He stepped out on to the balcony and reached back inside for the shotgun. Then, setting down each booted foot with great care, he moved to the corner of the building. And on to the stairway that canted across the side facing the creek. His face did not lose the pained look until he was on the solid ground between the Riverside Hotel and the bank of the water course.
The breeze stirred his open frock coat as he started back along the side of the building, then turned to go across half the front. The horses hitched to the rail looked at him fleetingly. Lost interest in him. The street, with small puffs of wind-stirred dust dancing on it, was otherwise empty.
He did not have to go up on to the stoop to see into the saloon through the window to the right of the entrance: had the height to see as much as he needed while standing on the street.
The two newcomers were standing at the bar, their broad backs to him. Each had a shot glass in his hand. Arnie Dalton, dressed in a blue nightshirt, was starting toward the double doors that gave on to the kitchen and, presumably, the private quarters of the hotel. He glanced back at his late night customers twice. And both times it was plain to see the dread that was deeply inscribed on his pale face.
‘Night to you, Mr Dalton!’ This from the one who had done most of the talking when they arrived.
Dalton opened and closed his mouth twice. Only then managed to call out: ‘Good night, gentlemen!’
‘Thanks for your trouble!’ Jake added.
Then the hotelman went through the double doors. And the dialogue section of the play in which Dalton had taken such a reluctant role was over. Then one of the men still on stage finished his rye, crouched out of sight of Gold for several seconds. Straightened again to put his boots on the bartop. Jake nodded to him and the man drew his revolver and took long, silent strides toward the foot of the stairway.
‘This sure does taste good, Chester! Near as good as that first bottle of liquor we had after we got to Dodge City that time! You recall that, partner? Hell, we swallowed some dust that trip, didn’t we? That sonofabitch of a trail boss had us riding drag the whole...’
Chester had moved outside Barnaby Gold’s range of vision now. Jake poured two more shots from the bottle, but did not lift either glass. For to drink would have left a gap in the monologue he was addressing to himself in the mirror on the wall behind the bar. His reflection showed him to be an ugly man of a little over thirty. Hard-eyed and with a bushy black moustache, teeth of almost the same colour, and a knife scar on his right cheek.
As he continued to recall the events on the trail drive and its rewards in Dodge City, Kansas - not pausing to allow his absent partner an opportunity to interject - his tone altered to take account of whether the memories were pleasant or painful. But his expression of tense expectancy did not change at all.
‘...whole time! But the grub was real fine, wasn’t it? What was the cook’s name? Joe Maguire, wasn’t it? Got roaring drunk with that big red-headed whore and chased her stark naked out of the room! Man, did she have the biggest...’
On the upper floor a door crashed open with a kick,
Chester snarled: ‘You’ve had it, undertaker!’
Barnaby Gold clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. And drew the wood-butted Colt from its holster.
A revolver was fired, the bullets exploding from the muzzle so fast the man had to be fanning the hammer.
Jake’s image in the mirror abruptly showed a blackened-toothed grin of pleasure. And he raised one of the glasses of rye toward his mouth.
The horses made nervous sounds and movements at the sudden burst of rapid fire gunshots.
Gold thumbed back the hammer of his Peacemaker and took a double-handed grip on the butt. Pressed his elbows against his chest with the Murcott cradled across them. Aligned the barrel of the Colt on Jake’s broad back.
‘Shit!’ Chester shrieked as the gunfire was curtailed. The tone was almost maniacal. ‘Jake, he ain’t here!’
Jake hurled away the glass and whirled. His left hand streaking to his holstered revolver.
Gold squeezed his trigger. The bullet shattered the window to send a spray of shards across tables, chairs and the floor. Drove into Jake’s chest. Too high. The impact slammed him against the bar counter, but he completed his draw. Fired from the hip.
Yelled: ‘On the street!’
His bullet took out a triangular fragment of glass still held in the window frame. Then thudded into a balcony support.
