Ralph Compton Navarro

Chapter 18

Karla flailed with the knife until an arm smashed down on her wrist. Her hand opened, and the knife fell as she was pulled quickly backward, stumbling over rocks and shrubs. She fell and was dragged over sand and gravel, the bottoms of her feet and the backs of her heels rubbed raw.

She must have been carried sixty or seventy yards down the canyon before the man suddenly released her. She fell hard on her back, the air slammed from her lungs.

“Got yourself free, uh, pretty gringa?” the man said in a heavy Mexican accent, catching his breath. “Good. That makes less work for me and Weelis.”

Karla was too out of breath to say anything. She looked back the way she’d come. A shadow moved toward her. Two figures, in fact—the man called Willis manhandling Billie the way Karla had been wrenched and dragged down the canyon. Willis had one arm around the girl’s waist, his other hand cupped over her mouth.

Approaching, he twisted around and flung Billie down beside Karla, then brought his hat to his mouth, sucking a finger. “Little bitch bit me!”

Billie gasped and sobbed, her hair splayed across her face.

Gaining her breath at last, Karla rose up on her elbows and snarled at the Mexican, whom she’d heard called Pancho, “What do you think you’re doing?”

Pancho flung his hat aside and grinned down at her, showing his pointed brown teeth buried within his thin, drooping mustaches. “Weelis and I decided we have gone without female companionship long enough.”

With that, he chuckled and threw himself atop Karla, pinning her hands down with his own and nuzzling her neck. Karla recoiled from the oily, bristly feel of the man, and from the ripe stench of the mescal on his breath. Gritting her teeth, she struggled, scissoring her legs and trying to free her hands.

As she fought, she heard Billie struggling to her left, pleading and sobbing. Clothing ripped. Billie started to scream, but it was cut short by a hand on her mouth.

“Shut up, you little bitch,” Willis growled at the girl. “One word of this to Edgar, and Pancho and I’ll skin you both alive!”

Karla slipped her right hand out from under Pancho’s left, and slapped the wiry Mexican hard across his face. Laughing, he grabbed her wrist, squeezing until she thought the bone was being pulverized, and slammed it back down in the gravel beside her head.

He was lowering his head once more to hers when he suddenly froze. Keeping his hand clamped down on hers, he jolted upright and looked around, listening.

“Weelis,” he whispered.

Willis was too involved to reply until Pancho had called his name two more times. Willis raised his head from Billie’s chest and turned to his cohort, frowning incredulously, his hair in his eyes.

Pancho opened his mouth to speak but stopped when something thrashed in the brush on the south side of the canyon, to Karla’s right. Both men turned sharply that way. An instant later, Pancho released Karla’s left hand, and slipped his revolver from his holster, thumbing back the hammer.

“What the hell was that?” Willis said, rising on his knees and unholstering his own pistol.

The brush on the other opposite of the canyon thrashed, as though something large were on the prod. Both men whipped their heads that way.

“ ’Paches,” Willis said, a trill in his voice. He stood, stumbling back a step. “Shit . . .”

“Madre Maria!” Pancho cried, standing over Karla and extending his pistol toward the right side of the canyon.

Karla turned her face to the ground and crossed her arms over her head as the bark of Pancho’s revolver echoed like a cannon in the narrow cleft. The man fired again. Willis did, as well, both men firing until the chasm filled with one continuous roar, making Karla’s ears ring and her nostrils fill with the rotten-egg smell of cordite.

The din died suddenly, punctuated by both gun hammers snapping on empty chambers.

“What the hell . . . ?” Willis whispered.

Karla lowered her arms and turned to look up at the two men. They stood ten feet away, back to back, facing opposite sides of the canyon. The darkness was relieved by only the few stars that shone between the towering rock walls. Billie lay huddled to Karla’s right, facedown, head buried in her arms.

On the right side of the canyon, the brush popped and rattled, as though someone were thrashing around with a stick.

“Sheet,” Pancho muttered. “They’re still there—reload!”

Both men had just begun ripping fresh shells from their cartridge belts when a gun popped on the right side of the canyon, the flash like a sudden lightning bolt lashing parallel to the ground.

“Madre!” Pancho cried, both knees buckling as he grabbed his left thigh.

Willis flipped opened his revolver’s loading gate and tried shoving a bullet into a chamber. The bullet clicked against the cylinder and dropped from his shaking hands, plunking off his right boot toe.

The gun in the brush popped again.

Willis’ right leg snapped back. The man grunted sharply and fell, clutching his knee and cursing.

