Ralph Compton Navarro

Chapter 17

Setting his feet beneath him, Dupree looked at Karla with wild-eyed rage. The men who’d been resetting the saddles had turned to watch the show, chuckling.

“That girl there—she’s got spunk,” one remarked.

Dupree’s face turned even redder. He drew his right arm back, then suddenly forward, slamming the back of his hand against Karla’s face. Karla spun and flew, falling on her stomach. She heaved herself up on her arms. Her right cheek burning, her lower lip split and beginning to bleed, she turned quickly to see Dupree glaring at her as he moved toward her slowly, hands balled into tight fists, eyes glassy with rage. Karla scooted back on her seat and drew her knees up to protect herself from another blow.

“No one pushes Derrold Dupree. You hear?”

“Hold it, Dee.”

The voice had come from behind Dupree. The leader, Edgar Bontemps, stood beside his horse—a tall Chickasaw with two black socks and two white. One hand shoved down in his left saddlebag, he frowned across his horse’s rump at Dupree.

Dupree stopped in his tracks, staring furiously down at Karla. Bontemps grimaced, pulled his hand out of the saddlebag, and walked around his horse. As he strolled up to Dupree, his liquid blue eyes softened, and he laid a casual hand on the man’s thin shoulder.

“You know we don’t hit the girls,” Bontemps said, keeping his voice low and mild, one friend speaking to another. “Those are the rules, Dee. You understand the rules, right? We don’t get paid for damaged merchandise.”

Dupree stared hard at Karla for several more seconds. Then his shoulders loosened, and some of the flintiness left his colorless eyes. “Right, Edgar.”

Bontemps looked over his shoulder, where the other men were cinching their saddles and removing the feedbags from their horses’ snouts. Karla’s Arabian stood among the other horses, the hardcases having picked it up somewhere along the trail.

“Willis, come over here and tend the women, will you?” Bontemps said. “Dee’s a mite frustrated and needs a break.”

“You got it, Edgar,” Willis said, grinning and waving his coffeepot in the air, drying it before dropping it into a telescoping leather travel bag. “Be happy to.”

Bontemps smiled at Dupree. “Go tend your own mount. I want you and Granger to scout ahead this afternoon.” He slapped the man’s shoulder twice, puffing dust from Dupree’s black shirt and dyed hemp vest. “Best get a move on.”

When Dupree had gone, Bontemps jerked his trousers up his thighs and squatted over Karla. She removed her fingers from her swollen lip and peered reluctantly up at the grotesque man.

His oily, wildly curly hair made his bowler hat sit unevenly upon his head. He had curious and disturbing dark rings around his eyes, and gold earrings in both ears, which caused the lobes to droop grotesquely. On his arms, below the folded sleeves of an orange silk shirt with ruffled sleeves, were tattoos of snakes and trees and naked women. Karla had seen earlier that the palms of both his hands had been tattooed with bright red apples, each missing a bite.

With exaggerated tolerance, drawing out his Southern accent, he said, “Don’t make my boys mad, young lady. As you can see, you won’t like ’em when they’re mad.”

Karla brushed at the blood trickling down her lip.

Bontemps reached out, thumbed some of the blood from her chin, then looked at his thumb as though he’d never seen blood before. Rubbing his thumb on a patched trouser knee, he glanced at the sobbing Marlene and said to Karla, “Now get that cryin’ brat on her horse before I shoot her and throw her in a ravine. That girl’ll bring a nice sum, all young and smooth, but I don’t put up with bullshit.”

With that, Bontemps rose and walked away.

When Willis came over, stood before Karla, and crossed his big arms on his chest, threatening, Karla knelt down beside Marlene. The girl had stopped crying. She lay on her side, shivering and staring at the ground, her skirts and petticoats fanned out around her legs.

Karla swept a lock of copper blond hair back from the girl’s cheek. “Come on, Marlene. You have to get up now.”

The girl said nothing. A shiver racked her like an electrical charge. The desert air had dried the tears on her cheeks, leaving a salty patina.

“Please, Marlene.” Karla was surprised by the sudden resolve she was feeling. She’d thought she’d given up, but the prospect of the girl being killed forced her to put some steel into her voice as she spoke into the girl’s right ear. “If you don’t get up, Marlene, they’re going to kill you, and you’ll never see your family again.”

Thinly, the girl said, “I won’t see them again, anyway.”

“Yes, you will,” Karla whispered in the girl’s ear. “I promise you will.” She knew she had no grounds to make such a promise, but the words were out before she could take them back. She’d spoken them with such quiet force that she found herself strangely buoyed by them. It was almost as if she’d heard them spoken by someone else.

All the other girls were mounted now, and looking wanly down at Karla and Marlene. One of them—a sixteen-year-old, Billie, who’d worked at a stage station near Benson—had tears in her hazel eyes. “Come on, Marlene. Listen to Karla. We’ll be all right.”

