The horse snorted and leapt from a standstill: his head going up to jerk clear of Will Gershel’s hand reaching for the bridle.
Polk reined his mount to a skidding, turning halt. And was thrown from the saddle out front of the hotel. This as a flatbed wagon came hurtling around the curve of the street in a cloud of dust. At the same moment as the animal spooked by Jesse raced across the ford.
Barnaby Gold was still in the saddle, the noose around his neck: the rope trailing behind horse and rider - every man with a hand on it having let go at the moment Jesse made his frantic move.
The black-clad man with his wrists lashed together at his back fought to stay astride the bolting horse: knees pressed to the saddle fenders while his feet sought the stirrups.
The animal came up out of the creek just as Polk regained his feet - reached as Gershel had done to try to grip the bridle. But the horse veered suddenly to the side, frightened more by the sight and the sounds of the braking, slewing wagon than by the attempted capture.
Barnaby Gold was pitched in the opposite direction. Could do no more than tuck his chin down on to his chest and bring his knees up to his belly. He hit the street with his right shoulder and hip. The breath rushed out of his lungs and a sea of boiling pain washed over him. He thought he screamed his agony aloud, but could not be sure. For sounds were being vented from too many other throats.
He rolled over twice and then came to a halt. On that side of his body that felt on fire with the effects of the fall.
He had instinctively closed his eyes. Now he opened them and orientated himself.
He was up against the water trough, facing out across the street. First saw Sheriff Floyd Polk who still had his gun drawn, but hanging down at his side. The lawman was staring toward the creek. Barnaby Gold, his vision blurred by spontaneous tears of pain, looked in that direction. Saw the homesteaders coming across the ford. Will Gershel in the lead, having to half-drag Jesse by the wrist. The boy was directing a string of babbling words at his father, who showed no sign of hearing.
Down the street, in front of a half-circle of Bacall citizens stretched from one side to the other, was the stalled wagon with a sweat-lathered team in the traces. Something close to a dozen women had climbed down from it. Gold recognised Martha Gershel and Gertrude Wolfe. The young woman he had seen take her child into the house when the stranger rode by. And Joanne Engel held between two women he had never seen before.
‘Mr Gershel, you can thank your—’
The Gershel father and son went right on by the lawman, followed by the other men from the river valley. And the tense and suddenly enraged Polk curtailed what he was saying. Began to whirl, but caught a glimpse of Anne Kruger’s body sprawled face down at the corner of the hotel. He cursed and went toward the dead whore.
Gritting his teeth against the pain it caused, Barnaby Gold forced himself up into a sitting posture against the water trough.
‘Explain yourself, woman!’ Will Gershel thundered.
‘Tell him, girl!’ his wife responded woodenly.
The group of men had halted some ten feet in front of the gathering of women. All the homesteaders were equally grim-faced, with the exception of Joanne Engel and Jesse Gershel. She looked proudly defiant: he expressed deep-seated dread.’
‘Go to hell, all of you!’
Martha swung toward the girl trying to act a woman, and backhanded her hard across the cheek.
‘Tell him! Tell everyone here!’
Polk had crouched to look at the waxen face of the dead whore. Now he came to the water trough, and helped Gold to his feet. Took out a penknife from a pants pocket, opened it and cut through the wrist binding.
‘Appreciate it, sheriff.’
‘You tell it, woman,’ Gershel demanded of his wife.
‘All right, Will!’ she snarled. But then moderated her tone. ‘I had my doubts, right from the time the stranger brought the girl to our place. Ain’t none of us livin’ in the valley don’t know about the womanly airs this child puts on. But I kept tellin’ myself it was her ways give encouragement to the stranger to have his way with her.’
‘All right, Ma, but that don’t mean I had nothin’ to do with—’
‘Shut your mouth, boy!’ his father rasped, still holding him by the wrist. Tightly enough to make Jesse wince with the pain of the grip.
‘But then I kept thinkin’ about Jesse bein’ gone from home all night for the first time ever, Will. And about him and the girl been walkin’ out together for so long. Him a man with man’s needs and her a child with ideas ahead of her years.’
‘All that thinkin’ don’t mean not a damn thing, woman!’
‘You didn’t come home last night, Will.’
