Ghost Towns

by Louis L'Amour

  The childish voice floated through the air and seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It caused all of the men except Ledbetter to jump a little and look around, even the usually iron-nerved Bo and Scratch. They had already encountered the mysterious youngsters, and now they heard the boy’s voice.

  The girl chimed in a second later, saying, “Over here, mister…” The voices were so wispy they didn’t seem real.

  But what else would you expect ghosts to sound like, Bo thought?

  “No, over here, over here!” the boy called.

  “There!” one of the outlaws cried. He triggered wildly, Colt flame blooming in the darkness as the shots gouted from his gun. He emptied the weapon, and as he lowered it, he said, “Where the hell’d they go? I hit the little bastard, I know I did!”

  “Stop shootin’, you idiot!” Tarver said. “That’s a little kid you’re blastin’ away at!”

  “No, it’s not,” Bo said, figuring that any distraction would work in his and Scratch’s favor. “That little boy and girl were orphans who were killed in a flood here months ago. The water made the orphanage collapse. More than thirty children died that night, and their spirits are here in Duster.” Bo paused as more lightning glared across the sky. “They’ve come back tonight.”

  “Over here…over here…over here…”

  The outlaws twisted and turned frantically, looking for something that wasn’t really there. Scratch leaned close to Bo and said, “That one hombre never reloaded his gun.”

  “I know,” Bo replied. “That makes it four to two. Good enough odds for you?”

  “Damn good enough,” Scratch snapped, and slapped leather.

  “Look out!” Tarver yelped. “Get those two saddle tramps!”

  The outlaws’ panic had given Bo and Scratch a chance to draw their guns. Both Colts blasted as the two drifters split up, Bo going right and Scratch going left. Bo hoped that Ledbetter would have sense enough to keep his head down.

  One of the outlaws spun around with a harsh cry as a bullet from Bo’s gun drilled through his body. Another doubled over as one of Scratch’s slugs punched into his belly.

  But then Tarver and the desperado called Harry began to return fire, forcing Scratch to dive behind the old water trough. Bo dashed for the far side of the street, but it was too far away. He would never make it.

  Sure enough, a bullet traced a trail of fire across the outside of his left thigh. The wound was minor, but the impact was enough to knock his leg out from under him and send him tumbling to the ground. He knew he would be ventilated good and proper before he could get to his feet again.

  But he had landed so that he was turned toward the old hotel or saloon or whatever it was, and in the light of the campfire Bo saw Reverend Ledbetter rise from the ground and throw himself at Sam Tarver. “No!” the preacher screamed. “Vengeance belongs to the Lord—and to the children!”

  A pair of shots erupted from Tarver’s gun. Ledbetter crumpled as the bullets smashed into him. His action gave Bo time to draw a bead on Tarver, though, and before the boss outlaw could fire again, the walnut-handled Colt leaped in Bo’s hand. Three shots rolled out, all of them hammering into Tarver’s chest and driving him backward so that he fell heavily on the old boardwalk. The planks were rotten. Tarver busted right through them.

  At the same time, Scratch fired from behind the water trough at Harry. One of the slugs smashed the outlaw’s elbow; the second tore his throat out. He went down with blood fountaining from the wound. It looked more black than red in the firelight.

  That accounted for four of the five outlaws, but the one who had emptied his gun at a ghost was still on his feet. His gun wasn’t empty anymore, either. He had been desperately thumbing fresh cartridges into the cylinder as the battle went on around him, and now he snapped the weapon closed and lifted it, grinning as he aimed it at Bo.

  It was Bo’s gun that was empty now. He couldn’t do anything as the outlaw shouted to Scratch, “Drop your guns, mister, or I’ll blow holes in your pard, I swear I will!”

  Bo heard the curses coming from Scratch and called, “Kill the varmint!” He wasn’t surprised, though, when Scratch stood up a moment later and tossed his Remingtons to the ground in front of the water trough.

  “All right,” Scratch said. “Now what?”

  The outlaw chuckled. “Now I get a fresh horse, and an extra one too. No way those troopers’ll catch me.”

  Bo knew the man was about to pull the trigger, but before that could happen, something large and dark plummeted from the old balcony. The outlaw never saw it coming as it crashed into his head, shattering as it knocked him to his knees.

