Navarro

by Ralph Compton

“You don’t have to cook for me, girl. I work for you, remember?”

  Karla took the basin off the table and dumped it in the backyard. Navarro was eating the food she’d prepared while hearing the pump squawk as she ran water over the basin. When she came back in, she returned the basin to the table and took two water glasses from the cupboard. She set them on the table, slumped back down across from him, and poured two fingers of whiskey into each.

  “You’re drinkin’?” he said, raising his eyebrows as he picked up one of the glasses.

  “I learned it from you, remember?” She smiled, knocked her glass against his, and took a sip. She smacked her lips and sighed. “Just like you taught me how to ride, how to track, and how to shoot—you taught me how to drink.”

  “That was beer.”

  “Grandfather doesn’t have any beer around the house. Just rye whiskey, and cognac and port for visitors.”

  “Christ.” Navarro threw back half his whiskey, set the glass on the table, and cut off a chunk of venison with his fork. “You’re gonna get me fired.”

  She sipped her whiskey, leaned forward on her elbows, and propped her drawn face in her right hand. “We’ve talked a lot about horses and shooting and such, but you’ve never told me if you’ve ever been in love before.”

  Navarro chewed, swallowed, and indicated her glass with his fork. “That’s the whiskey talkin’.”

  “Have you?”

  He paused, a fork of tomato and meat halfway to his mouth. He stared at the food for two seconds, then shoveled it into his mouth. Chewing, he nodded. “Christ, I’m fifty years old. Of course I’ve been in love, a time or two.”

  “What happened?”

  “First woman died durin’ the War, while I was off fightin’ it. The second . . .” He paused again, wiped a hand on his jeans, took a sip of the whiskey, and set the glass down. He forked the last bit of meat, frowning, his heavy brow ridged. “The second . . . well, I should’ve known better.” He jabbed the meat into his mouth and chewed.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “What?”

  “I sense drama. A little Shakespearean tragedy in the life of Taos Tommy Navarro?”

  Avoiding her eyes, Tom ate a cracker soaked in tomato juice and shook his head. “Just the common old tragedy visited on every one of us, we live long enough.”

  She splashed more whiskey into his glass, then into hers. Her voice thickened a little, and she pooched her lips out. “Come on, Tommy, tell me. I’m heartbroke.”

  Navarro tossed the fork onto his empty plate, leaned back in his chair, cleared his throat, and probed his teeth with his tongue. “She was the widow of the second man I killed—outside of the War, that was.”

  “Gosh,” Karla said. “Go on.”

  “The man was town marshal of Pueblo, in the Colorado Territory. He was planning to kill a friend of mine in cold blood. I shot him in a fair fight. In his pockets, I found a picture of a pretty, innocent-eyed girl. I paid her a visit, to explain my side of it.”

  “And you fell in love?”

  Navarro nodded.

  “What happened?”

  “We were together for a couple months when her dead husband’s brother, the marshal’s deputy, got wind of who I was. He pulled a gun on me, in a Denver eatery. Cordelia got between us, took a bullet in the neck. She died in my arms.”

  Karla ran a slender index finger around the rim of her glass as she studied it. “What a romantic tragedy.”

  Navarro lowered his head and ran a rough hand over his damp hair. “Not so romantic. Just a tragedy.”

  “And the deputy?”

  “Killed him on the spot. It was self-defense, but that doesn’t matter when you kill a lawman. So I ran out. Left her there. Never been back to Colorado.”

  “There wasn’t anything you could have done.” He sat stiffly, hands on his thighs, staring at the table. Finally, he grabbed his glass, threw the whiskey back, and stood. “I’ve had a hard day, and I’m goin’ to bed.”

  “Oh, please, Tommy. Don’t kick me out. I don’t want to go back to the house tonight. I don’t want to be alone!”

  “You can’t stay here.” He picked up his plate and tossed it into the wreck pan on the range.

  “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

  Navarro turned to her, drawing his mouth wide to speak. She gazed up at him with such heartbreak and beseeching that he let the objection die in his throat.

  He sighed. “All right. You can have the cot. I’ll sleep in the hammock.” He pointed an authoritative finger at her. “But you’re out of here at sunrise. This ain’t proper, and if the old man finds out, he’ll likely have me tarred and feathered and run out of the country!”

