Branded Page 5

  “The old fella that branded you. Can you remember anything more about him that could give us some kind of description?” Emmett asked Noose as they ate.

  “It was a long time ago. He was old back then. At least he looked old to me. Remember, I was just a kid, and it was dark. Fifties or sixties, mebbe. Puts him seventies or eighties now. Suppose he could be in his sixties. Seems pretty old to be killing all these folks and covering as many miles as The Brander has been doing, but he was a tough son of a bitch then. Some men just look old. I recollect him as tall. Thin. Long white hair. And like I said, he was missing three fingers on his right hand. Looked like a chicken claw.”

  “That’s a damn good piece of description for us to be looking for.”

  “A good start. Folks will remember a man missing all them fingers on that right hand.”

  “You said he had two sons,” Bess reminded Noose. “Could The Brander be one of them?”

  Emmett seemed to give that suggestion some consideration.

  “They had all their fingers,” Noose replied. “At least they did when I knew ’em. Weren’t nothing but a pair of scared kids. Soft. We’re looking for the father.” He nodded decisively to himself, grimly resolved. “He was the crazy one.”

  As there was little civilization farther south until they reached Evanston a hundred miles away, Noose decided they had been heading in the wrong direction, so after a group discussion, it was decided the hunting party would turn around and ride east toward Green River.

  Consulting a map, the three made note of the nearest towns and hubs of civilization north, east, and west, rejecting farther south as that was the direction the killer’s previous victim had been and they saw no reason for him to backtrack. Otherwise, the branding slayings seemed to follow no logic or pattern besides the capricious bloodthirsty whims of the fiend committing them.

  The trail of The Brander was colder than the frigid subzero Wyoming winter landscape the three manhunters rode through. Much of the time, they couldn’t see ten feet ahead of them. Noose felt that symbolized their progress with their quarry.

  Who would The Brander’s next victim be?

  Where would he strike next?

  Wyoming was a big territory.

  For all they knew, he’d already left Wyoming.

  The progress with the horses was slow. Roads, when there were ones, were ankle-deep in snow for the horses. Trails, those they could find, were knee-deep. When they had to cross open plains, their mounts had to shove on through drifts that reached their bellies.

  It was a guessing game as to the location of the killer they were hunting, trying to pick up his trail, but doggedly Noose, Bess, and Emmett persevered. With each fruitless day and more miles covered turning up nothing but a head cold, that determination grew.

  The foreman at the corral in Smith hadn’t seen any old man missing three fingers.

  Neither did the wagon master on the road on the plain south of Bondurant.

  Two bootmakers twenty miles apart in Freemont had repaired several broken heels, but the owners had all their fingers. Business for them at least appeared to be better than it was for their counterparts to the south.

  “These folks that this guy you’re calling The Brander put his iron to and killed, what’s the connection?” Noose once again asked Emmett.

  “None I’ve been able to tell. Does there have to be a connection?”

  “The man who branded me didn’t seem the type to do it for no reason.”

  “Even if there is a connection with the men,” Bess pointed out, “that don’t explain why he is branding the families.”

  “Reckon it don’t.”

  Joe Noose, Bess Sugarland, and Emmett Ford rode on through the sleet and slush, bundled against the relentless snow that always seemed to be in their chests as if trying to push them back, to stop them from reaching The Brander.

  It was the last week of December, and they had been on the trail for three weeks and two days.

  CHAPTER 6

  Holed up on his isolated farm during a blizzard in the middle of nowhere thirty miles away from anything had been driving Buck Dodge nuts with cabin fever.

  The cowboy had been crawling out of his skin all morning. He paced the floor of his small hardscrabble house, his loaded carbine rifle close at hand. He was wrapped in three blankets over his coat and gloves and was still cold. The wind moaned through the planks of the walls. The broken roof groaned under the weight of four feet of snow. The hinges on the door rattled. The man was hearing things, and hearing nothing, which had become the same thing. His humble spread was socked in with snow. He couldn’t shake the feeling of unease. Every ten minutes, Dodge cracked the wood shutters and looked out, checking if anything was out there beyond the vague outlines of the buck-and-rail fence and small barn buried under piles of heavy snow so deep it made them vague, unrecognizable shapes.

