The Indian gave a cry and disappeared in a blood spray.
Spying more movement on his right, Navarro turned again. As lightning flashed and thunder cracked wickedly, filling the air with the smell of brimstone, two more Indians appeared, bolting toward him through a doorlike cleft in the sandstone ridge. The rain had started in earnest, great white buffeting sheets, and the Indian’s mocassins splashed through the puddles as they bolted toward Navarro.
Tom shot one as he paused to nock his arrow. An arrow careened toward Tom from his far right, but the wind caught it, sent it clattering onto the rocks over his left shoulder. As his breath was sucked out of his lungs by the chill wind, rain sluicing over his hat and washing down his face, Navarro cocked a fresh shell into his Winchester’s breech.
A lightning bolt sliced out of the murky gray rain and slammed into the stone ridge with a cannonlike boom, showering the entire area with blue-white sparks and the fetid odor of burning hair. Tom raised his gaze in time to see the other Indian, who had just loosed an arrow, leaping toward him, only three feet away and screeching like the devil’s own hound.
The Apache dove into him, driving the rifle down and out of his hands. Navarro heard the rifle clatter against a rock. Tom hit the ground on his back, the Indian screeching and driving against him, digging his knees into Tom’s thighs as he rose up and lunged toward Tom’s face.
Instinctively, Navarro reached for the Indian’s right wrist, caught it three feet from his face and raised his eyes to it. A razor-edged pig sticker with an upturned tip and hide-wrapped handle was aimed at his throat. Navarro had stopped it just before that savage blade had cored his Adam’s apple.
Thunder cracked, for a second drowning the Indian’s maniacal, unwavering screech.
Lightning flashed again, glinting off the knife blade and off the savage black eyes staring down into Navarro’s own, filled with barbarous glee. The Indian had placed both hands on the knife’s handle, pushing with all his weight against Navarro’s right hand.
The blade tip slid down to prick Navarro’s neckerchief. An eye wink later, the blade poked through the neckerchief and into Tom’s neck, sharp as rattle-snake teeth.
The Indian’s lips stretched back from long, thin teeth crooked and brown as old fence posts as the brave sucked a breath. His quivering chest expanded against Navarro’s right, weakening forearm.
Tom pivoted slightly right. Grunting and grimacing as he held the knife back with his right hand, he brought up a rock in his left, and smacked it hard against the Indian’s head.
The buck’s renewed screech died stillborn as he fell onto his left shoulder. The Indian, sluggish from the blow, climbed to his knees and began crawling away from Navarro. Navarro jerked onto his own knees, grabbed the Indian’s right foot, and pulled him back down.
The Indian jerked his foot from Navarro’s grasp. Crawling forward, he scrambled to his feet. Navarro did likewise, reaching for his Colt, his hand coming up empty. He must have lost the revolver in the scuffle. The Indian flew toward him in the driving rain.
Navarro pivoted left, stuck his foot out, grabbed a fistful of the Indian’s hair, and pulled. The brave tumbled over Tom’s outstretched foot, dropping to his knees.
He was coming up again as Navarro leapt toward him. Spying movement on his right, sensing another Indian heading his way, Navarro rammed his right fist into the face of the brave before him. He rammed the face again, another pistoning blow, feeling the nose give beneath his fist and turn flat to the face, feeling the thick, wet blood on his knuckles.
A rifle popped to Navarro’s right, nearly coinciding with another thunderclap.
Navarro leapt at the dazed Indian staggering bloody-faced before him. He got behind the buck, wrapped his right arm around his neck, cupping his chin, and jerked the head to the right and back, hearing the crunch and branchlike snap. He’d intended to use the dead buck as a shield, but the rain had made the Indian’s skin slick, and he lost his grip.
As the body dropped before him, he cast his gaze straight ahead.
A stocky savage with a prunelike face stood on a rock about fifteen feet up the grade, his soaked calico shirt buffeting in the wind, sopping silver-streaked hair drawn back.
He had a Henry rifle raised to his shoulder and was siting down the barrel at Tom’s forehead. Navarro felt like a deer trapped in a locomotive’s rushing light.
Thunder clapped, rattling his ear drums. At the same time, a witch’s finger of a shimmering lightning bolt jutted out of thin air twenty feet above and to the Apache’s right. The bolt was gone in an instant, leaving the Indian limned in flickering sparks, like those from a blacksmith’s forge. The electricity jerked down from his arms and out over his rifle, etching it precisely in the gray air before Navarro.
The Indian bellowed as the light faded.
He dropped the rifle, fell straight down from the boulder, and lay flat on his face, limbs akimbo. Flames traced a black circle in his shirt, just below his left shoulder blade. The flames were quickly snuffed by the rain. The man’s hair and mocassins continued to smoke and sizzle as Navarro turned away, retrieved his Winchester, and dropping to one knee, brought the rifle up to his waist and looked around through the driving rain.
He knelt there for a long time, letting the rain pound him, watching the lightning flash off the rocks. Somewhere behind him, a tree was struck with a thundering crack followed by the rustling and cracking of falling branches and then the dull whump as the trunk hit the ground.
The storm had settled on this rocky knoll, cloaking Tom in a murky, dusky gauze.
Finally, when nothing else moved ahead or around him, Navarro retrieved his revolver and holstered it. Taking the Winchester in both hands, he crept up to the rocky ridge, slipped through the doorlike notch, and dropped to a knee, swinging the Winchester’s barrel back and forth before him.
No movement here, either.
Looking around the buckling boulders, he found only the gray remnants of a fire and a pile of green cottonwood limbs. In a hollow about thirty yards from the crest, he found the mud-smeared tracks of five Indian ponies in the soft sand near a spring. Broken tree limbs littered the sand. Apparently, when the storm had hit, the horses had jerked their reins free and run.
Navarro took cover in the V between two boulders, and when the lightning had drifted east, he made his way back over the ridge top, found and reshaped his hat, and continued down the other side.
“Tommy!” a voice called above the wind.
Navarro turned. The rain had let up but the clouds still hovered low. Twenty feet downslope and left stood the short, bulky, water-logged shape of Paul Vannorsdell. The rancher’s black stood white-eyed nearby, the rancher clutching his reins.
“We heard the gunfire and were comin’ up, but the damn lightning held us back!”
Navarro moved toward him. “Where’s Charlie and Hector?”
“Back down where you left the group. Potts took an arrow in his hip.”
Navarro looked at him.
A grim expression swept the old man’s face. He shook his head and said fatefully, “No sign of my granddaughter.”
“Goddamn it!” Navarro brushed past the rancher, heading down the slope to find his horse. Like the Chiricahua ponies, the piebald had probably torn loose and galloped ten miles away by now.
“Where you goin’?” the rancher called after him.
“Home!”
Chapter 7
In the small cave where she’d taken refuge from the storm, Karla woke with a start.
She turned left, fumbling with the Winchester carbine with which she’d slept across her breast. She quickly jacked a round into the magazine and got her right index finger through the trigger guard. At the same time, she peered through the cave’s arched opening, only three feet high, through which milky dawn light washed.