Ghost Towns

by Louis L'Amour

  “You smell like the inside of a bottle,” Brian said. “They tell me you were knocking ’em back pretty hard in there.”

  “Guess I was, then.” I shook free of his grip and walked to his patrol car under my own power. “Your place got pillows?” The army’s guardhouse had been short on such luxuries.

  “You can wad your shirt up and sleep on that,” Brian suggested.

  On the way over, I made Brian stop once and let me out so I wouldn’t vomit all over his backseat. I didn’t last more than about twenty minutes in the cell before I was asleep. I hadn’t taken my shirt off, since I was sure that process—not to mention bruises I didn’t want to see—would make me puke again.

  From the cell, I thought I heard a telephone ringing, but couldn’t tell if it was in a dream. A little later, Brian unlocked the door and shook me awake. “Get up, Marsh!”

  Remembering where I was took a few seconds, and remembering how I got there longer than that. “Why?”

  “We got an emergency call,” he said. “You know George Moffat?”

  I pictured an old man, hands always shaking a little, fingers starting to hook inward like claws. He had a ready smile, a few teeth short of a full set, and eyes that had almost disappeared behind folds of skin while I was still in grade school. “He still around?”

  “He was. His sister called in and said he’s wandered off by himself.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “He’s not right in the head, Marsh. Senile, I reckon. She takes care of him. It’s just them two on their ranch and they don’t really work that anymore. She doesn’t know where he’s gone or when he left.”

  The fog in my mind began to lift. I had always liked George Moffat. Hell, everybody liked George. He was a character, a long-time rancher with roots in the area stretching back further than just about anybody’s. He always had a penny and a wink for kids he met in town, and a grin for their parents.

  He had been forgetful for years, it seemed. But I hadn’t heard that he’d gone so far downhill. It was a cool night, and if he was stumbling around in the dark, he could do himself some serious damage. Over a few days, he could die of exposure.

  “Sheriff says you can join the search party,” Brian said. “We need every able-bodied man we can get looking for him.”

  “My head is still pretty—”

  “I’m sorry for not being clear, Marsh. Sheriff says you’ll join the search party or he’ll make sure the county prosecutor throws the book at you. You’ll be charged with drunk and disorderly, assault and battery, property damage, and whatever else they can think of.”

  “Isn’t blackmail still against the law?” I asked. “Or did they change that while I was away?”

  Brian didn’t think I was funny. “Your call,” he said. “You coming, or am I locking you in here by yourself?”

  “You got a jacket I can use?” I asked. “And water and maybe a gun? My stuff is all in my truck.”

  “We’ll swing by and pick it up,” he said. “It’s on the way to the Moffat ranch.”

  As Brian promised, we drove back to the Sundown Saloon. I got my denim jacket off the truck seat, my Winchester rifle from the rack, and what was left of my hat off the ground. I punched it a couple of times and made it look more like a hat, but it’d never keep my head dry again.

  About thirty people had gathered at the Moffat ranch. The women would stay with Shirley, old George’s sister, who had to be at least seventy. The men had come to search. I had the feeling most of them had not just been arrested or beaten up.

  Brian took a backseat to Herman Fairhope, who was fifteen years older than us and acted as if he’d been with the sheriff’s office since the days of Wyatt Earp and the unpleasantness in Tombstone. Herman handed down search rules like they were commandments from on high and he was slightly more important than God. Stay with your team, don’t get out of sight, carry water and a firearm for protection and to signal with.

  I recognized a few of the men. The local faces got older but otherwise didn’t change much. Kids grew up and left the area, and like me, sometimes came back. It was hard for ranch families to keep them around, and getting harder all the time. Then the war had disrupted families everywhere.

  These were hard-bitten men with leathery, rawboned faces chapped by wind and weather. They wore denim jackets like mine or canvas barn coats, work boots, and hats that they toiled in every day. Most had arrived in trucks, some towing horse trailers. The horses were turned out into a corral; we would be searching on foot, the way Shirley believed George had gone.

