Branded Page 9

  “I have to agree with Emmett, Bess.”

  “Saddle up, boys.”

  The bounty hunter and the marshals swung into their saddles and proceeded in single file formation at an urgent clip back toward the clearing where they just had the skirmish. The air stank of cordite and gun smoke that still hung in the air. Noose rode two horse lengths out in front, using his legs to stay on Copper’s saddle, keeping his hands free to maintain a full grip on his cocked and loaded Winchester socked to his shoulder. He was looking down the barrel of the Winchester—swinging the muzzle back and forth in a steady sweep of the immediate area, his finger tight on the trigger, ready to shoot anything that moved on two legs. Patrolling at a quick, brisk trot, his horse passed the clearing where they exchanged fire a few minutes ago and traveled on. Behind, Bess then Emmett followed with their pistols drawn, reloading shells. Seventy-five yards onward, Noose looked down his gunsight at a heavy fallen log filled with bullet holes. The snow behind it had been disturbed, showing the indentation of a man who had taken cover behind it before taking flight. That man was long gone.

  The Brander was in the wind.

  The tracks of his horse trailed away, placement of the hooves in the snow widely spaced, indicating long strides, showing it had left in a big hurry at a full gallop.

  “He’s on the move. Heading west. Yee-hah!” Noose gave Copper some spur and the bronze-colored stallion charged off after the other horse.

  The marshals drove their steeds after the bounty hunter, and three horses and riders broke off at a full clip together onto a flat plateau.

  Right as a gale-force gust of sleet and snow hit them head-on and it was a whiteout.

  Snow-blind, the three manhunters and the horses they rode didn’t see the drop-off until they had ridden over it. The animals’ hooves went out from under them and three tons of horseflesh became airborne. The plateau ended sharply as the ground suddenly fell away in a sheer ninety-degree slope, pitching the horses head over heels down a steep incline with the riders in the saddles. It was a soft landing in the five-feet-deep fresh snow but the animals somersaulted through the drifts. Blasts of dislodged snow flew everywhere. The horses bellowed and grunted and the people hollered and yelled. Down, down, the horses and riders on their saddles tumbled, out of control, rolling over and over in a tangled knot of legs and heads and hooves, unable to stop or right themselves. Finally, the horses just slid on their sides the rest of the way. Then they were at the bottom.

  The trio scrambled out from under their steeds as the horses unsteadily righted themselves and man and beast climbed to their feet and brushed off the snow.

  “Everybody okay?” Noose shouted.

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit. Yes, I’m okay.”

  Noose looked up and saw the stallion.

  The Brander’s dun horse stood three hundred yards away, saddle empty.

  A set of human tracks, black as specks of pepper on the pristine white landscape, led into a rise of snow-packed hills that surrounded them, scattered with trees and patches of woods.

  After checking that their horses were okay, at Noose’s hand signal the two marshals and the bounty hunter made off on foot.

  Moments later, the driving gusts of snow had covered The Brander’s tracks and his trail had vanished again.

  Swapping glances, the trio decided to split up and head off in three directions.

  Their three figures disappeared west, south, and north into the snowstorm and the blizzard became a battleground.

  * * *

  The Brander spots the pile of dried timber on the ground, sees it suits his purposes. Reaching into his heavy duster, he draws out the canister of coal oil and splashes it on the wood. Taking out a box of matches, the fiend strikes one in a flash of sparks, tosses it on the pile of wood, and watches the wood ignite in a burst of flames.

  He jams his cold branding iron facedown in the fire . . . in ten minutes it will be red-hot.

  * * *

  Noose smelled a fire. A fire in a snowstorm made no sense, but the acrid stench of the smoke of burning wood and a coal oil accelerant was unmistakable as it stung his nostrils. The bounty hunter advanced cautiously through curtains of snow, his Colt Peacemaker drawn and its hammer cocked. All around him was a wintery wasteland of white falling flakes with opaque outlines of trees behind translucent veils of flurries. His boots crunched through the unbroken crust of snow as he trudged on, his eyes snapping back and forth from his surroundings to the ground, searching for boot tracks.

