Part 1: After the Noose
1
A full moon. Big, bloated, obscene.
Its pallid light filters down on the craggy, shadow-pocketed landscape
of the northern Wyoming Territory. Black surreal clouds roll in the sky.
A cool wind howls and shrieks, the dark pines bend and sway.
A lone, crooked oak claws at the sky, its stripped limbs creak and
moan. From one blasted limb a body hangs, strung by the neck with a coil
of frayed rope. The body swings and turns with a gentle tenebrous
motion, urged by the night winds.
With a sound like dry lips parting, the eyes open.
2
The Indian was old. His burnished face a map of the rocky, gouged
landscape around him. He wore a faded gray army shirt and a tattered
campaign hat with the crossed silver arrows of the scouts. On his knotted
feet were black moccasins, the soles threadbare. Wrapped around him
like a sheet of misery was a stained blanket. He carried an oil lantern that
hissed and sputtered, casting grotesque shadows over the rocks and
leafless, stunted trees.
He was very old. Even he couldn’t remember just how old. He knew
only that in his youth he had fought the beaver trappers in the mountains.
And much later, had been with them when the mountain men had their
final rendezvous in 1840. And he had been old then, nearly forty years
before.
His name was Swift Fox and he was Flathead.
He knew this just as he knew some of his tribe called him Old Fox or
Sly Fox behind his back. Just as he knew he’d first fought, then
befriended the whites, even serving in their Army in campaigns against
the Dakota.
Swift Fox kept walking.
He mounted a rise, the cool November wind blowing dust in his face.
He saw the big oak in the distance and made for it. He stepped carefully,
a lifetime of navigating such terrain teaching him the value of patience.
He’d seen too many men scramble over the rocks and slopes in a rush only
to catch their boots in a yawning crevice and snap their ankles. This had
never happened to Swift Fox and he planned on keeping it that way. Old
men’s bones, he knew, didn’t mend so well.
The temperature was in the mid-forties.
Seasonable for that time of year in the Wyoming Territory. Yet the
chill dug into him, laid on his skin like frost, clotted his old, sluggish blood
with ice. This more than anything told Swift Fox in no uncertain terms he
was an old man.
At the big oak, he stood motionless for some time, watching the hanged
man.
The breed, Charles Goodwater, had told him of this. He’d seen the
hanged man from a distance as he stalked a deer and had quickly returned
to camp to report it. Swift Fox had come, knowing if he didn’t cut the man
down no one else would. Not Indian nor white. And in his way of
thinking, there was something blasphemous about letting a man hang in
the wind until he rotted and dropped to bones.
So he had come.
Holding the oil lamp with a steady fist, Swift Fox studied the hanged
man. He was dressed in a long midnight-blue broadcloth coat with black
pants, scuffed Texas boots, and a dark flat-crowned hat. He wore a white
cotton shirt that was brown now with dried blood.
Swift Fox wet his lips and set the lamp down. The flickering light
threw huge, maddening shadows. The man hung only a foot or so off the
ground so Swift Fox only needed to climb up a few feet. He slid a long,
curved skinning knife from the sheath at his hip and sawed at the rope.
The blade was sharp enough to take off a finger with a single slice, but the
rope was stubborn. It took Swift Fox a few seconds to cut through it, the
blade winking back moonlight and steel.
The body hit with a thud.
Slowly, patiently, Swift Fox climbed down and sat next to the man. His
old bones creaked in protest. The man’s hands were tied behind his back
and Swift Fox cut them free. The arms were not stiff as he worked them
free and rolled the man over. He hadn’t been dead long.
Swift Fox pushed aside a strand of his white, blowing hair and brought
the lantern closer to the man’s face. The hanged man had dark skin like an
Indian, yet his features were European. A half-breed maybe or just a
white who’d spent his life in the wind and sun.
The wind howling like the spirits of the dead in this lonesome place,
Swift Fox checked the man’s pockets. He carried no weapons, no
identification. Just inside his coat, Swift Fox felt metal beneath his
fingertips. He turned the flap of material out.
A badge.
Swift Fox looked closer.
The hanged man had been a deputy U.S. Marshal.
There would be hell to pay for this, the old man knew. The murder of
a federal marshal meant nothing but trouble and a lot of it. Swift Fox
looked in the dead man’s face.
And the eyes opened.