  By the time we got underway, the sun skinning over the Dragoon Mountains was spreading pink undertones across cloud bottoms. It hadn’t rained since mid-September and Halloween had passed, so the ground was dry and hard. Old George hadn’t left much in the way of tracks, just a few scuff marks that might have indicated he had gone east. The search party broke into groups of five and set out toward the various points of the compass. My group, which included Brian Wallis—presumably so I wouldn’t escape—headed into the rising sun.

  We worked our way across grassy pastures that hadn’t been recently grazed. Pigweed grew as tall as a man, as did sunflowers, their blooms long gone. Yucca stalks erupted from spiky balls and probed the sky. Thorny mesquites dotted the landscape, their leaves darker green than the creosote bushes trooping around them. Dried-out Russian thistle had stacked up against fences and more grew wild, along with yellow-tipped rabbitbrush. The scant tracks that might or might not have been George’s had long since vanished; no path showed through the overgrown fields.

  Besides Brian and me, our group consisted of Lester Crain, a beefy guy who had been a friend of my brother Dayton Jr., an older rancher named Pat Griffin, and a slender, gray-haired man who looked familiar but who I couldn’t place. We had been on the trail a couple of hours when a search plane flew over, wagging its wings at us. We watched it go by, and then Brian called a rest break. I glanced at the man I didn’t know, who sipped from one of the blanket-sided canteens the sheriff’s officers had loaned us. The sun had been beating down on us, warming the day considerably.

  He caught my eye as I unscrewed the cap off my own canteen. “You’re Maude Sinclair’s boy?” he asked.

  I swallowed, drew the canteen away from my lips. “Yes, sir. Marsh Sinclair.”

  He covered the distance between us with his hand outstretched. “Isaac Schultheis,” he said, and instantly I knew who he was. “I’m sorry for your loss, and sorry I never got to know your mother better. She seemed like a fine woman.”

  Easy for him to think so, since he didn’t know her. Isaac Schultheis owned a grocery store in Fry that she wouldn’t patronize because he was Jewish. I had met plenty of Jews in the army, and Italians, Irishmen, and Negroes too, and more in New York afterward. As long as they weren’t phonies or too full of themselves, they were all okay with me.

  Truth was, my mother had a mean streak, and as she got older she stopped trying to control it. She seemed to think age gave her license to make any nasty, hurtful comment she wanted, and rarely offered anything but complaint and criticism. I didn’t come home after getting out of the stockade partly because I was embarrassed to see my friends, but mostly because I didn’t want to see her. Phone calls were bad enough. You’d think once she had told me a hundred times how disappointed my father would have been in me, that would be plenty, but she wouldn’t let up.

  “Were you in the war?” Schultheis asked.

  “Yes, sir.” When I didn’t elaborate, he searched my face for a minute. I could tell when he remembered what he’d heard about me, although he tried unsuccessfully to hide it. I didn’t look away until he did, opening his canteen and taking another drink.

  “Guess we’d best get on with it, then,” he said.

  “Right.”

  My mother was right about me, was what it came down to. My father, Dayton Sinclair, had served in the first war. He never talked much about what had happened there, but it was assumed because
of the kind of man he was that he had been a hero. He had been dead for nine years by the time the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.

  The next day my brother Dayton—we all called him Day, and that suited my mother, who had believed that the sun rose and set for him since the instant of his birth—enlisted. Day was killed at Normandy, cut in half by Nazi machine-gun fire while storming the beach. The soldier who told us that also told us that his friends blew up the machine-gun nest, as if that made it somehow less horrible.

  I supposed I could have stayed out of it, since my father and brother were both dead and my mother needed someone to help run the ranch. But she didn’t protest when I told her I was enlisting. She found some Mexican workers through the bracero program and they did a good job on the ranch, and she probably liked them better than she ever had me. Anyway, I had Nazis to kill, an older brother I idolized to avenge.

  Only it didn’t turn out that way.

