The Max Brand Megapack (26 page)

THE GHOST (1919)

The gold strike which led the fortune-hunters to Murrayville brought with them the usual proportion of bad men and outlaws. Three months after the rush started a bandit appeared so consummate in skill and so cool in daring that all other offenders against the law disappeared in the shade of his reputation. He was a public dread. His comings were unannounced; his goings left no track. Men lowered their voices when they spoke of him. His knowledge of affairs in the town was so uncanny that people called him the “Ghost.”

The stages which bore gold to the railroad one hundred and thirty miles to the south left at the most secret hours of the night, but the Ghost knew. Once he “stuck up” the stage not a mile from town while the guards were still occupied with their flasks of snakebite. Again, when the stage rolled on at midday, eighty miles south of Murrayville, and the guards nodded in the white-hot sun, the Ghost rose from behind a bush, shot the near-leader, and had the cargo at his mercy in thirty seconds.

He performed these feats with admirable
finesse.
Not a single death lay charged to his account, for he depended upon surprise rather than slaughter. Yet so heavy was the toll he exacted that the miners passed from fury to desperation.

They organized a vigilance committee. They put a price on his head. Posses scoured the region of his hiding-place, Hunter’s Cañon, into which he disappeared when hard pressed, and left no more trace than the morning mist which the sun disperses. A hundred men combed the myriad recesses of the cañon in vain. Their efforts merely stimulated the bandit.

While twoscore men rode almost within calling distance, the Ghost appeared in the moonlight before Pat McDonald and Peters and robbed them of eighteen pounds of gold-dust which they carried in their belts. When the vigilance committee got word of this insolent outrage they called a mass-meeting so large that even drunken Geraldine was enrolled.

Never in the history of Murrayville had there been so grave and dry-throated an affair. William Collins, the head of the vigilantes, addressed the assembly. He rehearsed the list of the Ghost’s outrages, pointed out that what the community needed was an experienced man-hunter to direct their efforts, and ended by asking Silver Pete to stand up before them. After some urging Pete rose and stood beside Collins, with his hat pushed back from his gray and tousled forelock and both hands tugging at his cartridge-belt.

“Men,” went on Collins, placing one hand on the shoulder of the man-killer, “we need a leader who is a born and trained fighter, a man who will attack the Ghost with system and never stop after he takes up the trail. And I say the man we need is Silver Pete!”

Pete’s mouth twitched back on one side into the faint semblance of a grin, and he shrugged off the patronizing hand of the speaker. The audience stirred, caught each other with side-glances, and then stared back at Silver Pete. His reputation gave even Murrayville pause, for his reputed killings read like the casualty list of a battle.

“I repeat,” said Collins, after the pause, in which he allowed his first statement to shudder its way home, “that Silver Pete is the man for us. I’ve talked it over with him before this, and he’ll take the job, but he needs an inducement. Here’s the reward I propose for him or for any other man who succeeds in taking the Ghost prisoner or in killing him. We’ll give him any loot which may be on the person of the bandit. If the Ghost is disposed of in the place where he has cached his plunder, the finder gets it all. It’s a high price to pay, but this thing has to be stopped. My own opinion is that the Ghost is a man who does his robbing on the side and lives right here among us. If that’s the case, we’ll leave it to Silver Pete to find him out, and we’ll obey Pete’s orders. He’s the man for us. He’s done work like this before. He has a straight eye, and he’s fast with his six-gun. If you want to know Pete’s reputation as a fighting man—”

“He’ll tell you himself,” said a voice, and a laugh followed.

Silver Pete scowled in the direction of the laugh, and his right hand caressed the butt of his gun, but two miners rose from the crowd holding a slender fellow between them.

“It’s only Geraldine,” said one of them. “There ain’t no call to flash your gun, Pete.”

“Take the drunken fool away,” ordered Collins angrily. “Who let him in here? This is a place for men and not for girl-faced clowns!”

“Misher Collins,” said Geraldine, doffing his broad-brimmed hat and speaking with a thick, telltale accent—”Misher Collins, I ask your pardon, shir.”

He bowed unsteadily, and his hat brushed the floor.

“I plumb forgot I was in church with Silver Pete for a preacher!” he went on.

