Ralph Compton Navarro

Chapter 10

Several yards out from the hollow, Navarro quartered left along the ridge base and stopped, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Farther left along the arroyo, the horses were tethered in a patch of high grass surrounded by mesquite trees. Their shadows moved among the denser shadows of the brush and the arroyo’s western bank.

A shadow wearing a hat moved among the horses and the lone braying pack mule.

Navarro had taken two steps forward when red-yellow light blossomed from between two mesquite shrubs. The gun’s report reached Navarro’s ears at the same time the slug slammed into the rock wall over his right shoulder. He threw himself forward, hitting the ground as another shot rang out.

The horses whinnied and clomped around, snapping brush. Hooves pounded as a couple galloped off.

Gaining his feet, Navarro moved west along the arroyo, remaining near the base of the rock wall and keeping the grass and shrubs between him and the shooter. In his vision’s periphery, several more shadows moved—his own men spreading out across the arroyo.

“He’s near the horses,” Navarro called. “Hold your fire.”

Tom dropped behind the boulder as, keying on his voice, the shooter squeezed off another shot. The slug spanged off the rock wall where Tom had just stood. Navarro extended his Winchester over the boulder, made sure the horses were clear, then fired into the powder smoke webbing around a mesquite tree.

As his slug ricocheted off the ground, Navarro bolted out from the boulder and ran to the trees. Shots exploded to his left. Dropping to a knee, he turned to see the fire blossoms of two pistols—three quick shots, then two more as if in afterthought.

To his right, a horse screamed and hooves thudded in the arroyo’s soft sand. Navarro whipped around as a shadow flitted across the arroyo, faintly limned by blue starlight and heading into a southern cleft.

“Sumbitch’s lightin’ a shuck, Tommy!” Tixier called, his boots thudding as he ran.

Navarro ran after the shadow, his cocked rifle held high in both hands. When he’d run forty yards, he saw the cleft the rider had taken—a narrow, rocky feeder cut meandering south. He walked into the cut, hugging the cactus and shrubs growing along the western edge, then paused, holding his breath.

Hooves thudded into the southern distance.

“Where is he, Tom?” Musselwhite said behind him.

Navarro shook his head and stole along the cut, hearing the footsteps of Charlie, Dallas, and Captain Ward approaching from behind, Tixier’s breath rasping loudly. Someone kicked a rock, stumbled, and cursed.

“Looks like the bastard got away,” Musselwhite said when they’d all walked about thirty yards and were rounding a western dogleg in the narrow defile. “Don’t think he got any of our horses, though.”

Navarro stopped, dropped to one knee, and touched a black smear in the rocks. He rubbed the fresh blood between his fingers.

He stood and walked another twenty more yards, again stopped. A man lay sprawled across a spindly shrub in the lee of a large boulder. One arm had caught on the boulder, the other on the shrub, and his head sagged between, so that it looked like he was half lying, half kneeling. Navarro walked slowly up to the body and saw that half his head had been blown away. The blood glistened faintly in the long black hair curving down the back of his buffalo-hide tunic decorated with large red flowers.

Navarro turned and brushed angrily past the other three men who’d walked up behind him and were staring at the dead man. Tom cussed loudly, the oath echoing, and headed back down the cut.

“What’s he so mad about?” Captain Ward asked Tixier. “At least they didn’t get the horses.”

Musselwhite answered, “No, but we’ll have to move camp now. Every Apache within twenty miles probably heard those shots.”

When they’d chased down the two loose horses, Navarro and the others broke camp, saddled up, and rode off down the arroyo.

Two hours later, they made a second, hasty camp along a shallow sandy wash in the open desert, surrounded by creosote and catclaw. They picketed the horses and mule close and kept their coffee fire small and smokeless.

Hunkered down beside the low flames and clutching his coffee cup in his right hand, Navarro glanced at Tixier and Musselwhite, then stared into the star-shrouded desert. The young captain was already curled up in his blankets, snoring.

“At first light, you boys turn back,” Navarro said tonelessly.

Charlie and Dallas glanced at each other, the firelight shunting shadows across their sun-seared faces. “What’re you talking about?” Musselwhite asked.

“The farther south we get, the deeper into Apache and Yaqui country we get, and the more border bandits we’re gonna run into.” Navarro sipped the coffee. “No point in you boys risking your hides for that fool gringa. I’ll track her alone.”

