He squeezed Karla’s hand and stared at the doorway a hundred feet beyond. If he could get Karla halfway there safely, he’d go back inside for Billie.
Sudden movement on his left. Navarro turned, raising the shotgun. The miner upon whose lap Karla had been sitting before Ettinger had turned her over to the rurale faced him, his Indian-dark face burnished red with exasperation.
“Qué es esto?”
Tom glanced at Karla. “Run.”
Karla bolted past the incensed miner, hair flying as she dashed for the door. Tom turned around, bent his legs to Ettinger’s table. Billie was sitting on Bontemps’ knee. He grabbed her arm, jerked her off the slaver’s knee, and heaved the girl out ahead of him, rasping in her ear, “Run to the door!”
Billie whipped her stricken gaze at him.
Backing away from the table, Navarro trained the shotgun on Bontemps, who’d bolted out of his chair and froze, crouching, with both hands on his .45s. The buscaderos stared at Navarro blandly, cigarettes or cigars in their teeth, cards in their hands.
Ettinger slid his chair back and heaved to his feet. “Just who in the hell do you think you are, you son of a bitch?”
“Why, it’s ‘Taos Tommy’ Navarro,” Bontemps said, glee dancing in his eyes. “I thought you was dead!”
The room had fallen nearly silent beneath muttered exclamations. Still backing away from the table, holding his shotgun on Bontemps, Navarro glanced behind him to see Billie stumbling toward Karla, who was waiting at the back of the room.
Navarro swung his gaze forward. Ettinger triggered a pocket pistol. The bullet nipped Navarro’s left leg. Someone behind him screamed, and a thump rose as a miner hit the floor.
Bontemps slapped leather with both hands.
Navarro swung the shotgun to Ettinger and tripped the right trigger. The shotgun boomed and jumped. In the periphery of his right eye, Navarro saw the screaming mine manager bounce off the bar clutching his gaping middle.
Tom swung the barn-blaster back toward Bontemps, and dropped the left hammer. The slaver dove to his right, and the head of the buscadero behind him erupted in a fine red spray.
As the other buscaderos leapt to their feet, filling their hands, Tom chucked the empty shotgun toward Bontemps, who was crawling around behind a table, and pulled both Dragoons from his waistband. One of the bodyguards had beat him to the mark. The bullet whipped past his right ear and shattered a stained-glass window behind him. A girl shrieked.
Dodging two more pistol shots, Navarro crouched and cut loose with both Dragoons, shattering glass behind the bar and punching lead through two buscaderos. A pistol roared on his left. He quarter-turned and fired three quick rounds at Bontemps, punching holes in the table the slaver crouched behind and, as the man flinched, bloodied his right eye.
“Ahhhh!” the slaver screamed, dropping both pistols and clutching his wounded eye as he dropped to the floor.
Navarro wheeled and ran toward the door, leaping the men and the girls who’d dropped to the floorboards, arms crossed on their heads. He was ten feet from the door when a gun barked behind him. The slug burned a path along Tom’s right elbow. Wheeling, Navarro fired his last three rounds.
The tall bartender slammed back against the broken mirror and dropped with a wheeze. At the same time, the fat woman rose up from behind the bar and rested a long-barreled shotgun along the bar top, squinting down the barrel.
The gun exploded as Navarro leapt through the front door and ran toward the open wrought-iron gate, where the two main guards lay sprawled in glistening blood.
Navarro cast a look into the street beyond the gate. Twenty yards right of the fountain, four horses stood staring toward him, twitching their ears and swishing their tails.
Louise Talon and Billie sat one. Hawkins was helping Karla onto Navarro’s packhorse.
Waving an arm, Navarro shouted, “Go!” He grabbed his and Hawkins’ gun belts from the apple crate, slung each over a shoulder, and ran limping across the yard toward the bay Hawkins was holding for him.
“Tommy!” Karla cried, whipping a look behind as she and the other two women galloped east.
A shot popped to Navarro’s left, the slug pinking the fountain with an angry twang. Tom turned to see several men sporting mine company badges running toward him.
“Hold it!” one shouted, leveling a shotgun.
Navarro grabbed the reins from Hawkins’ hand, tossed the old hide hunter his cartridge belt, and leapt into his saddle. As Tom and Mordecai spurred their mounts into lunging gallops, the shotgun exploded. The shooter was too far away for the buck-shot to do anything but sting Navarro’s back and cause his horse to shake its head and whinny.
Pistols barked, the slugs tearing dust clods at the horses’ hooves. In seconds, the mountain man and the Bar-V segundo were splitting the wind amid the shacks at the ragged eastern edge of town, bringing the women into view ahead.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Hawkins yelled, glancing at Tom over his right shoulder. “I never figured that old dog could hunt!”
“He can’t,” Navarro yelled, urging the bay even faster as the street became a road. “He just got lucky!”
A hundred yards before the river, which was gleaming silver in its wide, shallow bank, Navarro rode up abreast of Karla. He reached over, grabbed the reins from the girl’s hands, then gigged the bay on ahead of her and on past Louise and Billie, swinging right at the river and loping upstream, into the broad, dark night.
At a hide-parting clip, Tom led the group along the stream for nearly a mile, then followed a cart trail up the snaggle-toothed ridge rising northward. Near the ridge’s lip, he turned his horse off the trail, stopped, and reined back toward the valley. The women were approaching, weary horses blowing and lunging floppy-footed into the grade.
“Keep pushin’!” Navarro called to Louise. “Take the girls on over the ridge.”
Slumped forward in her saddle, Karla followed Louise and Billie up the ridge. Hawkins halted his horse on the trail before Tom, rested both hands on his saddle horn.
“Those badge-toters must’ve grabbed some horses off the street,” Hawkins said, breathless.
Navarro stared out over the valley, listening. The moon was rising over the far ridge like a big dented quarter. Above the usual night sounds rose the thumps of pounding hooves and men’s voices raised in anger. Back down the trail, shadows moved along the stream.
“My eyes ain’t what they used to be, but they look to be four.”
“Five,” Navarro said. “Keep the women moving.”
“What’re you gonna do?”
“We can’t keep this pace up forever. I’m going to get these five off our trail. Discourage anyone else from following suit.”
Hawkins pulled his rifle from his saddle boot. “You’re gonna need help.”
Tom shook his head and shucked his own Winchester. “Keep moving. I’ll catch up to you in a few minutes.”
Hawkins chuffed and, gigging his horse on up the ridge, grunted over his shoulder, “That ole dog’s luck ain’t gonna hold forever.”
Hearing Hawkins’s hoof falls dwindle down the other side of the ridge, Navarro turned his horse from the valley, followed the trail for another thirty yards, then turned into the rocks along the crest. Dismounting, he tied his horse to a shrub, then made his way back through the rocks. He levered a shell, lowered the hammer to half cock, and hunkered behind a boulder on the right side of the trail.
He removed his hat and cast a glance into the valley, shimmering silver under the rising moon, the opposite ridge climbing darkly on the other side of the stream. A hundred yards down the shaggy cart path, shadows danced in the moonlight. The running hoofbeats and leathery tack squeaks grew louder.