  The dim glow of the fire bloomed to his left, appearing as a palpitating orange light he figured to be two hundred yards off. As he started for it, out of the corner of his eye to the right something caught his attention.

  Noose saw a figure.

  His heart began pounding like a sledgehammer in his chest.

  There he was!

  The man who branded him, a phantom, stood beside a tree not moving a muscle. One arm was raised and the glove clenched an object that looked like a gun.

  Noose instantly dropped to one knee and aimed dead center in the figure’s chest, leveling his aim on his pistol with his left hand gripping his right gun-hand wrist. “ I got you dead to rights, old man!” he roared. “ Drop your weapon and raise your hands! Surrender and the marshals and I will take you in unharmed. But if you don’t throw down your weapon by the count of three, I will chop you down! One! Two!”

  The hazy figure with the weightless gravity and spectral aspect of a ghost did not comply.

  “Three!”

  Squeezing the trigger three times, Joe Noose fired the .45 in a rapid string of shots, putting them square in the figure’s chest. The triple booms echoed throughout the valley, startling birds from the trees.

  Lowering his gun, the bounty hunter squinted in surprise.

  The Brander had not moved.

  He was hit. Had to be dead.

  But he was standing.

  “What the—?”

  Quickly raising his pistol, Noose loosed off three more loud rounds into the head and chest of the figure a hundred yards away, but as the smoke cleared he saw the bullets had not felled the fiend.

  Who didn’t shoot back.

  Knowing something was amiss, Noose switched guns, holstering the empty Colt, then, pointing the loaded Colt, rushed the figure. By the time he was ten feet away, he saw it was no man at all, just his coat and hat hung on the branches of the tree. The bounty hunter’s shots had all hit their mark . . . the wind whistled through the holes in the flapping cloth.

  And too late he realized what the coat was.

  A diversion.

  Feeling the sudden heat at his back, Joe Noose rounded as The Brander attacked him from behind, a large skeletal figure flying at him, clenching the red-hot branding iron in both gloved fists, the glowing Q coming right at Noose’s face. He was looking into the burning eyes of his oldest enemy behind the waving long white hair. Startled, the bounty hunter raised his arm to protect his face as the brand slammed against the coat on his forearm, instantly searing through the cloth.

  It wasn’t the pain of the brand burning through the cloth toward his skin that incapacitated Joe Noose—it was the crazed eyes of the old man he remembered so well that sent raw fear shuddering through his body, turning his guts to jelly, immobilizing his limbs into a state of paralysis. His hand was trembling so badly he couldn’t work his pistol, his trigger finger not responding to his mental commands. Then The Brander was upon him, clenching the searing branding iron with both hands and leaning his bony shoulders into it, as Noose covered his face in terror. The stench of the old man’s body odor came back to him and made him choke. He smelled in the fiend’s foul breath the aroma of a corpse. Somehow Noose got a punch off into The Brander’s shoulder, hitting him hard enough to stagger him back so the hot brand came free, leaving a flaming curlicue of charred and cindered cloth and setting the arm of Joe’s coat on fire. As the old man stumblingly regained his balance, Noose tried to beat the fire out
on his gun arm while firing his pistol twice at the same time, but his shots went wild as the flames spread to the shoulder of his heavy coat. As shots blew chunks of bark out of a tree, The Brander dodged to the right, disappearing into the driving sheets of snow.

  Afire, the bounty hunter leapt onto the ground, covering the burning arm of his coat with his body and rolled twice in the snow, dousing the flames while still gripping his pistol—but as he rolled onto his back and tried to rise, a boot stamped down on his gun wrist, pinning his gun hand to the icy snow as a second boot kicked him hard in the chest, pressing him flat.

  The Brander stood over him, a tall and terrible figure, the gusting wind wreathing his face in swirling sleet as he stared down with an omnipotent gaze through the blowing trestles of his long white hair . . . and lowered the red-hot branding iron toward Noose’s face. The red-hot Q spat off searing heat, steaming in the frozen air. It was burning his cheek, about to touch flesh. Past the glowing coil, the bounty hunter’s bulging fear-filled eyes saw the psychotic whorls of The Brander’s eyeballs reflecting the blazing metal like the Devil himself.

