As he’d said so many times to his boys, all a man needed to break a woman was patience and a whip.
Just like a saddle mare.
Chapter 35
Jess Leslie crossed her hands and rubbed her upper arms, frowning.
“I feel dirty all over,” she said. “I need to bathe.”
“Stay clear of the well,” Pace said. “Beau Harcourt’s men stirred up the water and maybe they wakened the cholera.”
“The creek?” Jess said.
“There’s no cholera in the creek.”
“Runs too fast, I reckon,” Lake said.
“Then I’ll bathe in the creek.” She looked at the two men. “One of you will have to come with me. There’s coyotes out there and maybe wolves and I don’t want to be there alone.”
Pace looked at Lake. “You, Mash?”
Lake shook his head. “No. I’m an old reprobate and I don’t trust myself. I might take a peek.”
“You won’t see anything you haven’t seen many times before,” Jess said.
“I know, but nowadays my old heart wouldn’t stand the excitement.”
“Then it’s you, Sammy,” Jess said. “Let’s go. If you think your heart can stand it.”
“Kinda dark, isn’t it?” Pace said.
“You protect me from the coyotes and I’ll protect you from the boogerman,” Jess said. “I don’t want to feel soiled a moment longer than I have to.”
She stepped to the door. “Are you coming?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Wouldn’t do you any harm to take a bath yourself, sonny,” Lake said.
“Sammy’s a guard,” Jess said. “He should keep his powder dry. Besides, I don’t want him dirtying up my bathwater.”
Pace was not in the best of moods as he picked up his rifle from the desk and followed the woman into the street.
As suddenly as it had begun, the wind had died. Now a gray haze hung over the town, and the blanched buildings looked like fading images on a tintype.
“Be fog come morning,” Pace said. “Sometimes in summer it drifts up from the Mogollon Rim and covers the whole basin.”
“If it wasn’t so scary, it would be pretty,” Jess said.
Pace smiled. “Now who’s sceered of the boogerman?”
Jess chose a spot where the creek flowed between two rocks, creating a sieve of white water about three feet deep.
She stripped in the waning moonlight and her slender naked body was as pale as bone.
Pace had taken himself off a ways and fetched his back against the trunk of a cottonwood, the Winchester between his drawn-up knees.
It had been three years since he’d seen a naked woman, and he watched Jess with pleasure, but without desire, as a man looks at a nude painting in an art gallery.
Jess stood in the water, then lowered herself into the eddies. She squealed as the sting of the icy creek hit her butt, and then kneeled without moving for long moments, letting her body get accustomed to the cold.
Pace smiled, enjoying himself.
But, when the woman began to wash her shadowed, secret places, he turned away to spare her shame.
The creek flowed through a series of shallow rock shelves. The upper levels ran over a clay bed, the lower over pebbles.
The fog, spreading, was now drifting into the higher shelves and between the trunks of the cottonwoods and pines growing on the banks.
Jess was now a white blur in the misty gloom, but Pace heard her splash water. And, God help her, he thought, she was actually humming a little tune.
Pace shook his head in admiration.
The girl looked fragile, frail as a china doll, but, mentally and physically, she was enduring, as strong as any man, himself included.
His wife had been like that, the perfect spouse for a lawman.
Then she was taken by the cholera and all that had been wonderful in her came to an end, leaving a vast emptiness in Pace that nothing could ever fill.
Pace heard Jess get out of the water and he stepped toward her.
She stood on the bank shivering, and then began to pick up her clothes.
“You can’t dress without getting dry first,” Pace said.
“I don’t have a towel, Sammy. Didn’t you notice?”
The woman’s nakedness didn’t trouble Pace, nor did it her.
“Damn it, here.” Pace slipped the canvas suspenders from his shoulders and took off his shirt. “Use this,” he said. “It’s clean, or fairly clean.”
“You’ll be cold,” Jess said.
“I’ll be just fine.”
