Ghost Towns. Martin H. Greenberg

shoot,” he snapped. “That hombre’s not attacking us.”

      It was true. The man was too scrawny to constitute a threat anyway, even if he had been hostile. As he loped forward and waved his sticklike arms over his head, his pitiful screeches became words that the two drifters could understand.

      “Are you real? Oh, dear Lord, are you really there? Please be real!”

      “Please be real?” Scratch muttered. “What in blazes does he think we are, ghosts or somethin’?”

      Bo glanced around at the abandoned, devastated settlement. “Good place for it, don’t you think?”

      Scratch couldn’t argue with that.

      The scarecrow man stumbled and fell to his knees as if the last of his strength had deserted him. He pawed at the dust of the street, then threw his head back and howled. “Oh, Lord, take me! Spare me from these tormenting phantasms!”

      “What’d he just call us?” Scratch asked with a frown.

      “I don’t think he’s talking about us,” Bo replied as he swung down from the saddle. He handed his reins to Scratch. “Here. Hang on to my horse while I see what I can do for the old-timer.”

      It was rare for the two of them to run into anybody they could call “old-timer.” This man, who appeared to be the sole inhabitant of Duster, fit the bill, though. He looked to be in his seventies, with long, tangled white hair and a ragged beard that reached down to his narrow chest. He was so skinny a good wind would blow him away. Filthy rags flapped around his emaciated form. Bo thought the duds had once been a brown tweed suit and a white shirt. The man wore no shoes or boots; his bare feet were scarred and callused.

      His eyes rolled like those of a locoed horse as Bo approached. “Take it easy, old-timer,” Bo said, speaking in a calm, quiet tone as he would have if he’d been trying to settle down such a horse. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. I don’t know what happened here, but my friend and I will help you.”

      Still on his knees, the man stared up at Bo and said, “Are you real?”

      “Real as can be,” Bo assured him.

      “You’re not…not like them?”

      “Like who?” Bo didn’t think anybody else was around here, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

      The man placed his hands over his face, the bony fingers with their knobby knuckles splayed out across his gaunt features. “Them,” he said with a shudder. “The ones who torment me.”

      “Who?” Bo asked again, as it suddenly occurred to him that the old man might be talking about some of those renegade Apaches who snuck across the border now and then. Apaches were known for being the most skillful torturers on the face of the earth.

      But they weren’t who the old man had in mind. As he lowered his hands he gazed up with the most fear-haunted eyes Bo had ever seen. “Them,” the old man croaked. “The children!”

      Then he pitched forward on his face, either in a dead faint—or just plain dead.

      With all the debris around, Scratch didn’t have any trouble finding enough scraps of dry wood to start a fire. He built a small one in the shade of a building that was still upright, a two-story structure with a sagging balcony along the front that had probably been a hotel or a saloon. Bo lifted the old man and carefully carried him into that same shade. The old-timer didn’t weigh much at all; his body was like a bundle of twigs inside his leathery hide.

      Scratch got some coffee brewing, using water from their canteens. Bo made sure the old man was still alive. He found a threadlike but fairly steady pulse in the hombre’s neck. He checked the man’s body but didn’t find any wounds.

      “Looks like he’s about starved to death,” Scratch observed.

      “Starved to death…and scared to death on top of it,” Bo said. “We’ll have to get him awake again so he can tell us what happened here.”

      “Whatever happened, it’s too late for us to do anything about it. And it ain’t really any of our business, either.”

      Bo just looked over at Scratch, who sighed and went on, “Yeah, I should’ve knowed better than to say that, shouldn’t I? You’d reckon after all this time I’d know you can’t abide a mystery, Bo Creel.”

      “Let’s just get a little food and coffee in him and see if it helps.”

      The old man roused enough to gulp at the coffee when Bo held a tin cup to his lips. He had let the strong black brew cool off some first so the old-timer wouldn’t scald himself. When the man had swallowed some of the coffee, Bo spooned beans into his mouth. The old-timer swallowed without even chewing.

      “Whoa there, mister,” Bo said. “Take it easy. I know you’re hungry, but you’re liable to make yourself sick if you keep that up.”

      The old man’s rheumy eyes flickered open. “Who…who are you?” he choked out. His voice was hoarse from the screaming he had done earlier.

      “My name’s Bo Creel. This is my partner, Scratch Morton.”

      Scratch tugged on the brim of his Stetson. “Howdy.”

      The old-timer looked back and forth between them. He was still a little wall-eyed. “Wh-what are you doing here?”

      “Just passing through,” Bo explained. “This is Duster, isn’t it?”

      The man’s head jerked in a nod, bobbing a little on the skinny neck.

      “We figured on buying some supplies here,” Bo went on. “We didn’t know that something had happened to the town.”

      “A deluge,” the old man muttered. “The rainbow was a promise from God that never again would the world be destroyed in a flood, but that night…that terrible night…I began to doubt the word of the Lord.”

      “Came a gully-washer and a toad-strangler, did it?” Scratch asked.

      The old-timer shuddered. “The heavens opened, and a torrent came upon the earth. When the ridge gave way, it was like a wall of water came roaring down on the town. An avalanche, only of liquid rather than stone. I saw it coming.” He lifted his hands and covered his face again. They muffled his voice as he went on, “I tried to get the children out of the orphanage, but it was too late. They fled to the upper floor, thinking it would be safer there, but then…then…”

      Frowning, Bo and Scratch glanced at each other. Bo leaned closer to the distraught old man and said, “That big brick building on the edge of town…it was an orphanage?”

      The man lowered his hands and nodded. “Yes. There were more than thirty children living there.” His voice was hollow with agonizing memories. “I…I was the director. George Ledbetter is my name. The Reverend George Ledbetter, although God has turned His back on me now, and rightfully so.”

      “You shouldn’t ought to feel like that,” Scratch said. “Ain’t no way one man can stop a flood.”

      “No, but I should have died in there with them,” Ledbetter rasped. “The older children hustled the little ones upstairs, trying to save them, but then…the flood washed out the foundation. The men who built it must not have used the proper materials…oh, dear Lord, the sound as the timbers began to creak and then snap, the rumble as the walls began to collapse…but even over those sounds, even over the terrible noise of wind and water, I could hear the screams from inside.”

      The old man began to shake and sob.

      Bo let him get some of it out, then said, “You must not have been in the building when the flood hit.”

      Ledbetter managed to nod. “I went out to make sure no one had been left outside and then couldn’t get back in. I thought the children would be safe on the second floor, that the water wouldn’t reach that high. I actually thought that I