The Crimson Trail

Book 4: Joe Noose Western

by Eric Red

Genres: Westerns; Action & Adventure Romance; Young Adult

Synopsis

In his fourth series installment, acclaimed author and horror filmmaker Eric Red brings his trademark volatile action and bloody violence to a classic genre, injecting modern speed and grit into Old West legend as Joe Noose and Marshal Bess Sugarland follow a trail of blood through the valley of death …
HUNT FOR THE CATTLE DRIVE KILLER
Joe Noose knows what fear looks like. He sees it in the eyes of his new friends—a dozen trail-hardened cattle men who don't scare easily. It's not the 500-mile trek across treacherous Montana territory that's got them spooked. It's not the 3,000 heads of cattle they've got to wrangle either. They're afraid that someone on this drive—one of their own team—is a serial killer. Five wranglers are already dead. Every man is a suspect. And the woman rancher in charge is paying Joe Noose to root out the evil on this cursed cattle drive—by riding alongside the killer …

Release date: June 29, 2021

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 224

Sample

The cattle drive set forth after the thaw in 1887 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 on 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 rover 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 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 longhorns 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 two days later and blowing his face off 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 that the experienced wranglers’ deaths were accidental. Now everybody was watching their back and looking over their shoulder, sleeping with one eye open, if they slept at all. A few were sleeping in the saddle, catching some shuteye on the trail. A palpable 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 longhorns 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 mountain 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 moving steers that were snorting and going at one another 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 cow 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 was hundreds of hooves coming at his face before he got trampled to death.

“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 who to send his back pay to, only to grasp she had no idea if the man had a wife or children. Despite her heartfelt conviction her crew were her family, Laura realized she knew almost nothing at all about the wrangler she had employed all these years, or perhaps 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 rovers, wondering how 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.

“Goodbye, 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, then swung to the next face, and 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 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 might 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 selection 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 goodbyes.” 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.

That the killer would strike again was a dead certainty, the only question was who was next. For some odd reason Laura Holdridge did not fear for her own life, having an intuition she herself was not the killer’s target, her men were. Why? She trusted her instincts, but that didn’t stop her from strapping the massive Colt Dragoon revolver under her coat and lately keeping it under her pillow.

The five hundred head of prime Wyoming beef stood before her scattered out across the plain, giving her bovine looks that seemed to say, Let’s get a move on. It was time for the outfit to get back on the trail. They had to make time. It was over three hundred miles to Cheyenne and the outfit had a schedule to keep if they were going to cross that considerable distance, the whole of the state of Wyoming, and get there in time for the two-day cattlemen’s auction three weeks from now. The murders of her wranglers had slowed down the cattle drive, already costing several days dealing with the burials. Getting the herd to Cheyenne presented an impossible task now there was a killer in the outfit picking off her wranglers, and there seemed nothing she could do about it.

What the hell was she going to do?

She knew what she should do. Go to the law. Report the killings. Ride back to the local sheriff in Wind River or ride ahead to the U.S. Marshal, report the deaths, and let the authorities investigate. And the minute she did that, her outfit and the cattle would be detained for an investigation. Guaranteed then she would not make the auction and by this time next year, would have lost the ranch, everything she and her husband worked for, and her men would be unemployed. Going to the law was the right thing to do. But it was suicide for her ranch and those in her employ. She had discussed it with the wranglers earlier in the day before the burial, and they were all agreed to report the deaths once they made it to Cheyenne; it is what McGraw, Johnson, Fullerton, and Wade would have wanted, too.

There was one other thing she could do.

Quit.

Turn the herd and abandon the cattle drive, put them back in her corral. Pay her wranglers what she could. Sell the cows at a huge loss after the auction. Her outfit would lose money but keep their lives. Perhaps then the killings would stop.

Laura didn’t know what to do at this moment, had never felt so helpless and overwhelmed in her natural life. The entire combined weight of the massive herd of steers filling her field of vision suddenly felt like it was sitting on her bosom—a crushing weight of those tons of cows bore down on her, and Laura couldn’t catch her breath; her heart was pounding, her pulse racing. Pull yourself together, woman! she excoriated herself. You will not fall apart in front of your men! Be strong! Through sheer force of will, Laura Holdridge settled down, regaining her composure. Inhaling deep refreshing breaths of the clean Wyoming air into her lungs, Laura willed herself to stand straight and be calm, and her panic attack was carried off in the wind.

The cattlewoman was not a quitter. She never quit once in her whole entire life. But she had the lives of eight souls she was responsible for as trail boss. She had to ask them whether they wanted to turn back or push on.

She walked back to the men at the grave. “Listen up.”

Eight pairs of eyes immediately locked on her, she had the full attention of the hardy cowpokes standing before her. She was the boss.

Laura Holdridge addressed the rovers as the first among equals, looking each man directly in the eye as her gaze swung across their attentive faces while she spoke. “Boys, we all know we have a killer in the outfit. He’s murdered four of us. That pisses me the hell off, as I’m sure it does eight out of the nine of you. What burns my ass the most? That’s he’s one of you. I trust all you boys with my life, each and every one of you, but unless one of you fesses up now, I got no idea in hell which one of you has our outfit’s blood on his hands.”

As she stood before them by the oak tree, Laura witnessed paranoid, distrustful glances traded by men who had always been friends. It broke her heart to see. But she remembered what her mother always said: Nothing wrong with a broken heart so long as it don’t break you. The cattlewoman looked perspicaciously into the eyes of each and every cowhand—not one had the eyes of a killer.

