Ralph Compton - The Ghost of Apache Creek

“Maybe the killer, if such exists, lives in the ghost town,” the vaquero said.

“Yeah, and that’ll be the first damned place I’ll look,” the deacon said.

After the vaquero rode out, Santee stepped toward the wagons.

“Maxine!” he yelled. “You get ready.”

He heard the woman give a pleasurable little squeal and it pleased him.

As he’d said so many times to his boys, all a man needed to break a woman was patience and a whip.

Just like a saddle mare.

Chapter 35

Jess Leslie crossed her hands and rubbed her upper arms, frowning.

“I feel dirty all over,” she said. “I need to bathe.”

“Stay clear of the well,” Pace said. “Beau Harcourt’s men stirred up the water and maybe they wakened the cholera.”

“The creek?” Jess said.

“There’s no cholera in the creek.”

“Runs too fast, I reckon,” Lake said.

“Then I’ll bathe in the creek.” She looked at the two men. “One of you will have to come with me. There’s coyotes out there and maybe wolves and I don’t want to be there alone.”

Pace looked at Lake. “You, Mash?”

Lake shook his head. “No. I’m an old reprobate and I don’t trust myself. I might take a peek.”

“You won’t see anything you haven’t seen many times before,” Jess said.

“I know, but nowadays my old heart wouldn’t stand the excitement.”

“Then it’s you, Sammy,” Jess said. “Let’s go. If you think your heart can stand it.”

“Kinda dark, isn’t it?” Pace said.

“You protect me from the coyotes and I’ll protect you from the boogerman,” Jess said. “I don’t want to feel soiled a moment longer than I have to.”

She stepped to the door. “Are you coming?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Wouldn’t do you any harm to take a bath yourself, sonny,” Lake said.

“Sammy’s a guard,” Jess said. “He should keep his powder dry. Besides, I don’t want him dirtying up my bathwater.”

Pace was not in the best of moods as he picked up his rifle from the desk and followed the woman into the street.

As suddenly as it had begun, the wind had died. Now a gray haze hung over the town, and the blanched buildings looked like fading images on a tintype.

“Be fog come morning,” Pace said. “Sometimes in summer it drifts up from the Mogollon Rim and covers the whole basin.”

“If it wasn’t so scary, it would be pretty,” Jess said.

Pace smiled. “Now who’s sceered of the boogerman?”

Jess chose a spot where the creek flowed between two rocks, creating a sieve of white water about three feet deep.

She stripped in the waning moonlight and her slender naked body was as pale as bone.

Pace had taken himself off a ways and fetched his back against the trunk of a cottonwood, the Winchester between his drawn-up knees.

It had been three years since he’d seen a naked woman, and he watched Jess with pleasure, but without desire, as a man looks at a nude painting in an art gallery.

Jess stood in the water, then lowered herself into the eddies. She squealed as the sting of the icy creek hit her butt, and then kneeled without moving for long moments, letting her body get accustomed to the cold.

Pace smiled, enjoying himself.

But, when the woman began to wash her shadowed, secret places, he turned away to spare her shame.

The creek flowed through a series of shallow rock shelves. The upper levels ran over a clay bed, the lower over pebbles.

The fog, spreading, was now drifting into the higher shelves and between the trunks of the cottonwoods and pines growing on the banks.

Jess was now a white blur in the misty gloom, but Pace heard her splash water. And, God help her, he thought, she was actually humming a little tune.

Pace shook his head in admiration.

The girl looked fragile, frail as a china doll, but, mentally and physically, she was enduring, as strong as any man, himself included.

His wife had been like that, the perfect spouse for a lawman.

Then she was taken by the cholera and all that had been wonderful in her came to an end, leaving a vast emptiness in Pace that nothing could ever fill.

Pace heard Jess get out of the water and he stepped toward her.

She stood on the bank shivering, and then began to pick up her clothes.

“You can’t dress without getting dry first,” Pace said.

“I don’t have a towel, Sammy. Didn’t you notice?”

The woman’s nakedness didn’t trouble Pace, nor did it her.

“Damn it, here.” Pace slipped the canvas suspenders from his shoulders and took off his shirt. “Use this,” he said. “It’s clean, or fairly clean.”

“You’ll be cold,” Jess said.

“I’ll be just fine.”

He held up the shirt. “Now put it on. It will dry you and keep you warm.”

There’s no accounting for what a woman will and will not do, but Jess smiled and did as Pace told her.

She was closing the last shirt button when the wolves howled again.

Close this time. Very close.

Chapter 36

Sam Pace racked a round into the chamber of his rifle as his eyes scanned the opposite creek bank where pine tops lifted like obsidian arrowheads into the sky, their trunks lost in mist.

The wolves howled again and Pace felt fear clutch at him.

“Get back to town,” he whispered to Jess. “Tell Mash.”

The woman clutched her clothes to her breast, her face drained of color. “Come with me, Sammy. The wolves will kill you.”

“They’re human wolves,” Pace said. “It’s the Peacock brothers. They’d cut us down in the street before we reached my office.”

He turned his head, and, his voice urgent, he said, “Jess, you git now.”

The woman needed no second bidding. She fled into the night, wolf howls following her.

Pace took cover behind the cottonwood, watching, waiting.

A few moments of sullen silence slunk past, slow enough that Pace had time to dry his fear-sweated hands on his pants and clutch his rifle again.

A bullet thunk ed into the tree trunk and another chipped bark near Pace’s face, driving splinters into his cheek.

Damn it, them Peacock boys could see in the dark.

A voice rose from the gray and black gloom, hollow and echoing, like a man speaking in a sepulcher.

“Mash Lake, is that you? Step out and take your medicine.”

Pace thought he had a fix on the location of the speaker, but he wasn’t sure. He needed the man to speak again.

“This is Lake,” he said. “State your business.”

He lifted the Winchester to his shoulder.

“You know our business,” the man yelled. “You killed our brother. There is talking to be done, a reckoning to be made.”

Pace aimed into darkness. Now he knew the spot among the trees where the Peacocks were hidden.

His finger took up a quarter inch of slack on the trigger.

“Come out, Lake. We want to—”

Pace fired.

He levered shells into the Winchester and dusted shots to the right and left of the speaker’s location.

Suddenly a man yelped like a wounded cur . . . and kept on yelping, each shriek rising to a higher pitch.

A rifle blasted beside Pace and Lake threw himself to the ground.

“Is it the Peacocks?” he said.

“Yeah, and I winged one of them.”

“I heard him squeal.”

Lake fired in the direction of the yelps, and Pace’s rifle joined in the fusillade.

They shot their rifles dry but there was no return fire.

Gun smoke drifted and became one with the gray mist.

“They quit,” Pace said. “Damn it, they just gave up and left.”