The Stranger from Abilene

Once the place had been a sun-dappled, grassy spot, but now it was overrun with brush and cactus, and the site of the mass grave left a rectangular scar that would last for years.

Pace had walked to the cemetery every day for the past three years; he knew the way, his feet feeling out the path in inky sand-torn darkness. The mass grave had no marker, but Pace found it easily, a tall wild oak guiding him to the spot. He knew the place well, and why not? He’d buried eighty-three people there, him and big John Andres, among them Pace’s own wife and child, taken by the cholera. At the end, the last bodies he’d rolled into in the pit had been those of John and his wife, Martha.

Before then, the town had been known as Apache Creek, but when folks had started dying, the mayor issued a decree that from henceforth it would bear the name Requiem.

No one had disagreed with him—at least, not those who were still alive.

Pace’s hat had blown away in the storm, but he clasped his hands in front of him, bowed his head and waited as always for Jane to talk first. The wind roughed up the oak and Pace heard the tick-tick-tick of blown sand hitting the tree’s leaves and trunk. He stood stock-still for an hour, waiting with a madman’s rigid patience for Jane to talk to him. But she didn’t whisper to him, to tell him to be faithful and brave. Not that night.

And all the while, Pace turned slowly into a pillar of sand.

His matted hair and long beard were stiff and yellow, the rags he wore gritty, the color of earth. His eyes were rimmed with red, and dirt gathered at the corners of his mouth.

Filthy, smelly, overgrown with hair, Sam Pace looked that night more animal than human. His untrimmed nails curved like talons. Those and his fiery gaze gave him the appearance of a dangerous scavenger come to raid the graves of the dead.

Only one thing about Marshal Sam Pace was clean: the oiled blue Colt shoved into the pocket of his ragged pants.

The habits of a lifetime die hard, and Pace had lived long with the Colt and knew its ways. He lavished care on the big revolver, but none on himself. Such was the manner of the gunfighting lawman—a reverence for the tool of his trade that not even madness could alter.

Finally Pace stirred. He talked to Jane for a while and asked her to kiss the baby for him.

“On her cheeks,” he said. “I always loved to kiss her chubby little cheeks.”

Then he turned and walked back toward town.

Suddenly he stopped in his tracks. He knew why Jane had said nothing to him—she was afraid to make a sound.

It was the same reason the people who’d fled the cholera had not yet returned to Requiem.

Outlaws! Damn them!

Pace stood in the middle of the street, his Colt in his hand. He couldn’t see the bad men, not yet, but they were here all right, lurking in the shadows, ready to rob the bank and hooraw the town.

Marshal Sam Pace’s town.

His face took on a determined look as he raised his gun to waist level, his thumb on the hammer. He’d show them. Teach them that Sam Pace was no bargain.

“I’m ready for you skunks,” he yelled. “Come the hell out and take your medicine like men.”

There! Slinking into the alley by the Oxford Hat Shoppe. The outlaw was crouched, ready to take aim at him.

Pace thumbed off a shot, then ran for the alley. He was just in time to see the man, a fleeting shadow crawling on his hands and knees, disappear around a corner.

There was a splash of blood in the sand, then a scarlet trail leading toward the rear into the alley. Well, that fatherless son of a bitch wouldn’t be back for another dose of Marshal Sam Pace anytime soon.

Pace angled across the street to the bank, wind and sand tearing at him. His face set and hard, his eyes reached into the darkness.

He saw movement—another damned outlaw crawling like a dog on all fours!—and fired. He was rewarded by the man’s yelp of pain and he fired again. This time the outlaw dropped and sprawled on the boardwalk.

“Got you,” Pace said. “That’ll teach you that you can’t rob banks and scare folks in my town.”

He thumbed back the hammer of his Colt and walked toward the dead man. He stepped onto the boardwalk, then stumbled as his boot crashed through a rotted timber. Pace fell to his left and his head struck something hard. Lightning flashed inside his skull, followed by blackness. He heard the fading sound of the roaring night . . . then nothing at all.