GHOST TOWNS
Edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davis
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
Contents
Introduction by Russell Davis
The Water Indian
Steve Hockensmith
The Ghosts of Duster
William W. Johnstone, with J. A. Johnstone
St. Elmo in Winter
Margaret Coel
Mr. Kennedy’s Bones
Johnny D. Boggs
Gunfight at Los Muretos
Bill Brooks
Iron Mountain
Candy Moulton
The Defense of Sentinel
Louis L’Amour
Paradise Springs
Sandy Whiting
Silent Hill
Larry D. Sweazy
End of the Line
Lori Van Pelt
The Town That Wouldn’t Quit
Deborah Morgan
Now We Are Seven
Loren D. Estleman
Contention City, 1951
Jeff Mariotte
The Ghost of Two Forks
Elmer Kelton
Kiowa Canyon
James A. Fischer
About the Authors
About the Editors
Introduction
Russell Davis
My memory isn’t quite what it used to be, but I think the year was around 1977, perhaps 1978. My mother and father took me on a family vacation to Colorado and I have three very distinct memories from that particular journey. The first is of my father pushing my mother into the hotel swimming pool with all her clothes on. The second is of discovering mica—a type of sheet mineral that can slide apart in paper thin pieces and has the ability to cut like a razor. And the third…the third is of taking a Jeep tour of several ghost town sites.
The tour itself was pretty neat, but what made it truly memorable was how many things went wrong just as we were trying to reach that last ghost town. The “best one” the guide said. The Jeep broke down on a narrow, steep mountain track. It began to rain. And the rescue Jeep sent for us ran over the toes of my right foot. Nothing broken, but I suspect that was more luck (the road was soft, my feet were small) than it was anything else. We never did make it to the last ghost town. To the “best one.”
From my earliest exposure to the idea of ghost towns—especially western ghost towns—I’ve been hooked. As I’ve traveled throughout the West, I’ve visited many places that were once booming and are now empty places that often feel haunted to me. The idea for this anthology came from those visits and from suspecting—deep down, where I try not to look too often—that even places like Tombstone, Arizona, and Virginia City, Nevada, are haunted by the spirits of those people who lived (and died) there during those early days of westward expansion.
The invitation for the authors in this anthology was simple: write a story about a ghost town (real or fictional) and, if they so desired, the story could have elements of the supernatural. Most of them, to my surprise, decided to go with it and wrote tales of ghosts and other supernatural events. Being surprised is one of the great pleasures of putting together a project like this. And I don’t want to ruin the surprise for you, so I’ll let you travel these pages on your own, without too much forewarning of what you may find.
Some people say that the western is dying; I say it is changing and evolving, but still very much alive. In this book, you’ll find a story from Steve Hockensmith—who is best known for his western mystery series that began with Holmes on the Range, a tale from New York Times bestselling author Margaret Coel, and even a ghost story from Elmer Kelton, whose career has been a shining example of brilliance and originality in the western field. Most of the authors have won Spur Awards or Western Heritage Awards (or both); many have been on bestseller lists and have a great many readers who look forward to each new work with anticipation. It should come then, as no surprise to you, that the stories you are about to read are, as they say, “good ’uns.”
I believe that stories should be shared—some of these would make fine tales to be told around the campfire, preferably to young kids who’ve just tried to visit a ghost town and strange events kept them from ever seeing it. I believe that stories, especially stories about the West, are durable—like the men and women who first crossed into the frontier to discover that only the strong survive. And, finally, I believe that well-written stories take on a life of their own…that they leave the page and enter the imagination of the reader, almost like a ghost, whispering in the ear from the inside of the mind, rather than the outside.
As always, I suggest and hope that you share this anthology with your family and friends. Western literature in all its forms can and will survive, but only when the stories are shared, when they are durable, and when they take on a life of their own, reaching more people and, in particular, those who have yet to read a real western.
Some might say that because many of these tales contain an element of the fantastic, they aren’t real westerns. This is nonsense, of course. The American West is a place of the fantastic. It was tales of the fantastic and the unimaginable that drove people to reach out and attempt to tame the frontier. It was tales of the fantastic that led people on the search for gold, and tales of the fantastic that created so much fear about the native peoples of this land. And now, so many years after the first frontiersmen came here, the American West is still a place of the fantastic.
I know this to be true because I live here…and I’ve seen wild mustangs appear and disappear in the blink of an eye during the sunrise, walked the ruins of an abandoned mine and found the claim paper in an old coffee can tied to a post, and ventured through the graveyards that no one tends or even visits anymore, yet somehow the stones remain and the occasional bundle of flowers appears.
And so, I invite you to turn the pages and discover these stories and share them with anyone who might be willing to discover them too. Because, in the end, the Western story is about the fantastic, about discovery, and about places that still exist.
The West is not gone, nor even a ghost. It is still here, ghost towns and thriving places, working mines and abandoned claims, haunted saloons and taverns teeming with life. The West has changed in many ways, but if one looks—in the stories and in the places—the real American West remains and always will.
Northern Nevada, Autumn 2009
The Water Indian
Steve Hockensmith
Mr. William Brackwell
c/o The Sussex Land & Cattle Co.
Somerset House
London, England
Dear Mr. Brackwell:
I trust your journey back to Merry Old was a smooth one, and you met with fewer of the, shall we say, surprises that were so commonplace during your stay in Montana. (By “surprises,” of course,