3
For the next four days, the many daughters of Swift Fox cared for the
hanged man. They wrapped him in buffalo blankets and fed him a hot
broth of deer blood. While they did this, the old man kept watch and
smoked his pipe. On the morning of the fifth day, the hanged man
regained full consciousness.
He looked at the old man’s daughters and then at the old man himself.
Then he asked for water in a dry, dead voice. The old man sent his
daughters away and let the hanged man drink all he desired from a jug
fashioned from the bladder of a buffalo.
“My throat burns,” he finally said, his eyes blue and icy.
“It is not broken, “ Swift Fox said. “By the grace of the fathers, you
lived.”
“You speak good English.”
The old man took this as a fact, not a compliment. “I was a cavalry
scout.”
“Did you bring me here?”
“Yes.”
The man nodded painfully. He looked around. “Flathead?” he asked.
“Yes. I am called Swift Fox.”
“Joseph Smith Longtree,” the man said. “Where am I exactly?”
“You are in a camp on the north fork of the Shoshone River. Less than
a mile from where I found you, Marshal.”
Longtree coughed dryly, nodding. “How far are we from Bad River?”
“Two miles,” the old man told him. “No more, no less.”
Longtree sat up and his head spun. “Damn,” he said. “I have to get
down to Bad River. The men I’m hunting...they might still be there.”
“Who are these men?”
Longtree told him.
There were three men, he said. Charles Brickley, Carl Weiss, and
Budd Hannion. They ambushed an army wagon in Nebraska that was en
route to Fort Kearny, killing all six troopers on board. The wagon had
carried army carbines which, it was learned, were sold to Bannock war
parties. That was a matter now for the army itself and the Indian Bureau.
But the killing of soldiers was a federal offense which made it the business
of the U. S. Marshals Office. Longtree had trailed the killers from the
Dakota Territory to Bad River. And in the foothills of the Absarokas, they
had ambushed him. They jumped him, beat him senseless, strung him up.
“But you did not die,” Swift Fox reminded him.
“Thanks to you.” Longtree was able to sit up now without dizziness.
Swift Fox was studying him. His hair was long and dark, carrying a
blueblack sheen foreign to whites. “You are a breed?” he asked.
Longtree smiled thinly. “My mother was a Crow, my father a beaver
trapper.”
Swift Fox only nodded. “When do you plan on hunting these men?”
Longtree rubbed his neck. “Tomorrow,” he said, then laid back down,
shutting his eyes.
4
The wind was blowing when he made it into Bad River.
It wasn’t much of a town. A rutted road of dirt and dried mud
meandered between rows of peeled clapboard buildings. What signs hung
out front had been weathered unreadable by the elements. There was a
livery, a blacksmith shop, and a graying boarded-up structure that might
have passed for a hotel. There was no law here, no jailhouse. What
Longtree had come to do, he would do alone.
Dust and dirt in his face, the wind mourning amongst the buildings,
Longtree hitched the horse Swift Fox had loaned him outside the livery
barn. The horse--an old gray--wasn’t too happy about being left in the
wind.
“This won’t take long,” Longtree promised him.
He broke open the short-barreled shotgun the old Flathead had given
him, fed in two shells, and started down the rotting, frost-heaved
boardwalk. His army spurs jangled as he walked. Swift Fox had done
some checking and found that the men Longtree was looking for often
frequented the Corner Saloon in Bad River.
This is where Longtree went now.
He had his neckerchief pulled up over his nose and mouth so he
wouldn’t be breathing grit. The shotgun was held firmly in his fists, his
eyes narrowed. His dark clothes were gray now with dust and dirt.
Outside the saloon, he paused. It was a decaying structure, single-story,
its boarding warped and peeled, the doorway askew with an old army
blanket tacked to the frame.
Longtree went in with a slow and easy pace, the shotgun ready in his
hands. It was dim inside, lit only by sputtering lamps. The floor was
uneven and covered in layers of pungent sawdust. The stuffy air stunk of
cheap liquor, smoke, and body odor. Beaten men lounged at the bar. A
few more in booths. An obese, toothless bar hag slicked with sweat and
grime grinned at Longtree with yellow gums.
“What’ll ya have?” the bartender asked. He was bald and had but one
arm, an empty sleeve pinned to his side.
Longtree ignored him, keeping his neckerchief up over his face so the
men at the back table wouldn’t recognize him.
