Ralph Compton the Ghost of Apache Creek (9781101545560)

by Compton, Ralph; West, Joseph A.

  Mine eyes have seen the glory ...

  A bullet crashed into the deacon’s left thigh and shattered bone. He dropped to a knee, staggered to his feet, and walked on, gritting his teeth.

  He sang his war song like that, the words wrenching out of him.

  Of the coming of the Lord . . .

  Two bullets now, fired with fine accuracy from .44-40 Winchesters.

  One ball slammed into the deacon’s chest, the other lower, deep in his belly.

  He fell to his knees, triggered his guns.

  Empty clicks.

  Bullets hammered into him. Shredded him. Destroyed him.

  The deacon took a last look at the sky, caught a glimpse of something terrifying, then screamed and fell on his face.

  His body erupted one last time, but Deacon Santee was already dead.

  The Apaches left him where he lay and did not go near his body.

  They knew and feared the ways of cholera.

  Chapter 51

  “Damn it, Mash, hold it for a while longer,” Sam Pace said. “It’ll be dark soon.”

  “Man can’t hold what’s not in his hand,” Lake said.

  “Hell, Mash, piss over the side,” Jess said. “I don’t mind.”

  “I do,” Pace said. “The Peacocks will shoot his damn fool pecker off.”

  “When a man’s got to go, a man’s got to go,” Lake said.

  He stood, turned his back to Jess, and fumbled with his fly. He leaned against the rail and sent a steaming stream of piss hissing over the side.

  Lake talked over his shoulder.

  “Had to stop an’ piss in the middle of a gunfight oncet, up in the Nevada Slate Ridge country,” he said. He nodded. “Yep, I recollect that like it was yesstidy.”

  “We don’t want to hear about it, Mash,” Pace said, irritated.

  “I do,” Jess said. “How did you manage it, Mash, without getting shot?”

  “Well,” Lake said, “me an’ this gold miner, English feller by the name of Giles St. John, got into it over a silver watch he claimed I stole from him. He called me out and we stood in the street and took pots at each other. But, after a spell, I held up my hand and said, ‘Giles, hold your fire. I got to take a piss, get rid of some of the beer in my gut.’ Giles, he says, ‘You go right ahead, Mash. I’m a British gentleman and I won’t shoot until you’ve finished.’”

  Lake sighed, buttoned up, and said, “Hell, I needed that.”

  “What about Giles St. John?” Jess said.

  “What about him?” Lake said.

  “What happened after you stopped to take a piss and he told you he wouldn’t shoot, him being a gentleman and all?”

  “Oh yeah. Well, I’m standing there, letting it go, and the damned limey took another pot at me. Damn near blew my head off. So I buttoned up and said, “Giles, you’re a no-good son of a bitch, an’ low down.’”

  Lake sat, and settled his back against the rail. “I drawed my revolver again, and cut loose. Come mighty close. Then ol’ Giles, he figures he’s had enough for one day and takes off running, and I ain’t seen him from that day to this.”

  Lake shrugged. “Of course, we was both drunk at the time, so I never did hold that pot against him none.”

  “So the moral of the story is: Don’t drink a belly-load of beer before a gunfight,” Jess said.

  Lake smiled and nodded. “Young lady, them’s words of wisdom. Beer an’ gunfighting just don’t mix.”

  “Mash,” Pace said, “please, if you ever get the urge again, don’t tell us any more big windies.”

  “It ain’t a windy, Sam. It happened just like I tole you.”

  “I think Mash’s story is easier to believe than three people sitting in a bell tower waiting for dark,” Jess said.

  “Me too,” Mash said. He eyed Pace. “Huh! Big windy, my ass.”

  Night erased the last traces of daylight from Requiem.

  A ghost town casts still shadows. But it makes the surrounding darkness restless, on edge, as though it’s waiting for something to happen, perhaps the misty midnight appearance of the people who once lived there.

  The wind was from the east, coming off old, stone mountains, bringing with it the scent of pine and the ability to make placid men angry.

