Ralph Compton Navarro

Chapter 19

The morning after the two privates had tried to perforate his hide, Tom Navarro rose early, dressed quickly, and bid farewell to Sullivan, Ward, and Bryson. Riding through the fort’s open front gates, he saluted the two sentries and gigged the horse into a lope, the dun packhorse following on its ten-foot lead.

The morning began desert-fresh, but the sun rose, blistering, the mountains receding and cowering behind a brassy haze. Soon the Bar-V segundo’s new denims and chambray shirt were sweat-stained, and his broad-brimmed black hat was coated with a fine sheen of adobe-colored dust. The only old accoutrements he had were his gun belt and .44, the undershot Justins on his feet, and the red bandanna knotted around his neck.

Navarro preferred familiar mounts for treks into strange country, but his own horse had probably either been taken by the same scalp hunters who’d nabbed Karla, or was still wandering the cuts around Gray Rock, foraging and looking for water. The bay stepped out smartly, and as he wended his way into the rough country near the peak, the bay as well as the dun proved sure-footed and deep-bottomed.

Good stayers both, and they seemed forgiving of long stretches without water. Not bad for Army remounts, which, like most soldiers, often proved over-trained and underexperienced.

The trek back to Gray Rock proved futile. The slavers’ sign had been obliterated by isolated rain squalls, wind, and animals. All that remained atop the mountain was dry horse apples, dirt-caked carnage, and the sickly sweet fetor of death.

The Army had buried the bodies in graves too shallow to thwart predators. Bloody limbs and viscera were strewn about the dust and rocks.

Without tracks, he had no choice but to head south and try to cut the scalp hunters’ trail somewhere along the way, or hope to hear word of where the renegades might be headed.

He camped at the butte’s base, having a few drinks that night in honor of Dallas and Charlie, noting how lonely it felt without either or both at his side. He started south so early the next morning that a mountain lion was still keening and whining atop the peak above him, probably warning wolves or coyotes away from its breakfast.

Two nights later, Navarro rode into Tombstone amid the patter of tin-panny music and the blasts of jubilant gunfire, soiled doves beckoning from cat-house balconies. After stabling his horses, he consulted Sheriff Johnny Behan, who offered no information about a slaver named Bontemps, which didn’t surprise Navarro. Johnny Behan was better known for gambling and carousing than for fogging owlhoot trails.

Not wanting trouble from long-memoried enemies or prospective gunslicks, Navarro drank and ate alone in his Russ House hotel room, then slept with his pillow over his head to blot out the noise from the street below his room, including fiddle music and several bursts of gunfire.

Up with the dung shovelers the next dawn, he saddled his grained and curried mounts, and followed the river courses into Sonora. Combing such vast, rugged terrain was akin to cleaning a buffalo rug one hair at a time. Sitting a ridge and gazing over the thrusting barrancas and pillared rimrocks stretched out between distant, blue snow-mantled peaks, he felt overwhelmed with futility.

He rode on, however. He would not give up his search until he’d either found Karla or settled her score.

He’d been scouring river basins, inquiring in little towns and at farms for two weeks, learning nothing about slave traders or Yanqui girls. Then, one morning, in the sandy creekbed in which he’d camped the night before, he came upon the sign of four shod horses.

One of the track sets caught his eye.

There was something in the horse’s gate, shoe fit, or nail pattern that seemed familiar. He’d tracked many horses over the years, and thousands of prints had been seared into his brain. Maybe he only imagined something familiar about this set, but he followed them, anyway.

He’d trailed the four riders for two hours, and was plodding along a deep-rutted cart trail, with an alkali flat on his left, when a shot sounded to his right and slightly behind. He reined the bay to a halt and, shucking his Winchester from the saddle boot, whipped his head toward the sound.

A rocky ridge heaved a hundred feet off the trail, paralleling it. As he studied the formation, three more rifle shots rang out. They’d seemed muffled, as though fired from inside a building.

A faint yell rose on the breeze.

Navarro reined the bay to the base of the ridge, dismounted, and tied both horses to a spindly shrub. His Winchester in his right hand, he climbed the slope, weaving around rocks and yucca. Removing his hat, he hunkered down behind a cracked, cart-sized boulder at the ridge’s brow, and peered into the shallow draw on the other side.

A sun-bleached adobe stood against the draw’s opposite ridge, which shelved gently back, spiked with yucca, short grass, and mesquite shrubs. Several brown and cream-colored goats milled along the rocks, pulling at the brush.

Inside the cabin, another shot barked, the slug blasting open a shutter on the other side of the house. The ricochet sliced off a rock with a metallic zing, puffing dust and narrowly missing a goat, which craned its head to stare at the bullet-scarred rock for several seconds before turning again to graze.

Ignoring the gunfire, Navarro turned his attention to the brush corral, where four horses and a mule stood statue-still, facing the rear fence and the spindly cottonwood partially shading it. Two horses were duns, one a black barb, the other a white Arabian.

