The Ghost of Apache Creek

Chapter 4

Sam Pace opened his eyes and looked into a gathering dusk.

Harcourt and his men were gone and he was alone in the street. Shadows angled in the alleys and a solemn hush lay over the town. Only the thud-thud-thud of an opening and shutting door was loud, like a booted man walking in a cathedral.

Pace tried to get to his feet, failed, and gratefully sank to his belly again. The wind felt cool against his cheek and somehow the growing darkness was soothing, easing away his pain.

His gun was about six feet away, only part of the handle sticking up from the sand. He crawled toward the Colt, leaving a bloody slug-trail behind him.

After shaking grit from the revolver, Pace tried to rise again. This time he succeeded, swaying on his feet, his world rocking around him as though he were caught in a mighty earthshake. He laid the Colt on the boardwalk, taken by an idea that might help soothe his hurt.

Naked, shivering from cold brought on by the beating he’d taken and loss of blood, Pace staggered in the direction of the creek that ran deep and clear to the east of town. The hundred-yard journey took him an hour. He fell constantly as he passed in and out of consciousness. Each time he eventually struggled to his feet and stumbled forward a yard or so, only to fall again. A groan escaped his lips every time he slammed into the dirt.

The creek was hidden by stretching shadows, but Pace heard it bubble over its sand and pebble bottom, and a soaring cottonwood marked the bank. Slowly, painfully, on all fours, he crawled over uneven ground and rested when he reached the tree. Coyotes called in the distance, and the night birds pecked at the first stars. The wind stirred the cottonwood branches and bent the nearby willows to its will.

Pace reached the bank and let himself roll into the water. The coolness of the creek, born of a mountain, came as a shock. But Pace delighted in its tumbling waters as they numbed his pain and washed blood from his head and body.

After a while he lay on his back and watched the rising moon. It beamed at Pace, as though glad to see him again, then drew a veil of cloud across its face.

After an hour, Pace struggled to his feet and the creek rushed swiftly between his knees, threatening to unbalance him. He crawled to the bank and threw himself down on a patch of grass, breathing hard. His eyes reached into the night, in the direction of Requiem, and his mouth tightened against his teeth.

How the hell was he going to make it back?

The moon was high in the sky when Pace finally reached the boardwalk outside his office. He rested, sitting in the dirt, his bent elbow on the warped timbers, each breath heaving hard and fast. He tilted back his head and yelled into the night. “Bastards!”

He felt the Colt’s hammer grit against the frame as he thumbed off a shot, then another. Smoke drifting around his naked body, he called out again, his voice hoarse into the heedless dark.

“A crazy man! Damn you all, you drug a crazy man!”

Pace pushed up on the boardwalk and got to his feet. He triggered the Colt again, but the hammer clicked on a spent round.

“Bastards!”

The naked man climbed onto the boardwalk and roared obscenities into the night, his mind shadowed with dark places where gibbering phantoms dwelled, his boon companions.

Pace stumbled into his office. His way illuminated by blades of moonlight, he slumped behind his desk. He opened a drawer, removed one of his dwindling supply of matches, and lit the candle on the desktop.

For a moment the room flared with light, then dimmed to a dull yellow shimmer that made the darkness dance and gleam like tarnished silver among the cobwebs in the corners where the silent spiders lived. A scrap of mirror hung on the wall, thick with dust and fly specks. Pace rose, wiped it off with the heel of his hand, and brought the candle close. He stared into the mirror and into the burning eyes of a madman.

The knives of Harcourt’s riders had scraped part of his head into stubble, but long scalp locks still hung from several places and damp strands of hair spilled over his shoulders. His beard had received the same treatment, some areas shaved to the skin, other patches still intact, falling over his naked chest.

The candlelight, though less cruel than the glare of day, still revealed to Sam Pace what he’d become: a poor, insane creature who had surely been doomed from the moment of his birth.

He turned away from the mirror and sat at his desk again, settling the candle in front of him.

Slowly, laboriously, he cleaned and oiled his Colt. From a box of .45 shells in a drawer in his desk, he loaded five rounds and lowered the hammer on an empty chamber, the habit of a lifetime that required no thought. Years before, he’d had the Colt’s action tuned by an El Paso gunsmith. It took only two pounds of pressure on the trigger to trip the hammer. And that was nothing, really. Nothing at all.

Pace cocked the revolver, its triple-click loud in the quiet. He shoved the muzzle against his temple.

All men live. Not all deserve to.

Pace put himself in that last category. What the world didn’t need was another crazy man.