Navarro

by Ralph Compton

  Finally, he hunkered down on his haunches. He took his Henry rifle in his left hand, removed the worn glove from his right, and ran his fingers over a shoe print clearly defined in the needle-flecked black dirt of the forest.

  He probed the soil around and within the print the way a doctor would feel for a patient’s pulse.

  A crow cawed in the tree crowns. Closer by, a black squirrel berated Hawkins from a rotten nook in a lightning-split lodgepole.

  Ignoring the din, the old wrangler straightened. He removed his broad-brimmed hat, ran his hands through thinning salt-and-pepper hair combed back from a prominent widow’s peak, and peered along the shoulder of the hill, following the tracks with his gray-eyed gaze.

  Finally, snugging the hat back down on his head, its thong hanging free beneath his chin, Hawkins turned and ambled back the way he had come. He waded the stream and approached the three horses and the woman waiting for him on the other side.

  “It’s right where I figured it would be, ma’am,” Hawkins said as he slid his Henry into his saddle boot. “The forest kept the rain off it. Looks like they crossed the stream and rode along the shoulder of the hill yonder.”

  “They’re avoiding the main trails again.”

  “Looks that way. Cautious son o’ bitches, pardon my French.”

  “How far ahead?”

  Hawkins took the reins from her and swung up onto his claybank. “I’d say about two days, ma’am. Maybe three. Even where the tracks are protected from the weather, they’ve disintegrated some.”

  “Damn,” Louise said. “I was hoping we were gaining on them.”

  Hawkins heeled the claybank forward, tugging on the lead rope attached to the steeldust packhorse. “It’s gonna be tough catchin’ up to those skanks. They been through this country more than once, know it well, and what’s more, they know where they’re headed. All we can do is follow, read their sign . . . where we can find sign.”

  They’d been on the trail for the past week and a half, since Billie Brennan, the girl who worked for Mrs. Talon at the swing station, didn’t return from doing laundry down at the creek one afternoon. When Mordecai had gone to check on her, he’d found the laundry strewn across the brush and in the water, and the prints of a dozen horses. Not barefoot horses, like the ones Indians rode, but horses, like the ones white men rode.

  Word was out that Edgar Bontemps’ crew of slave-trading scalp hunters was working the country.

  Mordecai had saddled a horse and followed the slavers’ trail, slowly arcing south toward Mexico, till it was too dark to see. He’d returned to the swing station to find Mrs. Talon standing before the cabin’s lighted windows, hands on her hips, waiting. He’d ridden up to her and, in response to the question in her brown eyes, slowly shook his head.

  “I’ll pack provisions.” Turning on a heel, the woman headed inside. “We’ll ride at first light.”

  “Mrs. Tal—”

  “That girl’s like a daughter to me, Mordecai,” she’d said, swinging back around to face him, her hourglass figure silhouetted by the lantern-lit windows behind her. “I intend to get her back. I’ll buy her back from those savages, if I have to.”

  Now Hawkins shook his head as he urged the claybank into the stream, then up the bank on the other side, and up the hill beyond, following the fading tracks of nearly two dozen shod horses. “We’re just lucky we ain’t run into bandits yet, or worse,” he grumbled half under his breath.

  Urging her horse up the hill behind the plodding packhorse, through the forest of columned sun and shadow, Louise stared at the old wrangler’s slouched shoulders and the back of his sun-cracked vest. “You think I’m wrong, going after them?”

  Hawkins didn’t turn to her. “I don’t think you’re wrong, necessarily, ma’am. I think it would’ve been better if we’d waited till I could throw together a posse, track the scallawags with a bit more fightin’ force.”

  “Forming a posse might’ve taken a week or more, spread out the way the ranches are around here. We know we can’t depend on the lawmen or the Army.”

  Hawkins conceded the point with a nod. “I’m just wonderin’ what we’re gonna do once we’ve caught up to this bunch.”

  Mrs. Talon’s voice betrayed strained patience. “We’re going to buy Billie back.”

  “I ain’t sure five hundred dollars is gonna do it, ma’am.”

  “Then we’ll take her back . . . one way or another.”

