“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.
Chapter 4
Navarro driving, Amado following on his buckskin and leading Ky Tryon’s horse, the Bar-V wagon raced through the descending night, following the deep-scored wagon trail into the high country where the saguaros thinned and cottonwoods began appearing in swales, with cedars, sedge, and broomgrass growing thick along the benches.
The Bar-V sat in a high valley that, from the granite crests looming over it, resembled two giant hands cupped together at the heart of a long, bulky mountain. The sky was lit up like a Mexican Christmas tree when the wagon thundered through the yard’s wooden portal, whipped past the corrals and blacksmith shop, and squawked up to the bunkhouse, Navarro sawing back on the reins and bellowing, “Hoah now . . . hoooo-ahhhh!”
The bunkhouse door had opened as the wagon passed under the portal, and several silhouetted figures stood on the porch, hatless, cigarette smoke billowing around their heads in the still night air.
“Why you boys so late?” asked Dallas Tixier, stepping off the porch with several others. “I was beginning to think the senoritas had talked you into staying another night.”
Navarro wrapped the reins around the brake handle. “A coupla you men help Ky inside. He’s got a bullet in his left thigh. Someone tell Joe to break out his medical kit and put water to boil.”
In Apache country, bullet and arrow wounds were as commonplace as horse throwings or saddle galls. Without any to-do, three men helped Tryon out of the wagon and inside, one of the men saying, “Ah, Christ, Ky, I seen whores’ hickies worse than that.”
When the kid was inside and the stove had been fired up for water, the wagon driven up to the back of the main house for unloading, Tixier turned to Navarro. “What happened, Tommy?”
Navarro curled his lip. “Bushwacked in Arrowhead Canyon.”
“Apaches?”
Navarro shook his head. “Some younker fancied himself the next William Bonnie.”
“You put him down?”
“Like a chicken-thievin’ hound.”
Tixier returned his long black cigar to his teeth and lowered his gaze to Navarro’s left arm. “Looks like you need some attention there, your ownself.”
Navarro glanced at the torn sleeve and dried blood. He hadn’t realized he’d been grazed until after he’d killed the man in buckskins and was helping Tryon onto his horse.
“Just a scratch.” Navarro turned away, looked westward toward the open range capped in stars.
Tixier blew a long stream of smoke. “What’re you thinkin’?”
“I’m thinkin’ I’m feelin’ restless. Might need to move on again soon. Maybe a horse ranch up in Montana.” Tom turned to Tixier, the half-Mexican, half-Pima he’d scouted with out of Fort Bowie, fighting Apaches before they had tired of army ways and had taken up the ranching life. “Would you come with me?”
“It’s cold up there, ain’t it?” Tixier said around the cigar in his teeth.
“I’ll get you a fat Indian woman.”
Tixier shifted the cigar and grinned. “Then, hell, I’d think about it.”
Navarro retrieved his saddle, which he’d wrestled off the dead paint, and hefted it onto his left shoulder. “I’m goin’ to bed.”
He’d started away from the bunkhouse, heading for his own cabin near the creek, but Tixier’s voice stopped him. “Trouble up to the house tonight.” He inclined his head to indicate the sprawling adobe fronted with shrubbery and a wide front veranda, several windows sprouting lantern light.
“What kinda trouble?”
“The senorita and Don Vannorsdell,” Tixier said conspiratorially. Light from the window flanking him glistened off his gold eye tooth. “Her vaquero came to say hasta luego.”
Navarro looked toward the house, sighed deeply, shifted the saddle on his shoulder, and walked eastward across the yard. He crossed a narrow arroyo and tramped through the chaparral to the shack that had been here long before Vannorsdell had moved to the valley—a squat, boxlike adobe with a sagging brush arbor silver limned by starlight.
He mounted the porch and reached for the door latch. The motion was stillborn.
Wheeling left, he dropped his saddle, saddlebags, and rifle boot and snapped his horn-handled .44 from his holster. Thumbing back the hammer, he extended the gun to the hammock hanging beneath the arbor and in which a shadowy figure lay.
He stood tensely, gun extended, staring.
“Go ahead and shoot,” Karla said, her voice small and brittle.
Navarro tipped the Navy’s barrel up and depressed the hammer with a ratcheting click. “Know how close I just came to perforating your fool hide?”