Destined to Die (8 page)

Jesse Gershel exploded a rifle and his father let loose both barrels of the Purdey.

Two more shotguns and rifles showered a hail of death across the screaming, writhing woman toward the front of the house. The horse hitched to the rail reared and snorted.

The six horses with men in the saddles were reined to dust-billowing halts, this dust clinging to the wet coats of the animals, and the boots and pants of the men who flung themselves from the saddles.

The eight men on the trail slowed to a halt with less fanatical zeal: with the exception of one who leapt from his saddle and raced to crouch beside the hysterically screaming woman.

All guns were back in their boots and holsters now.

The woman was placated and two of the men who had been in the Gershels’ group went up on to the stoop of the house. For a moment or so they were beyond Barnaby Gold’s range of vision. Then they backed into sight again. In stooped attitudes, each one holding the ankle of a bullet-riddled, blood-trailing corpse.

‘Pa, it ain’t him!’ Jesse Gershel shrieked.

The sniper was face-down when he was dragged to the Gershels. Hatless. Enough of his hair and clothing not splashed by blood to show that both were the wrong colour.

‘That’s what I was tryin’ to tell you!’ the woman screamed, wrenching free of the man who helped her to her feet. ‘You trigger-happy, crazy fools! He come here to tell you! The man you want got loose from Martha! Killed JL Larkin! Maybe even killed Martha and the girl as well!’

‘Frig it, we seen the horse and figured you was runnin’ scared from that guy, Gertrude!’ one of the sniper’s killers yelled.

‘You fools never do think anythin’ right!’ the woman countered. ‘Get back on your horses and ride for the Gershel place! See if Martha and the Engel girl have come to harm!’

By the time the men streamed through the natural arch and galloped their mounts south down the trail, Barnaby Gold and his gelding were concealed in the wooded gully.

CHAPTER NINE

THE woman had been shaken and then hard-slapped out of her hysteria by the man who went to her. Then there had been some more heated exchanges. But low voiced, so that the black-clad man at the top of the slope could not hear what was being said. Part of the talk had seemed to be about whether or not somebody should stay with the woman. But nobody did. A blanket was brought from the house to drape the blood-run corpse where it lay. Then, as Barnaby Gold led his gelding deep into the gully, all the men rode up toward the arch.

Men spanning an age group from twenty to fifty. Most attired in bib aprons over sweat-stained shirts. Homesteaders, all of them. Not expert horsemen and doubtless unused to firing their weapons in rage. Grim-faced and angry. Some looking a little sick at having been involved in the gunning down of the man in front of the Wolfe house. Will and Jesse Gershel almost haggard with anxiety about the fate of a wife and mother.

Ordinary, hard-working men visited by trouble that was snowballing as decent and honest as most probably, just as John Lloyd Larkin had claimed. Almost in the same breath as he had said he was not prepared to tell the truth unless he was asked.

Then, when they had ridden out of sight beyond the high ground, Barnaby Gold led his horse out of the gully and mounted him: started to ride down the slope away from the arch. A man like few others. Disliking crowds wanting no part of anything at which he did not excel Totally single-minded in achieving his aims, to the paradoxical extent of allowing himself to be far side-tracked if anything threatened to keep him from his purpose.

He rode toward the house with the sawn-off Murcott unhooked from the rigging ring. The safety catch off and the twin barrels resting across the saddle horn. His approach was heard, but he was not seen until he rode around the corner of the house and along the front.

When the door banged open and the woman who had been hysterical a minute or so earlier stood on the threshold. A tall, thin, gaunt-faced woman of fifty or so. With thinning grey hair, a sallow complexion and a soured mouth-line. Wearing a shapeless grey dress of denim that hung straight from her narrow shoulders to her laced black shoes.

She was holding a heavy, long-barrel Le Mat revolver with a hanging ring in the base of the butt, visible beneath the heels of the two hands in which she gripped it. She tracked his slow progress with the seven inch barrel and then held a rock-steady aim on him when he turned the
horse to face her and reined him in.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Wolfe.’ He accompanied the greeting with the personable smile.

