Branded Read online

  The following morning, after Noose had been put on a horse and sent on his way, Abraham forced Emmett and Willard to help him burn the bodies of the hanged boys, so no evidence would remain. Willard had to collect the head that had been severed in the noose. The father made his traumatized sons dig a shallow pit. The three corpses were dragged there and set aflame with coal oil. The three stood and watched the bodies burn in the back of the ranch, until they were nothing but charred bones and ash. Then Abraham himself filled in the pit with dirt and no trace of the young outlaws remained. Nobody ever came looking for them and even if they had, they would have found not a trace. Nobody knew. Except the Quaids. And the boys would never, ever forget.

  Their father, Abraham Quaid, had not always been murderous, and certainly not the way he was now, the monster he had become.

  Emmett would remember the night of the branding as the beginning of the Bad Time—those eight long, grim years of suffering for the two brothers growing up with their father on the Bar Q ranch. It was a time of pain, terror, and despair for himself and his little brother, Willard. They were subjected to the relentless torment of their father, less and less a man either of them recognized.

  The death of the boys’ mother, Abraham’s wife, Cora, three years before had been what made their father mean. Perhaps it was the loneliness of the ranch without the comfort of the woman who had been at his side, perhaps the responsibility of raising two young sons on his own, keeping his pain and loss hidden from them, had bent the single father.

  More and more tyrannical and isolated Abraham became.

  Forbidding the boys to attend the local school, their father homeschooled them in the morning when they woke and later again at night before they went to bed. The Bible, the Agricultural and Farming Journal were their textbooks. He also taught them reading, writing, and arithmetic. He was a brutal disciplinarian.

  The Q brand he used to burn Noose he now used as a cold metal rod to beat his children when they failed to measure up to his expectations or failed him in some way. The beatings were frequent. The brand kept his sons in fear of him and the loveless Abraham Quaid equated fear with respect.

  By the time they were in their early teens, there were marked differences between Emmett Quaid and his younger brother, Willard Quaid. Emmett had grown up stronger and more resilient, bearing up more fitfully under Abraham Quaid’s iron fist. Willard hadn’t. The boy was sensitive and had severe emotional problems, given to swings of mood and occasional hysterical outbursts that brought the full force of his father’s wrath down upon him, resulting in psychological and physical punishment that only made Willard worse, weaker, and more unstable.

  Emmett took his share of punishment at his father’s hand. But Abraham reserved a special harshness for Willard, the weaker of his two sons, who became the special object and focus of his cruelty. Their father thought his lessons did not make Willard a man. The boy was too weak, the runt of the litter. Emmett dared not stand up to his father and defy him by openly protecting Willard, but protect him he did: when Willard was unable to do his work because of his attacks of nerves Emmett did his chores for him; when the younger boy broke tools or dishes due to his clumsiness, Emmett took the blame and the beating with the rod—the cold branding iron—that followed—to this day he bore the scars on his buttocks and legs; and when in the night Willard burst into uncontrollable screams, Emmett lay in bed with his little brother with his hand on his mouth, stifling the cries so their father would not hear.

  Always, big brother Emmett promised Willard he would look after him, and he kept his promise as long as he could. His younger brother was under his wing, constantly near his side, and in this way the boys somehow survived life with their father on the ranch the eight long years after the branding incident.

  It all changed on the ranch when Emmett turned eighteen years of age.

  He couldn’t stay.

  There was a world out there and he had to see it. Emmett felt if he spent another day on his father’s ranch he would die. Even now, he believed he would have. So one fateful morning, he woke before dawn and saddled his pony. Kissing his sleeping brother Willard a last time, Emmett wept as he rode out of the Bar Q ranch and never looked back. He never said good-bye to his father.

  For his eighteenth and nineteenth years, Emmett Quaid traveled Wyoming and Idaho, finding work from his skills as a hardworking ranch hand and going from place to place. Drawn by a sense of right and wrong and protecting the defenseless baked into him by his family upbringing, he soon found work in law enforcement, working as a sheriff ’s deputy in several small towns.