The audience turned their heads and chuckled deeply.

“Take him out, will you?” thundered Collins. “Take him out, or I’ll come down there and kick him out myself!”

The two men at Geraldine’s side turned him about and led him toward the door. Here he struggled away from his guides. “Misher Collins!” he cried in a voice half-whining and half-anger, “if I capture the Ghost do
I
get the loot?”

A yell of laughter drowned the reply, and Geraldine staggered from the room.

“What do you say, men?” roared Collins, enraged by these repeated interruptions. “Is Silver Pete the man for us?”

There was no shout of approval but a deep muttering of consent.

“I’d hire the devil himself,” murmured one man, “if he’d get rid of the Ghost.”

“All right,” said Collins, and he turned to Pete. “You’re in charge here, and it’s up to you to tell us what to do. You’re the foreman, and we’re all in your gang.”

The crowd was delighted, for Pete, finding himself deserted before the mass of waiting men, shifted uneasily from one foot to the other and kept changing the angle of the hat upon his mop of gray hair.

“Speech!” yelled a miner. “Give us a speech, Pete!” Silver Pete favored the speaker with a venomous scowl.

“Speech nothin’,” he answered. “I ain’t here to talk. I ain’t no gossipin’ bit of calico. I got a hunch my six-gun’ll do my chatterin’ for me.”

“But what do you want us to do, Pete?” asked Collins. “How are we going to help you?”

“Sit tight and chaw your own tobacco,” he said amiably. “I don’t want no advice. There’s been too many posses around these diggin’s. Maybe I’ll start and hunt the Ghost by myself. Maybe I won’t. If I want help I’ll come askin’ it.”

As a sign that the meeting had terminated he pulled his hat farther down over his eyes, hitched his belt, and stalked through the crowd without looking to either side.

Thereafter Murrayville saw nothing of him for a month, during which the Ghost appeared five times and escaped unscathed. The community pondered and sent out to find Pete, but the search was vain. There were those who held that he must have been shot down in his tracks by the Ghost, and even now decorated some lank hillside. The majority felt that having undertaken his quest alone Pete was ashamed to appear in the town without his victim.

On the subject of the quest Geraldine composed a ballad which he sang to much applause in the eight saloons of the town. It purported to be the narrative of Silver Pete’s wanderings in search of the Ghost. In singing it Geraldine borrowed a revolver and belt from one of the bystanders, pushed back his hat and roughed up his hair, and imitated the scowling face of Pete so exactly that his hearers fairly wept with pleasure. He sang his ballad to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” and the sad narrative concluded with a wailing stanza:

“I don’t expect no bloomin’ tears;

The only thing I ask

Is something for a monument

In the way of a whisky flask.”

Geraldine sang himself into popularity and many drinks with his song, and for the first time the miners began to take him almost seriously. He had appeared shortly after old John Murray struck gold six months before, a slender man of thirty-five, with a sadly drooping mouth and humorous eyes.

He announced himself as Gerald Le Roy Witherstone, and was, of course, immediately christened “Geraldine.”

Thereafter he wandered about the town, with no apparent occupation except to sing for his drinks in the saloons. Hitherto he had been accepted as a harmless and amusing man-child, but his ballad gave him at once an Homeric repute, particularly when men remembered that the song was bound to come sooner or later to the ear of Silver Pete.

For the time being Pete was well out of ear-shot. After the meeting, at which he was installed chief man-hunter of the community, he spent most of the evening equipping himself for the chase. Strangely enough, he did not hang a second revolver to his belt nor strap a rifle behind his saddle; neither did he mount a fleet horse. To pursue the elusive Ghost he bought a dull-eyed mule with a pendulous lower lip. On the mule he strapped a heavy pack which consisted chiefly of edibles, and in the middle of the night he led the mule out of Murrayville in such a way as to evade observation. Once clear of the town he headed straight for Hunter’s Cañon.

Once inside the mouth of the cañon he began his search. While he worked he might have been taken for a prospector, for there was not a big rock in the whole course of the cañon which he did not examine from all sides. There was not a gully running into Hunter’s which he did not examine carefully. He climbed up and down the cliffs on either side as if he suspected that the Ghost might take to wings and fly up the sheer rock to a cave.