  Sam Pace stood at the rail of the bell tower, his eyes searching into the night. Nothing moved and there was no sound.

  Lake stepped to his side. “See anything?”

  Pace shook his head.

  “Then, just like you said, the cholera’s done for them Peacocks,” Lake said.

  “Seems like.”

  “Does that mean we can get down from here?” Jess said.

  “It do,” Lake answered. He looked at Pace. “Don’t it?”

  Pace made no answer, his head turned, eyes fixed on the saloon.

  “Hell, boy, what do you see?” Lake said.

  “I don’t know what I see.”

  “Describe it, Sammy,” Jess said. She sounded tense.

  “White,” Pace said. “I thought I saw something white move near the saloon door.”

  “A coyote?” Jess said.

  “Maybe.”

  Pace was silent for a while, then said, “You know what I think it was?”

  Jess and Lake stared at him.

  “I think maybe it was a naked man on all fours, crawling along the boardwalk in the shadow of the saloon wall.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Jess said.

  “It means two things. One, all the Peacocks aren’t dead.”

  “And the other?” Jess said.

  “The other is that we could be in a heap of trouble.”

  Chapter 52

  Sam Pace lifted his rifle to his shoulder.

  He aimed just to the right of the saloon door where the wall met the boardwalk.

  Levering the Winchester from his shoulder, he dusted shots along the angled shadow from the door to the end of the boardwalk. His bullets splintered timber from the walk and thudded into the saloon wall.

  The racket of the rifle roused Requiem from slumber.

  The Peacock brothers’ high-strung horses yanked away from the saloon hitch rail. The startled animals uprooted the supporting posts and galloped down the street, dragging the rail with them.

  Echoes slammed through the alleys and town buildings, booming like muffled drums.

  Lake’s eyes probed the darkness, his ears ringing.

  “Did you get him, Sam?” he said, too loudly.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” Pace said. “It’s too dark to see. Where’s the damned moon?”

  He listened into the night, heard nothing.

  “Like Jess says, maybe it was just a coyote,” Lake said.

  Pace said nothing, and the woman said, “Sammy, you’re scaring the hell out of me. Let’s get down from here.”

  “I don’t want to dangle from a rope with the Peacocks taking shots at me,” Pace said. “We’ll wait for a spell.”

  “Damn it, Sammy, wait for what?” Jess said.

  “I don’t know.”

  The woman was silent for a moment, as though she’d just been slapped.

  “Right, that’s it,” she said. “I’m climbing down the rope.”

  “Wait!” Pace said.

  He smelled it now. The sulfurous stink of rotten eggs.

  “Mash, was that you?” Jess said, her nose wrinkling.

  “Hell no. I—”

  “It’s coal oil,” Pace yelled. “Damn it, they’re going to burn the church out from under us.”

  Pace smelled smoke, then saw the first flames lick the side of the church. The fire reached higher. And higher.

  The timber that framed the building, especially the heavier beams that supported the roof, had baked beneath four summers of relentless sun and they were tinder dry. The fire quickly took hold and the church torched, blazed, roared as though in mortal pain.

  Black smoke shrouded the belfry, and the air became hard to breathe.

  “Damn it,�
� Lake said, “I’m gonna jump.”

  “No!” Pace yelled. “You damned fool, you’ll break your legs.”

  He dragged Lake toward the bell rope. “Climb down.”

  “How the hell do I manage that?” Lake said.

  Behind him, flames were shooting through the floorboards.

  Pace shoved the rope into Lake’s hands. “Here. Learn as you go.”

  The old man aired out his lungs, cursing Pace and the mother who bore him, but he took the rope. He clambered down, using only his hands, and his head bobbed out of sight.

  “Now you, Jess,” Pace said.

  The woman needed no second bidding. The entire church was ablaze, and the supporting timbers of the bell tower cracked and creaked, threatening to collapse into the inferno.

  Pace watched Jess slide down the rope and took one last glance around him.

  What he saw chilled him to the bone.

  Sparks from the burning church had jumped to the roof of the saloon and the rod and gun store next to it. Both buildings, parched tinderboxes, smoked, and here and there flames fluttered like scarlet moths.

