The Ghost of Apache Creek

Chapter 49

Deacon Santee found two dead men in the grass, separated by about twenty paces. Both had been shot multiple times, most of their wounds in the back.

He drew rein and looked around him.

It took a while because his sight was blurred, but he spotted the bodies of three more punchers, like the others widely spread apart.

Several cows grazed by the river, one of them a longhorn, but the rest of the herd was scattered to hell and gone, as though they’d dropped off the edge of the world.

The signs were written in burning letters four feet tall and the deacon had no trouble reading them.

There had been a running fight with Apaches, and his sons had been killed early. The rest of the punchers had tried to make it back to camp and had died after they crossed the creek.

As for the herd, it had spooked and most of the cattle would still be running.

His eyes had once been far-seeing, but now, as the cholera ravaged him, the deacon couldn’t make out his wagons.

But they’d be there, he knew. He had no illusions about what he’d find, but then, hope is often the last thing to die in a man.

Santee kneed his horse forward, riding through the long summer twilight and the silence that lay softly on the land.

The breeze felt cool on his face and tasted of pine and he heard coyotes yip in some faint, faraway place.

The deacon rode on, fearful of what he’d find, fearful of the death that awaited him. Fearful of what might come thereafter.

It was worse than he’d imagined, worse than anyone could have imagined.

A man can use a woman hard, but in the end, if he’s considerate, little harm is done.

But Apache warriors had ways of using a woman where much harm was done and consideration for the woman’s well-being didn’t enter into their way of thinking.

And so it was with the deacon’s wives.

The women lay on their backs, legs spread wide, their naked bodies bone white in the half-light except where dried blood crusted black.

Among them lay the body of the vaquero who’d helped Santee shoot Beau Harcourt into collops. The scrap iron head of a war lance was buried deep in the man’s chest and he’d been scalped.

But he’d sold his life dearly, the ground around his body littered with empty shells from his Winchester.

The deacon half stepped, half fell from the saddle.

He moved from body to body, forcing himself to experience the horror in full measure to feed his growing anger.

He felt no grief. No sense of loss.

He took women only for the physical pleasure they provided. Emotional bonds did not interest the deacon in the least.

But ownership did.

The gals had been his’n. And the Apaches had taken them away from him.

Now he would exact the women’s blood price in lead.

That day Deacon James J. Santee sought redemption of a sort, trusting that belted men would talk of him in later days as a man who had sand enough to exact a reckoning.

He drew his guns and looked to where the Apaches had gathered, sensing that true nobility lies in being superior to your previous self.

As he sought revenge for his dead wives and braced himself for his last fight, the deacon was about to do something finer than he’d ever done before in his hunted, violent existence.

And in the end he perhaps found, at least in small measure, his lost nobility.