Ghost Towns

by Louis L'Amour

  And the marshal stood away from the sickbed there in the physician’s fine old house with its gingerbread scroll work and tall windows and fancy shake roof and flocked wallpaper.

  Wes took the revolver and remembered in an instant when such a thing in his hand was as familiar to him as breathing. But it wasn’t nothing he wanted to be reminded of now, nothing he wanted to take up again.

  He thumbed back the hammer.

  “Before you pull that trigger,” the marshal said, “I understand your people rest in unmarked graves.”

  Such talk pinched his nerves.

  “Wind and time will rub out any trace of those poor folks—your wife and children. Is that what you want, for them to be forgotten—yourself along with them?”

  He turned the cocked gun instead at the man who had offered it to him.

  “It don’t matter about me,” he said.

  “Shooting me won’t solve any of your problems,” the marshal said. “It’ll just make them worse. Let me tell you, hanging is about the worst way a man can die. Bullet’s much easier and quicker and a lot more honorable, case you place any stock in honor.”

  He lowered the hammer on the pistol and set it on the bed.

  “I’d pay you good money,” the marshal said. “Enough to buy your family some nice headstones. There is a fellow in St. Louis—an Italian—who carves the best headstones you ever laid eyes on. Carves them out of marble comes all the way from Italy, and gets a handsome price, but you could easily afford it on what I’d pay you. Think how nice that’d be—headstones for your wife and children. Why a hundred years from now people would be able to see who they were and where they rest, maybe put flowers on their graves out of sheer kindness ’cause that’s the way some people are. They aren’t all like you and me, Wes.”

  “You’ve got a hell of a gift of gab,” Wes said.

  “Don’t I, though?”

  “How much money?”

  “Let’s say two hundred dollars, cash.”

  “What do I have to do for this cash money?”

  “Kill a no good son of a bitch who needs killing.”

  “What makes you think…?”

  The marshal lit a cigar he’d taken from the pocket of his waistcoat, blew a stream of blue smoke toward the plaster ceiling, noted the fine wood furniture that adorned the room. French, he thought.

  “I know all about you, Wes Bell. I know more about you than your Ma.”

  “You don’t know nothing about me.”

  “No sir, you’re wrong. It’s my job to know about people—and what I don’t know, I find out and I found out everything about you. I know before you took up preaching you was in Leavenworth prison. I know how bad you was. And that is why I’ve come now, to ask you this thing, because I know you got the grit to get it done.”

  “Killing for money ain’t part of me.”

  “You’ve killed plenty for free before the law caught you and put you in the jug. Now tell me if I‘m wrong.”

  “That was a long time ago and I never killed nobody who didn’t deserve it or wasn’t trying to kill me first.”

  “Hell, me too. But you haven’t forgot how to pull a trigger on a man have you? It’s like riding a bicycle.”

  “No, I haven’t forgot how.”

  “Let me just go ahead and tell you about this fellow,” the marshal said, retaking his seat by the bed and taking up his hogleg again and putting it back in his holster. “He’s a scourge, worse’n the plague. Everywhere he goes he leaves a bloody trail behind: dead folks, raped folks, hurt folks. He ain’t never done a good thing in his life. At least you seen the light, Wes. You got broke down and turned your life around ’cause that’s what a normal human would do at some point when he saw the errors of his ways. But not this fellow. This fellow is as bad a seed as ever was planted in the devil’s garden and he needs weeding out.”

  “It makes no sense you asking me to do it. You’re the law, why don’t you do it, if he’s so bad?”

  “Oh, believe me, I’d do it in heartbeat, wouldn’t think twice about doing it. Hell, I’d hang him and then shoot him and then burn his body just to make sure no man woman or child ever had to cross his path again. But I can’t do it, Wes.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “’Cause I’m a dead man myself. Got cancer of the ass. Eating me up bad and there’s no way of knowing I’d find him before the grim reaper finds me.”

  The marshal smoked casual as though waiting for his steak to come.

  “There is one other thing about this fellow, Wes, one more reason I come to find you and no other for this job.”

  He waited to hear what the marshal’s reason was.

  “He’s your brother, Wes. This no good son of a bitch is your kid brother, James, and if there’s anybody knows his ways and where he’d go to ground when he’s being chased it would be you, Wes.”

  “James?”

  “None other.”

  James was only nine years old when Wes got sent to the pen. And while behind those bars, his ma took James to somewhere in New Mexico, he’d heard, and married a miner and all contact between them was lost.

  “I haven’t seen him since he was a kid,” he said to the marshal.

  “Yes, that’s probably true, but kin is kin and blood is blood and I do believe of all the men in this world you are the one who could find this little murderer and put him down. Do you want to know what all crimes he’s committed? Should I tell you about the raping of women and young girls, how he slashed their throats afterward? Should I tell you about how he murdered an old man and his grandson who weren’t doing anything but fishing and he shot them in the back of their heads merely for what was in their lunch pails? Shall I tell you how he burned down a house with a man and his family still in it because they were colored? Shall I tell you such tales, Wes, or will the money be enough?”

  “Oh, you give a long and windy speech, marshal…”

  “Yes, I do, Wes. Yes, I, by God, do.”

