“Aren’t you happy for me, Pilar?”
The older woman blinked, then let out a long, silent breath. “Senorita, has Juan discussed this with your grandfather?” She dropped her arms to her broad, round sides. “Have you discussed this with your grandfather?”
“Why should I?” Karla said, unable to keep the defensiveness out of her voice. “It’s our decision. We will make our own plans!”
When Pilar said nothing, Karla turned to her, her smooth-cheeked, heart-shaped face flushed with beseeching. “Surely if we love each other, there will be no trouble. Isn’t that right, Pilar?”
The older woman dropped her eyes demurely and let her gaze stray across the official papers and cloth-bound account books littering the huge desk before her. She said gently, “It is a different world here than the one you are used to back east, mi amor. In the East, I think things must be libre como un pajaro.” She looked around the room searchingly. “How do you say? Looser. Here, the old traditions . . . they are still followed. Especially by men such as your abuelo, Don Vannorsdell.”
“But—”
“Karla!” The burly voice rose beyond the office, on the heels of a door slam.
She turned to the door as boots clacked on the flagstones in another part of the house.
“Karla, are you here?” her grandfather’s voice boomed in the cavernous dwelling.
Karla glanced at Pilar once more, reluctant to end the conversation, then lifted her chin to the broad, open entrance to the hall. “In your office, Grandpa!”
The pounding had grown quieter as the man bent his old legs for the kitchen. It grew louder now as he approached the office. Paul Vannorsdell’s stocky figure appeared in the dim doorway, a craggy, florid face under a flat-brimmed leather hat, the brim of which looked mouse-chewed.
He peered into the room. “What on earth are you two doing in here?”
“We are cleaning your office, senor,” Pilar hurried to explain, raising her feather duster as if for evidence.
“We are cleaning and discussing the womanly aspects of love,” Karla said, good-naturedly jibing the old man.
When she’d first come to the Arizona Territory from Philadelphia, after her parents had been killed in a train collision, she’d found her grandfather, whom she’d never met, to be every bit the irascible old hermit her mother had once told her he was. In the two years since, however, Karla had probed the chinks in his armor, and had even gotten him to laugh a time or two.
At the moment, however, that armor was solid. The gray-brown eyes did not smile. The carefully trimmed gray-brown mustache capping his thin upper lip did not so much as twitch. Vannorsdell’s shoulders seemed to pull together for a moment, tensing. His craggy face flushed slightly, and then, visibly suppressing an angry impulse, he crouched and forced a cunning smile into his eyes as he beckoned to Karla. “Come on, daughter. I have something to show you outside.”
Reluctant to snap away from the passion of the previous conversation, Karla frowned. “Outside?”
“Hurry!”
A moment later they were descending the broad fieldstone porch steps—the stocky old Dutchman in baggy trousers and a doeskin vest, the young brunette in green jeans and plaid flannel shirt, her hair pulled back in a pony tail and secured with a turquoise-studded barrette. Her jeans stretched taut across her rounded hips and thighs. She wore a horsehair belt, which she’d braided herself, and high-heeled brown boots with red stars tanned into the pointed toes.
They crossed the hard-packed ranch yard surrounded by adobe-brick outbuildings, to one of several peeled-log corrals east of the L-shaped bunkhouse. The west-angling sun softened the light and the pulsing heat, tinging the adobes with pink and conjuring brown shadows.
Several of Vannorsdell’s sweaty, dusty drovers stood near the corral, smoking and talking. Hearing the screen door slap shut, they turned to Karla and her grandfather, shaping whiskery grins around their brown paper cigarettes.
Inside the corral stood the rancher’s number two man, Dallas Tixier, holding the head stall of a fine white Arabian. The horse shook its small, elegant head and lowered its broad snout, peering at the group with wary curiosity. Its high-set tail swished once, and its copper eyes reflected the pink hues of the adobes. Beside the animal, Tixier grinned, squinting his blue eyes and flashing a gold eyetooth under his black sombrero.
Placing her hands on the corral’s top rail, Karla whistled. “Who belongs to that fine animal?”
The old man quirked a grin. “You do.”
