The deacon staggered into the street and made for his horse at the barbershop hitch rail.
The left side of his chest was soaked in blood, he stank, and he was on fire with fever. He reckoned everything that was inside him had turned to liquid and would be gone by now. But it was not. It kept coming, running down his legs, leaving a track behind him like the slime trail of an obscene snail.
Twice he stumbled, and had to claw to his feet again.
The hot sun pounded him, baking his unspeakable stench to his body, and he had a raging thirst.
His horse was close. Not far, only a few steps.
Very soon, he’d be with his women. They’d attend to him, make him better. Wash him, give him clean clothes, set him in the shade, and quench his thirst with cool water. Be loving wives.
He smiled.
The deacon would be himself again.
Chapter 46
“What do you think, Sam?”
Pace met Lake’s eyes. “Five men went into the saloon, there was a gunfight, and only one of them left. The deacon. What does that tell us?”
“Seems like the deacon done fer them Peacock boys, them as were still alive.”
Pace nodded. “Yep, seems like.”
“He was movin’ slow, the deacon. I think he’d taken a hit.”
“Could be. But he’s dying of the cholera anyhow.”
“I don’t think I seen that much shit since—”
“Mash! Please, stop it,” Jess said.
“Sorry,” Lake said.
“It’s disgusting.”
“Cholera is disgusting,” Pace said. “Everybody who gets it dies hard. Nobody passes away with dignity.”
“Then if I get it, shoot me,” Jess said. “Put me out of my misery.”
“The cholera’s down there, Miz Jess,” Lake said. “It ain’t up here.”
“Down there, up here, I don’t give a damn. I want out of this hell town,” the woman said. “I’m willing to take my chances with the Apaches.”
“Me too, I guess,” Lake said. He looked at Pace. “How about you, Sam?”
“I’ll make that decision later,” Pace said, his eyes guarded.
“There’s no decision to make, Sammy,” Jess said. “You’re getting out of here with us.”
“Jess is right, boy,” Lake said. “If you stay here it’s all up with you. You’ll always be crazy as a loon.”
“We’ll see,” Pace said. “Until I come down to it, a man never knows which way the pickle will squirt.”
Lake and Jess locked eyes, each aware of what the other was thinking.
Sam Pace continued to walk a fine line between sanity and madness. It would take very little to tip him over the edge into that hellish place where he’d spent the past three years.
“Well, this is interesting,” Pace said.
Lake joined him and they both peered over the top of the railing.
“What the hell is he doin’?” the old man said.
“Looking this way.”
“Hell, boy, I can see that.”
One of the Peacock brothers stood outside the saloon door, his back against the wall for support. The man looked ill, close to death ill, and it was obvious that he could barely stand.
“Surrendering?” Lake suggested. “Reckon he’s had enough and wants to give up, Sam?”
That question was answered when the Peacock drew his revolver and thumbed off two fast shots. His bullets stung the bell, then whined away like angry hornets.
Pace drew his Colt and fired back. He missed, but the Peacock brother staggered back into the saloon and faded into shadow.
“What the hell was that fer?” Lake said.
“He wanted to make sure we were still here,” Pace said. “That’s what it was fer.”
“I think he’s sceered, Sam,” Lake said. “I say we go down there and have it out with him.”
“There may be others.”
“Yeah, but you can bet the farm they’ll be as sick as he is.”
Pace was silent for a few moments, then said, “I don’t know. He looked spry enough after I shot at him.”
“He also hit the bell, twice,” Jess said. “I’d say that’s good shooting for a dying man.”
“For any man,” Pace allowed.
The day faded and the light changed from searing white to pale lilac. Shadows appeared in the street, and angles of thin darkness appeared in the alleys between the buildings.
Mash Lake had been sitting in silence, but now his face wrinkled in thought.
“Hey, Sam,” he said, “if we clumb down the rope we could come up on them by surprise, like,” he said. “Gun them damn Peacock boys before they even know what’s hit them.”
“Climb down the rope and we’ll take nobody by surprise,” Pace said. “The bell will ring so loud, folks will hear it in the next county.”
He reached out and thumbed off a piece of wood from the railing, then crumbled it in his hand. He let the pieces fall to the floor.
“Rotten,” Pace said. “Even if we untied the rope from the bell beam, none of the timber up here is strong enough to hold it.”
“I never thought o’ that,” Lake said. He shook his head. “I guess every jackass thinks he’s got hoss sense until he’s told otherwise.”
Jess brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. Her forehead was sheened with sweat and her dress showed damp at the armpits and clung tight to her breasts.
“All right, Sammy, you didn’t like Mash’s suggestion,” she said. “Let’s hear yours.”
“We wait until full dark, then make our break,” Pace said. “I’ll go first and then replace the ladder. If any of the Peacocks are still alive by then, I’ll hold them off until you and Mash climb down.”
“And then?” Jess said.
“And then we hightail it out of Requiem. Sometimes it’s a sight safer to pull your freight than your gun.”
