Vannorsdell studied him, his tobacco-stained teeth showing through his dry, parted lips. “You think they have her?”
“There’s only one way to find out.” Navarro turned. “Hector. Charlie. Let’s mount and see what all the smoke’s about.”
Hector Potts was an old Indian trader who’d married one of Cochise’s daughters several years back, before she’d died of a stomach complaint. Charlie Musselwhite had been a drover since he was tit-high to a mustang dam. He’d fought Indians from Dakota to the Mexican border and still had his hair, because he’d learned to fight by their rules. Because of their knowledge of Indian ways, Navarro had hired both men himself.
Musselwhite, with his spiky corn yellow hair and perpetually amused brown eyes, had already kicked out of his boots and was on the ground pulling a pair of well-worn mocassins onto his feet, grimacing with the effort. Hector Potts had his Colt Bisley out. Tonguing the right corner of his mouth with concentration, he slowly turned the cylinder, making sure all six chambers showed brass.
The hair on the back of his neck prickling and his stomach feeling light, Navarro dropped his quirley, stubbed it out in the gravel, and grabbed his Winchester. He jacked a shell into the chamber, off-cocked the hammer, and mounted his horse. Glancing at Vannorsdell, he said, “The rest of you wait here.”
“What if you don’t come back?” Rob Miller said. He turned away to urinate on a shrub.
“You can send my fortune to Aunt Bess in Paducah,” Navarro said.
“Robbie, do you think Arliss will still love me if I come back without my hair?” Musselwhite asked Miller, doffing his hat and grinning over his shoulder as he gigged his horse after Potts and Navarro. The drover had been sparking the working girl of a neighboring rancher for the past three months.
“Hell, no,” Miller called after him.
Chapter 6
Navarro reined his piebald to a halt in a round cup in the sloping desert floor shaded by several large mesquite trees and stunt cedars. The manzanita grass grew thick.
Keeping his voice low, the Bar-V segundo said, “Let’s leave the horses here.”
“You know how I feel about walkin’, Tommy,” Hector grumbled.
“How do you feel about tryin’ to level a shot at a running Apache from the back of a crow-hopping mount?”
“Oh, I’m just jawin’,” Hector said, dismounting. “Sure wish I had me a pair of mocassins like Charlie. Those look right soft on the feet, they do. . . .”
When they tied off their horses to the mesquite trees, still speaking barely above a whisper, Navarro said, “Let’s split up. I’ll head toward the smoke column on the left. You boys head for the one on the right. If you see the girl and can get her out without getting her and yourselves killed, do it. If the Apaches are too close, leave her. We’ll meet down with the old man and the others in two hours and palaver up another plan.”
“Why don’t you take Hec, Tommy?” Charlie said, holding his Colt’s revolving rifle in both hands. “He moves too slow for me.”
“I move too fast for both of you. Go!”
Navarro turned and, holding the Winchester in his right hand, walked north through the cracked, sun-blasted boulders, descending the slope to the bottom of the dry wash. He climbed up the far side of the wash and wended his way through the boulders, some as large as Murphy freight wagons.
Halfway to his destination, he ducked low between a cedar shrub and the fallen skeleton of a barrel cactus, and shot a look up the hill. The smoke was gone. He looked right. The smoke was gone over there, as well—only loose rock piles spiked with dry brown grass under an arching sky.
Cool air moved against his back, drying the sweat beneath his collar. A raindrop struck his right ear. He swung a look behind him.
The plum clouds had moved closer, shepherding gray rain curtains. The sky over Navarro was still bright, but it wouldn’t be in about ten, fifteen minutes. Lightning forked across the purple front, and thunder rolled.
He turned forward just in time to see a shadow flit between two rocks about forty yards ahead and left. Another flitted over a rise before dropping into a shallow swale nearly straight ahead. Navarro had only glimpsed the second shadow, but he’d seen the shoulder-length hair flying around a head band, outlined by the brassy sky behind.
Navarro crawled straight back down the rise for thirty yards. He moved left around a huge chunk of pitted black lava. Behind him, thunder rumbled, growing in volume. The light grew wan, and the cool wind picked up, lightly swirling dust.
