Navarro shrugged and continued staring at the kids and the dog, puffing his cigarette.
“Don’t turn your back on an open challenge, Taos Tommy,” the hardcase warned. “Folks gonna think you’re chicken.”
Navarro heard the clomp and spur-ching of boots on the porch steps behind him. He could smell the kid drawing close, and he’d been right about the stale beer and goat cheese, as well as chili peppers, sweat, and horse piss.
The kid stopped. “I got a bet goin’ over to the cantina yonder. Ten silver dollars says I can blow two holes in your old chest before you even clear leather. Wanna try provin’ I’m wrong?”
Navarro turned and faced the kid, his broad hat brim shading his dark face and searing gray eyes. “Kid, I got tired of drilling daylight through little punksticks like you a long time ago. Damn tired. I don’t answer the challenge anymore. Never will again. Now go back over to the cantina, buy you and your friends a round on my silver“—he flipped the kid a cartwheel, which bounced off the kid’s shoulder and hit the loading dock with a clang—“and leave me the hell alone.”
The kid’s nostrils flared. He glanced at the coin lying near his right boot. Behind him, laughter rose from the cantina.
He snapped his angry gaze to Navarro, took one step closer, narrowing the gap between them, and lifted his hand above his pistol grips. In a sneering voice, he said, “When I count to three, I’m grabbin’ iron. You suit yourself.”
The kid had just said, “Two,” when Navarro’s left hand leapt forward, grabbed the kid’s gun from its holster, and almost casually tossed it into the street. The Colt Lightning landed in the dust with a plop.
The manuever had taken less than a second.
The kid gave a startled grunt as he clawed at his holster and stumbled back, his right hand coming up empty. “H-hey!” he complained, turning to the gun gleaming up from the gray dust.
Red-faced, cheeks bunching, he returned his gaze to the segundo towering over him. Navarro grinned, his teeth showing white against his tanned skin.
“You son of a bitch!” the kid snapped.
Turning, he walked to the lip of the loading dock. Navarro extended his right boot, tripping the kid, who gave an indignant wail as he stumbled forward and fell head-first off the dock’s lip, into the finely churned dust of the street.
“Ooooh,” Jorge Amado said from the wagon bed, wincing and beetling his bushy black brows.
The kid climbed to his knees, holding his right shoulder. “My arm, damn ye . . .”
Navarro lowered his tall frame from the loading dock. The kid’s right right arm hung at an odd angle.
“Here, let me pop that back into place for you,” Navarro said. He grabbed the kid’s arm and brusquely jerked it back. With an audible crack, the ball of the arm snapped back into its socket.
“Awwww!” the kid screamed.
The kid screamed louder as Navarro grabbed both his arms and dragged him over to the stock trough on the other side of the wagon. The ramrod slammed the kid against the trough. The kid’s screams died, his eyes fluttering, his head wobbling on his shoulders as the pain, heat, and alcohol combined to make him faint.
Navarro took a handful of the kid’s hair and dunked his head in the trough, plunging it deep. He held him down for a good ten seconds, the kid thrashing his arms and legs against Navarro’s iron grip. The ramrod bore down stiff-armed, still puffing the quirley clamped in his teeth.
He pulled the kid’s head up from the stock trough. The kid took a deep, raking breath, water rolling off his face and pasting his hair against his forehead.
“How ’bout if I give you one more long drink so you can think more clearly about your future?” Navarro said.
The kid’s protesting cry turned to bubbles as the ramrod muscled the head back down in the trough, causing water to spill over the sides, making mud around the kid’s knees. Finally, Navarro jerked him out. The kid arched his back as he sucked air into his lungs, then fell forward vomiting water.
Navarro stood over him grimly, sucking the quirley down to little longer than a .44 shell. “I’ve just given you the benefit of the doubt, pip-squeak. I’ve decided you’re just another shit-brained little hot-head out lookin’ to make a name for yourself by blowin’ out my lamp. A minute ago, you didn’t know better. Now you know better. You come around me again, I’m gonna trim your wick so low you’ll never hold another spark.” Navarro stepped forward and kicked the kid’s side with the toe of his boot, throwing him onto his right shoulder with a whimpering groan. “Comprende?”
The kid coughed and finally nodded.
Navarro turned to the cantina, where three wide-eyed faces peered over the batwings. “Davis, Potter, Jurgens—get your asses out here and haul your friend back inside the saloon,” he snarled.
The three Circle-6 riders filed through the batwings, all looking sheepish, brush-scarred chaps flapping around their legs.
“Sorry, Mr. Navarro,” said the tall, long-haired blond named Potter, a flush rising beneath his tan. “We were just funnin’ the kid.”
Arnie Jurgens, whose father Navarro had scouted with out of Fort Bowie some years ago, said, “He was braggin’ all mornin’ about how fast he was. Then we seen you pull up in the wagon”—he shrugged—“and we bet him he wasn’t as fast as you.”
“Thanks for tellin’ him who I was, Arnie. ’Preciate that.”
“Sorry, Tom.”
“Take him inside and keep him there till I’m gone. Then you boys best haul your sorry tails back to the Circle-6.” He looked at the stocky young Jurgens, whose plump face was a pale oval below his gray felt sombrero. “I have a feelin’ your pa had other things for you to do in town besides goading tinhorn gunslicks into lead swaps and putting burrs in my bonnet.”
When the three had hauled the young hardcase back inside the cantina, Navarro retrieved the kid’s gun from the street and tossed it onto the porch roof. He turned to his own three men, who were regarding him grinning.
“What the hell are you boys lookin’ at?” Navarro whipped his dead quirley into the street. “You’re burnin’ daylight!”
Chapter 2
In a high hanging valley of the Santa Catalinas, Karla Vannorsdell was helping her grandfather’s Mexican maid, Pilar, clean the old patriarch’s high-ceilinged study, and thinking about the tall Mexican boy who’d become her beau. She ran a feather duster over the rearing bronze Morgan horse on her grandfather’s map table.
The feather duster paused on the horse’s cocked tail. Eyes suddenly bright, the color rising in her cheeks, Karla turned to the older woman and said quickly, because she had to share the news with someone and the maid was the only other woman on the ranch, “Pilar, Juan and I are going to be married.”
The words, so long considered, shocked Karla almost as much as they did Pilar.
The plump maid had been dusting the broad, hide-covered desk fronting a vast, oak-framed map of Arizona Territory. She whirled, round brown eyes snapping wide. “Karla!” she exclaimed, then, fearing someone had heard, peered self-consciously at the room’s open doors.
The girl was relieved to have told someone. She’d been harboring the secret for weeks, since Juan had proposed to her by the spring-fed waterfall under Antelope Peak. Pilar stared at her, her eyes dark and fretful.
“Aren’t you happy for me, Pilar?”
The older woman blinked, then let out a long, silent breath. “Senorita, has Juan discussed this with your grandfather?” She dropped her arms to her broad, round sides. “Have you discussed this with your grandfather?”