  He saw no horses, no men; no intruders stood out against all the oppressive whiteness, no movement whatsoever but the ceaseless swirls of snowflakes.

  There was nothing out there but the blizzard.

  But Dodge could not shake the feeling something bad was closing in.

  His dog Blue hadn’t stopped barking the last two hours straight. Sounding the alarm about something. A big tough old mastiff and a good guard dog was Blue. The animal was the man’s best friend. The hound didn’t bark at just anything and whatever had him riled up today wasn’t wildlife, a moose, or deer. It might have been wolves, but the dog’s throaty vociferations would have run off any wolf pack by now. And Blue was still barking, the sound of each bark driving nails into the cowboy’s skull.

  Just as he was about to close the shutters against the dog’s infernal barking, there was a burst of motion at a tree. He raised the gun only to see a murder of crows explode into the empty sky, wings slashing like black blades. Just birds. Boy, was he jumpy.

  Dodge had been stuck indoors for the last week. The loneliness was getting to him. The man blamed his nerves on a bad Wyoming winter whose blizzard conditions and bitter subzero temperatures made it impossible to leave the farm and get to town. His larder was stocked with enough provisions, and there was plenty to eat and drink so that wasn’t the problem. Being cut off was. Being snowed in made people landlocked in these parts. The roads and trails were too deep to ride any great distance. The isolation had the better of him and kept him on constant edge. The farm five feet deep in snow had become for Buck Dodge a prison with frozen walls.

  At least his house was usually warm, his potbellied stove normally ablaze, filled with burning wood, keeping the two rooms toasty, even if the air was close and stale. But he was out of firewood. A cord of it was piled by the barn not a hundred yards from his front door, but today for some reason he was afraid to leave the safety of the house and go out there. Because it now was very cold inside and getting colder, soon he would be forced to go out or freeze to death.

  The cowboy’s ears perked.

  His dog had stopped barking.

  “Blue?”

  Dead silence.

  “Blue!”

  Grabbing his rifle, Dodge went to the window and threw open the shutters. No barking came from outside. Something wasn’t right.

  He loved his dog. The cowboy decided to check it out. Shouldering on his heavy sheepskin coat and tugging on his work gloves, Buck Dodge took his rifle and stepped out the front door. A wall of snow and cold wind met him head-on in a frigid blast and he forged out into it, Stetson hat low over his eyes. Keeping the rifle leveled, he swung it right and left outside the house, but there was nothing out there. The arctic wind froze his bare ears even as it deafened him with its bitter howl. “Blue!” he yelled into the din, the volume of his voice swallowed by the wind. “Who’s out here? I’m armed!”

  The dog was chained around the side of the house to a railroad spike in the ground.

  The hound’s bark had been silenced.

  Gripping his rifle, Dodge flattened against the side of his house and a
dvanced sideways step by step along the wall. Snow and sleet blew into his eyes, and he swept his coat across his face to clear them. When he reached the corner, the cowboy leapt around, leveling the cocked rifle at...

  Nothing.

  The dog was gone. No blood, no signs of struggle, the hound was just not there anymore. Had it run off, chasing an interloper? Buck Dodge closed in with his rifle, checking for the dog’s prints in the snow, but the prints he saw were not canine but human.

  A man’s fresh footsteps in the snow.

  The tracks were leading around the other side of the house, away from him.

  Buck followed the bootprints, his rifle held at the ready in his gloves. Again, he flattened against the right side wall of the shack, inching closer and closer to the corner to the rear of the house. When he reached it, he took a few hyperventilating breaths and leapt around, ready to fire and expecting to step into a barrage of bullets.

  None came his way.