  It was serving as a deputy, when one day Emmett witnessed a tough group of brave U.S. Marshals rout a gang of outlaws who held up a local bank. The federal marshals had ridden in and immediately taken over from the sheriff Emmett worked for, taking instant charge with the authority the badge gave them and the fearless moral character the men had about them. Within fifteen minutes, the standoff was over, all the bank robbers gunned down by the U.S. Marshals and slung over their saddles. Emmett Quaid watched them in awe, and at twenty-one years of age, decided he would be a federal marshal.

  Turning in his deputy badge, he set off for the U.S. Marshals headquarters in Laramie, Wyoming, and filled out his application. He was accepted. There, he received training in firearms, horsemanship, serving warrants, and all manner of technical law enforcement, and by his twenty-second year, he had become a deputy marshal. At age twenty-six, he was a full-fledged U.S. Marshal stationed in Pocatello, Idaho.

  In all those years, he thought of his father and his brother less and less, tried to forget the terrible place he was from, and had nearly forgotten it all.

  Then one day at the U.S. Marshal’s office in Pocatello, Emmett received the letter from his father telling him his younger brother, Willard, was dead. The note, written in Abraham Quaid’s terse poor penmanship, was brief and to the point: Willard had taken ill of consumption and his weak constitution had failed, causing his death. He was buried on the ranch. The letter relayed the information and nothing else, a note as cold and brutal as the parent who wrote it. Emmett never wrote back.

  While he maintained his duties as a deputy marshal and continued to train, Emmett Quaid privately labored under a black depression. Racked with guilt, he believed himself to be to blame for his little brother’s death; if only he had stayed home to look after Willard, the boy would be alive. During the Bad Time, Emmett had promised Willard he would always protect him but in the end he’d broken his word, and now his brother was dead. In the barracks, when the other men slumbered, he would weep himself to sleep. Emmett hated his father for a very long time until he came to accept that not only had he failed as a brother but he had also failed as a son by abandoning his father, too. The U.S. Marshals Service had forged in him a sense of duty and personal responsibility, and Emmett Quaid accepted that his act of leaving home, where his family needed him, resulted in terrible consequences because of his actions.

  Family is everything, the good and the bad of it.

  Several years went by and Emmett Quaid kept planning to take a leave to go back and visit his father, Abraham Quaid, but every time he was ready to, something held him back inside from going back to the dreaded ranch.

  It was his father who came to him one fateful day when a report arrived at the Pocatello U.S. Marshal’s office about a killer using a Q brand on his victims.

  Emmett Quaid requested the assignment to track down the murderer, and was given it.

  As he rode out after The Brander, Emmett knew his trail would lead him home.

  Emmett felt bad about how unfairly fate had bound his and Joe Noose’s destinies together now their paths were inescapably intertwined; after what their father had done to Noose as a boy, after all this time, Emmett was using Noose to save the very man who branded him.

  The worst of it was once his father was found, Emmett Quaid fully intended to shoot Joe Noose dead, and Bess Sugarland along with him, because no
body could know the truth about Abraham Quaid if his boy Emmett was going to bring his dad home and keep him safe.

  Fate was cruel.

  Noose had a lot of settling up to do with the Quaids in this life, Emmett readily admitted, and there would be a reckoning for all of them in Hell.

  CHAPTER 21

  The town of Consequence, Wyoming, was sleeping.

  In the predawn hours, the sky was just lightening, and darkness hung over the small town.

  The sheriff ’s office and jail was a one-story brick-and-mortar building at the end of the long street that ran through the settlement. The placement was conspicuous. The bunker was built like a fortress, with a heavy iron door and steel bars and shutters on the window.

  The snow lay heavy on the street and boardwalk and it was very quiet. Then came the sound of hooves and three men rode up the block on three stout horses, towing a fourth gelding. One dismounted in front of the sheriff ’s office, while the other two remained in their saddles, cradling rifles. The three wore heavy dusters and gloves against the biting cold, and their breath condensed in thick clouds in the cold air. The temperature was in the single digits.

