Destined to Die (16 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

WILL and Jesse Gershel were riding at the head of the group of men. In back of them was Festus Wolfe and the other homesteaders who had converged on Bent River Crossing to gun down Clinton Davis in mistake for Barnaby Gold.

Fourteen riders in all, dressed in work clothes but armed with revolvers, rifles and shotguns. They galloped under the town marker sign and began to slow their mounts as they rode between the houses at the foot of the sloping street. Then reined them to a halt in the commercial, mid-town area of BacalL Where merchants and clerks emerged from doorways to gaze through the settling dust of the halt at the grim-faced, unshaven and weary-looking men in the saddle.

‘Okay, you people!’ Jesse Gershel yelled, taking off his CSA forage cap, running a shirt sleeve across his sweat-beaded brow and replacing the cap. ‘We don’t want none of you pokin’ your noses into our business!’

He glared at the apprehensive townsmen.

‘Shut your mouth, boy!’ his father growled. And made the same survey to either side of the street: but with no belligerence in his grim-set face. Said: ‘You folks need our business, ain’t that right?’

There was a long silence as each citizen of Bacall waited for another to speak. Until the gunsmith blurted:

‘Ain’t no one can deny that.’

‘We hear a stranger named Barnaby Gold is here in town?’

‘Best you don’t mess with him. Folks like you: and him bein’ what he is.’

‘Advice ain’t what we come for!’ Will Gershel countered, and the gunsmith backed into his premises. ‘You folks know what he done?’

‘He killed a couple of gunslingers down to the—’

‘I mean to us!’ Gershel cut in on the white-bearded, elderly owner of the clothing store. ‘He raped the Engel child. And shot her Ma and Pa. Then he gunned down JL Larkin.’

Gasps and cries of shock rippled along either side of the broad, sun-bright street. Will Gershel waited for the noise to subside. Then: ‘Where is he?’

‘Floyd Polk rode out into the valley after talkin’ with the kid,’ the clothing storekeeper said.

‘Polk can ride to hell and back, for all we care! Yellin’ at the top of his voice about due process of law and the rest of it! Won’t alter nothin’! Where’s Gold?’

Now there was angry aggression on Gershel’s fleshy, time-lined and element-darkened face as he swept his narrow-eyed gaze along each side of the street.

‘Damnit, you can’t ride into this town and...’

Again the white-bearded man was cut off in mid-sentence. By Jesse this time.

‘Don’t tell us what we can’t do, old timer!’

Another tense silence.

‘We’ll search through every damn buildin’ here if we have to!’ Will Gershel snarled.

‘Let’s get to it, Will!’ Festus Wolfe yelled.

‘There’s only two places in town rent rooms!’ the gunsmith called from within his store, to silence the vocal agreement given to Wolfe. ‘And he ain’t stayin’ at the boardin’ house!’

The elder Gershel set the pace for the group. Heeled his horse into an easy walk up the sloping curve. The other homesteaders closed into a tighter group to the sides and behind him. Drew revolvers from holsters and rifles from boots: unhooked shotguns from saddle horns.

Doors were slammed, some of the townsmen shutting themselves in their premises - others waiting until the gun-toting riders had gone by before running in the opposite direction to be with their womenfolk and children.

At the arched entrance of the church, the gaunt-faced preacher implored: ‘Let there be no more violence here.’

And was ignored.

‘Hey, Pa! That’s his horse hitched outside the saloon!’

Jesse’s voice rang out above the sound of running feet, as the men working on the new schoolhouse dashed for shelter into the laundry, despite the chattering protests of the Chinese.

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.