Silence thickened, relieved only by the sighs and groans of the two wounded men shuffling around in the darkness before Karla, who lay on her side beside Billie, one hand on the girl’s back.

For a time, she’d been certain she was about to die. Now she wasn’t so certain. . . .

The brush on the right side of the canyon thrashed. A man chuckled. Karla turned from the wounded men to see a tall shadow move out from the canyon wall. The brush on the opposite side of the canyon crackled, and another shadow walked out to meet the first one in the canyon’s center, where Pancho and Willis clutched their wounded limbs and rolled on their backs in agony.

“Does that hurt terribly, Pancho?” Edgar Bontemps asked. “It should.” He slid his foot toward the wounded Mexican.

Pancho screamed. “Ah, madre, please . . . !”

Sensing what was coming, Karla closed her hands over Billie’s ears and steeled herself, wincing.

“What have I told you men about playing with the girls? Huh, Willis? What have I told you about damaging the trade goods?”

“Please, Edgar,” Willis said in a pinched voice. “Don’t do this. You can’t expect us to ride with these girls for days without tryin’ to get a little. That ain’t reasonable. It just ain’t reasonable.” He panted. “Oh, Lord. You blew out my knee, Edgar!”

The gun exploded again, flames stabbing down from Bontemps’ silhouette. Willis screamed. It did not sound like a human scream at all, as it spiraled and echoed toward the canyon’s rim, charging the darkness with an enervated fever.

“There!” the man raged. “I blew out the other!”

Willis cried and panted. He whimpered like a small child.

“Just ’cause you,” Willis managed to squeak out accusingly, “just ’cause you can’t take no pleasure . . . since the war . . .”

Another gun blast silenced him.

“And now for you, Pancho . . . a lesson to take to the next world.”

“No, por favor!”

Pop! Pop!

Silence except the distant murmurs of the other men spilling out from the camp.

“Should I bury ’em, Edgar?” Dupree asked.

“No,” Bontemps said. “Drag ’em back to camp so the others get a good look at what happens to those that fool with the merchandise.” Walking away, he holstered his pistol and grumbled, “And tie those girls with the others.”

Two days later, Mordecai Hawkins—chief wrangler for the Butterfield stage station at Benson, Arizona—halted his horse along a rocky saddle high in pine-clad Sonoran mountains. Holding his Henry rifle in his right hand, he leaned out over his left stirrup and scoured the ground with his gaze.

After a minute, Hawkins straightened, slammed his left fist down on his saddle horn so hard that the claybank spooked, flicking its ears and tossing its head. The old wrangler loosed a spiel of epithets that would have colored the cheeks of the woolliest St. Louis grogshop proprietor.

“What is it, Mr. Hawkins?” a woman said behind him.

The wrangler broke off the tirade midsentence and whipped around in his saddle, startled. “Uh . . . sorry, Mrs. Talon,” the old wrangler said meekly. “Didn’t hear ye ride up.”

“Have we lost the trail again?” Louise Talon asked.

She sat a tall paint mare—a regal brown-eyed woman of early middle-age, with long cherry blond hair pulled back in a ponytail held fast with a bone clasp at the nape of her neck. She wore black gloves, a felt hat, a cream blouse that accented the full breasts and slender waist, and a belted wool skirt with a slit for riding astride.

Louise Talon had what Hawkins had heard described as classical beauty, with a prominent chin, straight nose, and salty Irish humor lines around her wide-set eyes, which shone like pennies at certain times of the day. Hawkins thought the woman could pass for an Irish queen, but she was no fainting Fianna. She had run the swing station at Benson since her husband, a freight contractor, died six years ago, leaving her with one swaybacked gelding and a file drawer swollen with unpaid bills.

At first, Hawkins had scoffed at working for a woman. But having seen Mrs. Talon fight off marauding Apaches and horse thieves with a Winchester rifle, in addition to cooking, cleaning, serving stage passengers, and tending an irrigated kitchen garden, he’d deemed her as tough or tougher than many of the men he’d once trapped with up along the Green River in Wyoming—high praise from an old hardtack frontiersman like Hawkins.

“ ’Pears the rain washed it out,” Hawkins told her with a faint edge of annoyance. “Why don’t you wait here, give the horses a blow? I’ll cross that creek yonder. See if I can cut the sign again in them trees.”

Without waiting for her reply, he dismounted, handed her his reins and the packhorse’s lead rope, then ambled down the gravelly hill tufted in short tough grasses with a sprinkling of blue and purple wildflowers. He crossed the creek and tramped along the pine-clad shoulder of the opposite hill, lowering his head to scour the ground with his gaze.

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.