It did nothing to shift the grimness from her eyes and the set of her mouth.

‘You’re him, ain’t you?’

‘You make that
him
sound as if it’s in capital letters. As though you were speaking of God.’

‘It’s the Devil prefers black. And from what I’ve heard you’ve done, you could be him. Let that shotgun go,’

‘No lady.’

‘What?’

‘No, lady. Not until you put away that revolver. I don’t want to kill anybody, and I don’t think you do, either.’

‘I could plug you where you sit on that horse, young feller!’

‘If you’re that good with a gun that big, do it, Mrs Wolfe. But if you miss, I’ll guarantee I’ll have to shovel you into your own grave.’

The woman gasped, stared fixedly into the unblinking green eyes of the man astride the horse: knew it was no idle threat. Then admitted her lack of confidence by allowing the barrel of the Le Mat to sag toward the stoop boarding.

‘What do you want here?’

He hooked the shotgun on the rigging ring and swung down from the saddle. Without shifting his gaze from her and with his left hand in the holed pocket of his frock coat.

‘Check on the deceased.’

She leaned against the doorframe and now held the revolver one-handed. ‘They thought he was you.’

‘What I thought, Mrs Wolfe.’

‘You saw it?’

He nodded. And turned his back on her to go to where the dead man lay beneath the blanket.

‘They saw that black horse of his there and they come runnin’. I come outta the house to tell them it wasn’t your horse. But they said they didn’t hear me, what with the noise of the water. He must’ve figured that and he come out to show himself. But they said they was so scared of what might’ve happened and so mad at you, they just started to fire.’

Gertrude Wolfe gasped again. And let the revolver clatter to the stoop to put both hands up to her face. Then turned to rush into the house.

Barnaby Gold could hear the wet sounds of her vomiting as, after he had pulled off the blanket, he rolled the corpse on to his back. The exit holes in his back showed he had been hit by two rifle bullets. But the entry wounds at the front were masked by the pepper shot that had ripped through his pants and shirt to tear the flesh from the bones at throat, chest, belly and thighs. His face was not hit - merely splashed with now-congealed blood.

If he had carried anything in his shirt pockets, it had been shredded. One side pocket of his pants was empty. In the other was a comb and thirty-five cents. In his only hip pocket, a five dollar bill and a piece of paper folded into quarter-size.

Gold remained in a crouch beside the body as he unfolded the paper: saw it was a telegraph form with a message scrawled in pencil. But before he could read it he heard a tread on the stoop. Saw Mrs Wolfe was on the threshold again, so draped the shot-shattered body and stood up.

The woman’s face had a freshly-washed look. She asked dully: ‘You robbin’ him?’

‘No,
lady,’

The telegraph message read: CLINTON DAVIS RIVERSIDE HOTEL BACALL ARIZ LIKELY GOLD STRIKE NEAR YOU SOON STOP ARKIN MISSED GETTING RICH CHANNON EL PASO TEXAS.

He refolded the paper and held it up before putting it into a pocket of his frock coat. Said: ‘Just a fair exchange, Mrs Wolfe. I gave him a message. Now I’ve got his.’

‘He asked about you. Before he come back here to the place.’

Barnaby Gold had gone to his horse. Now slid from the centre of the bedroll, lashed on behind the saddle, three lengths of a pole. One with a triangular shovel piece on an end.

‘Anywhere around here you don’t want him buried, lady?’

There were short lengths of threaded metal protruding from the ends of two of the poles. He began to screw these into the appropriate receiving holes to form a long-handled shovel.

‘Dear God in Heaven, he said you used to be an undertaker,’ the woman gasped.

‘Nowadays just bury my own dead. Over on the river bank be okay? You’re not likely to plough the ground there.’

She made no response and he went to the spot indicated: began to dig into the moist, easy-to-work earth.

‘Your dead?’

