Navarro

by Ralph Compton

  Sitting against the cave wall, the rifle between her raised knees, she waited until the murky dawn light spilled over the ridges and down into the canyon, showing the crannies and hollows, the rocks and the spiky shrubs. She pinned her hair under her man’s range hat, gathered her gear from the cave, and stole down the narrow trail winding through boulders to the grassy hollow where the Arabian stood, double-tied to a mesquite and hobbled so it couldn’t bolt during last night’s storm.

  Before she’d left the ranch, Karla had filled one side of her saddlebags with grain. Now she placed a feedbag over the Arabian’s head. As she saddled the horse, the grinding of its teeth filled the quiet air—a reassuring sound amid the eerie quiet after the storm.

  Her imagination kept conjuring Apaches stealing down the slopes around her, but she resisted them, forcing instead the more pleasant memories of listening to her flint-haired vaquero beau read his love sonnets to her in Spanish while nearby their tethered horses cropped the meadow grass or a spring murmured through rocks.

  A half hour later, she rode west along the spongy canyon floor, the Arabian’s hooves making sucking sounds in the freshly eroded silt and sand. Around noon, she picked up the stage road cleaving a valley between two bald mountain ranges. She was about to rein the horse off the trail, toward a distant cottonwood copse, where she’d probably find a spring keeping the trees so green, when the smell of something burning touched her nostrils.

  She peered around. A mile or more ahead, a thin column of black smoke rose above a rocky knoll. She stared at the smoke warily. Tom had told her that, if she ever found herself alone in the desert, to regard smoke with caution. Smoke often meant an Indian attack, and the Indians might still be around.

  Finally, Karla batted her heels to the Arabian’s sides, moving slowly ahead. She shucked the carbine from the saddle boot, jacked a shell into the magazine, lowered the hammer to half cock, and rode with the rifle across her thighs.

  She’d ridden three-quarters of a mile and was rounding a wide bend when the Arabian stopped abruptly and, sniffing the air, pricked its ears and whinnied.

  “Easy, boy, easy,” Karla said, running a hand down the animal’s fine neck and urging it forward.

  She moved around the bend and stared across a low jumble of rock and cactus. Urging the reluctant horse closer, she studied the mound of fire-blackened wood as small flames licked here and there from the wreckage, black smoke swirling and rising.

  On a flat panel tilted against a high wagon wheel half buried in ash and sand were the words, in gold-leaf lettering, BUTTERFIELD OVERLAND EXPRESS. Strewn about the rubble were the oblong remains of charred bodies, marked by half-burned hats and boots. A silver-plated revolver, untouched by the flames, shone between the still burning spokes of a wheel.

  The wagon tongue was still burning, the horses gone, probably led off by the Apaches.

  The Arabian whinnied and sidestepped, fighting the bit. Karla leaned over the horse’s neck, cooing gently, as she studied the deep ruts the stage had carved in the sand when it had left the main trail, bulling over cactus and scattering rocks. All around were the relatively fresh prints of unshod hooves.

  A chill engulfing her, Karla peered back along the powder white trail obscured by shimmering heat waves and the glaring sun. What looked like a body lay sprawled on the trail fifty yards away.

  Karla was about to ride on and investigate when a high-pitched bark rose on her right. With a start, she turned that way, swinging the rifle out before her.

  Two enormous black turkey buzzards, with faces like ancient bald men, stared at her furiously from fifteen feet away. Near them a small man with short gray whiskers and thin brown hair lay on his back among small stones and a barrel cactus. He wore faded blue denims, suspenders, and a cartridge belt and holster, the revolver missing.

  Five arrows protruded from the man’s chest, each centered over his heart. Two more jutted from his thighs. His ankles were crossed as though he were only napping; one arm was flung wide while the other gloved hand lay upon his bloody chest, loosely wrapped around the base of an arrow.

  His blue eyes stared unflinching at the sky. His lips formed a perfect “O” of frozen shock and horror.

  One of the buzzards, standing near the man’s empty holster, gave another angry squawk and leapt in the air, beating its dusty wings. The other skitter-hoppped several feet away, its skinny throat swelling as it breathed. Shadows glanced across the sand, and Karla looked up to see three more of the big carrion eaters swirling amid the smoke from the burning stage.

