The Stranger from Abilene

by Ralph Compton

  The man could have been a sleepwalker, lost in a nightmare, or a wandering drifter seeking shelter from the storm. But Marshal Sam Pace was neither of those things. He was aware. Alert. Ready. And he was listening. The dead were talking . . . . He heard their thin whispers in the wind.

  He stopped and lifted his head, his eyes bright.

  “Is that you?” he said, raising his voice to a shout. “John Andres, is that you calling to me?”

  He listened into the night, hard-driven sand hissing over him.

  Pace opened the twisted door of Big John’s Bakery and Pie Shop and stepped inside; the storm, frustrated for the moment, let him go.

  “John?” Pace said. “Why did you call out to me?”

  The bakery was angled in deep shadow. Its shelves were empty, gray with cobwebs, and the place smelled of pack rats and dry rot.

  “Where the hell are you, John?” Pace said. “Martha, are you there?”

  Something rustled in a corner. The wind pounded at the store window, demanding entry. The door grated on its hinges.

  But the pie shop was a tomb, dark, empty, without human life.

  Sudden realization spiked in Pace, startling him.

  There was no one here. Not a soul.

  Big John—big laughing John Andres, who had won a medal at Gettysburg and another at Cold Harbor— was dead of cholera these past three years. He himself had buried Martha—a plump, rosy-cheeked woman who’d baked the best apple pie in the county and made biscuits so light they almost floated. John and Martha had moldered long in the ground and nothing about them would look human any longer.

  Still, he tried again. “John? Martha? Are you there?”

  A hollow silence mocked him. Outside, the wind raved and ranted, impatient for his return.

  Pace stumbled to the door and once again stepped into uproar.

  But wait. He was in no rush to walk again. It was time for thought.

  He sheltered in a store doorway, feeling crafty, because he knew there was much mischief afoot. Chin in hand, he pondered the wind. Aha, now he knew. It came from the northwest.

  “Do you know what that means, Sam?” he said aloud.

  He answered his own question, the habit of a man who had spent too much time alone.

  “Sure do, Sam. It means you’ll only be insane until the wind shifts.”

  Pace nodded and smiled. He was happy that he’d gotten to the truth of the thing.

  See, earlier in the day, the wind had blown from the south, and he’d been perfectly sane. But within the last hour, it had shifted. When it blew from the south again, he’d be his old rational self.

  William Shakespeare said he would, and ol’ Will knew about such things, him being a famous playwright an’ all: “I am but mad north-northwest. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

  For some reason, Pace had always remembered that quote since he’d heard an actor say it at a theater in Deadwood, and it tickled him. He said it aloud. Then once again.

  But another thought silenced him.

  “Sam,” he said, aloud, his face puzzled, “when the wind was from the south, how come you were still crazy as a loon?”

  Pace shook his shaggy head.

  “Sam doesn’t know,” he said. He thought about it. “I reckon ol’ Will Shakespeare has some explaining to do. That’s what I think.”

  The marshal stumbled into the street and again got pummeled by wind, hammered by stinging sand.

  “Will Shakespeare!” he yelled, throwing his arms wide, his head back. “You know nothing! You don’t know shit!” He laughed, an empty noise without humor. “Damn you, when the wind was from the south, I was still stark-raving mad and I didn’t know a hawk from a handsaw!”

  Pace looked beyond the edge of town, his eyes cunning again as they searched the darkness.

  Now he had a plan, a good plan.

  The graveyard was out there, hidden in the gloom.

  “Sam,” he said, “the best thing you can do now is talk to Jane and the baby. You can tell them about the south wind and how Shakespeare doesn’t know nothin’.”

  Pace nodded. Yes, he’d do that. Jane would understand his madness and give him comfort.

  The cemetery had been laid out just two hundred yards beyond the town limits. Because of flooding considerations, it lay atop a shallow rise at the base of a bare rock ridge shaped like the bow of a steamship.

