Ralph Compton the Ghost of Apache Creek (9781101545560)

by Compton, Ralph; West, Joseph A.

  His shaved head made him look older than his thirty years, and his blue eyes were glazed, distant, staring back at him like a rabbit hypnotized by a rattlesnake. He was painfully thin, his face tanned to a mahogany color by sun and wind, and he noticed wrinkles where none had existed before.

  At least he wouldn’t make the woman faint again.

  Or so he hoped.

  Pace stepped into the cell where the woman lay on his bed, an iron cot with a straw mattress. Both cot and mattress had seen better days.

  She wore a pink gingham dress, stained and torn, and her scuffed shoes showed the wear and tear of hard travel.

  Whoever she was, she was pretty, her eyelashes fanning over high cheekbones, a tendril of yellow hair falling across her forehead.

  Her body was slim and shapely and she looked to be about seventeen, maybe younger, more girl than woman.

  And she had a story to tell—if he could keep her conscious long enough to tell it.

  Not by inclination a drinking man, Pace remembered that there was a bottle of Old Crow in his desk drawer that he’d kept for special occasions.

  He smiled, revealing teeth that, despite everything, were remarkably clean and white.

  If this wasn’t a special occasion, then what was?

  He poured a shot of the whiskey into a glass, returned to the cell, and shook the girl awake.

  She opened her eyes and Pace said quickly, “For God’s sake, don’t faint.”

  To his relief, this time the girl looked at him without too much fear.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “In the marshal’s office.” Pace smiled. “I’m the marshal of the town of Requiem in the Little Colorado River Basin country. But, just so you know and so it won’t come to you as a surprise, like, I’m tetched in the head.”

  To Pace’s surprise, the girl rolled up her eyes and fainted again.

  Chapter 9

  Deacon Santee had chosen a pretty, peaceful place to make his camp.

  His three wagons were drawn up next to a grove of wild oaks, and a treelined creek ran close by. Tall mountains, their slopes covered in pine, provided a dramatic backdrop and summer wildflowers grew in great profusion everywhere.

  The deacon’s cattle grazed on the other side of the creek, spread out over a square mile of grass, tended by the half-dozen vaqueros he’d hired along the Texas border.

  “Well, Pa,” Jeptha Santee said. “Have you reached a verdict?”

  The deacon sat with his back against a tree, his Bible clutched in his hands. “I have,” he said, “and it is a just one. The harlot will be chastised by the whip.”

  Jeptha grinned. “You want us to fetch her, Pa?”

  “Yes, you found her in the swamp, so the privilege should be yours. Light the lamps, then bring forth Sally Anderson to meet her deserved fate.”

  Jeptha and his older brother, Enoch, sprinted to one of the wagons, disappeared under the canvas top, and emerged dragging a struggling, screaming woman between them.

  “Let all here present witness her shame,” the deacon said.

  The girl turned her head to the deacon. “No! Please don’t whip me!”

  “You should have thought of that before you helped Jessamine Leslie run from the marital bed.”

  “Deacon, I’m sorry,” Sally shrieked. “I’ll do anything you want, but please don’t hurt me.”

  As his grinning sons pulled the woman toward a tall cottonwood tree, the deacon said, “It’s too late for sorrow. Now there is only my just vengeance.”

  Jeptha and Enoch, joined by their brothers Gideon and Zedock, laughed cruelly. Sally Anderson screamed for a while, then fell silent.

  “She’s dead, Pa. Ain’t no use in whupping her no more.”

  Deacon Santee pointed his coiled bullwhip at the woman tied by her wrists to a cottonwood branch.

  “See if she is faking it,” he said.

  “I don’t need to, Pa,” Jeptha said. “She’s deader’n shit.”

  The butt of the deacon’s bullwhip thudded against his son’s cheek, leaving an angry red welt.

  “You do as I say, Jeptha, and don’t ever use that vile word in my presence again.”

  Jeptha, tall, rangy, dressed like his father in a broadcloth tailcoat and battered black hat, stepped sullenly to the tree, a hand to his cheek.

