But after the need to fight was in the past and his father had drank and whored the bitterness of losing his wife out of his system, the confined world in which the boy lived came to accept him for what he was: and allowed him to plough his own furrow through it in the manner he chose.
A loner’s manner that during boyhood precluded games and in adolescence kept girls at bay. There was school, then work. And in the spare time after both and the household chores, books occupied him. And long hours at the East or West Street wharves looking at the ships. Or maybe, right down on the tip of the Battery, gazing out across the harbor toward the Atlantic Ocean.
So his father was pleasantly surprised when his seventeen-year-old, apparently sea-loving son readily agreed to move out to landlocked Arizona Territory after the end of the war.
This part of the country appealed to Barnaby Gold Senior because, not only did it offer a good business opportunity, it was also reputed to have a fine climate for a man with bronchial troubles. He looked at Tucson first, then Standing. But both towns already had morticians. So the Golds came to Fairfax, the father’s excitement and happiness marred only by his son’s lack of enthusiasm.
And the citizens of Fairfax felt precisely the same. They needed the services of an undertaker and Barnaby Gold Senior was just the right kind of friendly, easygoing man who fitted well into the small community.
While the slow to smile, taciturn youngster made no effort to integrate himself into his new surroundings.
Thus it was like New York again in one respect — the local people finding it difficult to understand his temperament, admitting to failure and finally accepting him for what he was. Most did so quickly when his father assured them that nobody — even himself — had ever been able to enter the closed and very private world in which the youngster existed. While some of Barnaby Gold Junior’s contemporaries, of both sexes, found it more difficult to come to terms with him.
With his lithe, loose-limbed build, blond hair and cool good looks allied to his polite manner and the mystery of his big city background, he was attractive to the naive young country girls of Fairfax, who competed to meet the unwitting challenge of his morose aloofness which riled the unsophisticated teenage boys who had previously been their beaux. And for the first few months after the move to Fairfax, the atmosphere wherever the town’s younger set congregated had often been charged with tension — with the danger that the newcomer would again have to resort to violence to establish his right to be as he wanted to be.
But then the girls, one by one, abandoned their efforts. Some with resignation, others with an angry feeling of having been scorned. While their opposite numbers were, for the most part, content to ignore the son of the undertaker and happy that the situation was back to what it had been before he showed up in town. Thus, since there had been no backing away from fights and no fighting in which the newcomer’s underlying viciousness was seen, there was no call to brand him a coward or to accuse him of foul play.
He was a strange one, that was all. Considered to have something wrong ‘up top’. And ‘down below’, too, some giggling girls and guffawing boys maintained. But Barnaby Gold Junior waited for almost two years, taking his own time and paying no attention to external influences, before he started to visit the cantina in Standing and so exploded this myth.
When he made his second night camp away from Fairfax, Barnaby Gold lit another fire at the side of the trail: and although on this occasion he did sit at it for a while to warm himself before stretching out under the blankets of his bedroll, its prime purpose was the same as before; But even though it glowed far into the early hours of a new day, its embers and smoke attracted no unwelcome visitors.
He awoke with the first shaft of sunlight, that lanced over the eastern ridges and within thirty minutes had drunk two mugs of coffee, eaten some bread and hard cheese and washed up and shaved: allowing an arc of bristles to remain along his top lip and to either side of his mouth. Then he saddled the gelding and lashed his furled bedroll on behind.
But he did not yet remove the hobble from the animal’s forelegs.
The campsite was in a shallow basin under a rugged butte that towered a hundred feet high a half mile to the west. The ground surface to either side of the trail was of shale in which an occasional greasewood, saltbush, squaw-bush and mesquite grew. And cactus plants were established on the long slope that fell away from the base of the butte.
It was toward these that Barnaby Gold headed, coming to a halt ten feet in front of a man-high cactus with extended arms of unequal length.