‘We waited at Clyde’s place. Ready to come into town, see if two gunslingers had taken care of Gold for us.’
‘Must’ve hidden themselves real well when I rode by,’ Polk growled sourly.
‘I couldn’t sleep from worryin’, Will. Stood it as long as I could, then I went down to Virgil’s and Mary-Ann’s.’
‘They’re dead, ain’t they, Martha?’ Festus Wolfe asked fearfully.
‘They’re dead, right enough. Sure as the girl been taken by a man. But it wasn’t the stranger responsible for any of it’
Like almost all the women from the wagon, she wore a waist apron over her dress. Now she delved a hand into its front pocket. And drew out something that glinted in the bright morning sunlight. A half-dollar sized silver medallion with a silver chain threaded through an eye on one edge.
Martha Gershel held the chain at either end, so that the medallion swung slightly at its centre.
‘See what it is, Will?’
Her husband made a wet sound deep in his throat. ‘The lucky token we give Jesse on his fifteenth birthday, Martha.’ He sounded drained to the brink of exhaustion.
‘It don’t mean nothin’, Pa!’ Jesse vented a sob at the end of this.
‘Where’d you find it, woman?’
‘In the girl’s bed. Chain broken, Will. In the bed where Jesse and she—’
‘Shit, it’s true!’ Joanne Engel blurted out after remaining so arrogantly defiant throughout the telling of Martha Gershel’s story. And thus claimed the shocked attention of the audience. ‘Jesse did it to me! And I didn’t try to stop him! My Ma, she was wed at my age! So was lots of you women! Yet me, I was supposed to wait! Well, frig it, I wasn’t gonna wait! Jesse come to me and we done it! Now I’m a woman! And he’s a man!’
‘No, Pa, she’s lyin’!’
‘Shut up, boy. What about your parents, girl?’
They was up at Bent River Crossin’, visitin’ with the Wolfes. Jesse saw the wagon there so knew they was away. But after we done it, we went to sleep. They come back. Must have seen Jesse’s horse in the barn. Crept into the house. Found us in bed. Started yellin’ fit to bust a gut.’
She paused, and something close to a smile spread across her freckled features as she looked around at her audience. The women flanking her, the men in front, and the townspeople behind. Enjoying their shocked reactions to her bald telling of what had happened.
‘Jesse’s gun was on his clothes on the floor by the bed. I grabbed it and shot them. Virgil first. Then Mary-Ann. They fell down, but they weren’t dead. Jesse took the gun and finished them off. Then we buried them out at the barn. And Jesse and me done it again.’
Gasps and groans rippled through the arc of townspeople. The women who had already heard the girl’s story remained tight-lipped. Their menfolk muttered soft curses and blasphemies.
‘She was sleepin’ sound as a baby when I got back from the Engel place, Will,’ Martha said bitterly. ‘I roused her and said we had to come to Bacall. At Bent River Crossin’, I showed her the lucky charm and she told me and Gertrude what she just told you people. So we come here quick. The other women joined us on the way. When we met up with Sheriff Polk and told him ... told him, too, that you menfolk weren’t home ... he come on ahead to get here faster. Try to keep yo
u from doin’ what you was to the stranger.’
All eyes now swung their attention to where Barnaby Gold had been standing. But he was no longer at the water trough. Just Polk stood there, coiling up the lynch rope removed from the young man’s neck.
It was the man named Clyde who said: ‘We’re much obliged to you, sheriff.’
Other homesteaders nodded and grunted their agreement with this.
‘Then show it by handing the Gershel boy and the Engel girl into my custody,’ the lawman answered.
Movement was glimpsed at the shattered upper storey window of the Riverside Hotel. But nobody paid more than passing attention as Barnaby Gold, his gun-belt buckled back around his waist, leaned over the sill to retrieve the Murcott from the balcony.
Because Will Gershel became the centre of concentration when he said: That ain’t our way, and you know it’
‘Pa, what you gonna do?’
‘We’re all gonna do it, boy.’
He released his hold on his son, and snatched the revolver from the boy’s holster. Backed away from him. The other men also opened up a gap between themselves and the terrified Jesse.
‘You women. Push the girl out alongside him. And stand clear.’
‘Will, you can’t!’
‘Gershel, put up the gun!’ Polk drew his own six-shooter as he tossed the coiled rope into the water trough.
