Ralph Compton Navarro

Chapter 5

Navarro and five other riders were mounted and waiting before the big house. The sun hadn’t yet climbed above the horizon, and the clear sky above the ranch was lighter than the land. The smell of mesquite smoke still peppered the fresh air.

After Pilar had discovered Karla’s empty bed, she’d awakened the old man. Still in his pajamas and slippers, he’d ordered the hands, just rising in the bunkhouse, to scour the grounds. When they’d found no sign of the girl, and had discovered the Arabian gone, Tixier had fetched Navarro.

The house’s stout oak door opened and Vannorsdell walked out, tucking his shirt into his baggy riding denims. “I can’t believe she’d pull such a stupid stunt,” the old rancher said, as Jorge Amado handed him the reins of a black quarterhorse gelding, saddled and waiting. The rancher grunted and wheezed as he climbed into the saddle. He turned to Navarro, who wore a white cotton shirt with blue pinstripes, suspenders, and bull-hide chaps over blue denims. “Doesn’t look like she slept in her bed at all last night. What in the hell do you think she’s up to?”

“Looks to me like she went after her Don Juan.”

“Do you think she’s really that goddamn crazy in love with that bean eater?”

Navarro shrugged. “You know Karla.”

“If that crazy girl started out when she told Pilar she was going to bed, she’s a good seven, eight hours ahead of us.”

“I tracked her from the corral to where she left the main ranch trail, heading south. With any luck we’ll ride out a few miles and run into her, heading back.”

“And when we do, I’m gonna tan her hide,” Vannorsdell said, gigging the black across the yard and riding abreast of Tom. The other hands fell in behind. The old man grumbled, “Worrying me like this, pulling me away from my work . . . I have a meeting up at the Circle M later this morning.”

When they’d trotted through the main gate, Navarro, the best tracker of the bunch, galloped out ahead of the pack, Vannorsdell staying about twenty yards behind. The stocky old man was an awkward rider. Although he prided himself on his abilities, he rode like he was riding a pinwheeler, as though he were always about to chin the moon, his bolo tie whipping over a shoulder, one arm flopping back like a broken wing. He never had fallen, however—at least, not when Navarro was around. Together they’d ridden every swale and ridge line on the old Dutchman’s sixteen-thousand acres.

The girl’s trail wasn’t hard to trace, following, as it did, the old horse trail leading straight south through a notch in the Alder Bluffs, then angling west along Copper Creek. Navarro rode with his jaws set. Just like a girl to do something this impulsive and downright dangerous.

Karla had ridden with Navarro out this way several times, and she knew the country, but this was a godforsaken place, where danger lurked under every rock and cactus. Even seasoned drovers wouldn’t drift out here alone. If the heat, falling rock, mountain lions, and diamondbacks didn’t get you, the Apaches would. And horses, even Arabians, were known to tumble down ravines.

And then there were the diabolical sun and lack of water. . . .

Damn fool girl.

What made Navarro even angrier was the guilt he felt at turning her out last night. If he’d let her stay at his place until she’d settled down, she might not have pulled such a plug-headed stunt in the first place. . . .

Also, he was afraid. At the moment, he wanted to tan her hide as badly as her grandfather did, but Navarro and Karla had developed a special bond over the past three years. He’d never fully realized it before, but getting close to her, hunting and riding together, he’d sort of gotten an inkling of what it must have been like to have a daughter.

This riding after her lost love gave him another inkling, and soured the first one more than a tad.

“Damn,” he said, after they’d ridden an hour. He was at the top of a rocky knoll, looking around.

The other men had halted below to loosen their saddle cinches and give their mounts a blow. Vannorsdell was squinting up at Navarro. “What is it, Tom?”

Navarro reined his piebald down the other side of the knoll. Ten minutes later, he appeared again at the top of the knoll. “I found the trail. Mount up.”

They’d ridden for another hour and forty-five minutes through a rocky draw, with saguaros and barrel cactus on both steep slopes, when Navarro leaned out from his saddle and frowned down at the trail. “I’ll be a . . .” he muttered.

Vannorsdell was riding behind him, beside beefy Rob Miller, who had only one ear, the Apaches having taken the other two months after he’d begun riding for the Bar-V. “Tom, what is it?” the rancher asked.

Navarro rose up in his saddle and looked around. A flush rose in his face, darkening the already dark cherry skin. “I’m not sure we’re on Karla’s trail.”

Vannorsdell rode up to his left. “What are you talking about?”

“She’s been givin’ me one hell of a time trackin’ her—I’ll tell you that.”

“Karla? How can she be hard to track?”

“She’s been obscuring her trail.”

Vannorsdell scowled at him. “How?”

“She’s been riding over the hardest ground she can find. Taking shortcuts between canyons. In some places, she’s been rubbing out her trail or obscuring it with sand and rocks.”

“Where in the hell did she learn how to do that?”

Navarro sent his gaze up the wall to his left, then up the one to his right. His horse blew and stomped its right front hoof. Navarro frowned down at the animal.

“What is it?” Vannorsdell asked.

“Ole Crowfoot here—he’s actin’ a mite wily. Like we might be on Apache sign instead of Karla’s.” Navarro dismounted and, holding the reins in his right hand, hunkered down on his haunches. He traced the outline of a hoofprint in the clay-colored sand and gravel in the sparse shade of a spindly pinion. “This print here ain’t shod.”

“You mean to tell me we might be following Apaches instead of Karla?”

Navarro felt the flush of embarrassment. “I think she lost me back in Manzanita Gulch.”

