The Ghost Moths by Harry Farthing

Author:Harry Farthing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2020-11-30T23:08:15+00:00

25

LAND OF BLACK SNOW

Red Cliff, Eagle County, Colorado, United States of America

November 1958

The floorboards of the small house in Red Cliff always used to creak however lightly he trod, but that early morning, they prompted no change to his grandmother’s faint snoring as he tiptoed to the frosted window. Even in the dark he could see outside that it had snowed—and, by the look of it, all night.

The young Christopher Anderson quickly shouldered his satchel, squeezed his hands into gloves, and pulled a gray wool cap over his curly blond hair. Taking down his precious Remington .22 from beneath his long dead grandfather’s cane fishing rods, he glanced at the television screen set in its wood cabinet on the other side of the room. “I’ll be going now,” he whispered to the shadow of Clint Walker in the gray screen.

“You be careful out there, son. Back by high noon.”

“Not if the Indians get me.”

“There haven’t been any Indians round here for seventy years, boy,” came the imagined reply—but this time in his father’s voice. “You read too many damn cowboy books, watch too many Westerns on that television.”

Outside, the town was still, no one about. Dawn was beginning to lighten the heavy load of cloud that stuffed the sky and bring definition to the ghostly crags and skeletal aspens that lined the steep slopes below. Holding his rifle across his front as if on patrol, the boy quickly left the town behind, his only companions the metallic rattle of the too-fast-to-freeze Eagle River, the black telegraph poles that stood guard over the Union Pacific rail line like silent crows, and the Ute warriors of his imagination that were silently working their way up the valley toward him.

The boy let that fantasy drop when he reached the old metal gate that blocked the road. Always closed with a rusty chain and padlock, that morning it bore a new enameled sign bearded with icicles. Under the red skull and crossbones, black stenciled letters read:

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