—I don’t see anybody floating in the Snake, boss.”

  “—Gimme those field glasses.”

  Twenty feet below the bounty killers, their quarry huddled close to the side of the hill, keeping himself small. The chit-chat had stopped and though Noose couldn’t see them, he figured the gang was making a thorough scan of the river with a pair of binoculars. The cowboy hoped they wouldn’t check the hill. If he were in Frank Butler’s position, he’d lower a man on a rope tied to a saddle up top, having him check the whole slope where the horse took the fall just to be sure—but he wasn’t Butler . . . these cutthroats were impatient and trigger-happy, short on deliberation and diligence, and that hotheadedness had gotten their asses in a sling many times this day.

  Just to be careful, Noose put one hand on his holster.

  It was empty!

  His Colt .45 revolver was gone. It dropped out of his holster when he and his horse fell down the hill. That and the fifteen rounds in his belt were the only protection he had, and bullets weren’t of much use without a gun to shoot them with. The cowboy regretted losing the two Winchester repeater rifles and ammo bags on Copper’s saddle that got washed away with the horse, but regretted losing the horse more. For now he didn’t move a muscle, one hand gripping the tree trunk, the other holding onto a boulder as he hid out of sight.

  So far, Noose didn’t hear any of the men above him dismount. No squeaking of the saddles. No jingle of spurs or stirrups or sounds of boots hitting the ground. As the minutes ticked by, he grew confident none would dismount. In a few minutes they’d turn their horses right around and follow the northerly direction of the Snake River’s flow, looking for his body washed up onshore. These vermin were nothing if not predictable.

  Problem with these boys was they were lazy, Noose knew . . . they wanted the easy money. Good chance that was going to get them killed in the end.

  “I don’t see him. Take these damn field glasses back,” Butler’s voice growled from above. “Let’s ride down and check the river.”

  You do that, partner, Noose thought, grinning not a stone’s throw away. You just do that.

  As he’d surmised, there was directly a clamor of reins and hooves and bumping of men and saddle that sounded more confused than menacing, followed by a clopping of hooves as the riders retreated back the way they came and their noisy departure faded into the country stillness.

  Good. His arm was getting tired.

  The day was hot, the raw heat of the hard Wyoming skies bearing down hard.

  Joe Noose peered out from beneath the tree, squinted upward, and saw nothing but the ridge above against the harsh glare of the sun. He began to scale his way back up the steep incline, using the bushes and scrub for hand- and foothold. The cowboy made swift progress, wanting to be on top of the hill and off the side of it before the bounty killers rode down to the river—one look up and they’d see him and shoot him right off the side of the ravine.

  A few minutes later, Noose’s fingers clung to the lip of the roof of the hill. Lifting an eyeball over the edge, he took a cautious glimpse at the surroundings . . . the coast was clear. The bounty killers looked to be long gone. Nonetheless, he was careful as he swung his legs up, and quickly surveyed the area as soon as he was atop the hill in case Butler had grown a brain and left one of his boys behind as an insurance policy.

  Nobody was up here with him except a small lizard darting under a rock, so Noose crawled all the way back up. He turned his head slightly and adopted an intensely listening attitude—in the distance, maybe three hundred yards west, he could just make out the sounds of the gang riding out of the trees far below at the edge of the river. Voices could be heard, but the bounty killers were too far away for him to hear what was said.

  Dropping silently to his stomach, he inched forward on the dirt and peered over the edge of the hill he had just recently fallen over on his horse.

  The outfit had assembled down at the river’s edge, all present and accounted for. Eight horses. Eight men. Eight hats. They were discussing something he couldn’t hear or make out. The
ring of hat brims tipped together against the sun looked as sinister as a clump of poisonous mushrooms. Butler was pointing north—presumably ordering a search of the shoreline for Noose’s body in that direction whether he was alive or dead, because that’s where the river would have taken him. The riders departed in powerful lockstep like a vile, dangerous mechanism of murder, a machine just as likely to kill the man that used it. Above, a scud of clouds passed over the sun at the precise moment of the gang’s hegira, casting a forbidding shadow over the land escorting the bounty killers on their northward journey.