They were all there.
Brickley, thin and wizened, hat pulled down near his eyes. Weiss,
chubby and short, grinning at his partners. Hannion, a muscled giant, a
knife scar running down one cheek.
Longtree went to them.
“You want somethin’?” Weiss asked, a single gold tooth in his lower
jaw.
“I have a warrant for the arrest of you men,” Longtree said. “Murder.”
They looked up at him with wide, hateful eyes.
Longtree flashed his badge and pulled down the neckerchief.
“Oh God,” Weiss stammered. “God in Heaven...you’re dead...” He fell
backwards out of his chair as Brickley and Hannion went for their guns.
Longtree shot Brickley in the face, his head pulping in a spray of blood
and bone. Hannion pulled his gun and took his shot in the chest, hitting
the floor and flopping about, pissing rivers of red.
Longtree broke open the shotgun, emptied the chambers, and fed in
two more shells. He stepped over the corpses and towered above Weiss.
Weiss was trembling on the floor, his crotch wet where he’d pissed
himself, bits of the other two men sticking to him.
“Where’s my horse?” Longtree asked him. “My guns?”
Weiss shuttered, unable to talk.
Longtree kicked him in the face, the boot-spur slicing off the end of his
nose and dumping the man in the wreck of Hannion. Weiss screamed, left
arm sunk up to the elbow in the bloody crater of Hannion’s chest.
Longtree grabbed him by the hair and pulled him to his feet.
“My things,” he said in a deadpan voice. “Now.”
Barely able to walk, Weiss led him out of the saloon and through the
screaming wind to the livery stable. A lamp burned in there; a grizzled
old man oiled a bridle. He saw the blood on Weiss. Saw Longtree’s badge
and fled.
Weiss pointed to Longtree’s horse and his saddlebags, bedroll, and
weapons lying in the corner. Then he fell to his knees, crying,
whimpering, drool running down his chin.
“Don’t kill me, Marshal! Oh, God in Heaven, don’t kill me!” he rambled
in a broken, lisping voice. “Please! They made me do it! They made me!”
Longtree kicked him in the face again and the man howled in agony.
Sighing, Longtree turned to his things and went through them.
Everything was in order, save the warrants and wanted fliers of the men--
they were missing. His gun belts and nickel-plated Colts were untouched.
His Winchester rifle had been emptied of cartridges. Nothing else had
changed.
Behind him, he heard Weiss make a run for it.
Longtree turned quickly and let him have both barrels. The impact
threw Weiss through the doors, his midsection pulverized. He hit the
ground a corpse. Only a few ripped strands of meat held him together.
The killing done, Longtree sat down and smoked.
5
Later, after he’d hauled the corpses to the undertaker’s and arranged
for their burials using the outlaws’ horses and guns as payment, Longtree
hit the trail. He rode up to the camp of the Flathead and gave Swift Fox
the horse and gun back, thanked the man.
And then he was gone.
Longtree didn’t like Bad River. It had a stink of death and corruption
about it. And if the truth be told, there were few frontier towns that did
not. And the reality of this brought a bleak depression on him.
So he rode.
He headed east to Fort Phil Kearny where orders from the U.S.
Marshals Office would be awaiting him.
And that night, the air stank of running blood.
6
The switchman was a big fellow.
He went in at nearly three-hundred pounds and though some of it was
fat, much of it was hardened lanky muscle accrued from a lifetime of hard
work. His name was Abe Runyon and in his fifty years, he’d done it all.
He’d driven team and rode shotgun on a stage in the Colorado Territory.
He’d been foreman for the Irish gangs that laid track from Kansas City to
Denver for the Kansas Pacific Railroad. He’d logged some. Trapped some.
Of all things, he liked railroad work best.
And tonight especially. A storm was hitting southeastern Montana
with a vengeance. The sky was choked with snow and already some six
inches had fallen, propelled with gale-force intensity by winds screaming
down from the Tobacco Root Mountains. Runyon was sitting in a
signalman’s shack, playing solitaire before the glow of a lantern. Outside,
the wind was screaming, making the little shack tremble.
Runyon cursed under his breath, knowing he’d have to spend the night
out here. Knowing he’d been a damn fool to be inspecting track with the
clouds boiling and belching in the first place.
There’d be no whiskey tonight.
It would be just him and his cards and the little wood stove that kept
him warm.
