Black as Death

by George G. Gilman

  ‘It was my idea, son,’ Cater admitted as the five men stopped beside the hearse. Of these, only the blacksmith was armed with the handgun he had used to kill the wounded stallion.

  ‘But it didn’t take much to convince the whole town it was a good one,’ Hogg added.

  ‘For the good of the town, Barnaby,’ the elderly preacher said.

  ‘Mr. Norbert,’ Jeb Stone urged from the side of his mouth and nudged the banker with an elbow.

  The bald-headed, round-faced man who was as nervous as the saloon keeper, cleared, his throat and held out a paper sack that was bulky but light

  He cleared his throat ‘Everyone chipped in, young man. Not near enough to cover the market value of the property and its contents and the goodwill of the business. But there’s better than three hundred dollars taken up.’

  ‘Token of how bad we feel about what it has been necessary to do, Barnaby,’ the preacher added.

  While he listened to the variously anxious and embarrassed spokesman for the town, Gold took a cheroot from his case and hung it at the corner of his mouth. But he did not strike a match, leaning back to scrape it over a piece of silver trimming on the hearse, until after he had reached down to take the proffered sack of bills. Then set light to a corner of the sack before touching the flame to the tip of the cheroot. Next, as charred pieces of paper began to fall, he tossed the flaring money out on to the street

  Anger swamped Jeb Stone’s nervousness and he rasped. ‘Most folks have said it and most folks are right! There’s somethin’ just not right about you, boy!’

  ‘Quit it,’ Jeb Cater growled. ‘Once the money was given to him, it was his to do what he liked with.’

  ‘Hey, watch him!’ the saloon keeper warned. And took a step back as Gold reached under the seat of the hearse.

  The others also backed off from the rig, Hogg raising a hand toward the butt of the gun stuck through his belt He halted the move when he saw it was not the Murcott that Gold drew out from beneath the hammer cloth drape. Instead, the roll of bills he had taken from the hip pocket of Floyd Channon’s pants.

  ‘Here, Mr. Norbert,’ he said, extending his arm. ‘Only thing of value the dead man had on him. Maybe there’s some other stuff in his saddlebags. Appreciate it if you’d send the money to his family. Place called the Double-C ranch somewhere east of El Paso, Texas.’

  ‘Sure, sure, I’ll do that.’ The eager-to-please banker accepted the roll.

  ‘Won’t be no need to send it, son,’ John Hogg said grimly. ‘After what Jack told us about the Channon family, we figure they’ll come by Fairfax pretty soon.’

  ‘The reason we burned your place, Barnaby,’ the Reverend Baxter was in a hurry to explain. ‘It seems the Channons of Texas are not the kind of people to allow the violent end of its son to pass unavenged. The trouble is not of our making and it was the only thing we could think to do to have proof of this when the Channons come here.’

  The fire was not burning so fiercely now. There was more acrid black smoke than brightly leaping tongues of flame and the sounds of the former inferno were lessening in volume by the moment. The men with the pails of water abandoned their fire watch and crossed to join the main group before the saloon. ‘We ask your forgiveness, Barnaby,’ the preacher went on. ‘Your father and you served this community well for the past eight years and it was a difficult decision to burn your place like we did. But we knew you were intent upon leaving Fairfax and we had to consider the welfare of those who will continue to live here.’

  ‘All of you said your piece now?’

  ‘Except for that advice I promised you, boy,’ Jack Cater countered. ‘Lot of what I’ve heard about the Channon clan could be rumor. But I’ve heard so much there just has to be more than a little truth in it. Go to Europe like you always said you wanted. But no matter where you finally light down, don’t ever give up lookin’ over your shoulder, boy. Reckon the United States Treasury got more money than the Channons. But I wouldn’t...’

  Barnaby Gold took up the reins and interrupted: ‘I already had that message, Mr. Cater. From a member of the family. Bye bye.’

  ‘Luck to you, Barnaby.’

  The team responded to a low snap of the reins and the hearse rolled forward. And the black-clad man with the smoking cheroot angled from a corner of his mouth was again immune to everything which did not affect what concerned him — driving his rig north along the street and out on to the open trail beyond.