Karla’s mouth fell open but she didn’t say anything.
Vannorsdell announced proudly, “Born in Arabia, that fine animal was. A prince from one o’ them fine desert castles raised him from the best bloodstock anywhere in the world. I bought him from a rancher near Soledad.”
Karla studied the old man, skeptically. The drovers flanked him. They said nothing as they smiled at Karla. “He’s . . . for me?”
“Sure he is.” Vannorsdell glanced conspiratorially at the men behind him, winked, and turned back to his granddaughter.
Karla looked at the fine Arab, which shook its head impatiently and snorted. It wasn’t her birthday or either of her dead parents’ birthdays or any other special day that she could remember. Finding no discernible reason for the present from a man who rarely gave presents of any kind, much less Arabian horses, she turned back to her grandfather, frowning. “But why?”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” The old man laughed. The men behind him chuckled. Vannorsdell jerked his head at the Arabian. “Go get acquainted, girl!”
Karla studied the horse again. She couldn’t help feeling she was being led into a trap of some kind. She felt guilty for such a notion. In the two years she’d known him, she’d gradually grown to, if not love, at least respect her grandfather. But it had been a hard-won respect, a regard that the old frontierman’s ill temper and narrow-mindedness frequently poked and prodded and sometimes even strained to the breaking point.
“What’re you waitin’ for?” the old man urged, his voice climbing high.
Karla glanced at him, shrugged, hitched up her jeans with both hands, and crouched through the fence. She crossed the corral and held out her hand to the horse. The Arabian’s round eyes appeared as wary as hers.
Keeping its cream tail high, it backed a step, and Tixier, holding the halter rope taut in his gloved right hand, said, “Ho now.” The horse lifted its snout, glared down at Karla, and twitched its nose.
“Easy, boy,” Karla said gently, lifting her hand to its snout. “Easy, now. There . . .”
She turned to her grandfather, who was staring over the corral at her, with the dusty drovers lined out to his left. Still half expecting the ground to open beneath her feet, Karla raised brows bleached by the desert sun. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Senorita,” said Dallas Tixier, shaping a grin as he peered at her from under the horse’s cocked head, “I think your eyes say it all.”
Karla looked the horse over, ran an appreciative hand over its shivering withers. “How old is he?”
“Three,” Tixier said. “A fine, fine animal.”
“He’s saddle-broke,” Vannorsdell called to her. “A good rider. Calm, too, for an Arab. I told Tixier to find me a good, calm horse that won’t turn twister at rattlesnakes or prairie dogs . . . since you ride all over creation,” he added with a disapproving tone.
Karla’s frequent riding of the greenest broncs in her grandfather’s remuda had been a bone of contention between them. Vannorsdell didn’t think a young woman should ride anything but old mares with a sidesaddle, much less wear men’s denims, boots, and a pistol on her hip. And she shouldn’t ride every day. As headstrong as the old man, Karla had won that battle, but she helped Pilar cook and clean, as well.
Tixier offered the halter rope to Karla. “There is some light left, senorita. Why don’t you take him for a ride around the buildings? Shall I get a saddle . . . ?”
“Why not?”
Karla said, running a hand down the gelding’s smooth, arched neck, across the well-defined withers. Her shoulders loosened. So the horse really was hers. It wasn’t a joke or a trick of some kind. And what a magnificent beast he was, too.
She turned a genuine smile to her grandfather. “Thank you, Grandpa,” she said. “He must have been awfully expensive.”
Vannorsdell flicked a dismissive hand.
Cantering hooves sounded on the trail east of the ranch yard. Karla turned her gaze that way, where the low sun cast long, sharp-edged shadows along the ground. A rider on a sleek pinto moved up the hill toward the ranch headquarters, his low-crowned sombrero bobbing above the dense chaparral sheathing the wagon trail. As the rider approached, Karla saw the red bandanna flopping around the man’s neck, the gray flannel shirt, brown vest, blue charros with gold stitching down the outside of the legs, the red sash around his waist.
“Juan,” she said, her full lips spreading a smile.
