Ralph Compton the Ghost of Apache Creek (9781101545560) Read online

  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?”

  Pace saw his Colt lying on the ground several feet away, a fact that brought him no comfort.

  “Mr. Harcourt, this is my town. You may own the range around it, but you don’t own Requiem.”

  “I’ve got a different opinion on that. What happened here anyhow?”

  “Three years ago we got took by the cholera. Four score citizens and more now lie in the graveyard. The rest lit out. But they’ll be back and find their lawman waiting for them.”

  “You?”

  “Me.”

  That last brought guffaws from Harcourt’s hardfaced riders.

  Talking above the laughter, the big man said, “You cut your hair, shaved, or bathed in them three years . . . Marshal?”

  “Maybe. But not that I recall. Sometimes I get loco, tetched in the head, and then I don’t remember to do things. I don’t remember anything, except the cholera. But sometimes I can tell a hawk from a handsaw, when the wind is right.”

  “Hell, what do you eat? Lizards?”

  “When the store owners pulled out, they left stuff behind. I eat from cans. I eat peaches and beans and meat sometimes.”

  Harcourt grinned. “No matter, a man should remember to take a bath.” He tilted his head to the side and his grin faded to a smile. “You got a horse?”

  “Yes, at the livery.”

  “Then saddle up and get out of here while you still can.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Because all them dead people will come back and expect to find you here?”

  “No, the folks who left will come back.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  “Man, you’re even crazier than I thought you were. What’s your name, wild man?”

  “Do you care?”

  “No. But I still want to hear it.”

  “Sam Pace.”

  A tall rider wearing a fringed buckskin jacket stiffened in the saddle and said, “Well, I’ll be.”

  “Something bothering you, Heap?” Harcourt said.

  The man called Heap ignored the question and said, “Were you the Sam Pace out of Cochise County?”

  “There and other places,” Pace said.

  Heap nodded, then answered the question on Harcourt’s face. “Gunfighter. Or he was. He wore a Ranger’s star when he killed Dixie Tavern back in seventy-five, and Dixie was fast on the draw.”

  “He sure don’t look like much now.”

  “No, he don’t, boss. That’s fer sure.”

  Heap watched absently as Harcourt shook out his rope.

  Finally, as though he’d just fitted words to a thought, he said, “Back in the day, Pace was hell on wheels with a gun; killed his share. Even a crazy man don’t lose that.”

  Harcourt frowned at Pace. “Is that right? You good with a gun?”

  “I manage,” Pace said.

  Harcourt sat back in the saddle, the rope swinging idly in his right hand.

  “For some reason you worry me,” he said, “and I don’t like being worried.”

  The rope snaked out and the loop dropped neatly over Pace’s shoulders, then dropped to his ankles.

  “But all that changes right now,” Harcourt said. “Time to read to you from the book.”

  He kicked the steeldust into a gallop.

  Pace was yanked off his feet and sent tumbling into the dirt. His body spun as Harcourt let rip with a rebel yell and dragged him into the street.

  Pace’s world narrowed to the billowing cloud of yellow dust that enveloped him and the pain that scraped mercilessly at his belly, back, and thighs. He opened his mouth and tried to roar his outrage and anger. But his mouth filled with sand and he could only croak. His throat clogged and he vomited green bile on himself.

  Somewhere he heard men laugh.

  Chapter 3

  Sam Pace lost count of how many times Harcourt dragged him up and down the street behind his running horse. A lot. That much he knew. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, Pace’s cartwheeling body came to a stop and he felt the pressure of the rope around his ankles ease.

  Harcourt’s voice came from a long way off, from somewhere beyond the settling dust cloud.

  “Boys,” the big rancher said, “Marshal Pace will take his bath now. And a shave and a haircut.”

  Four of Harcourt’s grinning riders, hooting and hollering, scrambled off their horses and grabbed Pace, dragging him to his feet.

  “Fill a horse trough,” one of the men said. He nodded. “Over there, outside the saloon.”

  The trough was of zinc-lined wood, green with algae and slime. A couple of Harcourt’s riders took turns to shuttle a bucket from the well, stopping only when the water was an inch from the top.

  Pace slowly understood what was about to happen to him. He glanced across the street to where his Colt lay, half buried in sand. He tried to stagger toward the gun. He was abraded bloody from head to toe, the front of his left thigh gouged by a broken whiskey bottle Harcourt had gone out of his way to gallop over.

  Pace struck out at a man trying to drag him to the trough. His fist connected solidly with the man’s chin and the cowboy went down like a felled ox.

  Pace paid dearly for that.

  He was wrestled to the ground and the boots went in, thudding into his ribs and face. He tried to cover up, but the kicks found their target every time, thumping into his body, beating like the sound of a muffled drum.

  “Enough. I don’t want the crazy nut dead.”

  Harcourt’s voice.

  Pace was hauled to his feet. Through swollen, half-shut eyes, he saw the rancher sit his horse, grinning.

