EPILOGUE
The forest fires raged through the month of August.
In the months that followed Bonny Kate Valance’s death, the flames bellowed against the sky but never came nearer than a mile from Victor, so the town was safe. In early fall, the great Teton fires of 1888 roared their last when mud season came early in October, bringing the rains as the skies opened and a torrential flood doused the inferno in two days, leaving the Grand Teton mountain range a vast blackened no-man’s-land of scorched earth, charred trunks, and fallen, cindered trees lying spread across twenty muddy miles of deforested land like millions of burnt toothpicks. The trees would grow again, and in a few years the Tetons would again be lush and green with conifers. Such was the cycle of nature in Wyoming.
Joe Noose remained in Victor through the first snowfall in early November, for he had matters to attend to that would keep him there until the temperatures grew very cold and winter descended and the land grew icy and dark.
By popular vote Noose had been appointed interim sheriff of Victor, given his fitness for duty, a job he agreed to do until a replacement could be found for Al Shurlock. The fact he had single-handedly gunned down all the bad guys gave the locals confidence the bounty hunter turned marshal should wear the sheriff’s badge for a while. Joe Noose didn’t ask for the job—the mayor asked him the day Bonny Kate and her gang were laid to rest in the local cemetery—but Noose didn’t say no. He could use the money.
The fact was, he had no choice but to remain in Victor for several months during his horse, Copper’s hospice. Noose had no intention of leaving town until he could ride out of town in his friend’s saddle, but the medical treatment for the wounded horse was going to take many weeks while the animal healed from its bullet-shattered shoulder, and in the early days it would be touch and go. The veterinary treatment was expensive, and Noose needed the money from the sheriff’s job to pay for the medicine and equipment, so that’s the way it went.
Everybody told him to put the horse down. There was no way to save a lamed steed. It was just a horse. But Joe Noose never made a habit of listening to people and it wasn’t just a horse—it was his best friend. Copper had saved his life more than once, and a debt was owed.
He rented out part of the stable in the town corral and had a chain and leather harness built that he chained around a winch on the beam in the rafters. Strapping his fallen horse into the harness, Noose winched the horse upright off the ground, where its hooves were off the floor. He changed Copper’s bandages and cleaned its wound and applied fresh ointments and solvents several times a day and night—Noose rarely slept much; he warmed the recovering, weakened horse with blankets on its back, fed it the best hay as its appetite slowly returned, and kept it hydrated with water. He scrubbed his stallion down with soap and water and manually massaged it. For two months Joe Noose rarely left Copper’s side, and his equine friend knew it, and felt the comfort, the glow slowly returning to its warm brown eyes.
Folks were still telling him to put the horse down, that it would never walk again. Noose didn’t listen, like he never did.
The long days and nights in the passing weeks, when Joe Noose wasn’t on patrol in the town or in the sheriff’s office, he was at Copper’s side in the stable. Noose never smiled, rarely said a word to anyone that wasn’t sheriff-related business.
After the burial service, Joe Noose never once visited Bonny Kate Valance’s grave, and nobody ever left flowers. The lady outlaw had signed her death warrant the moment she shot Noose’s horse. The gallows had been dismantled after her hanging and, at Joe Noose’s directive, the wood of the yardarm and platform and trapdoor were used to build an equipment shack behind the sheriff’s office. There would be no more hangings in Victor, the town decided, and the mayor put it into law—one execution had been enough.
Noose largely ignored the everyday goings-on in the town that didn’t directly concern the sheriff’s office and kept to his duties of disarming and locking up rowdy cowboys and wranglers who caused a fuss. One time he broke the nose of a john who beat a whore. While sheriff, he shot only one man—a booze-crazed young gunfighter who drew his gun in the street and waved it aggressively at passersby, and after fair warning Sheriff Noose drew his Peacemaker and shot the kid’s gun hand off at the wrist. The youngster would survive, but had better learn to shoot with the other hand. Noose advised him if he ever returned to Victor, he’d shoot the other one off, too. The kid never returned, and Joe Noose’s tour of duty as sheriff of the town of Victor was otherwise uneventful.
He slept beside his horse, wrapped in a blanket, his arm around his stallion. One day, there was a change.
In late October, as the sky steamed from the doused trees as the heat from the blackened forest rose in the relentless assault of the rain, Joe Noose disengaged the harness, and Copper stood on its own four powerful legs for the first time in two months. Noose just smiled and patted his horse’s head, as if to say We did it. Then he opened the gate of the stall and led Copper slowly, tentative step by slow step, out of the stable and into the corral and the heavy rain that was falling. Man and horse stood getting drenched in the rain, up to their ankles and fetlocks in heavy mud, standing together. Copper threw its head back and opened its mouth, refreshed by the downpour and lapping the fresh water and nostrils flaring, breathing in the cold, wet air. Noose’s face broke into a big, cracked grin, the first time he had smiled in two months since coming to town. Copper was back. Horse and rider just stood in the rain getting wet, and the man was laughing, and to the few wet cowhands who witnessed the scene, it seemed like the damn horse was laughing, too.