  Hawkins sighed and said without enthusiasm, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Mr. Hawkins, you are an infuriating old pessimist!” Louise reined the mare off the trail, overtaking the packhorse and Hawkins’ claybank. “If we’re going to make any headway at all, we’d better pick up the pace.”

  She galloped the mare out ahead of him, over the brow of the hill and into a grassy hollow between slopes. A big magpie flew up from a single gnarled cedar left of the trail, screeching.

  Hawkins stared after the woman, shaking his head. “We been pushin’ hard enough. These horses need a rest.” She’d dropped from view, but he scowled and raised his chin to add, “These’re the only horses we got—best treat ’em right!”

  Later that day, they came upon two bodies in a narrow canyon, about fifty yards from where others had camped. Both men had been shot first in the legs, then finished off with bullets to the head. Hawkins and Mrs. Talon stared down at them. Scavengers had been having a feast.

  “Look at that,” Hawkins said. “Take you a good look. Men who would do that to each other would—”

  Hooves thudded behind him. He turned to see Mrs. Talon galloping off down the canyon, following the outlaws’ path.

  Hawkins cursed, dug a tobacco twist from his jeans pocket, and angrily bit off a sizable chunk. Chewing, he stared after the woman, her back defiantly straight, her saddlebags and rifle boot flapping like wings.

  Hawkins cursed again. It wasn’t easy working for a woman who had bigger cajones than he had.

  Chapter 19

  The morning after the two privates had tried to perforate his hide, Tom Navarro rose early, dressed quickly, and bid farewell to Sullivan, Ward, and Bryson. Riding through the fort’s open front gates, he saluted the two sentries and gigged the horse into a lope, the dun packhorse following on its ten-foot lead.

  The morning began desert-fresh, but the sun rose, blistering, the mountains receding and cowering behind a brassy haze. Soon the Bar-V segundo’s new denims and chambray shirt were sweat-stained, and his broad-brimmed black hat was coated with a fine sheen of adobe-colored dust. The only old accoutrements he had were his gun belt and .44, the undershot Justins on his feet, and the red bandanna knotted around his neck.

  Navarro preferred familiar mounts for treks into strange country, but his own horse had probably either been taken by the same scalp hunters who’d nabbed Karla, or was still wandering the cuts around Gray Rock, foraging and looking for water. The bay stepped out smartly, and as he wended his way into the rough country near the peak, the bay as well as the dun proved sure-footed and deep-bottomed.

  Good stayers both, and they seemed forgiving of long stretches without water. Not bad for Army remounts, which, like most soldiers, often proved over-trained and underexperienced.

  The trek back to Gray Rock proved futile. The slavers’ sign had been obliterated by isolated rain squalls, wind, and animals. All that remained atop the mountain was dry horse apples, dirt-caked carnage, and the sickly sweet fetor of death.

  The Army had buried the bodies in graves too shallow to thwart predators. Bloody limbs and viscera were strewn about the dust and rocks.

  Without tracks, he had no choice but to head south and try to cut the scalp hunters’ trail somewhere along the way, or hope to hear word of where the renegades might be headed.

  He camped at the butte’s base, having a few drinks that night in honor of Dallas and Charlie, noting how lonely it felt without either or both at his side. He started south so early the next morning that a mountain lion was still keen
ing and whining atop the peak above him, probably warning wolves or coyotes away from its breakfast.

  Two nights later, Navarro rode into Tombstone amid the patter of tin-panny music and the blasts of jubilant gunfire, soiled doves beckoning from cat-house balconies. After stabling his horses, he consulted Sheriff Johnny Behan, who offered no information about a slaver named Bontemps, which didn’t surprise Navarro. Johnny Behan was better known for gambling and carousing than for fogging owlhoot trails.

  Not wanting trouble from long-memoried enemies or prospective gunslicks, Navarro drank and ate alone in his Russ House hotel room, then slept with his pillow over his head to blot out the noise from the street below his room, including fiddle music and several bursts of gunfire.

  Up with the dung shovelers the next dawn, he saddled his grained and curried mounts, and followed the river courses into Sonora. Combing such vast, rugged terrain was akin to cleaning a buffalo rug one hair at a time. Sitting a ridge and gazing over the thrusting barrancas and pillared rimrocks stretched out between distant, blue snow-mantled peaks, he felt overwhelmed with futility.