“Suppose the Peacocks come after us?” Lake said.
“If they’re not dead, they’ll be almighty sick. Them boys won’t come after us.”
Pace looked over the rail and studied the saloon. There was no sign of life and no sound, only the tick-tick-tick of the batwing doors blowing back and forth against each other in a rising east wind.
“In another hour or two, we’ll have nothing to fear from the Peacocks,” he said. “They were dead men the moment they put the dipper to their lips and drank from the well.”
Chapter 47
By the time the sun began its drop to the horizon and the sky streaked red, two of the Peacock brothers were dead, and the others barely holding on to life.
After cholera strikes, it doesn’t let go. It torments its victims all the way to the grave, and the dying is not quick and never easy.
The dead brothers lay in pools of their own filth that reeked of rotten fish, the distinctive aroma of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. Swollen tongues stuck out of their stick-dry mouths and even in death fever burned in their eyes, as though the disease was reluctant to give up even the ravaged carcasses of its victims.
The surviving Peacocks sat at a table, naked, stripped of the filthy clothing that had clung, stuck, and cleaved to their stinking bodies.
Their beautiful Colts, tuned like fine violins by a German gunsmith, they’d cast aside on the floor, the need for them gone.
Fire.
Now their weapon was fire.
“Soon,” one of the brothers said. “It must be soon.”
“Come the darkness,” the other said.
“We’ll be too weak by then, maybe dead.”
“No, we’ll find the strength. Sometimes the dead can walk.”
The man waved a hand in the direction of the church. “Over there is one who has done us much harm. We’ll watch him burn and then we’ll hound his soul through the canyons of hell for all eternity.”
“And we’ll be five again.”
“Yes. Five. As we were before the man called Lake came into our lives.”
The brother who’d spoken first rose to his feet and immediately collapsed on the floor. He convulsed as a wave of pain hit him, then lay still for a few moments.
His brother didn’t ask him how he was because there was no point. He already knew. Like himself, his brother was dying one faltering heartbeat at a time.
Finally the man on the floor began to crawl. After an agonizing length of time, he reached the cans of coal oil that the deacon had left against the wall.
He grabbed a can by its handle and dragged it with him to the saloon door. There he stopped and his skull face split in a grotesque grin. He turned and looked at his brother.
“I can do it. When the time comes, I’ll be able.”
The sitting brother’s eyes moved to the door. It was still not dark, but the orange sun hung low in the sky and the shadows were lengthening.
“Not long, brother,” he said. “It will soon be dark.”
“I long to see them burn,” the Peacock at the door said. “We’ve seen it before many times, have we not? How the skin bubbles, the hair blazes, the eyes scorch out of the head as though rammed by red-hot pokers.”
“And they scream, brother. They shriek and wail and gambol about in a dance and it always makes me laugh.”
The man clutched on to the table, clenched his teeth against pain and the sudden, abominable flux that gushed, spluttering, from his body. It was a full five minutes before he could find the strength to talk again.
Finally he said, “Not long now before all the fires of hell descend on this accursed place.”
Above the saloon, a red-tailed hawk quartered the sky and its shrill hunting cry slashed through the evening quiet like a razor.
Chapter 48
Deacon Santee heard the screech of a hawk above the tree canopy, but did not lift his head to look. Nor could he.
He was sick, sicker than he’d ever been in his life.
Right now he should be in bed, tended by his women, not lying across the neck of a horse, trusting that the animal was less lost than he was.
He was traveling toward the setting sun, in the right direction.
Once out of these infernal trees, he’d know where he was headed.
Camp couldn’t be too far away now.
He sniffed, sniffed again.
Wood smoke. Praise the Lord, it was wood smoke!
Not far, then. A mile. Maybe less.
The horse stopped dead in its tracks, so suddenly that the deacon had to grab on to its neck to avoid a tumble.
He tried to kick the animal into a walk, but it stood stock-still, refusing to budge.
Then he smelled it, a stench different to his own rotten-fish stink. Sweeter. And close.
It took a tremendous effort of will, but Santee managed to raise himself into a sitting position in the saddle.
Then he saw what his horse had seen.
His sons Gideon and Zedock.
Or what was left of them.
There was not a shred of human decency in Deacon Santee, nor any depth of paternal feeling. His sons had been sired on whores and he’d always believed he had the ability to hammer out more should the need arise.
But something stirred in him as he watched his boys twist in the wind, their hands rawhide-tied to a tree limb.
Love, pity, empathy, all were alien emotions to the deacon, yet, in small measure certainly, he felt them now, fragile and faint, like a butterfly fluttering its wings in his belly.
He kneed his horse closer to the tree. Nearby, a wisp of smoke rose from an ashy fire. The burning sticks that had been rammed into his sons’ eyes had been lit there.
Their bellies had been cut open and curling blue entrails tangled down their legs and spilled onto the ground.
Was it then, or before, that they screamed? Their mouths were still open now, but the screams were silent.
Gideon and Zedock had been given a death worse than cholera. Worse than anything.
