Ghost Towns

by Louis L'Amour

  “My, my…you’re smarter than you look, aren’t you?” Fiona said, something like admiration peeking out from behind weary bitterness. “But I bet there’s still one thing you haven’t figured out.”

  “That’s right,” Old Red said. “Why?”

  Fiona jerked her head at her father.

  “Because the king of Kennedyville commands it, that’s why.”

  Then more words spilled out of her, coming so fast, in such a flood burst, she couldn’t even take the time to breathe.

  “At first, he sent Keeley out to scare you off. That’s what he does whenever any Mormons try to stay the night around here. But when he found out you were Gentiles, he thought we could trick you into staying. Permanently. As part of the family. Keeley would have to keep out of sight for a while, but that wouldn’t last long—just until my father could catch one of you in the act.”

  “Catch us—?”

  “—in what act?” I’d been about to ask. But then suddenly I knew, and all I could whisper was, “Oh, my.”

  Catch one of us with one of them, she’d meant. With her or her sister.

  I couldn’t help myself then: I shivered. When it comes to sheer blood-freezing terror, a lake monster’s got nothing on a shotgun wedding.

  “You know,” Old Red said, “if y’all are this desperate to, uhhh…expand the family, I’d say it’s time you moved on to greener pastures, courtin’-wise.”

  “Don’t you think we know that?” Eileen cried out, her voice quavering, on the verge of becoming a sob. “Don’t you think that’s what we—”

  “No!”

  Her father slammed down a fist with such force every plate on the table jumped an inch in the air. “I was here before those bloody Mormon heathens, and I’ll still be here after they’re gone! This is my home! My land! My town! My family! And I’ll never give any of it up! Never!”

  When Kennedy was done, Fiona, Eileen, and Keeley were all looking down, silent and still, like worshippers in church competing to seem the most pious. Hate the man as they might—and I suspected they did—a little blustering and table thumping and they were utterly in his thrall.

  “Well,” Old Red said quietly, “I think we best be leavin’.”

  The old man blinked at him.

  “What? You can’t leave now. It’s dark out.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about us,” I said. My brother and I stood and started backing away from the table. “We’ve done plenty of night herding. We won’t break out necks.”

  “Look…” Kennedy tried out an unconvincing smile. “I’m sorry about the tricks. The lies. Let us make it up to you. A good night’s sleep indoors and a hearty breakfast before you hit the trail. What do you say?”

  I say you’re insane, I thought.

  For obvious reasons, I kept this to myself.

  Kennedy’s smile went lopsided and slowly sank.

  “You can have your pick of spreads….”

  The old man stood and took a staggering step after us. He stopped next to the spot where he’d left his shotgun propped up against the wall.

  “Your pick of wives. Just stay. Please. You won’t regret it.”

  We kept backing away.

  Kennedy took another step toward us. Beyond him, his daughters and son just watched from their seats, unmoving, unblinking, glassy eyed. They seemed strangely sleepy, as if what they were seeing was merely a dream they’d had before and would no doubt have again.

  Old Red and I reached the door.

  “Don’t go,” Kennedy said, his voice half-pleading, half-demanding. “We need you here. I need you….”

  “Good-bye,” my brother told the old man.

  “And good luck,” I said to his children.

  And then we were outside in the gloom.

  We saddled up quick as we could by lantern light. I kept expecting Kennedy to come out and tell us again to stay…or try to make us. Yet when it came time to swing up atop my mount, I found myself lingering, waiting.

  Old Red horsed himself without pausing a jot.

  “They ain’t comin’, Brother,” he told me.

  He knew what I was thinking. Maybe the boy or one of the women would dart out after us, beg to be brought along. And we could—maybe should—help them out. After all, we knew what it was like to be trapped on a farm, tied down by obligation and expectation. And Old Red, at least, knew what it was like to escape.

  He hit the cow trails at eighteen and never saw the family farm again. And in a way, I felt like he was running from the old homestead even still. You can’t get much further removed from the dreary toil of sodbusting than a gentleman deducifier cracking mysteries in well-appointed drawing rooms.

