Gold nodded. ‘Right. You’re just a kid, older in mind than body. There was a chance you were in a state of shock after whatever happened that got your parents killed. But that’s not the way it is. So I’ll just eat and be on my way. None of this is any of my business. And kid you may be, but I figure you’re in control of the situation.’
‘I’m not, I’m not! I need help! I was gonna tell you everything that happened! But I just couldn’t think how to do it! So I just put on that act of being calm and all, while I was thinking!’
‘You did it real well.’
She set her chair upright and dropped on to it as violently as she had left the table. And stared intently across at him.
‘Please, Barnaby! Jesse came by last night. While my folks was over at a neighbour’s place. He sweet-talked me into going with him.’ She shook her head, the pony-tails swinging. ‘Shit, I ain’t saying I wasn’t ready to be sweet-talked that way. I ain’t saying I tried to fight him off or nothing. And I ain’t saying I didn’t enjoy it and all.’
Gold looked up from his plate and was certain there was a tacit suggestion in her eyes that she was willing to demonstrate her brand of enjoyment between the sheets.
‘You’re not exciting me, Joanne,’ he lied.
She scowled, but not for long. ‘We fell asleep, Barnaby. Didn’t hear Virgil and Mary-Ann drive back to the house. They found us together in my bed. Naked as when we were born. Virgil, he went crazy. And I’m sure as sure he would’ve killed Jesse if Jesse hadn’t got his gun first. Mary-Ann, she just kept on screaming and screaming. No different after Virgil was dead than when she’d first seen me and Jesse in the bed. Jesse, he just told her to stop. And when she wouldn’t, he shot her, too. I never touched no gun, Barnaby. I swear it.’
Gold rattled his fork down on his empty plate. And finished the last of the fresh mug of coffee.
‘I believe you,’ he said as he stood up and pushed his chair back.
She shook her head again. ‘And I never helped him to bury the bodies out to the barn, neither. Jesse, he said it had to be done. That afterwards he’d ride home and say he’d been out drinking in Bacall. I was to wait until this morning. Then go see Will and Martha - his parents. Say how worried I was that my folks hadn’t got back yet from visiting the Wolfes up at Bent River Crossing.’
Gold had taken a cheroot from the tin box he carried in an inside pocket of his frock coat. Now he struck a match on the butt of the Peacemaker in the holster and lit the tobacco. He let the dead match fall on to the greasy plate.
She stood up, hands gripping the edge of the table, her immature breasts heaving with powerful emotion.
‘I don’t want to go along with all that, Barnaby! Last night, when he told it to me, I agreed. But I don’t now. Even before you found Virgil and Mary-Ann. I knew folks wouldn’t go along with the idea that they was taken by Injuns or fell into the river and got swept away.’
Gold clicked his tongue and nodded. ‘That’s right, Joanne. Especially since the wagon and team are safe in the barn.’
Gold clicked his tongue and nodded. ‘That’s right, Joanne. Especially since the wagon and team are sale in the barn.’
‘Aw, shit!’
He turned from the table. ‘Bye-bye, kid.’
‘I told you I didn’t like that kid stuff and little lady crap!’ she shrieked, suddenly a child with a temper tantrum because she had not been given what she wanted.
‘I was wrong first off,’ he said from the doorway that gave on to the kitchen. ‘With a mouth like you have, you’re not any kind of lady.’
‘But I’m a woman!’ she hurled back. ‘Last night Jesse made me one of those!’
She whirled and ran into a bedroom. Not her own. She left the door open and Gold heard a ripping of fabric. A gasp. Then the unmistakable metallic sounds of a gun being cocked.
He started across the parlour.
She came out of her parents’ bedroom, her dress torn from the neckline to the start of her shallow cleavage. Her right hand fisted around the butt of a big Army Model Starr .44 revolver.
She pulled up short as he came toward her. And squeezed the trigger. The crack of the gun sounded very loud in the confines of the parlour. The gun bucked in her hand and the exploded bullet buried itself in the wall.
A gasp of shock vented from her mouth and she struggled to thumb back the hammer again.