  Tarred and feathered, hell. Men were strung up for lesser offenses than sharing sleeping quarters with young women. He’d get her up at first cock crow, send her back to the house. She’d have calmed down by then.

  Later, after he’d been lying in the hammock for an hour, unable to sleep and thinking about Cordelia, he heard a click. He reached for the gun beneath his pillow, but stopped. The click came from the door, which opened slowly. Karla stepped out.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “Can’t sleep.” Before he knew what she was doing, she’d rolled over him and, distributing her weight evenly, snuggled up against his shoulder.

  “Hey, what in the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m lonely and I want to sleep on your shoulder.”

  Navarro didn’t say anything. He lay there awkwardly, wrapping one arm around her shoulders because he didn’t know what else to do with it. His muscles tensed. She didn’t say anything, either, but her chest rose and fell as she breathed. Her shoulders quivered, and he felt a wetness on his chest, where her face lay against it. She sniffed back tears.

  “I’m sorry, Karla.”

  “I’m going to ride out and find him tomorrow. I’m going to bring him back and I’m going to tell my grandfather that if he doesn’t let us marry, I’m leaving.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “Anywhere Juan wants to go.”

  “Juan’s a vaquero. He rides from job to job, just like the rest of us saddle tramps.”

  “He’s not just a saddle tramp. He writes poetry.”

  Navarro sighed.

  They lay there for a long time. Finally, she quit crying and rested her head against his cheek. He felt the brush of her eyelashes against his face as she blinked. Her breath was a faint rasp through her parted lips. Her breasts pushed against his side. Smelling the lilac water she’d washed with, the faint pumpkin aroma of her hair, he ran his hand down her back, feeling the womanly curve of her.

  A discomfiting warmth rose within him.

  “I can’t sleep all shut in like this,” he grumbled, dropping his right foot to the floor.

  As he slid out from beneath her, she said, “Where you going?”

  “Inside. And you’re going home.”

  “Tommy . . .”

  “You heard me.” His voice was stern. “Git!”

  She sat up and looked at him defiantly. “I won’t ever go back there.”

  “You don’t have anywhere else to go. Now git!”

  She struggled to her feet, wrapped her blanket around her shoulders, and stalked off the porch in a huff. “You’re a bastard, Tommy!”

  “Yes, I am.” With that, he went into the cabin and slammed the door behind him.

  It took him another hour to fall asleep. He didn’t know how much time had passed before boots thumped on the porch. Someone pounded on the door.

  “Tommy!” Dallas Tixier called.

  Navarro lifted his head from the pillow, groggily glanced around the shack. Golden light poured through the sashed windows, winking off the bottle and empty glasses on the table. For the first time in years, he’d slept past dawn.

  “What is it?” Navarro growled.

  “It’s the senorita,” Tixier said. He threw open the door and peered in, his bushy black brows knit beneath the
brim of his high-peaked sombrero. “She’s flown the coop.”

  Chapter 5

  Navarro and five other riders were mounted and waiting before the big house. The sun hadn’t yet climbed above the horizon, and the clear sky above the ranch was lighter than the land. The smell of mesquite smoke still peppered the fresh air.

  After Pilar had discovered Karla’s empty bed, she’d awakened the old man. Still in his pajamas and slippers, he’d ordered the hands, just rising in the bunkhouse, to scour the grounds. When they’d found no sign of the girl, and had discovered the Arabian gone, Tixier had fetched Navarro.

  The house’s stout oak door opened and Vannorsdell walked out, tucking his shirt into his baggy riding denims. “I can’t believe she’d pull such a stupid stunt,” the old rancher said, as Jorge Amado handed him the reins of a black quarterhorse gelding, saddled and waiting. The rancher grunted and wheezed as he climbed into the saddle. He turned to Navarro, who wore a white cotton shirt with blue pinstripes, suspenders, and bull-hide chaps over blue denims. “Doesn’t look like she slept in her bed at all last night. What in the hell do you think she’s up to?”

  “Looks to me like she went after her Don Juan.”

  “Do you think she’s really that goddamn crazy in love with that bean eater?”

