Gold had the impression that, when Martha Gershel spoke of rape and a woman being taken by a man, she experienced a surge of excitement. He judged this from the way her eyes brightened and her grip tightened on the tray.
‘So the fair hearing talk was crap, lady?’
She flinched when he used the mild expletive. ‘Around here we do things right, stranger! And it ain’t right to use foul language in the hearin’ of a female!’
‘My apologies, lady. Wrong of me to assume that just because the Engel girl has a bad mouth that every...’
‘I’ve never even heard that sweet girl take the Lord’s name in vain!’ she countered, then whirled and strode from the room, the china on the tray rattling.
Gold waited until he could hear her washing the dirty crockery before he struck another match. Then another and another.
Martha Gershel had completed her dish washing chore and had left the house by the rear door before he saw the rope was burned through sufficiently to snap with a hard tug. And he was about to give this a try when he heard a small sound and wrenched up his head to look toward the doorway. Where Joanne Engel stood, her shoes off so that he had not heard her tread across the hall.
‘Martha’s out to the barn doing something, Barnaby,’ the girl said, displaying her slightly buck teeth in a gentle smile. Once more acting the part of a full grown woman, in her juvenile attire of gingham dress and white socks with her hair in pigtails.
She turned sideways on to him, back to the doorframe and one leg raised and bent with the sole of the foot pressed to the woodwork. And she was arched forward a little, to thrust out her underdeveloped breasts.
Gold clicked his tongue.
‘I don’t know what, but it could be she’s doing something to herself. I heard her talking to you awhile back. I reckon she hates you as much as you hate me, Barnaby. But it sounded like she lusts after you, too. When she was talking about—’
‘Beat it, kid.’
Anger coloured her freckled cheeks and injected rigidity into her alluring stance. ‘I told you before, don’t call me that!’
‘What other kind of shit can you stir for me, kid?’
She dropped the folded-up foot to the floor and swung away from the doorframe to face him full on.
‘I was maybe willing to help you, you sonofabitch! Cut you loose so you maybe had a chance of getting away from these rubes around here!’
She came into the room, her rage not so all-consuming that she failed to remember Martha Gershel was close by. So she kept her voice to a venomous, rasping whisper.
‘But now I’m going to watch you swing from a tree branch. And I’m going to get a real thrill out of doing that. Especially since I’ll know you’re dancing on that rope for something you didn’t do. That’ll make it even better, you high nosed bastard. And you’ll know that if you hadn’t treated me like I was just out of diapers, you maybe would’ve missed being lynched.’
She was at the side of the table, her hands splayed on its top, half-leaning across it to bring her flushed face within a foot of Gold’s. He could feel the hot breath of her anger on his skin.
Just one length of rope had been used to secure the prisoner. An end was tied to a leg of the chair and it was simply wound around his thighs then his torso and arms and fastened with a running knot close to the top of the chair back. So that it only had to be parted anywhere along its length and he was free.
‘Emily Jane and Maria were women.’
‘What?’
‘Married one and the other was a whore. Both of them screwed me up real bad. You’re just a kid, but in that department you leave them way behind.’
‘I told you, don’t call me—’
She snatched up one of her hands and made to lash it at his face.
He jerked his thighs apart and the section of charred rope snapped. He powered upright and the coils of the rope fell away. Except where it encircled his chest. Then the act of shooting forward an arm to grasp her wrist caused the knot to run.
The chair fell to the floor.
Joanne Engel screamed her terror.
He used his free hand to raise the rope noose up over his shoulders and head. His hat fell off.
Her scream continued.
He dropped the noose over her head, released his hold on her wrist and jerked the knot tight to the nape of her neck. The sound she was making was choked to a premature end.
‘Be a pleasure to kill you, kid,’ he whispered, close to her ear. ‘But I don’t get my thrills like that.’
The rear door of the house banged open and running footfalls came from the kitchen.
‘Joanne!’
Martha Gershel sounded anxious, but not overly concerned.
