Noose Page 14

  She may be only one woman but she had the badge.

  She was the law.

  This could save him. If he could get to her, Noose could tell her what really happened back at the bar: how Butler had murdered her father, the marshal, and framed him for the terrible crime to get the fat reward put on his head. But would the marshal’s daughter believe him? It would be his word against seven bounty killers. Noose knew he had proof of his innocence and Butler’s guilt if he could live long enough to get it in front of the proper authorities: the proof was in the bullets in the dead lawman’s chest—Butler had shot the marshal with his own gun and that Colt Dragoon was a different caliber than Noose’s Colt .45, so those fatal rounds could not have been fired by Noose’s pistol. The cowboy’s one slim hope was getting to the woman marshal somehow without getting gunned down by the bounty killers and then spilling his guts to her. But he wasn’t stupid. Noose knew that right now the woman wanted his head and it was very personal and she would be the first to shoot him on sight—but if she was any kind of sworn law enforcement officer with a shred of integrity, she would do the lawful thing: she would use her authority as U.S. Marshal to call off the bounty raid and take the whole situation in front of the judge in Jackson Hole, where the matter could be investigated and adjudicated. Noose knew full well that Butler and his gang were not going to like that, and maybe not stand still for it. It was long odds, but about the only chance he had.

  The woman showing up could be a stroke of luck yet for Noose.

  But not for the lady marshal, he quickly concluded.

  She could easily wind up dead, shot in the back or worse, if she got in the way of the bounty killers and they decided to be rid of her. These cold-blooded killers had already murdered one U.S. Marshal and would not hesitate to murder another. This was a certainty. Out here in this vast wilderness, the shot wouldn’t be heard and her body would never be found. Noose doubted this woman truly knew the kind of men these were, but Noose definitely did.

  And now suddenly it wasn’t just his own hide he was worried about, it was hers.

  If she died it was on him.

  In a way, Noose felt responsible for the murder of the U.S. Marshal. Even though Noose didn’t see it coming, had he not been such a stubborn self-righteous cussed son of a bitch and trailed the bounty killers to town, that lawman would still be alive.

  And his daughter wouldn’t be out here in grave danger.

  So if she got killed it would be on his head, was how Joe Noose looked at it.

  Right then, he felt his ingrained stubbornness kick like a mule in his gut.

  No way he was going to let anything happen to this woman.

  Not while he was still breathing and had bullets left.

  If he could just contact her in some way even if it meant getting too close to the gang for his own safety.

  He had to warn her.

  CHAPTER 30

  Bess needed to relieve herself.

  Had to for the last fifteen miles.

  She’d been holding it in for the last two hours and was in considerable discomfort with the bounce of the saddle. The country they had been riding through the last two hours had been wide-open prairie that did not afford any privacy. She could have ridden off by herself, gone a few miles, and probably found a suitable spot, but something told the canny female marshal it was a good idea to stick to these villains like glue and not let them out of her sight. At the same time, she didn’t want them to watch her drop her drawers so she had bitten the bullet—literally had stuck one of her .44-40 rounds between her molars, grinding against it, riding out the cramps in her bowels that came and went.

  Five minutes ago, to her indescribable relief, fortune smiled on her. Luckily for her, the grim dogged procession of tired horses and bent buzzard figures of bounty killers rode up an incline and the posse was in the trees—rows of pines in dense walls of branches and trunks in both directions were on either side of the narrow trail. Both sides gave Bess ample forest cover to do her business shielded from sight of the men. To her left, the landscape angled sharply upward in a sheer slope of hard granite and lush conifers jutting at obtuse angles to the grade—that would be a hard climb and the woman didn’t think she had that kind of time. To her right, the slope looked level for a few hundred yards past the tree line, then appeared to drop off into a ravine of some kind. That was the preferred direction she would head for.

  When she could stand it no more, she spoke up. “Mr. Butler,” Bess called out to the man in black riding directly before her on his giant mean stallion. “Can we take a ten-minute break? Nature calls.”