Gold snatched the smoking gun from her hand and hurled it into the grate of the fireplace. Gripped her shoulder with his left hand and made to bring back his right to slap her across the face.
She cowered away from him, her features showing an expression of childish terror.
He squeezed his eyes tight shut, then pushed her away from him., She slammed to a halt against the wall.
‘Go on, mark me up some more.’
When he opened his eyes, her mouthline was set in a sinister smile.
‘He made me a woman! And I’m not yet thirteen, mister!’ She rasped the words through her bared teeth. There was a challenge implicit in her stance,
‘Finish it, Joanne.’
‘It’s well known hereabouts that me and Jesse have been walking out. But him being twenty years old and me being what I am, well folks just wouldn’t easily believe what happened. But if I was to tell them some passing stranger dressed all in black and wearing two guns on his belt came by and had his way with me - killed my folks and all like that . . . Well, Barnaby, I reckon they’d believe that easy enough. And even if I haven’t killed you, you wouldn’t get out of this neighbourhood alive.’
‘Just what is my breakfast going to cost me, Joanne?’
The challenge, the anger and the slyness drained out of her face and attitude. And she became the pathetic, apologetic young girl as she modestly clutched the two sides of the torn dress together.
‘I’m sorry I tried to kill you, Barnaby. Take me over to the Gershel place. With you there, to tell how you found the bodies and all, I’ll be able to say what really happened. Honest I will. The whole truth, just like I told it to you. And it won’t matter that Jesse’ll be there with his folks not ready to believe he’d do such a terrible thing.’
Her big brown eyes implored his agreement.
He sucked in lungful of smoke and let it out in a long stream. ‘Okay,’
‘Oh, thank you, thank you.’
She started toward him.
He held up a hand. ‘First change into a different dress.’
‘I’ll be forever grateful,’ she said shrilly as she swung to go toward her bedroom.
Gold clicked his tongue. Muttered: ‘For me, kid.’
CHAPTER THREE
AFTER Barnaby Gold Senior died from a heart seizure in the carpentry workshop behind the funeral parlour in Fairfax, his son simply wanted to bury the deceased, sell the business and fulfil a long-nurtured ambition to go to Europe.
But a series of events which had its beginning on the day of the elder Gold’s funeral had interfered with this clear-cut plan.* (*See The Undertaker 1: Black as Death.) He was still intent upon reaching a seaport from which he could board a ship to Europe, but first there was unfinished business that needed to be attended to.
He had to kill some men who were out to kill him.
Which gave him a double reason for submitting to the precocious Joanne Engel’s blackmail. Primarily, it was that he did not want to have to contend with a bunch of trigger happy hillbilly farmers tracking him when he was already the target for the professional gunslingers hired by the Channons of west Texas. But allied to this was the fact that by taking the girl to her neighbours, he would establish his presence in this Arizona-California border land. And thus give the Channons’ manhunters a fresh lead to their quarry after they had allowed his trail to go cold.
So this was why Barnaby Gold Junior rode with Joanne Engel aboard the heavy cut-under wagon up the Colorado River trail. Instead of riding the gelding away from the homestead alone - after using the 12-bore Murcott to blast her conniving head
off her shoulders.
They rode the wagon with the black gelding hitched to the tailgate, because neither of the team mares was saddle-broke. And Gold did not relish the prospect of sharing his mount with this girl-woman’s nubile body pressed against his.
The only clouds in the sky now were widely scattered patches of puffy white, flat-bottomed, above the highest ridges in the Mohave Mountains on the Arizona side of the river and the Chemehuevis across in California. The humidity was low now and the heat of the dazzingly bright sun was dry and scorching.
Joanne Engel had foreseen this and when she changed her dress - the fresh one was also gingham-patterned but in green and white - she had donned a plain, wide-brimmed sun hat.
She said it was four miles along the trail to the Gershel place then, for the first quarter of the trip, she was silent: her freckled face as devoid of expression as that of Gold.
Suddenly: ‘You dig them all the way up?’
‘No.’
