The Ghost of Trouble Creek

In 1876, ROY T. BRODIE, 35, is released from a Texas prison. A former lawman turned bank robber (one heist, in which he didn’t fire a shot), Roy got religion while serving a five-year sentence. But that doesn’t mean he’s completely “a new creature” (to quote the Bible). He still has the buried bank loot (the law thinks his accomplices, all now violently deceased, got away with it). And when he sees a sexual opportunity with a certain lady soon after his release, he looks up the Apostle Paul’s commandment in the Bible to “flee fornication.” He asks a reverend if that means don’t do it at all or just don’t overdo it. Roy is now on his way to where the Lord, he says, is leading him: the Dakota gold rush. (“If the Lord wants me to strike it rich,” he says, “I can’t let nothing stop me.”) He digs up the bank robbery money to take with him. But on the stormy night that he passes through Trouble Creek, Texas, he fleetingly sees, during a lightning flash, a man’s face in the dark window of the closed jailhouse. He later learns from a picture that it was the face of the late LESTER DEES, 45, the Trouble Creek sheriff. Dees was shot to death in the jailhouse by an unknown assailant. His deputy was a suspect because Dees was rumored to be having an affair with the deputy’s wife. Protesting his innocence, the deputy was lynched by a group of masked men, leaving the town in need of some law and order. Taking the jailhouse apparition as a divine call to seek justice, both for Dees and his deputy, Roy agrees with the mayor to be the town’s new sheriff temporarily. Roy learns from the local PARSON that Dees, though a reprobate most of his life, got right with the Lord not long before his death. Scary occurrences convince Roy that the jailhouse is now haunted by Dees’s ghost. For one thing, Roy finds that a 6 x 8 framed picture of Dees on the jailhouse wall keeps being turned around to face the wall. He leaves it that way since it must serve some ghostly purpose. One night the corrupt SALOON OWNER (whose henchmen conveniently lynched Dees’s deputy) tries to have this nosy new sheriff assassinated. Trying to make an arrest, Roy wipes out the owner and his gang in a spectacular saloon gunfight. But they are thereby eliminated as suspects in Dees’s murder as the jailhouse haunting continues. Other suspects include the widow MRS. DEES and the late deputy’s wife SADIE, each accusing the other of being the jealous killer. The two women have a catfight that wrecks the town’s general store. Roy questions them in the jailhouse, then sends them to pay for the store damage. And he discovers, after the two women leave, that Dees’s picture on the wall had been turned to face out. But turned to face/incriminate which lady? That night, with the MAYOR as a witness, Roy zeroes in on Sadie, interrogating her. Then all three of them see it as the picture, which had been strategically hung backwards again by Roy, is turned by Dees’s ghostly hand to face the guilty Sadie. Spooked enough by that, Sadie totally loses it when Dees’s disembodied footsteps are heard walking out the door, as if the ghost has been avenged. She tearfully confesses to killing Dees in a crime of passion, having felt she was losing him (a reprobate almost to the end) to another lady. (As for her lynched husband, Sadie says “he wasn’t that much of a loss.”) Having solved Dees’s murder, Roy resumes his journey to the Dakota gold rush. But just as the reprobate Dees had died a repentant, Roy had begun to feel guilty about keeping that bank loot from five years ago. Having served the time, Roy drops off the money at the bank he had helped to rob. He confides to the banker that returning the money is the hardest thing he’s ever done, but he goes on to Dakota as a better man.