Destined to Die

by George G. Gilman

  With the revolver clutched in his right hand, the Gershel boy unhooked a coil of rope from his saddle horn. One end of this was skilfully formed into a hanging noose. His father used hand gestures to signal the homesteaders into a single line along the centre of the street, horses turned to face the facade of the Riverside Hotel.

  For a second after the mounts were still, just the rippling of the creek around the bridge pilings disturbed the silence.

  ‘You Daltons and the whore!’ Will Gershel roared. ‘And any other innocent folks inside! Come on out here!’

  Hammers clicked back and the lever actions of repeater rifles were pumped. Sweat beaded every hard-set face. Here and there, hands trembled. Eyes shifted in sockets, transferring suspicious stares from the batwinged entrance to the windows on both lower and upper floors. Raked the roofline. Gazed at the corners of the building.

  ‘All right! Don’t shoot! Me and Fran are comin’ out!’

  Fear quavered every word Arnie Dalton yelled. Two pairs of footfalls sounded on the floor of the saloon. The batwings were pushed open slowly and the Daltons showed themselves on the threshold, the husband with his arm around the shoulders of his wife. They stepped down off the stoop as the batwings flapped closed at their backs.

  ‘Where’s Annie?’ a homesteader asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Up in her room, I guess. She should have heard you, Mr Gershel.’

  ‘Maybe the sonofabitch is holdin’ her hostage, Pa!’

  ‘Can we go?’ Fran Dalton rasped fearfully.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Dalton blurted his gratitude, took hold of his wife’s elbow and hurried her out across the street: heading for the law office on a course that took them past one end of the line of mounted men.

  The woman looked back several times at the facade of the hotel. Waited until she and Arnie were at the doorway of Polk’s office before she shrieked: ‘The open window on the balcony! That’s his room!’

  Her husband wrenched her forward and sent her staggering into the law office.

  A dozen gun barrels were tracked to the target and the triggers were squeezed. The sound of the fusillade caused several of the horses to rear and back away. One of the homesteaders, cursing his mount, was pitched from the saddle.

  The window of Barnaby Gold’s room was shattered. Splinters of wood exploded from the frame, the surrounding timber and the balcony rail. Some of these shards showered down on to the black gelding below and the horse, schooled to be calm at the sound of gunfire, was panicked by this rain of debris. He wrenched up his head and the hitch in the reins was loosed. He wheeled away from another hail of wood chips that a second volley of bullets gouged from the hotel facade: then bolted down the curving slope of the street.

  Jesse Gershel had been first to fire at the open window: his act spurring other men to blast at the target. But now his father re-established his leadership, not having exploded his Purdey in the barrage.

  He leapt from his horse and bellowed: ‘I wanna see him hung! Let’s go get him if he’s still alive!’

  He lunged into a run across half the width of the street Others aped his actions.

  ‘Pa, watch out!’

  Jesse was still trying to control his spooked horse. He glimpsed a movement at the corner of the building on the creek side. And as he shrieked the warning, he triggered a shot through the billowing dust and drifting gunsmoke.

  Other homesteaders reacted instinctively. Whirled and exploded shots at the same target. Still others turned in the same direction, tracking their guns. But did not fire them. ‘Were older and slower in their moves. Had time to see the target more clearly.’ Shouted counterwarnings to that of Jesse against the crackle of the gunfire.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Don’t!’

  ‘It’s not—’

  ‘It’s—’

  But Anne Kruger was already going down on to her knees. Blood blossoming on the white fabric of her dress. At the belly, chest and both shoulders.

  The shooting had been curtailed, but horses were still stamping and scraping at the ground, snorting and snickering. These sounds covered the crack of the whore’s knees impacting with the hard-packed dirt of the street. Then she sprawled out prone.

  ‘We friggin’ killed her!’ a man blurted in dread. And hurled his Winchester to the street, as if it were the rifle and not he who was tainted.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Will Gershel rasped.

  Started toward the bullet-riddled woman. But pulled up short when she turned her head and raised it. To gaze at Gershel and the other men with eyes that were filled with dismay rather than pain.