  ‘Crazy kid.’

  ‘Headstrong as they come.’

  ‘Stubborn as a damn mule.’

  ‘City kind.’ The man who rasped this spat into the dust settling behind the slow-rolling hearse.

  ‘His Pa was from the city. And he was a fine man.’

  ‘The finest.’

  ‘Makes you wonder how he could father a son like that.’

  With the fire now almost out and the departing hearse diminishing through the moonlit distance, some women were emerging on to the street.

  One of them murmured sadly: ‘There was nothing wrong with the boy until that flighty Emily Jane up and took off.’

  ‘That’ s what I find so hard to figure out why he killed that Texas feller for killin’ that no good—’

  ‘And you see what he put on the cross? Once beloved, that’s what.’

  ‘That Channon guy, he told Jack and me he loved Emily Jane,’ Jeb Stone put in knowledgeably.

  ‘And you know somethin’ else, Jeb?’ the barber said thoughtfully, as he peered out along the trail toward the receding hearse, ‘Ain’t the only thing them two had in common.’

  ‘How you mean?’John Hogg asked.

  ‘I ain’t never come across two colder, one-track-minded men in all my life. And if I had to choose between the two of them, I’d have to say Barnaby Gold has the makin’s of bein’ the coldest.’

  The storekeeper who had spat before, did it again. And brought the group discussion to an end when he growled: ‘As cold as all them graves he’s dug.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HAD it occurred to him to reflect upon what the people of Fairfax were talking about as he drove the hearse slowly north from town through the moonlit evening, Barnaby Gold could have made some educated guesses and come close to the kind of sentiments expressed and which man or woman spoke them.

  But filling the time with such a futile mental exercise did not occur to him. Fairfax and its citizens were now just parts of his past, something he had wanted for a long time, and it was the prospect of a better future that concerned him.

  And, as if in a token gesture of his firm intention to lay the past to rest, he reined the team to a halt and turned on the seat to look back down the trail. He had judged the distance correctly and expressed the ghost of a smile when he saw that Fairfax was out of sight, lost to his view beyond the line of a low rise that angled across the valley. The smile broadened, his green eyes glinting and his teeth gleaming in the moonlight. Then he took the high crowned black hat off his head, stood up and, holding it by the brim, curled his arm far back: swung it forward and released it. The hat spun away smoothly, soaring high into the air: then scaled through a long, decaying arc to bounce to the ground some thirty yards east of the trail. By which time Gold was on the seat again, folded forward and rocking with uncontrolled laughter.

  Had anyone been close enough to hear and see the lanky, blond-headed young man they might have thought he was in the grip of a hysterical madness. But as it was, there were just the two black geldings in the traces of the hearse. And these animals merely turned their heads briefly to gaze dolefully at the man on the seat, then resumed their docile attitudes to await a command signal they understood.

  Which came less than a minute later, when Gold’s mood of unmitigated mirth was exhausted and his angularly handsome face displayed just a quiet smile of satisfaction with his lot.

  This bout of body-shaking laughter was uncharacteristic of the man who now continued to drive the glass-sided rig northward. Even more a
lien to his nature, the people of Fairfax might have said, than his cold blooded killing of Floyd Channon. And others, who had known him before he and his father came to the tiny Arizona community eight years earlier, would have agreed.

  You’re a strange one and no mistake, son, Jack Cater had said to him. And, out of his hearing, another Fairfax man commented he was as cold as the graves he dug. Two opinions, expressed in countless different ways, which had been used to describe him since his childhood.

  Barnaby was born in a tenement house on Pearl Street in New York’s Lower East Side, the much longed-for and destined to be the only child of Barnaby and Elvira Gold, in the year of 1849. And because of the circumstances of his birth it was inevitable that he should be over-indulged to the limited extent that his mortuary attendant father and seamstress mother could afford.