  Almost unconscious from the beating he’d taken, his head reeling, Pace had enough awareness to realize that he wanted to kill Beau Harcourt real bad.

  “Mr. Pace’s bath now, if you please,” Harcourt said.

  “Still want us to give him a shave an’ a haircut, boss?” a man asked.

  “Of course. Can’t you see? It’s what t
he gentleman needs.”

  Pace was stripped of his filthy rags and tossed into the horse trough. Somebody found a mostly bald scrubbing brush, but there were bristles enough left to shred the already sand-scoured skin of Pace’s belly and back. Pace growled and roared and fought, striking out at his tormentors, but he was weak from loss of blood and the pounding Harcourt’s riders were still dishing out with their fists and the heavy wooden brush.

  After a few minutes, there was blood in the water of the trough and fury in Pace’s eyes, the black, all-consuming anger of a crazy man.

  The cowboys laughed and joshed each other, enjoying the sport. Then they took out their knives. They were Barlow folders for the most part. Nevertheless, their carbon steel blades were honed sharp and their owners wielded them with enthusiasm. The punchers started on Pace’s hair, sawing at thick clumps they yanked upward and gathered in their fists. Skeletal fingers of blood trickled from Pace’s head as ragged bunches of hair joined the crimson gore in the trough, making a vile stew of the man’s misery. The keen blades dug deep as they scraped along Pace’s cheeks and chin, shaving off skin along with beard. Now his face bled and crimson drops dripped off his chin.

  Pace made a lunge for a man’s knife, but the puncher hit him with a vicious left and his eye swelled closed.

  He heard Harcourt’s voice.

  “How’s he looking, boys?”

  “Real purty,” a man said.

  “Well, he’s had enough, I reckon,” Harcourt said. “Get him out of there.”

  Finally it was over. Dragging him, dripping wet, from the trough, the Harcourt riders threw Pace in front of their boss’s steeldust.

  “Haul him to his feet,” the rancher said.

  Harcourt stared at Pace for a long time. Then he said, “Well, Marshal Pace, you don’t worry me any longer, you being so nicely bathed and groomed an’ all.”

  Men laughed and Harcourt said, “You got a day to rest up, a day to get your shit together, and a day to contemplate the errors of your ways. After that, I don’t want to see you in this town anymore.”

  Harcourt’s eyes swept over Pace. The man was now diminished, a bleeding, dripping wreck who was a threat to nobody, and the rancher lost interest in him.

  “Do you understand?” he said.

  Pace’s tongue was thick in his cracked and bloody mouth, but he managed.

  “You go to hell,” he said.

  Beau Harcourt shook his head. “Aw, the heck with it,” he said, resignation and contempt battling for elbow room in his voice.

  He rode up on Pace, freed his right foot from the stirrup, and kicked the bloody man hard in the face. Pace dropped and lay still.

  “You’ve got a big mouth, mister,” Harcourt said. “Time you kept it shut.”

  “Hey, boss, lookee.”

  One of Harcourt’s riders had led a tall blue roan Appaloosa from the livery stable.

  “Ain’t he a beauty?” the puncher said. “He’s a two-hundred-dollar hoss any day of the week.”

  Harcourt acknowledged that with a nod, then said, “Seems like Marshal Pace wasn’t so crazy he forgot to take care of his horse.”

  “What will I do with him?”

  “The hoss? Take him with us, of course.”

  The rider nodded in the direction of Pace’s sprawled body. “What about him?”

  “If he recovers, he can walk,” Harcourt said. He pointed south. “Old Mexico is only three hundred miles thataway, give or take.”

  Chapter 4

  Sam Pace opened his eyes and looked into a gathering dusk.

  Harcourt and his men were gone and he was alone in the street. Shadows angled in the alleys and a solemn hush lay over the town. Only the thud-thud-thud of an opening and shutting door was loud, like a booted man walking in a cathedral.

  Pace tried to get to his feet, failed, and gratefully sank to his belly again. The wind felt cool against his cheek and somehow the growing darkness was soothing, easing away his pain.

  His gun was about six feet away, only part of the handle sticking up from the sand. He crawled toward the Colt, leaving a bloody slug-trail behind him.

  After shaking grit from the revolver, Pace tried to rise again. This time he succeeded, swaying on his feet, his world rocking around him as though he were caught in a mighty earthshake. He laid the Colt on the boardwalk, taken by an idea that might help soothe his hurt.

  Naked, shivering from cold brought on by the beating he’d taken and loss of blood, Pace staggered in the direction of the creek that ran deep and clear to the east of town. The hundred-yard journey took him an hour. He fell constantly as he passed in and out of consciousness. Each time he eventually struggled to his feet and stumbled forward a yard or so, only to fall again. A groan escaped his lips every time he slammed into the dirt.