  All of the men wore badges on their coats.

  The man with the sheriff ’s badge who got off his horse was the hulking, heavyset sheriff Buford “Bull” Conrad, a formidable lawman in his late fifties. Beady eyes squinted out of a weathered, saturnine countenance behind a bushy brown beard. His large-roweled Mexican spurs clanked as he trudged to the sheriff’s office and pulled a ring of heavy keys from his coat pocket, unlocking the door and shoving through it.

  Inside, it was almost pitch-dark, broken only by a faint dawn light filtering through the windows. In the shadows, the office was one large room, one side with desks for the sheriff and head deputy next to a stove and well-armed gun rack, one side a row of jail cells.

  Presently there was one occupant.

  The prisoner, named Lester Wiggins, was a feral, disheveled cowboy with an animalistic aspect to his predatory, stupid features. The cowboy, alarmed, sat up abruptly upon hearing the sheriff enter, shivering equally from cold and terror. His eyes watched as slowly and deliberately, Sheriff Conrad crossed the office, spurs jangling, snatching a Winchester repeater from the rack on his way to the jail cell.

  Giving the lever of the rifle a loud cock, Conrad stood in front of the bars, rearing forbiddingly over his prisoner, The lawman’s grim face was shadowed, glowering eyes glinting in the dim dawn light. With dramatic effect, he just stood with a shuttered executioner’s gaze and regarded the cowboy in the cell. At last, the lawman spoke.

  “You’re going to pay the price.”

  He said it as a statement and question.

  The prisoner dropped his gaze, heaving a heavy sigh.

  He nodded.

  Moments later the door to the jail opened and Sheriff Conrad led Wiggins out in steel handcuff s, a blanket draped over his freezing shoulders. A jab of the Winchester in his back got the prisoner up into the saddle of the fourth horse. The two hard-bitten deputies, Tom Rickey and Joe Bob Hubbard, kept the prisoner covered with their rifles as with a sneer Sheriff Conrad got on his horse. “C’mon, boys, we don’t want to keep the judge waiting.”

  They rode off at a brisk trot and didn’t have far to go.

  The sun was not yet fully risen as the mounted lawmen escorted their prisoner to the local courthouse just down the street, where court was already in session.

  Judge William “Bill” Black routinely started his proceedings at the crack of dawn so he could be finished by breakfast.

  The thin, white-haired jurist was a patrician man in his sixties, seated at the bench of the single-room courthouse in his black robes. With a brusque, impatient manner and pitiless eyes, Judge Black presided over the proceedings with the air of a man who wanted it done with.

  There was no jury. This courtroom had no jury box.

  At one table, a young prostitute freshly missing an eye sat at the prosecution table. The side of her face was bandaged and the whore looked ridden hard and put away wet. She was in pain and distress, and no small state of discombobulation from taking regular nips from a small bottle of laudanum. The prosecutor had the floor, giving a vividly detailed account of an attack on a pair of local prostitutes by a vicious john that left one with a broken neck and the other without an eye. The counselor’s fiery oration was suitably outraged, and the judge listened impassively, checking his pocket watch twice.

  The doors opened and Sheriff Conrad brought in the accused, Lester Wiggins. Force-marching the prisoner at gunpoint past the pews with a few local spectators to the trial, the lawman dragged Wiggins to the other desk and shoved the stupid cowboy down beside an inept-looking defense lawyer, who was nodding off.

  Judge Black and Sheriff Conrad made quick, covert eye contact and the lawman nodded, the jurist nodding back.

  Conrad didn’t stay to watch and left the courtroom.

  At the defense table, the accused sat there with a dull look in his eyes as the prosecutor pointed at him and hurled invective in his direction.

  The judge raised his hand to the prosecutor. “Wrap it up, Counsel.”

  The lawyer for the prostitute asked for a verdict of death by hanging.

  Judge Black asked the sleeping defense lawyer what he had to say in his client’s defense and got a snore in response.

  The cowboy jumped up and shouted, “I didn’t do it, Your Honor.”

