Navarro

Chapter 12

Karla watched Navarro’s eyes flutter and his head slip back over the ridge. “Tommy!” she screamed.

The exclamation had barely died on her tongue before sharp breaths and running footfalls sounded behind her. She whipped around. An Indian loosed a savage whoop and slapped her once with the back of his hand, once with his open palm. The blows staggered her.

As she fell to her knees, the brave grabbed her wrist. He’d jerked her halfway to her feet and was turning back toward the hollow when a shot sounded behind him. The bullet whomped through his chest and exited his lower back, spraying blood onto the rock wall to Karla’s right.

The brave fell, knocking Karla to one knee.

“Hey!” A man’s voice rose from the rocky slope dropping toward the hollow.

Heart thudding, both cheekbones still numb from the Indian’s blows, Karla cast her gaze down the incline. A white man stood with his feet spread on two separate boulders, a rifle in his hands. It was too dark for Karla to make out his features, but she saw he wore a white man’s shirt, duster, and Stetson.

White men had come. Thank God.

Hope lightened her heart and she wanted to run to the man, but embarrassed by her nakedness, she remained on her knees, crouching low and holding her arms across her breasts.

“My friend fell down the mountain!” she cried, lifting her head to indicate the rocky lip above. “Please help him!”

The man kept his eyes on her and made his way up the rocks, crouching over his extended rifle. As he came closer, she saw the leering grin on his hard, craggy face. Her hope died, replaced by the old, needling fear. The man was white, but the lascivious expression told Karla he was no better than the savages from whom she’d just escaped.

“Well, what do we have here?” he said, lips stretching back from his teeth.

Karla knelt with her arms across her naked breasts, and watched the man approach, his hard features taking shape in the darkness.

In the hollow behind him, rifles flashed and popped. Bullets screeched off rocks. White men whooped and hollered.

“Look at you, little missy,” said the man approaching Karla, the lewd grin frozen on his bearded cheeks. “You ain’t got a stitch on!”

Karla jerked her glance toward the dead Indian. The brave’s rifle lay only a few feet away. She glanced at the white man again. He was only ten yards away, closing slowly, as though approaching a wild animal.

Karla lunged for the rifle, scooping it off the ground, and automatically jacking a shell into the chamber.

“Hold on!” the man ordered. “Just hold on, little miss. You don’t wanna shoot me. Why, I’m your friend! I done saved you from the savages, didn’t I?” He glanced at the dead Indian sprawled near Karla’s feet.

He spread his arms in supplication, the rifle in one hand, aimed toward the sky. His shaggy brows furrowed, but the lewd, confident grin remained as he continued walking toward her, one step at a time.

Karla stood and extended the rifle. She’d fired a Henry before, but this one felt like lead in her hands, which were weak from being tightly bound with rawhide.

“Don’t come near me,” Karla said, fear and fatigue trilling her voice.

The man took one more step and stopped. “Okay,” he said reasonably. “Okay, we’ll do it your way.”

“My friend is Tom Navarro, segundo of the Bar-V ranch,” she said nervously, loosening and tightening her grip on the Henry. “He’s fallen down the mountain behind me. He’s hurt. My grandfather will reward you generously for helping us.”

“Sure, honey, I’ll help,” the man said woodenly, running his flat eyes across her chest. “Just put the gun down, and I’ll help you . . . and your friend. . . .”

He took another step. Karla’s jaw tightened, her muscles tensing. “Get away!” A sob slipped through her gritted teeth. Her mind kept returning to Tommy, lying broken somewhere on the other side of the slope behind her. She had to get to him.

The man, grinning, had lowered his arms. Suddenly, he lunged toward her, whipping his rifle toward Karla’s. Before his Winchester connected with her Henry, Karla squeezed the trigger. The man grunted as the bullet tore through his belly. His momentum carried him another stumbling step forward. Dropping his rifle and slapping both hands to his middle, he fell to his knees.

Face bunched with pain, he looked up at her, eyes wide with shock. His voice was tight, barely audible. “Why, you little . . .” One hand on his belly, he reached with the other for the rifle angling across his right knee.