  Feeling sick and making a conscious effort to keep in her stomach the jerky she’d eaten for breakfast, Karla gigged her horse back toward the trail. She looked cautiously around as the Arabian walked tensely, its tail swishing anxiously. Karla held the carbine’s butt against her hip socket. She felt as though a crouching Apache were centering an arrow on her back.

  Ten yards from the trail, she reined back abruptly. She’d heard something. Her gloved hand fingering the Winchester’s trigger, she raked her gaze across the desert scuffed by the stage and a dozen horses.

  “Kar-la.” It was a wheezy rasp, like her name spoken by two yucca blades scraping together.

  Her eyes whipped this way and that, finally settling on the stone her gaze had traveled across several times before. There was something odd about the rock. It seemed to move.

  She stared at it tensely, her stomach squeezing. The rock appeared to turn slightly. The bottom third moved up and down, a slit widening and closing as her name was muttered again in the same anguished chords barely discernible above the cicadas’ whine and the snapping of the flames.

  Karla’s heart raced as she gigged the horse across the trail and up a sandy rise. The rock capped the rise. Only it wasn’t a rock. It was a man’s head, the skin of the face drawn up and back over a thick mane of black hair. The blood-filled brown eyes stared luridly out at her, unblinking. The lids had been hacked off.

  Again the mouth moved. “Kar-la . . .”

  Her heart turned a somersault, and the desert tipped violently to one side, then to the other. She nearly fell from the saddle. Grabbing the horn, she dropped the carbine, vaguely heard it smack the sand beneath the horse. The Arabian lifted its head high and left, trying to turn away from the grisly spectacle.

  “Juan,” Karla sobbed.

  As she shook her right boot from the stirrup, the Arabian reared and twisted backward, throwing her off its back. She fell sideways in the sand, landing on her hip and shoulder. If there was any pain from the fall, it didn’t register. As the horse bolted away, Karla turned to the head staring at her glassily from the sand pile overrun, she saw now, with large red ants.

  Sobbing uncontrollably, tears blurring her eyes, Karla climbed weakly to her knees, began climbing the mound toward Juan.

  “Karla,” rose the rasp again, barely heard above Karla’s own cries, “come no closer.”

  “Oh, Juan,” she said, phlegm thickening in her throat, tears washing down her cheeks. As she gained the top of the mound, feeling occasional ant nips, like cuts from glass shards, on the undersides of her arms and legs, she dropped down to her elbows and spread her open palms on either side of his head.

  Juan’s mouth opened, the bloodred tongue flicking between bloody lips. “Shoot me, Karla.”

  “I can help you,” she cried, digging feebly into the sand beneath his chin.

  “No! I don’t want you to see what they did.” Juan’s voice cracked with a grating sob. “Sangre de Christo! Shoot me, Karla. I beg you!”

  Karla ceased her digging, lowered her head to the sand between her outstretched arms, before Juan’s bloody head.

  “Bring the gun,” Juan whispered. “Karla, please!”

  Karla raised her head, regarding his pain-glazed eyes. Drunk with horror and sorrow, she climbed feebly to her knees. She stood, turned, and walked heavily back down the hill. She dropped to her knees, picked up the Winchester, and placed her right index finger through the
trigger guard. She drew the hammer back. It clicked as it caught.

  “Hurry!” Juan called, his mouth stretching wide.

  Karla stood and walked slowly up the hill, the carbine hanging slack in both hands. She regarded Juan again through sun-gilded tears—her romantic vaquero lover who’d written and recited poems to her in Spanish.

  “Do it!”

  She dropped to a knee, raised the carbine’s butt to her swollen cheek, centered the bead on his forehead. “I love you, Juan.”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. She closed her eyes as she squeezed the trigger. The rifle cracked, the butt jerking solidly against her face, the sulfur peppering her nose.

  Without looking, she turned away, walking slowly down the hill, and dropped to her knees. She did not open her eyes for a long time, until she heard the thud of hooves racing toward her.

