The deep, gravelly voice came from a long ways away. Someone was shaking him.
“Tommy?”
Behind the voice and high above, rifles snapped. Navarro blinked hard. Sharp nails probed his brain. A blurred figure was hunkered down beside him. Navarro smelled sweat and blood. He wasn’t sure if it was his own or someone else’s or a mixture of both.
Tixier’s emaciated, bristled face took form. The mestizo knelt beside Navarro, his slumped shoulders rising and falling sharply with his strained, wheezing breath. “We gotta get outta here, Tommy. All hell’s broke loose. Can you walk?”
Navarro winced against the nearly overpowering ache in his skull, rolled onto a shoulder, and looked around. He and Tixier were on a sand-and scree-strewn slope. Fifty feet above was the lip of the ridge they’d fallen down.
“Where’s Charlie . . . Ward?”
“Ain’t seen ’em. I was climbin’ down when you fell past me.”
Karla’s voice echoed behind the ringing in Navarro’s ears. “Tommy, don’t leave me!”
He grabbed Tixier’s sleeve. “Where’s the girl?”
“She’s still up there, Tom. Come on. We gotta get outta here . . .”
Navarro gained his feet with effort and stared up at the ridge. “You go, Dallas. I’m not leaving without her.”
“We ain’t in any shape to fight ’Paches no more tonight.” Tixier leaned forward, planted his hands on his knees. He heaved a heavy, wheezing sigh. Blood glistened on his arm, and his knees were shaking as badly as Navarro’s.
Tom studied him, the two images of the man moving in and out of painful focus. Tixier was right. Neither he nor Navarro was in any shape to climb back up the mountain. Even if they could, they’d be of no use to Karla.
Hearing the sporadic shooting on the mountaintop, which evoked in his damaged skull more anxiety than curiosity about who the Indians were still shooting at, Navarro gently pulled Tixier’s good arm. “Come on. Let’s find our horses. . . .”
He tramped heavily down the slope, looking back to see Tixier moving slowly after him, reaching for rocks as though drunk. Crawling over boulders and cat-stepping over sand slides, they made their way down the mountain’s aproning slopes. Twice the banging in Navarro’s head brought him to his knees and Tixier had to prod him with a boot toe and several jerks on his arms to get him moving again.
He’d just stumbled over a cactus skeleton when something to his right, on the other side of a low, square boulder, caught his eye. A human form. Navarro glanced at Tixier mincing sideways down the slope ahead of him, then stepped around the boulder to his right, and looked down.
It was Musselwhite, lying facedown, arms and legs spread, head turned to the left. Blood matted the back of his shirt and his head, pasting his hair against his scalp. A dark stream poured from his lips.
Navarro looked up and back toward the chalky cliff looming behind him. Apparently, Charlie had fallen down the sheer rock wall, at least two hundred feet high. If he’d fallen from a place only a few feet right, he’d have landed on the higher sand slide with Dallas and Navarro.
But he hadn’t, and he was dead.
Navarro ran a hand over his close-cropped scalp, draped his wrist over his knee and stared down at the seasoned tracker; deep lines of sorrow etched his dirty face. He’d met Charlie when they’d started working together at the Bar-V, but they’d grown nearly as tight as he and Tixier, who’d been together for the past twelve years.
Navarro glanced at Dallas, a vague shadow still moving away from him down the slope, the sound of his foot scuffs loud in the desert silence. No point in breaking the news to the old mestizo until they were out of this, Navarro thought. Pushing off his knees, he stood, glanced at Charlie once more.
“Sorry for leavin’ like this, pard. I’ll be back later to bury you proper.”
Nearly losing his balance, he turned around the boulder and began moving carefully down the slope toward Dallas, who’d disappeared over the incline’s brow.
Tixier was still ahead of him, and they were slipping and sliding down the last incline, when Dallas’ feet slipped out from under him, and he fell backward over a yucca clump, his breath an injured bird fluttering around in his chest.
“You go, Tommy,” the old mestizo wheezed. “I’m finished.”
Navarro stumbled toward him, prodded his side with a boot toe. “Get your ass up, you greasy half-breed. We ain’t finished yet, you son of a bitch.”
“Ah, shit, Tommy . . .”
When he’d gotten Dallas on his feet again, they negotiated the last incline shoulder to shoulder, hands around waists, like lovers. They continued walking this way, holding each other up, gently guiding themselves forward.
They’d walked a half mile in what Navarro thought was the direction of their horses, when Tixier’s knees bent. The mestizo slipped from Navarro’s grasp and dropped to the ground, his head rolling back on his shoulders.
“Dallas,” Navarro growled, holding Tixier up by his right arm. Clumsily, he dropped to a knee beside his friend, grabbed Tixier’s shirt with his other hand, gave it a tug. “Don’t give up. We’re close to the horses.” He wasn’t sure that was true, but as far as they’d come, they had to be.
Setting his teeth against his own pain, Navarro squinted his eyes at Tixier and shook him hard. “Dallas, don’t you fold on me!”
Tixier’s sweaty head lolled to his right shoulder. His eyes were closed, lips parted slightly.
Navarro shook him again, causing the man’s head to bob. “Bastard!”
Tixier said nothing. His eyes remained closed.
Navarro eased him down onto his right shoulder. Doing so, he placed a hand on the man’s lower back, feeling a sticky wetness. He brought his hand to his face. The hand was covered with blood gleaming in the starlight.
Navarro turned Tixier over slightly, saw the bullet hole over the mestizo’s left kidney. Turning the man onto his back, Navarro lowered his head to his chest and turned an ear to listen.
The bird in the old mestizo’s lungs had fallen silent. There was no heartbeat.
“You old bastard,” Navarro wheezed, shoulders slumping. “You old son of a bitch.”
Hands on his knees, he stared at Tixier. Around him, the night had fallen cool and quiet, not a breath of breeze. The branches around him were slender, crooked etchings against the star-jeweled sky. The velvet hump of Gray Rock shouldered northward—black and silent.
Navarro leaned forward, clutched Dallas’ right hand in his, gave it a squeeze. “You rest easy.”
He straightened Dallas’ legs and crossed his hands on his chest, then grabbed a mesquite branch and pulled himself to his feet.
He turned and stumbled off through the shrubs, arms hanging straight down at his sides.
He’d gone only a little ways before his steps grew even heavier, and he was dragging the toes of his boots in the gravel.
Finally, his knees buckled, he dropped, and his head fell back on his shoulders. His eyes closed, and he lost consciousness before he sagged sideways and hit the ground on his right arm.
“Wait a minute,” the short man said. He stood before Karla at the base of Gray Rock, holding her chin in his gloved hand and running his eyes down her naked body. “You ain’t one of our girls at all, are ye?”
“Please, mister.” Karla drew her knees up and crossed her arms on her chest. Her heart hammered. “I need—”
“Who the hell are you? And why are you—now I ain’t complainin’, mind you—naked as a jaybird?” The short man chuckled.
“I’m Karla Vannorsdell, and I was—”
“Save it,” the short man interrupted again. He stood and jerked her to her feet. “You can tell it to Edgar.”
The paint stood fifteen yards away, reins dangling, cropping at a sage shrub. The short man pulled Karla toward the horse. Halfway there, she jerked her right hand from his grip, wheeled, and ran, leaping a sage bush and dashing between two wagon-sized boulders.