  The tracks of the boots in the snow continued along the side of the house, then turned the corner.

  The unseen son of a bitch was playing games with him.

  Where the hell was Blue?

  The smells of cold damp wood and snow filled his nostrils, but there was a new, strange smell.

  Hot metal.

  Flattening against the wall, the cowboy advanced with his gun toward the corner to the left side wall of his home, throwing glances left and right to be sure whoever the trespasser was didn’t ambush him from back the way he came. His boots crunched on the snow as he passed the rear window of the house. Turning his head, he snuck a quick glance through the glass window into his shack.

  Crash!

  The red-hot branding iron smashed through the window in an explosion of shattering glass and pile-drove against the bare flesh of his face, the blazing Q sizzling into his flesh, searing the mark of brand into his features in a cloud of steam and smoke of burning skin and hair!

  In a hideous high-pitched scream of agony, Buck Dodge staggered back, stumbling into the deep snow, hands dropping his rifle as they went to his face, white-hot burning pain enveloping his head.

  Writhing on the ground, he heard the fast footfalls running across the floorboards out his front door and crunching louder on the snow as his assailant rushed up to him. “You son of a bitch, you burned me, you dirty son of a bitch!” Dodge shrieked, pulling his hands away to see the shadowy figure standing over him, an undefined blur of blackness because the cowboy’s eyelids had been scalded shut over his eyeballs.

  All Buck Dodge could see was the glowing red curlicue getting closer and closer, feeling the unbearable heat of the metal intensifying on his face until the brand pressed against his skull and he smelled the smoke of his own roasting flesh and his own tortured screams filled his ears.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, The Brander wipes his rusty hatchet clean on the white snow that isn’t soaked with blood.

  His victim is in pieces.

  He has chopped him up after using the branding iron to interrogate him, repeating his single question over and over until he got his answer.

  The fiend’s work is done here.

  Now his next work waits to be done and his question has been answered, where he needs to go to do it.

  Having left its signature, the brand, its business finished for now, is extinguished in the cold snow with a steaming hiss—the metal goes black, cold, and dead, waiting to burn again. And again.

  Walking out into the snowstorm, the tall skeletal figure disappears into the swirling snowflakes, then in an unseen creak of saddle, clink of stirrup, and clop of hooves is gone.

  CHAPTER 7

  A hundred and fifty miles south in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Deputy Marshal Nate Sweet, whom Marshal Bess had left in charge of the U.S. Marshal’s office in her absence, was thinking this was not what he signed up for.

  The laconic thirty-year-old lawman with the Johnny Appleseed complexion and steady disposition found himself this morning having tea with the five women from the Jackson Hole Women’s Auxiliary at the town council offices off Broadway. He sat on the sofa sipping cold tea in the plush office surrounded on all sides by five bossy middle-aged councilwomen whose perfume was as suffocating as the weaponized estrogen sucking the air out of the room. The ladies, a major political power in the town of Jackson who pretty much ran things municipally, were in a foul temper. As a group, they were none too pleased that their handpicked female marshal Bess Sugarland, the representative of their gender they basically bullied into office as the first female U.S. Marshal in Wyoming, was absent from her post. The ladies were even less pleased that a young male marshal, a deputy at that, occupied it. Sweet privately admonished himself for not getting Bess to write a letter explaining the reasons for her absence on the hunt of the branding killer, because none of these councilwomen bought his explanation, no matter how many times he patiently explained it to them. The deputy was trying his best to be polite, but a gunfight with both hands tied behind his back and no bullets in his gun would have been more pleasurable and less effort. These women never shut up, he couldn’t get a word in edgewise, and Nate Sweet didn’t know how much more he could take.

  “When is Marshal Bess going to be back in Jackson?” demanded Eleanor Rittenhouse, a pushy aristocratic woman from Philadelphia who had a ranch in neighboring Solitude and served as council treasurer.

