Funeral By The Sea (4 page)

They walked along the base of the towering rock and she abruptly moved closer to him and linked her arm through his.

The turn in the trail near its end had taken them out of sight of Bud and Kent and the bulk of the wagon was between them and what lay beyond. But even if he was prepared to attempt an escape from this dangerous situation into which he had come with calm deliberation, the woman’s carefree attitude would have cautioned him against it.

‘Well, what do we have here, Miss Eve?’ a man asked from a ledge some twenty feet up on the rock face.

Like the forward sentries, he wore a sheepskin coat against the coastal cold of the night. And toted a Winchester which was canted to a shoulder.

‘You’ve got a nosy nature, Drake!’ the woman snapped at him irritably. ‘What I’ve got is my business!’

The man on the rock murmured something softly in a similar tone to that of the woman as she and Gold stepped on to the fine sand of a broad beach. A few moments later came around the seaward end of the slab of rock and saw the lights of the town.

Eve Delroy took a deep breath and said softly, ‘Welcome to Oceanville, stranger. Where the Pacific air is real healthy. But that doesn’t mean a thing if Hal figures you’re ready to die.’

Seth Harrow began to yell advance news of the stranger approaching.

Barnaby Gold experienced a slight stab of disappointment that he could not see the ocean because of the way the tides piled the sand into a long, high ridge.

CHAPTER FOUR

OCEANVILLE was not so much a town as a village. For it was no more than a curving row of eleven crude adobe buildings with a large frame house - palatial by comparison - at one end. Erected on the very edge of the beach under an arc of sheer, towering cliffs that jutted out into the water to north and south to obscure the coastline beyond and form a secluded cove.

The old-timer had said it was the best hideout he ever saw and it was plain to see why the wagon driver was impressed. The only ways to get in were through the easy-to-guard ravine and on the featureless sea which lapped without spite at the tide line beyond the sand ridge along which a half dozen clinker-built fishing boats were beached, tilted on to their sides.

Feet, hooves and wagon wheels had compressed a strip of sand at the base of the northern arc of the cliff and this area of hard-packed beach broadened as it became a one-sided street in front of the adobe buildings which bore the weather-ravaged sign of having been sited here for a great many years.

The identical two-room houses with morose-looking Mexican men, women and children at doorways and windows, peering wall-eyed at the familiar Eve Delroy and the stranger who accompanied her. Then a building more than four times as large as the fishermen’s houses. With an arched entrance fitted with batwing doors and the single word CANTINA painted in a curve of faded lettering above.

The men who looked out over the batwings and through the breath-misted windows were all Americans. Who expressed varying degrees of eager expectancy as they shifted their attention between the couple and the large frame house out front of which Seth Harrow had halted his wagon.

The spartan dwellings of the Mexicans smelled of old fish. Liquor, tobacco smoke and cloyingly sweet perfume permeated the air in the vicinity of the cantina.

Beyond, the street of hard-packed sand rose slightly, to curve across the front of the big house and its outbuildings which were erected on an elevated area and offset at a more acute angle than the other structures aligned along the arc of the cove’s cliff.

It was two storeys high with enough windows in the frame facade to suggest at least twenty rooms. It had a broad stoop from end to end and three chimneys atop its high pitch roof. Every window filtered light through lace curtains and all the chimneys wisped smoke. A player piano was tinkling a melancholy melody from somewhere inside.

The outbuildings comprised a large stable, a storage barn, a summerhouse and a solarium.

The whole piece of property looked like it should have been situated far to the east and with all the lights on and the fires lit, needing the sounds of loud talk, laughter, clinking glass and a cheerful tune from the player piano to complete the impression of a party in progress.

But as Gold and Eve Delroy started up the slight incline toward the parked wagon, there was just the mournful music and the regular breaking of combers on the sand. Until the batwings creaked and the men and some sluttish-looking women filed out from the cantina. To gather into a stationary group on the street and watch and wait.

‘If you got a God you believe in, son, best you start to pray to Him.’

The woman had signaled a halt at the foot of the four steps that led up to the stoop. And as Seth Harrow whispered awesomely from aboard the wagon behind them, she hugged the stranger’s arm tighter to her side.

Barnaby Gold waited with impassive patience for what was to happen next. And looked on without the slightest change of expression or tensing in his easy stance as the double doors of the house were folded inwards and Hal Delroy stepped across the threshold. Aimed an old .36 Navy Colt down the steps at him. Asked,

‘Step aside, if you will, Eve. I rather over-indulged in the after-dinner brandy and may not be able to hold this weapon’s kick to the right.’

The men from the cantina seemed to be almost all out of the same mould as the sentries in the ravine and on the ledge. Rugged-featured, mean-eyed men spanning an age range from mid-twenties to mid-forties and dressed western-style.

Their leader was not like this at all. He was a match for the house. Short and plump, impeccably attired in black suit and starched shirt for the dinner he had recently eaten. About fifty, with black hair turning grey, neatly cut and slicked down across his head. A round, smooth-skinned face decorated with a thick moustache that was entirely grey. Small dark eyes and a snub nose. A full-lipped mouth that provided the sole obvious family resemblance to his sister. Double chins and a short, thick neck.

His face was beaded with sweat and Gold could smell the scents and powders and pomade he had applied to his body before he dressed for dinner.

He spoke with the same cultured accent as Eve. Only the gun in his right hand gave him a look of evil.

‘No, Hal!’ the woman snapped. And disengaged her arm to stand in front of Gold. ‘I want him!’

The old-timer aboard the wagon caught his breath. Some doors of the adobe houses were slammed closed. A young child complained in his native tongue. The men and the whores out front of the cantina remained indifferently silent. The player piano ran out of power and faltered to a stop.

Delroy was as deadpan as the young man he was ready to kill. ‘You know who he is?’

