Ralph Compton the Ghost of Apache Creek (9781101545560)

by Compton, Ralph; West, Joseph A.

  Beside him, Jess had a couple of blankets tied to her back and she wore a battered hat Pace had given her.

  “Change your minds,” he said. “You won’t make it.”

  Lake shook his head. “Sam, I’ve fit Apaches afore and I reckon I’ve got their measure. We can’t stay here, boy. We’d starve to death if’n the cholera didn’t get us first.”

  Pace looked at the woman. “Jess?”

  “I’m going with Mash, Sammy. This is a terrible, cursed place. I can’t stay here a minute longer.”

  Her face was strained, the plea in her voice almost a sob.

  “Sammy, come with us. I’ll be a good woman to you, I promise.”

  Pace smiled. “I reckon not. This is where I belong.”

  Jess had realized hours before that further argument was useless. Now she accepted what was happening and gave up the struggle.

  “Then take care of yourself, Sammy,” she said.

  Pace nodded. “You too, Jess.”

  Lake stuck out a hand. “Good luck, boy. Don’t go too crazy, you hear?”

  “I’ll try not to,” Pace said. He held Lake’s hand a moment longer than a handshake demanded.

  He watched them go, kept his eyes on them until they dissolved into shimmering distance and passing time.

  Pace knew they wouldn’t make it to Snowflake alive.

  He was sure Mash Lake, an old Indian fighter, knew as well.

  Maybe Jess had a different idea, but he’d never been any good at reading women and couldn’t guess what was in her mind.

  She’d lived a hard, degraded life and Pace felt she deserved better than that. But worst of all, her death would go unnoticed and unmourned, and that was the greatest tragedy of all.

  He looked into the distance, empty now, and lifted a hand in farewell.

  “Good luck, my friends,” he said.

  Pace walked along the street, past blackened heaps of charred timber, all that was left of his town. Only the livery stable still stood. The fire had been content to scorch its roof and walls and do no other damage.

  He looked inside and noticed a can of red paint, and that gave him an idea.

  Pace kicked out a pine board from the stable wall, then found a paintbrush. He laid the plank flat on the ground, kneeled, and wrote DANGER CHOLERA WELL.

  He stood and admired his handiwork. It would do just fine.

  Pace walked back to the well and laid the board across the parapet.

  He nodded, satisfied. Now nobody else would drink the damned water.

  The sun began its climb into the morning sky as Pace walked down the street, past the livery and in the direction of the cemetery.

  Now all he could do was wait, and there was no better place than a shady spot near his wife and child.

  When he reached the site of the mass grave, he unbuckled his gun and let it drop to the ground. Then he sat, his chin on his knees, and began his vigil.

  The sun left and the moon found him there.

  Then the sun again.

  But Sam Pace did not move.

  He was waiting . . . for the return of the living . . . or the dead.

  Historical Note

  Cholera was an ever-present danger in Western cow towns, where outhouses and cattle pens were often situated too close to the water supply.

  The great Asiatic cholera outbreak of June and July 1867 killed three hundred people in booming Ellsworth, Kansas, and helped hasten the town’s demise as a major cattle center.

  Wagon trains were particularly susceptible to the disease. In bad years, two-thirds of the emigrants on the Oregon Trail succumbed to cholera, a greater mortality rate than from any other cause.

  There was no cure and people could go from healthy to dead in a matter of hours.

  Sometimes the pioneers received a proper burial, but many were simply abandoned in their beds by the side of the trail, to die alone.

  Emigrant John Clark later described such a scene: “One woman and two men lay dead on the grass and some more ready to die. Women and children crying, some hunting medicine and none to be found. With heartfelt sorrow, we looked around for some time until I felt unwell myself. Got up and moved forward one mile, so to be out of hearing of crying and suffering.”

  To prevent the disease, emigrants were advised to “carry a small bottle of tincture of camphor and a few lumps of sugar in your pocket . . . and when you have any pain or disorder in your bowels, take three or four drops (of the camphor) on sugar.”

  Of course, by the time you had “pain or disorder in your bowels,” you were already dead.