“Come on, come on,” Willis growled. “We ain’t got all goddamn day!”

Marlene lifted her head and looked at Karla, hope showing in her eyes. Karla gave the girl her floppy black hat, which had been lying nearby, and tugged on the girl’s arm. Marlene snugged her hat on her head and slowly gained her feet. Karla led her over to her horse, helped her poke a dirty bare foot into a stirrup, then lifted her up into the saddle.

Stoically, Marlene stared down at Karla as Willis tied the girl’s hands to the saddle horn, the slaver muttering and shaking his head as he worked. Karla patted Marlene’s thigh encouragingly.

When Willis finished tying Marlene’s hands, he turned to Karla and gave her a brusque shove toward the pinto she’d been riding. “Come on, Mother,” he said with dry mockery. “Climb into the saddle. I’m tired of this foolishness.”

As Karla stumbled back toward the paint, she glanced at the skinning knife riding in the beaded leather sheath on the man’s left hip. As she reached up for her saddle horn and poked a bare foot through the left stirrup, the image remained in her vision, as if burned into her retina.

Having fought off her inertia, she began turning a plan in her mind.

If she could only get her hands on a knife . . .

Later, as the group rode across a cedar-pocked flat, Karla found herself positioned off the left rear hip of Marlene’s mare.

“How are you doing, Marlene?”

Marlene turned to her, the floppy black hat shading the girl’s small face. She glanced at Willis riding several yards behind Karla, trimming his fingernails with a folding knife, whistling and swaying lazily in his saddle.

“Am I really gonna see my folks again, Karla . . . or were you just saying that?”

“I meant every word of it, Marlene,” Karla said, keeping her voice low. As she stared straight ahead, her eyes were resolute. “We’re going to get away from these men.”

As they continued riding the rest of that day, Karla kept eyeing the knives her captors wore in belt sheaths, ankle sheaths, sheaths hanging from leather lanyards around their necks, down their backs, or protruding from boot tops. One man even wore a small bone-handled knife in his hat, Karla noticed when he’d doffed the low-crowned sombrero to wipe sweat from the band.

Most of the men wore at least two knives, prominently displayed. Who knew how many more they were wearing, secreted away in their clothes?

With that many knives around, Karla should be able to get her hands on at least one.

She mulled the idea until the group stopped at noon the next day. She was freed to tend to nature and, squatting down behind rocks, saw something bright lying in the red gravel ten feet away, between two scraggly pinions. When she finished her business, she glanced around and, seeing that the man instructed to keep his eye on her was smoking and talking to another man to his right, stole over to the object and looked down.

Her heart skipped a beat.

What she found herself staring at was an Indian arrow—sun-bleached and cracked but with a razor sharp, flatiron head. She glanced around again. The two men behind the rocks were still talking. Quickly, she crouched down, plucked the arrow off the ground, and broke it over her knee, making the break as close to the head as she could.

She stood, slipped the sharp tip and four-inch length of broken arrow into her right front pocket, pulled the long shirttails from her jeans, and arranged them over the pocket, concealing the elongated lump. Turning, she strode back to the horses.

The chinless, stubby-nosed man assigned to watch her stared at her suspiciously, his carbine crossed in his arms. “What were you doing over there?”

“What do you think?”

“What was that cracking noise?”

“I stepped on a twig,” Karla said, rolling her eyes as she brushed past the man, whom she’d overheard being called Snipe. “Don’t get your shorts all in a knot.”

When the group stopped again that night, bivouacking in a deep sand gorge, the girls were again tied in a string at least a hundred feet away from the men. As the altitude was higher here, the nights colder, Willis had been ordered to build them a small fire. Water was more plentiful here, too, so each girl was given a cup of coffee to wash down her serving of the antelope, which a couple of the scouts had shot earlier.

After they’d each been freed to tend to nature, and when their fire had been banked and they’d each been given a blanket, they all curled up and went to sleep. All except Karla.

She lay awake listening to the men getting drunk and singing and laughing around their fire on the other side of the gorge, just beyond some rocks and brush. They’d run into more whiskey traders earlier, so if things went like the last time they’d traded scalps for whiskey, they’d probably all be sleeping like March lambs within a few hours. One man had been sent to guard the girls, but he’d apparently had a good portion of mescal over supper. Sitting against the high rock wall to Karla’s right, he was having trouble keeping his head up. He took frequent sips from a small flask he’d produced from his boot well.

Lying on her side, curled beneath her single blanket, Karla watched him through slitted lids. Even before the other men had turned in for the night, the guard was sound asleep, chin on his chest, hat fallen onto the rifle resting across his thighs.

