“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.
Chapter 6
Navarro reined his piebald to a halt in a round cup in the sloping desert floor shaded by several large mesquite trees and stunt cedars. The manzanita grass grew thick.
Keeping his voice low, the Bar-V segundo said, “Let’s leave the horses here.”
“You know how I feel about walkin’, Tommy,” Hector grumbled.
“How do you feel about tryin’ to level a shot at a running Apache from the back of a crow-hopping mount?”
“Oh, I’m just jawin’,” Hector said, dismounting. “Sure wish I had me a pair of mocassins like Charlie. Those look right soft on the feet, they do. . . .”
When they tied off their horses to the mesquite trees, still speaking barely above a whisper, Navarro said, “Let’s split up. I’ll head toward the smoke column on the left. You boys head for the one on the right. If you see the girl and can get her out without getting her and yourselves killed, do it. If the Apaches are too close, leave her. We’ll meet down with the old man and the others in two hours and palaver up another plan.”
“Why don’t you take Hec, Tommy?” Charlie said, holding his Colt’s revolving rifle in both hands. “He moves too slow for me.”
“I move too fast for both of you. Go!”
Navarro turned and, holding the Winchester in his right hand, walked north through the cracked, sun-blasted boulders, descending the slope to the bottom of the dry wash. He climbed up the far side of the wash and wended his way through the boulders, some as large as Murphy freight wagons.
Halfway to his destination, he ducked low between a cedar shrub and the fallen skeleton of a barrel cactus, and shot a look up the hill. The smoke was gone. He looked right. The smoke was gone over there, as well—only loose rock piles spiked with dry brown grass under an arching sky.
Cool air moved against his back, drying the sweat beneath his collar. A raindrop struck his right ear. He swung a look behind him.
The plum clouds had moved closer, shepherding gray rain curtains. The sky over Navarro was still bright, but it wouldn’t be in about ten, fifteen minutes. Lightning forked across the purple front, and thunder rolled.
He turned forward just in time to see a shadow flit between two rocks about forty yards ahead and left. Another flitted over a rise before dropping into a shallow swale nearly straight ahead. Navarro had only glimpsed the second shadow, but he’d seen the shoulder-length hair flying around a head band, outlined by the brassy sky behind.
Navarro crawled straight back down the rise for thirty yards. He moved left around a huge chunk of pitted black lava. Behind him, thunder rumbled, growing in volume. The light grew wan, and the cool wind picked up, lightly swirling dust.
Tom hunkered down behind a rough-edged black rock, doffed his hat, and peered around the left side.
One of the Apaches slipped around a boulder, slick as a snake, moving toward Navarro’s last position behind the dead cactus. He was a lean kid with the traditional red bandanna, bare-chested and wearing only a loincloth and knee-high leggings. A deerhide quiver was strapped to his back, five or six arrows protruding from the top. Winding around rocks and cholla, he moved up behind where Tom had been only two minutes before, and slowly raised his bow and arrow.
Navarro heard a rock click and turned left. The other Indian was moving in from the other direction—a chubby kid with pitted cheeks, dressed similarly to the first but with a big bowie sheathed on his hip. His right eye had been sewn closed over the empty socket.
Navarro shuttled his gaze to the first brave. The young Chiricahua had just discovered that Navarro had left his previous position. He wheeled to the other brave and muttered something Navarro, who knew a smidgin of the guttural language, couldn’t hear above the rising wind and rumbling thunder.
Navarro stepped out from behind the rock. Seeing him in the periphery of their vision, both bucks wheeled toward him, startled.
Navarro raised the Winchester and fired, blowing the first kid straight back into the cactus. The other buck, sensing Tom had the drop on him, had wheeled away as Navarro shot his friend. Not seeing the boulder two feet to his right, he tripped over it, falling face-first in the gravel, losing his bow and arrow and giving an indignant groan.
Navarro’s second shot, squeezed off as the kid had fallen, blew shards from the rock.
Tom ran toward the rock. The kid climbed to his feet, wheeled toward Navarro, and cut loose with a high-pitched shriek as he clawed the bowie from his hip and ran toward Tom. He was twenty feet away and closing fast when, facing the buck, straight-backed, feet spread, Tom casually raised his cocked Winchester, squinted businesslike down the rifle’s barrel, and blew a neat, round hole through the Indian’s head.
The kid stopped, head snapping back, arms flying straight out from his shoulders. The bowie flew from his hand and clattered in the rocks. He stood like a broken ship’s mast for several seconds, then fell straight back like a drunk gandy dancer falling into a bed.
Navarro ejected the spent shell, jacked another into the breech, and lifted the rifle to his shoulder, looking around. He’d have bet a fresh venison shank and a pint of mescal that these two younkers weren’t the only two Chiricahuas up here.
Keeping the rifle raised, he moved ahead toward the jumble of rocks at the ridge line, where the smoke had originated. The wind blew him from behind, chilling the sweat under his shirt. Rain pelted him, splotching the rocks and bringing up the smell of sage and creosote. The moisture beads glistened on his rifle stock.
Keeping the rifle raised, he moved slowly up the hill.
He was near the crown, where a steep wall of red sandstone rose from powdery sand, when he spied movement on his left periphery. He whipped around and dropped to a knee as a copper-faced Indian crouched over a flat-topped boulder, aiming a strap-iron arrow at him.
Navarro had just snugged the Winchester to his shoulder when the arrow snapped away from the cedar bow and wheezed about three inches off the nub of his left shoulder. Navarro fired twice, quickly, not hearing his own casings fall from the breech.