  Once the place had been a sun-dappled, grassy spot, but now it was overrun with brush and cactus, and the site of the mass grave left a rectangular scar that would last for years.

  Pace had walked to the cemetery every day for the past three years; he knew the way, his feet feeling out the path in inky sand-torn darkness. The mass grave had no marker, but Pace found it easily, a tall wild oak guiding him to the spot. He knew the place well, and why not? He’d buried eighty-three people there, him and big John Andres, among them Pace’s own wife and child, taken by the cholera. At the end, the last bodies he’d rolled into in the pit had been those of John and his wife, Martha.

  Before then, the town had been known as Apache Creek, but when folks had started dying, the mayor issued a decree that from henceforth it would bear the name Requiem.

  No one had disagreed with him—at least, not those who were still alive.

  Pace’s hat had blown away in the storm, but he clasped his hands in front of him, bowed his head and waited as always for Jane to talk first. The wind roughed up the oak and Pace heard the tick-tick-tick of blown sand hitting the tree’s leaves and trunk. He stood stock-still for an hour, waiting with a madman’s rigid patience for Jane to talk to him. But she didn’t whisper to him, to tell him to be faithful and brave. Not that night.

  And all the while, Pace turned slowly into a pillar of sand.

  His matted hair and long beard were stiff and yellow, the rags he wore gritty, the color of earth. His eyes were rimmed with red, and dirt gathered at the corners of his mouth.

  Filthy, smelly, overgrown with hair, Sam Pace looked that night more animal than human. His untrimmed nails curved like talons. Those and his fiery gaze gave him the appearance of a dangerous scavenger come to raid the graves of the dead.

  Only one thing about Marshal Sam Pace was clean: the oiled blue Colt shoved into the pocket of his ragged pants.

  The habits of a lifetime die hard, and Pace had lived long with the Colt and knew its ways. He lavished care on the big revolver, but none on himself. Such was the manner of the gunfighting lawman—a reverence for the tool of his trade that not even madness could alter.

  Finally Pace stirred. He talked to Jane for a while and asked her to kiss the baby for him.

  “On her cheeks,” he said. “I always loved to kiss her chubby little cheeks.”

  Then he turned and walked back toward town.

  Suddenly he stopped in his tracks. He knew why Jane had said nothing to him—she was afraid to make a sound.

  It was the same reason the people who’d fled the cholera had not yet returned to Requiem.

  Outlaws! Damn them!

  Pace stood in the middle of the street, his Colt in his hand. He couldn’t see the bad men, not yet, but they were here all right, lurking in the shadows, ready to rob the bank and hooraw the town.

  Marshal Sam Pace’s town.

  His face took on a determined look as he raised his gun to waist level, his thumb on the hammer. He’d show them. Teach them that Sam Pace was no bargain.

  “I’m ready for you skunks,” he yelled. “Come the hell out and take your medicine like men.”

  There! Slinking into the alley by the Oxford Hat Shoppe. The outlaw was crouched, ready to take aim at him.

  Pace thumbed off a shot, then ran for the alley. He was just in time to see the man, a fleeting shadow crawling on his hands and knees, disappear around a corner.

  There was a splash of blood in the sand, then a scarlet trail leading toward the rear into the alley. Well, that fatherless son of a bitch wouldn’t be back for anothe
r dose of Marshal Sam Pace anytime soon.

  Pace angled across the street to the bank, wind and sand tearing at him. His face set and hard, his eyes reached into the darkness.

  He saw movement—another damned outlaw crawling like a dog on all fours!—and fired. He was rewarded by the man’s yelp of pain and he fired again. This time the outlaw dropped and sprawled on the boardwalk.

  “Got you,” Pace said. “That’ll teach you that you can’t rob banks and scare folks in my town.”

  He thumbed back the hammer of his Colt and walked toward the dead man. He stepped onto the boardwalk, then stumbled as his boot crashed through a rotted timber. Pace fell to his left and his head struck something hard. Lightning flashed inside his skull, followed by blackness. He heard the fading sound of the roaring night . . . then nothing at all.