SHOOT-OUT
Navarro heard the clomp and spur-ching of boots on the porch steps behind him. The kid stopped. “I got a bet goin’ over to the cantina yonder. Ten silver dollars says I can blow two holes in your old chest before you even clear leather. Wanna try provin’ I’m wrong?”
Navarro turned and faced the kid, his broad hat brim shading his dark face. “Kid, I got tired of drilling daylight through little punksticks like you a long time ago. Damn tired. I don’t answer the challenge anymore. Never will again. Now go back over to the cantina, buy you and your friends a round on my silver”—he flipped the kid a cartwheel, which bounced off the kid’s shoulder and hit the loading dock with a clang—“and leave me the hell alone.”
The kid’s nostrils flared. “When I count to three, I’m grabbin’ iron. You suit yourself.”
THE IMMORTAL COWBOY
This is respectfully dedicated to the “American Cow boy.” His was the saga sparked by the turmoil that followed the Civil War, and the passing of more than a century has by no means diminished the flame.
True, the old days and the old ways are but treasured memories, and the old trails have grown dim with the ravages of time, but the spirit of the cowboy lives on.
In my travels—to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona—I always find something that reminds me of the Old West. While I am walking these plains and mountains for the first time, there is this feeling that a part of me is eternal, that I have known these old trails before. I believe it is the undying spirit of the frontier calling, allowing me, through the mind’s eye, to step back into time. What is the appeal of the Old West of the American frontier?
It has been epitomized by some as the dark and bloody period in American history. Its heroes—Crockett, Bowie, Hickok, Earp—have been reviled and criticized. Yet the Old West lives on, larger than life.
It has become a symbol of freedom, where there was always another mountain to climb and another river to cross; when a dispute between two men was settled not with expensive lawyers, but with fists, knives or guns. Barbaric? Maybe. But some things never change. When the cowboy rode into the pages of American history, he left behind a legacy that lives within the hearts of us all.
—Ralph Compton
Chapter 1
Stuffing a blue receipt into his shirt pocket, Tom Navarro pushed through the Tucson Mercantile’s main door and paused on the stone loading dock. The Murphy freight wagon was parked before the dock, and three Bar-V boys were loading the dry goods stacked at the dock’s lip. The sun-seared men in high-crowned, wide-brimmed hats and brightly colored bandanas sweated in the midday heat—above a hundred and five, if the rusty thermometer hanging on a porch post was right.
“Doggone, Tom,” Lou Waters complained as he handed a twenty-pound sack of cracked corn to Ky Tryon, “why’d you have to pick the very middle of the day for this back-and-belly job?”
Navarro, the Bar-V segundo, glanced at the brassy sky, dug out his makings sack, and slowly shaped a cigarette. “I thought it’d be good to sweat some o’ last night’s tarantula juice out of your blood, before you headed back to the ranch. You looked a might deep in the pain barrel this mornin’, and I know how a wagon ride over a bumpy desert trace can make you feel like that rat in your guts is pullin’ your tongue down your throat sideways. Might cause you to lose that expensive lunch I bought you.”
“Expensive?” Jorge Amado chuckled. The stocky Mexican standing in the wagon bed took a sack of cornmeal from Tryon and stowed it away with the flour, pinto beans, and coffee beans he’d already stacked neatly against the wagon’s front wall. “It was free with the beer, Senor Tom.”
“Was it? Well, hell. Next time, remind me to buy you boys a proper meal.”
“Dang, Tom, cheap as you are—” The canteen’s batwings squawked. Tryon, lifting another sack from the loading dock, glanced toward the cantina and froze.
The cantina was a flat-roofed adobe, painfully white in the unrelenting sun, with a brush roof and splintery batwings. The doors swung back and forth as a man stepped before them and stood beneath the brush arbor, staring at Navarro, thumbs hooked in his pistol belts.
He was a scrawny little hardcase with a long, horsey face, buck teeth, and a beard that hadn’t seen a barber chair in months. A straw sombrero hung down his back, and his sweat-soaked white shirt was open clear to his belt buckle. Head tilted up, he regarded Navarro with slitted eyes, as though he were sizing up a bronc for riding. Several flies buzzed around his face, attracted to the smell of spilled beer and goat cheese, no doubt, but he paid them no mind. A short-barreled Colt with worn walnut grips rode in his low-slung holster.
Behind him, several faces appeared over the batwings. The grins shuttled between the little gun-slinger and Navarro, who stood on the loading dock, casually smoking his cigarette while regarding the little man dully.
“So you’re Tommy Navarro,” the little man said. He had a high, screechy voice. “ ‘Taos Tommy’ Navarro.”
The three Bar-V drovers had stopped working. They stiffly slid their gazes between Navarro and the little hardcase. Navarro stared down at the man from under the brim of his flat-brimmed black Stetson with a snakeskin band, the brown paper quirley drooping out the right corner of his mouth.
His hard-angled face was wind-seamed and sunburned to the color of a dry-blistered cherry table. He might have passed for Mexican if not for the shell gray eyes set deep in spoked sockets and the prematurely silver hair and sideburns, trimmed weekly by the Bar-V’s German cook.
“Kid,” Navarro said, having sized the little man up for under twenty-five and the short-barreled Colt as a hand-me-down, “go back where you came from.”
The kid swaggered out from under the awning. His bleary eyes said he’d been drinking most of the morning, and the swagger added that he didn’t hold it well. “Taos Tommy Navarro,” he said in his little-dog bark. “Well, well.”
“Go home, kid.”
“They say you’re fast.”
“I ain’t gonna tell you again.”
The kid stopped abruptly and held his hand above his holster. He glanced at the Colt Navy riding high in a soft brown holster on Navarro’s right hip. “I bet you ain’t no faster’n me.”
Navarro scowled around the quirley at the other three drovers, frozen in their work positions, squinting in the brassy light. Navarro looked at the kid again, still holding his hand above his pistol, waiting, challenge in his glassy brown eyes.
He chuffed and turned, giving the kid his back and strolling over to another porch post to his right. He leaned his broad left shoulder against the post and stared northward up Main at a string of freight wagons pulled up before the livery barn.
“Get to work, boys,” the ramrod told his crew. “If we’re gonna make it back to the Bar-V before dark, we gotta start pushin’ soon.”
“Hey, I was talkin’ to you,” the kid behind him said.
Navarro did not respond. He was watching two Mexican boys running around the freight wagons, loosing invisible arrows and calling to each other in Spanish.
“Careful, Tom,” Ky Tryon said as he stiffly picked up a ten-pound keg of molasses. Slowly, he turned to hand the keg to Waters, who reached for it while eyeing the hardcase.