‘How about cover them up again?’
‘No.’
‘That’s awful ... leaving them like that.’ She sounded genuinely shocked.
‘These days I only bury the people I kill, kid.’
‘Don’t call me kid!’ Her anger was venomous.
He said nothing and there was another lengthy silence. During which Barnaby Gold could have reflected upon a different occasion when he drove a wagon similar to this one, with a young girl on the seat beside him. A girl in another kind of trouble. A few years older than Joanne. Her name was Emily Jane and he had married her. She was dead now. Was maybe the reason Barnaby Gold Senior was dead. Certainly her life with the younger Gold and her death away from him was the reason Channon money had been spent to hire the best guns around. Or rather, his instinctive response to the manner of Emily Jane’s death.
He could have been thinking along these lines in the hot silence, but he wasn’t, for it was not in his nature to dwell on the past,
‘These days?’
‘What?’
‘You said these days you only - shit, I know! The way you dress and all. You’re an undertaker!’
‘I used to be.’
That’s creepy.’ She shivered, as if for a moment she felt ice cold in the morning heat.
‘It’s a necessary trade.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t mean that. I mean that now - with the guns and all - you kill people and then calmly dig a grave and bury them.’
He could sense her big brown eyes staring at his calm-set profile.
‘You do it for money?’
‘No.’
Her gaze left his face to scan their surroundings. The slow flowing river, the dusty trail, the rocky ridges and brush and timber stands. An empty land, suddenly sinister in its desolation. She swallowed hard and all pretence at being an adult was suddenly gone under the pressure of fear.
‘Mr Gold, you haven’t brought me out here to –’
‘Maybe the first man I killed was my father,’ he interrupted evenly. The second was because – Goddamn it to hell, it’s none of your business, kid. Now I only kill people who are aiming to kill me.’
She believed him and her fear was expelled in a long sigh. Which prefixed a silence that remained unbroken until he drove the wagon out of a large stand of mixed timber and another homestead could be seen a half mile along the trail.
‘That’s the Gershel place.’
Gold had guessed they were getting near their destination when, in the dappled shade of the trees, he sensed a new tension mounting within the girl at his side.
Like the Engel homestead, this one was close to the river bank but the cultivated land was long and narrow rather than square: the four hundred foot wide strip confined by the Colorado on one side and a high, sheer bluff along the other. The crops began almost immediately beyond the timber and the trail made a sharp left turn and then a right one to follow close on the water’s edge.
The house and barn, of similar frame construction to those of the Engel place but on a larger scale, were sited back from the river and under the hundred foot high cliff.
A driveway of crushed rock cut away from the trail between symmetrically planted fruit trees and opened out on to the area fronting the house.
A dog began to bark ferociously when the hooves of the team horses and the wheel rims of the wagon sounded on the crushed rock. A man yelled something and the animal became quiet. It was a big black crossbreed, tied with a long rope to the rail of the stoop. Sitting on his haunches and panting from the heat rather than anger, when Gold steered the team into a half-circle to bring the wagon to a halt immediately opposite the front door of the house.
The door was open and a man stood on the threshold. About fifty, an inch or so over six feet tall and weighing in the region of a beefy two hundred pounds. He was dressed in a heavily soiled bib apron and heavy work boots. No shirt and no hat. What little black hair he had on his head was slicked down over the crown. There was dark stubble on his florid cheeks and pocked jaw. His blue eyes were set in narrow, short sockets that did not match his bulbous nose and fleshy lips.
Dirtied up and unshaven after early hours working his fields, he looked out of place on the swept stoop in the recently white-painted doorframe flanked by shiningly clean windows.
‘Mornin’ to you, stranger,’ he growled, unsmiling. ‘Joanne, what you doin’ ridin’ with a stranger?’
His Tennessee dialect was more pronounced than that of the girl. As he spoke, somebody else moved in the shadowed interior of the house behind him.
‘Name’s Baraaby Gold, Mr Gershel. Bring you some bad news.’
