The Ghost of Apache Creek

Chapter 22

“Well,” Mash Lake sighed, “I guess that just about tears it.”

He was right.

“What will I do now, Enoch?” Jeptha said, hesitating with one boot on the boardwalk.

“You’ll do as I say.”

“Stay right where you’re at, Jeptha,” Pace said.

“Mister, I’m getting mighty tired o’ you,” Enoch said. “I’m ending this right now.”

He went for his gun, a practiced, fast movement that blurred his right hand.

Pace was faster.

Enoch’s gun was leveling when Pace’s bullet hit him, high in the left shoulder.

Enoch absorbed the bullet shock, fired, missed, and took a step back, blood on his buckskins.

Beside him, Pace heard Lake shoot. He was vaguely aware that Jeptha had fallen to one knee, screaming, but was still trying to get his work in.

Enoch thumbed off a second round. But he’d been hit hard and was unsteady on his feet. His bullet plucked futilely at the left arm of Pace’s shirt.

Pace steadied. Fired. Fired again. Two shots that sounded as one.

This time Enoch went down, sudden blood on his lips.

He sprawled on his back, chested a couple of great, heaving gasps, and lay still, all the life that was in him fled.

Mash Lake kneeled beside Jeptha, and Pace joined him.

The boy was dying, but he grabbed Lake by his shirtfront and whispered, “You got any pretty young gals with bows in their hair in this town?”

“A few,” Lake said. “And they’re real purty, an’ all.”

“I knowed they was here. I just knowed it.”

“Did you want to meet a little purty gal?”

Jeptha nodded, smiling, his eyes fading. “Hell yeah. I wanted to fuck her, then blow her brains out fer bein’ so damned uppity.”

“Boy,” Lake said, “you’re a credit to the mama that bore you.”

But Jeptha was already dead and didn’t hear him.

Lake rose to his feet, his knees cracking. “Well, Sam, we know it wasn’t the deacon took Jess. These boys of his’n were on the scout for her.”

“Seems like.”

Lake gave Pace a speculative look. “You’re good with the iron, Sam. As fast on the draw as any I’ve known.”

“You throw some fast lead your own self, old man.”

“I never throwed it at a feller more deserving than Jeptha. The boy was a sorry piece o’ white trash.”

“He was a mean one all right.”

Lake stretched a crick out of his back. “Damn it, Sam, now there’s more buryin’ to be done.”

“The hell there is. We’ll throw a loop on their feet and drag them out of town. Them two Santee whelps don’t deserve a proper buryin’.”

“You’re a hard, unforgiving man, Sam.”

“I reckon. But only when I ain’t crazy.”

A thick mist arrived with the dawn, hugging the ground, and when Pace led the way out of town it looked as though he and Lake were riding through a gray sea.

“We ain’t gonna find tracks in this fog,” Lake said.

“It’ll burn off when the sun comes up,” Pace said.

Lake peered ahead of him, the mist curling around his horse. “So, where do we go in the meantime?”

“Pick a bearing, Mash. Any direction that takes us away from Requiem.”

Lake, surprised, stared hard at Pace. “You ain’t goin’ sane on me, boy, are ye?”

“I don’t know, old man. I could be. Maybe bein’ crazy for three years is enough for any man.”

“I don’t know about that,” Lake said.

“I don’t know either,” Pace said.