Gold exploded a second shot from the Peacemaker. This as Jake dropped into a crouch. Which placed his head in the line of fire. The bullet smashed through his discoloured teeth set in a snarl of rage. Banged the back of his head against the front of the bar counter. Blood erupted from his mouth and he collapsed out of Gold’s sight.
Light spilled from the houses down the curving street. Questions were shouted. The two horses snorted and reared, trying to jerk free of the hitching rail.
Against the noise, Gold holstered the Colt and swung up and over the stoop rail, thumbing off the shotgun’s safety catch. Dropped into one of the rocking chairs that was immediately below the point where the window of his room looked out on to the balcony and street.
The horses became calm. Questions to which there had been no positive answers were still being asked. But not so loudly now that the silence after the gunfire lengthened.
In the private quarters at the rear of the hotel, Fran Dalton was crying in fear. Her husband was rasping at her to be quiet.
The breeze stirred the leaves of the trees. The creek made rippling sounds beneath the bridge.
No one emerged from the houses. The citizens of Bacall anxious to know what had happened, but all of them too afraid to be the first to investigate the cause and result, until somebody guaranteed it was safe to do so.
Barnaby Gold wore the pained expression again as he strained to hear any sound that Chester might make. His left hand was fisted around the twin barrels of the shotgun and his right index finger was curled across the front of both triggers. His elbows rested on the arms of the rocker and the Murcott was angled across his chest. Behind his pursed lips, his tongue was poised to click.
He heard an intake of breath above him. This a moment after Arnie Dalton had silenced his wife with a slap.
There was no sound of Chester’s unbooted feet stepping out on to the balcony. But a few motes of dust floated down from a crack between two planks.
Gold shifted his elbows off the chair arms and held the Murcott vertically, squeezing the base of the stock between his thighs. A line of sweat beaded his upper lip as he stared up at the darkness of the underside of the balcony.
There was neither sound nor sign that the man had swung his trailing legs out over the window-ledge.
From the second-storey hallway, Annie Kruger called softly: ‘Barnaby?’
And this caused Chester to catch his breath in surprise.
Gold tracked the gun and his eyes toward the front of the balcony: and had to rock the chair back a little to draw a bead on the point from above which the small sound had come.
He squeezed both triggers.
The horses snorted and reared again in response to the massive sound of the two barrels being discharged: the belch of flame and smoke from the muzzles. And one of them jerked loose, wheeled and bolted away, its hooves beating on the planking of the bridge. Before it lost his footing and stumbled into the creek. Recovered, and galloped out along the north trail.
Something fell heavily from above, thudding to the ground through the billowing dust of one horse at the gallop and another still rearing on its tether.
Chester. Still alive, for the planks of the balcony had absorbed most of the power of the shotgun’s double blast. And it was probable that pieces of shredded timber torn out of the balcony floor had done as much damage to the man as the Murcott’s twin loads. He lay on his back in the settling dust, his thighs and belly and face sheened with crimson. A portion of his intestines hung out through a hole in
his flesh. He made moaning sounds and blood bubbled in his mouth. His hands kept clenching and unclenching, as if he imagined there was some physical hold with which he could cling on to life.
Barnaby Gold got quickly up from the rocker, holding the shotgun low down at his side. Went to the gap in the balcony rail and drew the Peacemaker from the holster.
They... said... you... was... just... a... frigging ...kid.’
‘Growing up fast, mister.’ He aimed the Peacemaker at Chester’s blood-covered face and stooped so that the muzzle was just an inch from the pain-creased brow. Squeezed the trigger.
The hole drilled into his skull looked insignificant compared with the gory injuries that the shotgun blast had caused. He twitched once and was still.
Up on the balcony, the whore gasped. And accused in a shocked tone: ‘My God, he wasn’t a horse. The sawbones could maybe have saved his life.’
Barnaby Gold glanced up at her as he slid the gun back in the holster.
‘Lady, he tried to kill me.’
