The Ghost of Apache Creek

Chapter 34

“That’s what I seen and I figured you should know,” the vaquero said.

“Where the hell was this?” Santee said.

“About a mile north of the old ghost town.”

“You saw them for sure?”

“With my own eyes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before this?”

“I didn’t think it so important.”

“The buzzards could be circling my sons,” the deacon said. “Did you think that wasn’t important?”

The vaquero shrugged. “It is not likely. Señor Enoch is a pistolero and so is Jeptha. They would not fear the Apaches.”

“Then why aren’t they back here?”

The vaquero said nothing. The question was impossible to answer.

But the deacon pushed it. “Why aren’t they here?”

“They toy with women, perhaps,” the vaquero said, taking a stab at it.

“Maybe. Jeptha, my youngest, has a . . . fixation, I guess you’d call it . . . about blond women with bows in their hair.”

“But just maybe he found one,” the vaquero said. “Stranger things have happened.”

“Yeah, maybe. Or an Apache bullet found him.”

The deacon ordered the vaquero to mount up and tell Gideon and Zedock to return with the herd.

“I’ll leave at first light and take a look for them buzzards you saw,” he said. “If somebody killed my boys, Apache or white man, I’ll tear this country apart until I find him.”

“Maybe the killer, if such exists, lives in the ghost town,” the vaquero said.

“Yeah, and that’ll be the first damned place I’ll look,” the deacon said.

After the vaquero rode out, Santee stepped toward the wagons.

“Maxine!” he yelled. “You get ready.”

He heard the woman give a pleasurable little squeal and it pleased him.

As he’d said so many times to his boys, all a man needed to break a woman was patience and a whip.

Just like a saddle mare.