  The creek was hidden by stretching shadows, but Pace heard it bubble over its sand and pebble bottom, and a soaring cottonwood marked the bank. Slowly, painfully, on all fours, he crawled over uneven ground and rested when he reached the tree. Coyotes called in the distance, and the night birds pecked at the first stars. The wind stirred the cottonwood branches and bent the nearby willows to its will.

  Pace reached the bank and let himself roll into the water. The coolness of the creek, born of a mountain, came as a shock. But Pace delighted in its tumbling waters as they numbed his pain and washed blood from his head and body.

  After a while he lay on his back and watched the rising moon. It beamed at Pace, as though glad to see him again, then drew a veil of cloud across its face.

  After an hour, Pace struggled to his feet and the creek rushed swiftly between his knees, threatening to unbalance him. He crawled to the bank and threw himself down on a patch of grass, breathing hard. His eyes reached into the night, in the direction of Requiem, and his mouth tightened against his teeth.

  How the hell was he going to make it back?

  The moon was high in the sky when Pace finally reached the boardwalk outside his office. He rested, sitting in the dirt, his bent elbow on the warped timbers, each breath heaving hard and fast. He tilted back his head and yelled into the night. “Bastards!”

  He felt the Colt’s hammer grit against the frame as he thumbed off a shot, then another. Smoke drifting around his naked body, he called out again, his voice hoarse into the heedless dark.

  “A crazy man! Damn you all, you drug a crazy man!”

  Pace pushed up on the boardwalk and got to his feet. He triggered the Colt again, but the hammer clicked on a spent round.

  “Bastards!”

  The naked man climbed onto the boardwalk and roared obscenities into the night, his mind shadowed with dark places where gibbering phantoms dwelled, his boon companions.

  Pace stumbled into his office. His way illuminated by blades of moonlight, he slumped behind his desk. He opened a drawer, removed one of his dwindling supply of matches, and lit the candle on the desktop.

  For a moment the room flared with light, then dimmed to a dull yellow shimmer that made the darkness dance and gleam like tarnished silver among the cobwebs in the corners where the silent spiders lived. A scrap of mirror hung on the wall, thick with dust and fly specks. Pace rose, wiped it off with the heel of his hand, and brought the candle close. He stared into the mirror and into the burning eyes of a madman.

  The knives of Harcourt’s riders had scraped part of his head into stubble, but long scalp locks still hung from several places and damp strands of hair spilled over his shoulders. His beard had received the same treatment, some areas shaved to the skin, other patches still intact, falling over his naked chest.

  The candlelight, though less cruel than the glare of day, still revealed to Sam Pace what he’d become: a poor, insane creature who had surely been doomed from the moment of his birth.

  He turned away from the mirror and sat at his desk again, settling the candle in front of him.

  Slowly, laboriously, he cleaned and oiled his Colt. From a box of .45 shells in a drawer in his desk,
he loaded five rounds and lowered the hammer on an empty chamber, the habit of a lifetime that required no thought. Years before, he’d had the Colt’s action tuned by an El Paso gunsmith. It took only two pounds of pressure on the trigger to trip the hammer. And that was nothing, really. Nothing at all.

  Pace cocked the revolver, its triple-click loud in the quiet. He shoved the muzzle against his temple.

  All men live. Not all deserve to.

  Pace put himself in that last category. What the world didn’t need was another crazy man.

  Chapter 5

  “Boss!”

  Beau Harcourt opened the tent flap and stepped outside into moonlight. “What is it, Ben?”

  “Deacon Santee ain’t comin’ in, boss. At least not tomorrow, he ain’t.”

  Harcourt’s handsome face flashed his anger. “Why the hell not?”

  “He’s gettin’ hitched, boss,” the cowboy said. “Says the lady will be his seventh bride an’ that’s a lucky number. He says he’s plannin’ a big soiree after the . . . what did he call it? Oh yeah, the nuptials.”

  “Why the hell don’t he bed them ladies of his and let it go at that? Why does he always have to marry them?”

  “Don’t know, boss,” the man called Ben said. He was a tall, loose-limbed puncher with the face of a kicked hound dog. “But the deacon says he won’t live with a woman without benefit of clergy, whatever that means.”

  “Clergy my ass.”

  Harcourt fished around for more words to express his frustration with Santee, but finally settled on “You see the herd?”

  “As much as I could in the dark. Counts out to a thousand head all right. I’m certain of that. He’s rounded up a bunch of scrubs, though.”

  “Damn it, a man with a rustled herd and the Rangers right on his ass stops to get hitched. I can’t figure it.”

  “Me neither,” Ben said.

  Harcourt glared at the man as though he wanted to haul off and punch him.

  Ben caught the look and tried to deflect Harcourt’s anger. He said, “The deacon ain’t a man to be hurried, and you can’t push him too hard neither. He’s got a hair temper an’ hair triggers on his guns.”

  The big rancher recognized the logic in that and let his irritation go. Hell, it wasn’t Ben Trivet’s fault that Santee was a stupid son of a bitch.