  He grabbed the woman by the hair and wrenched back her head. He stared into her face for a few moments, then said, “She’s gone, Pa.”

  “Gone much too soon,” the deacon said. “She didn’t suffer near enough.”

  Nine people had stood in lamplight and watched Santee flay the skin off the woman’s slender back until the blood flowed.

  Five were his wives; four his sons.

  The deacon stepped in front of the women, who shrank against the sides of their wagons. He pointed with his whip.

  “What do you see over there?” he said.

  None of the women answered, fear stiffening their tongues.

  Santee jammed the coiled whip under the chin of his youngest wife and lifted her pale face to his.

  “Nancy, what do you see?” he said. He pointed with his whip. “Hanging from yonder tree, what do you see?”

  The girl, sixteen years old and the deacon’s fifth bride, was terrified. She said something in a whisper that no one could hear.

  “Speak up,” he said. “What do you see?”

  Louder this time, the girl said, “Sally. I see Sally.”

  “And why is she hanging there?”

  “I . . . I don’t know,” Nancy whispered.

  The deacon threw up his arms, tilted his head back, and roared at the night sky. “She doesn’t know!”

  His prominent blue eyes popping out of his head, he ran down the line of women, stopping briefly in front of each one.

  “Claire, do you know?”

  “Leah, do you know?”

  “Sarah, do you know?”

  He halted when he reached the oldest woman in the group, a worn redhead with dead eyes.

  “Maxine, tell me.”

  “Because she helped the Leslie girl escape your clutches, Deke.”

  “No!”

  Santee shifted the whip to his left hand and backhanded Maxine across the face with his right. The woman fell, and he stood over her.

  “Because she betrayed me!” he screamed down at her. “You hear that? She betrayed me.”

  The deacon stepped back and took a Bible from the pocket of his frock coat. He held the book against his chest and bowed his head.

  He remained in that posture for ten minutes, and those around him stayed right where they stood, scarcely daring to breathe.

  Deacon Santee cut an incongruous figure. He was dressed like a man of the cloth, a battered top hat on his head, yet under his coat two heavy Smith & Wesson revolvers hung from his hips in crossed gun belts.

  He was small, skinny, pale, round-shouldered, thin-lipped, bald—and as fast and deadly with the iron as a rattlesnake.

  Far off, among the wild oaks, an owl glided silently through the branches like a phantom and small things saw its fleeting shadow and squeaked and gibbered in the underbrush.

  The lamps set around the cottonwood guttered in a breeze that pushed the dead woman’s body back and forth and made the tree limb creak.

  Finally, like a man waking from sleep, the deacon stirred.

  He blinked, looked at the men and women around him, and said, “God has spoken to me. He said the woman betrayed my trust and my punishment was just. He said woe betide any other who is so inclined, for she will surely perish as did Sally, the whore of Babylon.”

  The deacon glared at his wives. “So saith the Lord. So saith me.”

  “Amen,” Maxine said.

  Santee stared hard at the woman for a full minute, but Maxine’s face was empty of all but innocence and he let it go.

  “You women get back into the wagons,” he said. “There will be no wedding feast this night.”

  The deacon watched
his wives climb into the wagons, then said, “You, Gideon and Zedock, get back out there with the herd. Enoch, Jeptha, come here.”

  Jeptha, the deacon’s youngest son, was a slack-mouthed youth of limited intelligence and filthy habits. Enoch, the oldest, was smarter and addicted to the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott and the works of Dickens. He also kept both volumes of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in his saddlebags. He’d actually read the tomes several times.

  Both he and Jeptha were vicious killers, and eager.

  The deacon said, “I want you boys to find Jessamine. Bring her here so that she may feel the lash for her iniquity.”

  He stepped closer to his sons, his eyes blazing with the righteous fire of a witch-hunter. “This time I’ll make sure she lasts longer than the whore hanging from yonder tree.”

  He pointed to the horse line. “Now mount up and go. If ye don’t bring Jessamine Leslie back to me alive, it would be better for you two that you’d never been spawned.”

