“I don’t know, Tom,” Tixier said when they’d ridden an hour through the same country they’d ridden yesterday. “The sign’s gonna be hard to pick up after the storm.”
“You’re right, Dallas,” Navarro said, leading the procession through a rocky draw made slick by the fresh mud. “But I think I know where she’s heading.”
“Where?” Musselwhite asked behind him.
“Mexico.”
“Ah, hell,” Tixier said.
They rode through the midday heat blasting off the rocks, resting their mounts for ten minutes every hour. Navarro skirted the canyon in which they’d run into the Apaches, swerving south and then east along a maze of interconnected creeks and washes. He was off Karla’s original trail but hoped to pick it back up along the San Pedro.
If she’d gotten through the Apaches, that was.
They were following a wash the Army called Weeping Squaw Creek, a scout having come upon a squaw mourning over the body of her dead husband there in ’68, when Tixier reined his grulla mustang to a halt near a lightning-blasted cedar. He looked up the rocky ridge on the other side of the narrow, deep wash.
“Not agin.”
Navarro followed the mestizo’s gaze. Smoke puffed from a notch in the brush and saffron rocks, about halfway up the ridge.
All at once, the three riders reined their mounts off the trail and into the wash, their horses leaping the six feet to the damp, sandy bottom pocked with coyote and bobcat prints. Navarro shucked his saddle gun and dismounted, dropped his reins, and ran crouching to the opposite cutbank. He jacked a round into the Winchester’s magazine and turned to Tixier shouldering up to the bank on his right.
“Not much smoke for Apache talk.”
“Maybe they don’t have much to say.”
“Or maybe they’ve already said it,” Musselwhite added, his white teeth flashing between sunburned lips as he thumbed back the hammer of his Yellowboy repeater.
Tixier turned to Navarro. “Could be the senorita.”
Navarro stared at the smoke, then off-cocked his Winchester and handed it to Tixier. “Cover me.” He hoisted himself up the ledge, took the rifle back from the mestizo, and dashed through the brush. When he made the mountain’s base, he hunkered down behind a boulder and stole a look up the slope.
The smoke was still rising, webbing on a breeze. It was a steady column, not like the intermittent puffs of an Apache signal fire. More like a cook fire.
Navarro scurried up the slope, weaving a slanting course up the mountainside, following a game path pocked with deer and racoon scat. He stayed low, dashing between shrubs and boulders, keeping an eye skinned for sunlight reflected off gun barrels or the flatiron of an Apache arrow.
Halfway to the smoke, he paused for breath, then continued parallel to the ridge, leaping from rock to rock, nearly tripping when his boot slipped into a crack. When he started smelling the smoke and charred meat, he slowed to a walk, breathing through his mouth and bringing his feet down carefully.
He climbed the slope above the encampment. When he figured he was directly above the fire, he paused behind a boulder, listening. Hearing nothing, he leapt onto the boulder and raised the Winchester, siting down the barrel at the figure squatting by the small blaze in a rock ring, roasting a rabbit over the flames.
Sensing someone behind him, the man dropped the meat in the fire and whipped around, falling back on the ground and slapping the covered black holster on his right hip. The man was young, well under thirty, and clad in blue cavalry garb, captain’s bars on his shoulders. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and his straight brown hair was dusty and damp. Dried blood lay over a nasty gash on his right temple. His eyes widened fearfully as he fought the Army-issue Colt from his holster.
“At ease, soldier,” Navarro said, lowering the Winchester.
The captain jerked his head up at the man looming over him. He froze with his hand on the grips of the Colt half out of its holster.
“I’m friendly,” Navarro said, turning, leaping onto a lower rock right of the boulder, then down into the camp.
The soldier sat by the fire, his rheumy blue eyes acquiring a wary cast. He looked addlepated. “Who’re you?” he asked thickly, keeping his hand on the Colt’s grips but leaving the gun in the holster.
“Tom Navarro, segundo of the Bar-V ranch.”
The soldier looked at him, as if he were hearing the words from far away. He snugged his Colt back down in the holster.
“What’s your handle?”
Again, the young soldier squinted up at him, fish-eyed, as if sifting through a brain fog for words. “Me . . . I’m, uh . . . Jonah Ward.”
Navarro glanced at the gold bars. “Captain Jonah Ward.”
The young man nodded dully.
Navarro hunkered down on his haunches and laid the rifle across his thighs. “What happened to you, Captain? Why are you alone out here?”
Ward glanced away and ran his palm slowly down his tunic, stained with dry brick red blood that had run down from his temple. “I lost my command. The whole patrol wiped out. Twelve men. Apaches.”
“When?”
“Two days ago.”
Navarro fingered the Winchester. “You the only survivor?”
“Sergeant Tanner and a scout were with me for a while, but they both died from their wounds . . . yesterday, I think.” Ward’s breath caught as, pondering, he suddenly remembered. “The sergeant died yesterday morning. Tingsla died a few hours later. They were hit bad.” Ward’s eyes filled with tears and he dropped his gaze.
“Where did this happen?”
Ward blinked his eyes clear, and he shook his head. “Can’t recollect. A lot of confusion. I remember we entered a canyon. Turned out to be a box canyon. The Apaches were laying for us. I was hit with a tomahawk, and the sergeant threw me over my horse and led me out.”
“Sounds like you might have run into Nan-dash’s reservation jumpers. We ran into a few last night ourselves.”
Ward nodded. “Nan-ta-do-ka-dash. We’d been on his trail for three days, out of Fort Apache.” He seemed to think about that, then balled his sun-blistered cheeks and squinted up at the Bar-V segundo. “What are you doing out here, Navarro?”
“Trailin’ a girl. My boss’s daughter.”
“Good Lord.”
“Ran away from home to be with her vaquero beau.”
“Heaven help her.” Ward looked at the rabbit he’d dropped in the fire. The flames had turned it black.
“Hungry?” Navarro asked.
“I snared that rabbit, didn’t want to risk a pistol shot. I haven’t eaten since the morning before the attack. No canteen, but last night’s rain filled the rock tanks.” Ward snapped his teeth and looked chagrined. “I reckon I’ve been a little disoriented, Mr. Navarro.”
“No horse?”
Captain Ward shook his head. “The sergeant’s horse ran off last night, during the storm. I need to get back to Fort Apache. Can you help me?”
“Fort Apache’s north. We’re heading south. We can drop you off at Fort Dragoon.”
“That’ll do.”
Navarro took the young man’s arm. “Come along, Captain. My two partners and our horses are down below. If you think you can ride, I’d like to get a couple more miles in before nightfall.”
Ward nodded as he climbed to his feet and straightened his dusty tunic. “I can ride.”
Ward was a little wobbly on his feet—Navarro figured that the tomahawk had rattled his brains around plenty—and they took their time descending the slope, Tom leading the way but turning often to help the younger man over the larger rocks and through brush clumps.
When they gained the creek bottom, Navarro introduced the captain to Tixier and Musselwhite, who were smoking black cheroots while their horses drew water from a spring they’d found several yards east. Navarro gave the captain several twists of fresh jerky from his saddlebags, mounted his buckskin, pulled Ward up behind him, and gigged the horse out of the draw and onto the trail they’d been following before they’d spied the smoke.