  The Mormon settlement of Snowflake, Arizona, was established in 1878 by William J. Flake and Erastus Snow. Hence the name Snowflake.

  In the 1880s, serious overgrazing in Texas resulted in catastrophic cattle losses and range deterioration. This is what drove ranchers like Beau Harcourt into the previously unexploited grasslands of the Little Colorado River Basin.

  Unfortunately, by the turn of the century, the Texas experience had been repeated in Arizona.

  Today, despite modern range management, the entire basin is seriously overgrazed.

  Don’t miss another exciting Western adventure in the USA Today bestselling series!

  SLAUGHTER CANYON

  A Ralph Compton Novel by Joseph A. West

  Coming from Signet in January 2012.

  Deputy United States Marshal Matt Battles sat his horse and studied the rain-lashed railroad siding. Under his slicker, his right hand rested on the worn walnut handle of the Colt tucked into his waistband.

  A man born to vigilance, his hard, clear blue eyes scanned the railroad car drawn up just a few feet from the end of the rails. A chuffing locomotive made up the rest of the train, there being no other cars but the big Pullman.

  Four soldiers wearing rubberized ponchos stood guard outside the car, their bayoneted rifles gleaming in the downpour. One smoked a pipe, his hand over the glowing coal to keep it alight.

  Battles shifted in the saddle, then winced as pain gnawed at his left thigh. Carson City Tom Sanchez had put lead in there three years before. It had not been a serious wound as wounds go, but a hurt like that does pain a man in rainy weather.

  Battles lifted his head as lightning scrawled across the night sky and thunder rumbled, still distant, but coming his way.

  “Well, Matt,” he said aloud, the habit of men who ride lonely trails, “let’s get the damned thing over with.”

  He kneed his buckskin forward and rode down a shallow, grassy rise to the gravel flat beside the tracks.

  The sudden appearance of a tall man riding a stud horse drew an immediate response from the soldiers.

  “Halt! Who goes there?” the smoking man challenged, talking through teeth clenched on the pipe stem.

  Battles drew rein, then said his name.

  The soldier’s proper response should’ve been “Pass, friend, and be recognized.”

  It wasn’t.

  “Come in slow and keep your hands where I can see them,” the soldier said. “I got faith in this here Springfield.”

  Battles rode to within three feet of the soldiers and stopped. They faced him in a bayoneted semicircle, neither hostile nor friendly, just ready and aware.

  The four men had the lean, tough look of old Apache fighters and had probably been handpicked for this guard detail.

  A careful man his own self, the marshal kept his motions to a minimum, and none of them were quick.

  “State your intentions,” the pipe-smoking soldier said.

  Battles’s amused smile erased a dozen years from his face and softened the hard, tight planes of his jaw and mouth.

  “My intention is to follow my orders and present myself to the president of the United States,” he said. Then, as a clincher: “I have a letter of introduction from Governor Roberts.”

  “Wait there,” the soldier said. “I’ll talk to the colonel.”

  He vanished inside the Pullman and appeared a few moments later, followed
by a beautiful officer wearing an impeccable dress uniform, gleaming in blue, silver, and gold. A black, spade-shaped beard, trimmed, combed, and scented, spread across his breast and he wore a crested signet ring on his left pinky finger.

  The officer stayed under the shelter of the car’s platform and beckoned Battles closer. He stretched out an arm and was visibly irritated as raindrops spattered his uniform.

  “I’m Colonel James Sinclair,” he said. “Show me your bona fides.”

  Battles reached under his slicker, a move that tensed the soldiers, and produced two pieces of paper. One he passed to the colonel, the other he again stuffed under his slicker.

  As Sinclair read, thunder rumbled across the sky and lightning flashed.

  Fretting over the delay and his growing discomfort, Battles peered through the downpour at the Pullman. All the car’s windows were lit up, rectangles of orange in the rain-needled darkness. He thought he heard the chink of glasses from inside and a man’s laughter, but, because of the dragon hiss of the storm, he wasn’t sure.

  The beautiful officer looked up from the letter he was holding and looked at Battles.