  “As nature will do,” he amiably replied without looking back. “Take your time. We’ll rest the horses ’n wait for you here.”

  “Much obliged,” Bess said with a relieved exhale. Descending out of her saddle and tossing the reins to Butler, she loped off the trail across the wild grass toward the dense tree line ahead. Her pace became even brisker as soon as she crossed into the cool, dark, peaceful canopy of pine forest. Once she felt the comforting embrace of its solitude, only then did she look back—to her great relief, after a few paces the posse was soon lost from view altogether past the branches.

  Bess was thinking, Ought to have told Butler twenty minutes, because she intended to walk as far as she could into the woods and put a considerable distance between herself and the men behind her before she did what she came to do . . . even the next state would not be private enough for her.

  A wave of relief washed over Bess, who experienced a sudden flood of euphoria—it felt so good to be alone finally. It had been suffocating having no breathing space to herself and her own thoughts riding with these bad men the last day. She had not realized until this very instant the degree of tension and paranoia she experienced every single moment she was in the company of Frank Butler and his bloodthirsty gang . . . the always having to look over her shoulder, always having to watch her own back, needing to keep her eyeballs on them every second of every minute of every hour with her hand always near her gun, constantly on guard expecting the unexpected, knowing anything could happen with killers like these who were capable of anything. She was alone. Truly alone. With them. The debilitating clenched guts and stomachaches of tension never ceased. Bess’s head swam as she felt a rare panic attack coming on. In the anxiety of the moment, she just wanted it to stop, wanted it over with . . . this whole damn terrible business had to end.

  Something blinded her for an instant—a metallic flash in her eyes. A ray of sunlight through the high branches had glinted off the marshal’s badge on her breast and her eye caught the quick reflection . . . she took that as a sign.

  Bess understood the U.S. Marshal’s badge was worn on her shirt for a reason, so she settled down immediately. She had a job to do.

  The female marshal knew she was better than all of these bounty killers put together and would prove it. Don’t let the sons of bitches get you down, Nate Sugarland always said. Bess then added to herself, especially dirty sons of bitches like these. A murder of crows these men were, a kettle of vultures. Bad business. Very bad company indeed.

  Bess stopped walking. Where was she going and what difference did it make? Not going to feel safe until this thing is over and better accept it. So she sucked it up.

  This was as good a place as anywhere.

  * * *

  “Shouldn’t somebody go with her?” Lawson asked, unsure.

  “Any volunteers?” Butler quickly shot his boys a dry, sardonic glance, like it was the worst idea in the history of bad ideas.

  No hands were raised. Nobody spoke up. All thought better of it.

  “I would not want to be in the boots of the man who found that filly with her drawers around her ankles,” Butler said with a snort of laughter, a roll of his twinkling eyes, and a merry grin on his face. He shook his head. “Nossir, I would not.”

  That supplied the bounty killers with a brief, cheap chuckle at the lady marshal’s expense.

 
CHAPTER 31

  She was coming his way.

  Noose could not believe his luck when the posse stopped and the marshal dismounted and headed into the woods. He knew he could count on her getting well out of earshot of the bounty killers, and the cowboy wasn’t going to get a better opportunity to catch her alone and tell his story. The time for him to make his move was now.

  He hunkered down on a high ridge above the forest line, the Butler Gang to his left sitting on their horses on the trail with the western mountain face on the other side. Below him, south, the forest was flat and continued a few hundred yards to his right where it dropped off in a gradient pine-covered slope that spread out west for close to a mile where it met the twinkling blue line of the Snake River.

  The small, blue jean–clad figure of the woman disappeared into the trees, and Joe Noose broke from his place of concealment and descended toward the woods.

  * * *

  She buttoned up and washed her hands in a brook. Bess didn’t want to go back, not to those men, but knew she had to. This thing wasn’t done by a long shot. If I could only stay here by myself a few more minutes, the marshal had been wishing. Suddenly she realized she was not alone, sensing a presence that quickly made itself known when it spoke from a few yards away.