  As if waking slowly from a deep, troubled sleep, she slowly turned her head left. Men on horseback galloped toward her—a half dozen copper-skinned men on short-legged mustangs, their long black hair flying in the wind, red or blue bandannas gleaming in the sun.

  The hooves thundered, growing quickly in volume, until Karla could feel the earth vibrating beneath her knees.

  She watched them almost impassively. An instinctive fear grew within her, but it was surmounted by fury burning up from deep within her loins, quelling her tears and drying her cheeks.

  Watching the men gallop to within thirty yards, she picked up the carbine, ejected the spent shell and jacked a fresh round into the breech. Standing, she spread her feet and brought the rifle to her shoulder. With an eerie calm, she snugged the butt against her shoulder, cheeked up to the stock, and centered a bead on one of the half dozen riders bouncing above the sage and threading through the chaparral.

  She squeezed the trigger, and the rifle popped, spitting smoke and flames. The rider had anticipated the shot, and ducked, expertly swerving his horse to the left. The slug smacked off a boulder behind him with an angry echoing crack. The warrior whooped and jerked his bull-chested paint back toward Karla, savagely beating the horse’s flanks with his heels.

  Karla tried another shot, again missed. She ejected the spent shell, rammed another into the chamber, and fired at a brave only ten yards away. Screaming and howling like a devil loosed from hell, the brave dropped over the right side of his horse as the slug sliced the air where his chest had been. He bounded upright, jerked his rawhide reins sharply left, and slammed his blaze-faced dun directly into Karla.

  She was out before she’d hit the ground.

  Five minutes later, she lay belly down over the back of a Chiricahua war horse as the Apache braves lit southward across the hills, whooping.

  Behind them, the piled white ashes of the stage smoked.

  The buzzards lit upon the dead driver and commenced to feed.

  Juan’s raw, ant-streaked face, the bullet hole in his forehead streaming bright red blood, glared skyward.

  Chapter 8

  Navarro and the other Bar-V men had a long night’s ride through intermittent rain. They stopped at a line shack to tend to Hector Potts’ left hip and to feed and rest the horses before resuming their trek through the mud. Well after midnight, the sky clearing to show several stars and a gauzy moon, they passed beneath the portal of the Bar-V headquarters, the yard a rumpled, wet quilt before them.

  “Tommy,” Vannorsdell said, riding beside Navarro, “you’re the best tracker I’ve ever known. . . .”

  “Don’t worry—Dallas, Charlie, and I’ll ride out first thing in the morning on fresh horses. We’ll get her back.”

  “You better take more men than that.”

  “With less dust and fewer sun reflections, we have a better chance of slipping through Apache country with our oysters.”

  “That damn girl. I’ll tan her hide.”

  “She’s in love.”

  “She has her father’s blood. He was a wild one, that boy. It was pure luck he got rich readin’ for the law back east.”

  They reined up before the barn. As the other men dismounted, Vannorsdell turned again to Navarro. “You think I was wrong to run off her Don Juan, don’t you?”

  “It ain’t my say.”

  “What if it was your say?”

  Navarro dismounted and reached for the latigo cinch. “Then I’d say you were wrong.”

  Vannorsdell stared down at him, then dismounted, tossed his reins to one of the other men, and stalked off toward the house, where Pilar stood on the porch with a dully glowing lantern.

  Silent, the men tended to and stabled their mounts, then stalked off to bed. At dawn the next morning, after only four hours’ sleep, Navarro, Dallas Tixier, and Charlie Musselwhite saddled fresh mounts and, with a mule outfitted with three weeks’ trail supplies, mounted up and gigged their horses through the main gate.

  Behind them, Vannorsdell watched grimly from the house’s front porch.

  “I don’t know, Tom,” Tixier said when they’d ridden an hour through the same country they’d ridden yesterday. “The sign’s gonna be hard to pick up after the storm.”

  “You’re right, Dallas,” Navarro said, leading the procession through a rocky draw made slick by the fresh mud. “But I think I know where she’s heading.”

  “Where?” Musselwhite asked behind him.

  “Mexico.”

  “Ah, hell,” Tixier said.

