Ghost Towns

by Louis L'Amour

  Hell, dyin’ ain’t that bad, I guess. Ain’t that right, Mr. Kennedy? You should know. Ha. At least I’ll be able to sleep. Ain’t had a decent night’s sleep in thirty years. Not bad dreams, nothin’ like that. No hobgoblins. No haints. Just a bunch of treetops, blowin’ in the wind. I see ’em all the time. Ponderosa pines. Swayin’. Can you figure that one out, peon? You’re just some miner, I warrant. Found any color? No, that ain’t likely. Not the way you’re dressed. No, these here mountains played out years ago. Like this town. Like Mr. Kennedy. Hell’s fire, like me.

  Wasn’t that way back in ’68 and ’69. This was Elizabethtown. E-Town, we called her, for short. The first incorporated town in New Mexico Territory. Colfax County seat. All ’round Baldy Mountain, folks found gold. Before long, E-Town had two hotels, three dance halls and seven saloons. That’s when I come up. Struck up a bargain with my pard yonder, Mr. Kennedy. Charles Kennedy’s his name.

  Charles Kennedy. You recognize that name, huh? Yeah, I reckon Mr. Kennedy’s a name remembered well in these parts. He should be. And Clay Allison? Heard tell of him? No? That’s a surprise. Clay was a good hand with a gun. He’s dead now. Been dead. And was gone from these parts long before his demise. But I’ll get to that directly.

  Back then, I was what you might call a trader, like my pa and his pa, who was runnin’ trains from Missouri ’long the Santa Fe Trail before your pappy was born. But my interest was in medicine. Wanted to be a doctor. Wanted that real bad. And tradin’ was what I done to get me close to that dream of mine. Costs a passel of money to learn to be a sawbones.

  So I partnered up with Mr. Kennedy. He had him an inn on the pike betwixt E-Town and Taos. In that meadow over that way. The inn’s long gone. Clay and the boys burned ’er down. It’s all gone now, ain’t it? Nothin’ left but rottin’ cabins and some old stone buildings.

  You was right, Mr. Kennedy! You cursed E-Town good. Cursed all of us mighty fine, ol’ pard.

  Sorry, Mr. Mex. Let me get back to my story. My confession. Yep, ain’t much left to E-Town but this here graveyard. I knowed this boneyard well. Over yonder, that’s where folks say Charles Kennedy is buried, but you know that ain’t true as Mr. Kennedy’s been travelin’ with me. But there’s where we planted Pony O’Neil. Vigilantes rubbed him out in ’68. He ain’t there, neither. Nor is Wall Henderson over by that dead tree.

  I dug ’em up.

  Both Pony and Wall made mighty fine corpses, and any doctor’ll tell you that a good cadaver is hard to come by in medical school. So that was my trade. I dug ’em up and packed ’em in a barrel full of charcoal and such. Freighted ’em to Cheyenne durin’ the early years, till the Denver Pacific reached Denver City in 1870. And from there, just ride the rails all the way to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the University of Michigan’s medical school.

  Then, after sellin’ my prime specimens, I’d buy wares and come back to Cheyenne, Denver, and down to E-Town. Bring somethin’ here that folks wanted, and haul somethin’ in need at Ann Arbor. That’s the way you run a freightin’ enterprise.

  “Your cadavers are superb,” Professor Sawyer told me. “Young, healthy men.”

  Which they was before they got kilt. You wouldn’t find many old-timers and younguns in a minin’ camp like E-Town. Just young men, full of vim and vigor. And, later, full of lead. Which is when I visited ’em.

  Yep, Professor Sawyer sure liked me fetchin’ him top-rate cadavers. And ever’ once in a while, he’d let me watch his young students go to work.

  But then folks started suspicionin’ certain unwanted activities at the cemetery here. E-Town was boomin’. We had us a newspaper, mercantiles, billiard halls, and whores. A man could buy the best old Kentucky whiskey in the territory, or try his hand buckin’ the tiger at a faro layout. There was a Chinaman who had a laundry, and folks was buildin’ this big ditch to bring in water from the high country. The Moreno Water and Minin’ Company, they called it. Didn’t pan out. But they sure tried to make ’er work. E-Town was buckin’ to become more than just a county seat. Folks saw ’er on ’er way to become the best by-grab minin’ burg in the Southern Rockies.

  ’Bout that time was when I discovered that Mr. Kennedy and I was good pards. You see, I was what you might call a silent partner in his inn. Mr. Kennedy was greedy, though—most folks who come to E-Town was greedy. Hell, it was greed that brought us all to this high country. Anyhow, Mr. Kennedy had this here side business. Some miner would have a poke full of dust on his way to Taos, maybe Santa Fe, and they’d never be seen or heard from again. Maybe Mr. Kennedy would slit a throat. Maybe he’d just brain the poor bastard with the blunt end of an ax. Then he’d burn the body and bury what was left, if anything was left.