The first day he progressed barely a half-mile. The second day he covered even less ground. So his search went on. In the night he built a fire behind a rock and cooked. Through four weeks his labor continued without the vestige of a clue to reward him. Twice during that time he saw posses go thundering through the valley and laughed to himself. They did not even find him, and yet he was making no effort to elude them. What chance would they have of surprising the Ghost?

This thought encouraged him, and he clung to the invisible trail, through the day and through the night, with the vision of the outlaw’s loot before him. He ran out of bacon. Even his coffee gave out. For ten days he lived on flour, salt, and water, and then, as if this saintly fast were necessary before the vision, Pete saw the Ghost.

It was after sunset, but the moon was clear when he saw the fantom rider race along the far side of the valley. The turf deadened the sound of the horse’s hoofs, and, like another worldly apparition, the Ghost galloped close to the wall of the valley—and disappeared.

Peter rubbed his eyes and looked again. It give him a queer sensation, as if he had awakened suddenly from a vivid dream, for the horse, with its rider, had vanished into thin air between the eyes of Peter and the sheer rock of the valley wall. A little shudder passed through his body, and he cursed softly to restore his courage.

Yet the dream of plunder sent his blood hotly back upon its course. He carefully observed the marks which should guide him to the point on the rock at which the rider disappeared. He hobbled the mule, examined his revolver, and spun the cylinder, and then started down across the cañon.

He had camped upon high ground, and his course led him on a sharp descent to the stream which cut the heart of the valley. Here, for two hundred yards, trees and the declivity of the ground cut off his view, but when he came to the higher ground again he found that he had wandered only a few paces to the left of his original course.

The wall of the valley was now barely fifty yards away, and as nearly as he could reckon the landmarks, the point at which the rider vanished was at or near a shrub which grew close against the rock. For an instant Pete thought that the tree might be a screen placed before the entrance of a cave. Yet the rider had made no pause to set aside the screen. He walked up to it and peered beneath the branches. He even fumbled at the base of the trunk, to make sure that the roots actually entered the earth. After this faint hope disappeared, Pete stepped back and sighed. His reason vowed that it was at this point that the horse turned to air, and Pete’s was not a nature which admitted the supernatural.

He turned to the left and walked along the face of the cliff for fifty paces. It was solid rock. A chill like a moving piece of ice went up Pete’s back.

He returned to the shrub and passed around it to the right.

At first he thought it merely the black shadow of the shrub. He stepped closer and then crouched with his revolver raised, for before him opened a crevice directly behind the shrub. It was a trifle over six feet high and less than half that in width; a man could walk through that aperture and lead a horse. Pete entered the passage with cautious steps.

Between each step he paused and listened. He put forth a foot and felt the ground carefully with it, for fear of a pebble which might roll beneath his weight, or a twig which might snap. His progress was so painfully slow that he could not even estimate distances in the pitch-dark. The passage grew higher and wider—it turned sharply to the right—a faint light shone.

Pete crouched lower and the grin of expectancy twisted at his lips. At every step, until this moment; he had scarcely dared to breathe, for fear of the bullet which might find him out. Now all the advantage was on his side. Behind him was the dark. Before him was the light which must outline, however faintly, the figure of any one who lurked in wait. With these things in mind he went on more rapidly. The passage widened again and turned to the left. He peered cautiously around the edge of rock and looked into as comfortable a living-room as he had ever seen.

The rock hung raggedly from the top of the cave, but the sides were smooth from the action of running water through long, dead ages. The floor was of level-packed gravel. Silver Pete remained crouched at the sharp angle of the passage until he heard the stamp and snort of a horse. It gave him heart and courage to continue the stealthy progress, inch by inch, foot by foot, pace by pace toward the light, and as he stole forward more and more of the cave developed before him.

A tall and sinewy horse was tethered at one end, and at the opposite side sat a man with his back to Pete, who leveled his revolver and drew a bead on a spot between the shoulder blades. Yet he did not fire, for the thought came to him that if it were an honor to track the Ghost to his abode and kill him, it would be immortal glory to bring back the bandit alive, a concrete testimony to his own prowess.