He said nothing else before turning to go up on to the stoop.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE breeze outside quickly neutralised the acrid stench of gunsmoke. But within the confines of the saloon the exploded powder of Jake’s two shots still clung to the atmosphere. This as Barnaby Gold crossed to the bar counter and leaned over the heap of the gunman’s corpse to pick up a sheet of paper from beside the still-filled shot glass. The stub of a pencil lay nearby.
While he was reading what was scrawled on the paper, he heard the doors from the kitchen open. And the whore’s tread on the stairs.
Barnaby Gold staying here? one of the gunslingers had written. Then, on another line: Write yes or no or well kill you first.
Dalton’s hand was trembling with fear, so that the Yes he wrote was barely decipherable.
Keep talking. Which room?
Ferst left top of stars.
Chester had known what the terrified Dalton meant
Give answers. Go to bed.
‘You can see they made me,’ Dalton said fearfully after Gold put the paper back on the bar. ‘Not only me. I was afraid for Fran, too. And Annie.’
Gold folded the paper neatly and put it with the telegraph he had taken off the corpse of Clinton Davis.
‘It’s all right, Mr Dalton. I’ve got no quarrel with you.’
‘What was their quarrel with you?’ Fran asked.
She had draped a large coat over her nightdress and was clutching it together across her sparse breasts. Her eyes were red from weeping. There was the beginning of a dark bruise on her left cheek where Arnie had hit her into silence.
‘It’s not our business,’ her husband said quickly.
Running footfalls sounded out on the street.
‘Somethin’ to do with them mountain folks, I’ll bet,’ the whore muttered. If she used a nightdress in her trade, it was not the one she wore now, which was of unappealing red flannel, draping her full body shapelessly.
There were gasps of shock and some strangled curses as the citizens of Bacall came close enough to see what was left of Chester.
Then: ‘Arnie? You and Fran okay? What happened here?’
‘Nobody gives a shit about me!’ Annie Kruger snarled. And turned to go back upstairs.
Gold took the same route.
‘I’ll have our mortician take care of the bodies,’ Dalton called.
‘Nobody will touch them except me.’ Gold’s voice was soft, but insistent, as some faces showed above the bat-wings. ‘Appreciate it if you’d have Mr Street open up his livery so I can get what I need.’
‘You’re leavin’?’ He sounded surprised, and ready to be pleased.
‘Not right now.’
The whore was halfway along the hallway to her room. When he reached the top of the stairs, she asked: ‘You want me again?’
‘Seeing a man get killed make you want a live one lady?’
‘Damn you, I was worried about you! After the shootin’ started.’
She swung around and hurried to reach her room. Again slammed the door. By which time Gold was in his room. He went to his saddlebags and took out two cartridges for the Murcott and three for the Colt. Reloaded both weapons and went back downstairs.
Fran Dalton was gone. Her husband was behind his bar, pouring drinks for the five men - coats on over their nightshirts and boots unlaced - who had run to the scene of the violence. All of them looked at the black-clad, shotgun-toting young man with apprehension.
‘Fred Street’s gone to open his place like you said, Mr Gold,’ Dalton said.
‘Them hillbillies wouldn’t’ve hired no gunslingers to do their dirty work, mister,’ a tall, gaunt-faced, bespectacled man added. Then, after Gold had given a nod of acknowledgement to Dalton and stooped to grab hold of the back of Jake’s coat collar: ‘I run the funeral parlour here in Bacall.’
‘I’m like the mountain people, sir. Do my own dirty work.’ He dragged his limp burden to the batwings, then paused to ask: ‘Any particular part of the cemetery you want me to bury them?’
An elderly man, short and pot-bellied, with a white beard, growled: ‘We don’t want filth like that buried in our churchyard.’
‘Fine.’
‘In our town even.’
This as the batwings flapped.
The street was deserted again, but with more lights on now. With the Murcott in the crook of an arm, Barnaby Gold got a grip on Chester with his free hand. Then began to move backwards in a crouch. Dragging both corpses to the end of the street, then across the shallow creek. The water came up to his knees. He left the remains at the side of the trail beyond the town marker and recrossed the creek.