  Chapter 10

  The rising sun slanted through the small cell window, throwing the shadow of its four iron bars on the floor.

  “Ma’am,” Pace said, “it’s sunup. Maybe time you were awake.”

  The girl’s eye fluttered, then opened, and this time Sam Pace kept his distance, standing with his back against the far wall.

  “I’m the marshal,” he said quickly, before she fainted again.

  The girl sat up in the cot and touched fingers to her forehead.

  “I feel so dizzy,” she said. “Where am I? What town is this?”

  “Requiem,” Pace said. He stayed right where he was, afraid to move.

  “The coyotes . . . ,” the girl said.

  “Yeah. I scared them away.” He took a step closer to the cot. “Sometimes they’ll do that if they’re really hungry, attack a person.”

  The girl looked at him from head to toe, and her eyes widened, then brightened with alarm.

  “Uh-huh. I look a sight, don’t I?” Pace said, trying to throw a loop on her fear. “I had a run-in with some cowboys.”

  “You’re the marshal?” the girl said, a gasp of disbelief.

  Pace smiled. “What’s left of him.”

  “What did you call this town?”

  “Requiem.”

  “Strange name for a town.”

  “Well, it’s a strange town.”

  “My name is Jessamine. Jessamine Leslie.”

  “Sam Pace. Right pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am.”

  “And yours, too, I’m sure.”

  The girl rose and her skirts rustled as she stepped from the cell into the office.

  Pace followed, carrying the glass of whiskey he’d poured earlier.

  Jessamine stood at the window and looked out.

  After a long while she said, “The town is empty.”

  “Should be,” Pace said. “Requiem is a ghost town.”

  “Oh my God,” Jessamine said. “It seems like I ran away from one hell and landed in another.”

  “It’s just a town,” Pace said.

  He extended the glass. “Drink this. It’ll make you feel better.”

  Jessamine took the glass in an unsteady hand, drained the whiskey in a gulp. She passed the glass back to Pace. “What happened here?”

  “Cholera,” Pace said. “Three years ago. It took my wife and child and half the town.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “The well water was poisoned.”

  “The well I saw last night? In the middle of the street?”

  “Yes. I think it’s still poisoned. I draw my water from the creek.”

  “I was going to drink from it,” Jess said.

  “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  “Hell, so am I.” The girl looked puzzled. “Why are you still here?”

  “The people who didn’t die up and left. But they’ll be back, and I’ll be here to greet them.”

  “When are they coming back?”

  “I don’t know. Sometime.”

  Jess’s gaze searched Pace’s face. “I don’t know you from Adam, mister, and the whiskey has loosened my tongue, but I want to tell you something.”

  “Tell away. Call me Sam.”

  “I’ll call you Sammy. I’ve always been partial to that name.”

  Jess moved from the window to the desk where Pace was sitting.

  “It seems to me that you’ve stayed put right here for three years, but you’ve been running all that time,” she said.

  “From what?”

  “Your memories. But you hope one day to recapture them and see things go back to what they were. That’s why you think the townspeople will return.”

  Pace sat at his desk, suddenly irritated. “That’s not the way of it at all.”

  “The people might come back, but your wife and child won’t.”

  “Don’t you think I already know that?” Pace said. “I’m not that crazy.”

  “I think you are,” the woman said.

  “And you, Miss Leslie, what are you running from?” Pace said, anger touching his eyes.

  “You can call me Jess. It isn’t like we’re kin, but ‘Miss Leslie’ doesn’t sit real well with me.”

  “What are you running from, Jess? Your ma and pa?”

  The woman smiled and shook her head. “What do you think I am?”

  “A frightened, innocent young lady running from something . . . or somebody.”

  Jess laughed, a humorless yelp. “Innocent. Lady. Those are two for the book.”

  She perched on the corner of the desk and looked down at Pace.

  Pace prompted the girl. “You got a story to tell, Jess.”

  “Are you asking me that as a lawman?”

  “No, as an interested party. Well, maybe a little of both.”

