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

  “Apologize to the deacon, Ben,” Harcourt said. He looked at Santee. “He meant no disrespect.” Then he attempted what he hoped was a disarming smile. “It’s too early in the morning for a killing, Deacon.”

  Trivet felt the breeze cool on his face. He heard the babble of the creek as it bubbled over blue river stones, the rustle of jays quarreling in the wild oaks, and he saw the play of sunlight in the mist.

  He was twenty-five that summer, healthy, strong, and he’d formed a vague plan to start his own ranch one day with a pretty wife at his side.

  Right then he was scared and he didn’t want to die.

  It’s good for a man to have pride, but now and again it will turn around and spit in his face.

  As it did now.

  Trivet, aware that other men watched, found himself backed into a corner. He knew he couldn’t show fear or any hint of git, so he did all he could do—reach down into himself and find his cojones.

  “I ain’t apologizing, Deacon, for what I think,” he said. “A man’s got a right to his opinion.”

  Santee nodded, his pinched, malicious face grave. In a somber voice, as though giving a sermon from a pulpit in hell, he said, “Then the slanderer must die, for that is the law of God. Verily, he shall be destroyed for his iniquity and his bones scattered by wild beasts.”

  “No!” Harcourt yelled.

  The fraction of a second it took Harcourt to utter that exclamation matched the speed of Santee’s draw.

  The deacon skinned both guns and the shots sounded as one.

  Trivet’s face went slack and there was a strange, luminous shock in his eyes. Hit twice in the chest, he fell on his knees, his gun coming up, and Santee, grinning, shot him again.

  Trivet died in that position, on his knees, all ready to meet his God.

  But the deacon would have none of that.

  He lifted his boot, kicked Trivet in the chest, and sent his body jerking backward.

  “Fair fight,” Santee said. He was looking at Harcourt.

  “Fair fight,” Harcourt said, the words bunching in his throat.

  But it had been cold-blooded murder and the rancher knew it.

  Trivet was no gunfighter. He was a dead man the moment he spoke up about the woman.

  Still, the deacon could’ve let it go, laughed it off, and no harm done.

  But he hadn’t.

  And Harcourt knew the reason: The man felt the need to prove how fast he was with the iron.

  Damn it, why?

  The answer to that question brought realization, and with it came a chill that iced Harcourt’s belly.

  He’d thought of the deacon as nothing more than a business associate, albeit a crooked one, but basically harmless.

  Now all that had changed.

  Santee had shown himself to be something else entirely, a man more ruthless, callous, and dangerous than Harcourt ever could have imagined.

  He looked at the deacon reloading his guns, and a sense of foreboding filled him, like a man who hears the tolling of his own funeral bell.

  Chapter 24

  The herd was ready to move out, but the deacon took his sons Gideon and Zedock aside and led them close to his wagons.

  “You know what to do,” he said. “The Mexicans I hired are all good with the iron and they’ll back your play.”

  Santee bunched a fist into Gideon’s shirt, pulling him close to his own scowling face.

  “I want all the Harcourt hands dead, you understand? Shoot them. Then shoot them again. Let not one of them escape you.”

  “Is this afore or after we sell the herd?” Gideon asked.

  He was small and thin like his father, and every bit as spiteful and mean. Even whores stayed clear of him after he marked a few, and dogs ran from him in the street.

  “Damn it, where is Enoch when I need him?” the deacon said. “After, you idiot. After you get the money from the army quartermaster.”

  “We come back here, Pa?” Zedock said.

  The deacon let out a slow hiss of exasperation.

  How the hell had he sired idiots like these?

  “I went over all that already. First you send a rider on a fast horse to tell me you made contact with the army. Then you head back here your own selves with the money.” He laid on some sarcasm. “I’ll be the only man standing, so even you two will be sure to recognize me.”

  “We’ll do as you say, Pa,” Zedock said. “You can count on us.”

  “Let’s hope so,” the deacon said. “If you foul this up, don’t come back because I’ll kill you on sight.”