When both fires had burned down, and the men’s snores competed with the coyotes’ yammering, Karla rolled onto her left side. During the last time the men had untied her, she’d hidden the arrowhead up her right shirtsleeve. Jostling her arm until the arrow fell into her palm, she nudged Billie with her other elbow.

The girl groaned but remained asleep.

“Billie,” Karla whispered, nudging her again, “wake up.”

The girl’s eyes opened, and she tensed with alarm. “What?”

“Shhh,” Karla said. “I have a plan to get us out of here. Are you awake enough to listen?”

Billie turned to face her, blinking. “What’re you talking about?”

“I promised Marlene I’d get her back to her family, and I aim to keep my promise. Are you ready?”

“What . . . how . . . ?”

“I found an arrow sharp enough to cut through the ropes.” Karla turned a glance at the guard, who had now rolled onto his right shoulder, snoring.

Turning to Billie again, and keeping her voice down, Karla said, “They’re all drunk. Once we get all the girls untied, we can put bridles on the horses and ride out of here. If we’re very quiet, I think we can do it.”

Billie rose up on her left elbow. “How will we know where to go?”

“We’ll head north until we find a ranch or a town . . . anyone who’ll help us get back to the border.” Karla spared another glance at the guard. “These drunks’ll probably sleep until dawn. By the time they find us gone, we’ll be a good five or six hours away.”

Billie turned from Karla to regard the camp beyond the brush and the rocks. The fire had died down, but enough flickering light remained to silhouette the men slumped along the base of the rock wall. Not far from the firelight, the towering walls enshrouded the gorge in chill velvety darkness.

Billie turned to Karla. “All right.”

“Roll over,” Karla said, “and extend your wrists as far back as you can.”

As Billie rolled one way, giving her back and tied wrists to Karla, Karla rolled the other way, giving her own back and tied wrists to the girl. Sliding as close to Billie as she could, Karla took the girls hands in her own, traced the rope with her fingers, then took the arrowhead between the thumb and index finger of her right hand, and began sawing at the rope.

It was a long, tedious process, for the rope was stout, and the arrow wasn’t as sharp as a good bowie or skinning knife, like those worn by the hardcases. Lying with her back to what she was cutting, with her hands tied, cut off the blood flow. Her fingers stiffened quickly and she had to clasp the arrowhead in her palm several times, and rest. Precious time was wasting. She hadn’t thought it would take this long.

She was about two-thirds through the rope when the guard snorted suddenly. Karla had been staring at the ground as she worked, jaw tensed, but she lifted her gaze to the man now. He’d lifted his head and seemed to be looking this way. It was too dark for her to see him clearly, but she thought his mouth opened.

“I told you the money was good in that little bank,” he grumbled thickly. “Didn’t I tell you, boys?”

Karla lay still, clasping Billie’s hands in her own to keep her quiet. Karla could hear her heart beating. She stared at the hardcase. A minute later, his head collapsed, and a half minute after that, his snores resumed, blending with the others on the other side of the canyon.

Karla went back to work on Billie’s rope, and a minute later, her fingers stiff and swollen, she sawed through the last of the hemp strands. The rope gave, and Billie’s wrists sprang free.

“You did it!” Billie whispered.

Karla relaxed her tired muscles, resting her head on the ground, catching her breath. “Now free me,” she whispered to the girl behind her. “The arrow’s in my hand.”

Billie scrambled onto her knees and plucked the arrowhead from Karla’s right palm. Billie placed one hand on Karla’s shoulder and sawed at the rope with the other—choppy, uneven strokes. The knots were too tight for even the hardcases to work loose with their fingers; they always cut the rope. Billie grunted and gasped with effort, jerking Karla’s shoulders back and forth. But since she had full use of her hands, it wasn’t long before Karla felt the rope give.

Scrambling onto her knees, she ripped off the remaining rope from both wrists, then tugged and pulled and squeezed until she had her ankles free, as well. She squeezed Billie’s arm. “I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

Silently, Karla stood and tiptoed over to the unconscious guard. She crouched beside him, placed her hand on the bone-handled knife poking up from a sheath on his right hip, and slowly slipped it out.

Holding the knife in both hands, she turned slowly and tiptoed back to Billie kneeling and watching her, the girl’s wide eyes shadowed by the dying umber fire. Karla knelt and put the knife’s sharp edge to the ropes tying Billie’s ankles together. One flick of the knife, and Billie’s feet were free.

“Let’s free the rest of the girls,” Karla whispered, rising.

She turned away from Billie, then turned quickly back. A shadow moved just behind the girl, a high-crowned hat taking shape in the dull light. Karla’s blood turned to ice. Before she could move or think or do anything, an arm snaked around her from behind.

A hand closed brusquely over her mouth, pinching off her wind, lifting her off her feet, and jerking her back, half carrying, half dragging her off down the canyon.