Ghost Towns

by Louis L'Amour

  “Lester,” I said. “I miss Day too, you know. If I could bring him back—”

  He glared at me, his jaw thrust aggressively in my direction. “Funny, I thought this was how you wanted it. You inheriting the whole ranch, not having to share anything.”

  “Guess you don’t know me that well, do you?”

  “Know as much as I want to. I know you’re a coward, a worthless—”

  “That’s enough, Les!” Brian snapped.

  From my seat I could see up the slope of the opposite riverbank, toward the old Spanish fort. A three-quarter moon didn’t do much more than paint the leaves of the mesquite and other plants with a silvery brush, but I thought I saw light flickering near the ruins. “Look!” I said.

  “What is it?” Isaac asked.

  “A light, up on the hill.”

  Everybody watched, but it didn’t recur. After a minute, people began grumbling and hitting the bottle again.

  “I’m going to take a look,” I said. Before anyone could protest, I stormed away from the campsite, across the cool, muddy river, and started up the far side. I was sure I had seen something. And I wanted to get away from Les before he started a fight. I hadn’t volunteered to investigate the mystery light because I was some kind of hero, I just didn’t want another beating.

  Away from the fire and with my legs soaked, the night’s chill took on a bite. I drew leather gloves from my jacket pockets and pulled them on. Thorns snagged my clothes as I climbed the slope, but I ignored them and kept going.

  The crumbled adobe walls of the presidio, most less than four feet tall, made a flat pattern among acres of mesquite, spectral in the moonlight. I paused at the edge of the ruins, listening.

  There came another flicker of yellow light, like distant lightning through thick clouds. In that instant of illumination I saw a lean figure. “Hello!” I called, trying to keep my voice strong. “Who’s there?”

  “You best get outta here!” a male voice responded. It was thin, barely carrying across the short distance. An old man’s voice. “Might already be too late.”

  Goose bumps raised the hair on my neck. “Mr. Moffat? Is that you? It’s Marsh Sinclair.”

  “Young Marsh. Seems like just last week I was pullin’ pennies outta your ears.”

  I started weaving my way through the brush and adobe walls. “That’s right. You okay, Mr. Moffat? You’re not hurt?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “There’s a search party out looking for you. They’ve gone every which way. Flying airplanes over and everything. There’s a few of us across the river, in Contention City.”

  “Never meant for anything like that,” he said. I could see him now, headed toward me. He walked with his usual lanky stride, his steps shorter than they had once been, but his head held high. One sleeve of his shirt was torn almost completely off and his pants legs hung in ribbons around his boots. He gripped a flashlight that glowed weakly, then blinked out, no doubt the source of the flickering light.

  “What did you mean, too late?” I asked, half afraid of the answer.

  “Let’s get your friends out of there,” he said. It didn’t tell me much, but the urgency he said it with was convincing.

  On the way down the steep slope from the plateau, me holding his arm much of the time to help his balance, he started telling me what he had come for. “You know my people helped found Contention, right?”

  “I’ve heard that,” I said.

  “Well, it’s so. Only there’s been a story goin’ around…a lie, I believe, and I wanted to put it straight while I still could. My mind ain’t what it once was, maybe you heard.”

  “I heard you were having some trouble remembering.”

  “That’s the nice way to say it. I’m gettin’ old and forgetful, and reckon the time I got left is short. I wanted to find a way to prove the lie before I’m gone, even if it’s only to myself. To witnesses would’ve been better, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that.” He allowed himself a dry chuckle. “Course, we don’t get you and your friends away from here, I might have more witnesses ’n I counted on.”

  “What do you think’s going to happen?” I asked him. We had just started across the river. My legs were still cold and damp from crossing it the last time.

  Before he could answer, a gunshot sounded from the direction of the camp and a bullet whipped through branches above us. I swore and pushed George down in the river. I had left my rifle back at the camp.

