Free Destined to Die by George G. Gilman Page A

out quickly. ‘Sleep deep with clear consciences. We wouldn’t hear no one ridin’ down the trail in the dead of night. Unless he was makin’ a real racket.’
    Gold was unscrewing the three pieces of the shovel.
    ‘Appreciate the thought, Mrs Wolfe.’
    He started toward his horse to stow the dismantled tool in his bedroll.
    ‘That Joanne Engels a high and mighty miss for her age. Don’t like it that we won’t allow marriage before a person is sixteen. Mary-Ann was only talkin’ about her last night. About how she was sorry she ever let her know that she was only eleven when she got wed to Virgil back east. Said, too, how she didn’t like for the girl to be walkin’ out with that no-good Jesse Gershel.’
    Barnaby Gold had returned to the edge of the river. To hunker down, wash the dirt from his hands and the sweat from his face.
    ‘But you people didn’t leave all the mountain ways behind, lady,’ he said as he came erect, wiped his hands dry on his coat and took out a cheroot.
    ‘We take care of our own, sure enough. Deal with our own troubles. But we ain’t never had none as big as this before.’
    He struck a match on the stock of the Murcott and lit the cheroot before he swung up into the saddle. Saw something akin to sorrow in the dark eyes of the woman. Maybe apology, maybe pity. But in response to his implacable gaze, her feeling turned to anger.
    ‘But you got no call to look so high and mighty about it! Seems to me I never did come across anyone before so set on doin’ things his own way! Least we got rules we abide by because they was made for the good of all of us.’
    ‘Sure, Mrs Wolfe. Where there are people, you have to have rules. I’m just one person. Bye-bye.’
     

CHAPTER TEN
     
    FESTUS Wolfe had brought seven other men down the trail on the Arizona side of the river, but during the remainder of the afternoon, Barnaby Gold rode by only five homesteads. Frame houses and outbuildings amid carefully tended fields of crops.
    A dog barked in one of the barns as he approached and went on by. In the house on another property he heard a baby crying. Once, as he rounded an outcrop of rock, he caught sight of a slim woman with auburn hair. She dashed from the house, snatched up a boy of about four playing with a toy handcart and rushed back inside with him. The slamming of the door curtailed the child’s tearful protests.
    He rode across the front of each river-facing house with the Murcott resting on the saddle horn. Knowing he was being watched from behind windows that glinted in the sunlight. Aware of the possibility that perhaps not every man had responded to Will Gershel’s call. Or that a woman, more familiar with guns than Gertrude Wolfe, might be driven to blasting at him by some vivid mental image of wholesale slaughter: conjured up by his appearance on the trail.
    But his passing was merely noted. Surreptitiously and fearfully. And he was followed only by the anxious gazes of the watchers for as long as he remained in their sight. Also, there was no sign of the men who had ridden so hard toward the Gershel homestead in the wake of the bloody killing of Clinton Davis.
    Which would have struck most men as odd. But Barnaby Gold gave it no thought. An aroma of cooking food had been mixed in with the smell of woodsmoke curling from the chimney of the last homestead he passed, and thus, after a long period of feeling nothing except for weariness, he began to consider his hunger and how to satisfy it. Decided that the town of Bacall, which could not now be far up the trail, was likely to offer more appetising fare than he carried in his saddlebags. And he smoked another cheroot to help stave off the demands of his stomach for hot food.
    The sun sank to a crimson death beyond the ridges of the Chemehuevi Mountains across the river and, when the short-lived dusk had run its course, he saw lights ahead of him. More glints of yellow through blackness than a mere homestead would merit. A mile