  Old Red had freed himself from the past—or was trying to, anyhow, which maybe amounts to the same thing. So if he looked at Fiona and Eileen and Keeley and didn’t see the strength there to do likewise, I suppose it wasn’t there to be seen.

  I pulled myself up into my saddle.

  “Think they’ll ever get away from here? The gals? Or the kid?”

  “Not till the old man’s dead.” My brother gave his pony his heels. “Maybe not even then.”

  The horses ambled slowly out toward the trail, finding their way by memory as much as moonlight. It could have been a short journey—all we had to do was head north fifteen minutes and bed down in the same abandoned farmhouse we’d been in the night before. But Old Red and I agreed to push south a ways instead. More than ever since we’d begun our travels, we both felt the need to move on.

  I looked back just the once. All I could see was the dull yellow glow from the cottage windows aflicker through the trees like a sunset shimmering on dark, rippling water. Then a turn in the trail blotted it out, and the last of the light was swallowed into the black depths of the forest.

  Should you ever make it to America again, Mr. Brackwell, I’d urge you to visit the Bear Lake Valley. It’s beautiful country, and friendly too. Lord knows they like their visitors.

  If it should be ten years before you pass that way—heck, a hundred—I feel like you’d find “Kennedyville” there still, utterly unchanged.

  Population: Four…but always room for more, if you’re of the right frame of mind.

  Yours faithfully,

  O. A. Amlingmeyer

  Logan, Utah

  July 4, 1893

  The Ghosts of Duster

  William W. Johnstone with J. A. Johnstone

  “All I’m sayin’ is that I never promised to marry the gal. Hell, you know me better’n that, Bo! Do I look like the sort o’ fella who’d want to get himself tied down by apron strings?”

  Bo Creel glanced over at his best friend and said, “You look like a fella who’s damned lucky to be alive. That lady’s brother had a shotgun, you know.”

  Scratch Morton grinned. “I know. For a minute I figured I’d be pickin’ buckshot outta my backside until next week.”

  The two men rode along the base of a ridge in West Texas, being careful not to skylight themselves. They had lived long, eventful lives on the frontier and knew that although most of the hostiles were either on reservations or had gone south into Mexico, it was still possible to run across a band of renegade Apaches in this vast, rugged area west of the Pecos.

  Bo and Scratch were of an age and had been best friends for decades, ever since they’d met as youngsters during Texas’s war for independence some forty-odd years earlier. They’d been on the drift for almost that long. They didn’t think of themselves as saddle tramps; they were just too restless by nature to stay in one place for too long. Although they had been just about everywhere in the West, they liked to wander back to their home state of Texas every now and then. Once a Texan, always a Texan—born, bred, and forever.

  Scratch was a handsome, silver-haired dandy in a fringed buckskin jacket and cream-colored Stetson. The twin Remington revolvers on his hips had ivory handles. Bo, on the other hand, looked like a preacher in a sober black suit and flat-crowned black hat. His Colt had p
lain walnut grips.

  The weapons were similar in one respect, though: they were well used. Bo and Scratch had a habit of running into trouble. Scratch was just a natural-born hell-raiser, and Bo couldn’t help but stick up for folks who were outnumbered and outgunned.

  They were in El Paso when Scratch made the acquaintance of a comely maiden lady. One thing led to another, and although the lady was still comely, she wasn’t quite a maiden any longer. She hadn’t made any complaints about that change in her status, but her proddy, overly protective older brother did, so Bo and Scratch had left the border city rather hurriedly.

  Since then they had spent a couple of days riding east and were still a long ways from getting anywhere. This part of Texas took awhile to ride across. Bo had done pretty well in a poker game before their hasty exit from El Paso, so they had enough money to buy supplies. The problem was finding a settlement where they could pick up some more provisions.