  Navarro shrugged. “You know Karla.”

  “If that crazy girl started out when she told Pilar she was going to bed, she’s a good seven, eight hours ahead of us.”

  “I tracked her from the corral to where she left the main ranch trail, heading south. With any luck we’ll ride out a few miles and run into her, heading back.”

  “And when we do, I’m gonna tan her hide,” Vannorsdell said, gigging the black across the yard and riding abreast of Tom. The other hands fell in behind. The old man grumbled, “Worrying me like this, pulling me away from my work . . . I have a meeting up at the Circle M later this morning.”

  When they’d trotted through the main gate, Navarro, the best tracker of the bunch, galloped out ahead of the pack, Vannorsdell staying about twenty yards behind. The stocky old man was an awkward rider. Although he prided himself on his abilities, he rode like he was riding a pinwheeler, as though he were always about to chin the moon, his bolo tie whipping over a shoulder, one arm flopping back like a broken wing. He never had fallen, however—at least, not when Navarro was around. Together they’d ridden every swale and ridge line on the old Dutchman’s sixteen-thousand acres.

  The girl’s trail wasn’t hard to trace, following, as it did, the old horse trail leading straight south through a notch in the Alder Bluffs, then angling west along Copper Creek. Navarro rode with his jaws set. Just like a girl to do something this impulsive and downright dangerous.

  Karla had ridden with Navarro out this way several times, and she knew the country, but this was a godforsaken place, where danger lurked under every rock and cactus. Even seasoned drovers wouldn’t drift out here alone. If the heat, falling rock, mountain lions, and diamondbacks didn’t get you, the Apaches would. And horses, even Arabians, were known to tumble down ravines.

  And then there were the diabolical sun and lack of water. . . .

  Damn fool girl.

  What made Navarro even angrier was the guilt he felt at turning her out last night. If he’d let her stay at his place until she’d settled down, she might not have pulled such a plug-headed stunt in the first place. . . .

  Also, he was afraid. At the moment, he wanted to tan her hide as badly as her grandfather did, but Navarro and Karla had developed a special bond over the past three years. He’d never fully realized it before, but getting close to her, hunting and riding together, he’d sort of gotten an inkling of what it must have been like to have a daughter.

  This riding after her lost love gave him another inkling, and soured the first one more than a tad.

  “Damn,” he said, after they’d ridden an hour. He was at the top of a rocky knoll, looking around.

  The other men had halted below to loosen their saddle cinches and give their mounts a blow. Vannorsdell was squinting up at Navarro. “What is it, Tom?”

  Navarro reined his piebald down the other side of the knoll. Ten minutes later, he appeared again at the top of the knoll. “I found the trail. Mount up.”

  They’d ridden for another hour and forty-five minutes through a rocky draw, with saguaros and barrel cactus on both steep slopes, when Navarro leaned out from his saddle and frowned down at the trail. “I’ll be a . . .” he muttered.

  Vannorsdell was riding behind him, beside beefy Rob Miller, who had only one ear, the Apaches having taken the other two months after he’d begun riding for the Bar-V. “Tom, what is it?” the rancher asked.

  Navarro rose up in his saddle and looked around. A flush rose in his face, darkening the already dark cherry skin. “I’m not sure we’re on Karla’s trail.”

  Vannorsdell rode up to his left. “What are you talking about?”

  “She’s been givin’ me one hell of a time trackin’ her—I’ll tell you that.”

  “Karla? How can she be hard to track?”

  “She’s been obscuring her trail.”

  Vannorsdell scowled at him. “How?”

  “She’s been riding over the hardest ground she can find. Taking shortcuts between canyons. In some places, she’s been rubbing out her trail or obscuring it with sand and rocks.”

  “Where in the hell did she learn how to do that?”

  Navarro sent his gaze up the wall to his left, then up the one to his right. His horse blew and stomped its right front hoof. Navarro frowned down at the animal.

  “What is it?” Vannorsdell asked.

  “Ole Crowfoot here—he’s actin’ a mite wily. Like we might be on Apache sign instead of Karla’s.” Navarro dismounted and, holding the reins in his right hand, hunkered down on his haunches. He traced the outline of a hoofprint in the clay-colored sand and gravel in the sparse shade of a spindly pinion. “This print here ain’t shod.”