  “No!” Pace yelled.

  His town was burning to death.

  Chapter 53

  Sam Pace grabbed the rope and started his downward climb.

  He was still ten feet above the ground when the bell tower collapsed.

  Flaming timbers plummeted around Pace and a beam slammed into the top of his left shoulder, numbing his arm. He let go of the rope and fell heavily to the smoldering ground.

  The weight of the heavy iron bell forced the shattered wreckage of the tower to tumble into the street—and saved Pace from further injury from falling beams or the bell itself.

  But fire rippled across the ceiling of the church and hemmed him in on all sides as the walls blazed. Trapped by sheets of flame, Pace felt tongues of fire lashing at him, the heat threatening to scorch out his lungs.

  Fire is a good servant but a bad master, and Pace felt a surge of panic as flames lashed at him. Blinded by smoke, he turned to his right and, limping on a left ankle that had taken the brunt of his fall, ran for his life.

  Pace lowered his head and hit a shifting scarlet and gold wall. He splintered through burning timbers and what was left of the charred framing and hit the grass rolling.

  He felt fire rip at his back, staggered to his feet, and tore off his burning shirt. Then he ran again, away from the church. Behind him the entire building collapsed with a roar, flames shooting high into the night sky.

  Pace limped into the street, and the sight that greeted him caught the breath in his throat.

  The whole town was on fire, from the saloon all the way to the barbershop. The east wind had picked up and spawned a roaring firestorm that cartwheeled through the buildings.

  Worse was to come.

  As Pace watched, the fire finally found the stacked barrels of gunpowder in the rod and gun shop. With a tremendous roar, the roof of the store was lifted clean off. The blast leveled the walls and scorched and splintered timbers hurtled across the street.

  Pace felt the explosion like a gigantic fist, its punch powerful enough to knock him on his back.

  For a couple of minutes he lay where he was, stunned. Then slowly, painfully, he rose to his feet.

  The sky above Requiem had shaded from midnight blue to cherry red, barred by a dozen columns of sooty black. The wind fanned flames that devoured Requiem like wolves, picking the town clean to the bone.

  Sam Pace groaned and fell to his knees, a sorrowing penitent at a sacrificial altar.

  His town was gone. And with it, the reason for his existence.

  Pace saw the movement out of the corner of his vision, the slow crawl of a white worm. He lifted his head and his eyes narrowed, focused, clutched at a fistful of night.

  The worm crept, slithered, slid away from the burning church, its way lit by fire.

  Sam Pace rose to his feet. He drew his Colt and limped toward the worm, tall and terrible, his naked chest splashed by scarlet shadow, the hollows of his eyes deep in darkness.

  The worm, pale, covered in filth from its own body, stopped and looked at him. It raised a hand, in a plea for mercy or in defiance, Pace would never know.

  “Which of them Peacocks are you?” Pace said, looking down at the man.

  The mouth in the skull face opened, smiled. “Pestilence.”

  Pace nodded. “Then go back to hell, damn you.”

  He emptied his gun into the man, and was still thumbing the clicking hammer when Jess grabbed his arm and gently pulled him away.

  Chapter 54

  Come daylight, the wind still came from the east. It nosed around the cremated remains of Requiem, now a charred skeleton of ruined buildings that framed crazily leaning spars rising out of a gray sea of ash.

  Wisps of smoke still drifted from the wreckage, the sad remnants of the town’s funeral pyre.

  Sam Pace and Jess stood in the street and gazed at the carnage the fire had wrought.

  Pace was silent, his face like stone, and Jess’s heart went out to him.

  “I’m sorry, Sammy,” she said, looking at him, “so sorry that your town is gone.” Then, hopefully: “There’s no reason left for you to stay.”

  Pace said nothing, but after a few long moments he said, “Are all the Peacock brothers dead?”

  Jess nodded. “Mash says he saw one burn in the church. I guess the two others died in the saloon.”

  “Where is Mash?”

  “He left to go look for the Peacock horses. He told you that.”

