Navarro

Chapter 3

Tom Navarro’s spry paint followed the meandering desert trace through a notch in the hills, around a long bend hugging a dry wash on the left, and into a shallow canyon. Scrub pines and mesquite stippled the boulder-strewn slopes on both sides. Behind Navarro, the wagon rattled and drummed, the beer and wine casks sloshing near the tailgate.

Amado, Waters, and Tryon rode behind the lumbering Conestoga, slouched in their saddles, faces dimming beneath their hat brims as the sun sank low.

The supply trip to town was normally a much-coveted assignment—especially when the fun-loving Tixier led the crew. It wasn’t as much fun when Navarro led. The silver-haired frontiersman and exgunslinger ran a tight ship, allowing the men to stay in town only two nights and never past midnight either night. And they could cavort only with the doves Navarro deemed acceptable—namely, those who would not put a man on his back with a burning case of the pony drip. Men with the drip couldn’t ride or do much of anything but lay abed and howl.

And howling, as Navarro said, “ain’t what the boss is payin’ us for.”

Navarro halted the paint and dismounted to remove a windblown branch from the trail. As he grabbed the horn to mount again, he froze and lifted his head to the slope rising on the right side of the trace. Holding his breath, he pricked his ears.

He’d turned fifty that March but he still had the ears of a coyote, and he’d heard something just now. Wasn’t sure what but it didn’t sound natural. There wasn’t a lick of wind. The birds were oddly silent for this time of the day. It had cooled some, and the birds usually fed and fought and called reminders of their boundary lines from early dusk to good dark.

Hearing nothing else, Navarro swung up into the saddle. The wagon hammered along behind, slowing as it approached Tom. Tryon must have seen the cautious set to Navarro’s shoulders.

“What is it, boss?”

“I don’t know.” Navarro glanced around. It was getting late for an Apache attack. The desert Indians wouldn’t normally fight at night, for they worried that, if they were killed after dark, their souls would get lost on their way to the next world. “Stay alert. I’m gonna ride up the southern slope and take a look around. Keep moving. I’ll catch up to you in a bit.”

Tom swung his horse forward and gigged it down the twisting canyon trail. After fifty yards, he turned the horse left off the main trail and followed a narrow game trail, spotted with deer and rabbit scat, high onto a pine-clad mountain shoulder. He rode up and over the shoulder and into another canyon.

Soft thuds rose from below. He glanced into the canyon. Several blacktail deer, led by a spike buck, clattered up the opposite slope, their white rears and knobby black tails bobbing as they scattered into the mesquite and pinions and disappeared over a rocky knob.

Navarro gazed after the deer and fingered the horn handle of his .44. Could be Apaches that spooked them. Possibly a bear. Navarro had killed a grizzly out here late last fall, after the grizzly had butchered several head of Bar-V beef. Or maybe they’d heard Tom’s own hoof falls. It was damn quiet out here tonight, with no birds singing, no coyotes howling the sun down.

Navarro was rounding a thumb of cracked andesite when, up the slope on his right, beyond a boulder snag, a horse blew. Navarro reined his paint to an abrupt halt and shucked the Winchester repeater from the saddle boot beneath his right thigh. Holding his reins in his gloved left hand, he cocked the rifle with his right and snugged the brass butt plate against his hip.

He sensed more than heard the bullet slicing the air to his left. Throwing his chest flat against the paint’s neck, he heard the bullet buzz over his right shoulder a split second after the rifle’s crack rose from downslope.

He reined the horse left and, staying low, swung his rifle toward the downslope side of the hill, where two men crouched in the rocks and shrubs. Navarro fired the Winchester. One-handed, he jacked another shell and fired another round.

His first round barked off a rock. His second took one bushwacker—a short hombre in a dirty plaid shirt and a straw sombrero—through the high right side of his chest. He only saw the man begin to fly backward down the slope when the second man fired. The bullet smashed into the paint’s chest with a cracking thump. As Navarro shook loose of the stirrups, the horse reared, twisting and falling as it screamed.