  The boy knew little of the harsh deprivations his parents suffered to see that he was well fed and clothed during those early years down in the Battery. For, spurred on by the needs of their child, his parents doubled and redoubled their efforts to get ahead in the world. And ahead to them meant uptown, into a decent house, with Barnaby Gold Senior working at a job that brought in enough money to support his son and allowed his wife to devote all her time to taking care of him.

  They achieved the move a week after Barnaby Junior’s fourth birthday: and his earliest childhood memories were centered upon a small brownstone house between Washington Square and Broadway, just around the corner from the funeral parlor where his father worked and trained to become a fully qualified mortician.

  From this time on, his memory was rich with the sights and sounds and sensations of New York City, but in later years he rarely chose to resurrect the past: primarily because the images which came readily to mind were of the worst kind.

  The pain-wracked dying of his mother from consumption when he was eight. The period of morose mourning, followed by a longer one of drinking and whoring, in which his father indulged. The punishment he received at the cruel hands of other children — taunts, bloodied noses, black eyes and dirtied clothing — who bullied him unmercifully because he was the son of a man who dealt in dead bodies. Then the chastisements, which caused him even greater anguish, from his father when he learned to give as good as he got. Then better than he got, so that the fights in the alleys no longer involved him.

  It was at this point in his life that he could have become as one with the society in which he was living. When, respecting his strength of character and physical courage, his contemporaries made overtures of acceptance. But, having proved himself in their eyes, he rejected their offers and became a youthful loner among those of his own age. And, much to the delight of his father, began to get better grades at the free school he attended, and show interest in the undertaking business.

  Barnaby Gold Senior, sober and respectable again, had a financial investment in the funeral parlor by that time: then, upon the death of his elderly partner, became sole owner. His son was twelve and readily agreeable to terminate his education and enter the trade.

  The war between the States was hotting up at this period and although it had very little direct effect on the daily lives of Gold father and son, the newspaper reports he heard and the stories that were told him by soldiers on furlough set the man to thinking about moving out West. And the longer the fighting went on, the more convinced he became that peace, when it arrived, would be an uneasy one for a long time. With old rivalries difficult to forget in an atmosphere thick with grudges and lacking much will to forgive.

  When the peace did come, Barnaby Gold Senior discovered his fears had been well-founded and that his vague idea to head out West was not exclusive to him. An exodus from the battle-ravaged East to the vastness that lay beyond the Mississippi began in earnest. And when he suggested to his seventeen-year-old son that they should join it, he expected no response other than the one which was given. An immediate if unenthusiastic acquiescence.

  For this was the way of the young man.

  Thus had Barnaby Gold Junior come to Fairfax, Territory of Arizona, some eight years ago — in much the same low-key manner as he had left it less than an hour earlier this very night. Only in the privacy of his own company giving more than a hint of his true feelings.

  He was at the northern end of the valley in which the town was situated and the night was entering the early hours of a new day when he called a halt and made camp. Took the horses from the traces, lit a small fire, climbed into the rear of the hearse and with his frock coat rolled up to form a pillow, went to sleep between the track designed to hold a casket

  He was hungry when he fell asleep and more so for the first few seconds when he awoke. But then he saw clearly the scene that accompanied the smells of cooking food and bubbling coffee and a less mundane feeling gripped his stomach.

  He had parked the hearse, hobbled the horses and lit the fire under a craggy-faced bluff to the east of the trail that ran up from the valley and across a mesa featured plateau. The sun was well risen by the time he awoke, but the immediate area was still in shade from the sixty foot high bluff. It was desert hot, though, and the three men making use of the fire to cook breakfast were stripped down to their pants, suspenders, undershirts and hose: the rest of their clothing scattered untidily on the sandy ground. Their travel-weary mounts were hitched to a mesquite tree near where the team horses were hobbled. The men sat on their saddles to one side of the freshly fuelled fire, gazing bleakly through the glass side of the hearse at the stirring Gold.

  Middle-aged, unshaven, dirty faced men with tired eyes and unkempt hair: looting at the undertaker in the back of the hearse with scant interest — as if there was nothing uncommon about this situation. The man with the biggest build wore a gunbelt with a revolver in the holster. The other two had removed their gunbelt and they rested on the ground, close at hand.