  He lashed at the two young men with his riding crop.

  “Why the hell are you standing there with your mouths hanging open? Mount up and git going. And make sure you keep the Mexicans in check. I’ll deal with them later.”

  Santee watched the herd move out, the cattle drifting through a cloud of yellow dust.

  He smiled, happy at the way things had worked out.

  There were seven Harcourt riders and seven of his own—his two sons and five Mexicans fresh off the Texas border, where they’d played hob, robbing, raping, and killing.

  Killing Trivet had evened the odds and he was confident Gideon and Zedock could do the rest.

  He looked around the camp.

  A couple of Harcourt’s punchers were holding the remaining half of his herd in a box canyon three miles to the south. Only two of his men were in camp, the cook and an older hand who had pleaded sickness from an attack of piles.

  When the time came he’d handle those two himself.

  As for Beau Harcourt, he was sulking in his tent. The deacon smiled. Even the sight of somebody else’s blood had been too much for him.

  Now the man expected a share of the army money and that made the deacon’s smile stretch into a grin.

  He’d pay Harcourt off all right. In lead.

  Santee’s wagons were parked under a stand of pine and wild oak and he watched his women walk back and forth, their hips swaying. He walked in the direction of the wagons.

  But he stopped in his tracks when he saw the four riders coming in.

  Damn it, even at a distance, they looked like specters of death on horseback.

  Santee’s hands dropped to his guns.

  Chapter 25

  Sam Pace and Lake rode northward, the broad land lying open before them. The mist had lifted and the ten-thousand-foot-high peaks of the White Mountains were now visible to the east, their pine-covered slopes motionless, drowsing in sunlight.

  “See it, Sam?” Lake said, his sharp old eyes reaching out over the dry grassland.

  “Yeah, I’ve been studying on it for quite a spell. It ain’t smoke, is it?”

  “Dust. Something mighty big kickin’ it up.”

  “The deacon’s herd?”

  “Seems like. Two thousand head of cattle make a heap o’ dust in their passing.”

  Pace’s mind was working. Had the deacon snuck into town and taken Jess? It hardly seemed likely, but it was possible.

  Lake said aloud what Pace had been thinking.

  “Maybe he’s got Jess,” he said. He amended that. “I mean, your prisoner.”

  “Well, she isn’t my prisoner right at this moment,” Pace said, irritated. “Now, is she?”

  “Sorry, Sam,” Lake said. He smiled. “I was only sayin’.”

  “Well, don’t say it, Mash. It’s starting to annoy the hell out of me.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re tetched, boy. Makes you fly off the handle real easy.”

  Pace let that go. Now was not the time to discuss his sanity or his lack thereof.

  He drew rein and stared at the dust cloud.

  “What the hell do we do now?” he said. “We can’t go charging into a cattle herd that’s kicking up dust, looking for a girl who might be there or might not.”

  “No, we can’t, Sam. Anyway, if it is the deacon and we go anywhere near his woman, he’ll shoot us off’n these horses quicker’n scat.”

  Afte
r bowing his head in thought for a few moments, Pace straightened and said, “Well, there’s nothing that says we can’t take a closer look.”

  “What fer a closer look?”

  “Because I want Jess back, and right now I can’t think of anything else to do. Can you?”

  “Well, we could return to Requiem.”

  “For what?”

  “To plan our strategy.”

  “Damn it, we don’t have a strategy.”

  Lake didn’t take time to think about it longer.

  “All right, then, let’s take a closer look.” He grinned. “Maybe we can cut your prisoner out of the herd without the deacon taking pots at us.”

  “Mash,” Pace sighed, “there are times when you try a man’s patience. You surely do.

  “We won’t waste time following the herd. We’ll ride on ahead and see if we can figure where it’s headed.”

  “Seems as good a plan as any,” Lake said. He was silent for a moment, then said, “Here, Sam, you think the deacon might be throwing in with the Harcourt feller?”