Barnaby Gold kept the noose tight enough around the girl’s neck to keep her silent, but not to choke her, as he gathered her up with an arm around her waist and carried her struggling form to the parlour doorway.
The woman emerged from the kitchen and stopped short, suddenly brought to the edge of hysteria. She was carrying the gun-belt.
Joanne Engel saw her and was still. And for a heartbeat, so was the woman. But then she moved her hand toward the studded Peacemaker - had her thumb on the hammer and was about to swivel the muzzle toward Gold when his voice caused her to freeze.
‘Try it and I’ll throw this lying little bitch at you, lady! And keep hold of my end of the rope!’
Martha GersheFs fine breasts heaved with tension. Her eyes looked ready to pop out of their sockets.
‘What’s happened?’ she gasped.
‘Let go of the gun and toss the belt over here, lady.’
‘I can’t.’
Joanne was trying to say something and he allowed a little slack in the rope.
‘I don’t want to die, ma’am!’ she blurted huskily. ‘Please do like he—’
‘I can’t trust you not to—’
Barnaby Gold looked calmly into the mask of horror that was her face. Said: ‘Way you want it, lady.’
‘No!’ She shrieked the single syllable and hurled the gun-belt across the hallway. Hard enough so that he felt a sharp pain when the butt of one of the guns hit his knee.
Then he simply let go of the rope and uncurled his arm from around the girl’s waist. It was not a long fall, but she did not expect it. And there was no time to prepare for the impact. She screamed as her hip, elbow, shoulder and the side of her head cracked against the floor.
Gold went down on to his haunches, took hold of the gun-belt and stood up.
‘You stinking, rotten—’
‘Watch your mouth, kid,’ Gold cut in on her evenly, as he began to buckle the belt. ‘There is a lady present.’
Martha sagged against the kitchen doorframe. ‘Dear God,’ she whispered, a hand at her throat. ‘I just thought the girl was havin’ a nightmare.’
Gold finished tying the knot to hold the toe of the holster to his thigh. Asked: ‘Were you going to blast her demons away with these .45s, lady?’
‘No, I...’
He retreated into the parlour, to pick up his hat from the floor. Then took the time to go to the window, open it and let out the fly. The dog, which was lying flat out in the shade, growled at the sight of him.
Out in the hallway, the girl had crawled toward the woman, who was still as Gold had left her, sagged against the kitchen doorframe.
‘I think you went to get these guns to kill me, Mrs Gershel.’
She swallowed hard. Then used a great deal of effort to pull herself erect. ‘That’s exactly right, stranger! To get it over and done with. Make it quick for you. And so the decent, hard-working men around this neighbourhood wouldn’t have to carry the guilt of a lynchin’ around with them for the rest of their lives.’
There was pride and defiance in her certainty that what she had planned was the right thing to do. And then she placed a protective arm around the shoulders of Joanne again after the girl had risen painfully to her feet.
Both of them backed fear
fully into the kitchen when Gold started toward them.
‘You took my cheroots, lady.’
She nodded toward a small pine, scrubbed-top table against a wall of the kitchen which was as neat and clean as the other parts of the house Gold had seen. His tin of cheroots, still open with the match, ash and remains of a smoke in the lid, was on the tray on the table. He emptied this mess on to the floor and took out a cheroot before placing the tin in an inside pocket of the frock coat. Then crossed to the range and used a match from a box on a shelf above to light the tobacco. He also pocketed the box.
Went toward the open rear door of the house.
‘I’m grateful, stranger,’ Martha Gershel said.
‘Why you thanking him, ma’am?’ Joanne asked, her voice shrill and on the brink of anger.
‘He could have spilled worse than that, child. And taken more than a handful of matches from us.’
Barnaby Gold ignored the girl to direct a lingering look at the woman. The kind of look - arrogantly appraising - which a young man in his mid-twenties did not normally offer to a woman of more than forty.
The old-for-her-age Joanne Engel recognised what was implied by this open gaze from the cool green eyes of the black-clad man. And scowled her resentment.
While Martha’s cheeks became flushed in a manner that would have better suited the girl.