  “She says you did,” the judge replied.

  “She didn’t know what she saw. She only got but one eye.”

  “That’s because you popped it out with your thumb, you dirty miserable sonofabitch!” the whore screeched.

  “Order.” The judge hit the gavel. “Did any witnesses see this?”

  “Yeah, but he broke her neck!” she wailed.

  “Then it’s your word against his.”

  “He told everybody he done it!”

  “Case dismissed for lack of evidence. The accused is free to go.” Judge Black hit the gavel.

  Stunned, the whore began shaking head to foot. “What? He killed my girlfriend and he took my eye and you ain’t ’t gonna do nothing to him!”

  The wronged woman leapt up, drawing a derringer flintlock .45 from her bloomers. Everybody dropped to the floor. Drawing a vengeful bead on the cowboy thug who cowered in terror covering his face, she righteously declared: “A bullet is the only way a whore is gonna get true justice in this life!”

  Without a drop of sweat, Judge Black reached below the bench and pulled out a giant Colt Dragoon handgun stowed there. From the bench, he shot the prostitute in the side of the head, blowing the other side of her face off in a gory explosion of blood, brain, and skull that splattered the onlookers. Replacing the smoking revolver, he pounded the gavel. “Court’s adjourned.”

  Leaving the bench, Judge Black left through the courtroom back door that instead of leading to the judge’s chambers opened into the living room of his own next-door house attached to the courthouse in an adjoining structure.

  The tidy living room was opulently furnished with a huge fireplace, oriental rugs, leather couches, gaslight wall sconces, and a full brass-railed bar. It looked like a San Francisco bordello down to the photos of naked showgirls framed on the wall.

  Going into the kitchen, he lit the stove and took out the eggs and ham to prepare his breakfast when came a knock on the door.

  He answered it. Sheriff Conrad stood in the doorway with a thick envelope that he handed to Judge Black.

  “He paid the price.” The lawman grinned.

  “The full price?”

  “Every dollar.”

  “Tell him he hurts another whore like that again, the price doubles.”

  Conrad walked away with a wink and a wave.

  Chuckling, Judge Black shut the door, walked back into the living room, and lifted the oriental carpet to reveal a large hidden safe built into the floor. He undid the combination and deposited the cash in the stron
gbox. The safe was already filled with a fortune in bribes: random valuables in the form of jewelry, gold, bank notes; along with property deeds, bills of sale, livestock vouchers, and all manner of barter currency.

  Sitting on top of the valuables was a leather-bound black notebook. The judge made an entry in it with his fountain pen. There were pages and pages of other entries in the ledger filled with handwritten names and dollar amounts. He returned the black book to the strongbox.

  Closing and locking the safe, Judge Bill Black covered it with the rug, then went to the kitchen to enjoy his breakfast.

  CHAPTER 22

  The three riders and horses traveled the rugged trail north, their figures dwarfed by the snowy wastes of northern Wyoming.

  They had once again lost the trail of The Brander. He was out there, somewhere, but they knew not where. Wyoming was a very big territory. He could be anywhere.

  Joe Noose had been doing some figuring, and when he had made up his mind he shared it. “I think Abraham Quaid ain’t killing random individuals. I best believe he’s killing damn specific ones.”

  “But if so, who?” wondered Bess.

  “You ask me, he’s killing the gang that robbed his cattle, burned his ranch, and shot him. He’s tracking ’em all down, putting ’em six feet under. These ain’t crazy kills, this is all about revenge.”

  “We don’t know that,” Bess brooded.

  Emmett was suddenly overjoyed. “I’ll be! Of course it is!”

  “What the hell are you smiling about?” The bounty hunter lifted an eyebrow with an expression of disregard to the gleeful lawman.

  “Because you’re right, Joe.” The marshal grinned broadly, hugely relieved. “My—The Brander is out for justice he didn’t get when that gang slipped the noose. It all makes sense now.”

  Marshal Bess scowled. “I don’t see how murdering entire families, slaughtering women and children, makes any sense at all.”