“Tom, how in the hell does my granddaughter know this country so well? And where in the hell did she learn to obscure her sign like that?”

Navarro toed a stirrup and swung into the saddle. “I reckon I taught her, Mr. Vannorsdell.” Without looking at the rancher’s reaction, he turned to the men behind him. “Keep your carbines to hand and your eyes skinned. I might have just rode us up the asses of about a half dozen Apaches.”

The men muttered as Navarro started out, shucking his own Winchester from the saddle scabbard under his right thigh. He jacked a shell into the breech and set the rifle across his saddle bows.

Karla was probably heading for the San Pedro River. That was the best corridor for a ride toward Mexico. Navarro would probably cut her sign there, in the San Pedro Valley, but the four Apaches, who looked to be no more than an hour or so ahead, could make getting there a little rough.

The longer he rode under the hammering sun, the more certain he became that Karla had not come this way. He didn’t see the print of a single shod hoof. Somewhere, she’d made a clean break from her previous trail.

Navarro had taught her well.

Behind him, Vannorsdell and the hands rode Indian file, not talking much, their saddle leather squeaking, their horses’ shod hooves ringing off stones.

Around them, cicadas whined. The heat was a heavy pall. There was no wind. At three in the afternoon, Navarro heard a deep, distant rumble. He hipped around in his saddle and peered over a cone-shaped mountain of rock. Behind the mountain, the sky was the color of a ripe plum. A hairlike line of lightning sparked. Five seconds later, thunder growled.

Vannorsdell followed Navarro’s gaze, then turned back to Tom. “Movin’ slow. Looks to be headin’ south. Maybe it’ll skirt around and miss us.”

“Maybe,” Navarro said, turning forward and riding on. If that storm carried as much rain as it appeared, these gullies would be rivers soon, and Karla’s tracks would be obliterated.

A half hour later they were climbing toward a pass, along an ancient Spanish trail skirting a wash to their left. Pines, mesquite, and cholla grew around them, and mountain goat scat littered the flat, black rock mushrooming along the wash. In natural rock bowls they found water dotted with grass seeds and dead and hatching insects, and stopped to let the horses draw, then mounted and continued climbing the steepening, winding trail.

They’d stopped at another tank to let the lathered horses drink, when Jorge Amado blew air through his teeth. “Look at that, Tom.”

Navarro followed the stocky Mexican’s pointing finger, to a column of smoke billowing out from a rocky knoll about a hundred yards ahead and slightly south. Navarro poked his hat brim off his forehead and bit down on the brown paper quirley in his teeth.

His shell gray eyes, spoking at the corner, stared hard at the smoke. He slid them left across the wash. Another column rose about two hundred yards ahead, from a jumble of black rock shaped like a sleeping bear. The column rose straight up, in a series of staggered charcoal puffs.

“Ain’t it just a wonder how they do that?” Tom said, a tenseness beneath the mock-jovial tone.

“You know, Mr. Navarro,” said Rob Miller, “every time I see smoke talk like that, my other ear starts to ache somethin’ crazy.”

“Apaches are men, same as us,” Hector Potts said, squatting to fill his hide-covered canteen with the tepid water.

Vannorsdell stepped up beside Navarro. He was smoking a stout cigar. “I reckon I forgot to tell you, Tommy—while you and the other boys were in Tucson, a cavalry detail from Fort Apache stopped at the ranch. Nan-dash is off the reservation again. They said he killed an itinerant trader. Slow-cooked him in a clay pot over his own burning wagon.”

Navarro grinned sardonically and blew smoke through his nostrils. “That’s nice to know.”

“Sorry, Tommy. I was going to tell you today.”

“Today would’ve been a good time.”

“You think they’re layin’ for us?”

“Could be. We cut Karla’s sign again, about twenty minutes ago. She came this way. The Apaches came later.”

Vannorsdell studied him, his tobacco-stained teeth showing through his dry, parted lips. “You think they have her?”

“There’s only one way to find out.” Navarro turned. “Hector. Charlie. Let’s mount and see what all the smoke’s about.”

Hector Potts was an old Indian trader who’d married one of Cochise’s daughters several years back, before she’d died of a stomach complaint. Charlie Musselwhite had been a drover since he was tit-high to a mustang dam. He’d fought Indians from Dakota to the Mexican border and still had his hair, because he’d learned to fight by their rules. Because of their knowledge of Indian ways, Navarro had hired both men himself.

Musselwhite, with his spiky corn yellow hair and perpetually amused brown eyes, had already kicked out of his boots and was on the ground pulling a pair of well-worn mocassins onto his feet, grimacing with the effort. Hector Potts had his Colt Bisley out. Tonguing the right corner of his mouth with concentration, he slowly turned the cylinder, making sure all six chambers showed brass.

The hair on the back of his neck prickling and his stomach feeling light, Navarro dropped his quirley, stubbed it out in the gravel, and grabbed his Winchester. He jacked a shell into the chamber, off-cocked the hammer, and mounted his horse. Glancing at Vannorsdell, he said, “The rest of you wait here.”

“What if you don’t come back?” Rob Miller said. He turned away to urinate on a shrub.

“You can send my fortune to Aunt Bess in Paducah,” Navarro said.

“Robbie, do you think Arliss will still love me if I come back without my hair?” Musselwhite asked Miller, doffing his hat and grinning over his shoulder as he gigged his horse after Potts and Navarro. The drover had been sparking the working girl of a neighboring rancher for the past three months.

“Hell, no,” Miller called after him.