  “It’s begun,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

  “What has?” I asked. But when I raised my head and looked toward the town, I knew what he meant.

  The crumbled buildings still stood where they had been, faintly limned by moonlight. But around them, towering above them in some cases, were the ghostly images of those buildings as they had been in the town’s prime. Tall and proud, their doors and windows and roofs intact. People—not real ones, but apparitions—darted about. Through the people and the buildings, the trees and tangled brush remained visible.

  I could hear—faintly, as if from far away—a steady pounding noise. I realized it had to be the town’s stamp mills, each with twelve to fifteen stamps driving down a hundred times a minute, crushing ore. Over that were alarmed voices and gunfire. The smells of wood smoke and gunpowder tinged the air.

  “I have to get in there,” George said. He lurched up and started toward the bank. I grabbed him but caught his bare arm, slick with river water, and it slid from my grasp. He splashed through the last few feet of water, then through the reeds at river’s edge and into Contention City.

  “Mr. Moffat!” I called. “I don’t think—”

  He was barely aware of me. The specters of Contention City’s populace were shooting at each other from behind cover. Bullets whizzed past us—ghost bullets, I hoped, that couldn’t do any real damage. But I could also see my fellow searchers, and they had responded by drawing their own weapons, which could kill.

  “I gave almost ever cent I had to this ancient bruja down Sonora way for this spell,” he said. He knew I was there after all.

  “Bruja?” I repeated. “Spell?”

  He tried to look in every direction at once, like a kid at his first carnival. “A witch. She said it’d only work one time, and then only because we come from here.” He held my gaze for a second. “Something like that. Her English was about as bad as my Spanish, so I missed a lot of it.”

  Three men hurtled down the street, right toward us, wearing old West garb and carrying rifles. They could have stepped off a movie screen. I grabbed Moffat’s arm, tried to yank him out of the way, but I was too late. One of them passed right through Moffat, firing on the run.

  “What’s going on, Mr. Moffat?” I demanded. Another shot from the camp came our way—maybe someone responding to what he thought was a threat. Or maybe not—Les Crain stood behind the fire with his rifle near his shoulder. I tried to steer George that way, figuring Les wouldn’t shoot him. “Look!” I shouted. “I found him!”

  But even though the noise of old Contention City was muffled, there was enough of it that those at our campsite couldn’t hear me. I didn’t know for sure if any had even seen us.

  George twisted out of my hands again. “I gotta see,” he said. He walked fast for an old man who’d been exposed to the elements for almost twenty-four hours, as if the success of his “spell” had given him renewed energy.

  “See what?”

  George ducked behind a stone wall without answering. I followed, figuring it would offer cover from the search party’s guns.

  He strode up the hill, past that wall and the house that it had once been a part of. Excited voices, no louder than if they came over telephone lines, sounded behind us, and when I glanced back I could see through two men. From farther up the hill, a cowboy drew a bead on one of them with a revolver. He fired. I didn’t bother dodging his shot. The ghostly bullet slammed into me with the force of a thrown rock, passing through my arm and out the other side, spinning me
around and bouncing me off the wall.

  “Ahhh!” I cried. “That hurt!”

  Down the hill, the round had struck one of the men behind us, and he fell to the ground with blood fountaining up from his throat. “I thought these were just ghosts or something.”

  “Something like that, I think,” George said. He looked as clear-eyed and sharp as he ever had. “Come on, we have to hurry.”

  The bullet had torn my sleeve and skin, but it hadn’t pierced all the way through—that had been part of the whole surreal illusion. I was bleeding just the same. I figured that since sights and sounds were only partly there, a little of their physical presence was as well.

  Which might mean that a close range shot could be fatal.

  “I don’t know where you’re going, Mr. Moffat,” I said. “But be careful!”

  George nodded offhandedly, like he’d barely heard me, and continued up the hill past the cowboy. Gripping my wounded arm, I trailed behind him.