Tom hunkered down behind a rough-edged black rock, doffed his hat, and peered around the left side.
One of the Apaches slipped around a boulder, slick as a snake, moving toward Navarro’s last position behind the dead cactus. He was a lean kid with the traditional red bandanna, bare-chested and wearing only a loincloth and knee-high leggings. A deerhide quiver was strapped to his back, five or six arrows protruding from the top. Winding around rocks and cholla, he moved up behind where Tom had been only two minutes before, and slowly raised his bow and arrow.
Navarro heard a rock click and turned left. The other Indian was moving in from the other direction—a chubby kid with pitted cheeks, dressed similarly to the first but with a big bowie sheathed on his hip. His right eye had been sewn closed over the empty socket.
Navarro shuttled his gaze to the first brave. The young Chiricahua had just discovered that Navarro had left his previous position. He wheeled to the other brave and muttered something Navarro, who knew a smidgin of the guttural language, couldn’t hear above the rising wind and rumbling thunder.
Navarro stepped out from behind the rock. Seeing him in the periphery of their vision, both bucks wheeled toward him, startled.
Navarro raised the Winchester and fired, blowing the first kid straight back into the cactus. The other buck, sensing Tom had the drop on him, had wheeled away as Navarro shot his friend. Not seeing the boulder two feet to his right, he tripped over it, falling face-first in the gravel, losing his bow and arrow and giving an indignant groan.
Navarro’s second shot, squeezed off as the kid had fallen, blew shards from the rock.
Tom ran toward the rock. The kid climbed to his feet, wheeled toward Navarro, and cut loose with a high-pitched shriek as he clawed the bowie from his hip and ran toward Tom. He was twenty feet away and closing fast when, facing the buck, straight-backed, feet spread, Tom casually raised his cocked Winchester, squinted businesslike down the rifle’s barrel, and blew a neat, round hole through the Indian’s head.
The kid stopped, head snapping back, arms flying straight out from his shoulders. The bowie flew from his hand and clattered in the rocks. He stood like a broken ship’s mast for several seconds, then fell straight back like a drunk gandy dancer falling into a bed.
Navarro ejected the spent shell, jacked another into the breech, and lifted the rifle to his shoulder, looking around. He’d have bet a fresh venison shank and a pint of mescal that these two younkers weren’t the only two Chiricahuas up here.
Keeping the rifle raised, he moved ahead toward the jumble of rocks at the ridge line, where the smoke had originated. The wind blew him from behind, chilling the sweat under his shirt. Rain pelted him, splotching the rocks and bringing up the smell of sage and creosote. The moisture beads glistened on his rifle stock.
Keeping the rifle raised, he moved slowly up the hill.
He was near the crown, where a steep wall of red sandstone rose from powdery sand, when he spied movement on his left periphery. He whipped around and dropped to a knee as a copper-faced Indian crouched over a flat-topped boulder, aiming a strap-iron arrow at him.
Navarro had just snugged the Winchester to his shoulder when the arrow snapped away from the cedar bow and wheezed about three inches off the nub of his left shoulder. Navarro fired twice, quickly, not hearing his own casings fall from the breech.
The Indian gave a cry and disappeared in a blood spray.
Spying more movement on his right, Navarro t
urned again. As lightning flashed and thunder cracked wickedly, filling the air with the smell of brimstone, two more Indians appeared, bolting toward him through a doorlike cleft in the sandstone ridge. The rain had started in earnest, great white buffeting sheets, and the Indian’s mocassins splashed through the puddles as they bolted toward Navarro.
Tom shot one as he paused to nock his arrow. An arrow careened toward Tom from his far right, but the wind caught it, sent it clattering onto the rocks over his left shoulder. As his breath was sucked out of his lungs by the chill wind, rain sluicing over his hat and washing down his face, Navarro cocked a fresh shell into his Winchester’s breech.
A lightning bolt sliced out of the murky gray rain and slammed into the stone ridge with a cannonlike boom, showering the entire area with blue-white sparks and the fetid odor of burning hair. Tom raised his gaze in time to see the other Indian, who had just loosed an arrow, leaping toward him, only three feet away and screeching like the devil’s own hound.