‘I said we’re all gonna do it!’ Gershel snapped. And cast a glance to either side. Grunted when the other homesteaders pulled revolvers from their holsters.
‘She’s just a child!’ a woman pleaded.
‘And he’s your own son, Will Gershel!’ another added.
Martha gripped Joanne Engel’s upper arm and pulled her away from the two who held her. For a moment it seemed as if she was going to protect the girl. But then she pushed her firmly toward where Jesse stood.
‘They’re both murderers of innocent people. They wanted to be grown-up. Grown-up folks have to face the blame when they done wrong.’
The women opened up a gap behind where the boy and the girl stood.
Joanne began to cry. Every inch a child again. Arms hanging down at her sides and head bowed. Between her sobs she spoke words. About her ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy’ and how sorry she was for what she had done.
‘Pa, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t!’ Jesse wailed.
He whirled around, saw his mother and held out his hands to her.
Barnaby Gold stepped through the batwings as the first shot was fired.
Exploded by the revolver in Will Gershe’s hand. To crash a bullet into the back of his son.
‘No, Festus!’
‘Clyde!’
‘John, don’t!’
‘Will.’
The shrill pleas of the wives were all but masked by the crackle of guns fired by their husbands.
Jesse and Joanne were down on the street. Screaming for a short time. Then silent. But still moving. Jumping to the dictates of their punished nervous systems. Then jerking at the impact of each new bullet that tore into their flesh. To spurt blood through the gently rising dust.
Then the last gun was emptied of its final shot. And silence had an oppressive physical presence in the hot, bright, morning air.
‘Holy Mother of God!’ a woman in the half-circle of townspeople gasped.
Gershel looked to the side, his face drained of blood beneath his element-stained skin.
‘We’ll take our dead home on the wagon, sheriff. And there’s an end to it.’
Polk slid his gun into the holster. ‘For you people it’ll never be ended until you die.’
Gershel shifted the direction of his blank-eyed gaze a little to the left. Said to Gold who stood before the closed batwings: ‘We came real close to makin’ a bad mistake, son.’
Barnaby Gold, the shotgun canted across the front of his body, a cheroot angled from a side of his mouth, clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
‘But keep this in mind,’ the homesteader went on. ‘You were the rock that dropped into the heap of shit and set it to flyin’.’
‘And none of us came out from under it clean,’ Polk growled as the bullet-riddle corpses of Jesse Gershel and Joanne Engel were gently lifted and placed on the back of the wagon.
Under a pall of melancholy, the women climbed aboard the wagon and their men unhitched their horses and swung into the saddles. The crowd of townspeople dispersed.
Fred Street came around the curve, leading Gold’s black gelding and the bay which had been used for the abortive lynching.
Will Gershel took the bay from the liveryman, who came on up to the hotel with the black gelding.
‘Appreciate your trouble.’
‘Guess the saloon ain’t open?’ Street asked, licking his lips.
‘It’s open,’ Arnie Dalton assured as he came across from the law office.
His wife was not with him and from the long, hard look he directed at Barnaby Gold who was swinging astride his horse, the saloon keeper had learned from her some version of what happened during the night.
‘I’ll need to have Annie’s body removed. Then find out how she died.’ Polk eyed the mounted man quizzically.
‘Bacall’s own undertaker can take care of her body, Floyd,’ Dalton growled.
‘Damn waste of womanhood,’ Fred Street muttered as the batwings flapped behind him.
‘And the whole town can tell you Gold didn’t kill them. There ain’t no reason at all for him to stay here.’
‘I left twenty dollars on the bureau in my room, Mr Dalton.’
‘It’s too much. You need some change.’
‘To cover what I owe. And pay for the whore’s funeral. Bye-bye.’
He clucked to his horse and tugged on the reins to head him across the creek ford.
‘And nobody’ll be sorry if you never have cause to say hello again, mister!’ Dalton called sourly after him. ‘Now Annie’s dead.’
Barnaby Gold halted his horse, dismounted and retrieved his hat from under the tree at the side of the trail. Swung into the saddle again and struck a match to light the cheroot. ‘No chance of that, sir. Bacall isn’t between me and Europe anymore.’
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Destined to Die Page 13