  “I didn’t hear him.”

  Jess put her hand on Pace’s arm. “Are you all right, Sammy?”

  “I’m fine, just fine.”

  The woman’s face was blackened by smoke, her eyes red-rimmed, still smarting.

  “When Mash finds the horses, we can get out of here,” she said. “Mash said Snowflake is a big Mormon settlement and we’ll be safe from the Apaches there.”

  Jess put her hand on Pace’s forearm. “I think we could make it, you and me. I mean, be happy together.”

  Pace said nothing. He looked around him, his eyes distant.

  Then, like a man waking from a dream, he turned and smiled, a vague smile, remote as the far mountains.

  “I must stay here because the people will rebuild,” he said. “That is the way of western men and women. They endure. After hard times they straighten their backs, pick up and start all over again. It’s been that way in the past and it will be that way in the future.”

  Jess moved a step toward Pace, hesitated a heartbeat, then threw her arms around his neck.

  “Sammy, hang on,” she said. “You’ll be fine when we get to Snowflake. You’ll feel better. I know you will.”

  Pace gently disengaged the woman and looked around him.

  “I thought I’d lost everything,” he said. “But I haven’t. This is still a town, my town, and it will be reborn out of the ashes.”

  Jess said nothing. Suddenly she felt an emotion that was a close kin to despair and it cut through her like a blade.

  Mash Lake shook his head. “Nary a sign of them, Sam. Apaches would’ve jumped at the chance to nab them big American studs.”

  “Mash, what do we do now?” Jess asked, alarm in her voice.

  Lake smiled. “We walk, little lady.”

  “Without horses you’ll never make it,” Pace said. “How many Apaches do you think there are between here and Snowflake?”

  “Well, hell, boy, we can’t stay where we’re at,” Lake said.

  The two men had accompanied Jess to the creek. They sat on the bank while she kneeled by the water, splashing her face, neck, and breasts.

  “You can stay right here, Mash,” Pace said. “When the folks come back, you and Jess can find work helping them rebuild.” He smiled. “I might even make you my deputy if you steer clear of the whiskey.”

  Now it was Lake’s turn to show alarm.

  “Are you goin’ crazy on me ag
ain, boy?” he said.

  “Mash,” Jess said, “leave him alone.”

  “But he’s cuttin’ loco close again, Jess,” Lake said.

  The woman dried her hands on her dress, then did up the buttons over her breasts.

  “Sammy is coming with us to Snowflake,” she said. “He’ll be fine once he’s away from this awful place.” She hesitated just a moment, then said, “I’ll take care of him.”

  Pace shook his head. “No, I told you, I’m staying right here. Requiem is my town and now it needs me more than ever.”

  “Son,” Lake said, his voice gentle, “there is no town.”

  Pace smiled. “Well, that’s where you’re wrong, old man.”

  He rose to his feet and looked toward the piled ruins.

  “I can see it,” he said, his gaze glowing. “I can see the new buildings, all the tall stores and saloons and maybe a new church. The signs will be fresh painted and hang on chains outside every door and people will go in and out, the womenfolk with packages in their hands, the men stopping in the street to talk crop yields and cattle prices.”

  Pace grinned and pointed. “Jess, Mash, look. Can’t you see it? The town of Requiem, new-aborned from the ashes. It’s there. All you have to do is look.”

  Mash got to his feet and stood beside him.

  “Sam, if they’re to last, buildings need a firm foundation,” he said. “And so does a man. If he don’t have that, he’ll sink into the ground and be lost forever.”

  He turned and waved in Jess’s direction. “Over there is a woman who can give you that foundation, boy. Go with her so you don’t sink any deeper into craziness.”

  Pace shook his head. “You just don’t see it, do you, Mash?”

  The wrinkled planes of Lake’s face stiffened. “I see what I see, boy. An’ I don’t like any of it.”

  Chapter 55

  Mash Lake carried a burlap sack over his shoulder, bulging with the blackened cans of food he’d scavenged from the burned-out husk of the general store. He carried his rifle in his left hand.