Panting, hearing panicked grunts squirting up from her throat as though from someone standing beside her, Karla backed away from the man and quickly levered another shell into the Henry’s chamber. She centered the rifle on the man’s chest, steeled herself, and squeezed the trigger.

The rifle clicked empty.

Karla’s thudding heart fell hard. The man was bringing up his own rifle, grunting and cursing, his hand shaking. Karla took her own rifle by the barrel and lunged toward him, swinging the butt in a broad arc. It smacked his head so hard that Karla’s wrists cracked painfully.

The men fell on his right shoulder and lay quivering.

“Otis? Where the hell are ye, boy?” The man’s burly voice rose from downslope and several yards right of where the first man had come up.

Looking that way, Karla saw two shadows darting amid the tall pines and jumbled rocks and boulders. Victorious whoops and laughter rose from the hollow.

“Come on, son,” the man on the slope called again, his voice filled with laughter. “We done got ’em all, every blasted one. I got ole Nan-dash’s hair right here!”

Giving a startled cry, Karla dropped to her knees. She set the rifle down and jerked her head around. Before her, rocks clattered under the boots of the men climbing the slope. She peered up the ridge from which Tommy had fallen. If she tried to climb it, the approaching men would see her.

“Otis, let ’em go! It’s time to dance!”

Karla heaved herself to her feet, stepped over the dead Indian, and bolted behind three boulders wedged atop one another and shielding her from the hollow and the men climbing the slope. Looking around for an escape route, hearing the footsteps growing in volume behind her, she stole out from behind the boulders, edged over a little lip and into a hollow. A dark crevice shone in the rocks at the base of the lip on her left.

Moving to it, the sharp stones cutting her bare feet, she squeezed between the rocks and into the hollow, gritting her teeth against the jagged edges slicing her back, belly, and thighs. When she was wedged in the cramped hollow, she peered out from between the rocks.

She saw little but a pine looming ahead and left, more rocks and shrubs dropping along the slope to the hollow. Flickering light from the Indians’ fire, now taken over by the scalp hunters, edged up from below, giving the night an eerie luminescence. Victorious whoops still rose, punctuating the muttered conversation.

By the voices, there must have been twenty white men down there.

Scalp hunters.

Karla knew the breed. They’d visited the ranch on occasion, seeking water and grain for their horses—hard, soulless, bloodstained men with crusted Indian scalps hanging from their saddles. Enshrouded in flies and reeking of death.

“Look what I found!” a man shouted, laughing. “Tiswin!”

Back toward the dead scalp hunter, a man yelled, “Bing, I found him!”

Running boots clattered on rocks. Silence. The two men spoke, their voices too low for Karla to hear clearly. She drew her limbs together as much as she could in the shallow, irregular niche, and ducked low behind a rock, squeezing her eyes closed.

After a minute, the rocks clattered again. One of the men grunted deeply, as though shouldering a great weight. “Otis, you stupid bastard,” one of the men said through a strained sigh. “You let that wet-behind-the-ears ’Pache take ye down! Vern, don’t forget his scalp.”

The footfalls faded as the two men headed back down the slope toward the hollow.

The tension in Karla’s body relaxed slightly. Listening intently, she heard no other nearby sounds, only those of the revelry below the hill. Smoke wafted to her nostrils, smelling of mesquite and a meat other than mule. Beef. Her mouth watered. She hadn’t eaten in two days. The Apaches had allowed her only a half sip of water from a bladder flask.

Tommy. How could she get to him?

Peering around the rock before her, she saw that the glow of the fire had increased. With that much light, she wouldn’t be able to climb the ridge without being seen from below.

Suppressing her thirst and hunger, she thought through the dilemma. As she did, a horse whinnied somewhere on the other side of the mountain. If she could get to the horses, she might be able to mount one and ride through the narrow crevice the Apaches had used to attain the ridge.

Once down, she could skirt the mountain’s base and, hopefully, locate Tommy and the other Bar-V men.

She’d wait here until the scalp hunters, drunk on the Apache’s tiswin, had gone to sleep. . . .