  When the horses and riders were out of view, Joe Noose finally rose to his feet. He was tired. He was hurt in a dozen places. But flowing adrenaline fueled his busted body. That would last only so long. The cowboy knew his energy was not limitless, and he could not elude these men forever. Wiping clammy gritty sweat from his brow with the back of his aching hand, Noose stared out toward Hoback Junction, now hidden from view behind the towering jagged tree-carpeted mountains on either side of the river, where the distant blue line of the Snake would fork east toward Jackson in a few miles.

  An eagle swooped overhead and spread its vast wingspan coasting on the thermals; it banked and dove and coasted above the river in magnificent flight. Noose admired the sight, reflecting that some animals had no natural predators because they were too damn tough. He was not one of those animals, the cowboy knew, and right now he was prey for a whole gang of nasty predators.

  But once as a boy Noose had seen a small dog get snatched up in the claws of a big hawk that flew away with it into the sky. The boy Joe had watched, riveted, as that hound had fought savagely, clutched in the talons of the hawk ascending on big flapping wings way high into the sky. The dog had bit and clawed and fought for its life so hard that suddenly it must have got in a lucky bite because that hawk suddenly screeched and stopped flapping and bird and dog fell, dropping from an immense height. Young Joe had watched them plunge forever, like a dream, locked in a death embrace, sure that tough little dog was alive all the way down but the hawk sure wasn’t and the canine had won the fight. When the bird and dog hit the ground, both were instantly killed on impact. It was a mess. But all the boy Joe could think about was what that hound had been thinking on his way down . . . knowing it had killed that hawk so much bigger and tougher than it was. The dog had to know the fall would kill it, but Noose felt in his heart that even though that scrappy little hound knew it was going to be dead in a few seconds, it savored its victory against something bigger than it was, satisfied it took that son of a bitch with it.

  That dog had a good death, the way Joe reckoned things.

  Right now, Noose felt trapped in a no-win, lose-lose situation just like that dog had been, and his hawk was Butler and his gunmen. Death was a certainty but if he was going down he was going to take those sons of bitches with him . . . every last one.

  It was time to go. He had to get a move on. The big solitary figure of Joe Noose stood on the vast lip of the canyon cliff, feeling outnumbered and alone. He was still breathing but he wished he hadn’t lost his horse. It was a long, long, walk to town and those who were chasing him down had horses—he didn’t and that put him at a sizable disadvantage.

  For now, the good news was, they were looking for him in the wrong direction.

  The bad news was, the eight gunmen were heading north and now stood between him and Jackson Hole, the only civilization for fifty miles. To get there, he was going to have to get past them.

  Nothing had changed.

  CHAPTER 22

  The sun was going down, and Bess Sugarland knew they were going to have to camp soon. And she was going to have to camp with them. The rookie marshal figured on sleeping with one eye open but also figured she probably wouldn’t sleep at all.

  Bess was fifth in line of the eight horses and riders trotting down the trailhead. The shadows grew longer on the big dusters and weathered saddles of the rough individuals she rode with, and darkness was not far off. Bess could hear the mumbled whispers of the posse about that very thing. In the lead, Frank Butler swiveled his head back and forth in machinelike repetition; from where he was looking Bess could tell he was searching for a place to camp.

  On the right, a heart-stopping steep granite ridge ribbed with lush conifers shot up two hundred feet into the sky. The clouds were low right now, so the tops of the mountains and tall hills were sheathed in a misty evanescence. The blue-greens and olive greens of the grass and tree tundra were a dark and ominous shroud of color blanketing a terrain that, depending on the light, sometimes appeared almost black-and-white in aspect. The atmosphere was foreboding and dank. The sun had fled behind the grayish murk overhead, visible now only as a sickly boil of a glow in the hazy pallor of the unrelieved skies.

  To the left, the sprawling wending stretch of the churning Snake River carved a rumbling slash through the valley floor like a wet cold wound. The progression of the trail hugged the shoreline following the direction of the river’s powerful, inevitable flow—a course that ran through Jackson Hole, where Bess Sugarland knew all this was somehow headed.

  Everything boded ill.