  Scratch left his feet in a dive, snatched one of the Remingtons from the ground as he rolled over, and came up firing. He had two shots left in the ivory-handled gun and put both of them into the fifth and final outlaw. The man went over backward, twitched a couple of times, and then lay still as a dark bloodstain spread over the front of his shirt.

  Around him were scattered the remains of the old rain barrel that had fallen on him.

  Bo lifted his eyes to the balcony, saw the gap in the railing where the barrel had been pushed through it. He saw the two children standing there as well, looking down at the street. He halfway expected them to disappear again, but they didn’t. Instead the boy called, “Reverend Ledbetter! Reverend Ledbetter, get up!”

  The preacher wasn’t moving, though. Scratch hurried to Bo’s side, helped him to his feet, and whispered, “Them ghosts are back.”

  “They’re not ghosts,” Bo said with a shake of his head. “They’re real, and they just saved our bacon.” He called up to the children, “Ruthie, Caleb, you kids come on down. We won’t hurt you. That’s a promise.”

  Another rumble sounded close by. Scratch said, “That ain’t thunder. That’s—”

  “Hoofbeats,” Bo said.

  Followed a moment later by the sound of a bugle.

  The cavalry patrol’s grizzled Irish sergeant took charge of the children while Bo and Scratch explained to Lieutenant Stilwell what had happened here in Duster, both tonight and months earlier, when the flood washed away most of the town.

  “I got a chance to talk to those kids a little before you rode in,” Bo said. “They made it out of the orphanage that night before it collapsed, because Ruthie got too scared to stay there and ran out, and Caleb went after her. He’s her brother.”

  “Then they were never ghosts?” the lieutenant asked. Scratch grunted like that struck him as sort of a dumb question.

  Bo shook his head. “No. They didn’t leave when everybody else did after the flood, because this was the closest thing to a home that they had. And Reverend Ledbetter stayed, so they wanted to be where he was. They tried to take care of him, but his mind was already twisted around. He didn’t believe they were alive. He was convinced they were ghosts.”

  “What about the way they disappeared?”

  Scratch said, “They been livin’ in this ghost town for months, scroungin’ for food and shelter and tryin’ to take care o’ the reverend whether he wanted ’em to or not, so they know every hidey-hole and shortcut around here. They didn’t know whether to trust Bo and me when we first rode in, so they didn’t come all the way out, just spied on us and eavesdropped until they figured out we wouldn’t hurt ’em. Then Tarver and the rest o’ them owlhoots showed up.”

  “And thanks to Ruthie and Caleb taking a hand, we survived that little ruckus,” Bo added. “That’s the story, Lieutenant. It’ll be up to you now to take care of those kids.”

  Stilwell nodded. “We’ll take them back to Fort Stockton with us. I’m sure we can find people to care for them.”

  The cavalry surgeon who was riding with the patrol had been working on Ledbetter. He looked up from his task and called, “Lieutenant, maybe you’d better get those kids and bring them over here.”

  Stilwell nodded, his face grim. “All right, Corporal.” He and Bo and Scratch went over to where Ruthie and Caleb w
ere talking with the massive Sergeant O’Hallihan. Stilwell led the children to the boardwalk where Ledbetter had been placed on a blanket while the surgeon examined his wounds.

  Ledbetter’s head was propped up on a folded blanket. He lifted a trembling hand, managed to smile, and said, “Children…Ruthie, Caleb…you’re real?” Although the old man’s eyes were filled with pain, they were clearer now.

  “We been tryin’ to tell you that for months, Reverend,” Caleb said. “We just wanted to help you.”

  “And in my grief and guilt, I…I would not allow it.” Ledbetter’s lined face contorted. “I’m sorry, so sorry…”

  “Don’t worry, Reverend,” Ruthie said. “We know you were just too sad to be thinkin’ straight. We were sad too. All of our friends died. You were all we had left.”

  Tears trickled down Ledbetter’s leathery cheeks. The children each took one of his hands and clutched it. “You’ll have new homes now,” he whispered. “Real homes. Thanks to these men…” He looked at Bo and Scratch. “God bless you. My deliverers.”

  A long sigh came from him as life faded from his eyes. Ruthie and Caleb started to sob, still holding his hands.

  Scratch looked over at Bo and said, “I can’t figure it. We didn’t deliver him nothin’ but a mess o’ trouble.”

