Margaret and the Cowboy, A Ghost Story
Late in the year of 1960, my husband and I purchased and moved into one of the oldest farmhouses near Alamogordo, New Mexico. It was nearly a hundred years old and at the western edge of town on a now unused road that had traveled past our farm on through to the White Sands, over the San Andres Mountains, on to Las Cruces and eventually to California. Pat Garret, Billy the Kid, Colonel Fountain, and an array of Apaches, Spaniards, Mexicans, heroes and villains had traversed the road behind our simple wooden, white, pitched-roof farmhouse. It was a quiet place, enclosed in elm trees, fat cotton woods, willows, several barns and a rickety arrangement of pens for sheep, chickens and turkeys. A small house, used for itinerant farm hands, stood catty-corner to our house. It was then occupied by our hand, Gregorio, his wife and their small child. Forty acres of furrowed fields lay south of the houses and were edged on the west by a stingy apple orchard, too old to produce m...