For the first time Laura doubted her faculties.

“How do we know it’s one of us?” Leadbetter asked, looking at his fellows. There were a few nods.

“We don’t,” she replied evenly. “But who else could it be?”

“Not us.”

Laura hadn’t thought about that, but now she did. “You mean a killer who’s not part of the outfit, not riding with us but shadowing us, watching our every move, and when our guard is down and this individual sees an opening, that’s when he strikes.”

“Could be.”

“Smells like Injun to me,” Kettlebone, the cook, offered. “Them Injuns is so quick when they attack they don’t make a sound and you never see ’em. One minute you’re reaching up to scratch your hair, the next minute you’ve been scalped, your hair and skin is gone on the top of your head and all you is scratching is skull bone.” A few of the men groaned in disgust. “I have seen Apaches do this with my own eyes, boys.”

“Ain’t no Apache in Wyoming, Fred,” Brubaker argued. “Just Shoshone. And that tribe ain’t warlike and they don’t scalp. I count a bunch of ’em as friends.”

Laura shook her head. “Brubaker’s right. The Apaches are three states away, our cold doesn’t agree with them. Like the man says, the only Indians we have around these parts are the Shoshone and they’re a peaceful tribe. Nope, this isn’t Indian trouble. It’s something else, or someone else.”

The wranglers all muttered agreement.

“Boys, maybe it is a killer stalking our herd murdering us, or maybe the killer is one of you boys, though I hope it ain’t because I’d hate to have to hang one of you boys. Except for you, Leadbetter.” She pointed at the youngest wrangler, Frank Leadbetter, a hulking kid probably just out of his teens whose beard was just growing in. She teased him to lighten the grim mood and shake off as best she could some of the dread they all were experiencing.

“It don’t make no sense,” Sykes mumbled.

“Why is this happening?” Idaho moaned.

“Ain’t it obvious?” Laura faced her men soberly. “Somebody doesn’t want us to get our cattle to market. They’ll do anything to stop this cattle drive. That’s what’s happening. What do you boys think?”

Every head nodded in agreement.

“Who you think is behind it?” asked Kettlebone.

“We all know who’s probably behind it,” Laura spat. “Calhoun, who else? But I can’t be sure. Don’t make no difference, it doesn’t matter who it is. Somebody’s got it out for us. That’s the situation. Way I see it we got two choices: turn back or push on. We can go home. That’s one choice. The other choice is we get the herd to Cheyenne or die trying. I’m putting it to a vote.”

“It’s your herd, Mrs. Holdridge. You’re the boss,” Curly Brubaker, the new foreman, insisted. “It’s your choice.”

The cattlewoman shook her head, fairness in her gaze. “It’s your lives. It’s your choice, too. The Bar H Ranch isn’t just me, boys, it’s all of us. We ride or die.”

“Ride or die!” several rovers repeated. Moved by her words, the wranglers’ spirits were lifted, the outfit’s morale boosted by fellowship and cowboy orneriness.

“Let’s vote,” the cattlewoman said.

“Wait.” Billy Joe Barlow put up his hand, looking at the others. “Sorry, ma’am, didn’t mean to interrupt, but if I may, before we vote, if it was just up to you, Mrs. Holdridge, if it was, what would you do?”

Laura Holdridge was on the spot. All eyes were on her. She searched her soul before she spoke, and when she did it was what she truly believed with all her heart.

“If it was just up to me, I’d think to myself: This is my herd, am I going to let any man stop me from getting my herd to market like I got a right as a free American to do? And I’d answer: Nobody is going to take away my freedom. I’m moving my herd, and if they want to stop me they’ll have to shoot me, and let them try, because I’ll shoot right back because I’ll fight to the death for what’s mine. You asked me what I’d do if it was up to me, Barlow? I’d drive these longhorns to Cheyenne. Ride or die.”

The outfit’s faces had not a dry eye.

“OK. Let’s have us that vote.” The cattlewoman took a deep breath. “Anybody wants to turn back, raise your hand.”

No hands went up. Not one.

“Votes are counted.” Laura grinned. “We’re going to Cheyenne.”

The entire outfit let out a huge cheer, throwing their hats in the air, and Laura Holdridge never loved her boys more than she did right then.

The mood grew somber once more as they gathered again around Luke McGraw’s shallow grave, because Billy Joe Barlow and Rowdy Maddox hadn’t had the chance yet to say their piece, and Rowdy was going on and on.

It was then Laura saw something that caught her attention. Stepping away from her men, the cattlewoman looked out across the valley, raising her hand to her brow to block the sun so she didn’t have to squint.

Far in the distance, two horses had crested the rise above the sprawling valley across the five hundred head of steers standing stationary on the plain. She swore she recognized the two riders.

Could it be them?

What were the chances of running into them again, out here of all places?

The cattlewoman had eyes like an eagle, and sure enough, she recognized the two riders as Joe Noose and Bess Sugarland, a bounty hunter and lady U.S. Marshal, who had stopped by her ranch a few weeks ago. She had liked them very much. They’d stayed the night in her house and left the following day on U.S. Marshals business, tracking a killer. Joe Noose had left quite an impression on Laura. A third man had been their companion, another marshal Laura recollected, but she disremembered his name or anything else about him. Whoever that man was, he wasn’t with them now. Laura could se. . .