Navarro hit the ground on his right shoulder, dug his boots into the gravel, and flung himself forward and out of the falling horse’s path. The second bushwacker fired again, the flames stabbing from the end of the barrel, the bullet smacking a slender nub of rock two feet before Navarro’s face.

The rock finger disintegrated, but it had been enough of an obstruction to knock the bullet wide with an echoing spang, stinging Navarro’s face with only shards of rock and lead.

Cursing, hearing the horse’s final anguished throes to his left, Navarro rose to his left hip, aimed at the second bushwacker just as the tall slender gent in a floppy hat and buckskins levered another shell into the chamber of his Henry rifle.

Navarro shot the man low in the belly. As the man groaned and dropped to his knees, firing the Henry into the rocks at his feet, the Bar-V segundo remembered the sound he’d heard upslope.

Jacking another shell into his Winchester’s chamber, he pushed himself to his feet, ran across the trail, and crouched at the upslope’s base, behind rocks and twisted cedars.

He was edging a look up the steep, rocky grade when a bullet slammed into the rock a foot above his head, kicking up dust and stone slivers, which peppered the trail and dead horse behind Navarro like hail.

“Think you’re tough now, you son of a bitch!” The screechy, indignant voice of the kid from the cantina echoed around the canyon several times before it faded.

Pressing his back to the slope and clutching his rifle in both hands, Navarro swallowed the dry knot in his throat and fingered the Winchester’s trigger. The kid. The son of a bitchin’ stupid-ass kid!

The wiry little firebrand had found some amigos in Tucson, probably sleeping off drunks in the livery barn or the town’s lone boardinghouse. Intending to set up an ambush in the canyon, they’d taken a shortcut from town. Navarro had heard them on the ridge and busted their little fandango wide open.

Only they’d killed a good horse, one that Navarro had raised from a Colt and gentled in his own little paddock behind his cabin.

And the kid had the high ground. . . .

“Come on out here, you old duffer!” the kid called. “Think you can make sport o’ me now! Ha!”

The rifle popped. The bullet smacked the same rock the previous one had smacked, making Navarro’s ears ring.

Tom looked to either side. Straight above, the hill bulged, forming troughs on either side. From the angle of the kid’s shooting, he must be snugged up in the left trough. The hill’s bulge would prevent him from seeing what was going on in the right trough.

Navarro wheeled right and, crouching to keep his head below the bulge, began climbing the trough. The kid fired another round at his old position, the rifle’s report echoing. Navarro climbed between boulders, occasionally losing his footing in the chalky shale. Once he dropped to a knee, but pushed up and on, grabbing at boulders and shrubs for purchase.

“Come on outta there, ye old bastard!” the kid cried, his voice muffled. “Show yourself now, ye damn coward.” Another echoing shot.

Navarro climbed between two cracked boulders leaning away from each other, grabbed a pinion, and hoisted himself to the ridge top. Lots of gravel up here and spots of bobcat sign.

In the west, the sun was falling fast beneath fleecy golden clouds, bleeding deep into the jagged purple ridges.

On one knee and looking around, Navarro caught his breath, admonished himself to go easy on the rum-soaked Cubans Vannorsdell blessed him with on occasion, and scuttled around the rocky bulge, following the goat path down the other side.

The kid’s rifle had popped three more times before Navarro, heading downslope one slow step at a time and leveling the rifle out from his right hip, crept around a boulder and stopped.

The kid was hunkered behind a rocky shelf, his Spencer repeater propped in a notch of a flat rock. The kid yelled another jeering demand from behind his cover and jacked another shell in the Spencer’s breech.

Ten yards behind him, Navarro said, “Kid, you’re wild as a corncrib rat and dumb as a dog barkin’ at a knothole.”

The kid froze.

“I tried to educate you,” the Bar-V segundo said. “But it looks like I’m gonna have to put you down.”

