The Stranger from Abilene

The wind venomously hurled the sand against the ghost town of Requiem, as though trying to wake the place from its deep slumber. Stinging grit cartwheeled along Main Street and rattled against the cracked glass of store windows, threatening to break them further. Rusty-hinged doors squealed and slammed in the tempest, and the wind shrieked like a virgin saint forced to take partners for the devil’s barn dance.

A tall man walked through this maelstrom of wind, sand and darkness, his head bent, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. His boots thudded on the boardwalk, the chime of his spurs faint in the storm’s roar. He stepped along slowly, shoulders hunched, long hair tumbling down his ragged back.

The man could have been a sleepwalker, lost in a nightmare, or a wandering drifter seeking shelter from the storm. But Marshal Sam Pace was neither of those things. He was aware. Alert. Ready. And he was listening. The dead were talking . . . . He heard their thin whispers in the wind.

He stopped and lifted his head, his eyes bright.

“Is that you?” he said, raising his voice to a shout. “John Andres, is that you calling to me?”

He listened into the night, hard-driven sand hissing over him.

Pace opened the twisted door of Big John’s Bakery and Pie Shop and stepped inside; the storm, frustrated for the moment, let him go.

“John?” Pace said. “Why did you call out to me?”

The bakery was angled in deep shadow. Its shelves were empty, gray with cobwebs, and the place smelled of pack rats and dry rot.

“Where the hell are you, John?” Pace said. “Martha, are you there?”

Something rustled in a corner. The wind pounded at the store window, demanding entry. The door grated on its hinges.

But the pie shop was a tomb, dark, empty, without human life.

Sudden realization spiked in Pace, startling him.

There was no one here. Not a soul.

Big John—big laughing John Andres, who had won a medal at Gettysburg and another at Cold Harbor— was dead of cholera these past three years. He himself had buried Martha—a plump, rosy-cheeked woman who’d baked the best apple pie in the county and made biscuits so light they almost floated. John and Martha had moldered long in the ground and nothing about them would look human any longer.

Still, he tried again. “John? Martha? Are you there?”

A hollow silence mocked him. Outside, the wind raved and ranted, impatient for his return.

Pace stumbled to the door and once again stepped into uproar.

But wait. He was in no rush to walk again. It was time for thought.

He sheltered in a store doorway, feeling crafty, because he knew there was much mischief afoot. Chin in hand, he pondered the wind. Aha, now he knew. It came from the northwest.

“Do you know what that means, Sam?” he said aloud.

He answered his own question, the habit of a man who had spent too much time alone.

“Sure do, Sam. It means you’ll only be insane until the wind shifts.”

Pace nodded and smiled. He was happy that he’d gotten to the truth of the thing.

See, earlier in the day, the wind had blown from the south, and he’d been perfectly sane. But within the last hour, it had shifted. When it blew from the south again, he’d be his old rational self.

William Shakespeare said he would, and ol’ Will knew about such things, him being a famous playwright an’ all: “I am but mad north-northwest. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

For some reason, Pace had always remembered that quote since he’d heard an actor say it at a theater in Deadwood, and it tickled him. He said it aloud. Then once again.

But another thought silenced him.

“Sam,” he said, aloud, his face puzzled, “when the wind was from the south, how come you were still crazy as a loon?”

Pace shook his shaggy head.

“Sam doesn’t know,” he said. He thought about it. “I reckon ol’ Will Shakespeare has some explaining to do. That’s what I think.”

The marshal stumbled into the street and again got pummeled by wind, hammered by stinging sand.

“Will Shakespeare!” he yelled, throwing his arms wide, his head back. “You know nothing! You don’t know shit!” He laughed, an empty noise without humor. “Damn you, when the wind was from the south, I was still stark-raving mad and I didn’t know a hawk from a handsaw!”

Pace looked beyond the edge of town, his eyes cunning again as they searched the darkness.

Now he had a plan, a good plan.

The graveyard was out there, hidden in the gloom.

“Sam,” he said, “the best thing you can do now is talk to Jane and the baby. You can tell them about the south wind and how Shakespeare doesn’t know nothin’.”

Pace nodded. Yes, he’d do that. Jane would understand his madness and give him comfort.

The cemetery had been laid out just two hundred yards beyond the town limits. Because of flooding considerations, it lay atop a shallow rise at the base of a bare rock ridge shaped like the bow of a steamship.