  He rode on, however. He would not give up his search until he’d either found Karla or settled her score.

  He’d been scouring river basins, inquiring in little towns and at farms for two weeks, learning nothing about slave traders or Yanqui girls. Then, one morning, in the sandy creekbed in which he’d camped the night before, he came upon the sign of four shod horses.

  One of the track sets caught his eye.

  There was something in the horse’s gate, shoe fit, or nail pattern that seemed familiar. He’d tracked many horses over the years, and thousands of prints had been seared into his brain. Maybe he only imagined something familiar about this set, but he followed them, anyway.

  He’d trailed the four riders for two hours, and was plodding along a deep-rutted cart trail, with an alkali flat on his left, when a shot sounded to his right and slightly behind. He reined the bay to a halt and, shucking his Winchester from the saddle boot, whipped his head toward the sound.

  A rocky ridge heaved a hundred feet off the trail, paralleling it. As he studied the formation, three more rifle shots rang out. They’d seemed muffled, as though fired from inside a building.

  A faint yell rose on the breeze.

  Navarro reined the bay to the base of the ridge, dismounted, and tied both horses to a spindly shrub. His Winchester in his right hand, he climbed the slope, weaving around rocks and yucca. Removing his hat, he hunkered down behind a cracked, cart-sized boulder at the ridge’s brow, and peered into the shallow draw on the other side.

  A sun-bleached adobe stood against the draw’s opposite ridge, which shelved gently back, spiked with yucca, short grass, and mesquite shrubs. Several brown and cream-colored goats milled along the rocks, pulling at the brush.

  Inside the cabin, another shot barked, the slug blasting open a shutter on the other side of the house. The ricochet sliced off a rock with a metallic zing, puffing dust and narrowly missing a goat, which craned its head to stare at the bullet-scarred rock for several seconds before turning again to graze.

  Ignoring the gunfire, Navarro turned his attention to the brush corral, where four horses and a mule stood statue-still, facing the rear fence and the spindly cottonwood partially shading it. Two horses were duns, one a black barb, the other a white Arabian.

  Navarro stared at the Arabian, his spine tensing, his flinty blue eyes keen.

  He had little doubt it was Karla’s horse. Not many Mexicans could afford a white Arabian. What it was doing here, he had no idea. Maybe these people knew nothing about the slavers. Maybe they did.

  “Santa Madre!” a voice cried within the weathered adobe walls.

  A shot barked.

  Laughter rose.

  Navarro had just shifted his gaze from Karla’s horse to the cabin when the front door opened. A man came half stumbling, half running into the yard. He tripped over a rock and dropped to a knee—a lanky Mexican in pajama bottoms but no shirt or hat. A burly man stepped through the door, staggering, a bottle in his right hand.

  He extended the bottle at the man on the ground and berated the skinny gent in Spanish, warning him to hurry or he’d kill his brother. The stout man in the doorway, wearing a dark brown poncho with bandoliers crossed on his chest, turned drunkenly. He bounced off the doorframe, then disappeared back inside the adobe, leaving the door open behind him.

  Peering around the rock, Navarro watched the slender man climb to his feet, and limp across the yard to the covered wagon parked before the corral. He reached through the back flap and pulled three bottles out of the wagon. Cradling the bottles carefully in his arms, he hurried back to the cabin and disappeared through the door.

  Another shot erupted inside, followed by the sound of breaking glass . . . followed by angry shouts and another pistol blast.

  Navarro studied the draw, arranging a plan for approaching the cabin without being seen. He stood, retraced his steps down the ridge, stubbornly refusing to limp on his healing right leg, then made sure his horses were both tied fast. Rifle in hand, he left the horses tied to the shrubs and scrambled along the ridge’s base, heading east.

  After a hundred yards, he climbed the ridge again and scrambled down the other side, then along a shallow ravine that led around behind the cabin, to the ridge on the opposite side.

  He climbed halfway to the ridge’s crest and hunkered down in the rocks behind the adobe, amid the goats. The animals stopped foraging to eye the stranger warily.