  But I changed the burnin’ part once I learnt what he was doin’. It was luck. Fate. Somethin’ like that. I just happened to walk in on him one evenin’ when he was draggin’ Jim Witherspoon from the supper table. He seen me, dropped the body, and reached for his ax, but I always carried a Navy .36 in those years, and before he could take a step toward me, he was starin’ into that cold barrel.

  “What you gonna do with him?” I gestured at the late Mr. Witherspoon with the Colt.

  He didn’t answer. Never was much of a talker, Mr. Kennedy. So I took a chance and lowered the hammer on the Colt, slid it into my holster, and made a bit of a proposition. After a few long, cold, silent minutes, Mr. Kennedy set that ax aside, and me and him stuffed Witherspoon into a barrel of mine.

  Professor Sawyer praised Jim Witherspoon’s corpse too. And when I brung him the prime bodies of some sharper and his concubine, well, that’s when the professor told me that he just might be able to help me get into the university there so I could study to be a doctor. Study proper. In a few years, I’d be hangin’ a shingle with my name on it. Finally, I’d be Moses Q. Logan, M.D. Professor Sawyer told me to look him up next time I was in Ann Arbor, which I always done when I had a new cadaver or two for him and his students.

  Things could have been goin’ no finer. I loaded up on apples, calico, and whiskey, which I hauled to Cheyenne, Denver City, and down into E-Town, New Mexico Territory.

  Only…ain’t that the way of the world. Here I was, two jumps from seein’ my dream come true, drinkin’ a whiskey with Clay Allison and the boys in the Senate Saloon, when Mr. Kennedy’s wife come pushin’ through the batwing doors, hands and face covered with blood.

  She wasn’t his real wife. Not in the eyes of God. Hell, I didn’t even know what name those injuns had given her. Nope, she was nothin’ but a Navajo bitch he’d bartered for some years back, and she didn’t speak English no better than you did, but she was a woman, injun or not, her eyes ablaze with terror, and Clay and the boys was in their cups. All she yelled was some words in Spanish, but that got the boys’ blood boilin’, and mine icy with fear.

  Asesinato. Asesinato. Asesinato.

  You sabe that, huh? Yeah, me too. I knew exactly what she was sayin’ at the Senate Saloon that cool autumn day.

  Murder.

  Murder.

  Murder.

  Don’t know what all had happened, but, well, I suspect Mr. Kennedy had gotten contrary with her, and her with him. She didn’t hold with his killin’, told him so, so he had tried to kill her. Put a nasty cut atop her head, must have thought she was dead, but she come to while he was pullin’ a cork on a jug of forty-rod, and she run and fetched Clay Allison.

  “Sumbitch,” Clay said. He run over and helped Mrs. Kennedy to a chair, then drawed his Colt, and yelled, “Let’s go, boys! There’s trouble at Kennedy’s inn!”

  That saloon emptied real quick, except for Russ the barkeep, and his swamper, a little old greaser named Pedro. And me. My legs wouldn’t work. I just kept starin’ at that Navajo, wonderin’ if she planned on informin’ Clay and the boys what I had been doin’. I wasn’t even sure she knowed what I was doin’. Pedro, after he doctored that head of hers, he started conversin’ with her real soft in that Mex lingo, while Russ and me just stared, mutter-in�
� some flapdoodle, mainly waitin’ on the boys to return.

  I spied a good bay mare at the hitchin’ rail and figured I could fork that saddle and light a shuck for parts unknown if Clay and the boys come back suspicionin’ me.

  That fat Navajo knowed aplenty. She told Pedro that Mr. Kennedy had been murderin’ guests in their sleep, which he done sometimes, but other times, he’d kill ’em whilst they et supper. She said he had buried a few after he had burned the bodies. She never looked at me, just at Pedro and Russ. And ’bout ten minutes later I heard the boys. Shoutin’. Madder’n hornets. Yes, sir, that bay mare was lookin’ mighty temptin’ to me ’long ’bout then.

  My legs workin’ once more, I stepped onto the boardwalk and saw ’em, draggin’ Mr. Kennedy down the street, a rope ’round his neck, Clay proddin’ him with his .44.

  “Fiend!” one of the boys called him.

  Mr. Kennedy, he just stared at me when they reined up in front of the Senate.

  “Found a poke under his bed,” Clay informed us. He held out a leather bag that had the initials E.W. burned into it.