This after more than a minute. During which time she came down off the stoop and across to where he was digging.

‘It might help your menfolk to know he would have died anyway, Mrs Wolfe. Him or me. If I’d known who he was at Larkin’s place, I’d have killed him then.’

There was a pause between each sentence in which he shovelled earth from the hole to a heap. He could sense her looking at him intently. Eventually, she said: ‘I didn’t like him when he first showed up here. Scared me as much as you did. His comin’ like you, while my Festus was off the place.’

The erstwhile undertaker practising his former trade said nothing.

‘Asked if a man named Barnaby Gold had been along the river. When I told him I’d never heard of you, he described you perfect. Said how you used to be a mortician and still looked like one.’

The grave was being dug quickly, Gold aware that Festus Wolfe might have second thoughts about leaving his wife after Larkin’s body was found, come riding back under the arch and down the slope.

‘Course, I knew he was talkin’ about the very same man Will Gershel said he and Jesse had caught. But even if I hadn’t liked the looked of this here feller, I wouldn’t have said nothin’ about that. Us mountain folk handle our own trouble. So he rode on south without learnin’ nothin’ from me. And I was like on hot coals waitin’ for the men to get back. Tell them about him.’

Gold interrupted his chore, but only to run a coat sleeve across his sweat-beaded face: gave no sign that he was even listening to what the woman was saying.

‘But he shows up again first. Without them guns he had before. Says as how he run into you while you was quarrellin’ with JL Larkin. How it ended with you shootin’ poor old JL who never harmed a fly. Would have shot him, too, he said. Except you wanted him to give a message to the menfolk. Tell them that if any of them stood in your way from leavin’ this piece of territory, they’d get the same as JL.’

‘Appreciate you telling me all that, lady.’

‘Guess it’s the truth?
’

‘No.’

‘JL ain’t dead?’ There was hope in her tone.

‘He’s dead.’

‘Oh.’

‘It was an accident.’

‘Accident?’

‘Clinton Davis was aiming to kill me, but his bullet hit the logger instead.’

‘You say! Who’s left alive to back your word?’ she was immediately afraid at having hurled the challenge. But Gold did not even look up at her. And she moderated her tone to ask: ‘Did you have to ... to ... hurt Martha and the Engel girl when you escaped?’

‘The girl less than she deserved, the woman not at all.’

‘We can give thanks to God for that.’

‘Okay.’

She began to cast anxious glances up toward the arch of rock.

‘I wish you would leave that and go away, young feller.’

Two more shovelsful of dirt were moved from the hole to the heap.

‘My Festus and maybe some others could be back any time.’

‘Reason I’m working so fast, lady.’

‘There’ll be shootin’ if that happens. And it ain’t you I’m worried about. Not after you killed poor Mary-Ann and Virgil just hours since them and me and Festus was laughin’ and jokin’ in the house here.’

Gold was just three and a half feet down and had come up against solid rock. He climbed out of the grave and saw that Gertrude Wolfe was looking at him quizzically.

‘There are two people who can tell I didn’t, lady,’ he supplied. ‘But they’ve already told it another way.’

Gertrude Wolfe watched as he went to the body, carefully wrapped it in the blanket, hefted it up over his shoulder and brought it back to the graveside. Then he stepped down into the hole and lowered the corpse gently to the earth, face-up inside the makeshift shroud. While she witnessed this, then studied him as he shovelled the dirt back into the grave, there was a pensive expression on her thin, work-wearied face.

Asked: ‘When you’re through with that, you’re goin’ to high-tail it away from this stretch of river, young feller?’

‘I never high-tail it anywhere, lady.’

‘I think you should.’

‘So did Mr. Larkin.’

‘I can believe it wasn’t you killed him. That feller you’re puttin’ in the ground, God rest his soul, I knew he was no good. Didn’t know how to talk civil to a lady.’

The body was hidden by dirt now. Gold did not sweat so freely at this easier chore of filling in the grave.