  Joe Noose did something he had never done before in his entire adult life.

  He screamed.

  To his own ears, the scream didn’t seem to come from his own body. It was detached—a raw sound of helpless panic and terror of a dying animal—surely not him.

  Now Noose felt as he did when he was thirteen, helpless against this man, and no matter how big and tough and strong he’d grown up to become since what that old man had done to him, no matter how many men he’d killed or taken down, here he was again with the fiend about to brand him like an animal and there was nothing he could do.

  You’re only as good as your worst day.

  “Nooooooooooooo!” Joe Noose cried at the top of his lungs, seizing the rod of the brand in his free hand and wrenching it away from his face as he swept one of his legs into The Brander’s knee, knocking him off-balance. Noose forced the red-hot brand down into the snow, where it sizzled in a funnel of steam. Staggered, the fiend used both hands to try to wrestle the branding iron away from the bounty hunter, the force and momentum helping Noose stumble to his feet. Then the two adversaries were locked in hand-to-hand combat fighting for the implement, each clenching the rod with both gloved hands, struggling to scald each other with the incendiary Q. The bounty hunter could not believe The Brander’s strength; Noose was bigger and younger and had much more muscle than the skeletal figure he battled, but psychotic rage gave the fiend adrenaline-fueled physical power.

  With a roar of fury, Noose slammed the iron brand into a tree trunk with The Brander still gripping onto it.

  The metal bent on impact.

  Noose hammered the pole again and again against the tree trunk.

  On the third punishing blow, the branding iron broke in half.

  Staggering back, The Brander looked at the broken branding iron he clenched, halved, in each hand. When his ghastly bereft gaze raised to Noose, his eyes were horror holes. The hideous high-pitched shriek of total insanity that escaped his throat was bloodcurdling.

  Facing his oldest foe, Joe Noose again found his feet cemented to the ground. He knew he must attack the fiend now, punch, kick, stab, hit him with everything he had, but The Brander had him in his thrall and the bounty hunter couldn’t fight back.

  The sharp rifle cracks came loud and close. The bullets whistling through the air made The Brander duck.

  With a last look of bottomless hate over his shoulder to Joe Noose, The Brander hissed and fled into the white vortex, his duster flapping around him as he vanished into the snowstorm.

  Joe Noose was just standing there when Bess and Emmett came running out of the snowfall behind him and reached his side, and he stared with a vacant unblinking gaze into the emptiness of the winter void where his worst enemy had retreated.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you get him?”

  “ No.”

  “Joe . . .”

  The shaken Noose had already turned with shoulders slumped and walked away in defeat back toward his horse.

  CHAPTER 12

  Noose awoke.

  It was so dark.

  He lay on his side in the lean-to, wrapped in several woolen blankets beneath his buffalo-hide covering but was cold to the bone. His body was stiff, an ice block. His arms and legs didn’t respond to his commands, and the numbness and tingling in his limbs and extremities made him feel immobilized.

  It was so quiet—too quiet; unnaturally so.

  For long moments the big bounty hunter lay with his eyes open, head against his saddle, opening and closing his hands and rotating his ankles, working the circulation back into the fingers and toes of his extremities. As the minutes passed, he watched the clouds of his condensed breath forming in front of his face, making ghostly shapes like atavistic spirits of the wastelands. A sense of foreboding made him uncharacteristically ill at ease, filled with a free-floating dread.

  His eyes were good and usually became accustomed to the dark quickly, but not tonight. His vision was not adjusting to the darkness. The canvas of the lean-to was barely visible two feet away in the gloom.

  The silence was deafening.

  Something was wrong.

  Gritting his teeth, Joe Noose willed himself to sit up and raise his arms, forcing blood into his hands. The effort it took was immense and the body shock of the subzero night temperatures sleeping out on the open plain made him gasp as the buffalo skin fell off his shoulders.

  Too damn quiet.