‘Under different circumstances, lady, there’s something here I’m sure I would have enjoyed having.’ He nodded, then added: ‘Bye-bye.’
CHAPTER SIX
THE big black dog barked at him as he rode the gelding around the side of the house and across the yard to the strip of crushed rock through the trees. Barked and lunged at him, then snarled through bared teeth each time the rope snapped taut and jerked him to a halt. He could hear the animal for several minutes after he had ridden out of sight of the two pairs of eyes which had gazed fixedly at him from the stoop-shaded threshold of the house. One pair hating him, the other filled with a strange mixture of doubt, regret and subdued excitement.
Although he did not know of these expressions was merely conscious of being watched from behind. Until he was on the trail beside the river, heading north and the fruit tree orchard hid him from the house.
He felt no hatred toward Joanne Engel or regret at having allowed himself to be led so willingly into the trap that the Gershels had closed around him. What was done was done - he was as green as spring grass in a damp climate. But he learned from each new experience in the so far harsh world outside the confines of Fairfax and Standing. Maybe the hard way, but that was probably the best way.
He smoked the cheroot down to a stub and tossed this into the Colorado River. By which time he was a mile beyond the Gershel property and riding through a stand of piny on, juniper and oaks much more extensive than that to the south, filling a broad valley that had opened out from the end of the riverside bluff that crowded the homestead back down the trail.
Deep in the timber, the foliage of which offered pleasant shade from the blazing sun that was nearing its midday peak, he reached a clearing and reined in the gelding. The cleared area, some two acres, was man-made by the felling of trees over a number of years. The oldest stumps, many of them rotted, were closest to the river bank. And some of these first-to-be-felled trees had been used to construct a northern-style log cabin far enough back from the water’s edge to escape flooding when the river was swollen by rain.
Two shade oaks had been left growing at the front corners of the cabin. Out back of it there was a high pile of cordwood cut to even lengths and parked beside this a two-wheeled pushcart. On the eastern side of the clearing a half dozen recently-felled trees lay sprawled out from their yellow-topped stumps. Two had already been cleaned of branches, which were smouldering with a great deal of smoke on a tidily-built bonfire. While a man was working with a bucking saw and a small broad axe to strip another, tossing the severed trimmings on to the fire.
A tall, broadly-built, muscular man wearing only a pair of denim pants and calked boots, was hatless despite the strong sunlight that poured down, unobstructed, into the clearing.
The logger had his back to Barnaby Gold and was a rather indistinct form through the lazily drifting smoke of the fire. The thud of the axe, the rasp of the saw and the crackling of the sap-moist timber on the fire acted to mask the thud of hooves on the sun-browned grass of the clearing until the mounted man had ridden through the smoke and was within twenty feet of the naked-to-the-waist man. Who whistled tunelessly while he worked.
‘Good morning to you, sir.’
Gold spoke as he reined in the gelding during a pause when the logger dropped the saw to pick up the axe.
The whistling was abruptly curtailed and for a full second the man remained in a frozen stoop. Gold delved a hand into the holed pocket on the left side of his coat and gripped the mother-of-pearl butt of the studded .45. But his green eyes were lit with a personable smile when the man whirled toward him, axe held in an aggressive, cross-body position.
‘Shit, kid, what’s the big idea?’
He was in his fifties - maybe even early sixties. He had long, greasy black hair like an Indian, framing a face stained to a darker shade of brown than his heavily haired torso, the flesh inscribed with countless deep lines where it was exposed above his thickly growing grey and black beard. There was resentful anger in his light blue eyes and the way his discoloured teeth showed between lips all but concealed by the beard and its accompanying moustache.
‘Uh?’
The logger lowered the axe and half-sat on the tree he was trimming: ran a hirsute forearm over his face to clean off most of the sweat beads hanging in the cracks of his skin.
‘One thing I can’t abide is bein’ crept up on.’
Gold maintained his grip on the gun but did not thumb back the hammer. With a jerk of his right thumb over his shoulder he indicated the half-width of the clearing behind him.