He held up the shirt. “Now put it on. It will dry you and keep you warm.”
There’s no accounting for what a woman will and will not do, but Jess smiled and did as Pace told her.
She was closing the last shirt button when the wolves howled again.
Close this time. Very close.
Chapter 36
Sam Pace racked a round into the chamber of his rifle as his eyes scanned the opposite creek bank where pine tops lifted like obsidian arrowheads into the sky, their trunks lost in mist.
The wolves howled again and Pace felt fear clutch at him.
“Get back to town,” he whispered to Jess. “Tell Mash.”
The woman clutched her clothes to her breast, her face drained of color. “Come with me, Sammy. The wolves will kill you.”
“They’re human wolves,” Pace said. “It’s the Peacock brothers. They’d cut us down in the street before we reached my office.”
He turned his head, and, his voice urgent, he said, “Jess, you git now.”
The woman needed no second bidding. She fled into the night, wolf howls following her.
Pace took cover behind the cottonwood, watching, waiting.
A few moments of sullen silence slunk past, slow enough that Pace had time to dry his fear-sweated hands on his pants and clutch his rifle again.
A bullet thunked into the tree trunk and another chipped bark near Pace’s face, driving splinters into his cheek.
Damn it, them Peacock boys could see in the dark.
A voice rose from the gray and black gloom, hollow and echoing, like a man speaking in a sepulcher.
“Mash Lake, is that you? Step out and take your medicine.”
Pace thought he had a fix on the location of the speaker, but he wasn’t sure. He needed the man to speak again.
“This is Lake,” he said. “State your business.”
He lifted the Winchester to his shoulder.
“You know our business,” the man yelled. “You killed our brother. There is talking to be done, a reckoning to be made.”
Pace aimed into darkness. Now he knew the spot among the trees where the Peacocks were hidden.
His finger took up a quarter inch of slack on the trigger.
“Come out, Lake. We want to—”
Pace fired.
He levered shells into the Winchester and dusted shots to the right and left of the speaker’s location.
Suddenly a man yelped like a wounded cur . . . and kept on yelping, each shriek rising to a higher pitch.
A rifle blasted beside Pace and Lake threw himself to the ground.
“Is it the Peacocks?” he said.
“Yeah, and I winged one of them.”
“I heard him squeal.”
Lake fired in the direction of the yelps, and Pace’s rifle joined in the fusillade.
They shot their rifles dry but there was no return fire.
Gun smoke drifted and became one with the gray mist.
“They quit,” Pace said. “Damn it, they just gave up and left.”
“They haven’t left,” Lake said. “The Peacock boys are sure-thing killers and they didn’t like this ground, was all. They’ll be back.”
“The question is, when?” Pace said.
“The answer is, when it gets light. They know we’re holed up in the ghost town and that’s where they’ll come lookin’.”
“I think we
can take them, Mash,” Pace said. “They didn’t seem so all-fired tough tonight.”
“Maybe. So we burned them. All that means is they’ll be more careful next time. I told you afore, Sam, we can’t shade them boys in a close-up gunfight.”
“Then we won’t let them get close.”
Lake nodded. “I got an idea on that score, but we won’t be fightin’. We’ll be hidin’.”
“Until they give up and go away?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Sounds thin, Mash.”
“Hell, boy, it is thin. But is all I’ve got. You?”
“A long-range rifle fight, I reckon. Out in the hills, maybe.”
“Try that and you’ll be dead,” Lake said. “From now on the Peacocks will be prepared and they’ll get close, revolver close. We got lucky tonight. We won’t get lucky a second time.”
“You sure know how to cheer a man, don’t you?” Pace said, turning his head to regard the old man.
“Yep. I do it all the time. You might say that it’s my nat’ral sunny disposition.”
Chapter 37
“I’m your prisoner, Sammy,” Jess said. “I have to go where you go.”
“That doesn’t signify any longer,” Pace said.