  George stopped at an intersection, looking at another house, stone below but with wooden walls above the first three or four feet. There was a man in the doorway, hopping on one foot while he tugged on a boot. Behind him, watching through fearful eyes, were a woman and a boy of seven or eight.

  “I knew it,” George said, watching as the man grabbed a rifle from behind the door. “It’s just like he always said, he was inside when the shootin’ started. It weren’t him.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “My pa. That youngster’s me.” He said it as casually as if he’d been identifying cattle. That one’s a Red Brangus. Over there, that’s a Hereford. But then, it was something he had expected to see, maybe for a long time.

  “What are we looking at here, Mr. Moffat?” I asked him. “What’s going on?”

  “This is the gunfight that got my ma and pa just about rode out of town on a rail. Everybody blamed him for startin’ it, but you can see for yourself it was already goin’ on by the time he got out the house.”

  “That’s the way it looks, all right. But what—”

  George turned away from the spectacle of his own father—less than half the age the son was right now—striding down the road to get involved in the shooting, and met my gaze. “What’s it prove? Maybe nothin’ to anyone but me. As long as my folks lived, they told me this was how it was. But to everyone else in Contention City, and most of the people in this part of the country, the whole deal—the fight, the fire, all of it, was on my pa’s head. Sixty-four people died that day, couple dozen houses burned, and everybody says Contention City never recovered from it.”

  “So you wanted to see the truth for yourself.”

  Gunshots punctuated our conversation—some of them echoes from the past, others loud and close, the search party reacting to an assault they couldn’t understand. “Now that you’ve seen, is there some way to end it?” I asked him. “Someone’s like to get hurt.”

  George blinked a couple of times, as if it had never occurred to him. “I don’t rightly know.”

  Another level of sound joined the racket that already echoed between the hills hemming in the river. More gunshots, but from farther away, accompanied by something else.

  “Apache,” George said, at the same time that I realized what it had to be.

  “But they never attacked Contention, did they?”

  “Nope. Did Santa Cruz, though.”

  He was right. The Spanish force there had been driven away by persistent Apache raids. Isaac Schultheis had claimed that the night of the big battle in Contention City, flames had swept down on the town from the presidio, abandoned for more than a hundred years by then.

  None of it made sense, but it all connected in a nightmarish way that carried its own logic. Something had started in the presidio, then spread to Contention City when that became the next white settlement in the immediate area.

  “If it’s gonna be stopped,” George said, “it’ll be there.”

  We were relatively protected at our corner, with walls, real and half-real, beside us. The last thing I wanted was to leave that safety and go back up the hill, through a ghostly Apache raid and into a Spanish fort where the denizens were shooting at everything that moved.

  But if we didn’t stop it, would it just keep going? Would the fire start again, racing through the dry brush and trees, maybe spreading to surrounding ranches and homes?

  No way to know. But I hadn’t started it, and I was safe right where I was.

  “You comin’?” George didn’t wait for an answer. He started back down the hill, toward the river. Toward where the ghostly bullets flew with greater frequency.

  Shy of any better options, I followed.

  My nightmare was complete. Another couple of slugs stung me, and I saw some hit George, staggering him. Acrid gray smoke swirled around us, thick as fog, blotting out most of the spectral buildings. George kept going so I did too, walking unarmed on unsteady legs into the thick of war. All around us people were dead or dying, and still the lead flew. I could differentiate the solid crack of real guns from the muffled thuds of ghostly ones and the booming of muskets on the hill.

  We reached the river and splashed across. George walked with a determined stride, blood trickling from a gash on his temple. I trailed behind him like he was some sort of good luck charm and could keep me from being killed. As we climbed the hill, Apache warriors ran through us, some on horseback. I could feel the impacts, like someone bumping into me, hard but not too painful. The bullets hurt worse, stinging like sharp stones.

  Higher up, musket balls crashed through the brush around us. One hit my leg, almost knocking me down. George pressed on. I stayed with him.

