The Ghost of Apache Creek

Chapter 14

Mash Lake came down from the Padres Mesa country ahead of the four Peacock brothers, more troubles weighing on him than a sixty-eight-year-old man had reason to expect.

Thinking back on it, Lake blamed Mrs. Peacock, whoever she was, for his present woes.

Not content like a normal woman to have her babies one at a time, she’d squeezed out five at a single go, all of them boys.

A week before, in an act of great misfortune, instantly regretted, Lake had gunned one of them boys. Now the rest were on his back trail carrying hatred and coiled hemp.

That the killing was justified—a deck of cards has only four aces—was neither here nor there.

The Peacocks lived by a harsh code born of a hard land.

One of them was dead by the hand of another, and that called for a reckoning.

Around Lake the country stretched still and silent, hill country forested with cedar and pine. Ahead of him rose the purple peaks of the White Mountains, and somewhere beyond their sentinel ramparts lay the Mogollon Rim.

Lake had seen his last town five days before, his last ranch three.

By his own count he was missing at least six meals, but he still needed to put a heap of git between himself and the Peacocks.

All four of them boys were gamblers, as their brother had been, and they were good hands with the Colt’s revolver.

And there was no backup in them. They’d keep a-coming, like a pack of starving wolves.

It is a comfort to a man to have a companion in woe, but Lake had none such.

Apart from himself, the only other visible living creature in the vast land was his yellow mustang. But the little horse was not much of a talker and pretty much kept his own counsel.

Lake calculated—rightly, it must be said—that the mustang didn’t give a shit about his woes anyhow.

The day began its slow shade into evening and Lake rode under a candy cane sky when he came upon the town of Requiem.

From a distance, it looked like any other town he’d known, a place where no one would be glad at his coming or sad at his leaving.

He sat the mustang, lit his pipe, and studied the burg.

The town’s only street was empty of people. More importantly, there was no sign of the Peacock brothers or their big American stud horses.

Truth to tell, there were no horses at the hitch rails, and, as far as Lake could tell, the street was unmarked by the passage of rigs and wagons.

He puffed on his pipe, a careful man thinking things through.

It was almost suppertime, so that explained the empty street. People would be home, settin’ around the table or singing around the piano or whatever civilized folks did of an evening.

Lake had no way of knowing. He’d spent little time under a roof and none within the sound of church bells.

In the past he’d been an army scout, stagecoach guard, tin-pan gold prospector, lumberjack, railroad-track layer, cow-town peace officer, and for three months, before he’d given it up as a dead-end career, train robber.

Nothing he’d ever done was easy and nothing had come to him easy either. Some folks get life handed to them on a plate, but the plate had always been washed clean before it ever came around to Mash Lake.

He’d never lived with a woman who might have tamed him and helped him settle down in one place. He’d shared a bed with whores, of course, but they weren’t the marrying kind.

Now, about to enter the seventh decade of his existence, life and the living of it had whittled him down to skin, bone, and whipcord muscle. He was tough, enduring, with no softness in him.

And he was a hard man to kill.

If he’d been asked, Lake could name four men who’d tried.

There was Bill Foran, a wannabe bad man back in the Nations. Foran had drawn down on Lake and it was the last mistake he’d ever made.

He’d outdrawn and killed Cedar Creek Hamp Lawson up Tin Cup way in Colorado, and three years later the Texas gunman John T. Walters, who’d called him out on Christmas Eve in El Paso over a two-dollar gambling debt.

Earl Peacock was the most recent, and at thirty years old he should have been of an age enough to know better than to draw down on a mean, grumpy geezer with the whiskey on him.

Peacock had pulled his gun after Lake spotted his crooked deal at Chuck-A-Luck.

The gambler had cussed him for a doddering old fool who didn’t know his ass from a gin whistle and ordered him to skin iron.

An instant later the young man learned the hard way that in a belly-to-belly gunfight, age doesn’t matter a damn.

Only one lamp burned in the town, a firefly in the darkness, and Lake thought that mighty unusual, since the night was starting to crowd closer and the shadows were stretching long.

But he needed a meal and a place to sleep, and both beckoned to him.

“The hell with it,” he said aloud, to no one but himself, as is the habit of men who ride lonely trails. “Let’s see what’s shakin’ in this burg.”

He kneed the mustang into motion and headed into Requiem.

Later he would curse himself for not riding on and taking his chances along the Rim country.