“Changed your mind, huh?”
“Yes, I have. I made you my prisoner when I was tetched. I’m not tetched anymore.”
“Could’ve fooled me, Sam,” Lake said. “The way you was talking about bracing them Peacock brothers.”
“I may still brace them, Mash. There was a time I was considered a man who was pretty good with a gun.”
“Pretty good don’t cut it, Sam, not with the Peacocks.”
“Hell, Mash, we sent ’em running. How good can they be?”
“They’re revolver fighters, Sam. A gunfight in darkness and fog isn’t their thing, if’n you get my meaning.”
“Then why the hell did they shoot?”
“Because they thought you were me. They expected a feeble old man who’d get scared and try to talk them out of it.” Lake smiled. “Instead they bumped into a feller who was once considered pretty good with a gun.”
Jess handed Pace his damp shirt. “Dry that in front of the stove,” she said.
She laid a hand on Pace’s shoulder. “So, how come you aren’t crazy no more, Sammy?”
“Because I suddenly realize that I’m the marshal of nothing.” He reached into his pocket, found his star, and threw it on the desk. “I’ve been fooling myself. The people aren’t coming back, not to this bad-luck ghost town, they aren’t.”
“And the dead people down at the graveyard who want to eat you for supper?” Jess said.
Pace hesitated. “I don’t know about them. At least, not yet.”
Lake smiled his approval at Jess. “Good, now it seems ol’ Sam is only half crazy.”
“The church bell tower has been rotting away for three years,” Pace said. “It may not be safe any longer, if it ever was.”
“It only needs to hold us until the Peacock brothers give up and leave,” Lake said.
“If they decide to search the church, we’ll be trapped like rats,” Pace said.
“That’s a chance we’ll have to take. I reckon they’ll ride through, like, and then figure we lit out for the hills.”
Pace looked at Jess. “What do you think?”
The woman was quiet for a few moments, wrinkles gathering between her eyebrows.
Finally she said, “We can’t run and let them catch us in the open, so we’re stuck here. And it’s not just the Peacocks. You killed two of the deacon’s sons, and he’ll come after you. It’s only a matter of when and he’ll pick a time that suits him.”
She took the shirt from Pace’s hands and spread it over the stove. “The bell tower is as good a place as any to hide. At least up there, we’ll be closer to our Maker.”
Pace talked through a sigh. “Well, I guess that’s it. We’ll hide in the tower and hope”—he slammed a hand on the desk—“hell no, we’ll not. If the Peacock boys discover we’re up there, they can stand off and shoot the tower to pieces and us with it.”
“So, what does the genius suggest?” Jess said.
“We mount up and make a run for it. In open country Mash and me can keep the Peacocks at rifle distance. There’s a Mormon settlement west of Silver Creek by the name of Snowflake and we can head for there. They’ll have law and fighting men enough to enforce it.”
“And the deacon?” Jess said.
“I don’t think we have anything to fear from him, at least for a spell,” Pace said. “He’s got important business with Beau Harcourt and that will occupy him.”
Lake looked at the woman. “Jess?”
“I still think hiding out is the best idea, but I’ll go along for the ride,” she said.
“That only leaves you, Mash,” Pace said.
“Hell, Sam, I ain’t staying here by my own self with the Peacocks and the deacon and the hungry dead people and the hants an’ sich. I’ll play it your way.”
Lake rose to his feet and stepped toward the door.
“You two pack up as much grub as you can find,” he said. “I’ll get the horses.”
After Lake left, Pace stood at the window and looked outside.
The night was shading into dawn, but the fog was so thick he couldn’t see a thing beyond the boardwalk. There was no wind to stir the mist and it hung like a damp gray blanket over the town.
Jess had filled a burlap sack with canned food. Now her eyes moved to the window and she too let her gaze search into the fog.
“Can we find our way in this?” she said.