He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and drew the Peacemaker from the holster. He thumbed back the hammer, held the gun out at arm’s length from the shoulder and squeezed the trigger.
The recoil, caused his arm to jerk upwards and the bullet soared high into the air. His face expressionless, he ignored where it came to rest and glanced over his shoulder while the crack of the shot was still resounding off the face of the bluff. Some hundred yards away from him, the gelding was uneasy.
He cocked the hammer of the revolver, angled his arm downwards and fired a second shot. Saw a small piece of cactus flesh taken out of the side of the plant by the .45 shell.
The gelding was more distressed by the gunshot and its echo.
The animal’s new owner exploded four more shots at the cactus. Firing from the hip now, spacing them at regular intervals. Two misses, another clip on the side and one placed dead centre to tunnel through the plant and exit at the rear.
The shot that emptied the gun caused the horse to snort and attempt to bolt. The hobble prevented this and the gelding fell hard to his side with a snicker of pain.
Barnaby Gold slid the acridly-smelling Peacemaker back into the holster and allowed the side of his long black coat to cover it. Then he eased back the other side of the coat with his left hand, swiveled the second Colt on its stud, thumbed the hammer to cock it and squeezed the trigger that was unguarded at the front.
He did all this slowly and deliberately, his good-looking face with its embryo moustache as blank as before. But when the gun belched its bullet, the recoil hurled him into a half turn. And he showed a scowl of shock as he almost lost his footing on the shale.
He sucked in some warm morning air and let it out with a low whistling sound. Glanced down at the eagle-butted gun with his hand still fisted around it, and muttered softly: ‘Goddamn it to hell.’
He vented another spontaneous gust of laughter, like after he had hurled away his hat the first night out from Fairfax.
The gelding seemed to sense the good humor from which the raucous sound was born and ceased to struggle as the man returned to him. The horse lay still on his side and the man was merely grinning as he dropped to his haunches to release the hobble.
It seems we both have a lot to learn, boy,’ Gold said softly to the animal as he took a hold on the bridle to urge him to his feet, then he mounted and clucked the horse into movement northward. And, as he rode, he ejected the spent cartridges from both guns and reloaded the chambers with fresh shells from a carton in one of the saddlebags.
The empty cases dropped to the dusty, hard-packed trail and glinted in the sunlight. A mile beyond this, a line of horse droppings provided further evidence that a lone rider had passed this way. And before he paused at midday to establish his presence with a fire under a mesa wall, two cheroot stubs had been discarded among the gelding’s hoof prints.
He fired a dozen shots here, aiming at a projection of rock from the mesa. The horse was disturbed by the reports and the drifting smoke that assaulted his nostrils. But this time he made no attempt to bolt. Barnaby Gold learned to brace himself for the recoil of both guns, although his marksmanship did not improve very much. Only once did he adopt the double-handed grip with which he had killed Coombs and Dwyer. He was as accurate now as he had been then and when he saw this, he made the clicking sound with his tongue.
An hour after setting out from his lunchtime sto
pover he readied an intersection of trails marked with a three armed signpost from which the elements had long since eroded the lettering. But he knew from eight years ago, when he and his father had driven the newly purchased hearse from Tucson, what had been printed on the signpost. On the south pointing arm, Standing. West Tucson. East, Tombstone.
He veered the gelding to the left, to ride him slowly along a broad, shallow-sided valley and thirty minutes later allowed the grateful animal to drink from a narrow and muddy creek that crossed the trail. Then to crop at a patch of grass which grew in a grove of pinyons to the side of the trail. He stayed there for as long as it took him to smoke a cheroot then, as the dust of something moving showed on the trail far to the west, he remounted and clucked the horse across the creek.
The valley was not flat-bottomed and after a few minutes the small dust cloud was lost to his sight beyond a rise: several rises. And almost another half hour was gone from the blistering hot, glaringly bright afternoon before he saw the dust and its cause again. The driver and shotgun of the Tucson-to-Tombstone stage had their first sight of Barnaby Gold.