  “Come inside, Marshal,” he said. He motioned to the soldiers. “One of you take the marshal’s horse and see if you can find a place for it out of the rain.”

  Battles swung out of the saddle and followed the colonel into the Pullman.

  He found himself in a small office with a couple of desks. A sergeant orderly sat at one of the desks and rose to his feet when Sinclair and Battles entered.

  “Take the marshal’s coat and hat, Sergeant,” the colonel said. He managed a smile that was neither friendly nor amused. “And try not to drip all over the damned rug.”

  After Battles shrugged out of his slicker, Sinclair stretched out a hand.

  “Please, Marshal, you won’t need the firearm,” he said.

  It was useless to argue the point, and Battles surrendered the Colt.

  “It will be here for you when you leave, I assure you,” the colonel said, placing the revolver in his desk drawer.

  Sinclair had very white teeth, the canines large, wet, and aggressive, and the marshal pegged him as an ambitious career soldier who had fought all his battles in Washington.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  Sinclair opened the door that led from the office into the main interior of the car and closed it quietly behind him.

  The sergeant, a grizzled man with a deeply lined face, had regained his seat behind his desk. He smiled at Battles.

  “The colonel can be brusque,” he said.

  “Some men are,” Battles said.

  “Officers mostly, the brusque ones.”

  After a few moments’ silence, the soldier said, “You’ve been through it, Marshal.”

  “Some.”

  “You’ve got the scars. Inside, where they don’t show.” He smiled again. “But I can see them plain.”

  Battles studied the man, his hard eyes measuring him. “I could say the same thing about you.”

  “You could.”

  The sergeant lapsed into silence again, and then said, “Know what I think?”

  Battles said nothing.

  “Too many dead men in our pasts, friends and foe alike. All that dying weighs on a man after a spell.”

  The marshal’s smile again held that amazing warmth and youthfulness. “You’re a philosopher, Sergeant.”

  The old soldier nodded. “Uh-huh, nowadays it’s about all that’s left to me.”

  The door opened and Colonel Sinclair entered and looked at Battles.

  “The president of the United States will see you now,” he said.

  President Chester A. Arthur, a waxy-faced man who sported bushy sideburns and a magnificent mustache, sat behind a vast mahogany desk. To his left a thin, long-fingered clerk held a sheaf of papers and affected a worried look. Colonel Sinclair stood behind the president.

  Arthur waved Battles into the chair that fronted his desk. He studied the lawman for a few long moments, then said, “Are ye sharp set?”

  Battles shook his head. “No, Mr. President, I ate earlier.”

  “Then a glass of brandy with you?”

  “Please,” Battles said.

  The clerk put his papers on the desk and crossed to a campaign table that held several decanters and a collection of glasses.

  He poured brandy for Battles and passed him the drink.

  Battles looked at Arthur over the rim of his glass. The president was a sick man that spring of 1882, already suffering from the kidney disease that would kill him five years later, and it showed on him.

  “The brandy is to your liking, Marshal?” he said.

  Battles nodded. “It’s excellent, sir.”

  “Good, good, very good.” Arthur hesitated, then said, “I read your letter of introduction from Governor Roberts. He thinks very highly of you.”

  Battles smiled. “Then my thanks to the governor.”

  “Roberts is a good man, but a loyal Democrat,” Arthur said. He waved a hand. “It is his one big failing, I’m afraid. Such a pity.”

  The marshal, wary of politics and politicians, nodded, but said nothing.

  “Did Roberts tell you why you’re here?” Arthur said, after another pause.

  “All he told me was that it has something to do with the letter and map I found on Green River Tom Riley.”

  Sinclair looked alarmed. “Where is this Riley person now?”

  “Nowhere. He’s dead.”

  “You killed him?”

  “He was notified,” Battles said.

  “We want no loose ends, Marshal,” Sinclair said.

  Arthur flashed irritation. “Yes, yes, Colonel. I’ll make that clear to Marshal Battles later.”

  The president leaned forward on his desk.

  “We remember President Garfield, Marshal, do we not?” Arthur said.

  “Your predecessor, yes, sir.”