  His gloves were already on. Noose quickly massaged his fingers, getting them working, then reached over to grab his Winchester repeater. He cocked it and the sound of the round jacked into the chamber woke him all the way up.

  Pushing out of the flap of his lean-to, the bounty hunter stepped out into the night air. As he did, he saw why it was so very dark.

  There was no moon tonight.

  The lightless world was engulfed in stygian gloom. The sky above was a black void he felt weigh down on him like an unseen yoke over the buffalo skin he had draped over his massive shoulders. Looking out at the horizon, Noose could not see where the sky met the mountains, everything impenetrable black down to the ground below his feet, a negative space below his boots as if he were standing in starless space.

  He saw his breath condensing before his face and that was about it.

  Panic not in his nature, Noose chose to use his other senses, moving by feel. Clenching the repeater rifle in his gloved fists, he slid his forefinger through the trigger guard. Noose knew the camp and the proximity of things by memory and habit, a lifetime of training to always know his surroundings.

  The tree where the horses were tethered was to the right, twenty paces away.

  Bess’s lean-to was straight ahead, fifty paces.

  Emmett’s lean-to was to the left, fifteen degrees, a hundred and ten paces, by the dead tree.

  Check the horses first.

  Joe Noose began walking through the campsite. Five paces. Ten. Fifteen. Putting out one hand, his fingers touched the side of Copper’s head where he knew it would be for he remembered exactly his horse’s position.

  Copper did not respond to his master’s touch with warmth or surprise, just breathed in and out, as if the stallion was asleep, or in a trance. Noose could feel the horse’s steady gaze but that gaze was somehow strange and detached, the warm brown eye he could feel but not see was staring past him, not at anything. It had to be the bitter cold.

  Now check on Bess.

  Dislocated and disconcerted by the complete darkness, the bounty hunter still retained his bloodhound’s sense of direction; without using his eyes, he went by touch, measuring twenty paces to the left and soon reached her tent. Listening hard, he heard no snoring or breathing inside.

  Touching the barrel of the Winchester to the cord running from the stake in the ground, Noose traced it to the canvas tent, then opened the flap wit
h the muzzle.

  Still no sound, sleeping or otherwise.

  The tip of his boot crunched on a box of matches on the ground.

  Picking up the box, the bounty hunter drew a stick.

  Noose struck the match.

  It sparked in a flash of flame that illuminated the tent in a hellish firelight.

  Bess Sugarland lay on her back beneath her blanket, head against her saddle. Face the color of white marble, her bulging eyes were wide open and staring.

  A hideous fresh charred mark of the Q brand was burned into her forehead!

  The smoke of sizzling flesh hung in the air.

  She was dead.

  “Noooooooooooooo!” Noose cried.

  And suddenly he was grabbed from behind when a powerful arm wrapped around his throat, pinning him in an iron grip. The heat against his upper back was instantaneous and agonizing as he felt something pressed against his spine with superhuman force, then felt it sear through his flesh, spine, heart, lungs like a scalding spear until Noose saw the red-hot metal head of the Q branding iron burst out his chest in a cloud of bloody smoke and knew that he, too, was dead!

  Then Joe Noose woke up, hearing himself cry out. Outside his lean-to came the sound of two pairs of running footsteps, moving like stink in his direction. The sounds of guns being cocked rang out.

  “Joe!” Bess shouted in alarm, through the flap of the tent first, pistol drawn as she fell to one knee beside Joe and stared in his face. “What happened, Joe? Emmett, check the area!”

  Outside, Marshal Ford’s running footsteps circled the lean-to, then the steps slowed. “Clear! Is Noose okay?”

  Dazed, shaken, in the twilight between sleep and waking, Noose looked at Bess groggily and saw her shock and confusion at seeing him truly rattled for the first time since she’d known him. “Are you okay, Joe?”

  He nodded, embarrassed. “Bad dream.”

  “Joe . . .” She sighed, something in her eyes that looked to him a lot like disappointment. “Pull yourself together.”

  Rising, she holstered her weapon and stepped out of the tent. The bounty hunter heard the marshals’ receding voices.