  “If I remember right,” Bo mused, “there’s a little town not too far from here. Name of Duster, I think. We ought to be able to buy a few things there.”

  “I hope so,” Scratch said. “Otherwise we’re gonna get mighty tired of eatin’ jackrabbit by the time we get to San Antonio.”

  “Tired of it, maybe, but at least we won’t starve to death.”

  The ridge was to the north, on their left hand. Beyond it rose a range of jagged mountains, the sort of peaks that jutted up out of the desert with little or no warning in this part of the country. To the south swept a vast, brown, semiarid plain that ran all the way to the Mexican border. A few waterholes were located along the base of the ridge, Bo recalled; otherwise this was mighty dry country.

  They rode on, and as it became late afternoon, Scratch asked, “How far’d you say it was to this Duster place?”

  “Ought to be there any time now,” Bo replied.

  “Then shouldn’t we be seein’ smoke from the chimneys?”

  Bo rubbed his jaw and frowned. “Yeah, you’d think so. Maybe no one’s cooking right now.”

  “I was hopin’ for a nice hot supper, followed by a cold beer.”

  “Well, don’t give up hope just yet. Maybe I’m wrong about how far it is. I’ve never been there, just heard hombres talking about the place.”

  A few minutes later, though, the settlement came into view. Bo and Scratch reined their mounts to a halt and stared at it in surprise.

  Or rather, at what was left of it.

  Some sort of catastrophe had happened here, that much was obvious. A number of the buildings had been reduced to flattened, scattered piles of lumber and debris. Other structures leaned at crazy angles. Only a handful of buildings were upright and relatively intact. At the northern edge of town, nearest the ridge, was a huge mound of bricks and lumber. It looked like a large building had collapsed in on itself.

  “Good Lord A’mighty,” Scratch said. “What in blazes happened here?”

  Bo’s eyes narrowed as he studied the landscape both north and south of the ruined settlement. “Look yonder,” he said, pointing. “Below that notch in the ridge.”

  The roughly V-shaped gap he indicated had a deep gully below it, running arrow-straight toward the town. Scratch frowned at it and then said, “That ain’t natural, is it?”

  Bo shook his head. “I don’t think so. Looks to me like there must’ve been a mighty big thunderstorm in the mountains. The rain all washed down behind that ridge and busted through at a narrow place. That was like a dam breaking. The flood carved out that gully and came thundering down until it smashed right into the settlement.”

  Stretch gave him a dubious glance. “You sayin’ it rained enough to do that, here in West Texas? Hell, this is one of the driest spots east of…well, east of hell.”

  “Most of the time that’s true,” Bo agreed. “But every now and then it comes a big cloud. I’ve heard more than one story about folks drowning in the desert in flash floods.”

  “Yeah, but only when they was dumb enough to make camp in an arroyo or some place like that.”

  Bo pointed again. “When that ridgeline crumbled, the water formed an arroyo, and it was just like pointing a gun at Duster. I don’t know if everybody in town was killed in the flood. Seems unlikely. But the survivors must’ve packed up and left, because I sure don’t see anybody moving around.”

  “No, the place looks to be deserted, all right,” Scratch admitted. He let out a groan. “So much for buyin’ supplies here.”

  “Maybe we can find some the citizens left behind.”

  “If we do, they’ll likely be rotted from bein’ water-logged. Folks probably took anything that was any good with them when they pulled up stakes.”

  Bo knew that Scratch was probably right about that, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a look around. He said as much and jogged his horse into motion again toward the settlement.

  Scratch rode alongside him and asked, “What do you reckon that pile o’ bricks was? Don’t see too many brick buildin’s out here. Mostly adobe and some lumber.”

  “I don’t know, but it was a good-sized building. I’m surprised it collapsed. Looks like it should’ve been sturdy enough to stand up even to a flood.”

  “Maybe a cyclone come along and flattened it later.”

  “Maybe,” Bo said. “We’ll ride over and take a closer look after we—”

  He stopped short and jerked back on the reins as a ragged scarecrow of a figure dashed out from behind one of the leaning buildings and ran toward them, screaming.