“Damn,” he said.
He bit off the end of a cigar and lit it with a stick match, spitting out
bits of tobacco. Snow was beginning to drift in the corner, forced by the
wind through any available crevice. Runyon stuffed a rag in there. It
would serve for a time.
Swallowing bitterly at his luck this night, he wiped his hands on his
greasy overalls and sat back down to his card game.
And this is when he heard the sound.
Even with the howl of the wind and the rattle of the shack, he heard it:
someone out back rifling through the woodpile.
Runyon knew who it was.
Getting up, he grabbed his light Colt double-action .38 and opened the
door. Snow and wind rushed in at him. And despite his size and strength,
he was pushed back a few feet. Gritting his teeth and squinting his eyes,
he forced himself out, pounding through the drifts that came up to his
hips at times. Out back, he caught the thieves in the act.
“All right, goddammit,” Runyon shouted into the onslaught of wind
and snow. “Drop them logs!”
The thieves, as it were, were three scrawny-looking Indians dressed in
raggedy buffalo coats and well-worn deerhide leggings. They dropped the
wood, staring at him with wide, dark eyes. A lean, starving bunch, slat-
thin and desperate.
“Please,” one of them said in English. “The cold.”
His English was too good for a redskin and this made the bile rise in
Runyon’s throat. He had no use for Blackfeet and Crow savages and
especially those that considered themselves civilized enough to use a
whiteman’s tongue. Runyon, a well-thumbed catalog of intolerance, hated
Indians. Raised in an atmosphere of anti-Indian sentiments, Runyon was
born and bred to hate anything just this side of white. They’d never
actually given him any personal grief but he knew that a raiding party of
Cheyenne had killed both his grandparents in Indian Territory and that
his father had watched the bastards scalp the both of them from his hiding
place.
“Cold, are you?” Runyon said.
The one who spoke English nodded. The other two just stared. And
Runyon knew what they were thinking, knew the hatred they felt and how
the sneaky, lying devils would sooner slit his throat as look at him.
“We were caught in the storm," the injun said. “We need wood for a
fire. In the morning we will replace it.”
“Oh, I just bet you will. I just bet you will.”
“Please.” The voice was sincere and had it been a white man, even the
lowest murdering drifter, it would’ve touched Runyon.
But these were savages.
And Runyon knew the moment you showed them any mercy, any
compassion, was the moment they laughed in your face. And that they’d
come back and kill you first chance they got. The heathen red devils didn’
t respect compassion; they saw it as a weakness.
“If you’re cold, injun,” Runyon said, leveling the .38 in his face, “I can
warm you up with some lead right fast.”
“Please,” the Indian said and seemed to mean it. Hard-won pride
cracked in his voice; it was not easy to beg for a few sticks of wood.
“Get out of here!” Runyon cried. “Get the hell out of here before I kill
the lot of you!”
The three of them backed away slowly, not taking their eyes off the
white, knowing it was not a good idea to do so. Too many times had
members of their tribe been murdered by turning their backs on armed
whites.
“We will die,” the one said. “But so will you.” With that, they were
gone.
But they weren’t moving fast enough for Runyon’s liking.
Spitting into the wind, he took aim on the stragglers and sighted in on
the one who thought himself the equal of white men. He drew a bead on
the savage’s back and pulled the trigger. The chamber explosion was
barely audible in the shrieking, biting winds. Visibility was down, but
Runyon saw one of the savages fall just as a wall of snow obscured him.
“Damn heathens,” Runyon cursed and made his way back.
Sitting by the wood stove and warming his numbed hands, Runyon
grinned, knowing he’d freed the world of a few more thieving redskins.
The bastards would freeze.
Runyon smiled.
7
It was much later when the scratching began.
Runyon had been dozing in his chair, a game of solitaire laid out
before him, the .38 still in his fist. He’d been dreaming he was down in
Wolf Creek, warm and toasty, having a drink and eating a good meal.
Then he opened his eyes. He wasn’t in Wolf Creek. He was out in the
goddamn signal shack waiting for morning.
Something that never seemed to come.
Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he set the Colt down and listened. He’
d heard something. Some unknown sound. He knew this much. Runyon
wasn’t one to wake without reason. Cocking his head, he listened
intently. The wind was still shrieking, the snow still dusting the shack and
making it tremble.
But something more now.