The Concord was being hauled slowly toward the top of a gentle but long grade, the four-horse team straining to drag their burden over the final few yards to where the trail went between two grotesquely eroded outcrops of sandstone at the crest. The animals knowing from previous scheduled runs along this section of trail that they would soon be at the creek. While the two middle-aged men up on the box seat were relishing the prospect of a short stopover in the shade of the pinyon trees beside the ford. Inside the stage, the three male and one female passengers dozed or peered out of the dusty windows, enjoying the slow progress over the long upgrade that kept the pitching and rolling and jolting to a minimum.
Then the lone rider emerged between the outcrops about fifty feet ahead of the lead horses.
‘Hell’s bells!’ the driver growled, and wrenched on the reins to bring the team to a halt
This as the shotgun rasped: ‘Shit!’ and reached among the roof baggage to snatch up his Winchester.
And the passengers vented cries of alarm followed by shouted questions as the sudden stop jerked them out of lethargy.
Barnaby Gold continued to ride the gelding at the same easy pace as before to close the gap with the stalled Concord. Until the shotgun rider was on his feet, a bullet levered into the breech of the repeater which he aimed from the shoulder as he ordered: ‘Don’t come any closer, mister!’
The young man complied with the command but showed no facial reaction to it: as two elderly heads were thrust from the open windows of the doors on either side of the stage. To gaze, wide-eyed with trepidation, at a tall, thin, entirely black-clad figure seated astride an all black horse. With a double barrel Murcott hanging from one side of his saddle and his long frock coat opened to display one gun on his left hip and another in a holster tied down to his right thigh.
‘You make a move to draw, mister, and it’ll be the last thing you ever do in this vale of tears,’ the man with the aimed Winchester warned.
Gold’s hands remained where they were, their heels resting on either side of the saddle horn, fingers loosely clasping the reins.
‘You’ve got me wrong.’
‘I got you plumb dead to rights, mister.’
Gold’s calm attitude and easy unafraid posture astride the gelding acted to placate the agitation of the passengers. And intrigued the bearded driver.
‘What’ s the idea?’ he asked. ‘Ridin’ on over the crest that way?’
‘Been ridin’ the same way all day.’
‘But you must’ve heard the stage rollin’ up the hill?’
‘Right.’
‘Didn’t occur to you that you might scare us half to death? Lookin’ the way you do and just showin’ up between the rocks like you did?’
‘No.’
The driver showed exasperation. ‘That we might figure you was fixin’ to hold us up. And Craig here might plug you?’
‘I might still figure that and I might still do it, Jonas.’
‘Rubbish!’ This from the sour-faced old lady leaning out of a window of the Concord. ‘This young man is quite obviously an innocent traveler.’
There was a grunt of approval from the passenger at the same window. The two men on the other side of the stage looked less inclined to agree with her opinion.
‘So put away that rifle and let him pass,’ the woman snapped. ‘And let us get on ourselves. I have no wish to be late arriving at our destination.’
‘Jonas?’Craig growled.
‘Reckon she’s right,’ the driver answered, biting on the inside of his cheek as he peered quizzically at the man in the saddle, whose dark-hued appearance was relieved only by the blond hair which showed below each side of his hat brim. ‘He looks like death itself with all that black, but it’s my belief he’s just too dumb to know any better than to do what he done. Let him by.’
Craig was not quite able to mask his relief at being allowed to escape from the standoff situation without need to use the Winchester as more than a threat ‘All right, mister,’ he said. ‘On your way. But I’m gonna be coverin’ you with this here rifle for a time to come.’
Gold said nothing. Clucked to the gelding and steered him to the side of the trail to go round the stalled Concord. The muzzle of the Winchester tracked his slow progress.
‘You certainly are something frightening to come upon at first sight, young man,’ the woman told him in a grim tone as he rode by the door window from which she leaned.