Nobody ever told Noose to put his horse down again.
* * *
It was the first time Joe Noose had seen Bess Sugarland in five months.
In early November Idaho saw its first snowfall of the winter. The air was chill and a carpet of soft flakes gently fell on the landscape, coating the buildings and streets of Victor. The white of the snow was peppered with black smudges of ash from the burned mountains that lay to the south; flakes of ash flitted through the air with the fluffy flakes in dots of black with the white.
Noose had been on patrol, wearing a heavy coat he had recently purchased with his sheriff’s salary, since the end of mud season had brought a plunge in temperature to where his breath condensed in the air as he sat in Copper’s saddle. His trusty horse was now fully back on its feet, and Noose had taken to using his daily patrols of the town as an excuse to walk the horse and exercise its legs and wounded shoulder, which had completely healed. They were presently trotting down the snow-dappled main street that faced the entrance to the Teton Pass a few miles off. The winter and muddy fall before it had turned the landscape brackish brown, black, and white, a subdued palette of color. There were few people on the streets, and Noose kept his hands loose on the reins, away from the twin revolvers hung in his holsters, for he did not sense any trouble. Breathing deep of the frigid air, he exhaled a lungful of chill mist that clouded below his low-tipped Stetson.
As he gazed again south out at the distant pass, Noose thought of Jackson, several miles across, and of Bess Sugarland. There had been no word from her, not that he had expected any. The summer’s fires had cut off any communication between Victor and its sister city in the Jackson Hole valley just across the border in Wyoming. She had no way to contact Noose, nor he, her. The pass had been utterly impassable during the great fires and the rains that finally extinguished them—for the last couple months, what remained of the Teton Pass trail was a mess of mud and fallen, charred trees that made passage equally impossible. Noose knew Marshal Bess probably thought he died during the fires and over the last months had wished he could get word to her. There was every likelihood she had received a telegram from Cody or one of the other U.S. Marshals Service offices saying that Bonny Kate Valance’s execution had taken place, which would have made her realize Joe Noose had made it through the conflagration and had survived to successfully complete the job she had tasked him. At least he hoped that information had reached her one way or the other.
Noose felt bad that his female peace officer friend would be worried he was dead, because she would be blaming herself.
He missed her.
Besides his horse, Bess Sugarland was his best friend.
That was the truth.
Now this morning on Main Street in Victor, sitting astride his healthy and vigorous horse, Noose saw something he didn’t expect to see in the distance. It was a foggy view through the cloud of condensed breath he was exhaling.
Movement on the pass. Coming in his direction.
Two riders on horses a mile off.
No, three. One was small.
“Ho.” Joe Noose reined Copper and sat in the saddle, shielding his eyes from the snow and squinting into the distance.
The three riders were getting slowly closer, but they were too far off to recognize. They had come over the Teton Pass, so must have come from Jackson.
Joe Noose had a damn good idea who at least one of them was.
The snow fell in a vast flurry, bringing with it a gigantic winter hush over the world, where all Noose could hear was his own breathing and the flit and tap of the snowflakes on his coat and gloves. There he sat, watching the approaching stick figures; dark, indiscernible shapes on the white canvas of the pass until a glint of metal on the woman’s coat caught his eye and then he was sure.
His smile grew incrementally broader the whole ten minutes it took Marshal Bess Sugarland to ride up in front of him and Copper with the two mounted strangers at her side. The woman looked healthy, her ruddy outdoor face red from the cold but her eyes warm and cozy as two campfires as they locked on his. She was tearing up, and not just from the cold.
“I knew it was you.” She grinned, her voice cracking.
“What took ya so long?” He grinned right back.
They hugged right there in the saddles of their horses.
* * *
Shutting the door to the sheriff’s office behind them, Joe Noose showed Bess and her two companions to three chairs set in front of the wood-burning stove. The office was cold and their breath condensed on the air.
She had still not introduced her fellow travelers to Noose. He guessed she would in her own good time, and that they were here for a reason. One was a young, rugged, brooding U.S. Marshal, the other a quiet, reserved little boy of maybe nine or ten, Noose guessed. The kid seemed nervous and fearful and stayed close to Bess as she showed him a seat then took one herself.
“I’m the interim sheriff while they find a replacement. Bonny Kate’s gang killed the last sheriff and his deputies before I did for them and the town needed someone to wear the badge. Seemed like the right thing to do when they asked me. You maybe heard about all that.” A nod from Bess. “I don’t have any deputies. Think I got the situation in hand. But I’ll be moving on soon, I reckon.”
