Her eyes whipped this way and that, finally settling on the stone her gaze had traveled across several times before. There was something odd about the rock. It seemed to move.
She stared at it tensely, her stomach squeezing. The rock appeared to turn slightly. The bottom third moved up and down, a slit widening and closing as her name was muttered again in the same anguished chords barely discernible above the cicadas’ whine and the snapping of the flames.
Karla’s heart raced as she gigged the horse across the trail and up a sandy rise. The rock capped the rise. Only it wasn’t a rock. It was a man’s head, the skin of the face drawn up and back over a thick mane of black hair. The blood-filled brown eyes stared luridly out at her, unblinking. The lids had been hacked off.
Again the mouth moved. “Kar-la . . .”
Her heart turned a somersault, and the desert tipped violently to one side, then to the other. She nearly fell from the saddle. Grabbing the horn, she dropped the carbine, vaguely heard it smack the sand beneath the horse. The Arabian lifted its head high and left, trying to turn away from the grisly spectacle.
“Juan,” Karla sobbed.
As she shook her right boot from the stirrup, the Arabian reared and twisted backward, throwing her off its back. She fell sideways in the sand, landing on her hip and shoulder. If there was any pain from the fall, it didn’t register. As the horse bolted away, Karla turned to the head staring at her glassily from the sand pile overrun, she saw now, with large red ants.
Sobbing uncontrollably, tears blurring her eyes, Karla climbed weakly to her knees, began climbing the mound toward Juan.
“Karla,” rose the rasp again, barely heard above Karla’s own cries, “come no closer.”
“Oh, Juan,” she said, phlegm thickening in her throat, tears washing down her cheeks. As she gained the top of the mound, feeling occasional ant nips, like cuts from glass shards, on the undersides of her arms and legs, she dropped down to her elbows and spread her open palms on either side of his head.
Juan’s mouth opened, the bloodred tongue flicking between bloody lips. “Shoot me, Karla.”
“I can help you,” she cried, digging feebly into the sand beneath his chin.
“No! I don’t want you to see what they did.” Juan’s voice cracked with a grating sob. “Sangre de Christo! Shoot me, Karla. I beg you!”
Karla ceased her digging, lowered her head to the sand between her outstretched arms, before Juan’s bloody head.
“Bring the gun,” Juan whispered. “Karla, please!”
Karla raised her head, regarding his pain-glazed eyes. Drunk with horror and sorrow, she climbed feebly to her knees. She stood, turned, and walked heavily back down the hill. She dropped to her knees, picked up the Winchester, and placed her right index finger through the trigger guard. She drew the hammer back. It clicked as it caught.
“Hurry!” Juan called, his mouth stretching wide.
Karla stood and walked slowly up the hill, the carbine hanging slack in both hands. She regarded Juan again through sun-gilded tears—her romantic vaquero lover who’d written and recited poems to her in Spanish.
“Do it!”
She dropped to a knee, raised the carbine’s butt to her swollen cheek, centered the bead on his forehead. “I love you, Juan.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She closed her eyes as she squeezed the trigger. The rifle cracked, the butt jerking solidly against her face, the sulfur peppering her nose.
Without looking, she turned away, walking slowly down the hill, and dropped to her knees. She did not open her eyes for a long time, until she heard the thud of hooves racing toward her.
As if waking slowly from a deep, troubled sleep, she slowly turned her head left. Men on horseback galloped toward her—a half dozen copper-skinned men on short-legged mustangs, their long black hair flying in the wind, red or blue bandannas gleaming in the sun.
The hooves thundered, growing quickly in volume, until Karla could feel the earth vibrating beneath her knees.
She watched them almost impassively. An instinctive fear grew within her, but it was surmounted by fury burning up from deep within her loins, quelling her tears and drying her cheeks.
Watching the men gallop to within thirty yards, she picked up the carbine, ejected the spent shell and jacked a fresh round into the breech. Standing, she spread her feet and brought the rifle to her shoulder. With an eerie calm, she snugged the butt against her shoulder, cheeked up to the stock, and centered a bead on one of the half dozen riders bouncing above the sage and threading through the chaparral.
She squeezed the trigger, and the rifle popped, spitting smoke and flames. The rider had anticipated the shot, and ducked, expertly swerving his horse to the left. The slug smacked off a boulder behind him with an angry echoing crack. The warrior whooped and jerked his bull-chested paint back toward Karla, savagely beating the horse’s flanks with his heels.
Karla tried another shot, again missed. She ejected the spent shell, rammed another into the chamber, and fired at a brave only ten yards away. Screaming and howling like a devil loosed from hell, the brave dropped over the right side of his horse as the slug sliced the air where his chest had been. He bounded upright, jerked his rawhide reins sharply left, and slammed his blaze-faced dun directly into Karla.
She was out before she’d hit the ground.
Five minutes later, she lay belly down over the back of a Chiricahua war horse as the Apache braves lit southward across the hills, whooping.
Behind them, the piled white ashes of the stage smoked.
The buzzards lit upon the dead driver and commenced to feed.
Juan’s raw, ant-streaked face, the bullet hole in his forehead streaming bright red blood, glared skyward.
Chapter 8
Navarro and the other Bar-V men had a long night’s ride through intermittent rain. They stopped at a line shack to tend to Hector Potts’ left hip and to feed and rest the horses before resuming their trek through the mud. Well after midnight, the sky clearing to show several stars and a gauzy moon, they passed beneath the portal of the Bar-V headquarters, the yard a rumpled, wet quilt before them.
“Tommy,” Vannorsdell said, riding beside Navarro, “you’re the best tracker I’ve ever known. . . .”
“Don’t worry—Dallas, Charlie, and I’ll ride out first thing in the morning on fresh horses. We’ll get her back.”
“You better take more men than that.”
“With less dust and fewer sun reflections, we have a better chance of slipping through Apache country with our oysters.”
“That damn girl. I’ll tan her hide.”
“She’s in love.”
“She has her father’s blood. He was a wild one, that boy. It was pure luck he got rich readin’ for the law back east.”
They reined up before the barn. As the other men dismounted, Vannorsdell turned again to Navarro. “You think I was wrong to run off her Don Juan, don’t you?”
“It ain’t my say.”
“What if it was your say?”
Navarro dismounted and reached for the latigo cinch. “Then I’d say you were wrong.”
Vannorsdell stared down at him, then dismounted, tossed his reins to one of the other men, and stalked off toward the house, where Pilar stood on the porch with a dully glowing lantern.
Silent, the men tended to and stabled their mounts, then stalked off to bed. At dawn the next morning, after only four hours’ sleep, Navarro, Dallas Tixier, and Charlie Musselwhite saddled fresh mounts and, with a mule outfitted with three weeks’ trail supplies, mounted up and gigged their horses through the main gate.
Behind them, Vannorsdell watched grimly from the house’s front porch.