  “Not to his way of thinking.” Bo looked up at the mountains. The thunder was faint now, and the lightning only a fading glow. “Looks like the storm is moving on.”

  St. Elmo in Winter

  Margaret Coel

  “St. Elmo oughtta be up ahead somewhere,” Liam shouted over one shoulder. His voice was muffled in the canyon, almost lost in the wind whispering in the pine trees and the swoosh of snow falling from the branches. He hunched forward over his cross-country skis, knees slightly bent, and stared at the GPS cushioned in the palms of his black ski mitts. He’d planted his skis across the trail. “Another half mile,” he said. Then he looked back. “Think you can make it?”

  Charlie dug both ski poles into the snow and pushed another few feet up the steep incline. Half a mile? They might as well be going to the moon. She flashed Liam the most reassuring smile she could muster. The temperature must have dropped fifteen degrees in the last ten minutes. Her fingers felt like icicles inside her gloves. The cold was seeping past her scarf and crawling around inside her jacket. It was starting to snow. They hadn’t seen any other skiers on the trail in more than an hour. Probably the other skiers had already turned back. But she and Liam had set out this morning for the old ghost town of St. Elmo, and she didn’t want to admit that the steep trail, the falling temperatures, and a little snow were more than she could handle.

  “You have to see St. Elmo in winter,” Liam had told her—what, a thousand times? “It’s just like it was in the 1880s. All the shops and houses up and down Main Street are the same. The wooden sidewalks are still there, and the log railings where they used to hitch the horses.”

  “And how would you know St. Elmo looks the same?” She could never resist teasing Liam about his ongoing love affair with Colorado history. It rivaled his affair with her, she sometimes thought, and she wondered which he would choose, if he had to choose between them. A graduate student in physics, in love with history! “You’re in the wrong field,” she’d told him, but had he taken up history, she never would have met him. He’d been her instructor in physics lab class. She guessed she probably wasn’t the first student who had fallen in love with Liam Hollings, with his black curly hair and green eyes, and when he wore his cowboy hat and boots, he looked as if he’d stepped out of the Old West. There were times—when he was lost in a novel about the Old West or one of those grainy cowboy and Indian films—that, she thought, he wished he had lived back then.

  “We could drive to St. Elmo next summer,” she’d suggested. But Liam had gone on about how St. Elmo in the summer just wasn’t the same. It was perfect in the winter, so isolated and still in the snow, like one of those miniature towns in a snow globe or a little town under a Christmas tree. He’d gone to St. Elmo many times, summer and winter. Winter was best.

  Liam smiled at her now as Charlie dug her poles in hard and pulled alongside him. There was a light dusting of snow across his backpack and shoulders, and snow flakes were popping out like ice crystals on the sleeves of her own jacket. She edged her skis to keep from slipping backward and tried to catch her breath. She could hear her heart pounding. The freezing air stung her lungs. The world had been blue and white and golden when they’d started out, the sun blazing in a clear blue sky, the snow on the ground glistening so white it had stung her eyes. The sun had disappeared some time ago, and now the sky looked like a sheet of lead pressing down. The snow on the trail had turned gray.

  “Looks like a few flurries, that’s all.” Liam shrugged the snow off his shoulders. “The storm isn’t forecast until tonight.” He threw a glance up the trail. “See the fork ahead?” he said, but even as he spoke, the gray sky seemed to drop down and envelop the fork. “St. Elmo’s just a short distance on the right. We have plenty of time to see the place before we have to ski back down.”

  They were staying at a cabin at Mount Princeton at the foot of Chalk Creek Canyon, and the thought of the fireplace and the way the warmth of the fire last night had spread into the small living room and the red firelight had licked at the log walls sent a shiver down Charlie’s spine. Even if they were to start back now, it would take the rest of the afternoon to reach the cabin. Her legs and arms felt numb with the cold.

  “Ready?” Liam said, but he was already skiing up the trail, poles pounding the snow.

  Charlie started after him. It felt better to move, loosen her muscles, get the blood flowing. She could see her breath floating ahead in gray puffs. Liam was right, she told herself. He was always right. He knew Chalk Creek Canyon, all the old gold mines and mining camps, all the ghost towns. He’d hiked and skied the trails with his grandfather when he was a kid, filling up on stories that his grandfather told about the way things used to be. And Liam had been hiking and skiing to ghost towns ever since.