“Bounty hunter, then marshal, now sheriff. A body has a hard time keeping track of your movements, Joe,” Bess cracked. Noose was glad to see she hadn’t lost her ornery sense of humor, but was worried about the huge wooden leg brace she wore on the wounded leg—it was bigger than the one he last saw her wear, and he hoped that the bullet Frank Butler had given her to remember him by wasn’t going to mean she would lose that leg. Bess saw him looking at her brace and looked crossly at him. “It ain’t gangrene. I’m not losing the damn leg. Just got it jacked up again when my horse fell on me while I was riding up the pass with my deputy, looking for you during the fires. Thanks to you.”
With a sigh of relief, Noose looked over at the lawman who had just sat beside her by the stove. The young man had a hard, angular face and an intense, dark gaze and was watching Noose closely. “That him, your new deputy?” Noose asked.
Bess shook her head. “No, my deputy is a greenhorn named Nate Sweet I left back in Jackson to man the U.S. Marshal’s office while I came here. Somebody had to mind the store while I was away. Good man, Sweet is, lots of promise.” She looked over to the lawman with her. This here is Marshal Emmett Ford.”
Joe Noose gave Marshal Ford a long, hard stare—something was familiar about his face, but he couldn’t quite place it. “We met before, Marshal?” Noose asked. “I seem to remember your face.”
Ford held his gaze respectfully and shook his head, demurring. “No, sir. I don’t rightly recollect so.”
Noose shrugged. Maybe he was mistaken. He looked a question at Bess. Drew her gaze with him to the silent little boy bundled in coats, sitting staring into the fire. She spoke up. “The boy, we don’t know his name because he won’t talk. Marshal Ford brought the boy to me a few weeks ago. So I brought him to you. He’s why I come, Joe.”
His brows furrowing, not following her conversation, Noose went to the stove, where the pot of coffee brewed, filling the room with a warm, toasty aroma. Without asking if they wanted any, Noose poured two cups and handed them to Bess and Ford, both of whom accepted the hot beverages gratefully and sipped. The boy just watched the fire.
“Sit down, Joe,” Bess asked politely. He did. He was about to hear the story and the reason for her visit. “I’ll let Marshal Ford tell it. Go on, Emmett.”
The young lawman cleared his throat and spoke plainly. “This boy was the only survivor of the massacre of his entire family near Alpine. Father, mother, two sisters all cut to pieces and strewn about.”
“Indians?” Noose asked.
“No.”
“Go on.”
“They weren’t the first victims of this killer. We think it is one man. Twenty-five people, families, men, women, children, have been butchered by this fiend. The ones we know about, anyhow. He has been leaving a trail of bodies from the southern border of Idaho, and I’ve been hunting him ever since.” The marshal spoke gravely and the intense, personal dedication to catching this killer was plain in his eyes. This was a mission for him.
“Good hunting,” Noose said.
Bess interrupted. “I came to you for a reason, Joe. So did Marshal Ford.”
“What reason?”
Ford answered, “You’re the best bounty hunter in the western states, Noose. Everybody knows that. There ain’t a man in the world you can’t track down and apprehend. I haven’t been able to catch this killer on my own. I need your help. And there is a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bounty on this monster.”
“That’s serious money,” Noose replied, warming his hands by rubbing them together by the fire. “Very serious money. But the thing is, Marshals, I took a job as sheriff here in this town and gave my word I would perform those duties until a replacement is found. Nobody’s arrived to relieve me yet, don’t rightly know when they will. I’d surely like to chase down that bounty, but I have a job.”
Rising to her feet, Bess’s boots jingled as she walked to the wall and leaned against it by the stove, fixing Noose in her persuasive gaze from an elevated vantage. “Only you can catch this man, Joe.” Noose raised an eyebrow in question, letting her continue. “You don’t know the rest. This killer, he always leaves one alive, like this boy. And he does something to them . . . leaves his signature. One you’ll understand, Joe.” Gesturing to the boy, Bess made the motions with her hands of opening her shirt. “Show him,” she gently but firmly bid the child.
Swallowing hard, his eyes vacant, the little boy obediently unbuttoned his coat, then opened his ragged cloth shirt to expose his chest.
When Noose saw what was there, his eyes widened in raw emotion, and he rose from his chair to his towering full height, staring unblinkingly at what was on the kid’s naked, chicken-bone chest: The brutal mark of a red-hot branding iron was savagely burned into the child’s’s very flesh—half-healed and raw was seared a single upside-down letter . . .
Q
It was the same brand that Joe Noose bore forever on his own chest, a mark burned into him when he was little older than this boy, by the same man. He felt his own long-healed scar burn freshly under his shirt like a phantom pain, feeling again the white-hot agony of long ago. Noose was speechless as he just stared at the poor child looking up at him with hangdog eyes, displaying his disfigurement with shame.
His knuckles whitening, Noose’s fists clenched at his sides in a murderous cold fury that made the cartilage crackle.
When his gaze swung back to Bess Sugarland, she held it confidently. “This is a job for you, Joe. Only you can stop this man.”
Nodding, Joe Noose pulled the sheriff’s badge off his coat and laid it on the desk.