The Ghost of Apache Creek

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.”

The dumb Peacock’s mouth moved again.

“What’s in the tent?” his brother said.

“Nothing!” Harcourt said.

Too quickly.

The Peacock brothers stared at him and Deacon Santee gave Harcourt a surprised look that quickly turned hard and measuring.

Harcourt tried to cover up his gaffe. “I’ve got private papers in there is all.”

“We won’t touch your private papers,” said a brother who had been silent until then. “Only the man who calls himself Mash Lake is of interest to us.”

He kneed his horse forward to the tent, leaned out of the saddle, opened the flap, and looked inside.

After a few moments he swung his horse around and said, “Lake isn’t there.”

Harcourt exhaled his relief. Tension drained out of his belly like a beer-drinking man taking a piss.

It seemed the Peacocks were intent on the man called Lake. Nothing else, including the sight of a naked woman on a cot, mattered to them.

Emboldened now, Harcourt said, “There’s a ghost town to the south of here. Seems a likely place for a man to hole up for a spell.”

The brothers said nothing. They swung their horses, trotted away, and didn’t look back.

After they’d gone, Harcourt felt the air thick and hard to breathe, as though the Peacocks had polluted it by their very presence.