  Scratch cursed and slapped leather, filling his hand with the butt of an ivory-handled Remington. But as the gun came up with blurring speed, Bo reached across with matching swiftness and clamped a hand around the barrel.

  “Don’t shoot,” he snapped. “That hombre’s not attacking us.”

  It was true. The man was too scrawny to constitute a threat anyway, even if he had been hostile. As he loped forward and waved his sticklike arms over his head, his pitiful screeches became words that the two drifters could understand.

  “Are you real? Oh, dear Lord, are you really there? Please be real!”

  “Please be real?” Scratch muttered. “What in blazes does he think we are, ghosts or somethin’?”

  Bo glanced around at the abandoned, devastated settlement. “Good place for it, don’t you think?”

  Scratch couldn’t argue with that.

  The scarecrow man stumbled and fell to his knees as if the last of his strength had deserted him. He pawed at the dust of the street, then threw his head back and howled. “Oh, Lord, take me! Spare me from these tormenting phantasms!”

  “What’d he just call us?” Scratch asked with a frown.

  “I don’t think he’s talking about us,” Bo replied as he swung down from the saddle. He handed his reins to Scratch. “Here. Hang on to my horse while I see what I can do for the old-timer.”

  It was rare for the two of them to run into anybody they could call “old-timer.” This man, who appeared to be the sole inhabitant of Duster, fit the bill, though. He looked to be in his seventies, with long, tangled white hair and a ragged beard that reached down to his narrow chest. He was so skinny a good wind would blow him away. Filthy rags flapped around his emaciated form. Bo thought the duds had once been a brown tweed suit and a white shirt. The man wore no shoes or boots; his bare feet were scarred and callused.

  His eyes rolled like those of a locoed horse as Bo approached. “Take it easy, old-timer,” Bo said, speaking in a calm, quiet tone as he would have if he’d been trying to settle down such a horse. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. I don’t know what happened here, but my friend and I will help you.”

  Still on his knees, the man stared up at Bo and said, “Are you real?”

  “Real as can be,” Bo assured him.

  “You’re not…not like them?”

  “Like who?” Bo didn’t think anybody else was around here, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

  The man placed his hands over his face, the bony fingers
with their knobby knuckles splayed out across his gaunt features. “Them,” he said with a shudder. “The ones who torment me.”

  “Who?” Bo asked again, as it suddenly occurred to him that the old man might be talking about some of those renegade Apaches who snuck across the border now and then. Apaches were known for being the most skillful torturers on the face of the earth.

  But they weren’t who the old man had in mind. As he lowered his hands he gazed up with the most fear-haunted eyes Bo had ever seen. “Them,” the old man croaked. “The children!”

  Then he pitched forward on his face, either in a dead faint—or just plain dead.

  With all the debris around, Scratch didn’t have any trouble finding enough scraps of dry wood to start a fire. He built a small one in the shade of a building that was still upright, a two-story structure with a sagging balcony along the front that had probably been a hotel or a saloon. Bo lifted the old man and carefully carried him into that same shade. The old-timer didn’t weigh much at all; his body was like a bundle of twigs inside his leathery hide.

  Scratch got some coffee brewing, using water from their canteens. Bo made sure the old man was still alive. He found a threadlike but fairly steady pulse in the hombre’s neck. He checked the man’s body but didn’t find any wounds.

  “Looks like he’s about starved to death,” Scratch observed.

  “Starved to death…and scared to death on top of it,” Bo said. “We’ll have to get him awake again so he can tell us what happened here.”

  “Whatever happened, it’s too late for us to do anything about it. And it ain’t really any of our business, either.”

  Bo just looked over at Scratch, who sighed and went on, “Yeah, I should’ve knowed better than to say that, shouldn’t I? You’d reckon after all this time I’d know you can’t abide a mystery, Bo Creel.”

  “Let’s just get a little food and coffee in him and see if it helps.”