The Apache dove into him, driving the rifle down and out of his hands. Navarro heard the rifle clatter against a rock. Tom hit the ground on his back, the Indian screeching and driving against him, digging his knees into Tom’s thighs as he rose up and lunged toward Tom’s face.
Instinctively, Navarro reached for the Indian’s right wrist, caught it three feet from his face and raised his eyes to it. A razor-edged pig sticker with an upturned tip and hide-wrapped handle was aimed at his throat. Navarro had stopped it just before that savage blade had cored his Adam’s apple.
Thunder cracked, for a second drowning the Indian’s maniacal, unwavering screech.
Lightning flashed again, glinting off the knife blade and off the savage black eyes staring down into Navarro’s own, filled with barbarous glee. The Indian had placed both hands on the knife’s handle, pushing with all his weight against Navarro’s right hand.
The blade tip slid down to prick Navarro’s neckerchief. An eye wink later, the blade poked through the neckerchief and into Tom’s neck, sharp as rattle-snake teeth.
The Indian’s lips stretched back from long, thin teeth crooked and brown as old fence posts as the brave sucked a breath. His quivering chest expanded against Navarro’s right, weakening forearm.
Tom pivoted slightly right. Grunting and grimacing as he held the knife back with his right hand, he brought up a rock in his left, and smacked it hard against the Indian’s head.
The buck’s renewed screech died stillborn as he fell onto his left shoulder. The Indian, sluggish from the blow, climbed to his knees and began crawling away from Navarro. Navarro jerked onto his own knees, grabbed the Indian’s right foot, and pulled him back down.
The Indian jerked his foot from Navarro’s grasp. Crawling forward, he scrambled to his feet. Navarro did likewise, reaching for his Colt, his hand coming up empty. He must have lost the revolver in the scuffle. The Indian flew toward him in the driving rain.
Navarro pivoted left, stuck his foot out, grabbed a fistful of the Indian’s hair, and pulled. The brave tumbled over Tom’s outstretched foot, dropping to his knees.
He was coming up again as Navarro leapt toward him. Spying movement on his right, sensing another Indian heading his way, Navarro rammed his right fist into the face of the brave before him. He rammed the face again, another pistoning blow, feeling the nose give beneath his fist and turn flat to the face, feeling the thick, wet blood on his knuckles.
A rifle popped to Navarro’s right, nearly coinciding with another thunderclap.
Navarro leapt at the dazed Indian staggering bloody-faced before him. He got behind the buck, wrapped his right arm around his neck, cupping his chin, and jerked the head to the right and back, hearing the crunch and branchlike snap. He’d intended to use the dead buck as a shield, but the rain had made the Indian’s skin slick, and he lost his grip.
As the body dropped before him, he cast his gaze straight ahead.
A stocky savage with a prunelike face stood on a rock about fifteen feet up the grade, his soaked calico shirt buffeting in the wind, sopping silver-streaked hair drawn back.
He had a Henry rifle raised to his shoulder and was siting down the barrel at Tom’s forehead. Navarro felt like a deer trapped in a locomotive’s rushing light.
Thunder clapped, rattling his ear drums. At the same time, a witch’s finger of a shimmering lightning bolt jutted out of thin air twenty feet above and to the Apache’s right. The bolt was gone in an instant, leaving the Indian limned in flickering sparks, like those from a blacksmith’s forge. The electricity jerked down from his arms and out over his rifle, etching it precisely in the gray air before Navarro.
The Indian bellowed as the light faded.
He dropped the rifle, fell straight down from the boulder, and lay flat on his face, limbs akimbo. Flames traced a black circle in his shirt, just below his left shoulder blade. The flames were quickly snuffed by the rain. The man’s hair and mocassins continued to smoke and sizzle as Navarro turned away, retrieved his Winchester, and dropping to one knee, brought the rifle up to his waist and looked around through the driving rain.
He knelt there for a long time, letting the rain pound him, watching the lightning flash off the rocks. Somewhere behind him, a tree was struck with a thundering crack followed by the rustling and cracking of falling branches and then the dull whump as the trunk hit the ground.