  From here, Navarro had a clean view of the cabin’s rear. There were a door and a window on this end, but mesquite logs and brush had been piled high around the window. If he approached the adobe from the southeast corner, he should be able to make the hovel’s rear door without being seen.

  That was what he did, ignoring the pain in his right calf. He pressed his back to the hot, bright adobe wall left of the rear door hammered together from thin planks and cheap nails.

  Inside, a gun continued its intermittent bark, followed by raucous laughter. Whoever had come calling on the poor goat herders was having one hell of a time—at the goat herders’ expense. Probably whiskey peddlers or scalp hunters. The wagon he’d seen parked beside the corral had looked like those run by that brand of border tough, as thick in this country as flies on a fresh dog plop.

  Laughter and pleas spewed from the adobe walls and windows, punctuated by pistol shots.

  Navarro stole around the building’s northeast corner and sidled up to a chest-high window in the north wall. Crouching, he slid a quick glance into the room, where six men and one young woman milled. Four of the men, sitting at a small wooden table, were tangle haired, bushy bearded, and armed with prominently displayed guns and knives. Bottles, glasses, and coins littered the table.

  One man held an Indian-dark, round-faced woman on his lap and was nuzzling her neck and squeezing her breasts through a loose-fitting doeskin shift. The woman sat stiffly enduring the assault, looking away from the man, her face taut with disgust and anger.

  Navarro’s glance was so quick that he wasn’t sure what the other two at the table were doing, but the third was aiming a Merwin and Hulbert .44 at a gray-haired Mexican man tied to a chair before a window on the other side of the room. The man wore no shirt, and his lean, muscular arms and birdlike chest bore the scars of a dozen old knife wounds.

  An empty, dented vegetable tin stood atop the man’s gray head. The man aiming the .44—his elbow propped on the table, head lolling drunkenly—was the hombre who’d sent the other goat herder out to fetch more whiskey.

  The young man who’d done the fetching was crouched before the stone fireplace in the back wall, stirring beans in a bubbling pot with an air of desperation and casting wild-eyed glances over his right shoulder. His black hair hung in his eyes, one of which was noticeably lower than the other.

  Navarro slid his head back from the window as the older Mexican tied to the chair screamed in Spanish, “Ple
ase . . . in the name of all the sain—”

  The .44 barked. A tinny thud, followed by a squeal. Shrill laughter rose.

  In Spanish, a man at the table yelled, “Miguel, that’s another centavo you owe me, you son of a three-legged nanny goat!”

  Navarro inched his right eye once more across the window’s edge. From this pinched angle, he could see only the right side of the room. The gray-haired man screamed and cursed and fought against the ropes tying his hands behind the chair back. His right temple shone with a three-inch line of bright red blood. The can lay on the floor behind his chair. He was as angry now as frightened, and his pleas were laced with curses salty enough to make the Devil take note.

  Navarro slid his head back, dropped to his knees, crawled forward along the wall below the window, then rose and stalked around the adobe’s northwest corner and sidled up to the open front door. He raised the Winchester in both hands.

  Just beyond the door, the gray-haired man was pleading for his life while the man with the gun ordered the cook to replace the can.

  One of the other traders laughed as though at the funniest joke he’d ever heard. The girl squealed and struggled, the chair creaking as though it were about to break.

  The smell of fresh tortillas, frijoles, and gunsmoke wafted through the door beside Navarro’s right shoulder. He waited, listening. A chair scraped back. Boots scuffed across the hard-packed floor, moving toward him.

  When Tom heard them moving back toward the table, he waited until the gray-haired man began pleading again in earnest, then jacked a round into his Winchester’s breech. He turned through the door and snapped the Winchester up. He drew a bead on the big man taking rheumy-eyed aim at the older man with the can on his head, and fired.

  Blood burst in a fine spray from the big man’s shoulder. He flew back in his chair, dropping the pistol, his beard-enshrouded lips making a broad “O” as he raged.

  Two of the other three men had been sitting in a near-catatonic state of drunkenness while the fourth pawed the round-faced woman. Now, seeing Tom burst into the room, the woman howled. The man whose lap she adorned bolted up and forward, throwing the woman to the floor in a squealing heap and clawing his pistol off the table.