Lifting the defiant, coughing hulk off his booted feet, the full force of the enraged wind raised him into the air and blew him backward. Watching from the hotel doorway, a terrified Barker thought he could hear among the screaming gale an inhuman howl not unlike that of triumph.
Flung into the air and backward, Malone was forced to a last desperate tack. Stretching out one massive arm, he managed to catch hold of the reins dangling from his mount’s bridle. As it took up the weight, Worthless’s head snapped forward. Responding to the pull, the horse issued a slight, irritated snort from his nostrils. Otherwise he did not react, neither did he move. All four pillarlike legs seemed as firmly rooted to the earth as the iron footings of Mr. Eiffel’s tower. Clutching the reins with one hand, the massive stretched-out form of Amos Malone whipped up and down above the ground like a flag over Montauk on the Fourth of July.
The frustrated, infuriated tempest tore at him, clawing at his body. But no matter how hard it blew, it could not dislodge his viselike grip on his mount’s reins. Neither could it so much as budge an indifferent Worthless from his casual stance. Bellowing wind continued to flow over and around a sprawling rump that was as solid and immobile as if it had been hewn from a block of Vermont granite.
Climbing horizontally into the wind, Malone pulled himself hand over hand toward his horse until he was once more able to stand on his own beside it. With his right fist gripping the pommel of the saddle, he steadied himself. Grim of mien, he was preparing to inhale and blow into the heart of the storm for yet a fourth time when the most peculiar expression crossed his face. His nose wrinkled up, his cheeks swelled, and his eyes began to water. His lower jaw dropped, rose, dropped again. As recognition dawned on the watching Barker, the hotel owner’s own expression contorted. Throwing himself away from the now-doorless entrance, he scrambled crablike on hands and knees in the direction of the heavy walnut counter.
“Move!” he screeched above the roar of the wind and the dangerously loud rattle of barely standing walls. “If you value your life and future, take cover, take cover!”
An unquestioning Doc Stanton hurried to follow, not forgetting to bring along his precious medical bag as he scurried across the floor in the hotel owner’s wake. Only a frowning Hearts Doland remained at the doorway, neither seeing nor understanding any rationale sufficient to inspire such panic and haste among his companions.
“Why?” he shouted at the rapidly retreating Barker. “What’s changed that necessitates…?”
He never finished his query. Or perhaps he did. It was impossible to tell, because his words and every other sound in the world were drowned out by the concussive force of Amos Malone’s sneeze.
The mountain man’s mind-boggling chuff erupted directly into the face of the onrushing wind and tore it to pieces. Stunned zephyrs whipped back and forth, too damaged to reconvene. Traumatized drafts wafted to and fro, seeking shelter of their own in crevices and alleyways until they too could dissipate privately into nothingness. Shattered, shaken, and shafted, the ghosts of winds past that had arrived in search of satisfaction and destruction vanished, elementally and totally banished to the realm of the Aeolian memories that had given them birth.
When he could hear again, when he could think again, a trembling Bales Barker rose to his feet from where he had taken shelter behind the hotel counter. Slightly steadier on his feet, a shaken Doc Stanton rose beside him. Together the two men stumbled slowly to the entrance of the building and peered tentatively outside.
Every window in every building in town was gone, blown in. Rolled up like balls of string, the carefully laid wooden slat sidewalks had all piled up like so many giant tumbleweeds in front of Mordecai Smith’s Stable and Smithy at the far end of town. All the hitching posts were gone, as were the watering troughs. But the rest of the town appeared to have survived more or less intact.
Of Hearts Doland there was no sign. Having failed at the last to heed the hotel owner’s warning, he had played a final gamble and lost.
Staggering outside, Barker was at once astonished and relieved to see that save for the loss of every window and a considerable quantity of decorative architectural bric-a-brac, the bulk of his establishment remained intact. All up and down the street, shaken citizens were emerging in ones and twos to take stock of their own establishments. In keeping with the general inexplicableness of the shocking occurrence, the church steeple was intact but the heavy iron bell that had come all the way from New England was missing, borne away as lightly as a leaf on an intruding breeze.
It was not many minutes thereafter that the two men encountered a face they did not recognize. This surprised them, as while sizable for one of its type, the population of the town was not so vast as to preclude knowledge of all its citizenry by each and every responsible inhabitant.
“That were something, weren’t it?” Barker inquired conversationally of the unknown gentleman. “Never seen a wind like that. Never hope to again.”
From the back of his horse, the man frowned. “What wind?”
The hotel owner and the doctor exchanged a look. “What do you mean, ‘what wind?’ sir? Can it be possible that someone was too soundly abed to have not been rudely jostled awake by the recent local apocalypse?”
The rider made a face. “Damned if I know what you two are on about. Are you daft? Been peaceable calm hereabouts nigh on a week now.”
Stanton stepped forward. “Sir, I account myself a physician of some competence. Enough to know when I am awake and when I am drowsing in the grip of a dream. Setting even that knowledge aside, I and my friend can declare with the same certainty as should you that at this time of year this part of Colorado is never ‘peaceable calm.’”
The other man drew back. “Now I know you two are daft.” He looked around, squinting. “Or maybe you’re right and I am too. Been through this part of Nebraska a dozen times before and never come upon this community. Don’t know how I could’ve missed it.”
With that he chucked the reins he was holding and, patently unsettled, continued on down the street. Barker and Stanton looked at each other. Of one mind, they commenced to search for a certain exceptionally large recent resident of the hotel owner’s establishment in the hopes that worthy might could shed some light, or perhaps fresh air, on the unexpected conundrum with which they had suddenly been presented. Regrettably, they never again encountered him or his mount.
Both giant horse and giant rider were gone. Gone with the ghost wind.
Claim Blame
As I’ve said, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, I like better than to pull together seemingly disparate elements into a cohesive story. For example: Mad Amos Malone, the California gold rush, a couple of tough Irish miners, Scandinavian gold-mining immigrants, and a real place and name. Oh yes, and a certain city in a distant state famed for its own gold discovery.
What made this tale so much fun to write was the collision of two different immigrant cultures, Scandinavian and Irish, with Malone acting, for a change, as not the protagonist but the intermediary. Settling conflicting miners’ claims was a full-time job for some authorities during the gold rush. Who better to utilize his skills to prevent open warfare between such groups than Amos Malone?
Aside from the irritable Scandinavians and Amos himself, everyone else in the story is real and everything really did happen this way. There’s just no mention of the, um, Scandinavians in the history books.