  The army was full of fakes and creeps, guys who had never ridden a horse or milked a cow, much less pulled a stubborn calf out of its mother at four in the morning in ten-degree weather. Some thought I was a dumb farm kid, which maybe I was. I thought they were too slick for their own good.

  But I got through basic at Fort Hood and made it to France a few months before the end. That was where I learned that real combat, as opposed to the idea of it, scared the hell out of me. I didn’t want to be on the front shooting Germans, but behind thick, solid walls someplace.

  What ended my military career was a long night in a little French town called St. Fromond-Eglise. We moved in on the town, which had been occupied by the Nazis, through fog so thick I couldn’t see three feet past the end of my rifle. We had spread out too far, and at some point I realized I had no idea where the rest of my patrol was. I couldn’t call to them, because I didn’t know where the Krauts were. I was walking blind, feeling like my ears had been stuffed with cotton, and so scared of walking into a nest of Nazis that I could hardly swallow.

  I almost bumped into the wall of an old stone farmhouse before I saw it. Feeling my way to a window, I peered inside. There didn’t seem to be anyone home. Figuring I could hide out until the fog lifted, I broke the lock on the door and went in.

  It was cowardly, but I had been coming to accept the fact that I was not courageous. At least not without a few drinks inside me. In the kitchen I found a couple dozen bottles of wine. I thought maybe I could pour myself some bravery, get back out there, and find the rest of the guys.

  I cracked open the first bottle.

  And then the second. I didn’t stop drinking. I finished that bottle, most of another, and fell asleep at the kitchen table. When I woke up, it was almost noon.

  Twelve of our men had died in a firefight during the night. A battle I had missed, sleeping right through in a drunken stupor.

  Still half-drunk, I stumbled outside reeking of wine. The fact that our guys had won the fight didn’t make things any easier on me when I found them. I had been AWOL, drunk on duty, and exhibited extreme cowardice under fire. The battle I had slept through would be my last. Until my dishonorable discharge came through, I spent the rest of my enlistment in the guardhouse. My military career at an undistinguished end, I bummed around the East Coast for a few years. Three weeks after my mother’s death, the sheriff managed to track me down and I came home to figure out what to do with the ranch and all her things.

  Then, of course, booze got me in trouble again, and here I was, hung over and aching from the fight, tramping through the brush looking for a lost old man. So far all I had seen was a coyote, a few field mice, and about a dozen jackrabbits. Vultures circled overhead, and every time they swooped low, someone gave a shout and ran over to see if they had found George. So far, they hadn’t.

  Mid-afternoon, a sheriff’s deputy in a Jeep found us, bringing bologna sandwiches and refilling our canteens. None of the other search teams, he reported, had turned up anything. The plane had flown over the whole region, farther than even a healthy man could walk, much less one as old as George, without success. We took twenty minutes to eat the sandwiches, then continued our search.

  We had almost reached the San Pedro River when the sun went down. The cottonwoods lining the riverbanks had lost most of their leaves, but a few stragglers still clung, yellow and faded. We approached with the sunset at our backs, passing north of the ruins of the old Spanish fort called Presidio Santa Cruz de Terranate. It had only been occupied for five years before the Apaches drove them away, a century before the little town on the river’s far side, Contention City, had been established.

  “We’re going to camp at Contention,” Brian Wallis informed us. “Supplies should already have been dropped off there, and we’ll continue the search come daylight.”

  “Aw, Brian,” Les Crain grouched. “I got stuff to do.”

  “We all do,” Brian said. “That’s why we asked everybody to agree before starting out that they’d be in on this until the end.”

  “I didn’t think it’d go overnight. How could that old man cover so much territory?”

  “Sheriff’s called for more searchers and airplanes,” Brian said. “Tomorrow I’m sure we’ll find him, but for tonight, unless you want to walk back by yourself, you’re stuck with us.”

  Les’s gaze bore into me. “Stuck is right,” he said.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out what he meant. He had been one of Day’s best friends. The fact that I had come home instead of Day had upset my mother tremendously, and she wasn’t alone in that regard.

