Navarro

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?”

“Two days ago.”

Navarro fingered the Winchester. “You the only survivor?”

“Sergeant Tanner and a scout were with me for a while, but they both died from their wounds . . . yesterday, I think.” Ward’s breath caught as, pondering, he suddenly remembered. “The sergeant died yesterday morning. Tingsla died a few hours later. They were hit bad.” Ward’s eyes filled with tears and he dropped his gaze.

“Where did this happen?”

Ward blinked his eyes clear, and he shook his head. “Can’t recollect. A lot of confusion. I remember we entered a canyon. Turned out to be a box canyon. The Apaches were laying for us. I was hit with a tomahawk, and the sergeant threw me over my horse and led me out.”

“Sounds like you might have run into Nan-dash’s reservation jumpers. We ran into a few last night ourselves.”

Ward nodded. “Nan-ta-do-ka-dash. We’d been on his trail for three days, out of Fort Apache.” He seemed to think about that, then balled his sun-blistered cheeks and squinted up at the Bar-V segundo. “What are you doing out here, Navarro?”

“Trailin’ a girl. My boss’s daughter.”

“Good Lord.”

“Ran away from home to be with her vaquero beau.”

“Heaven help her.” Ward looked at the rabbit he’d dropped in the fire. The flames had turned it black.

“Hungry?” Navarro asked.

“I snared that rabbit, didn’t want to risk a pistol shot. I haven’t eaten since the morning before the attack. No canteen, but last night’s rain filled the rock tanks.” Ward snapped his teeth and looked chagrined. “I reckon I’ve been a little disoriented, Mr. Navarro.”

“No horse?”

Captain Ward shook his head. “The sergeant’s horse ran off last night, during the storm. I need to get back to Fort Apache. Can you help me?”

“Fort Apache’s north. We’re heading south. We can drop you off at Fort Dragoon.”

“That’ll do.”

Navarro took the young man’s arm. “Come along, Captain. My two partners and our horses are down below. If you think you can ride, I’d like to get a couple more miles in before nightfall.”

Ward nodded as he climbed to his feet and straightened his dusty tunic. “I can ride.”

Ward was a little wobbly on his feet—Navarro figured that the tomahawk had rattled his brains around plenty—and they took their time descending the slope, Tom leading the way but turning often to help the younger man over the larger rocks and through brush clumps.

When they gained the creek bottom, Navarro introduced the captain to Tixier and Musselwhite, who were smoking black cheroots while their horses drew water from a spring they’d found several yards east. Navarro gave the captain several twists of fresh jerky from his saddlebags, mounted his buckskin, pulled Ward up behind him, and gigged the horse out of the draw and onto the trail they’d been following before they’d spied the smoke.

Navarro heard the captain eating hungrily behind him as they rode. When the captain had finished the jerky, his head fell forward against Navarro’s shoulder, and soft snores rose up from the young soldier’s chest.

“They get younger every year,” Tixier said just behind Navarro’s grulla.

Tom shook his head and reined the horse around a sharp trail bend, flushing a skinny coyote from a clump of mesquite and Mormon tea on his right. The dun-and-cream coyote ran up a knoll, tail down, glancing sheepishly back over its left shoulder before disappearing down the other side.

The riders had just brought the canyon of the San Pedro into view ahead when the sun sank behind them, flooding the canyons and valleys with deep, cool shadows. Night was the best time for traveling in Apache country, because the Indians wouldn’t fight after dark, but Navarro didn’t want to continue and risk overlooking sign of Karla.

She was heading south, but they were leaving country foreign to her, and she might’ve gotten turned around anywhere. Navarro didn’t want to think about the possibility that Apaches might have nabbed her even before she’d reached the San Pedro. He, Tixier, and Musselwhite might be chasing a wild goose, but until they found Karla, either dead or alive, they had to continue scouring all the ground they could.