  “You mean to tell me we might be following Apaches instead of Karla?”

  Navarro felt the flush of embarrassment. “I think she lost me back in Manzanita Gulch.”

  “Tom, how in the hell does my granddaughter know this country so well? And where in the hell did she learn to obscure her sign like that?”

  Navarro toed a stirrup and swung into the saddle. “I reckon I taught her, Mr. Vannorsdell.” Without looking at the rancher’s reaction, he turned to the men behind him. “Keep your carbines to hand and your eyes skinned. I might have just rode us up the asses of about a half dozen Apaches.”

  The men muttered as Navarro started out, shucking his own Winchester from the saddle scabbard under his right thigh. He jacked a shell into the breech and set the rifle across his saddle bows.

  Karla was probably heading for the San Pedro River. That was the best corridor for a ride toward Mexico. Navarro would probably cut her sign there, in the San Pedro Valley, but the four Apaches, who looked to be no more than an hour or so ahead, could make getting there a little rough.

  The longer he rode under the hammering sun, the more certain he became that Karla had not come this way. He didn’t see the print of a single shod hoof. Somewhere, she’d made a clean break from her previous trail.

  Navarro had taught her well.

  Behind him, Vannorsdell and the hands rode Indian file, not talking much, their saddle leather squeaking, their horses’ shod hooves ringing off stones.

  Around them, cicadas whined. The heat was a heavy pall. There was no wind. At three in the afternoon, Navarro heard a deep, distant rumble. He hipped around in his saddle and peered over a cone-shaped mountain of rock. Behind the mountain, the sky was the color of a ripe plum. A hairlike line of lightning sparked. Five seconds later, thunder growled.

  Vannorsdell followed Navarro’s gaze, then turned back to Tom. “Movin’ slow. Looks to be headin’ south. Maybe it’ll skirt around and miss us.”

  “Maybe,” Navarro said, turning forward and ri
ding on. If that storm carried as much rain as it appeared, these gullies would be rivers soon, and Karla’s tracks would be obliterated.

  A half hour later they were climbing toward a pass, along an ancient Spanish trail skirting a wash to their left. Pines, mesquite, and cholla grew around them, and mountain goat scat littered the flat, black rock mushrooming along the wash. In natural rock bowls they found water dotted with grass seeds and dead and hatching insects, and stopped to let the horses draw, then mounted and continued climbing the steepening, winding trail.

  They’d stopped at another tank to let the lathered horses drink, when Jorge Amado blew air through his teeth. “Look at that, Tom.”

  Navarro followed the stocky Mexican’s pointing finger, to a column of smoke billowing out from a rocky knoll about a hundred yards ahead and slightly south. Navarro poked his hat brim off his forehead and bit down on the brown paper quirley in his teeth.

  His shell gray eyes, spoking at the corner, stared hard at the smoke. He slid them left across the wash. Another column rose about two hundred yards ahead, from a jumble of black rock shaped like a sleeping bear. The column rose straight up, in a series of staggered charcoal puffs.

  “Ain’t it just a wonder how they do that?” Tom said, a tenseness beneath the mock-jovial tone.

  “You know, Mr. Navarro,” said Rob Miller, “every time I see smoke talk like that, my other ear starts to ache somethin’ crazy.”

  “Apaches are men, same as us,” Hector Potts said, squatting to fill his hide-covered canteen with the tepid water.

  Vannorsdell stepped up beside Navarro. He was smoking a stout cigar. “I reckon I forgot to tell you, Tommy—while you and the other boys were in Tucson, a cavalry detail from Fort Apache stopped at the ranch. Nan-dash is off the reservation again. They said he killed an itinerant trader. Slow-cooked him in a clay pot over his own burning wagon.”

  Navarro grinned sardonically and blew smoke through his nostrils. “That’s nice to know.”

  “Sorry, Tommy. I was going to tell you today.”

  “Today would’ve been a good time.”

  “You think they’re layin’ for us?”

  “Could be. We cut Karla’s sign again, about twenty minutes ago. She came this way. The Apaches came later.”