‘Rode my horse from there to here, sir. Can’t see that as creeping.’
‘And I’ve spent best part of sixty-one years listenin’ to bigger brutes than these saplings crashin’ down, kid, Which ain’t done my hearin’ any good at all.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir.’
‘And don’t call me, sir. I ain’t been bull of the woods for a long time. Name’s John Lloyd Larkin. The hillbillies around here call me just JL. What can I do for you, kid?’
The alarm at being startled had gone and now he was peering with curiosity at his visitor, and it was obvious that his sight as well as his hearing was impaired.
‘Not a thing. I’m just passing through. Needed to be sure you wouldn’t try to stop me.’
Larkin had examined him from head to toe, then started to check on his horse and gear. ‘You’re the guy Will Gershel says might have killed the Engels and screwed that snot-nose kid of theirs?’
‘You going to try to stop me, Mr Larkin?’
The logger spat and some of the saliva did not clear his beard. ‘Shit, kid, how would I do that? You with them two pistols and that sawn-down shotgun dangling from the saddle?’
Gold nodded. ‘Okay.’
He took his hand from the coat pocket and took up the reins.
‘You have to do anythin’ to that girl and Mrs Gershel to get free?’
‘The girl may have a rope bum around her neck.’
‘If I’m gonna believe that, I have to figure you didn’t do what the girl said you did.’
‘You’re a believer in truth, Mr Larkin.’
‘Then ride away from here in any direction but north, kid. Will Gershel’s a good and honest man. If he wasn’t, he’d have took care of you himself. Seein’ as how you claim Jesse, his own son, did the killin’s. But with the crowd of other hillbillies he’s roundin’ up, he’ll take a back seat. Good and honest men, nearly all of them. But in a crowd, they’ll stick together to protect their own. Wrongs and rights of it won’t make much odds. You ride on the north trail and you’ll head slap bang into them.’
‘They told you a lot, Mr Larkin,’ Gold lit another cheroot, ‘considering you’re not one of them.’
‘No, kid, I ain’t one of them. I’m from Illinois and spent most of my workin’ life up in Montana and Oregon until I got too old to keep pace with the youngsters. And my blood got too thin to take them northern winters. But Will and me, we get on fine, us bein’ such close neighbours. And he asked me a favour. To go down the trail to his place and stand guard over you. Didn’t like the idea of leavin’ Martha to do it. But with so many men to get together over a big piece of country, it needed him and Jesse both to round them up.’
‘Why didn’t you do him the favour, Mr Larkin?’
‘Said I’d think about it, kid. Kept thikin’ instead of how I saw Jesse last night. Ridin’ south real fast. How he didn’t look sick from liquor to me. And how, if he got sick of a sudden, he was close enough to home to make it. Instead of beddin’ down in the timber.’
‘But you didn’t say anything, right?’
A shake of the head. ‘No, kid. On account of I’m an old man who likes to eat regular. And likes workin’ in the timber to earn my bread. But if the people hereabouts started to cut their own stove wood ... well...’
‘Sure, Mr Larkin.’
‘Course, kid, if I was asked right out, I wouldn’t lie about what I seen.’
‘Bye-bye, Mr Larkin.’
He clucked to the horse and tugged gently on the reins to head him across the clearing toward the point where the north trail led into the timber, called after him.
‘Appreciate it,’ Gold acknowledged, and leaned to the side, to flick the partially-smoked cheroot into the fire, a scowl on his face as if the tobacco had suddenly started to taste bad.
And felt the tug of a bullet snag at his coat sleeve. At the same instant as he heard the crack of a rifle. An instant before John Lloyd Larkin grunted and rasped: ‘Shit, some bastard shot me.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
BARNABY Gold kicked free of the left stirrup and straightened his right leg using the leverage of his right foot in the stirrup to power a headlong leap from the saddle. The gelding, calm in the wake of the sudden gunshot, was alarmed by the abrupt actions of his rider. Reared and bolted.
Destined to Die Page 4