  ‘I just come to tell you ... he ain’t in the hotel. He run off down the hill ... out back. Into the trees ... toward the river. Why you do this to...?’

  The agony of the multiple bullet wounds hit her and the words were curtailed. So that she could vent a keening scream. Then she died. The scream became the death-rattle in her throat and her head banged back against the dirt.

  ‘Pa, I thought it was him!’

  Jesse’s shrilly-voiced excuse ended perhaps three seconds of utter silence during which even the horses were calm in the presence of tragic death. And caused all eyes to shift their awe-filled stares from the corpse to the frightened boy.

  For a longer period of silence, Will Gershel seemed poised to lunge at his son. Needing this action to release the unbearable seething rage that reached to his every nerve ending.

  ‘Pa, don’t!’ Jesse croaked. ‘It was an honest mistake.’

  ‘That’s right, Will,’ the man who had thrown down his rifle added.

  The elder Gershel squeezed his eyes tight closed. Snapped them open and snarled: ‘She told us what we needed to know before she died, you men. And she didn’t oughta die for nothin’. Go get him.’

  The men left their horses to do GersheFs bidding.

  ‘Alive unless he wants it the other way.’

  The homesteaders moved into two groups to go around the hotel at either side,

  ‘Not you, Jesse!’

  Will Gershel stood still at the front of the building. And as he snapped this final order, his son froze in the act of turning. To stare at his father, fearful that the threat of a violent assault had not yet finished,

  ‘Why, Pa?’

  The elder man held his silence until the footfalls of his friends and neighbours had faded from earshot on the timbered slope out back of the hotel. Then: ‘You’re just too damn eager to kill him before we can put that rope around his neck.’

  ‘You noticed that, too, Mr Gershel.’ Barnaby Gold said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  HE stood at the glassless window with the bullet-holed surround. The Murcott angled down at the Gershels from his hip, left hand fisted around the twin barrels and right index finger to a trigger.

  The father turned and tilted just his head to look up at the black-clad figure. The son swung from the waist and started to bring up his revolver

  ‘Don’t be a fool!’

  The father shot out a hand and fisted it around the barrel of the revolver.

  ‘What have I got to lose, Jesse?’ Gold asked evenly.

  The father dropped his Purdey to the street. The son groaned and surrendered his revolver. The father dropped his, too.

  From across the street and along the curving side of it that offered a view of the facade of the Riverside Hotel, the citizens of Bacall watched and waited: as tense as the two men who stared up at the twin muzzles of the shotgun and the implacable face of the man who aimed it.

  ‘Pa?’ Jesse said, and seemed on the verge of weeping.

  ‘How’d you get the whore to do what she done for you, boy?’ Will asked.

  ‘I haven’t seen her since I left her in my bed first thing this morning, Mr Gershel.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘No. But you’re in a position where you have to listen.’

  ‘They’ll be back soon, Pa.’

  ‘Shut your
mouth and listen, Jesse.’

  ‘Appreciate it. Figured it wrong. Thought the last place you’d look for me was where you were told I was staying. What with my horse hitched to the rail in full sight.’

  Will Gershel nodded. ‘I figured it right, boy. Figured your kind can only get by doin’ the unexpected.’

  ‘Was too late to change my plan after the Daltons left and you started to shoot. Had to hit the floor and wait it out until you quit it. What Anne Kruger did was as much a surprise to me as you.’

  ‘Guess she must’ve liked you real well, boy.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘So what now? You’ve made it so she died for nothin’. Showin’ yourself like you have.’

  ‘She did what she wanted. What I’m doing. Because I didn’t do what the Engel girl said I did.’

  ‘All I’m doin’ is listenin’, boy. On account of, like you said, I ain’t in any position to do much else with that shotgun aimed at me and Jesse.’

  ‘Other people are listening, too, Mr Gershel. Bacall people who aren’t from the river valley and before that from Tennessee. Who don’t think that everything you do is right so a stranger has to be wrong.’

  ‘Tell it, boy.’

