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  “Good to see you, Laura.” Bess leaned down to shake hands. “I see you’re getting your cattle to market.”

  “Yeah, well, hoping to, anyhow. It’s a long way from here to there to Cheyenne.” The cattlewoman’s gaze darkened as she slid a sidelong glance at her wranglers. “We ain’t exactly off to an auspicious start. Did you catch that man you were after?”

  “We did. Up in Destiny.”

  “But . . .” Laura had noticed Bess’s shuttered expression.

  “It was complicated.”

  “Weren’t there three of you before?”

  “I’m afraid now there’s just two.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We are, too.”

  Joe Noose observed the men were standing around a grave. It was freshly dug, shovel stuck in the ground. He saw the Bible in Laura’s hand. It became clear to him. She and her crew had been holding a service when they had been interrupted by his and the lady marshal’s arrival. “Looks like you lost one of yours, too,” he said.

  “Four. So far,” Laura replied sadly. “One a day out of my ranch near Consequence. One back in Sweetwater Station. One by Muddy Gap. Ox Johnson, Jed Wade, and Clyde Fullerton were their names. Luke McGraw here today makes four.” Bess exchanged glances with Noose. What the hell?

  They both swiveled their gazes down to Laura Holdridge, who stood planted on both boots, fists on her hips, looking back and forth fearlessly up at both of them on their horses, taking their measure. The cattlewoman’s mind was working behind her eyes. “Take a ride with me.” It was less a request than a friendly order and her tone broached no refusal. Noose and Bess shrugged and nodded, and Laura mounted her horse in one swift, strong motion. She tossed the Bible down to one of her ramrods, who caught it. “Curly. Finish reading over Luke. Rest of you men, pay your respects and be back in the saddle in fifteen minutes. We’re moving out in twenty.”

  Spurring her horse and riding in the lead back toward the herd. The marshal and bounty hunter rode after her. Laura slowed her mare so Noose and Bess could catch up on either side of her saddle. She didn’t speak until they were well out of earshot of her crew. “Those deaths were no accident. My four drovers were murdered. Somebody on my crew is killing my wranglers. I can’t prove it. I don’t know who the killer is. Somebody doesn’t want me to get my cattle to market. I believe this individual or individuals will murder every one of my outfit including me to be sure these steers don’t make it to Cheyenne. So I’m asking for your help.”

  Bess looked at Noose.

  Noose looked at Laura.

  Who was looking at him.

  “You’re a bounty hunter, Mr. Noose. A damn good one, I understand. I will pay you five thousand dollars cash reward for you to discover the killer on my crew and stop these terrible murders. A dead-or-alive bounty.”

  The lady marshal raised her eyebrows.

  The bounty hunter tightened his jaw, swinging his glance back at the receding figures of the drovers standing around the grave. “You positive your drovers were murdered, and it wasn’t just accidents?”

  “Five thousand dollars positive.”

  “Saying your suspicions are true, it ain’t as easy as just asking them which one of them is the killer, Mrs. Holdridge. I’d have to ride along with you a spell, sniff around, for starters. You know I’m a bounty hunter. Do any of them?”

  “No. They’ll recognize the marshal here as the law because she was wearing her badge, but they don’t know who you are.”

  “What are you thinking, Joe?” Bess asked.

  “I’m thinking I sign on with Mrs. Holdridge’s cattle drive as a replacement wrangler, go undercover, and find me a killer.”

  “Do you know the first thing about cowpunching?” Bess laughed.

  “I’ve done a little.”

  “When?”

  “Ten, maybe twelve years ago.”

  “Joe.”

  “Nothing to it.”

  “You will be kicked in the skull or trampled or gored by a bull the first day out, if whoever the killer is on this drive doesn’t put a bullet in your back first.”

  Noose gave Bess that look and she rolled her eyes. He swung his gaze to Laura, his pale eyes steady as he extended his hand. “I like you, Laura. Think you got guts running these cattle and crew to Cheyenne by yourself and I don’t want to see you fail. I’ll take the job.”

  Laura Holdridge shook his hand with a firm grip, brushing her windblown blond hair out of her beautiful, stormy eyes. “Thank you.”

  “Thank me later.”

  “We move out in ten minutes,” the cattlewoman said, all business. With that, Laura brusquely yanked her reins and swept her horse around, riding hard back to the livestock and wagons, as her men turned from the grave back to their horses and mounted up, ready to move the herd.

  Noose looked at Bess, who, with a big old grin shook her head at him.

  “Joe Noose, what the hell are you getting yourself into?”

  Keep reading for a special early excerpt of the next

  Joe Noose western!

  THE CRIMSON TRAIL

  by ERIC RED

  On the long ride back from tracking down a killer in remote Wyoming, Joe Noose and Marshal Bess Sugarland come upon a large cattle drive. The trail boss, the ruggedly beautiful and tough cattlewoman rancher Laura Holdridge, tells Noose that four of her wranglers have died under mysterious circumstances on the cattle drive since she started moving the herd weeks ago.

  She suspects a killer in their midst but doesn’t know who or why. Learning Joe Noose is a legendary bounty hunter, Laura Holdridge offers him a five-thousand-dollar bounty to ride with the cattle drive across

  Wyoming, uncover the assassin, and capture him, dead or alive.

  Look for THE CRIMSON TRAIL,

  on sale this summer.

  CHAPTER 1

  The cattle drive set forth after the thaw 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 of 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 drover 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 the 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 bulls 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 and blowing his face off two days later 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 the experienced wranglers’ deaths were accidental. Now everybody was watching their back and looking over their shoulders, sleeping with one eye open, if they slept at all. A few were sleeping in the saddle, catching some shut-eye on the trail. A palatable 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 bulls 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 mountains 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 bulls that were snorting and going at each other 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 bull 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 were 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 whom to send his back pay to, only to realize she had no idea if the man had a wife or children. In fact, Laura realized she knew almost nothing at all about the wrangler she had employed all these years, or 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 drovers, wondering how much 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.

  “Good-bye, 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, 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 being 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 may 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 selectio
n 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 good-byes.” 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.