She released the halter rope and crawled through the fence. As she made her way across the yard, toward the entrance portal into which the Vannorsdell name and the Bar-V brand had been burned, her grandfather barked, “Better wash for supper, boys.”
As the men dispersed, spurs softly chinging as they headed for the bunkhouse, Karla stood by the portal, smiling as she watched the approaching rider appear around a bend in the trail, and pass through the headquarters’ open gate. Silhouetted against the painted western sky, the rider halted the pinto before her, his face shaded by his broad-brimmed hat.
“Well, well, well,” she greeted, jamming her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, shifting her weight coquettishly, “what brings you here in the middle of the week, Senor Juan? Don Renaldo give you your walking papers?”
“Hello, Karla,” the young man said, looking down at her but lifting his eyes to regard someone behind her.
She glanced over her right shoulder. Her grandfather stood before the corral, chest out, shoulders back, looking toward her. Vannorsdell cleared his throat, turned, and bent his old legs for the ranch house.
She turned again to Juan, who sat his saddle with a tense set to his shoulders. His handsomely chiseled, clean-shaven face was framed by his hat thong and by the long dark curls spilling down from his hat.
When he said nothing, just looked at her with troubled eyes, she said, “Would you like to come inside?”
“I cannot stay long.”
Karla studied him, rocked back on her heels, and swept a strand of hair from her face. “Is something wrong?”
Again, the young vaquero looked behind her. She turned another look over her shoulder. Her grandfather stood on the house’s wide veranda, looking toward her and smoking a long, thin cigar.
She turned back to Juan, her eyes wide with confusion. She opened her mouth to speak, but Juan cut her off. “Karla, I came here to tell you good-bye.”
“Good-bye!” she repeated. It was as if he’d slapped her across the face.
“I am leaving the Territory. Going back to Mejico.”
Only two days ago, they’d picnicked along Antelope Creek, flirting and joking . . . and planning their future together.
Haltingly, trying to absorb his words, she said, “Juan, I thought ...”
“I see now that it would not work, mi amore. I am a Mejicano. A bean eater.” He glanced at the house again. “You are a Norteamericano. You must marry a fair-haired gringo.” He cuffed his hat off his head, revealing a full head of sweaty dark brown hair.
Her heart thudding, Karla stepped up to his horse, placed a hand on his knee. “Juan, it will work—if we love each other.”
He shook his head and looked off. When he turned back to her, his lower lip trembled. He bit down on it. “You’re new to this country. This is the way it works here. I wanted to stop and tell you good-bye so you wouldn’t wonder what happened when you didn’t see me again.”
Karla felt as though a large bone were lodged in her throat, and her eyes burned. Her voice trembled as she spoke. “It’s my grandfather, isn’t it? He told you not see me anymore.”
“Don’t be mad at him, Karla. He’s right. If we got married, what would we do? Where would we live?”
“Here!” Karla cried. “You’ll work here—for my grandfather.”
The vaquero laughed without mirth and, squeezing her hand in his, leaned down and gazed lovingly, apologetically into her eyes. “I love you, Karla. But vaqueros don’t marry gringas.” He reined the horse around and galloped out through the gate, his gold-brown dust powdering the mesquite and creosote behind him.
Karla stood for a long time, listening to the fading thuds. Anger burned within her, and she wasn’t sure who she was angrier at: Juan or her grandfather. Tears rolling down her cheeks, she wheeled and strode stiffly toward the house.
She found her grandfather in his study, smoking in his chair behind his desk. His hat was off; his silver hair had taken its shape.
Karla stopped just within the door, took a deep breath. Her voice was even and hard. “You ran him off. You told him not to see me again.”
Vannorsdell regarded her sympathetically, the cigar smoldering between the index and middle fingers of his right hand. “Karla,” he said with a reasonable hunch of his shoulders, “he’s a Mex.”
Karla stared at him, felt the pressure building, feeling more hatred for her grandfather than she’d ever felt for another living thing. “Bastard!” she screamed.
She turned and—her smooth suntanned cheeks mottled red—ran from the room.