  Barnaby Gold did so. Even-voiced and expressionless. Loud enough for his words to carry partway down the curving street. Just as he had told it to Sheriff Floyd Polk earlier in the day. A witness in his own defence at a weird murder trial held on a sun-bright street. The stand was the bullet-shattered window. Jesse’s crazed stare marked him as the prosecution. The listening citizens of Bacall formed the jury. Will Gershel, as impassive as Gold, was the prejudiced judge. The horses were disinterested spectators.

  He told of his early morning arrival at the Engel place. Of seeing a man ride away. Of finding the corpses of Virgil and Mary-Ann Engel. Of Joanne’s admission of guilt and involvement of Jesse. Of her threat and how she carried it out at the Gershel homestead. Of Jesse’s story that he stayed out all night because he was sick from liquor. Of Joanne’s taunts when he was a prisoner in the Gershel’s parlour. Of JL Larkin’s evidence that Jesse was fine when he rode past his place. Of Anne Kruger’s account of Jesse not getting drunk - instead, just enraged by envy of Clinton Davis going upstairs with her. Of how he, Gold, had remained in town instead of resorting to guilty flight. Of how Jesse was the first to start shooting at Davis in front of the Wolfe homestead, at the hotel window in the wake of Fran Dalton’s shout and at Anne Kruger when he thought she was Gold.

  ‘And I guess he was the one,’ Barnaby Gold concluded, ‘who talked you people into holding off from coming to town. When the two gunslingers rode up the valley and told you they were looking for me.’

  Will Gershel shook his head. ‘Somethin’ else you figured wrong, boy. That was my idea. Seemed like the sensible thing to do. Them bein’ the same kind you are. And outnumberin’ you two to one. Why risk our lives if others was prepared to take care of you?’

  ‘And why have my death on your consciences, along with the way you killed Clinton Davis? When you couldn’t be sure I’m guilty?’

  ‘You’re guilty, boy. Only reason you stayed around here was to show how big you are. But you ain’t big enough to get out of this. The townspeople heard you spout all that stuff, same as me. Heard you tell what old JL Larkin and the whore is supposed to have said. Which wasn’t much. And they’re both dead anyways.’

  ‘Hey, that’s right, Pa!’ Jesse grinned.

  ‘Shut up, boy!’ Will Gershel did not look away from Barnaby Gold at the window. ‘So what d’you figure the townspeople are gonna do? When the men come back up out of the timber? And you’re gonna have to either start shootin’ or give yourself up without a fight. Maybe Jesse and me’ll be dead. A few other men. But so will you, boy. Shot dead, or hung for whatever new killings you do here.’

  Gold clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. ‘Everyone is destined to die some time, Mr Gershel.’

  ‘Your time has come, boy,’ a man said from the open doorway of the bullet-ravaged room. ‘Now, with a bullet in your back. Or you can hang.’

  Gold turned his head slowly. And saw Festus Wolfe standing on the threshold, aiming a Winchester from his shoulder. He had taken off his boots to enter the rear of the hotel and climb the stairs. The same as the other two homesteaders who had moved into the doorway to flank him. They aimed revolvers.

  Down on the street out front of the hotel, Jesse Gershel stooped to reach for his discarded hand-gun. His father kicked it clear just before Jesse’s fingers were about to close around the butt.

  Gold let go of the Murcott and it hit the window-sill and bounced down on to the balcony.

  ‘Now take off the gun-belt,’ Wolfe ordered tensely.

  ‘Sure.’

  He unbuckled it and let it fall to the floor. All three men in the doorway vented sighs.

  ‘We got him!’ Wolfe yelled.

  The rest of the homesteaders came out on to the street. Emerging from around both sides of the hotel.

  Gold looked out of the window just before strong hands gripped both his upper arms. Not to survey the grim-faced men and the grinning boy immediately below. Instead, to rake his expressionless green-eyed gaze along the sloping curve.

  It was deserted, the widely spaced buildings on either side giving no sign or sound that there was anybody inside them.

  ‘Wasn’t nobody heard you who’s goin’ to help you, boy,’ Festus Wolfe growled, moving out of the room ahead of Gold and the two men who held him prisoner.

  ‘Like a lady said awhile ago, Mr Wolfe, everyone makes mistakes.’