  “Shot by a damned anarchist.” Arthur shook his head. “Garfield, that poor, doomed bastard, it took him almost three months to die and him in agony most of the time.”

  Arthur turned to the clerk and, his voice slightly unsteady, said, “James, brandy. And refill the marshal’s glass.

  “There were sinister forces at work in this country the day Garfield was assassinated,” Arthur said, “and I fear they are still in operation today.”

  The president downed his brandy and immediately demanded another.

  “Look around you, Marshal,” Arthur said. “What do you see? An ordinary Pullman railroad car? Let me assure you it is not.”

  He turned to Sinclair. “Tell him, Colonel.”

  “The Pullman has two emergency escape hatches,” the officer said, “one in the ceiling of the observation lounge, the other in the presidential bedroom at the center of the car.”

  The colonel tapped on the window beside Arthur’s desk. “Three inches of bullet-resistant glass, made by laminating twelve sheets of quarter-inch glass into one piece.” He pointed to the walls and ceiling.

  “Nickel-steel armor plate, its method of manufacture still a secret, is riveted to the sides, floor, roof, and ends of the car, and the armor is undetectable from any distance.”

  Sinclair smiled, as though he relished imparting a final secret.

  “The weight of a normal Pullman car is eighty tons. This car weighs almost twice that much and can withstand a cannonade.”

  “And the reason for all this security is that I believe there is a conspiracy afoot to assassinate me and overthrow the legally elected government of this great nation,” Arthur said.

  Thunder crashed overhead, muted by the thick windows and armor plate of the Pullman. Lightning glimmered, staining parts of the car with sudden flashes of stark white light.

  Suddenly Matt Battles figured it out, the reason for him being there. Now he said as much to the president.

  “You want me assigned as your bodyguard,” he said.

  Arthur shook his head. “No s
uch thing, Marshal. You saw the guards outside, and there’s a company of the Tenth Cavalry bivouacked within train whistle distance. No, I need greater things from you.”

  Rather than ask the obvious question, Battles waited.

  The car was hot, warmed by a potbellied stove, and the air had grown thick and hard to breathe.

  Even the beautiful soldier had tiny beads of sweat on his forehead and nose, but Arthur seemed oblivious.

  He turned to the clerk. “My list, James, if you please.”

  The man dropped a paper in front of Arthur, and the president picked it up with both hands.

  “I’m going to read you a list of names, Marshal,” he said. “I want your comment on each.”

  “Who are they?” Battles said.

  “Gunmen,” Colonel Sinclair said, answering for his boss. “Killers, outlaws, men of reputation. They hold that in common, but there is one trait more.”

  The soldier waited until he saw a question form on Battles’s face, then said, “There’s a score of names on the president’s list and every man jack of them has disappeared off the face of the earth over the past month.”

  Battles smiled. “They’re in a dangerous profession, Colonel.”

  “I agree. But for them all to vanish at the same time is just too much of a coincidence, don’t you think?”

  Arthur spoke again. “I fear these men could have been hired by person or persons unknown to take part in a desperate venture—perhaps even start a second Civil War.”

  A Ralph Compton series classic is back! Don’t miss the USA Today bestseller

  RIDERS OF JUDGMENT

  A Ralph Compton Novel by Ralph Cotton

  Coming from Signet in December 2011.

  Newton, Kansas, September 7, 1871

  For the past two weeks Danielle Strange had been recovering in bed in the upstairs back room of Dr. Lannahan’s office. Her gunshot wounds had been healing quickly, but not quickly enough to suit her. Now that she was up and able to dress herself, she was restless and wanted to get on her way. She had spent over two years of her life hunting down her father’s murderers, a gang of desperados who had left his body hanging from a tree. There had been ten outlaws in the gang that had killed Daniel Strange. Posing as a young gunman named Danny Duggin, she had used the gun-handling skills her father, the gunsmith, had taught her early in life. Danielle had tracked the killers down, one and two at a time, and had taken her vengeance upon them. Only one of those outlaws remained alive. His name was Saul Delmano, and she eagerly wanted to get back on his trail before it grew too cold to follow.