His breath wheezing in his chest, Santee pulled his knife, leaned out of the saddle, and cut his sons down. The bodies thudded to the grass, one on top of the other, sprawled and untidy, and lay still.
The smoldering fire told the deacon that the Apaches were close.
He knew that their sense of smell was keener than a white man’s and that they followed the scent the way a wild animal does.
The stench of rotting fish that clung to his body would leave an easy trail.
He had to get back to the wagons. Surely some of the hands had made it through with the herd.
Once again, Santee gave his horse its head, vaguely aware that it followed an old game trail through the wild oaks.
The grass and trees were greener than he ever remembered them. Above the leaf canopy the sky had shaded into a lemon color, and the final flare of the dying sun tinted the few clouds burnished gold.
After . . . the deacon didn’t know how long . . . the trees gave way to brush, and then to grass.
Ahead of him spread the valley with its S-shaped creek. Harcourt’s tent still stood and he saw a few grazing cattle.
It was a peaceful scene, and the deacon raised his voice in a joyful shout of hallelujah. The good Lord had shown him the way.
He was home.
The Apaches knew the smell of cholera and stayed well away from the white man who tainted the earth with his fish stink.
But they watched him, their black eyes glittering, as they let him pass through their ranks to the valley.
Chapter 49
Deacon Santee found two dead men in the grass, separated by about twenty paces. Both had been shot multiple times, most of their wounds in the back.
He drew rein and looked around him.
It took a while because his sight was blurred, but he spotted the bodies of three more punchers, like the others widely spread apart.
Several cows grazed by the river, one of them a longhorn, but the rest of the herd was scattered to hell and gone, as though they’d dropped off the edge of the world.
The signs were written in burning letters four feet tall and the deacon had no trouble reading them.
There had been a running fight with Apaches, and his sons had been killed early. The rest of the punchers had tried to make it back to camp and had died after they crossed the creek.
As for the herd, it had spooked and most of the cattle would still be running.
His eyes had once been far-seeing, but now, as the cholera ravaged him, the deacon couldn’t make out his wagons.
But they’d be there, he knew. He had no illusions about what he’d find, but then, hope is often the last thing to die in a man.
Santee kneed his horse forward, riding through the long summer twilight and the silence that lay softly on the land.
The breeze felt cool on his face and tasted of pine and he heard coyotes yip in some faint, faraway place.
The deacon rode on, fearful of what he’d find, fearful of the death that awaited him. Fearful of what might come thereafter.
It was worse than he’d imagined, worse than anyone could have imagined.
A man can use a woman hard, but in the end, if he’s considerate, little harm is done.
But Apache warriors had ways of using a woman where much harm was done and consideration for the woman’s well-being didn’t enter into their way of thinking.
And so it was with the deacon’s wives.
The women lay on their backs, legs spread wide, their naked bodies bone white in the half-light except where dried blood crusted black.
Among them lay the body of the vaquero who’d helped Santee shoot Beau Harcourt into collops. The scrap iron head of a war lance was buried deep in the man’s chest and he’d been scalped.
But he’d sold his life dearly, the ground around his body littered with empty shells from his Winchester.
The deacon half stepped, half fell from the saddle.
He moved from body to body, forcing himself to experience the horror in full measure to feed his growing anger.
He fe
lt no grief. No sense of loss.
He took women only for the physical pleasure they provided. Emotional bonds did not interest the deacon in the least.
But ownership did.
The gals had been his’n. And the Apaches had taken them away from him.
Now he would exact the women’s blood price in lead.
That day Deacon James J. Santee sought redemption of a sort, trusting that belted men would talk of him in later days as a man who had sand enough to exact a reckoning.
He drew his guns and looked to where the Apaches had gathered, sensing that true nobility lies in being superior to your previous self.
As he sought revenge for his dead wives and braced himself for his last fight, the deacon was about to do something finer than he’d ever done before in his hunted, violent existence.
And in the end he perhaps found, at least in small measure, his lost nobility.
Chapter 50
The deacon staggered across the short grass, a gun in each hand, muzzles pointing to the painted sky.
As though anger had cleared his vision, he saw the Apaches now, gathered on the bank of the creek.
He glanced at the sky. It would be dark soon. A single star shone in the east, heralding the coming night. It was a pleasant evening and he felt like a man taking a stroll along a city boulevard.
He walked on, leaving a loathsome trail behind him as his rupturing guts emptied again and again.
Every step weakened him, and he did not know how many were left to him.
Enough.
Soon he’d be among the savages, where he would play hob.
His voice, weak, thin, reedy, rose in song.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored . . .
Now he was marching, by God. Marching to glory.
He fired his guns. Two fast shots that racketed across the hush of the evening.
“I’m a-comin’ for y’all!” he yelled. “Hear me! The deacon’s on his way.”
Steadily now, he triggered his revolvers, a rolling thunder of gunfire from the weapons of a master.
Ralph Compton the Ghost of Apache Creek (9781101545560) Page 14
