Moving to it, the sharp stones cutting her bare feet, she squeezed between the rocks and into the hollow, gritting her teeth against the jagged edges slicing her back, belly, and thighs. When she was wedged in the cramped hollow, she peered out from between the rocks.
She saw little but a pine looming ahead and left, more rocks and shrubs dropping along the slope to the hollow. Flickering light from the Indians’ fire, now taken over by the scalp hunters, edged up from below, giving the night an eerie luminescence. Victorious whoops still rose, punctuating the muttered conversation.
By the voices, there must have been twenty white men down there.
Scalp hunters.
Karla knew the breed. They’d visited the ranch on occasion, seeking water and grain for their horses—hard, soulless, bloodstained men with crusted Indian scalps hanging from their saddles. Enshrouded in flies and reeking of death.
“Look what I found!” a man shouted, laughing. “Tiswin!”
Back toward the dead scalp hunter, a man yelled, “Bing, I found him!”
Running boots clattered on rocks. Silence. The two men spoke, their voices too low for Karla to hear clearly. She drew her limbs together as much as she could in the shallow, irregular niche, and ducked low behind a rock, squeezing her eyes closed.
After a minute, the rocks clattered again. One of the men grunted deeply, as though shouldering a great weight. “Otis, you stupid bastard,” one of the men said through a strained sigh. “You let that wet-behind-the-ears ’Pache take ye down! Vern, don’t forget his scalp.”
The footfalls faded as the two men headed back down the slope toward the hollow.
The tension in Karla’s body relaxed slightly. Listening intently, she heard no other nearby sounds, only those of the revelry below the hill. Smoke wafted to her nostrils, smelling of mesquite and a meat other than mule. Beef. Her mouth watered. She hadn’t eaten in two days. The Apaches had allowed her only a half sip of water from a bladder flask.
Tommy. How could she get to him?
Peering around the rock before her, she saw that the glow of the fire had increased. With that much light, she wouldn’t be able to climb the ridge without being seen from below.
Suppressing her thirst and hunger, she thought through the dilemma. As she did, a horse whinnied somewhere on the other side of the mountain. If she could get to the horses, she might be able to mount one and ride through the narrow crevice the Apaches had used to attain the ridge.
Once down, she could skirt the mountain’s base and, hopefully, locate Tommy and the other Bar-V men.
She’d wait here until the scalp hunters, drunk on the Apache’s tiswin, had gone to sleep. . . .
As she waited, the cool of the desert night settled around her naked flesh, raising pimples along her back and arms. It got so cold that her muscles ached and her teeth clattered.
So gradually as to be almost imperceptible, the firelight faded and the celebration waned. When all but three or four of the voices had died, Karla waited another hour, transporting herself mentally to a summer hay meadow not far from the Bar-V headquarters, where the hot sun enshrouded her.
But then she thought of Juan, saw him as she’d seen him last, his skinned, blood-drenched face protruding from the ant-covered sand. She heard her own rifle shot, and though she hadn’t looked at Juan after she’d pulled the trigger, she now saw the hole the bullet had drilled through his forehead.
Her heart contracted. Sobs racked her, tears flowing from her eyes and coursing down her dusty cheeks.
“Juan,” she cried softly.
Suddenly realizing all the sounds from the hollow had died, she lifted her head and peered around the rock. The night was still, the stars vivid. A light breeze blew, and a single wolf howled.
Wiping the tears from her cheeks with the heels of her hands, Karla crawled out of the niche and looked around. Nothing moved. Except for the wolf, all was silent.
The breeze biting her, and the rocks chewing at her feet, she followed a path of sorts through the rocks and pines around the edge of the hollow. She moved slowly, swinging her gaze in all directions.
Several times she found the scalped bodies of dead Apaches, blood on their hairless skulls. By now she’d seen so much horror, and was so chilled and terrified, that the grisly sightings barely registered. Navarro, Tixier, and the others foremost on her mind, she stepped over or around the bodies and, avoiding the very center of the hollow, where the dying fire glowed wanly and where intermittent snores resounded, made her way to the other side of the mountaintop. The Apaches, and probably the scalp hunters, had picketed their horses there, in the willows and curl leaf growing along a spring.
Amid the scarps and pine snags, it took her a long time to find the horses. When she did, she also found a bridle hanging from a branch.
Holding the bridle low at her side, she moved slowly toward the herd grazing on long picket ropes or reclining in the grass along the spring. She singled out the shortest one standing off by itself, and moved to it slowly, wincing at the thorny brush beneath her feet.
Seeing her, the little paint shied, sidled away, giving its tail a single angry swish. Karla cooed to the mount, holding her soiled hands out placatingly.
“Shhh . . . it’s all right,” Karla said, her voice shaking with the rest of her. “Oh, what a handsome horse you are. . . . That’s all right. . . . Don’t be afraid.”
As much as she felt the need to hurry, she took her time with the paint, speaking to it softly and letting it get used to her smell, before slipping the bridle over its ears. Because of her stiff legs and sore feet, she needed three tries to leap up onto its back, and when she finally got settled there, she reined the horse westward across the brushy bench. Two horses whinnied behind her. Before her and to the right, another jerked with a start, leaping off its rear hooves and running out to the end of its rope.
She set her teeth against the noise and heeled the horse into the cleft in the rock wall. The trail dropped steeply, throwing her forward over the horse’s neck. Twisting and turning between the jutting stone walls, the little paint picked its way, its hooves clipping stones, the jolting ride causing Karla’s sore muscles to scream and her bare rump to burn against the horse’s coarse hide.
It took a good quarter hour to get to the bottom of the mountain. When the paint finally leveled out at the base of an apron slope buried in mesquite, Karla reined back and heaved a long sigh of relief.
She was just about to bat her heels against the horse’s ribs and begin making her way south along the mountain’s base, when the sound of crunching gravel rose on her left. Acrid cigarette smoke peppered her nostrils. She whipped her head toward the sound and the smell. A man in a battered bowler hat stood wielding a rifle and an enraged scowl, a crooked quirley protruding from his thin lips.
Before Karla knew what was happening, the man had grabbed her left arm and pulled. He was short but powerful, and the tug jerked Karla instantly off the paint’s back. She hit the ground hard, her head glancing off a stone.
“Goddamn girl!” the short man snapped, dropping to his knees beside her and brusquely grabbing her chin in his callused right hand. He gave her head a violent shake, rattling her brains around. “Where the hell you think you’re goin’? Huh? Where on earth you think you’re goin’?”
Chapter 13
“Come on, Tommy. Get your ass up now.”