Dallas lay back against his saddle, drew one half of his blanket over his body, and tipped his hat over his eyes. “You’ll track her alone. That’s a good one, amigo.”

From across the fire, Charlie looked at Navarro. “You moonblind, Tommy?”

At first light, the four men saddled up and rode east, meeting up with the deep canyon of the San Pedro as the bottommost point of the sun bled up from the eastern mountains. At ten o’clock they intersected the old Butterfield express route leading south to the mining camps in the Dragoon Mountains. Not long after that, they came upon a ruined stage filled with charred bodies, an arrow-pierced body lying nearby, the man’s eyes eaten out by buzzards.

“Tom!”

Hunkered over the dead man, Navarro looked up. Dallas stood at the bottom of a sandy knoll, staring at a black rock at the knoll’s crest.

The mestizo spoke without turning around. “Come over here!”

Navarro, Musselwhite, and Captain Ward tramped over to Tixier. Tom glanced up at the black rock the mestizo seemed so taken with. He glanced again. The object was no rock but a human head, skinned and sun-raisined, the eyes eaten out, a single bullet round in the forehead.

“Those people are savages,” Ward muttered.

Tixier looked at Navarro. “He look familiar, Tommy?”

Navarro stared at the head. He’d met Karla’s Don Juan one time, when he’d run into them riding out on the prairie, then seen him again from a distance. The square jaw and the hair under the peeled skin were Juan’s.

“Christ,” Navarro said, rubbing his jaw and looking around at the unshod tracks in the sand.

“What’s that out there?”

Navarro turned to Ward, followed the captain’s pointing finger across the chaparral, to a horse grazing about a hundred yards off, at the bottom of a low sandy ridge.

Navarro wheeled, walked over to his buckskin tied to a greasewood clump, and mounted up. He spurred the horse into a lunging gallop across the chaparral. When he was thirty yards from Karla’s horse, it bolted. Navarro kept the buckskin on its trail, overtook it, grabbed the reins, then turned the buckskin back to the others waiting at the bottom of the sandy knoll capped with Juan’s bloody head. The nervous Arabian ringed its eyes with white and fought Navarro’s grip on the reins but seemed pleased by the presence of other horses.

“Well, she made it this far,” Charlie said.

Navarro dismounted, tied the Arabian to a mesquite tree, and climbed back aboard the buckskin, reining the horse to the backside of the sandy knoll. “Let’s have us a close look around, gents.”

The others mounted their horses and joined Navarro’s search for Karla’s body, riding slowly across the flat, peering under every rock and cactus within a two-hundred-yard circle of the stage. Navarro felt sick to his stomach. The stage had obviously been run down by Apaches.

And Karla and Juan had been involved.

Like Juan, she was probably dead. He half hoped she was dead. The Apaches were not known for coddling their prisoners.

When Navarro had ridden around to the south side of a large clay-colored boulder a hundred yards north of the stage, he reined in the buckskin suddenly. A bloody corpse shone in the sun—what was left of one, anyway. Navarro raked his graze across the grisly leavings.

It wasn’t Karla. The coyotes had left only a torso, but it was a man’s torso.

As much as Tom didn’t want the Apaches to have Karla, he was relieved it wasn’t her.

“Well, it looks like they have her,” Navarro said when, after an hour of searching, they all returned to the trail just south of the burned-out stage. “Or at least they did when they left here.”

“We’ll be trackin’ ’em, then,” Musselwhite said, removing his canteen from his saddle horn. His buoyant tone belied what they all knew—if she wasn’t dead, she probably wished she were. And tracking her down would probably get them all killed.

Navarro looked at Ward sitting the Arabian. “Captain, you have a horse now. Fort Bowie’s that way. See that crease between those two ranges cropping up yonder? You’ll want—”

“I’ll stay with you men.”

“Where we’re goin’ ain’t exactly conducive to good health.” Navarro canted his head, indicating Dallas and Charlie. “I’d be shed of these two reprobates, if they didn’t tend to stick like ticks on a coonhound.”

“You men saved my life,” Ward said. “I’d like to do whatever I can to help. Besides”—the soldier lifted one shoulder—“it’s a scouting mission.”

Navarro glanced at Tixier and Musselwhite. Both men shrugged. Tixier shucked his bowie from the scabbard on his cartridge belt, flipped it around, and extended it handle-first to Ward.