  “Even if I agreed to do it I wouldn’t know where to begin and would not know if and when the time came I could do it—not my own blood, my own flesh. Could you do it?”

  “Yes, by God, I could and I would.”

  “Still…”

  “I know all about blood being thicker than water—but its blood he’s spilling more than water and the blood stains you as it does all your people who ever carried or will carry the Bell name and only blood kin can make it right in the eyes of the innocent. Only you can set things right with James, Wes Bell.”

  The marshal blew a ring of smoke toward the ceiling and watched as it became shapeless before dissolving altogether. Then he leveled his gaze at Wes.

  “You see, I have studied you like a schoolboy studies his books and I know everything about you and everything about that little killing son of a bitch brother of yours, James. Ironic ain’t it, in a way, you’re preaching the gospel and him named James, which was Jesus’ brother’s name. You ain’t Jesus, are you, Wes? You ain’t the second coming, are you?”

  “To hell with you.”

  “To hell with us all if that boy keeps up his killing and rampaging. To hell with every last man, woman, and child he comes across in this old world unless you stop him.”

  Then the marshal reached into the side pocket of his bear coat and pulled out a triple-framed tintype of a woman holding an infant and two other children—a boy in each of the attached frames. Anne and her youngsters—and pressed it into Wes’s hand.

  “To hell with them too,” he said, “for the sickness that took them is no less than the sickness that sets in that wild boy’s mind, Wes. No different. Dead is dead no matter how you come to be that way. But what is different is whether or not you just drew a bad hand in life’s game or some no good son of a bitch come along and took life without the right to do so. How’d you feel if it was James killed your wife and those kids instead of them dying of sickness?”

  Then the marshal stood and adjusted the weight of his heavy c
oat and settled the sugarloaf on his head.

  “I’ll come round tomorrow for your answer, Wes. And the two-hundred dollars if you so decide.”

  “Five-hundred,” Wes said. “Gold double-eagles, no script, and the name and address of that stone carver in St. Louis.”

  “Well now, Wes, you sure you wouldn‘t like to make it thirty pieces of silver…”

  And so it was that the very next morning the marshal came again and stacked five gold double eagles on the bedside table and a piece of paper with the St. Louis stone carver’s name and address written on it.

  “Down payment,” the marshal said. “The rest is waiting for you at the bank upon your return and proof the deed is done. Now raise your right hand so I can swear you in official with Doc Kinney here as eyewitness.”

  Doc Kinney looked on at the abbreviated ceremony.

  Then the marshal placed a small badge stamped out of brass next to the double eagles and said, “Get her done, son. Sooner rather than later. I’d like to still be breathing when I read the good news.”

  “What makes you think I won’t just take the money and run?”

  “Because,” the marshal said, with an air of confidence, “you know what the inside of that state prison looks like and I venture to guess it ain’t worth no two hundred dollars to go back. I hired you and I can hire others to track you down and for a lot less money. Sweet dreams, bucko.”

  Fifteen days had passed since he struck his bargain with the marshal.

  He began the trail where the marshal said the last crime had been committed—a place called Pilgrim’s Crossing, a small Mormon community in the high country of Utah. Saw the woman’s grave and asked her husband to describe the man who had raped and killed her. The man described had a mark on his cheek like a red star. James had been born with it—the one single thing he could recall about the kid before they hauled him off to prison: the red star birthmark.

  The man had pointed to some distant mountains when asked which way the killer went.

  “I just come in from working in the silver mines when I saw a man on a paint horse riding fast away toward them mountains then found Lottie tore up and dead.”

  The man was dressed in dark clothing, looked like a crow, soft gray eyes that spoke of nothing at all.

  “What lays that way?” he asked the man.

  “Los Muretos is all I know,” the man said.

  “How come you didn’t follow?”

  The man gave a slight shrug.

  “I have other wives to care for,” the man said. There were four small houses on the land each with a bonneted woman staring from the doorways.

  “Well then, I suppose you are one lucky son of a bitch you got spare wives to concern yourself with. Most men just have one and some don’t have any.” He felt disgust and turned his horse toward the north road.

  Another day’s ride and he met a man pulling a handcart.

  “How far to Los Muretos?” he said.

  The man was large as an ox himself and needed to be. The cart was burdened with a full load of watermelons.

  “Five or ten miles,” the man said, thumbing back over his shoulder.

  “You come from there?” he asked.

  The man nodded. A blue scarf kept his straw hat tied down against the cold air.

  “Three days ago.”

  “Any chance you come across a man with a red star on the side of his face?”

  The man shook his head.

  He rode on and the man took up his load again—each man seeing to his duty.

  Two more days of riding brought him to the top of a rocky backbone of a ridge where he looked down upon the town. In the long distance, a line of saw-toothed snow-covered mountains shimmered under a cold dying sun.

  A song of wind sang along the ridge and fluttered through his clothes and ruffled the mane of his horse. It chilled his blood, or something did.

  He glassed the town below him with a pair of brass Army field glasses. Then he swept them along the brown slash of road that ran uneven west and east. He saw nary a solitary thing moving along the road.

