The Ghost of Apache Creek

Chapter 35

Jess Leslie crossed her hands and rubbed her upper arms, frowning.

“I feel dirty all over,” she said. “I need to bathe.”

“Stay clear of the well,” Pace said. “Beau Harcourt’s men stirred up the water and maybe they wakened the cholera.”

“The creek?” Jess said.

“There’s no cholera in the creek.”

“Runs too fast, I reckon,” Lake said.

“Then I’ll bathe in the creek.” She looked at the two men. “One of you will have to come with me. There’s coyotes out there and maybe wolves and I don’t want to be there alone.”

Pace looked at Lake. “You, Mash?”

Lake shook his head. “No. I’m an old reprobate and I don’t trust myself. I might take a peek.”

“You won’t see anything you haven’t seen many times before,” Jess said.

“I know, but nowadays my old heart wouldn’t stand the excitement.”

“Then it’s you, Sammy,” Jess said. “Let’s go. If you think your heart can stand it.”

“Kinda dark, isn’t it?” Pace said.

“You protect me from the coyotes and I’ll protect you from the boogerman,” Jess said. “I don’t want to feel soiled a moment longer than I have to.”

She stepped to the door. “Are you coming?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Wouldn’t do you any harm to take a bath yourself, sonny,” Lake said.

“Sammy’s a guard,” Jess said. “He should keep his powder dry. Besides, I don’t want him dirtying up my bathwater.”

Pace was not in the best of moods as he picked up his rifle from the desk and followed the woman into the street.

As suddenly as it had begun, the wind had died. Now a gray haze hung over the town, and the blanched buildings looked like fading images on a tintype.

“Be fog come morning,” Pace said. “Sometimes in summer it drifts up from the Mogollon Rim and covers the whole basin.”

“If it wasn’t so scary, it would be pretty,” Jess said.

Pace smiled. “Now who’s sceered of the boogerman?”

Jess chose a spot where the creek flowed between two rocks, creating a sieve of white water about three feet deep.

She stripped in the waning moonlight and her slender naked body was as pale as bone.

Pace had taken himself off a ways and fetched his back against the trunk of a cottonwood, the Winchester between his drawn-up knees.

It had been three years since he’d seen a naked woman, and he watched Jess with pleasure, but without desire, as a man looks at a nude painting in an art gallery.

Jess stood in the water, then lowered herself into the eddies. She squealed as the sting of the icy creek hit her butt, and then kneeled without moving for long moments, letting her body get accustomed to the cold.

Pace smiled, enjoying himself.

But, when the woman began to wash her shadowed, secret places, he turned away to spare her shame.

The creek flowed through a series of shallow rock shelves. The upper levels ran over a clay bed, the lower over pebbles.

The fog, spreading, was now drifting into the higher shelves and between the trunks of the cottonwoods and pines growing on the banks.

Jess was now a white blur in the misty gloom, but Pace heard her splash water. And, God help her, he thought, she was actually humming a little tune.

Pace shook his head in admiration.

The girl looked fragile, frail as a china doll, but, mentally and physically, she was enduring, as strong as any man, himself included.

His wife had been like that, the perfect spouse for a lawman.

Then she was taken by the cholera and all that had been wonderful in her came to an end, leaving a vast emptiness in Pace that nothing could ever fill.

Pace heard Jess get out of the water and he stepped toward her.

She stood on the bank shivering, and then began to pick up her clothes.

“You can’t dress without getting dry first,” Pace said.

“I don’t have a towel, Sammy. Didn’t you notice?”

The woman’s nakedness didn’t trouble Pace, nor did it her.

“Damn it, here.” Pace slipped the canvas suspenders from his shoulders and took off his shirt. “Use this,” he said. “It’s clean, or fairly clean.”

“You’ll be cold,” Jess said.

“I’ll be just fine.”

He held up the shirt. “Now put it on. It will dry you and keep you warm.”

There’s no accounting for what a woman will and will not do, but Jess smiled and did as Pace told her.

She was closing the last shirt button when the wolves howled again.

Close this time. Very close.