  They rode through the midday heat blasting off the rocks, resting their mounts for ten minutes every hour. Navarro skirted the canyon in which they’d run into the Apaches, swerving south and then east along a maze of interconnected creeks and washes. He was off Karla’s original trail but hoped to pick it back up along the San Pedro.

  If she’d gotten through the Apaches, that was.

  They were following a wash the Army called Weeping Squaw Creek, a scout having come upon a squaw mourning over the body of her dead husband there in ’68, when Tixier reined his grulla mustang to a halt near a lightning-blasted cedar. He looked up the rocky ridge on the other side of the narrow, deep wash.

  “Not agin.”

  Navarro followed the mestizo’s gaze. Smoke puffed from a notch in the brush and saffron rocks, about halfway up the ridge.

  All at once, the three riders reined their mounts off the trail and into the wash, their horses leaping the six feet to the damp, sandy bottom pocked with coyote and bobcat prints. Navarro shucked his saddle gun and dismounted, dropped his reins, and ran crouching to the opposite cutbank. He jacked a round into the Winchester’s magazine and turned to Tixier shouldering up to the bank on his right.

  “Not much smoke for Apache talk.”

  “Maybe they don’t have much to say.”

  “Or maybe they’ve already said it,” Musselwhite added, his white teeth flashing between sunburned lips as he thumbed back the hammer of his Yellowboy repeater.

  Tixier turned to Navarro. “Could be the senorita.”

  Navarro stared at the smoke, then off-cocked his Winchester and handed it to Tixier. “Cover me.” He hoisted himself up the ledge, took the rifle back from the mestizo, and dashed through the brush. When he made the mountain’s base, he hunkered down behind a boulder and stole a look up the slope.

  The smoke was still rising, webbing on a breeze. It was a steady column, not like the intermittent puffs of an Apache signal fire. More like a cook fire.

  Navarro scurried up the slope, weaving a slanting course up the mountainside, following a game path pocked with deer and racoon scat. He stayed low, dashing between shrubs and boulders, keeping an eye skinned for sunlight reflected off gun barrels or the flatiron of an Apache arrow.

  Halfway to the smoke, he paused for breath, then continued parallel to the ridge, leaping from rock to rock, nearly tripping when his boot slipped into a crack. When he started smelling the smoke and charred meat, he slowed to a walk, breathing through his mouth and bringing his feet down carefully.

  He climbed the slope above the encampment. When he figured he was directly
above the fire, he paused behind a boulder, listening. Hearing nothing, he leapt onto the boulder and raised the Winchester, siting down the barrel at the figure squatting by the small blaze in a rock ring, roasting a rabbit over the flames.

  Sensing someone behind him, the man dropped the meat in the fire and whipped around, falling back on the ground and slapping the covered black holster on his right hip. The man was young, well under thirty, and clad in blue cavalry garb, captain’s bars on his shoulders. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and his straight brown hair was dusty and damp. Dried blood lay over a nasty gash on his right temple. His eyes widened fearfully as he fought the Army-issue Colt from his holster.

  “At ease, soldier,” Navarro said, lowering the Winchester.

  The captain jerked his head up at the man looming over him. He froze with his hand on the grips of the Colt half out of its holster.

  “I’m friendly,” Navarro said, turning, leaping onto a lower rock right of the boulder, then down into the camp.

  The soldier sat by the fire, his rheumy blue eyes acquiring a wary cast. He looked addlepated. “Who’re you?” he asked thickly, keeping his hand on the Colt’s grips but leaving the gun in the holster.

  “Tom Navarro, segundo of the Bar-V ranch.”

  The soldier looked at him, as if he were hearing the words from far away. He snugged his Colt back down in the holster.

  “What’s your handle?”

  Again, the young soldier squinted up at him, fish-eyed, as if sifting through a brain fog for words. “Me . . . I’m, uh . . . Jonah Ward.”

  Navarro glanced at the gold bars. “Captain Jonah Ward.”

  The young man nodded dully.

  Navarro hunkered down on his haunches and laid the rifle across his thighs. “What happened to you, Captain? Why are you alone out here?”

  Ward glanced away and ran his palm slowly down his tunic, stained with dry brick red blood that had run down from his temple. “I lost my command. The whole patrol wiped out. Twelve men. Apaches.”

  “When?”