The kid stayed where he was, facing the downslope, his Spencer cocked and aimed at Navarro’s old position. His right shoulder twitched. He didn’t seem to be breathing. Between the sweaty curls pasted to his shirt collar, his neck was growing crimson.

Finally, he whipped around, bringing the Spencer to bear, stretching his lips back from his teeth in an outraged snarl.

Navarro’s rifle spoke five times as Tom stood, gray eyes narrowed, feet spread, shooting and cocking, shooting and cocking.

The kid got off only one shot as Tom’s shots ripped through his chest, drawing a small circle over his heart. The kid’s head snapped back against the rock, eyes blinking rapidly, each shot holding him there for the next. After the last shot had blown through his spine, he sighed and slowly slumped to his right, relaxing, the Spencer slipping from his hands.

Behind him, the rocks dripped red.

At the bottom of the slope, a rifle barked. A horse whinnied. The rifle barked again. A man yelled.

Navarro climbed over the shelf the young firebrand had used for cover, and hurried down the steep, rocky slope, breaking his descent by grabbing pinion and mesquite branches.

Several more shots rose to his ears.

“Whatcha think you’re doin’, ye greaser bastard?” he heard Ky Tryon complain.

At the bottom of the slope, Navarro turned left onto the game path he’d been following when he’d been bushwacked. He stepped around his dead paint, traced a bend around the mountain’s shoulder, and stopped.

Ky Tryon lay upon the trail, clutching his extended left leg with one hand, his six-shooter in the other. Blood oozed between the fingers of the hand clutching his thigh. Tryon’s face was pinched with pain.

Right of the trail, downslope, the stocky Mex in the dirty plaid shirt was moving slowly up the slope toward Tryon. His sombrero hung down his back, and his long silver-streaked black hair fell over his shoulders. He moved awkwardly, obviously in pain from his wounded shoulder, his Winchester in his right hand.

“Stop there, amigo,” Navarro called.

The Mex wheeled toward him too quickly, then lost his balance and dropping. As his right knee hit the ground, the rifle went off, sending the slug several yards off Tryon’s right shoulder.

The man cursed loudly in Spanish as, on both knees now, he took the rifle in both hands and began fumbling another shell into the chamber. He didn’t look at Navarro but kept his pain-twisted, sweating face on the rifle as he cried and cursed and fought the lever, caught against a half-ejected cartridge.

Navarro brought his own Winchester to his shoulder, quickly aimed, and fired.

The round plowed through the Mexican’s head, just above the hairline. The man flew back onto a half-dead juniper, arms pinwheeling, the rifle clattering onto the rocks and gravel to his left.

Navarro lowered the Winchester and ran to Tryon. The drover looked at him through pain-sharp eyes.

“Came up to help you out,” he rasped. “Damn Mex smoked me.”

“I told you to wait below.”

“Well, I didn’t—okay, Tom?” Tryon barked and sucked air through his gritted teeth.

Navarro turned. “You see the other one?”

“What other one?”

“Wait here.”

Navarro moved quickly but cautiously down the slope, peering around boulders for the tall man in buckskins. The light was dying quickly, the shadows thickening, making him look twice behind prospective cover before moving on.

After he found the thick blood pool where he’d shot the man, it didn’t take him long to track him to where he’d crawled, smearing blood thick as oil, fifty yards down the slope and west of his previous position. The man sat with his back to a deadfall pine.

He literally cupped his guts in both his ham-sized hands. The wound smelled like fresh blood and excrement.

When Navarro’s shadow fell across him, he sighed and lifted his chin from his right shoulder. His big face with a mallet nose and tiny eyes was sweat-soaked, the beads turning crimson as a fleeting shaft of dying sun broke through a notch in a western ridge.

“Please, mister,” the man groaned, tongue cracking dryly, “just a drink of water . . .”

Navarro glanced up the slope at Tryon and at the dead paint—nearly as good a horse as he’d ever owned—stretched across the path as though dropped from the sky.

“How ’bout some lead instead?”

Navarro raised the rifle and fired.