  None of them said anything until after Gold had pushed open the rear door with his booted feet and slid out of the hearse: was fisting the grit of sleep from his eyes.

  Then: ‘You rest real easy and deep, boy,’ the biggest of the three opened. ‘Could’ve done you a mischief any time in the last hour.’

  ‘Yesterday was a heavy day,’ Gold replied as he moved to go along the side of the hearse.

  ‘Buryin’ folks,’ the shortest of the trio suggested.

  ‘Two of them.’

  The third man was the thinnest, with features that came close to having the set of a rodent. He directed a globule of spit into the edge of the fire.

  ‘Know you got a double barrel shotgun hid under the seat, boy,’ he said dully. ‘Know you didn’t trouble to eject the spent cartridges after you fired ’em. But if you made to get it, we’d have to figure as how you didn’t know we knew it.’

  Now, as Gold altered course to approach the fire, he grinned. It was a personable expression which, throughout his young life, had caused many people to reconsider their previously held opinions of him.

  ‘Waking up and finding you men here like this was a shock, Mr…?’

  ‘I’m Dwyer,’ the rat-faced man supplied. And nodded to the big one and the short one as he added: ‘Coombs and Ketland.’

  ‘Morning to you all. Guess I just wanted to be... ’ He shrugged his slim shoulders. And pulled up short, fifteen feet away from the men, when Coombs pulled the Colt .45 from his holster.

  ‘Back off, boy,’ he instructed as he clicked the hammer and waved the barrel casually at Gold. ‘All the way to that dead wagon. And empty out your pockets.’

  The grin was abruptly gone from the good-looking face, leaving it as devoid of expression as those of the seated men.

  Dwyer spat into the fire again. ‘Dish out the grub, Ketland,’ he said. And, in the same tone, ‘Put a couple of shots into his legs, Coombs.’

  Barnaby Gold recovered from the second shock and quickly backed to the rear wheel of the hearse: as the sun climbed high enough to glare down on to this area in front of the bluff.

  ‘You’r
e a fast learner, boy,’ Coombs; said as Ketland used a dipper to ladle a good smelling mixture of bacon and beans on to three plates. ‘We can do you a mischief or not, dependin’ on you. Makes no odds to us, Be over the border by noon and one more dead man markin’ our back trail won’t...’

  ‘Here, eat,’ Ketland interrupted and thrust a plate across the sand at Coombs. Then poured out three tin mugs of coffee.

  The youthful undertaker had started to empty his pockets as soon as he bumped his back against the wheel A bunch of keys to the how destroyed funeral parlor arid living quarters out back. A handkerchief, a comb, matches, forty-five cents in coins. And nineteen hundred and six dollars, comprising the fee Floyd Channon had paid for Emily Jane’s funeral plus the sum total of liquid capital in the Barnaby Gold and Son business.

  Only when the roll of bills was dropped to the ground among the trivia did the three men curtail their eating.

  ‘Hot damn, that looks a lot!’Ketland said.

  ‘It ain’t tobacco money, that’s for sure,’ Coombs agreed.

  Dwyer finished chewing a mouthful of food, swallowed it and asked: ‘How much, boy?’

  Gold told him.

  ‘Stole?’

  ‘Earned.’

  ‘Seems there’s a good livin’ in dead folks,’ Ketland said, and laughed harshly.

  Dwyer ignored him. ‘It’s stole now.’

  ‘Guessed it,’ Gold acknowledged.

  ‘Go get it, Ketland.’

  The short man was eager to comply with the order: tipped what was left of his breakfast on to the ground and got to his feet. Was careful not to get into the line of fire from Coombs’ gun as he claimed the money and returned to the fireside. And showed scowling reluctance for just a moment before he surrendered the roll into Dwyer’s outstretched hand. This as the sun shed its glaring light on the area of the fire.

  Dwyer put the money into his hip pocket and went on eating.

  Coombs asked: ‘This trail ends at a place called Fairfax. You know it?’