  Sweet returned her accusatory gaze politely. “For the third time, Mrs. Rittenhouse, I do not have that information. Marshal Sugarland is out on the trail on a dangerous manhunt and has advised me that it could take weeks or months before they subdue their quarry. Before Bess left, as I have said several times already, she left me in charge as interim marshal to perform all marshal duties in her stead.”

  “How do we know you’re not lying?” snapped Florence McCoy, a heavyset matron who was city council president and let everybody know it.

  “Excuse me?” Sweet blinked.

  “How do we know that Marshal Bess has not been forced out of office just because she’s a woman!”

  “By who?” This kept getting more ridiculous.

  “By the Jackson Gentlemen’s Business Bureau, that bigoted cabal of men in this town who everyone in this room knows pulled strings to get our woman marshal thrown out and replaced with a man! Sending you to oust her. How do we know this isn’t another male conspiracy?”

  “That’s silly.” Sweet was getting a headache trying not to laugh.

  “We don’t think it’s silly at all, do we, ladies?” Heads shook gravely. Murmurs of assent. Florence stirred her colleagues up with her melodramatic aria of pompous rhetoric. “As president of Jackson Hole Women’s Auxiliary, I say if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then by God, it is a duck. Now, Marshal Bess is not physically present in Jackson being town marshal and you, Deputy, wear her badge and sit in her seat, and I say that is empirical evidence of a conspiracy by the male establishment.”

  At last, Sweet understood why Bess complained so much to him about the daily town politics she had to deal with as marshal. As her deputy, his interface with the public was strictly procedural and town politics was his boss’s department. But now that Sweet was getting a taste, he gained even more respect for his boss with the political nonsense she had to contend with. Out of respect for Bess, Sweet kept his temper since she always did, and didn’t raise his voice. “It just isn’t true, ladies. Ask anyone. I have nothing but respect for Marshal Bess Sugarland, she’s the finest woman and finest lawman I’ve ever met. It’s an honor to be her deputy. She is totally dedicated to her job and this town. She’s out on temporary assignment, but she’s coming back and when she does, you’ll all be happy. Take my word.”

  “Well,” Eleanor huffed. “We can’t ask Bess. She’s not here.”

  “She’s not here because she’s on assignment.”

  “Marshal Sugarland did not tell us anything about that.”

  “She didn’t have tell you anything about it. It’s m
arshal business.”

  “So we’re just supposed to believe this because you say so? Who put you in charge?”

  “Marshal Bess did.”

  And so it went, around and around. Thoughts of using the councilwomen for target practice did cross Sweet’s mind.

  An accord of sorts was ultimately arrived at after three wasted hours when Deputy Marshal Sweet informed the fine ladies of the Jackson Hole Women’s Auxiliary that he was, in fact, in touch with Marshal Bess on a periodic basis by way of telegraph; she checked in with the Jackson U.S. Marshal’s office from time to time out on the trail whenever she came upon a town with a telegraph. The council battle-axes managed to extricate from long-suffering Sweet a promise that, at the first available opportunity, he would get Marshal Bess to telegraph a personal confirmation to the Jackson Hole Women’s Auxiliary that she had indeed made him marshal in her stead, and she would indeed be returning when whatever business was so important it required her to abandon her loyal constituents was completed. Sweet knew Bess would be pissed being asked to report to the women’s council who she believed were as big a pain in the ass as Sweet did—he knew her telegram would consist of three words: kiss my ass—but the deputy was at the point where he would agree to anything to escape the clutches of the councilwomen.

  When at last he got out of there in one piece, Sweet felt a surge of relief as he hit the frigid cold fresh air of Broadway. The temperature had dropped to below freezing in the few hours he had been at the council meeting, and despite the bright sunshine he was freezing his ass off. It was a beautiful Wyoming day, though, so the deputy took his time strolling through Jackson. He enjoyed the hike back to the office, even though the streets were covered in knee-deep snow and he was chilled to the bone. Sweet was rattled by those council broads and being outside cleared his head. This job was tougher than it looked.