  “Marshal, I’m unarmed and I’m turning myself in,” a husky, unthreatening drawl softly whispered.

  Whirling around, Bess drew her revolver, cocking back the hammer on the huge figure of the man standing under the shadows of a tall pine ten feet away. His shoulders were broad, his posture erect, and his clothes were covered with old blood. “You!” She instantly recognized Joe Noose from the first time she laid eyes on him when he rode into Hoback yesterday—the young woman had thought Noose was good-looking then but right now, as violence consumed her and she aimed her pistol between his eyes, she wanted only to blow the handsome out the back of his head.

  “No!” he said.

  Her finger began to close on the trigger, and he cleared the ten feet in less time than she had to squeeze it and his big fist wrenched the Colt Peacemaker out of her palm, flipped it around, knocked open the cylinder, dumped the bullets on the ground, closed the gun, and handed it back to her before she had a chance to breathe.

  Joe Noose now stood two feet from her, his craggy face wearing an expression of animal intensity, both his hands up, palms open and empty. “I didn’t shoot your father, Marshal. As God is my witness. Just let me ex—”

  Bess’s eyes were wild with rage and she heard herself screech like a cat as she lunged forward, drawing her bowie knife from her belt, stabbing and slashing at Noose with the blade. Her face was twisted in feral savagery. For a very big man, the cowboy was quicker than he looked, stepping out of the path of the knife with cat-footed grace and avoiding her furious swings and jabs with little apparent effort. Bess hissed: “You killed my father and I’m gonna cut your heart out, you son of a bitch!”

  “Now, that ain’t what happened,” Noose retorted with an unrattled calm she had to credit him for, even in her agitated state. He easily dodged and ducked her thrusts with the knife, keeping his hands out in a placating gesture, trying to talk her down. “Think about it, Marshal. I’m one man with one gun. You ever stop for a minute to think how I walked out of that bar, me against twelve men and twelve guns, if I had killed the marshal, your father? Think logical, ma’am. You figure I had me the drop on twelve men? Twelve professional shootists? I did not. I walked out because they let me walk out. Hell, they ran me out. Gave me a head start, in fact. Why do you think they did that, Marshal?” Cool and slow, Noose backstepped in a slow retreat as Bess kept coming at him with the knife—but Noose got away from her blade easier than Bess did from his words, and her slashing strokes had less and less punch behind them, listening to what Noose said: “They did that because they didn’t have no reward on me yet. There was no money in it. They needed to get you to get the reward authorized before there was any profit in hunting me down.” Bess stopped, lowering her knife hand to her side and just stood there, gasping for breath and staring wildly at Noose. He said, “Startin’ to make sense to you now?”

  She just glared at him, winded, but the anger was gone from her gaze. Her breath came in hard, rough bursts.

  Noose looked her straight in the eye. “I didn’t kill your father, Marshal. Frank Butler did. While his men stood by and watched. And he did it to frame me for the reward he and his pack of jackals could hunt me down and collect. That’s the truth. Those are the true facts. And that’s what happened.”

  Bess sheathed the knife. It seemed to her like she had always known something like that was what really happened. The big, rugged cowboy in front of her fixed her square with his blue, unblinking eyes the color of winter sky and she knew he spoke the truth—and knew he knew that she knew now.

  “I kinda figured.” Bess nodded.

  She sat down on a rock. Threw a glance to the trees in the direction of where she left the posse but didn’t hear any movement. Every part of her body hurt. Bess looked over at Joe Noose and saw the blood on his tattered and dirty shirt and pants and knew the tough man had taken a lot more punishment than she had and was holding up pretty well. She forgot her own pain, feeling ashamed.

  The handsome chipped-granite unshaven face regarded her patiently. “Question is, you’re the marshal and what do you plan to do about it? There’s still seven of them, but there’s two of us now.”

