Read Online Destined to Die by George G. Gilman - Free Book Online Page B

clatter to the stoop to put both hands up to her face. Then turned to rush into the house.
    Barnaby Gold could hear the wet sounds of her vomiting as, after he had pulled off the blanket, he rolled the corpse on to his back. The exit holes in his back showed he had been hit by two rifle bullets. But the entry wounds at the front were masked by the pepper shot that had ripped through his pants and shirt to tear the flesh from the bones at throat, chest, belly and thighs. His face was not hit - merely splashed with now-congealed blood.
    If he had carried anything in his shirt pockets, it had been shredded. One side pocket of his pants was empty. In the other was a comb and thirty-five cents. In his only hip pocket, a five dollar bill and a piece of paper folded into quarter-size.
    Gold remained in a crouch beside the body as he unfolded the paper: saw it was a telegraph form with a message scrawled in pencil. But before he could read it he heard a tread on the stoop. Saw Mrs Wolfe was on the threshold again, so draped the shot-shattered body and stood up.
    The woman’s face had a freshly-washed look. She asked dully: ‘You robbin’ him?’
    ‘No, lady,’
    The telegraph message read: CLINTON DAVIS RIVERSIDE HOTEL BACALL ARIZ LIKELY GOLD STRIKE NEAR YOU SOON STOP ARKIN MISSED GETTING RICH CHANNON EL PASO TEXAS.
    He refolded the paper and held it up before putting it into a pocket of his frock coat. Said: ‘Just a fair exchange, Mrs Wolfe. I gave him a message. Now I’ve got his.’
    ‘He asked about you. Before he come back here to the place.’
    Barnaby Gold had gone to his horse. Now slid from the centre of the bedroll, lashed on behind the saddle, three lengths of a pole. One with a triangular shovel piece on an end.
    ‘Anywhere around here you don’t want him buried, lady?’
    There were short lengths of threaded metal protruding from the ends of two of the poles. He began to screw these into the appropriate receiving holes to form a long-handled shovel.
    ‘Dear God in Heaven, he said you used to be an undertaker,’ the woman gasped.
    ‘Nowadays just bury my own dead. Over on the river bank be okay? You’re not likely to plough the ground there.’
    She made no response and he went to the spot indicated: began to dig into the moist, easy-to-work earth.
    ‘Your dead?’
    This after more than a minute. During which time she came down off the stoop and across to where he was digging.
    ‘It might help your menfolk to know he would have died anyway, Mrs Wolfe. Him or me. If I’d known who he was at Larkin’s place, I’d have killed him then.’
    There was a pause between each sentence in which he shovelled earth from the hole to a heap. He could sense her looking at him intently. Eventually, she said: ‘I didn’t like him when he first showed up here. Scared me as much as you did. His comin’ like you, while my Festus was off the place.’
    The erstwhile undertaker practising his former trade said nothing.
    ‘Asked if a man named Barnaby Gold had been along the river. When I told him I’d never heard of you, he described you perfect. Said how you used to be a mortician and still looked like one.’
    The grave was being dug quickly, Gold aware that Festus Wolfe might have second thoughts about leaving his wife after Larkin’s body was found, come riding back under the arch and down the slope.
    ‘Course, I knew he was talkin’ about the very same man Will Gershel said he and Jesse had caught. But even if I hadn’t liked the looked of this here feller, I wouldn’t have said nothin’ about that. Us mountain folk handle our own trouble. So he rode on south without learnin’ nothin’ from me. And I was like on hot coals waitin’ for the men to get back. Tell them about him.’
    Gold interrupted his chore, but only to run a coat sleeve across his sweat-beaded face: gave no sign that he was even listening to what the woman was saying.
    ‘But he shows up again first. Without them guns he had before. Says as