The Ghost of Apache Creek

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.

“Speak up,” he said. “What do you see?”

Louder this time, the girl said, “Sally. I see Sally.”

“And why is she hanging there?”

“I . . . I don’t know,” Nancy whispered.

The deacon threw up his arms, tilted his head back, and roared at the night sky. “She doesn’t know!”

His prominent blue eyes popping out of his head, he ran down the line of women, stopping briefly in front of each one.

“Claire, do you know?”

“Leah, do you know?”

“Sarah, do you know?”

He halted when he reached the oldest woman in the group, a worn redhead with dead eyes.

“Maxine, tell me.”

“Because she helped the Leslie girl escape your clutches, Deke.”

“No!”

Santee shifted the whip to his left hand and backhanded Maxine across the face with his right. The woman fell, and he stood over her.

“Because she betrayed me!” he screamed down at her. “You hear that? She betrayed me.”

The deacon stepped back and took a Bible from the pocket of his frock coat. He held the book against his chest and bowed his head.

He remained in that posture for ten minutes, and those around him stayed right where they stood, scarcely daring to breathe.

Deacon Santee cut an incongruous figure. He was dressed like a man of the cloth, a battered top hat on his head, yet under his coat two heavy Smith & Wesson revolvers hung from his hips in crossed gun belts.

He was small, skinny, pale, round-shouldered, thin-lipped, bald—and as fast and deadly with the iron as a rattlesnake.

Far off, among the wild oaks, an owl glided silently through the branches like a phantom and small things saw its fleeting shadow and squeaked and gibbered in the underbrush.

The lamps set around the cottonwood guttered in a breeze that pushed the dead woman’s body back and forth and made the tree limb creak.

Finally, like a man waking from sleep, the deacon stirred.

He blinked, looked at the men and women around him, and said, “God has spoken to me. He said the woman betrayed my trust and my punishment was just. He said woe betide any other who is so inclined, for she will surely perish as did Sally, the whore of Babylon.”

The deacon glared at his wives. “So saith the Lord. So saith me.”

“Amen,” Maxine said.

Santee stared hard at the woman for a full minute, but Maxine’s face was empty of all but innocence and he let it go.

“You women get back into the wagons,” he said. “There will be no wedding feast this night.”

The deacon watched his wives climb into the wagons, then said, “You, Gideon and Zedock, get back out there with the herd. Enoch, Jeptha, come here.”

Jeptha, the deacon’s youngest son, was a slack-mouthed youth of limited intelligence and filthy habits. Enoch, the oldest, was smarter and addicted to the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott and the works of Dickens. He also kept both volumes of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in his saddlebags. He’d actually read the tomes several times.

Both he and Jeptha were vicious killers, and eager.

The deacon said, “I want you boys to find Jessamine. Bring her here so that she may feel the lash for her iniquity.”

He stepped closer to his sons, his eyes blazing with the righteous fire of a witch-hunter. “This time I’ll make sure she lasts longer than the whore hanging from yonder tree.”

He pointed to the horse line. “Now mount up and go. If ye don’t bring Jessamine Leslie back to me alive, it would be better for you two that you’d never been spawned.”