  “We’ll follow the old railroad bed up the canyon,” he’d told her this morning, a map of the area spread on the table in front of them, their coffee mugs holding down two corners. “The Denver South Park and Pacific ran up Chalk Creek Canyon to the gold mines. Four or five trains a day, imagine, and every one of them stopped at St. Elmo. Passengers coming and going, all kinds of freight being loaded and unloaded. The depot was like Grand Central Station. St. Elmo was the biggest town in the area in the boom days of the 1880s and 1890s. Miners and railroaders lived there. Ranchers came into town on the weekends. There were boardinghouses, all kinds of stores—merchandise and hardware—a livery and fire station, the town hall where dances were held every Saturday night. Saloons and gambling parlors and whore houses. Then the mines played out. The trains kept running for a while, but pretty soon there wasn’t much reason to go up Chalk Creek Canyon. The tracks were finally pulled up in 1926. The few folks still living in St. Elmo just walked out the front doors and left everything the way it was.”

  “I get the picture,” she’d told him, and she’d even admitted that St. Elmo would be something to see, a town that had stayed on in the canyon when everything else had left. Mines shut down, tracks pulled up, people gone away.

  “We’ll have to watch ourselves on the trail,” Liam had said. “It’s not very wide. The old narrow gauge trains didn’t need much room.”

  Now Charlie planted her poles as hard as she could and tried to ski faster. Still Liam seemed farther and farther ahead, a gray splotch moving up the trail carved into the mountainside. The dark shadows of pine trees, boulders, and gray snow covered the slope that loomed over the south side of the narrow railroad bed. On the north side was the sheer drop off into the canyon several hundred feet below. Charlie tried to stay close to the slope, but the snow was getting heavier, blowing across the trail and stinging her face. She had to keep her head down, her chin tucked inside the f
olds of her scarf. Her face felt like ice. Her goggles were fogging. It was hard to make out where she was on the trail. She concentrated on staying close to the line of trees. If she swerved too far to the right, tipped her skis over the edge, she could tumble into the canyon before she knew what had happened. No one would ever find her. She could taste the panic beginning to rise inside her, like the burning aftermath of a spicy dinner.

  She couldn’t see Liam! The realization took her breath away. “Liam!” she shouted, but it was only the sound of her own voice that echoed in the silence of the falling snow. She made herself ski faster, digging the poles in hard to pull herself along. The snow cracked like ice beneath her skis, and the driving snow crusted on the front of her jacket and ski pants. She shouted again: “Liam, wait up!”

  She’d reached the fork in the trail, she realized. It had to be the fork because directly ahead were the dark shapes of trees looming out of the snow. She was in a whiteout, nearly blinded by the whiteness everywhere: air, sky, ground. She felt disoriented, slightly dizzy, and she had to lean forward on her poles a moment to regain her equilibrium. The storm predicted for tonight, when she and Liam had planned to be back at the cabin cooking steaks on the little grill in the kitchen and roasting potatoes in the fireplace and sipping hot wine—that storm was here now. Weather forecasts seldom got it right about the mountains: sunny and beautiful one moment, a blizzard the next. She could barely make out the branches of the fork. St. Elmo on the right, Liam had said.

  She headed to the right, still trying to stay with the line of trees, using their dark shadows as a guide. St. Elmo had to be close by. Houses and other buildings were still there, Liam had said. He was probably already in town looking for someplace where they could get in out of the storm. He’d come back for her. He wouldn’t leave her alone out here. “Liam!” she shouted again, hearing the panic rippling through the echo that came back to her.

  The trail was getting steeper, and that was almost funny, because she couldn’t see that she was climbing higher. But she felt the tightness in her chest, the strain in her calf muscles. Only the grooves in the base of her skis kept her from slipping backward. Exhaustion pulled at her, as if iron weights had attached themselves to her legs and arms. Her backpack felt like a hundred pounds. The cold had worked its way into her bones. She tried to flex her fingers, but they were numb. You could die in a storm like this, that was a fact, just lie down in the snow and go to sleep. She had to keep moving. Every few minutes, she heard someone shouting for Liam, and she realized that she was shouting and that she had settled into a weird rhythm: Ski, ski, shout. Ski, ski, shout.