  In the half-light of dusk, we scrambled down the west bank and forded the river, which was only about eighteen inches deep here. Contention City rose on the east bank—what was left of it, anyway.

  The town had been built as a mill site for Tombstone. Tombstone had miners and money but no wood or water, and Contention City had both, as did Fairbank and Charleston to the south. All were empty now, mostly forgotten. Ghost towns.

  Contention City had been constructed mostly of local stone and adobe, with some wooden walls and floors and ceiling timbers. Little remained except a few walls, most half-obscured by mesquite. A former mill, where ore from Tombstone’s mines had been crushed, was the tallest remnant. Contention City also had the nearest train depot to Tombstone, and part of that was still standing as well.

  Sure enough, someone had dropped off bedrolls and tarps, cooking gear, and some grub for dinner. Brian and Pat Griffin set to clearing a fire ring and starting a fire with downed branches. It turned out that Pat had brought a couple bottles of tequila in a knapsack he’d been toting all day, and before dinner was even cooked, people started in on one of those. Every inch of me ached, so I lowered myself gently onto a carpet of cottonwood leaves and waited for the bottle.

  When I reached for it, Brian Wallis shot me a look that could have frozen the flames. I passed the bottle to Isaac, who took a swallow and handed it off. “His family lived in Contention, didn’t they?” he asked. “George Moffat’s?”

  That sounded right, and I said so. I must have looked surprised that he would know.

  “I’ve made kind of a hobby of local history,” he said. “It’s a fascinating region, and I like to know about the place that I live in.”

  “I think there was some old story about the Moffats in those days,” I said, but the details were lost to me.

  “There was an altercation of some kind,” Isaac said. “One of the participants was a Moffat, I’m sure of it. Just give me a few moments.” The bottle made it back around to me. I skipped it. Once again, Isaac took just enough to wet his throat. After his every swallow, Lester Crain stared daggers at me, folding thick arms across his chest.

  “It involved a big cat,” Isaac said. His eyes were closed, like he was visualizing a page of a book he had read. “A jaguar. A white jaguar! That’s what it was.”

  “Never heard of such a thing,” Pat Griffin said.

  “Of course not,” Isaac replied. “This is a story, and stories have to include things that
aren’t commonplace. That’s the whole point. Anyway, as I remember it, this Moffat fellow was hunting outside of town. He said the white jaguar had been attacking local livestock, and he shot it. When he returned with the carcass, townsfolk worried. To the Apaches, they said, the white jaguar was sacred, and they worried about what might happen when word spread that one of their own had killed it. The Apaches were still a real threat, given that Geronimo didn’t finally surrender until 1886. The incident in Contention City would have been a couple of years before that, maybe eighty-two or eighty-three.”

  “What happened? Was there an Apache attack?” I asked.

  “As I understand it, the town suffered a rash of bad luck. Fires, accidents, a mill building collapsed. Finally, something especially tragic happened…I think the drowning of a young boy in the river. That was the spark that set things off. Guns came into play. Someone took a shot at one of the Moffats. Apparently a Moffat fired back, and the battle was on.” He offered a wan smile. “The mechanics of gunfights are, I’m afraid, outside my area of expertise. Let’s just say bullets flew and a fire started, some say coming down the hill from the old presidio. When it was all over, dozens were dead and much of Contention City was destroyed. It was the beginning of the end for this place.”

  The sun had gone down, the only light now coming from the fire pit. Brian passed out bottles of Coke and plates of cold carne asada and warmed beans, and conversation died while we wolfed down our dinners. When we were done, Brian poured some camp coffee he had brewed and Pat opened his second bottle.

  They had barely touched it—I was sticking with coffee—when Lester Crain started in on me.

  “You said the search party would be all men, Brian,” he said, staring straight at me. “Ain’t how it looks from here.”

  “What are you…oh, let it go, Les,” Brian said.

  “Let it go? His brother was the only one in that family worth a damn, and yet he’s the one sittin’ here. How’m I supposed to let that go?”