‘His name is Barnaby Gold and his horse went lame. He came here to buy a new one.’

‘I told the boy it was the wrong place to come to, Mr. Delroy,’ Harrow said quickly.

‘Did you bring the new dress for my sister, Seth?’

‘Yessir, I sure enough did.’

‘Than you already have a birthday gift, Eve.’

‘I want him, too.’

‘How far out you pick him up, Seth?’

‘Late afternoon, Mr. Delroy.’

‘On the trail?’

‘Yessir. At the pass.’

‘Why, stranger?’ His small, dark eyes met the steady gaze of Gold’s green ones for the first time

‘Why what, sir?’

‘The trail goes nowhere else but Oceanville. Why were you on it?’

‘Going to Europe.’

Delroy was suddenly intrigued. ‘Europe?’

‘That’s right, sir. By way of San Francisco. Intended to keep heading west until I reached the ocean. Then turn north.’

Delroy considered the response for long moments, then nodded. ‘That would get you there sure enough.’

‘He means no harm here, Hal,’ Eve put in hurriedly. ‘He was riding large as life up on the
seat beside Seth.

‘You’ve seen how things are here, Gold?’ her brother interrupted. And shifted the old Colt, to scratch his right cheek with the foresight.

‘Yes, I have.’

‘So you know that if you step out of line, you’re putting both feet in the grave.’

A nervous laugh escaped Seth Harrow’s throat.

Anger erupted color across Delroy’s cheeks. ‘What’s so funny, old man?’ he snapped.

Harrow swallowed hard. ‘He told me, Mr. Delroy. Before he started out to get to Europe, he was an undertaker. Over to some town in Arizona.’

The woman had stepped aside from Gold now that the gun was no longer aimed at him. So that her brother was able to survey him clearly from black hat to black boots. And after he had done this he smiled and showed a set of very white teeth.

‘Well, that is amusing, isn’t it? In the event it should be necessary to kill you, young man, you will be able to dig your own grave.’

There was laughter from the group out front of the cantina.

Barnaby Gold expressed a personable smile and clicked his tongue. ‘If I don’t get to eat soon, sir, I could die from hunger. Too weak to lift a shovel.’

Delroy brightened his own smile. ‘Then you had better get some food inside you. Please accept the hospitality of Oceanville for as long as Eve wants you.’

He backed across the threshold and gently closed the double doors.

The Mexicans and the men and women from the cantina started to return to what had occupied them before Seth Harrow raised the alarm, totally disinterested in the newcomer after Hal Delroy had approved of him.

Eve Delroy said with a smile but a tone of command in her voice, ‘Go have some supper, Barnaby Gold. I’ll send for you later. Seth, let me have the dress.’

The old-timer pulled a gift-wrapped package from beneath the wagon seat and passed it down to her. She took it and hurried eagerly up the steps, across the stoop and let herself into the big house.

When the doors had closed behind her, Seth Harrow sighed and shook his head. ‘One fewer or one more brandy and you wouldn’t be in the land of the livin’ no more, son.’

‘Seems I’m indebted to the whole Delroy family, Mr. Harrow.’

‘Take it easy with both of them, son. They’re as changeable as the riptides across this bay. Here.’

He tossed down the gunbelt and followed this with the saddle and accoutrements. And in response to the black-clad young man’s quizzical look said, ‘Wasn’t told not to give you your stuff back. And ain’t no way you can get to use them guns hereabouts and then get to see Europe.’

Gold strapped on the gunbelt as he said to Harrow, ‘Guess you’re right.’ Then hefted the saddle and stalled toward the cantina. This as the old-timer set his wagon rolling and turned off the street to go around to the rear of the big house.

Barnaby Gold did not like crowds and it was blatantly apparent that the twenty or so men and six women who peopled the cantina felt the same way about him when he pushed through the batwings. For tacit resentment reached him as strongly as the smells of the place, directed from mean or smoldering eyes which immediately shifted to look elsewhere before he could meet any gaze.

The talk and the three card games and the drinking and the vacant staring into space was
curtailed briefly in various areas of the square, low-ceilinged, smoke-filled room. Until the newcomer had threaded his way among the half dozen tables to reach a gap in the line of men at the bar counter. When he was ignored by everyone except for the tall, thin, gaunt-faced Mexican bartender.

‘My woman, she is heating supper for you,
senor.
You want a drink while you wait?’

‘Rye whiskey with a beer chaser should go down well.’

‘My pleasure,
señor.’

He set down a shot glass and a fresh bottle in front of Gold then began to draw a beer. Gold rested his saddle on the sawdust-strewn floor and delved into a pocket for money.

‘The greaser is paid by the month by Hal, stud,’ a beefily-built man with a scar on his bristled cheek said dully from Gold’s right. ‘Just to serve up the liquor and beer that Hal buys in with money we steal. Ain’t nobody but greasers have to pay for anythin’ in Oceanville.’

‘Appreciate the information, mister,’ Gold answered as the glass of foaming beer was placed in front of him.

‘You’re welcome, stud.’ He emptied his own brimful shot glass and added, ‘That includes the tail around here. But you won’t want none of that. Since Miss Eve has got you lined up to serve her.’

‘Here, stud! Sit yourself down to eat! Build up your strength for what you’re gonna have to do!’

This from one of two men in their mid-forties who sat at a table in a corner alcove formed by a side wall of the cantina and the short section of the L-shaped bar counter. Like the scar-faced man, they showed no sign of enjoying their sarcastic taunts.

‘Appreciate it,’ Gold said evenly as they rose from the table and he carried his saddle over there.

The scar-faced man brought him his drinks and said again, ‘You’re welcome, stud.’ Then injected a rasping note into his voice to add, ‘On account of that’s what Hal said you have to be.’