Navarro stared at the Arabian, his spine tensing, his flinty blue eyes keen.

He had little doubt it was Karla’s horse. Not many Mexicans could afford a white Arabian. What it was doing here, he had no idea. Maybe these people knew nothing about the slavers. Maybe they did.

“Santa Madre!” a voice cried within the weathered adobe walls.

A shot barked.

Laughter rose.

Navarro had just shifted his gaze from Karla’s horse to the cabin when the front door opened. A man came half stumbling, half running into the yard. He tripped over a rock and dropped to a knee—a lanky Mexican in pajama bottoms but no shirt or hat. A burly man stepped through the door, staggering, a bottle in his right hand.

He extended the bottle at the man on the ground and berated the skinny gent in Spanish, warning him to hurry or he’d kill his brother. The stout man in the doorway, wearing a dark brown poncho with bandoliers crossed on his chest, turned drunkenly. He bounced off the doorframe, then disappeared back inside the adobe, leaving the door open behind him.

Peering around the rock, Navarro watched the slender man climb to his feet, and limp across the yard to the covered wagon parked before the corral. He reached through the back flap and pulled three bottles out of the wagon. Cradling the bottles carefully in his arms, he hurried back to the cabin and disappeared through the door.

Another shot erupted inside, followed by the sound of breaking glass . . . followed by angry shouts and another pistol blast.

Navarro studied the draw, arranging a plan for approaching the cabin without being seen. He stood, retraced his steps down the ridge, stubbornly refusing to limp on his healing right leg, then made sure his horses were both tied fast. Rifle in hand, he left the horses tied to the shrubs and scrambled along the ridge’s base, heading east.

After a hundred yards, he climbed the ridge again and scrambled down the other side, then along a shallow ravine that led around behind the cabin, to the ridge on the opposite side.

He climbed halfway to the ridge’s crest and hunkered down in the rocks behind the adobe, amid the goats. The animals stopped foraging to eye the stranger warily.

From here, Navarro had a clean view of the cabin’s rear. There were a door and a window on this end, but mesquite logs and brush had been piled high around the window. If he approached the adobe from the southeast corner, he should be able to make the hovel’s rear door without being seen.

That was what he did, ignoring the pain in his right calf. He pressed his back to the hot, bright adobe wall left of the rear door hammered together from thin planks and cheap nails.

Inside, a gun continued its intermittent bark, followed by raucous laughter. Whoever had come calling on the poor goat herders was having one hell of a time—at the goat herders’ expense. Probably whiskey peddlers or scalp hunters. The wagon he’d seen parked beside the corral had looked like those run by that brand of border tough, as thick in this country as flies on a fresh dog plop.

Laughter and pleas spewed from the adobe walls and windows, punctuated by pistol shots.

Navarro stole around the building’s northeast corner and sidled up to a chest-high window in the north wall. Crouching, he slid a quick glance into the room, where six men and one young woman milled. Four of the men, sitting at a small wooden table, were tangle haired, bushy bearded, and armed with prominently displayed guns and knives. Bottles, glasses, and coins littered the table.

One man held an Indian-dark, round-faced woman on his lap and was nuzzling her neck and squeezing her breasts through a loose-fitting doeskin shift. The woman sat stiffly enduring the assault, looking away from the man, her face taut with disgust and anger.

Navarro’s glance was so quick that he wasn’t sure what the other two at the table were doing, but the third was aiming a Merwin and Hulbert .44 at a gray-haired Mexican man tied to a chair before a window on the other side of the room. The man wore no shirt, and his lean, muscular arms and birdlike chest bore the scars of a dozen old knife wounds.

An empty, dented vegetable tin stood atop the man’s gray head. The man aiming the .44—his elbow propped on the table, head lolling drunkenly—was the hombre who’d sent the other goat herder out to fetch more whiskey.

The young man who’d done the fetching was crouched before the stone fireplace in the back wall, stirring beans in a bubbling pot with an air of desperation and casting wild-eyed glances over his right shoulder. His black hair hung in his eyes, one of which was noticeably lower than the other.

Navarro slid his head back from the window as the older Mexican tied to the chair screamed in Spanish, “Please . . . in the name of all the sain—”

The .44 barked. A tinny thud, followed by a squeal. Shrill laughter rose.

In Spanish, a man at the table yelled, “Miguel, that’s another centavo you owe me, you son of a three-legged nanny goat!”

Navarro inched his right eye once more across the window’s edge. From this pinched angle, he could see only the right side of the room. The gray-haired man screamed and cursed and fought against the ropes tying his hands behind the chair back. His right temple shone with a three-inch line of bright red blood. The can lay on the floor behind his chair. He was as angry now as frightened, and his pleas were laced with curses salty enough to make the Devil take note.

Navarro slid his head back, dropped to his knees, crawled forward along the wall below the window, then rose and stalked around the adobe’s northwest corner and sidled up to the open front door. He raised the Winchester in both hands.