As she waited, the cool of the desert night settled around her naked flesh, raising pimples along her back and arms. It got so cold that her muscles ached and her teeth clattered.

So gradually as to be almost imperceptible, the firelight faded and the celebration waned. When all but three or four of the voices had died, Karla waited another hour, transporting herself mentally to a summer hay meadow not far from the Bar-V headquarters, where the hot sun enshrouded her.

But then she thought of Juan, saw him as she’d seen him last, his skinned, blood-drenched face protruding from the ant-covered sand. She heard her own rifle shot, and though she hadn’t looked at Juan after she’d pulled the trigger, she now saw the hole the bullet had drilled through his forehead.

Her heart contracted. Sobs racked her, tears flowing from her eyes and coursing down her dusty cheeks.

“Juan,” she cried softly.

Suddenly realizing all the sounds from the hollow had died, she lifted her head and peered around the rock. The night was still, the stars vivid. A light breeze blew, and a single wolf howled.

Wiping the tears from her cheeks with the heels of her hands, Karla crawled out of the niche and looked around. Nothing moved. Except for the wolf, all was silent.

The breeze biting her, and the rocks chewing at her feet, she followed a path of sorts through the rocks and pines around the edge of the hollow. She moved slowly, swinging her gaze in all directions.

Several times she found the scalped bodies of dead Apaches, blood on their hairless skulls. By now she’d seen so much horror, and was so chilled and terrified, that the grisly sightings barely registered. Navarro, Tixier, and the others foremost on her mind, she stepped over or around the bodies and, avoiding the very center of the hollow, where the dying fire glowed wanly and where intermittent snores resounded, made her way to the other side of the mountaintop. The Apaches, and probably the scalp hunters, had picketed their horses there, in the willows and curl leaf growing along a spring.

Amid the scarps and pine snags, it took her a long time to find the horses. When she did, she also found a bridle hanging from a branch.

Holding the bridle low at her side, she moved slowly toward the herd grazing on long picket ropes or reclining in the grass along the spring. She singled out the shortest one standing off by itself, and moved to it slowly, wincing at the thorny brush beneath her feet.

Seeing her, the little paint shied, sidled away, giving its tail a single angry swish. Karla cooed to the mount, holding her soiled hands out placatingly.

“Shhh . . . it’s all right,” Karla said, her voice shaking with the rest of her. “Oh, what a handsome horse you are. . . . That’s all right. . . . Don’t be afraid.”

As much as she felt the need to hurry, she took her time with the paint, speaking to it softly and letting it get used to her smell, before slipping the bridle over its ears. Because of her stiff legs and sore feet, she needed three tries to leap up onto its back, and when she finally got settled there, she reined the horse westward across the brushy bench. Two horses whinnied behind her. Before her and to the right, another jerked with a start, leaping off its rear hooves and running out to the end of its rope.

She set her teeth against the noise and heeled the horse into the cleft in the rock wall. The trail dropped steeply, throwing her forward over the horse’s neck. Twisting and turning between the jutting stone walls, the little paint picked its way, its hooves clipping stones, the jolting ride causing Karla’s sore muscles to scream and her bare rump to burn against the horse’s coarse hide.

It took a good quarter hour to get to the bottom of the mountain. When the paint finally leveled out at the base of an apron slope buried in mesquite, Karla reined back and heaved a long sigh of relief.

She was just about to bat her heels against the horse’s ribs and begin making her way south along the mountain’s base, when the sound of crunching gravel rose on her left. Acrid cigarette smoke peppered her nostrils. She whipped her head toward the sound and the smell. A man in a battered bowler hat stood wielding a rifle and an enraged scowl, a crooked quirley protruding from his thin lips.

Before Karla knew what was happening, the man had grabbed her left arm and pulled. He was short but powerful, and the tug jerked Karla instantly off the paint’s back. She hit the ground hard, her head glancing off a stone.

“Goddamn girl!” the short man snapped, dropping to his knees beside her and brusquely grabbing her chin in his callused right hand. He gave her head a violent shake, rattling her brains around. “Where the hell you think you’re goin’? Huh? Where on earth you think you’re goin’?”