  “That’d be Eugene Willis,” Russ said, and he walked up and spit in Mr. Kennedy’s face.

  “I ain’t seen hide nor hair of Gene since he lit out for Taos,” another gent said.

  Then Zeke McMasters held out a box he was carryin’, and as Pedro informed ’em all what Mrs. Kennedy said, Zeke dumped some bones into the dust.

  Well, you never heard nothin’ like the roar that shot out of Mr. Kennedy’s mouth. Pretty good yell, it was, ’specially considerin’ that rope pullin’ tight on his neck. He was howlin’ like the devil hisself, and starin’ right at me. Starin’ through me. Then he started talkin’.

  He cussed us all. Cursed us, rather. Cursed me and Clay Allison and his Navajo woman. Cursed us to the deepest depths of Hell’s fires. Cursed Zeke McMasters and Russ the barkeep. And cursed E-Town.

  So I drawed my Navy and shot him.

  Had to. You see that, don’t you?

  What you gotta sabe is this, amigo. I ain’t never kilt nobody before in my life. Not till then. I dug up bodies, sure. But you need to see it this way. I was doin’ the work of science, helpin’ teach young doctors what they needed to know. I was the cadaver man. Mr. Kennedy, he was the killer. Ask him if you don’t believe me. He never lied to nobody. Not once in more’n thirty years I’ve knowed him. He was the one murderin’ all ’em travelers. It was him that kilt Jim Witherspoon and Gene Willis and all those others. Sure, we split what money we found in their poke, but I never laid no hand on ’em…till after they was dead.

  But the boys might not have seen it that way.

  So I kilt Mr. Kennedy.

  Clay Allison, he allowed that mine was a scratch shot, but it wasn’t no such thing. I knowed where I was aimin’, learned a thing or two at Ann Arbor, by grab. That bullet severed the subclavian artery, and Mr. Kennedy bled out real quick. Never said nothin’ else. Didn’t have no chance to after I shot him. He just fell and was dead by the time Clay and McMasters rolled him over.

  “We was gonna hang him!” Zeke McMasters yelled at me, angry that I had spoilt all his fun.

  “A fiend like that,” I said, “don’t deserve a rope. He just deserves killin’!”

  Then Clay yelled out that we rid E-Town of that blight in the meadow, so they all run back down to the Mr. Kennedy’s inn, and burned it to the ground.

  You might have heard stories, amigo, that Clay and the boys chopped off Mr. Kennedy’s head, that we rode down to Cimarron after killin’ Mr. Kennedy and put his head on the post in front of Lambert’s place, just to let folks be warned that E-Town didn’t tolerate no mischief of the most fiendish kind. Falsehoods. Them’s shameless falsehoods. And some folks say Mr. Kennedy was hanged from the tree. That tree yonder. The dead one. Others say that Clay and the boys dragged him to death. Nope. Didn’t happen that way, did it, Mr. Kennedy?

  And there have been some that say that the bones that got found at the inn wasn’t even human bones, but dog bones. The bones was human, I guaran-damn-tee you, but they wasn’t Gene Willis’s remains, although they got buried as such on the far side of this boneyard. Nope, Gene Willis was in one of my apple barrels, ready for the trip to Ann Arbor.

  I looked over at my wagon, started to sweat, and then I seen that Navajo wife of his’n just eyein’ me.

  So I kilt her that night after Clay and the boys had gone down to Cimarron, and I said I’d bury Mr. Kennedy myself, since I had kilt him. They agreed to that, but it wasn’t Mr. Kennedy’s body that I buried in that pit I dug. It was his wife whose throat I cut that night whilst she slept. The next morn, when Zeke McMasters asked ’bout her, I told him and the boys that I figured she’d gone back to her own kind, and they accepted that.

  Yeah, I thought about takin’ her ’long with me to Ann Arbor, but I wasn’t sure they wanted no bodies of no dirty injun. I mean doctors didn’t practice medicine on injuns, just white folks like Mr. Kennedy.

  And he would be a prime specimen. So would Gene Willis.

  So I loaded Mr. Kennedy up in another barrel, freighted ’em to Denver City, and from there I rode the rails to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I sent word to Professor Sawyer that I had two new specimens for him. We met that night, as we always done, at that dark old building. I backed the wagon in, unloaded the barrels, and waited for the professor to pry off the lids.

  The gas lamp flared gently, and Professor Sawyer marveled at Gene Willis as we laid him on the doctorin’ table, brushed off the charcoal dust, and I told him Gene wasn’t nothing, wait till he laid eyes on my other cadaver, told him that I was ready to start my studyin’. He didn’t say nothin’, busy as he was openin’ that other lid, and then he looked down, and tumbled away, retchin’, his face turnin’ ashen quicker than I’d kilt Mr. Kennedy.