  The woman brushed the stray tendril of hair from her forehead. “I never knew my pa, and my ma ran off with a traveling man. I’ve been selling it since I was fourteen; started off down Tucson way.”

  “I didn’t know,” Pace said, aware of how lame that sounded.

  “How could you know, since I hadn’t told you?”

  Pace said, “Yeah, I couldn’t know . . . about . . . that.” He tried to smile. “By the way you look and such.”

  Jess gave him a long look, then said, “I ended up in a hog ranch in the Jacques Mountain country. Then the Apaches came and ran off all our livestock and burned the barn and smokehouse.”

  “And you fled?” Pace said.

  “Don’t ride ahead of me, Sammy.”

  “Sorry.”

  “The day after the attack a preaching man with loco eyes came in with three wagons. He spoke to Eli Shafer, the owner of the ranch—”

  “Pimp, you mean,” Pace said.

  “Yeah, you could call him that. Anyhow, the preacher spoke to Eli and Eli spoke to me. ‘Jess,’ he said, ‘I lost my stock, my barn, and my smokehouse an’ money’s tight, so you see how it is with me.’”

  The girl uncorked the bottle and poured whiskey into the glass.

  “Can’t drink the water around here,” she said.

  She drank, then said, “I told Eli to say it plain and he did. He said, ‘Jess, I done sold you to the preaching man fer forty dollars and a side of hickory-smoked bacon.’”

  Pace rose and walked to the window, a tall man, too thin, his slumped shoulders sagging under the weight of three years of deprivation and madness.

  The morning sun had washed away most of the night shadows, but the alleys remained rectangles of darkness and the aborning light added no luster to the store windows that stared back at Pace with blank eyes.

  “What did the preacher man want with you?” he said.

  That was a bad mistake.

  Chapter 11

  A man treads on dangerous ground when he casts even a hint of doubt on a woman’s charms, and Jess Leslie was no exception to that rule.

  “What the hell do you think he wanted me for, Sammy?” she said.
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  Pace recognized his mistake and tried desperately to undo the damage.

  “I . . . yes . . . I understand. I mean . . . you being such a pretty woman an’ all. Any man would . . . I mean . . .”

  Her point made, Jess let him off the hook. “The preacher’s name was Deacon Santee and he wanted to make me his seventh wife.”

  Suddenly Pace was interested. “Would that be Deacon Santee from down El Paso way? Rides with four tetched sons just as ornery as he is?”

  “You called that right, and when he’s in the mood he lets them share his women. I learned that much the hard way.”

  “I thought Deacon Santee had been hung by the Rangers a while back.”

  “You thought wrong, Sammy.”

  “And you managed to escape from him? That couldn’t have been easy.”

  “Well, I did, me and another of his wives. But in the dark we stumbled into swamp country and she either drowned or got caught, but I got lucky and made it to here. Then the coyotes came at me and the rest you know.”

  Jess stepped to the window beside Pace. “What do you see out there that’s so damned interesting?”

  “Just Requiem, and the morning light. It lies easy on the town, kinda like a blessing, but later, when the sun is full up, everything changes.”

  “Changes how, Sammy?”

  Pace’s smile was almost shy. “She shows all her scars and warps and wrinkles and it makes her look old and neglected and . . . sad.”

  “You’re a strange one, Sammy,” Jess said. “I don’t think you’re as tetched as you say you are, but you’re a strange one. No doubt about that.”

  Pace’s eyes caught and held the woman’s gaze. “You don’t think I’m tetched in the head, like them Santee boys?”

  “No. You’re nothing like them.”

  Jess looked around the office. “You got anything to eat, Sammy?”

  “Yeah, a lot of cans back there. Jed Heaver, feller who owned the general store, just up and left with his wife and kids after the cholera started killing folks. He rode out in the middle of the night and left everything behind.”

  “And you’ve been eating from cans ever since?”

  “This three year.”

  “No wonder you’re as skinny as a lizard-eating cat.” The girl stepped away from the window. “Let’s take a look.”