  “I’ve been studying on that and it seems likely.”

  “Run their herds together and start a ranch?”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Strange, that.”

  “Why?”

  “On account of how the deacon ain’t a one fer sharing. That’s if everything I’ve heard about him is true.”

  “I guess there’s a first time for everything, Mash.”

  “Yeah, I suppose stranger things have happened. Could be the deacon plans to go respectable, settle down as a rancher, like.”

  “You believe that?”

  Lake smiled and shook his head. “Not a word of it.”

  Chapter 26

  Pace and Lake bypassed the herd by riding well to the south. They kept to the timbered valley country where there was no chance of getting skylined on a bare ridge.

  The day was hot, the sun well up in the sky, and there was no cloud. Even among the pines and wild oak, the heat pounded at the riders mercilessly, and their shirts were black with sweat.

  Only the mountains looked cool, green and lilac in the distance.

  Pace kept an eye on the dust cloud to the north.

  The cattle seemed to be moving steadily, driven close and hard, but at noon the dust halted and Lake reckoned the herd had bunched up to drink the silty, riffled waters of Silver Creek.

  Pace led the way east for three miles, then swung due north again. He and Lake were now well ahead of the deacon.

  After another fifteen minutes, they rode through a stretch of brush country, then into pines that led all the way to the top of a rocky hogback.

  Pace drew rein. He was hot and irritated, and there was enough scare in him to tighten his throat when he spoke.

  “Hell, Mash,” he said, “we’re riding blind. We could be heading right into a bellyful of lead.”

  “Figured that my own self a while back,” Lake said.

  “But it don’t scare you none?”

  “Scares me plenty. Anything to do with Deacon Santee scares me plenty.”

  Pace studied the crest of the rise. If he and Lake dismounted and worked their way to the top, they could get the lay of the land and the likely destination of the herd.

  He ran his plan past Lake and the oldster nodded. “Suits me. I got nothing else to do this morning.”

  Pace tied their horses in a small hollow surrounded by brush where they’d be out of sight. Then he and Lake began their climb.

  The slope was a lot steeper than it looked from the flat and they had to climb part of the way on all fours, to the delight of the little claret cup cactus that hid in the grass and ripped mercilessly at their hands.

  Lake vented his lungs a couple of times when spines stung him, until Pace hushed him into an irritable silence.

  Their bellies hugging the ground, Pace and Lake looked down onto a wide bench that sloped upward a few feet from an S-shaped creek.

  A sizeable herd grazed on both banks of the stream and along the edge of a pine and oak forest that bordered the bench to the west.

  A second herd that looked to be about a thousand strong was bunched several hundred yards from the creek, the punchers keeping the cattle closed up tight.

  But what drew Pace’s attention was the tent pitched in one bend of the S. Nearby was a campfire and at a distance a couple of dozen glossy horses cropped grass.

  “Jess could be in the tent,” Lake said.

  Pace nodded. “It’s a possibility.”

  “How we gonna play it, Sam?”

  “We wait and we watch and hope something breaks.”

  Lake turned on his right side, his eyes scanning the horizon.

  “Dust cloud is close,” he said.

  “Yeah, this is where the deacon is headed, sure enough. You were right, Mash. He’s throwing in with Harcourt and his bunch.”

  Mash gave a slow grin. “Something tells me it won’t be a happy marriage.”

  From their perch above the bench, Pace and Lake saw the deacon’s herd arrive. Later they watched the death of Ben Trivet and the departure of the combined herds and could make no sense of either.

  Lake pegged Trivet’s killer as Deacon Santee.

  “Has to be him,” he said. “Ain’t nobody else hereabouts wears a frock coat, a stovepipe hat, and shucks a gun that fast.”

  Pace nodded. “He’s fast all right, real slick on the draw-and-shoot.”

  “He ain’t a man to mess with, Sam.”

  “I just came to that conclusion my own self,” Pace said.

  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.”