  ‘Too late for you to learn from this one.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  HIGH tension augmented the heat of the blazing sun to bead every face with sweat as preparations for the lynching of Barnaby Gold were made.

  Will Gershel had taken the rope from his son and broken from the group of his friends and neighbours. To ignore the footbridge and wade across the creek ford. Heading for a tree on the other side of the trail from where a mound of fresh dug earth marked a two-man grave.

  Some of the homesteaders gathered the reins of the horses and began hitching them to the rail outside the hotel.

  Festus Wolfe continued to aim his rifle at Gold while the two other men who had made him a prisoner in the room held his upper arms. And Jesse Gershel took a length of twine from a pants pocket to bind the captive’s wrists behind his back.

  Except for the area out front of the Riverside Hotel, the entire length of the street remained deserted.

  Gold gazed directly ahead, ignoring the sweating men close to him to look at Will Gershel. Watched him as he tossed the noosed end of the rope toward a stout branch some fifteen feet from the ground. At the third attempt he succeeded in looping the lynch rope over the branch. Kept his back to the activity in front of the hotel when he yelled: ‘All of you bring him over here! Bring a horse, too!’

  ‘Yeah, Pa!’

  Jesse hurried away from Gold to unhitch the reins of a horse from the rail. This as the men holding Gold’s arms urged him forward.

  The other men shuffled to obey Will Gershel’s command.

  From the law office came a strange sound. Like laughter. But also like sobbing. The sound of the venting of hysteria. Silenced by the crack of flesh against flesh.

  The booted feet of men and the hooves of a horse splashed in the slow-moving, shallow water of the creek.

  Drops of water and beads of sweat dripped from the men to the dusty surface of the trail on the other side of the creek.

  ‘Get him up on the horse.’

  Still Gershel avoided looking at Gold’s implacable face. By stepping up behind him, to knock off his hat and place the noose around his neck as he rasped the order.

  Jesse giggled as the prisoner was awkwardly raised and settled in the saddle: his shiny-booted feet not in the stirrups.

  ‘Shut up, boy!’ He cleared his throat and spat at the ground. ‘There’s a man about to die here!
’

  He held out the loose end of the rope.

  ‘What you want, Will?’

  ‘I want every one of you men to have a hand on this. When I set the horse to runnin’.’

  ‘He’s your son, Will,’ one of the homesteaders complained, taking off his hat to wipe a shirt-sleeved arm across his forehead.

  ‘The Engels were friends and neighbours to all of us, Clyde.’

  There were grunts of reluctant agreement. Then Clyde was second only to Jesse in taking a grip on the lynch rope.

  Will Gershel now moved forward, to stand alongside the horse and look up at Barnaby Gold who sat erect in the saddle, gazing across the rippling creek and down the curving, deserted street. The older man on the ground was outwardly more tense than the one in the saddle.

  ‘Anythin’ you wanna say, boy?’

  Hoofbeats hit the southern end of the street, the horse and rider hidden by the intervening buildings on the curve. Voices shouted, indistinct over the distance.

  ‘Just Goddamnit to hell I never got to Europe.’

  ‘That all?’

  ‘Bye-bye.’

  A shot rang out from the direction of the galloping horses. And a whole chorus of voices were raised.

  ‘Hit the friggin’ horse, Pa!’ Jesse’s words were shrill, almost like those of a woman.

  ‘You just gotta have a death wish, boy,’ Will Gershel said in strained tones.

  Sheriff Floyd Polk raced his horse around the curve and into view of the lynch mob and its intended victim. Fired his revolver into the air a second time. He continued to yell at the top of his voice, but the words were lost under a cacophony of sound. The hoofbeats of his horse. The running footfalls of Bacall’s citizenry as they wrenched open their doors and spilled on to the street. And the din of a wagon and team being driven hard up the hill behind the lawman.

  ‘What the hell?’ the man at the side of the horse growled.

  ‘We do things our way, Pa!’ Jesse roared. And lunged forward. To bring down his splayed hand on the rump of the horse.

  ‘No, boy!’ Festus Wolfe cried.