Just beyond the door, the gray-haired man was pleading for his life while the man with the gun ordered the cook to replace the can.

One of the other traders laughed as though at the funniest joke he’d ever heard. The girl squealed and struggled, the chair creaking as though it were about to break.

The smell of fresh tortillas, frijoles, and gunsmoke wafted through the door beside Navarro’s right shoulder. He waited, listening. A chair scraped back. Boots scuffed across the hard-packed floor, moving toward him.

When Tom heard them moving back toward the table, he waited until the gray-haired man began pleading again in earnest, then jacked a round into his Winchester’s breech. He turned through the door and snapped the Winchester up. He drew a bead on the big man taking rheumy-eyed aim at the older man with the can on his head, and fired.

Blood burst in a fine spray from the big man’s shoulder. He flew back in his chair, dropping the pistol, his beard-enshrouded lips making a broad “O” as he raged.

Two of the other three men had been sitting in a near-catatonic state of drunkenness while the fourth pawed the round-faced woman. Now, seeing Tom burst into the room, the woman howled. The man whose lap she adorned bolted up and forward, throwing the woman to the floor in a squealing heap and clawing his pistol off the table.

Tom yelled, “Stop!”

When the man kept coming toward him, raising the pistol and thumbing back the hammer, Tom drilled a round through his left thigh, just above the knee. The man dropped to that knee, his own screams joining those of the big man as he rolled onto his left hip, dropping the pistol and wrapping both hands around his leg.

Ejecting the smoking shell casing, Navarro took another step forward and raised his rifle to the other two men at the table. One froze with his right hand on his right hip. The other sat to his left, both hands lying flat on the table, fingers splayed and digging into the wood as if to gouge a sliver. Both stared at Tom fearfully, their jaws hanging.

The man on the floor before the table snapped his gun off the floor, cursing. He raised it toward Tom. Tom dropped the Winchester’s barrel and shot him through the right temple, spraying the floor with blood, brains, and bone.

Navarro jacked another shell and raised the rifle in the general direction of the two men sitting frozen behind the table. “You hombres want daisies growin’ out of your jaws, or do you think we can palaver like civilized folk?”

The man with his hands splayed on the table squinted at Tom and grumbled thickly in Spanish, “What do you want to talk about, amigo?”

The big man lay propped against the far wall, clutching his bloody shoulder and breathing hard as he stared at Navarro. Tom glanced right. The man who’d been cooking was now on both knees before the fire, his arms around the woman who lay at his feet. Her round eyes in her round, dark face regarded Tom cautiously.

“You own this place?” Tom asked the young man who’d been cooking.

“Sí.” He looked at the man tied to the chair behind Tom. “With my brother.”

“That your wife?”

“Sí.”

“Untie your brother. Then all of you go outside and get yourselves cleaned up.”

“Amigo,” said the Mexican with his hands on the table, lifting them and shrugging reasonably, “we are only settling a debt. Vincente and Alonzo bought whiskey from us last month on credit. We came for our money, and they didn’t have it. . . .”

Navarro glanced at the young man again, jerked his head at the gray-haired man. When the young man had untied his older brother, and they and the girl had gone outside, Navarro walked over to the table, Winchester extended from his hip. He looked at both drunk Mexicans sitting before him, still frozen in their chairs, bloodshot eyes rolling around in their sockets.

“Toss your guns in that corner. All of ’em—hideouts included.”

When the two men at the table had tossed five pistols into the corner behind the door, Navarro walked over to the man lying behind them. He removed a pistol from his cartridge belt, one from a shoulder holster, and a bowie from a boot sheath. He tossed the weapons into the corner with the others, then regarded the three whiskey traders coldly. They stared back at him in kind.

“Who belongs to that white Arabian out in the corral yonder?” Navarro asked.

When none said a word, Navarro approached the table. He swung the rifle back and forward, laying the barrel soundly against the head of the man on the left. The man was nearly thrown from his chair. He clutched his ear, drew the hand away, and looked at the blood smeared on his fingers. “Son of a whore!”

“I’m gonna ask you one more time, and I better get a straight answer. Who bel—”

“It’s his!” cried the man with the torn ear, jerking his head back to indicate the man lying against the wall.

The big man lay glaring up at Tom with flared nostrils. Blood puddled the floor beneath his shoulder.

“Where’d you get it?” Tom asked.

The wounded man shrugged his good shoulder. “Cabelludo cazadores.”

“Where’d you run into these scalpers?”

“Rio Bavispe.”

“Which way were they heading?”

“They head south. Traded the horse for whiskey.”

“They have Yanqui girls, gringas, with ’em?”

The wounded man nodded slowly. “They have gringas.” He made a lewd gesture and spread a grin. “Bonita gringas.”

A half hour later, when Navarro had learned the direction Bontemp’s men were headed, he sent the whiskey traders off in their wagon.

He left their guns with the goat herders and headed south. Karla’s Arabian followed on a lead line.