Funeral By The Sea

by George G. Gilman

  The crack of the Winchester followed by the deeper sound of the shotgun acted to silence the noise of celebration out on the street.

  ‘Hey, kid! How d’you make out?’

  Gold came out of the kitchen and along the passage. Swung the door to the dining room open just wide enough to retrieve the cheroot but not to see the Mexican girls. Had to step over the shotgun-blasted corpse of Vic, but was able to walk around those of Jimmy, Hal Delroy and Roy.

  He did not halt until he was out on the stoop. Immediately in front of him two more bodies were sprawled on the ground. The man at the top of the sand ridge was as inert as they were.

  Three loose horses were stationary on the beach. A man lay dead midway along the curving street. Two more close to the rocks where Warren Pruett had been concealed.

  There was not a sign of human life to be seen or heard.

  ‘I figure I did okay, sir!’ he yelled.

  The bounty hunter showed himself then, coming out from between two adobe houses midway along the street, Winchester canted to his shoulder and a broad grin on his sun-burnished face.

  ‘Thank God,’ a woman gasped.

  And Barnaby Gold glanced back into the house. Saw the ash-blonde Emily at the head of the stairs, her arms held in an attitude that meant the wrists were lashed together behind her back.

  ‘He surely must have been on our side, lady,’ he answered softly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  BARNABY Gold soaked in a tub of soapy water for a long time in the luxuriously furnished bathroom of the big house. While a Mexican woman washed and dried his clothes, Emily treated Seth Harrow’s back wounds and jubilant fishermen celebrated either with their families or at the cantina where everything was on the house.

  And Warren Pruett used a wagon from the barn to collect up the dead, starting with the trio of men killed yesterday morning and stored in the stable.

  The tub, which the giggling Mexican girls kept topped up with hot water, served to ease all but the most nagging aches out of Gold’s body. So that he felt virtually fully fit again when his cleaned clothes were brought to him and he dressed. Then went to retrieve his hat from the basement steps and next to the stable.

  His gear was where he had left it and he selected Vic’s fine black gelding again. He saddled the animal but left him in the stable. Reloaded the two Peacemakers and the Murcott, hooked the shotgun to the front rigging ring of the saddle.

  Then went to the cantina and smiled and nodded in acknowledgement of the effusive words of thanks and praise that were yelled at him. In English and Mexican-Spanish. Almost everyone drunk.

  ‘Appreciate some food and beer,’ he said to the gaunt-faced, beaming bartender.

  ‘Our pleasure, señor. You can have the whole town if you want. You and your amigo.’

  ‘But not the big house, if you don’t mind, son,’ Seth Harrow said when the cheers quietened. ‘These folks are plannin’ on burnin’ it to the ground.’

  ‘Just food and drink, sir,’ Barnaby Gold answered as he sat at a table near the doorway.

  The bearded old-timer was standing at the bar, in a group with the cantina whores and Emily, ‘So you won’t be concerned if me and these ladies get us some horses from the stable to ride outta here on?’

  ‘No, sir. Sorry I wrecked your wagon, Mr. Harrow.’

  ‘Shit, son! You think I care about that? Me and these ladies, we was makin’ good money from Hal Delroy. But ain’t none of us wouldn’t have paid double what we made to get off the lousy gravy train.’

  ‘Damn right!’

  ‘Stinkin’ pigs!’

  ‘Perverts!’

  ‘No charge,’ Barnaby Gold said as the bartender’s woman delivered to his table a tray laden with food and a glass of foaming beer.

  ‘You got no objection if we leave now, Barnaby?’ Emily asked.

  ‘No, lady.’

  ‘How about your friend?’

  ‘Unless you have a price on your head, he won’t care whether you stay or leave.’

  Drinks were hastily swallowed and then Seth Harrow, Emily and the other whores bustled out of the cantina. Yelling more words of appreciation.

  Barnaby Gold made a single wave of a hand serve as farewell to all of them. Then went on with his meal, during which the Mexicans trickled away, until just the bartender and his American customer were left.

  Seth Harrow and the whores rode by on their way out of Oceanville.

  The Señor Pruett, he is very good shot with the rifle, is he not?’

  ‘No denying that, sir.’

  ‘We were talking of him earlier. How he has gone with the wagon for the dead. He is bounty hunter, no?’

  ‘That’s what he is.’

  The beer was finished and a cheroot lit.

  ‘Another?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  The chair was pushed back from the table.

  ‘You are leaving now?’

  ‘After Mr. Pruett gets back.’ He paused halfway through the batwings and looked briefly at the bartender. ‘Appreciate the food. Bye bye.’

  He went to the big house, up on to the stoop and sat in the rocker. Corpses still littered the street, the beach and the house, the citizens of Oceanville content not to touch them after the bounty hunter had staked his claims. The decomposing flesh was beginning to stink in the noon sun, but Barnaby Gold was too familiar with the sickly sweet aroma to be bothered by it. And the bodies kept the flies away from him.

  Thirty minutes later, Warren Pruett drove the wagon into sight around the slab of rock at the bottom of the ravine. Halted it three times along the street to add corpses to the pile on the back.

  ‘Things have quietened down a little since I left,’ he said as he reined the team to a stop out front of the house.