He hitched the reins around the brake lever and started to swing down from the wagon. Aware of the suspicion in Gershel’s hard-set face and of the stone-like posture of Joanne who seemed petrified to the seat. Was still in the process of getting off the wagon when the girl sprang to her feet and shrieked: ‘He killed them and raped me!’
Gold had one hand on the seat rail and a boot on the front wheel rim, his back to the man in the doorway. He looked up at the girl as she lunged erect and saw in her face a terror that was only partially spurious, guessed an instant before she vented the accusation, that she was about to trick him.
He froze, his right hand hanging close to the holstered Peacemaker. Said softly, ‘You better tell Mr Gershel you mean Jesse, kid.’
‘What?’ This from the figure in the shadows behind Will Gershel. A woman, shock reverberating from the single shrieked word.
Joanne whirled and threw herself off the far side of the wagon, tripped and pitched full-length to the hard packed ground.
‘Keep him away from me! Please, don’t let him touch me again! He hurt me bad! He killed my mommy and daddy!’
Gold had been within a heartbeat of drawing the big Colt .45. Maybe to blast a bullet into the girl who had reverted to her true age as she vented the indictment. But now, as she scrambled to her feet after moving further away on all fours, he left the gun in the holster: stepped down to the ground and turned to face the Gershels.
He had seen the man was not armed. Now glimpsed Martha behind him and to the side. A well-built woman perhaps ten years the junior of her husband. A good-looking brunette neatly garbed in a black dress and white waist apron. With flour on her hands and a dab of it on her right cheek.
‘She’s lying, sir ... lady. Maybe about your boy, Jesse too.’
Martha Gershel’s expression was of torment. Will showed high rage. The woman backed into the house, but the man came forward as Gold crossed to the stoop and stepped up on to it.
‘Jesse!’
Joanne’s voice did not mask the sound of a footfall and the thumbing back of a gun hammer. Gershel looked to his right and Gold to his left. Saw a young man standing just off the end of the stoop. He wore a similar style apron to his father, with a check shirt beneath it. And a battered Confederate army cap. He held a Purdey bar-in-wood hammer shotgun levelled from the hip. Just one hammer cocked.
&nbs
p; ‘Step aside, Pa! I don’t wanna hit you, too!’
He sounded breathless and there was sweat on his thick-featured, acned face. From tension rather than exertion.
‘I’ll take the chance, boy,’ his father said sourly. ‘If this here stranger don’t unbuckle his gun-belt and hand it to me. If he don’t, well you squeeze that trigger, boy. And maybe I won’t be around to share in the hell your mother’ll let loose for bloodyin’ up her clean stoop.’
He did not shift the steady gaze of his small, narrowed eyes away from the expressionless face of Barnaby Gold. And continued to try to outstare the younger man during a long silence broken only by the sobs of Joanne Engel.
‘Well, son?’
‘He’s a killer! He told me! He kills people then buries them!’
‘Shut your mouth, Joanne,’ Gershel said in the same soured voice. And continued to gaze unblinkingly into Barnaby Gold’s face.
‘Will I get a fair hearing, sir?’
A slight nod. ‘All three of you.’
‘Watch him, Mr Gershel! He’s got some kind of trick gun on one side! I saw it!’
Gold brought both hands up to his chest and then lowered them slowly to his midriff - half-turning from the waist so that Jesse Gershel could see they came nowhere close to his guns. Then his right hand moved to release the holster ties from around his thigh while the left worked on the buckle.
When the belt was free, he extended it toward Will, all the time poised to lunge into the doorway should the elder Gershel make a sudden move to give his son a clear shot.
Will merely glanced down at the belt as he accepted it and gave a grunt of approval that perhaps also comprised a sigh of relief. This as he made a move. Not back into the house, though. Instead, he stepped further across the stoop, to put himself completely between Jesse and Gold. Held the gun-belt low down, giving himself no opportunity to draw the holstered Peacemaker or swivel the studded one.
‘All right, Jesse,’ he said. ‘Go put that Purdey back where you found it. And let’s us all talk this thing over. Quiet like. With nobody gettin’ hot under the collar.’
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