  “You bastard!” The professor pulled hisself to his feet, wipin’ his mouth with his sleeve, jerkin’ away from me when I reached out to help him. “You bloody damned fool!”

  I didn’t understand none of it. “But…” was all that come out of my throat, and then I looked at that barrel, inside it, and that gas lamp didn’t need to be no brighter, because I seen it. Seen it fine. Seen the worms and the maggots and Mr. Kennedy’s eyes, just glarin’ at me. Laughin’ at me.

  “I…” I turned back to Professor Sawyer. “I packed him in charcoal…like…” I looked back. Couldn’t believe it. Nor explain it. He couldn’t decompose like that. Not that quick. Not with all the precautions I taken. “Like I always done.”

  “Get out of here!” He was stumblin’ away, runnin’, gaggin’ more.

  “But…”

  “And take that…” He stopped just long enough to point at the barrel. “Take…that…with you!”

  “It won’t never happen again!” I told him, but the professor just yelled that he never wanted to see my face again. That if I ever showed up, he’d sic the constable after me.

  I looked down at that horrible sight, and slowly put the lid back on that barrel, tamped it down with the mallet, heaved Mr. Kennedy back on the wagon, leavin’ Gene Willis on the table for all those lucky young doctors. When I closed that lid, I knowed I was closin’ the door to my dreams, knowed I’d never become no doctor.

  It was charcoal. I hadn’t done nothin’ wrong. Wasn’t hot or nothin’. A body like that should keep, like Gene Willis done, but Mr. Kennedy didn’t. So I took him back to New Mexico, to the cabin I’d built next to that little pond that’s fed by the creek. The worms and the maggots was gone, just disappeared, when I reached the territory again, but it hadn’t been no dream. No, they had done their work on him, foul critters, manglin’ that corpse somethin’ fierce.

  That’s when ’em dreams started. The ones where all I can see is ’em treetops swayin’ in the breeze. I’d go to sleep, and then wake up, and that was most peculiar because I wasn’t dreamin’ of Mr. Kennedy and the maggots eatin’ his face. Just pine trees.

  Well, I told Mr. Kennedy, “What am I to do w
ith you?” And struck me, it did, that Mr. Kennedy would make a mighty fine skeleton. Maybe I’d teach myself to be a doctor, so I got him out of that barrel and drug him to the table, sharpened my knives, and went to work. Yes, sir, the coyotes et real good that night outside my cabin. I got Mr. Kennedy dissected.

  Best way to get a skeleton cured proper, I’d learned from one of ’em young students in Michigan, is to bleach the bones underwater. Carefully, I loaded Mr. Kennedy into some shoe boxes, which I sunk with rocks and let Mr. Kennedy sit there and think ’bout the pain he’d done caused me, crushin’ my doctorin’ dreams, and let him rest there for the winter.

  My plan to be a M.D. wasn’t the only thing that went bust that year. E-Town started to die up too. It was like Mr. Kennedy had cursed this town after all. Must have been two thousand folks there the year before, but by the followin’ spring, there was only a couple of hundred. Clay pulled out. So did Russ and Zeke McMasters and the rest of the boys. The fools that stayed didn’t stay long, saw there wasn’t no future in E-Town. Gold’s fickle. Like dreams, I reckon.

  Oh, I stayed. Probably would have stayed the rest of my days if ’em kids hadn’t come by. It was April, and the lake was still frozed, but one of ’em boxes of Mr. Kennedy’s bones had floated up somehow. Rocks hadn’t held it or somethin’. Maybe it was just Mr. Kennedy, tryin’ to reach the surface. Mr. Kennedy, he never told me why or how he done it, but it got done. Some boys from Cimarron had come over to do some ice-fishin’. But they seen that shoe box, and they picked it out usin’ the ax, opened it up, and went off screamin’. Screamin’ ’bout murder and bones.

  I barely got out of here with my life. I found the bones the boys had dropped, packed ’em up in my war bag, and that’s when I heard the posse ridin’ down. Ridin’ for me. They must have figured that I’d kilt some fellow just the way Mr. Kennedy done all ’em boys, and that one strumpet. Wasn’t right sure they’d believe my story, ’bout me becomin’ a doctor, and if they learnt who I was, they might recollect ’bout Mr. Kennedy, might start thinkin’ that I had somethin’ to do with those murders, might recall that it had been me that had shot Mr. Kennedy dead. Might have strung me up like you greasers plan on doin’.