Ralph Compton - The Ghost of Apache Creek

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 to 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 and 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 here, 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 the pit had been those of John and his wife, Martha.

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

No one had disagreed with him—at least, none of 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 this 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—this night, Sam Pace looked 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 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 hoorah 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 and 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 another 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.

Chapter 2

“Who the hell are you?”

Pace opened his eyes, squinting against the glare of the harsh morning sun. Inches from his face were the front legs of a horse, a steeldust with two white socks.

“I’ll ask you again,” the man’s voice said. “There won’t be a third time.” A pause, then: “Who the hell are you?”

Pace struggled to his feet and held on to a post for support. His head throbbed and the sunlight spiked viciously at his eyes. He tried to speak, but his voice was a dry croak.

Five men sat their horses, studying him. The man who had spoken—big, blond, and flashily handsome—was smiling. But it was a smile of contempt, not humor.

Pace put his fingers to the back of his head and they came away bloody.

“Did one of you rannies buffalo me?” he said.

“Hell no,” the blond man said. “Near as I can tell you got drunk, fell down, and hit your damn fool head.”

He looked beyond Pace to the bank porch. “You shoot that coyote, did ye?”

Pace turned and saw what the big man had seen. “I reckon so.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“I see things sometimes. I guess I mistook him for an outlaw, a bank robber.”

“There are no banks to rob in a ghost town, mister.”

“No. I reckon not,” Pace said.

The man on the steeldust grinned. “God, you’re a sight.”

“And he stinks,” another man said.

“What are you doing here?” the blond man asked.

Pace grabbed the bottom of his left sleeve between fingers and palm and rubbed sand off the star on his chest. “I’m marshal of this town.”

The big man looked around him, and then his men joined in his laughter. His horse tossed its head, the bit chiming.

“Maybe you haven’t noticed . . . Marshal, but there’s nobody here, ’cept you,” he said.

“They’ll be back. One day the people will come back to Requiem.” He pointed to the far end of town. “They’ll come off the trail yonder and head into town and their wagons will stretch for a mile and the kids will be running beside them. Then they’ll change the name back to what it once was, Apache Creek. That’s what they’ll do all right.”

“That’s what you think, huh?” the big man said.

“That’s what I know,” Pace said.

“And this place is now called Requiem?”

“Yes. Just that.”

“Good. It’s an apt name for a dead town.”

The big man shifted position in the saddle. “My name’s Beau Harcourt.” He waved a hand. “All of this is my range, and you’re on it. So what do we do about that?”