A low, almost mournful moaning noise broken up by the winds.
And scratching. Like claws dragged over the warped planks of the
shack.
Runyon swallowed, a trickle of sweat ran down his back. It was the
injuns. It had to be the injuns. Somehow, they had survived the subzero
temperatures and had come back now. Maybe with a raiding party. At the
very least with guns, knives, and evil tempers.
What had that injun said?
We will die...but so will you.
Runyon shivered.
He shouldn’t have shot that one…he should’ve shot them all. He
should’ve tracked the bastards through the snow and killed them. Shot
them all down and saved himself a hell of a lot of trouble.
But now they were back.
Runyon lit his cigar back up. He wished he’d brought more bullets for
the Colt, but, hell, he hadn’t expected any trouble like this. He should
have known better. Those savages were always on the look out for a lone
white man they could murder and rob.
They were circling the shack now. Moving with quiet footfalls. He
could hear them scratching at the shack. But what he heard then made no
sense: growling. A low, throaty, bestial growling. No man made sounds
like that. Maybe they had brought a dog. He could hear it sniffing,
pressing its nose up against the boards, growling low and snorting like a
bull.
Runyon aimed the .38 at the door.
The first one in was a dead man.
The door began to rattle, to shake as someone pulled at it. The boards
were shuddering, groaning beneath great force. Nails began popping free.
The entire shack was in motion now, swaying back and forth as something
out there clawed and tore at it. It wasn’t built for such stress. The roof
was collapsing, snow raining down as planks fell all around Runyon.
The lantern went out as it was engulfed in snow.
With something like a scream in his throat, Runyon began kicking at
the rear of the shack, knocking boards free. Just as he pulled a few planks
clear and squeezed his bulk through, the door was shattered to kindling.
Runyon plowed through the drifts, his ears reverberating with the
deafening howls of the thing that could not be a man. Runyon ran
through the swirling, blowing snow, tripping, falling, dragging himself
forward. Behind him, there was an awful low evil growling and something
that might have been teeth gnashing together.
He turned and fired twice at a blurry, dark shape.
A huge shape.
He could smell the beast now. It came on with a stink of decay, a reek
of rotting meat and fresh blood.
Runyon screamed now, a high insane screech that broke apart in the
wind.
And something answered with a barking wail.
Down in the snow, breath rasping in his lungs, fingers frozen stiffly on
the butt of the Colt, Runyon saw a great black form leaping at him. Much
too large to be a man. A giant. Runyon fired four more bullets and the gun
was knocked from his hand.
But the wetness.
It steamed from his wrist.
In the numbing cold he hadn’t even felt it, but now he saw. The thing
had sheared off his hand at the wrist. And as these thoughts reeled in his
head with a quiet madness, the black nebulous shape attacked again.
Runyon saw leering red eyes the size of baseballs.
Smelled hot and foul breath like a carcass left to boil in the sun.
And then his belly was slashed open from crotch to throat and he knew
only pain and dying.
Runyon was the first. But not the last.
BUY THE BOOK!
Copyright 2004 by Tim Curran
SKULL MOON
Wolf Creek, Montana Territory. 1878. The Gang of Ten. Masked
night riders that rustled cattle and imposed vigilante justice on
any who stood in their way. They were powerful, above the law.
But then they lynched the son of a Blackfoot medicine man who
threatened to tell their terrible secret. Now something is hunting
them. One by one they die in the most horrible ways, victims of
an ancient monster straight out of Blackfeet folklore. Deputy
Marshal Joe Longtree is a man used to getting the truth. But in
Wolf Creek, the truth can kill you. For when the sun sets behind
the mountains and the shadows grow long, an unspeakable
horror rises with a taste for human flesh and suffering.
Wolf Creek, Montana Territory. 1878. The Gang of Ten. Masked
night riders that rustled cattle and imposed vigilante justice on
any who stood in their way. They were powerful, above the law.
But then they lynched the son of a Blackfoot medicine man who
threatened to tell their terrible secret. Now something is hunting
them. One by one they die in the most horrible ways, victims of
an ancient monster straight out of Blackfeet folklore. Deputy
Marshal Joe Longtree is a man used to getting the truth. But in
Wolf Creek, the truth can kill you. For when the sun sets behind
the mountains and the shadows grow long, an unspeakable
horror rises with a taste for human flesh and suffering.