  Flames began spreading down the hill toward us, warm as the desert in summer but not scorchingly hot. But as we hiked through them, I noticed fire igniting the scrub—the real scrub—in spots. If there was a way to end this, we had to find it soon.

  It was harder than ever to know what was real and what was the result of George’s spell. Smoke and noise and pain and fear mingled in my head until each step was harder to take than the last. Somehow we made it to the fort’s walls (full height now, not the few inches or couple of feet they usually were, but we could step through the higher part). Spanish soldiers ran about, firing muskets over the walls. Apaches rained bullets and arrows down on them.

  As if drawn toward it, George led me to an open plaza. The soldiers were at the walls; here there were only a few women and some frightened children. They didn’t seem to see us. Horribly, in the center of the plaza was what looked like an ancient Apache man lashed to an upright pole, white stringy hair covering his face. He was naked, his bare chest crisscrossed with the marks of a whip.

  Worse, his hands and bare feet weren’t those of a man, but of a big, pale-furred cat. My gut lurched.

  A young Spanish girl looked at us, her hair dark, her eyes wide and liquid. “Help him,” she said, her English as clear as mine. “Free him.”

  George nodded once, as if he’d been expecting her command, and went to work. I joined him, trying to untie the man’s bonds. They were surprisingly solid in my trembling hands, although his form was as ghostly as any of the others. The girl helped us loosen the ropes from his ankles. As we worked, the old man changed, sleek white fur growing thick on his arms and back, then vanishing, then flickering between flesh and fur as fast as I could blink. He let out a long, low growl.

  Finally, we had him untied. One of the women saw us then and started to scream. As the old Apache fell forward, he changed again, transforming into the white jaguar that I’d somehow known he must be. He looked at us each in turn, then bounded away. Soldiers came running, summoned by the screams of the women.

  The little girl smiled at us as if we had done her a favor.

  This was the end, I knew. When those soldiers came into close range and fired those big musket balls at us, one after another, they would kill us. We were in the middle of their fort, and they had turned their attention from the Apache a
ttack to us.

  The first soldiers into the plaza aimed their weapons, pulled the triggers—

  —but even as they did, they became less material, more ghostlike. Musket balls flying toward us seemed to slow and stall in midair.

  Then they were gone: soldiers, structures, muskets, and all. The ruins were as I remembered them, low mud walls worn almost to nothing. The last thing to vanish was the girl, her wide smile beaming at us until she too had faded away.

  Elated whoops from Contention City split the sudden silence. “Come on, Mr. Moffat,” I said. “They’ll want to see you.”

  “That girl back there,” George said on the way down. “The Spanish one?”

  “The one who spoke English?”

  “Sounded like Spanish to me,” he said, “but I knew what she meant. Anyhow, the strangest thing—you remember I told you about that bruja, in Sonora, about as old as Moses.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’d swear, that girl had her eyes. And more teeth, but the same dang smile.”

  “You think she was an ancestor of the bruja’s? That had to have happened in the 1770s, right?”

  “We’ve seen a lot of crazy things tonight, Marsh. Crazier’n I’ll ever see again, for sure. But I’d swear that was the same person.”

  Descending toward the river, the sharp tang of burnt brush in my nose, aching from a dozen ghost-bullets, I didn’t doubt him a bit. I didn’t know what it all meant, and he probably didn’t either.

  But I knew that jaguar had given us each a blessing. For the girl, a long life and incredible powers. For George, answers to questions that had plagued him all his life, and the chance to put right his father’s mistake. And for me, a realization. I could wait around forever hoping to feel brave, but courage wasn’t some separate sensation that would well up inside me like fear or hope. It was simply understanding what had to be done, and doing it.

  We had survived the night and we had borne witness. As if thinking the same thing, George offered me a weary smile. If I lived long enough, maybe I could become half the man he was.

  It was a goal to work toward, anyway.