  But at least she had a horse like the others did.

  This was no place for a man on foot like Bess knew the man they hunted to be. Against her better judgment, she almost felt sorry for him but quickly remembered he murdered her father, or so they said. The man Joe Noose was out there somewhere, the female marshal thought as she looked left and right alertly, her uneasy gaze traveling over the ruggedly forbidding Wyoming terrain the company traversed. It was going to be a bad night for him. Maybe her, too.

  Butler whistled. “There.” The gang all looked where he was pointing: a clearing by the shoreline fifty yards ahead. “Looks like a good place to camp. Night’s upon us, boys. Noose ain’t going no place in the dark. With or without no horse. Let’s fetch us up some grub and catch some shut-eye and we’ll set out before dawn and have this sumbitch slung over a saddle by lunch tomorrow.” With a click of his teeth, Butler spurred his horse into a canter along the dusty trail and reined it around in the clearing below. There, he swung smoothly out of the saddle and tied off the reins on a large tree so conveniently positioned that it might have been left there for that exact purpose.

  The gang rode their horses down into the open area by the shoreline, dismounted, and began to unpack and set up camp.

  * * *

  An hour and a half later the sun had set.

  The sky was full dark.

  Four tents had been pitched. The female marshal had one to herself. The men were to bunk with one another, taking shifts sleeping while the others stood watch. The horses were tied off on two trees at the edge of camp. They were dimly seen in the gloom, jaws working in the feed bags strapped to their snouts as they stood together against the cold. A large campfire in between the tents cast a glimmering glow on the tents and the trees at the edge of the perimeter but barely reached the river just a few yards from camp. The firelight died after twenty feet and everything was swallowed in darkness and empty negative space where the breadth of the mountains could be felt and heard from the wind in the trees but not seen.

  A deep country silence descended, broken only by the occasional clop of a hoof or clink of a bullet belt or squeak of leather. Many of the men had already eaten and retired to tend their wounds, clean their guns, play cards, or sleep.

  Across from Frank Butler, Bess Sugarland hunkered by the fire.

  “How’s the food?” he inquired cordially.

  “I’ve had worse,” she responded, forking a mouthful of beans and squirrel meat.

  “Culhane can shoot the feather off a bird at four hundred yards but can’t cook to save his life,” the leader of the bounty killers said to the marshal in a tone that approached apologetic for him.

  Bess bit on something hard, winced, and spat a grain of buckshot into the palm of her hand. “Culhane, that’s his name? You should tell your man to shoot squirrels with a .22, not a scatter
gun.”

  “I’ll tell him that.”

  “How did you get into this line of work?” she asked Butler straight out.

  “Pay’s good. And I’m good at it. Might say I got a talent for it.”

  “Killing?”

  “Hunting men. Catching ’em. Killing comes with the job. But the job is catching men. Can’t kill what you can’t catch.” He caught her eye, the firelight dancing in his corneas. “But killing men, if and when it’s required without hesitation, is a job description of this here line of work. When it’s legal.”

  “Dead or alive.”

  “The notices sometimes say that, yes.” He nodded.

  “You prefer dead, I’m betting.”

  “The choice is up to them.”

  “Sure it is.” She smiled.

  He held her gaze. “They can surrender. They can not do the crime and get the reward put on their heads in the first place. Once they do, it becomes my business. I like my business to be neat and clean. The less fuss, the less hassle, the better.”

  “Bringing a man in dead is less hassle, I imagine.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Mind if I ask you another question, Mr. Butler?”

  “Ask me anything you want, Marshal.”

  She indicated the other bounty killers around the camp with a sweep of her hand with the fork in it. “Why do you need all these men?”

  “Can’t have enough good men.” He shrugged.

  “Fair enough. But today you’re only after one man. It seems excessive. Like a pack of hounds after one jackrabbit.”

  “The more dogs you have, the more likely you are to catch that hare. The one sure way to win a battle is with overwhelming force. I learned that in the war and I apply those lessons to my job. But this ain’t no rabbit we’re after, ma’am. This is a dog. A mad dog. A rabid cur of a dog that I remind you murdered your father.”