Ralph Compton - The Ghost of Apache Creek

Had he really heard a scream or had he dreamed it? The street was empty, but the scent of decay lingered. It was not the stench of the rotting dead. Surely it was the smell of the decaying coyote he’d killed the night before.

Pace, clutching on to the last shreds of sanity left to him, would not allow himself to think otherwise. He heard the scream again, a sharp, shattering shriek of fear. Hurt and stiff though he was, Pace ran in the direction of the sound.

Moon shadows slanted across the street, a series of light and dark rectangles, one after the other, cast by the false-fronted buildings. The wind rushed past his ears, urging him onward.

Faster. Faster. Faster.

Another scream, followed by a series of hysterical cries for help.

Then he saw them.

A pair of hunting coyotes stepped from shadow into moonlight like gray ghosts. They held their heads low, weight well forward, shoulders hunched, moving slowly, intent on the kill.

Pace saw a woman back out of a black rectangle into a patch of mother-of-pearl light, her gaze fixed on the predators, her face a blur of frightened white in the gloom.

He yelled and fired twice into the air. The coyotes spun on him, then stood for a moment, assessing the odds. Not liking the gunshots and the man running toward them, they scampered into the darkness, trailing alarmed yips behind them.

Pace sprinted toward the woman.

She saw him coming and screamed.

A naked man, more animal than human, charged at her through the malignant night.

The woman turned and ran. But she traveled only a few steps before falling flat on her face. She tried to rise, groaned once, and lay still.

“You fainted,” Pace said, “and I carried you here. You’re in my office.”

He was no longer naked but had thrown on his tattered rags that Beau Harcourt’s men had left lying in the street.

His marshal’s star gleamed on his shirtfront.

The woman looked at him with wide, frightened eyes and fainted again.

Carefully, trying not to irritate the cuts and scratches on his scalp, Pace shaved away his long scalp locks of hair and watched them fall around his feet like black snakes.

He did the same with his beard, shaving close, but he spared his great dragoon mustache, once his only vanity, a Texas Ranger badge of honor that had taken him years to cultivate. This he trimmed and combed into a semblance of its old self.

The result he saw in the mirror did not please him.

His shaved head made him look older than his thirty years, and his blue eyes were glazed, distant, staring back at him like a rabbit hypnotized by a rattlesnake. He was painfully thin, his face tanned to a mahogany color by sun and wind, and he noticed wrinkles where none had existed before.

At least he wouldn’t make the woman faint again.

Or so he hoped.

Pace stepped into the cell where the woman lay on his bed, an iron cot with a straw mattress. Both cot and mattress had seen better days.

She wore a pink gingham dress, stained and torn, and her scuffed shoes showed the wear and tear of hard travel.

Whoever she was, she was pretty, her eyelashes fanning over high cheekbones, a tendril of yellow hair falling across her forehead.

Her body was slim and shapely and she looked to be about seventeen, maybe younger, more girl than woman.

And she had a story to tell—if he could keep her conscious long enough to tell it.

Not by inclination a drinking man, Pace remembered that there was a bottle of Old Crow in his desk drawer that he’d kept for special occasions.

He smiled, revealing teeth that, despite everything, were remarkably clean and white.

If this wasn’t a special occasion, then what was?

He poured a shot of the whiskey into a glass, returned to the cell, and shook the girl awake.

She opened her eyes and Pace said quickly, “For God’s sake, don’t faint.”

To his relief, this time the girl looked at him without too much fear.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“In the marshal’s office.” Pace smiled. “I’m the marshal of the town of Requiem in the Little Colorado River Basin country. But, just so you know and so it won’t come to you as a surprise, like, I’m tetched in the head.”

To Pace’s surprise, the girl rolled up her eyes and fainted again.

Chapter 9

Deacon Santee had chosen a pretty, peaceful place to make his camp.

His three wagons were drawn up next to a grove of wild oaks, and a treelined creek ran close by. Tall mountains, their slopes covered in pine, provided a dramatic backdrop and summer wildflowers grew in great profusion everywhere.

The deacon’s cattle grazed on the other side of the creek, spread out over a square mile of grass, tended by the half-dozen vaqueros he’d hired along the Texas border.

“Well, Pa,” Jeptha Santee said. “Have you reached a verdict?”

The deacon sat with his back against a tree, his Bible clutched in his hands. “I have,” he said, “and it is a just one. The harlot will be chastised by the whip.”

Jeptha grinned. “You want us to fetch her, Pa?”

“Yes, you found her in the swamp, so the privilege should be yours. Light the lamps, then bring forth Sally Anderson to meet her deserved fate.”

Jeptha and his older brother, Enoch, sprinted to one of the wagons, disappeared under the canvas top, and emerged dragging a struggling, screaming woman between them.

“Let all here present witness her shame,” the deacon said.

The girl turned her head to the deacon. “No! Please don’t whip me!”

“You should have thought of that before you helped Jessamine Leslie run from the marital bed.”

“Deacon, I’m sorry,” Sally shrieked. “I’ll do anything you want, but please don’t hurt me.”

As his grinning sons pulled the woman toward a tall cottonwood tree, the deacon said, “It’s too late for sorrow. Now there is only my just vengeance.”

Jeptha and Enoch, joined by their brothers Gideon and Zedock, laughed cruelly. Sally Anderson screamed for a while, then fell silent.

“She’s dead, Pa. Ain’t no use in whupping her no more.”

Deacon Santee pointed his coiled bullwhip at the woman tied by her wrists to a cottonwood branch.

“See if she is faking it,” he said.

“I don’t need to, Pa,” Jeptha said. “She’s deader’n shit.”

The butt of the deacon’s bullwhip thudded against his son’s cheek, leaving an angry red welt.

“You do as I say, Jeptha, and don’t ever use that vile word in my presence again.”

Jeptha, tall, rangy, dressed like his father in a broadcloth tailcoat and battered black hat, stepped sullenly to the tree, a hand to his cheek.

He grabbed the woman by the hair and wrenched back her head. He stared into her face for a few moments, then said, “She’s gone, Pa.”

“Gone much too soon,” the deacon said. “She didn’t suffer near enough.”

Nine people had stood in lamplight and watched Santee flay the skin off the woman’s slender back until the blood flowed.

Five were his wives; four his sons.

The deacon stepped in front of the women, who shrank against the sides of their wagons. He pointed with his whip.

“What do you see over there?” he said.

None of the women answered, fear stiffening their tongues.

Santee jammed the coiled whip under the chin of his youngest wife and lifted her pale face to his.

“Nancy, what do you see?” he said. He pointed with his whip. “Hanging from yonder tree, what do you see?”

The girl, sixteen years old and the deacon’s fifth bride, was terrified. She said something in a whisper that no one could hear.