  “We got to make it to Jackson Hole. That’s the nearest U.S. Marshal’s office,” she said quietly.

  “Mackenzie and Swallows. Met ’em four days ago.”

  “That’s them.” She nodded.

  Noose crouched down in front of Bess so he was eye level with her even though the effort hurt his wounded side. “You know that gang’s got to kill the both of us now. Me, they still got the reward on. You, you’re a witness and if you talk, that reward is history and their necks are in nooses. They need both of us dead. You understand that?”

  She nodded again.

  “I’m sorry about all of this,” he said softly.

  “How is it your fault?” She looked confused.

  “I stirred things up, I suppose you could call it. Butler and his boys shot a man I had captured alive for the bounty and they stole his body at gunpoint, brought it to your father in Hoback for the reward. Thing was, I went after them. Came to that bar, confronted them, and told the marshal what they done, and, well, that’s when Butler shot your father. So in a way, this is my fault. If I’d have just let it go, your—”

  “Stop.” She cut him off. Bess looked Noose in the eye with a sad, unaccusatory gaze and shook her head sympathetically. “Sounds like you were trying to do the right thing.”

  He shrugged. “I was. But it turned out wrong anyhow.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Just trying to say I’m sorry I got you into all this.”

  Bess had a thought and, brow furrowed, looked up at Noose. “This whole thing, it ain’t just about reward money.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “That man Frank Butler wants your hide.”

  “There’s that, too, I reckon.”

  “What did you do to make him hate you so much?”

  At that, the cowboy paused and laconically scratched the back of his head and after he thought it over, half grinned. “I showed up, I guess.”

  Bess thought Noose looked damned handsome when he smiled, and she did, too. “What does that mean?”

  Noose shrugged. Considered his words. “It’s like this, I suppose. Take the world. There’s men like me on one end, men like him on the other, and all the rest of the folks in between. I ain’t saying I’m all the way good but Butler, he’s all the way bad. The two of us just can’t breathe the same air. Can’t be on the same planet. Before we met, we didn’t know of each other so there was no problem, but two days ago we did meet and the world, you see, it just ain’t got room for the both of us. One of us has got to go. Don’t mind saying I’m
hoping that’s him.”

  “I hope it’s him, too.”

  “Let’s make damn sure of it, then. You ready to move?”

  “I am.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Turning his back, Joe Noose returned to where the. 45 cartridges he’d dumped out of Bess’s pistol lay and picked them up off the grass. Walking up to the lady marshal, the cowboy handed them back. She reloaded her gun, saying, “Obliged.”

  Noose smiled. “I didn’t get your name.”

  She laughed. “Bess. Bess Sugarland.” The young woman held out her hand and the cowboy shook it.

  He smiled again with a wince of pain. “Marshal Sugarland, my name’s Joe Noose and it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance even if I’d prefer it was under better circumstances.”

  * * *

  The Butler Gang took a smoke break.

  Others had a drink from a bottle of whiskey they passed around. Killing time.

  Waiting for the lady marshal to come back from answering nature’s call.

  Frank Butler checked his pocket watch. She’d been gone ten minutes.

  He’d give her another ten.

  * * *

  Against the vast green wall of the canyon ravine, two people made their way down the jagged slope. The descent was difficult and the man had been wounded, so the woman was helping him along.

  “Nobody’s gonna hang you. I’m the law. It’s my word. You’re off the hook.”

  “Nice to hear. But right now hanging’s the least of my worries. Those killers back there are my worry. Ought to be your main concern, too.” Noose grimaced in pain. Blood was seeping through his shirt. “I’m messed up.”

  “I know,” Bess said.

  The lawman eased the cowboy to the ground and sat him against the rock. She opened her canteen and gave him water.

  “Drink.”

  Noose gulped it.

  “Let me look at these.” Bess examined his wounds and winced, squinting. “How is it you’re still alive, mister?”