They made camp in a deep hollow at the base of a pinion-covered ridge, staking the horses and the pack mule out on long ropes so they could graze and draw water from a run-out spring. Navarro and Musselwhite gathered wood while Tixier, the best cook of the three, hauled out the utensils, sliced beef and potatoes into a skillet, and boiled coffee. They ate silently, the sky a bejeweled, black velvet blanket arcing over them, coyotes yapping from ridges, nighthawks swooping.

Captain Ward said little, just stared into the fire with the troubled expression of someone who’d endured more than he’d been ready for. In deference to the young man’s condition, the others didn’t say much, either.

When Navarro had finished his supper and scrubbed his plate with sand, he fished a tequila bottle and cloth bandages from his saddlebags, and hunkered down beside Ward.

“Tip your head toward the fire, Captain.”

Ward turned to him, frowning curiously.

“That’s a deep cut those ’Paches opened on your noggin. Looks like you got a couple pounds of sand in it. It needs cleaning.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“You’ll probably live, but I see no reason go around with your head full of sand when you don’t need to.”

“Could pus up on you, Captain,” Musselwhite said as he poured himself another cup of coffee. “If it turns green, one o’ those Army surgeons might decide to amputate.”

Musselwhite chuckled at his own joke. Tixier shook his head. Ward said nothing, just tipped his head toward the fire with an expression of strained tolerance.

“You’ll have to forgive Charlie’s sense of humor,” Navarro said, splashing tequila on a bandage. “The rest of us do.”

“Don’t listen to him, Cap,” Musselwhite said. “I keep everyone in stitches around the Bar-V, I do.” Leaning toward Navarro, he picked up the tequila bottle and splashed a dollop into his coffee, then reached around the fire to splash a finger into that of Tixier, who was enjoying a dessert of sour dough biscuit and prickly pear jam. Pilar, who was sweet on the old mestizo, or half-breed, had given him a jar of jam for his birthday.

Navarro splashed more tequila on the bandage and scrubbed the captain’s temple with vigor. Ward frowned into the fire, his head moving with Tom’s tending.

“Apaches,” Ward said, as though talking to himself. “They don’t fight like soldiers . . . like men.”

Navarro tossed the cloth into the fire, picked up another from his lap, draped it over the lip of the bottle, and shook more tequila onto it. “How’s that, Captain?”

Ward’s nose wrinkled angrily. “They fight like children . . . like cowardly schoolyard bullies.”

“You got that right, Captain,” Tixier said. “That’s why the Army needs to change the way it fights them.”

“I attended West Point,” Ward said, lifting a defiant glance at Tixier. “I trained under the best fighting men in the world.”

“No, you didn’t,” Navarro said, again rubbing around the edges of the captain’s wound. “The best fighting men in the world, second only to the Cheyenne, are the very Apaches that butchered your patrol. Your West Point commanders are fine when it comes to fighting other white men, but when it comes to fighting Apaches, the best teachers are the Apaches themselves.”

Ward turned his skeptical eyes to Navarro. “What would you propose?”

Navarro tossed the second bandage into the fire, took a long pull from the tequila bottle, and reclined against his saddle, crooking an arm behind his head. “I’d propose what I did propose and got laughed at for. That the Calvary of the Southwest abandon the blue woolen uniforms with the shiny brass buttons for buckskins, that they ride unshod horses in very loose formations, and at the first sign of conflict, dismount and take to the hills and the rocks, the way the Apaches do.”

“Hear, hear, Tommy.” Musselwhite saluted with his cup and drank. “If we hadn’t fought so damn civilized, I’d have a lot fewer friends on the other side of the sod.”

“You men served?” Ward asked, glancing around.

“Sí,” Tixier nodded. He was sharpening his bowie knife on a whetstone—slow, even strokes—occasionally testing the edge on the black hair curling on his corded brown forearm. “Contracto exploradors.”

Across the hollow rose the thuds of a rock rolling down a hill, the sounds sharp in the quiet air.

“Away from the fire!” Navarro rasped, reaching for his rifle and rolling into the shadows.