  ‘Guess the real celebration will start when they make a bonfire of the house.’

  ‘Be somethin’.’

  There was a constant buzzing sound from the great swarm of flies crawling on the heap of bodies. The scavengers were interrupted several times as the last of the dead were heaved aboard. The man from the sand ridge first. Then the two on the street. Finally the five from in the house.

  ‘Be hard to identify them that got burned in the ravine,’ Pruett said, a little breathless from his exertions, as he leaned against a front wheel of the wagon. ‘But from them I spotted right off, there’s better than ten grand aboard this rig.’ He had looted one of the bodies for the makings and now began to roll a cigarette. ‘You sure you don’t want a cut, kid?’

  ‘Don’t you want to make your play here, Mr. Pruett?’

  The grey-haired, blue-eyed bounty hunter paused with his tongue halfway along the gummed edge of the cigarette paper. Momentarily surprised. But then he completed the action with his tongue, and left his lips parted in a smile.

  ‘You knew from the start, Undertaker?’

  The tone he used to name the former trade of Barnaby Gold gave it a capital letter.

  ‘Yes, sir. More or less. From the way you shot Eve Delroy when she yelled my name and you knew it was me she was going to whip.’

  Warren Pruett used his left hand to strike a match on the wheel rim and light his cigarette. His right hung close to the butt of the Army Colt jutting from his holster.

  ‘It wasn’t no real surprise, kid. I really did get to Oceanville on the trail of Matthew John Wise, But when I found that black geldin’ with his head near blown off with a shotgun ... well, one of the things known about you is that you tote a sawn-off double-barrel job.’

  ‘Important that you should kill me yourself, Mr. Pruett?’

  The older man spat out of the side of his mouth opposite to where the cigarette hung. ‘Hell no, kid. But if you was dead down here, there wasn’t any way I could get your carcass. Plugged the woman on the spur of the moment. Knew there was a chance somebody might plug you outta spite, but right then I had nothin’ to lose. What happened after that…?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, ain’t no denyin’ the shot I p
ut into Hal Delroy’s bitch of a sister was the most profitable one I ever did fire.’

  Barnaby Gold clicked his tongue. ‘Ten thousand or more aboard the wagon. How much are the Channons offering for me, Mr. Pruett?’

  ‘Last I heard, ten dead, kid. And I don’t mean dead as in dead or alive.’ He took the cigarette from his lips, pinched out its fire and lodged it behind an ear. ‘Now you tell me somethin’, kid?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Why’d you wait until now?’ He waved his left hand about him. ‘Until after all this?’

  ‘Maybe because you saved my life and I owed you like you said.’

  ‘So now we’re even, uh? After you kept me from drownin’ last night? No hard feelin’s?’

  ‘Or maybe it was because I didn’t have my shovel to bury you with.’

  ‘Why, you…’ The soft-spoken, even-toned threat provoked Warren Pruett to instant anger. And he went for his gun, teeth bared and blue eyes blazing.

  Gasps of shock sounded along the street.

  Barnaby Gold rocked backwards in the chair, right hand streaking to the Colt in the holster. He did not draw it. Thumbed the hammer back as the other man’s gun came clear. Squeezed the trigger at the moment the motion of the rocker leveled his right thigh with Pruett’s chest. To blast the bullet out of the toe of the holster and into the heart of the bounty hunter.

  Who was rigid for a second against the wheel, incredibly blue eyes puzzled.

  ‘Chance I took, sir,’ the younger man told him. ‘That someone as good as you with a rifle wouldn’t be really fast with a handgun.’

  Pruett may have heard the first few words, but no more. Died on his feet and toppled forward like a felled tree, still clutching his unfired revolver.

  His killer rose from the chair and moved along the stoop, stepped down at the end and went to the stable. Led his confiscated mount outside. Sensed the stares of shocked curiosity directed at him from the cantina and adobe houses as he took the three sections of the shovel from the centre of his bedroll and screwed them together.

  He dug the grave alongside that of Eve Delroy and the best part of an hour had gone from the afternoon before the burial chore was completed and the dismantled shovel was back in his bedroll.

  Only then did the bartender come out of the batwinged entrance of the cantina and reach the front of the big house as the black-clad young man swung up into the saddle.

  ‘This takes much understanding, señor.’ he said ruefully.

  ‘I prefer to bury my dead is all, sir.’

  ‘All these?’ The thin Mexican waved a hand at the wagon.

  ‘They were Mr. Pruett’s dead. Easiest way for you to deal with them is put them in the house before you burn it.’

  A nod. ‘Si, señor. We will do this.’

  ‘Bye bye.’

  He clucked for the horse to start.

  ‘Señor!’

  Barnaby Gold reined in the horse and looked back.

  ‘It is said that you wish to go to San Francisco. To board a ship to reach the other side of the world. You must go far to the east before you can ride north. One of the boats here is big enough to take you and your horse along the coast. It will be much quicker, señor.’

  ‘Appreciate the offer,’ the black-clad man astride the horse answered. ‘But there’s too much money involved.’

  ‘Money, señor?’ The Mexican sounded insulted. ‘It will be done for nothing.’

  A shake of the head. ‘Blood money is what I’m talking about, sir. Figure that before I leave for Europe, I’ll have to go to Texas.’