“We’ll leave it to the horses to pick a trail,” Pace said. “Anyway, the same fog that slows us will slow the Peacocks.”
“Mash says they’re half wolf.”
“They’re men, like any other men. I proved that when I shot one of them at the creek.”
Jess was silent for a while, then said, “Sammy, I don’t think you shot one of the brothers. I don’t think you shot anybody.”
“What do you mean?”
“A shot man doesn’t shriek like that . . . like an animal. They want you to think that one of them is down so you’ll lower your guard just a little. Professional gunmen like the Peacock brothers will always look for an edge, no matter how slight.”
Pace thought for a few moments. He said, “I reckon it troubled me at the time. I mean, that they gave up so fast. I couldn’t quite figure that one out.”
“As Mash says, it wasn’t their kind of gunfight and you weren’t the one they were after. They did their wounded wolf cry and backed away from it.”
“To fight another day when the circumstances will be more in their favor.”
“Right. When they have an edge.”
Pace nodded. “They won’t have an edge out in the open country. I’ll see to that.”
But Pace was talking into the wind.
There would be no open country.
Mash Lake stepped into the marshal’s office, his face a stony mask.
“We ain’t going anywhere,” he said.
“Why the hell not?” Pace said.
“Because the horses are gone.”
Chapter 38
“What do you mean the horses are gone?” Sam Pace demanded.
Lake’s voice revealed his irritation.
“How many ways do you want me to say it, Sam? The horses are gone. Departed, skedaddled, vanished, vamoosed.”
“Mash,” Jess said, “did the Peacocks take them?
Lake shook his head. “It was Apaches. Lifted them horses as nice as you please in the fog.”
“Are you sure?” Pace said.
“Sure of what, Sam? That the horses are gone?”
Annoyed, Pace said, “Hell no. I mean that they were stolen by Apaches.”
“Moccasin sign all over the place. Judging by the tracks, I’d say White Mountain, but I could be wrong.”
His anger growing, Pace said, �
�An Apache is an Apache. Don’t make a hill o’ beans difference what kind he is.”
“Maybe you’re right, Sam,” Lake said. “When a man’s got his feet to the fire, it don’t matter a damn what kind of Injun’s holding on to his ankles.”
The three fell silent, Pace and Jess having it in their heads that Lake’s news had brought them no pleasure and considerable worry.
“Will they attack us, Mash?” Jess said finally.
“Apaches are notional,” Lake said. “You can never tell what they’ll do from one minute to the next. But I reckon this was a horse raid and they ain’t lookin’ fer a fight, at least not yet and not with us.”
“The army?” Jess said.
“Seems likely enough. They’ve broken out, and they know the horse so’jers will be after them.”
Jess looked at Pace. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Well, what do we do now, Sammy? Hoof it?”
“We won’t get far on foot. The Peacocks will ride us down and hit us when we least expect it.”
“And the Apaches are painted for war,” Lake said. “Another mighty good reason for staying right where we’re at.”
“You talking about that damned bell tower again?” Pace said.
“Unless you can think of a better place,” Lake said.
“I’m studying on it.”
“Don’t study on it too long, Sam. We’re within spittin’ distance of death right now.”
“The graveyard,” Pace said, as though he’d had a sudden burst of intuition. “Apaches won’t go near a place where folks are buried.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Lake said. “But the Peacocks will.”
“All right, then, we could just head out of town, hole up in the hills someplace,” Pace said.
“If the Apaches are around, they’d find us fer sure,” Lake said.
“Oh, for God’s sake, you two!” Jess said, her cheekbones flaring red. “The Apaches, the Peacocks, the deacon—they’ll all be here sooner than you think. We’ll hide in the bell tower. It’s our only chance.”
“Like rats,” Pace said.
“Live rats,” Jess said.
“The lady makes sense, Sam,” Lake said. “I think we’ve fresh run out of options.”
Ralph Compton the Ghost of Apache Creek (9781101545560) Page 11