Musselwhite said, “Cap, those buttons on your coat sure are shiny.”

Ward looked at the knife before him, then lifted his puzzled gaze to Navarro. Wiping sweat from the inside band of his black Stetson, Navarro said, “No brass buttons on this scout, Captain. A Yaqui could spot the reflections from the Sea of Cortez.”

Ward’s blistered forehead crinkled. “This is a uniform of the U.S. Army. I can’t just—” He stopped, regarded the granitelike faces surrounding him. With a sigh, he took the knife, cut the buttons and bars off his tunic, and returned the knife to Tixier.

“Let’s find your girl,” he said.

The Apaches weren’t hard to track, for they’d done nothing to cover their trail. Navarro counted eight sets of unshod prints moving in no great hurry. They were a confident bunch, which meant they were extremely dangerous.

They were no doubt Nan-dash’s crew from the San Carlos Reservation, holing up deep in the Dragoons and planning more raids on the White Eyes. Segments of the group were no doubt wreaking havoc somewhere in the region even as Navarro and his corhorts chased the bunch who’d attacked the stage.

Navarro kept expecting to find Karla’s body, used up and butchered, along the trail. Funny, his feelings toward her. He’d never had a daughter, but a daughter was what she’d become to him. She was too young to be anything else. If Vannorsdell hadn’t ordered him to go after her, he’d have gone, anyway, the old man be damned. He’d not return to the Bar-V until he’d retrieved her, dead or alive.

If she were dead, the richest part of his recent life would be gone. Thinking about it returned him to the loneliness he’d known before she’d arrived, a shy, mousy little waif in a straw boater and braids.

Navarro and the others were crossing a narrow valley between two rocky, nameless ridges when they came upon a dead horse and a rider in grubby trail garb. At least, what was left of him had been clad in trail garb. The man’s horse had been partially butchered and cooked over a chaparral fire.

Navarro probed the ashes with his right hand.

“How old, Tommy?”

“Two, three hours.”

Musselwhite looked southeast along the Apache’s trail twisting through the brush and dipping into a swale where five cottonwoods flashed in the late-afternoon sun. “We’re gettin’ close.”

Tixier was chewing jerky in his saddle and casting his brown eyes at his horse sniffing the breeze. “My mare—she smells ’em.”

Navarro snorted, mounting his buckskin, then reaching across and snagging a stick of jerky from Dallas’ open shirt pocket. “It’s you she smells, you dirty half-breed!”

“No,” Tixier said, waiting, studying his horse as the others pulled out. “It’s ’Paches, all right.”

They found the body of the dead man’s partner among the cottonwoods, stripped and hacked apart, two young coyotes circling the carcass. Leaving the coyotes to their carrion, they continued across the valley, crossed the ridge beyond, and found the headquarters of a small ranch operation still burning, the sooty smoke a dark column against the sky’s fading light.

Three dead men and three dead horses were strewn about the yard, and farther along they came upon six dead cows and a dead vaquero, the young cowboy’s entrails strewn for nearly a hundred yards across the rocks and sage.

“Savages,” Captain Ward said as they rode past the carnage.

“You ain’t seen nothin’,” Musselwhite replied.

On the other side of the valley, they followed a dry creekbed up among high, craggy peaks spotted with mesquite and pinion. The sunlight was weakening, and the pines and cliffs shaded the trail.

When they’d been riding along the wash for an hour, Navarro halted his horse and lifted his head to listen. Faintly, the sound of Indian chanting and a slowly beating drum came to his ears.

He couldn’t see much, as the wash was on his left and a high wall of granite on his right. He dismounted and retrieved his field glasses from his saddlebags. He tossed his reins to Musselwhite, walked up the saddle they’d been climbing, and disappeared around a bend.

Behind him, Tixier dismounted and sniffed the air. “Smell that?” he said to Musselwhite and Ward. “Roasting mule.”

A quarter hour later, Navarro came back. The others had dismounted and loosened their saddle cinches, giving their horses a rest.

Navarro said, “Far as I can tell, they’ve bivouacked atop Gray Rock. They probably posted guards, so we’ll leave the horses here and walk the rest of the way.”

“Ah, Apacheria,” Musselwhite said ironically as he mashed out his cigarette with his boot toe. “I have so many fond memories.”