They drew away from each other.
“Maybe,” Navarro said, finding his voice, “if I’m down Benson way sometime, I’ll stop in for a visit.”
Louise picked up her coffee cup and stood, brushing grass and sand from her skirt. “I best get back to the girls, see if they need anything. Good night, Tom.” She moved away, stopped, and turned back to him. “You stop by anytime.” Her soft footfalls rose as she descended the knoll to the camp.
The next morning, Navarro was asleep against his saddle, hat tipped over his eyes, when a hand nudged his shoulder. He opened his eyes and raised the rifle he’d slept with in his hands.
“It’s me, Tom,” Mordecai Hawkins said softly, hunkered down by Tom’s left shoulder. The sun was full up, and birds were winging overhead. Louise, Karla, and Billie were still curled asleep beneath their blankets, on the other side of the fire, over which a coffeepot chugged.
Keeping his voice low, Hawkins said, “This might not be nothin’, but there’s a covered wagon comin’ up the pass, ’bout a mile away.”
Immediately awake, Tom straightened his hat, stood, grabbed the field glasses from beside his saddle, and moved quickly but quietly across the camp. On a rocky ledge overlooking the trail, he trained the glasses down the pass, where the trail snaked through the creosote, cholla, and the occasional cottonwoods reaching up from low depressions.
The sun was just above the eastern horizon, gilding the white canvas tarpaulin bowed over the oncoming wagon’s box. Compressing slightly as it started up the incline toward the pass, the Conestoga’s bulky shadow ran along the sage tufts on the west side of the two-track trail. The driver snapped the whip over the backs of the two mules in the traces, the animals leaning into their collars as the terrain rose beneath their hooves, the driver shouting shrill epithets. Even from this distance, the voice sounded familiar.
Tom leveled the glasses on the driver’s face, adjusted the focus. Frowning, he said, “What the hell . . . ?”
Beside him, Hawkins said, “Recognize that fella?”
Navarro handed the glasses to Hawkins. Squatting, the old hide hunter doffed his floppy-brimmed hat, brought the glasses to his deeply spoked eyes, and chuckled a surprised curse. “Well, hell’s bells, that ain’t no fella!”
Navarro took the glasses from Hawkins, said, “Let’s get out of sight,” and dropped down off the rock, slipping between two boulders on the east side of the trail. When he could hear the mules blowing wearily and the squawk of their leather collars, Tom stepped into the trail and held his rifle in one hand, barrel down at his side.
The Conestoga was about twenty yards away, just down from the saddle. The driver was peering off to her left. Spying Navarro in the periphery of her vision, she snapped her cow-eyed gaze forward, gasped, and leaned back on the ribbons, shouting, “Whooooo-ah! Whooooo!”
When she had stopped the team, she stared over their sagging heads, drilling Navarro with a belligerent stare. He stared back at her—the female apron from Our Lady of Sorrows. Her round, fat face was flush-splotched; her heavy bosom rose and fell sharply as she breathed. Her cream-and-brown dress, cut low to reveal a good half of her milky bosom, was caked with seeds and trail dust. Her dark brown hair had partially escaped its bun, with several wisps pasted to her sweat-glistening cheeks.
“I don’t have any money, if that’s what you’re after!” she yelled, her pig eyes narrowing. “Now get the hell out of my way or I’ll run ye down!”
“I don’t think so,” Navarro said.
She stared at him. “Where have I seen you before?”
Navarro said nothing.
The woman’s eyes brightened suddenly, and her chin snapped up. “You!” she rasped. With her right hand, she reached under the driver’s box, then pulled out an old Spencer carbine. She was raising the rifle and thumbing back the hammer, when Hawkins slipped out of the rocks beside the wagon, reached up, and wrestled the long gun from the woman’s pudgy hands.
“What do you have in the box?” Navarro asked the woman. She was screaming so loudly at both of them, making up epithets as she went, that she couldn’t hear the question.
Finally, Navarro walked around behind the wagon, loosened the puckered canvas over the tailgate. He peered inside. Several blankets had been strewn across the floorboards. Six girls in skimpy, soiled, sweat-stained dresses sat along the sideboards, their wrists and ankles tied with rawhide. One had a single pink feather dangling in her tangled hair.
The wagon smelled of hot canvas, sweat, and urine. A tin pan sat in one corner of the wagon box, a few glistening drops sharing the pan’s bottom with a single dead fly.
“Christ!” Navarrow growled, stepping back and fumbling with the tailgate latch.
“You leave those girls right where they are, mister!” Sister Mary Francis screamed as she came running with surprising speed around the wagon’s east side.
Hawkins tried to stop her, but she balled her right fist so tight it turned crimson. She brought it up from her knees, connecting soundly with Mordecai’s right jaw. Hawkins fell with a groan.
Losing her balance, she nearly fell, too, but managed to stay standing and whirl toward Tom, balling the same fist she’d used on the old hide hunter.
Having none of it, Navarro cocked his saddle gun one-handed and aimed it from his right thigh at the woman’s bulging belly.
Seeing the rifle, she stopped. “They’re mine, goddamn you. I’m sellin’ ’em all in Nogales.” A thought flitted across her eyes. “Less’n you boys want to buy ’em with gold or cash money . . .”
Navarro replied by tattooing her forehead with his Winchester’s butt plate. Eyes crossing, she staggered straight back and fell like a sack of potatoes.
They spent the next two nights camped in a long green horseshoe of the Rio Bavispe. The freed girls ate the venison and rabbits Navarro shot, and slept off the effects of the opium.
Karla and Louise helped the girls scrub the paint from their faces, and as Navarro and Hawkins smoked and drank coffee from a nearby bluff, keeping watch, they splashed around in the water, laughing, skipping stones, and talking about how good it would be to see their families again.
Both nights, Mordecai Hawkins lulled the girls to sleep with gentle notes from his rusty harmonica. Young Marlene, who rarely strayed more than four feet from Karla, slept curled against the older girl’s side.
Tom bound Sister Mary Francis, whom he intended to turn over to Phil Bryson at Fort Huachuca, and when the fat woman couldn’t keep her mouth shut, he gagged her. She may have been a nun at one time, but it probably hadn’t been much of a chore for Ettinger to recruit the pudgy slattern to run his brothel.
The group pulled out the third morning, Louise driving the wagon, all the girls except Karla riding inside, Sister Mary Francis tied to one of the packhorses. They were riding single file through a narrow canyon, Navarro in the lead, Hawkins riding drag.
Karla followed Tom on her high-stepping Arab. She kept a blanket draped over her bare shoulders; the sun had come out again after a strong wind and a brief, passing shower.
Halfway through the canyon, Tom’s bay lifted its head sharply and whinnied.
A rider stood atop a sandy knoll about thirty yards ahead and right of the rocky wash, partially concealed by a wind-gnarled pine. “ ‘Taos Tommy’ Navarro!”
The man was a long-faced, ghoulish-looking hombre in a battered, feather-trimmed derby, with gold rings in his ears. Over his right eye he wore a white bandage wrapped crosswise around his head, beneath the hat. The bandage was stained dark red. The blood had dripped out from under the bandage to run in a grisly rivulet down his cheek.