Ralph Compton - The Ghost of Apache Creek

When the time came he’d handle those two himself.

As for Beau Harcourt, he was sulking in his tent. The deacon smiled. Even the sight of somebody else’s blood had been too much for him.

Now the man expected a share of the army money and that made the deacon’s smile stretch into a grin.

He’d pay Harcourt off all right. In lead.

Santee’s wagons were parked under a stand of pine and wild oak and he watched his women walk back and forth, their hips swaying. He walked in the direction of the wagons.

But he stopped in his tracks when he saw the four riders coming in.

Damn it, even at a distance, they looked like specters of death on horseback.

Santee’s hands dropped to his guns.

Chapter 25

Sam Pace and Lake rode northward, the broad land lying open before them. The mist had lifted and the ten-thousand-foot-high peaks of the White Mountains were now visible to the east, their pine-covered slopes motionless, drowsing in sunlight.

“See it, Sam?” Lake said, his sharp old eyes reaching out over the dry grassland.

“Yeah, I’ve been studying on it for quite a spell. It ain’t smoke, is it?”

“Dust. Something mighty big kickin’ it up.”

“The deacon’s herd?”

“Seems like. Two thousand head of cattle make a heap o’ dust in their passing.”

Pace’s mind was working. Had the deacon snuck into town and taken Jess? It hardly seemed likely, but it was possible.

Lake said aloud what Pace had been thinking.

“Maybe he’s got Jess,” he said. He amended that. “I mean, your prisoner.”

“Well, she isn’t my prisoner right at this moment,” Pace said, irritated. “Now, is she?”

“Sorry, Sam,” Lake said. He smiled. “I was only sayin’.”

“Well, don’t say it, Mash. It’s starting to annoy the hell out of me.”

“That’s ’cause you’re tetched, boy. Makes you fly off the handle real easy.”

Pace let that go. Now was not the time to discuss his sanity or his lack thereof.

He drew rein and stared at the dust cloud.

“What the hell do we do now?” he said. “We can’t go charging into a cattle herd that’s kicking up dust, looking for a girl who might be there or might not.”

“No, we can’t, Sam. Anyway, if it is the deacon and we go anywhere near his woman, he’ll shoot us off’n these horses quicker’n scat.”

After bowing his head in thought for a few moments, Pace straightened and said, “Well, there’s nothing that says we can’t take a closer look.”

“What fer a closer look?”

“Because I want Jess back, and right now I can’t think of anything else to do. Can you?”

“Well, we could return to Requiem.”

“For what?”

“To plan our strategy.”

“Damn it, we don’t have a strategy.”

Lake didn’t take time to think about it longer.

“All right, then, let’s take a closer look.” He grinned. “Maybe we can cut your prisoner out of the herd without the deacon taking pots at us.”

“Mash,” Pace sighed, “there are times when you try a man’s patience. You surely do.

“We won’t waste time following the herd. We’ll ride on ahead and see if we can figure where it’s headed.”

“Seems as good a plan as any,” Lake said. He was silent for a moment, then said, “Here, Sam, you think the deacon might be throwing in with the Harcourt feller?”

“I’ve been studying on that and it seems likely.”

“Run their herds together and start a ranch?”

“Maybe so.”

“Strange, that.”

“Why?”

“On account of how the deacon ain’t a one fer sharing. That’s if everything I’ve heard about him is true.”

“I guess there’s a first time for everything, Mash.”

“Yeah, I suppose stranger things have happened. Could be the deacon plans to go respectable, settle down as a rancher, like.”

“You believe that?”

Lake smiled and shook his head. “Not a word of it.”

Chapter 26

Pace and Lake bypassed the herd by riding well to the south. They kept to the timbered valley country where there was no chance of getting skylined on a bare ridge.

The day was hot, the sun well up in the sky, and there was no cloud. Even among the pines and wild oak, the heat pounded at the riders mercilessly, and their shirts were black with sweat.

Only the mountains looked cool, green and lilac in the distance.

Pace kept an eye on the dust cloud to the north.

The cattle seemed to be moving steadily, driven close and hard, but at noon the dust halted and Lake reckoned the herd had bunched up to drink the silty, riffled waters of Silver Creek.

Pace led the way east for three miles, then swung due north again. He and Lake were now well ahead of the deacon.

After another fifteen minutes, they rode through a stretch of brush country, then into pines that led all the way to the top of a rocky hogback.

Pace drew rein. He was hot and irritated, and there was enough scare in him to tighten his throat when he spoke.

“Hell, Mash,” he said, “we’re riding blind. We could be heading right into a bellyful of lead.”

“Figured that my own self a while back,” Lake said.

“But it don’t scare you none?”

“Scares me plenty. Anything to do with Deacon Santee scares me plenty.”

Pace studied the crest of the rise. If he and Lake dismounted and worked their way to the top, they could get the lay of the land and the likely destination of the herd.

He ran his plan past Lake and the oldster nodded. “Suits me. I got nothing else to do this morning.”

Pace tied their horses in a small hollow surrounded by brush where they’d be out of sight. Then he and Lake began their climb.

The slope was a lot steeper than it looked from the flat and they had to climb part of the way on all fours, to the delight of the little claret cup cactus that hid in the grass and ripped mercilessly at their hands.

Lake vented his lungs a couple of times when spines stung him, until Pace hushed him into an irritable silence.

Their bellies hugging the ground, Pace and Lake looked down onto a wide bench that sloped upward a few feet from an S-shaped creek.

A sizeable herd grazed on both banks of the stream and along the edge of a pine and oak forest that bordered the bench to the west.

A second herd that looked to be about a thousand strong was bunched several hundred yards from the creek, the punchers keeping the cattle closed up tight.

But what drew Pace’s attention was the tent pitched in one bend of the S. Nearby was a campfire and at a distance a couple of dozen glossy horses cropped grass.

“Jess could be in the tent,” Lake said.

Pace nodded. “It’s a possibility.”

“How we gonna play it, Sam?”

“We wait and we watch and hope something breaks.”

Lake turned on his right side, his eyes scanning the horizon.

“Dust cloud is close,” he said.

“Yeah, this is where the deacon is headed, sure enough. You were right, Mash. He’s throwing in with Harcourt and his bunch.”

Mash gave a slow grin. “Something tells me it won’t be a happy marriage.”

From their perch above the bench, Pace and Lake saw the deacon’s herd arrive. Later they watched the death of Ben Trivet and the departure of the combined herds and could make no sense of either.

Lake pegged Trivet’s killer as Deacon Santee.

“Has to be him,” he said. “Ain’t nobody else hereabouts wears a frock coat, a stovepipe hat, and shucks a gun that fast.”

Pace nodded. “He’s fast all right, real slick on the draw-and-shoot.”

“He ain’t a man to mess with, Sam.”

“I just came to that conclusion my own self,” Pace said.