‘We are what we are, lady,’ he replied. ‘Appreciate you speaking up for me.’
He directed a personable smile toward her and she fluttered her eyelids and got patches of color in the centers of her cheeks: like a young girl excitedly embarrassed to have attracted the attention of a boy she admires.
‘Appreciate this, too!’ Jonas called after him. ‘Take care when you get to the way station at the head of the valley. Steve Brodie is real suspicious of all strangers, even ordinary folks.’
Then he yelled at the team and cracked the reins over their backs. And the shotgun, taken by surprise at the suddenness of the restart, cursed as he was forced to sit down hard and almost pitched off the stage.
Barnaby Gold waited until the Concord had gone over the brow of the rise between the outcrops, then paused to take out a cheroot and light it. The remnants of the smile he had shown to the old lady continued to glow in his green eyes and crinkle the skin to either side of them.
He dropped the spent match on the trail.
CHAPTER TEN
HE indulged in a further period of target practice during the late afternoon, just before the gloom of evening encroached along the valley in the wake of the sinking sun. But this time he combined drawing with shooting. And he also parted the seams of the pocket in the left side of his frock coat. So that, with his hand apparently in the pocket, he could swivel the eagle-butted .45 and trigger a shot in secrecy. Though during this training session he fastened back the coat so as not to blast holes through the fabric.
He took care to get the priorities right — did not sacrifice accuracy for speed.
The gelding pricked up his ears and turned his head in response to the first shot fired. But then resumed what he had been doing — flicking his tail at desert flies. While Barnaby Gold continued to blast at a tin can balanced on a dead log over a distance of ten feet as the beans which had been in the can began to bubble in the small cooking pot on the fire.
He was pleased the gelding had adapted so quickly to the crackle of gunfire. And not displeased with the progress he was making toward becoming competent with the pair of handguns. It would take time to become what Murchison, the Standing gunsmith, had termed a fast draw quick-fire artist, but he felt it was within his cap abilities to achieve this. For he had a feel for the revolvers. A certain indefinable sense of the guns being an extension of himself when they were in his grip. It seemed entirely natural to him to have them in his
fists.
It surprised him when he first became aware of the sensation which, strangely, was not accompanied by any feeling of power.
Maybe that would come, unbidden, when he was skilled enough to hit a target the size of the tin can twelve times with twelve shots in twelve seconds. For which he was patiently prepared to wait and see.
He had never rushed at anything in his life except the childhood scrap with the three kids on the icy New York City sidewalk. And marriage to Emily Jane Freemont.
He first saw her on a storm-lashed night filled with lancing rain and streaked with a barrage of fork lightning, on the trail linking Fairfax with Standing.
Barnaby Gold had gone to the larger town to buy some pine wood from the lumber merchant there. And, despite the threat of the impending storm, had taken time out at a back room of the cantina.
The rain was teeming, the wind was raging and the northern sky was jagged with lightning to the accompaniment of thunderclaps when he paid off the madam, climbed on to the seat of the fully laden flatbed wagon borrowed from John Hogg and drove out along the south trail.
Anyone else who drove off on to the open trail on such a night would have been called crazy. But people had grown bored of using the same old worn out terms about Barnaby Gold Junior, so his departure passed without comment. And only the whore named Maria was sorry he left, for she had heard men like the son of the undertaker did not often frequent cathouses. Certainly she had never sold herself to anyone like him.
He was no more than a mile out of town, needing to concentrate all his attention and strength on the chore of driving the heavily loaded flatbed — to keep the storm-frightened team on the trail and guard against running the rig into a mud patch where it was likely to sink to its hubs — when he saw the girl. Starkly illuminated in a series of lightning flashes that turned black night into blue day for all of three seconds.
It was obvious she had seen the approaching wagon in an earlier streak of brilliant light for she was halted at the side of the trail, turned sideways on to peer back into the force of the wind-driven rain.
Black as Death Page 8