The storm had settled on this rocky knoll, cloaking Tom in a murky, dusky gauze.
Finally, when nothing else moved ahead or around him, Navarro retrieved his revolver and holstered it. Taking the Winchester in both hands, he crept up to the rocky ridge, slipped through the doorlike notch, and dropped to a knee, swinging the Winchester’s barrel back and forth before him.
No movement here, either.
Looking around the buckling boulders, he found only the gray remnants of a fire and a pile of green cottonwood limbs. In a hollow about thirty yards from the crest, he found the mud-smeared tracks of five Indian ponies in the soft sand near a spring. Broken tree limbs littered the sand. Apparently, when the storm had hit, the horses had jerked their reins free and run.
Navarro took cover in the V between two boulders, and when the lightning had drifted east, he made his way back over the ridge top, found and reshaped his hat, and continued down the other side.
“Tommy!” a voice called above the wind.
Navarro turned. The rain had let up but the clouds still hovered low. Twenty feet downslope and left stood the short, bulky, water-logged shape of Paul Vannorsdell. The rancher’s black stood white-eyed nearby, the rancher clutching his reins.
“We heard the gunfire and were comin’ up, but the damn lightning held us back!”
Navarro moved toward him. “Where’s Charlie and Hector?”
“Back down where you left the group. Potts took an arrow in his hip.”
Navarro looked at him.
A grim expression swept the old man’s face. He shook his head and said fatefully, “No sign of my granddaughter.”
“Goddamn it!” Navarro brushed past the rancher, heading down the slope to find his horse. Like the Chiricahua ponies, the piebald had probably torn loose and galloped ten miles away by now.
“Where you goin’?” the rancher called after him.
“Home!”
Chapter 7
In the small cave where she’d taken refuge from the storm, Karla woke with a start.
She turned left, fumbling with the Winchester carbine with which she’d slept across her breast. She quickly jacked a round into the magazine and got her right index finger through the trigger guard. At the same time, she peered through the cave’s arched opening, only three feet high, through which milky dawn light washed.
Heart thudding, Karla held her breath, straining her ears to listen.
Outside the cave rose sibilant sniffing and panting sounds. A rock rattled, and a scratching, tapping sounded, punctuated by the clinks of shale being knocked together.
A shadow appeared
in the opening’s far right edge—a coyote or a fox, head low, ears pricked. It sniffed busily, a musky, urinelike smell wafting from its coat.
“Shoo!” Karla whispered.
The beast squealed softly, a clipped howl. It withdrew its head and vanished, its hurried footsteps quickly fading with distance.
Karla’s heart skipped a beat. She exhaled and lowered the Winchester. She sat with her wool blanket over her legs, her saddle and saddlebags behind her, for nearly a minute. When her heart had regained its normal rhythm, she set the rifle down, tossed aside the blanket, felt around for her low-heeled, high-topped riding boots, and pulled them on.
She retrieved the Winchester, climbed to her knees, and ducked through the opening, straightening and holding the rifle across her thighs. She wore tight denims and a cream flannel shirt, the tails untucked. Her brown hair fell straight across her shoulders, mussed from sleep. As she stood staring silently across the narrow, dark canyon opening before her, and at the patch of gray sky streaking the serrated rim, the cool morning air shoved against her, fresh from last night’s rain.
There was barely a breath of breeze.
She hardened her jaw, tensed her back against the doubt, the apprehension and loneliness squeezing her lungs.
“Taos” Tommy Navarro had taught her how to survive in the desert. He’d taught her where to look for water and game. How to shoot and ride. How to track and cover her trail.
She would not return to her arrogant, meddling grandfather. That was what he was expecting her to do, with her tail between her legs, begging for his forgiveness. She meant to find Juan, and that was what she’d do.
Juan’s uncle owned a rancho fifty miles south of the Mexican border, in a small canyon feeding the San Pedro. Hopefully, Karla would catch up to him later today or early tomorrow. What she and Juan would do then, she hadn’t thought through entirely. All she knew was that she loved him, that he loved her—she’d seen it in his eyes even when he was telling her good-bye—and that her grandfather would have no say in their future.
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