Ralph Compton - The Ghost of Apache Creek

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A man with nothing left to lose finds a reason to fight in this Ralph Compton western.
Requiem, formerly known as Apache Creek, is a town that has seen better days. After a plague of cholera swept through the streets, the only folk left behind are ghosts, including Marshall Sam Pace. Even though he’s still living and breathing, three years of solitude have turned Sam into a phantom—a lonely man that’s more than a little touched in the head.   But when a woman on the run stumbles into Requiem, Sam suddenly finds himself with a purpose. As Jess Leslie’s murderous pursuers track her to Requiem, the former lawman must protect her and make use of gunslinger skills long out of practice…   
More Than Six Million Ralph Compton Books In Print! From the Paperback edition.

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A few minutes before noon, appearing out of dust and a shimmering haze, rode four men in black, sitting tall on blood horses.

Lake watched the deacon walk toward them, then turned to Pace.

“The Peacock brothers,” he said. “I left a broken trail behind me, but they tracked me down. Now they know fer sure that I’m somewhere in this neck of the woods.”

“All right, so now we got another bridge to cross,” Pace said.

“I got a bad feeling about . . . ,” Lake began. His voice faltered to a halt.

“Don’t say it, Mash,” Pace said. “They’re only men, like the rest of us, and I’ve seen their kind before. Ever catch sight of the Earp brothers? I reckon them and the Peacocks are cut from the same cloth.”

Lake was no coward. He’d proved that often enough in the past. But suddenly he looked old and tired, a man who’d long before played out his string.

“Sam, you ever hear tell of the angel of death?” he said.

“I heard a tent preacher talk about that one time.”

“Well, the angel just spoke to me.”

A shiver ran down Pace’s spine. “There ain’t no angel of death, Mash. It’s all in a man’s mind.”

As though he hadn’t heard, the old man said, “I’m wrote down in the angel’s book in letters of fire. That’s what he tol’ me, plain as day.”

Pace looked at him. “Mash, get away from here. Ride south for the west Texas country where you have friends.”

Lake smiled. “Too late for that, Sam. I’m like the ranny who jumped off the cliff. No matter how much he regretted it on the way down, he knew there was no goin’ back.”

Pace moved his gaze to the men talking with the deacon.

And it dawned on him with terrible certainty that he was looking at four ambassadors from hell.

Chapter 27

Beau Harcourt walked out of his tent, leaving a tied-up Jess Leslie behind, and was taken aback by his visitors.

Four men sat tall, gaunt horses that stood heads hanging, dusty, and trail-worn.

But it was their riders that drew and held his attention as something ancient and reptilian in his brain warned him of danger of a kind he’d never encountered before.

The four men looked alike, their narrow faces pale and sunken, as though they were being eaten by the same death cancer.

They affected the dress and manner of the frontier gambler, black frock coats and pants and boots of the same color. Despite the heat, they wore high celluloid collars and string ties. Their hats were low-crowned and flat-brimmed, gold bands adding the only color to their somber outfits.

Each man wore a blue cross-draw Colt and had a Winchester booted under his right knee.

Harcourt had been around gunfighters before, men like Heap Leggett who were among the best, but he’d never encountered four like these.

Something . . . strange emanated from the men. It reached out to him with tentacles. Something more than danger; something more than menace; something akin to evil; something . . . demonic.

The day was bright, the sun hot, yet Harcourt felt darkness come down on him, as though he stood in the shadow of a gallows.

“These gentlemen are the Peacock brothers from up in the Padres Mesa country,” Deacon Santee said. “I didn’t get their given names.”

“Because they don’t matter,” one of the riders said. His eyes were green, like the sea off a rocky coastline. “Tell your friend the urgent nature of our business.”

“They’re hunting a man, Beau,” the deacon said. “Feller who goes by the name of Mash Lake. You seen or heard of him?”

Now Harcourt felt four pairs of green eyes on him and he didn’t trust himself to talk.

He shook his head.

“Figured that,” the deacon said. “Like I told you boys, there ain’t many strangers come calling around these parts.”

Then a strange thing happened that shook Harcourt and even made the deacon’s eyes bug out of his head.

The brother who sat his horse at the left of the line moved his mouth as though he was forming words. But he didn’t utter a sound.

One of the others spoke for him.

“If you boys are lying to us, it would be better for you if you’d never been born.”

The Peacock who’d spoken aloud saw the stunned look in Harcourt’s face and said, “My brother can’t talk, so I do his speaking for him.”

The deacon, maybe braver or more foolish than Harcourt, said, “Damn it all, how is that possible?”

“I know what he wants to say and when he wants to say it.”

The dumb Peacock’s mouth moved again.

“What’s in the tent?” his brother said.

“Nothing!” Harcourt said.

Too quickly.

The Peacock brothers stared at him and Deacon Santee gave Harcourt a surprised look that quickly turned hard and measuring.

Harcourt tried to cover up his gaffe. “I’ve got private papers in there is all.”

“We won’t touch your private papers,” said a brother who had been silent until then. “Only the man who calls himself Mash Lake is of interest to us.”

He kneed his horse forward to the tent, leaned out of the saddle, opened the flap, and looked inside.

After a few moments he swung his horse around and said, “Lake isn’t there.”

Harcourt exhaled his relief. Tension drained out of his belly like a beer-drinking man taking a piss.

It seemed the Peacocks were intent on the man called Lake. Nothing else, including the sight of a naked woman on a cot, mattered to them.

Emboldened now, Harcourt said, “There’s a ghost town to the south of here. Seems a likely place for a man to hole up for a spell.”

The brothers said nothing. They swung their horses, trotted away, and didn’t look back.

After they’d gone, Harcourt felt the air thick and hard to breathe, as though the Peacocks had polluted it by their very presence.

Chapter 28

From his perch on the rise, Pace watched the Peacock brothers leave. Beside him Lake was unusually quiet, his breath coming in short, quick gasps.

Was the old man frightened?

That seemed unlikely. He’d stood his ground and got in his work during the fight with the Santee boys and there had been no backup in him.

He said the deacon scared him, but then the deacon scared everybody, Pace included.

It had been the sudden appearance of the Peacock brothers that had tipped the scales and weighed the old man down.

Pace searched his brain for something reassuring to say, found nothing, and settled for “That Peacock you shot, did he look like them fellers down there?”

“Spittin’ image,” Lake said. “He had a skull for a face and green eyes that looked right through a man.” He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. “The feller needed killin’ all right, but why the hell did I have to be the one that done it?”

“Because you was there, Mash.”

“Yeah, but I could’ve been someplace else, just as easy.”

“Hell, he drawed down on you.”

“Nah, he didn’t. He had his hog leg in his hand and was shoving it into my face, like, cussin’ me out fer being a loco old coot. Well, by and by I got tired o’ hearin’ that and I drawed and gunned him. Surprised the hell out of the Peacock feller. He figured I was scared shitless and he wasn’t expectin’ nothin’.”

“Then his brothers came after you.”

“Right. And the Peacock boys don’t come at you one at a time. They hunt and kill in a pack, like wolves. Hell, I heard they even howl at the moon like wolves and eat their meat raw.”

Pace’s eyes were following Harcourt’s movement as he and the deacon walked toward the wagons.

“A man hears a lot of things from other men,” he said.

“Some of them even true,” Lake said, without a hint of a smile.

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