Walking past the entrance to the saloon, he heard Arnie Dalton say: ‘... just before he started blastin’ into the empty room. He called that Gold feller an undertaker. And then...’
The middle-aged, powerfully-built, square-faced liveryman was still hungover from the drinks he had taken in the saloon. He was sitting on a wooden crate, cradling his head in his hands, when Gold entered - and saw that the horses of Jake and Chester were enstalled there.
‘You want your mount, mister?’
‘No, sir. Just something from my bedroll.’
There was no lamplight in the stable, but enough from the moon came in for Gold to see his way to the corner Street indicated, where his saddle and bedroll hung from a wall hook.
‘Appreciate you taking the trouble to open up for me, Mr Street.’
He carried the three pieces of the shovel outside. The liveryman followed him through the doorway and snapped the padlock closed.
‘Trouble? I don’t reckon I know the meanin’ of that word, mister.’
Then, despite his pounding head, watched in fascination as the younger man screwed the three pieces of the shovel together.
‘Bye-by,’ Gold said when the chore was done. And turned with the Murcott in one hand and the shovel in the other to go back up the sloping curve of the street.
‘What? Oh, yeah. Night to you, mister.’
Other eyes watched him out of sight. Then the men in the saloon surveyed him curiously as he went back over the creek. Until lighted windows began to darken. The group in the Riverside Saloon broke up and headed again for home. Casting backward glances toward Barnaby Gold who worked slowly and deliberately at digging a two-man grave beside the trail on the far side of the creek.
Soon, just a single lamp in the saloon augmented the moonlight. And only the rhythmic thud of the shovel into dirt provided sound in addition to those of the breeze and the running water.
Gold’s mind was empty of thoughts as he worked on the grave with the apparent ease that came with long experience.
First Arkin, then Davis. Now Jake and Chester, whose surnames he did not know. He had been warned that to anger the Channons of Texas was to invite the attention of every gunslinger greedy for a share of the family’s wealth.
What was the point of regretting the series of
events that had caused him to give the Channons a thirst for vengeance? There was no way to alter the past. Just as pointless to wonder how many more like these he would have to bury. Before the Channons called a halt. Or, more likely, got off the first and decisive shot.
And this was undoubtedly the most likely ending the future held. Because the four men he had been forced to gun down on account of the Channon family’s reputation had all made the mistake of underestimating Barnaby Gold.
Arkin had known nothing of the young man except that he was a small town undertaker.
Clinton Davis had known that Arkin had failed - perhaps assumed he was dead - but was unaware of the details.
To Jake and Chester, he was just a frigging kid.
But as the death toll mounted and the knowledge of it spread, the other hired guns who were out there in the darkness, even now hunting for him, would not be so easy to beat to the killing shot. They would be much more wary in approaching this blond-haired, green-eyed, good-looking young man who had already buried four of their kind.
Then there was the prospect of ending his trouble with the mountain people along the Colorado south of Bacall. The possibility that they had held off so far because of some deal that was reached with Jake and Chester.
Barnaby Gold might have considered some or all of these points while he dug the six foot deep grave, laid the two men face-up in the bottom and then refilled it. But he did not give a thought to any of them.
And only the fact that the Murcott was never out of arm’s reach as he was working indicated that he was aware of being in mortal danger that could strike at any time.
When he was finished, heaping the dirt into a neat mound along the length of the grave, he lit a cheroot and dismantled the shovel. His boots and pants were dry now and he used the footbridge to cross the creek.
In the saloon he closed and bolted the entrance doors, and doused the lamp before he went up to his room: noticing that Dalton had failed to wash up the dirty glasses from the late night drinking session, and neither had he swept up the shards from the bullet-shattered window.
Up in his room, in the moonlight, he saw there were five bullet holes in the bedcovers and mattress beneath. So there had been one shell left in Chester’s six-shooter when he climbed out on to the balcony to search for the man missing from the bed. He had died in pain and disappointment after confidence replaced anger and fear.
Destined to Die Page 9