Chapter 3
Tom Navarro’s spry paint followed the meandering desert trace through a notch in the hills, around a long bend hugging a dry wash on the left, and into a shallow canyon. Scrub pines and mesquite stippled the boulder-strewn slopes on both sides. Behind Navarro, the wagon rattled and drummed, the beer and wine casks sloshing near the tailgate.
Amado, Waters, and Tryon rode behind the lumbering Conestoga, slouched in their saddles, faces dimming beneath their hat brims as the sun sank low.
The supply trip to town was normally a much-coveted assignment—especially when the fun-loving Tixier led the crew. It wasn’t as much fun when Navarro led. The silver-haired frontiersman and exgunslinger ran a tight ship, allowing the men to stay in town only two nights and never past midnight either night. And they could cavort only with the doves Navarro deemed acceptable—namely, those who would not put a man on his back with a burning case of the pony drip. Men with the drip couldn’t ride or do much of anything but lay abed and howl.
And howling, as Navarro said, “ain’t what the boss is payin’ us for.”
Navarro halted the paint and dismounted to remove a windblown branch from the trail. As he grabbed the horn to mount again, he froze and lifted his head to the slope rising on the right side of the trace. Holding his breath, he pricked his ears.
He’d turned fifty that March but he still had the ears of a coyote, and he’d heard something just now. Wasn’t sure what but it didn’t sound natural. There wasn’t a lick of wind. The birds were oddly silent for this time of the day. It had cooled some, and the birds usually fed and fought and called reminders of their boundary lines from early dusk to good dark.
Hearing nothing else, Navarro swung up into the saddle. The wagon hammered along behind, slowing as it approached Tom. Tryon must have seen the cautious set to Navarro’s shoulders.
“What is it, boss?”
“I don’t know.” Navarro glanced around. It was getting late for an Apache attack. The desert Indians wouldn’t normally fight at night, for they worried that, if they were killed after dark, their souls would get lost on their way to the next world. “Stay alert. I’m gonna ride up the southern slope and take a look around. Keep moving. I’ll catch up to you in a bit.”
Tom swung his horse forward and gigged it down the twisting canyon trail. After fifty yards, he turned the horse left off the main trail and followed a narrow game trail, spotted with deer and rabbit scat, high onto a pine-clad m
ountain shoulder. He rode up and over the shoulder and into another canyon.
Soft thuds rose from below. He glanced into the canyon. Several blacktail deer, led by a spike buck, clattered up the opposite slope, their white rears and knobby black tails bobbing as they scattered into the mesquite and pinions and disappeared over a rocky knob.
Navarro gazed after the deer and fingered the horn handle of his .44. Could be Apaches that spooked them. Possibly a bear. Navarro had killed a grizzly out here late last fall, after the grizzly had butchered several head of Bar-V beef. Or maybe they’d heard Tom’s own hoof falls. It was damn quiet out here tonight, with no birds singing, no coyotes howling the sun down.
Navarro was rounding a thumb of cracked andesite when, up the slope on his right, beyond a boulder snag, a horse blew. Navarro reined his paint to an abrupt halt and shucked the Winchester repeater from the saddle boot beneath his right thigh. Holding his reins in his gloved left hand, he cocked the rifle with his right and snugged the brass butt plate against his hip.
He sensed more than heard the bullet slicing the air to his left. Throwing his chest flat against the paint’s neck, he heard the bullet buzz over his right shoulder a split second after the rifle’s crack rose from downslope.
He reined the horse left and, staying low, swung his rifle toward the downslope side of the hill, where two men crouched in the rocks and shrubs. Navarro fired the Winchester. One-handed, he jacked another shell and fired another round.
His first round barked off a rock. His second took one bushwacker—a short hombre in a dirty plaid shirt and a straw sombrero—through the high right side of his chest. He only saw the man begin to fly backward down the slope when the second man fired. The bullet smashed into the paint’s chest with a cracking thump. As Navarro shook loose of the stirrups, the horse reared, twisting and falling as it screamed.
Navarro hit the ground on his right shoulder, dug his boots into the gravel, and flung himself forward and out of the falling horse’s path. The second bushwacker fired again, the flames stabbing from the end of the barrel, the bullet smacking a slender nub of rock two feet before Navarro’s face.
Navarro Page 2