  Nothing moved in the town either, but it was still some distance off and maybe too far to see human activity. He was sure from the campfire he’d found that morning he had closed the gap between him and his kid brother—embers still sighed in the ashes.

  “We’ll wait,” he said to the horse. There was nothing for the horse to graze on among the rocks. “When the sun is down good and proper, we’ll ride down there and find James.”

  He squatted on his heels and waited for the sun to sink below the mountains, thinking of his lost family as he did, the real reason he was doing this thing, and when the sky turned dark as gunmetal and night came on like a cautious wolf, he tightened the saddle cinch and mounted the horse and began his descent into the town he figured had to be Los Muretos.

  With darkness he saw the town’s lights wink on. A hunter’s moon rose off to the east casting the landscape in a vaporous light. He and the horse traversed the slope and came to the very edge of the town’s first buildings.

  He went on.

  The street was empty but he could see shadows moving behind the lighted windows. And farther up the street he heard the sound of a piano being played roughly. He followed the sound to its source—a solitary saloon, false-fronted, in the center of town.

  He tied off and stepped cautiously through the doors.

  Rough-looking men were bellied up to the long oak bar, the soles of their worn boots resting on the tarnished brass rail. They drank and laughed and swore. A cloud of blue smoke hung over their sweat-stained Stetsons, the smoke so thick it turned the men into shadows of men.

  The interior of the saloon was narrow and dim—like the inside of a cave—and there was a feeling about the place that did not set well with him: a feeling of trouble and danger and worse.

  The saloon girls were dressed in dark crimson gowns and looked like wilted roses lost in their seeking the sun as they moved wraithlike among the men.

  Along the wall opposite the long bar men played cards at tables, their backs to him, their faces shaded by the brims of their hats.

  He stepped inside quick, shutting the door keeping out the wind. Nobody bothered to look up. His right hand rested inside his mackinaw on the butt of his revolver.

  He’d had plenty of time to think about what it would be like to shoot his own brother. Told himself he wouldn’t feel anything because he never knew the boy that well, and if he was as snake mean as the marshal had claimed, well, then it was simply an act that if he didn’t do, someone else would. Blood and kin had nothing to do with it he told himself. Justice had nothing to do with it. Italian marble headstones is what it had to do with.

  His gaze took in the men along the bar and he did not see anyone he recognized as being James, a man with a red star birthmark on his face. Even without the red star birthmark he figured he would know James in spite of the long passage of time. Like a mother cow knows its calf, a brother knows his brother.

  Then his gaze shifted to the card players and not one of them felt familiar to him either.

  He moved farther into the saloon, pushing his way through the crowd, fingers curled around the gun-butt riding his left hip.

  He wanted to see who was there in the back.

  A sloe-eyed woman neither young nor pretty pressed suddenly against him. She had the cloying scent of dead flowers, and awful teeth when she opened her mouth. He tried not to look at her directly for fear of what he might see.

  “How’s about buying a gal a drink, cowboy?” she said, and before he could stop her, her hand snaked between his legs. “A drink will get a free toss with me.”

  He looked down then, but her own eyes were averted to where her hand now rested. “Well, how about it?” she said through the din.

  He’d consorted with many such women in his younger days and taken pleasure from them. He had drank with them and fornicated with them. He was as wild and wooly and reckless as a Texas cow
boy. This woman’s presence reminded him of every such woman he had sinned with and he didn’t have any favor for her, or any other woman since Anne.

  He took two bits and set it on the wood and said, “There’s your drink, Miss, but the rest don’t interest me.” He pushed on through the crowd toward the back where he saw a wheel of chance and a faro table with men bucking the tiger. But none of them at either station had a red star birthmark on his face.

  There was a low flat stage against the back wall and to the left of it a set of stairs leading up to the upper level where several private boxes ran the length of the saloon. These were the places the saloon gals took men and fleeced them like sheep—fleeced them of their money and their pride and still left them wanting more.

  His every sense told him James was in this place, in one of those boxes.

  He took the stairs and looked down upon the crowd below, the miasma of writhing human desperation it seemed to him, and was just as glad to have left it down there. To see them from this vantage point caused his belly to clench, his flesh to sweat, his muscles to knot. He could not imagine himself like those below ever again.

  An odd thing happened just then as he was looking down: a face of one of the men at the bar looked up, and it could have been his twin. Then the man looked away again, down at his drink there on the hardwood. Wes was sure it was all his imagination.

  He eased down the narrow hall to the first private box and drew back the curtain enough to peer inside. A pudgy man stood with his trousers down around his ankles facing a woman sitting on the side of a narrow cot doing what such women do.

  Wes let the curtain fall back and he moved on to the next box. This time he saw a young soldier sitting talking to his gal, both of them facing away—just sitting there on the small bed holding hands the way lonely people do.

  He eased down to the next box and the next, finding three in a row empty.

  Then there was just one curtain left to draw and he moved to it, the pistol in his hand, cocked and ready. Oddly, he felt calm. His heart rhythm was slow and steady as an old Regulator wall clock. He nearly always felt the same way as a young buck when trouble presented itself. He didn’t know what it was or why the calm had descended on him, it just had.