Knowing it hadn’t been a dream did nothing to quell the dreamlike quality. At the same time, his heart squeezed with sorrow.
Karla, Dallas, Charlie . . .
“You still kickin’, Mr. Navarro?” The voice came from across the room.
Tom switched his gaze to a man stretched out on a cot on the opposite side of the aisle and two cots down on the left. His vision was still blurred. He blinked hard to clear it, until the round young face swam into focus beneath a bandage like Navarro’s.
The man’s right leg was in a cast and drawn up by wires and pulleys to an iron bar hanging over the end of the man’s bed. The man’s right arm was in a cast, as well, and looped through a sling around his neck.
“Ward?”
The captain offered a wan smile.
“Figured you dead, too,” Navarro said.
The captain lifted a shoulder. His arms were crossed behind his head. His smooth sunburned cheeks were freshly shaved. “You’re at Fort Huachuca.”
“How long I . . . we been here?”
“Three days.”
“Goddamn.”
“This young man saved your life, Mr. Navarro.”
Tom turned to see one of the two men who’d been speaking near the outside door now moving toward him down the center of the room. Fortyish, thick red hair carelessly parted. Beard and mustache. He wore a black tie and a white jacket with captain’s bars, and a stethoscope around his neck. He held a clipboard in one hand, a gnarled quirley in the other. The cuffs of his baggy wool trousers dragged on the floor.
The medico halted near Navarro’s cot. “With a broken arm and leg, he crawled a mile to the main trail, and lay there for three hours, until a patrol happened by. He directed the soldiers to you.”
“Much obliged,” Navarro said to Ward. “Soldiers go up the mountain?”
“Found only a bunch of dead Apaches,” Ward said. “Scalped, left to rot in the sun—even Nan-dash.”
“No girl?”
“No girl.”
“Scalp hunters,” Navarro said, remembering how the Indians had suddenly seemed distracted when he, Karla, and the others were trying to get away. His brain working sluggishly, he thought it over. The soldiers hadn’t found Karla’s body, which meant she’d either escaped on her own, maybe down another side of the mountain, or the scalp hunters had nabbed her. If they’d nabbed her, where had they taken her? Why?
They must’ve been the bunch the late Cheatam and Gomez had been riding to meet. If only Tom had probed the horse thieves a little deeper, found out where they were selling the scalps. Probably the same place they were taking Karla . . .
Tom, suddenly realizing the medico was talking to him, looked up at the potbellied, stoop-shouldered man.
“I’m Dr. Sullivan, post surgeon,” the man repeated louder and more slowly, as though talking to a dim-wit. “How are you feeling?”
“I got a helluva headache, my lower leg feels bee-stung, I’m hungry, and I have to piss like a plowhorse. Other than that, I think I’m ready to ride.”
Chuckles echoed off the adobe walls. Navarro glanced around the room. Two of the other three patients regarded him from their cots, grinning. The two soldiers who’d been talking outside now stood shoulder to shoulder at an open window, grinning at him.
“Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Navarro,” the doctor said, jerking his head around to indicate the onlookers. “You’re legendary. I had to post a guard on the building to keep the enlisted men from strolling through to get a peek at the famous—” He frowned thoughtfully. “What do they call you?”
“ ‘Taos Tommy’ Navarro,” said one of the near-toothless men peering through the window, with a jubilant air.
“Famed Injun tracker and gunslick,” Ward added with a pensive smile. “I must be the only soldier in the Territory that hadn’t heard of you.”
Embarrassed by the foofaraw, Navarro returned his gaze to the doctor. “When can I get out of here?”
“You have a fractured skull,” the doctor said. “For that alone, I recommend bedrest for the next two weeks. The bullet that plowed through your leg missed the bone, but I’m going to need to keep draining it to avoid infection.”
“Shit!” Navarro brought his right fist down against his cot, then winced against the searing pain in his skull. If Karla was still alive in three weeks, would he be able to find her? The tracks the scalp hunters had made leaving Gray Rock would have long since disappeared.
He looked at the doctor, who was drawing deep on his quirley stub. “I need to talk to the post commander pronto.”
No sooner had the words left his mouth than heavy footsteps pounded the floorboards. Looking around the doctor, Navarro saw a tall heavyset man enter the infirmary, doffing a big tan hat with half the brim pinned to the crown.
“I ain’t used to takin’ orders from civilians,” the man said in a deep, burly voice echoing around the narrow room. “But you’re in luck, Tom. I came just to get a look at ye with your eyes open.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Navarro said as the big man approached. He was nearly as tall as Navarro’s six-three, but his torso was round as a whiskey keg, his double chin wobbled around on his neck, and he had half as much hair as when Tom had seen him last. “Phil Bryson?”
“Don’t look so damn surprised. Since they weren’t promoting you rebels, I was bound to make major eventually.”
Bryson held out his hand, and Navarro shook it, remembering a Lieutenant Bryson, tall and gallant, with muttonchop whiskers and a full head of hair. He’d been a junior officer most of the years Navarro had scouted off and on out of Forts Apache and Bowie. A hereditary addiction to alcohol—his father had died with a liver the size of a boar’s head—had kept Bryson at the rank he’d assumed upon graduation from West Point, but despite his off-duty predilection for spiritous liquids, he’d been one of the most levelheaded officers Navarro had known. His lack of ego and his gallows humor had made him a favorite among the enlisted men and the noncoms, and a sport to carouse with.
Smelling the liquor rolling off the man now, and seeing the syphilitic white around his eyes and mouth, Navarro knew that Bryson’s promotion had probably been less the result of the soldier’s change of character than of the Army’s lowered standards. Too many officers had simply died in the field, and as Bryson had said, the War Department Act of 1866 excluded ex-Confederates from holding commissions.
“Couldn’t have happened to a better man,” Navarro said, as Bryson pulled a Windsor chair out from the wall. The doctor had crossed the aisle to check on Ward.
“Ah, bullshit,” Bryson said, the chair squawking as he lowered his considerable girth to it. “You and I both know they promoted me because they’re short-handed, but what do I care? I’m gettin’ on in years, they make the pillows softer for majors, and I get first pick at the new batches of whiskey and whores from Las Cruces. Hell with ’em if they can’t take a joke.” Plucking two stogies from inside his tunic and glancing at the doctor, he said, “Doc, can he have a cigar?”
“No,” Sullivan said curtly as he unwrapped the bandage around Ward’s head.
Bryson extended the two cigars to Navarro, who took one and bit off the end. “What in the hell were you doin’ atop Gray Rock, anyway? Thought you gave up chasin’ ’Paches.”
“I was looking for a girl,” Navarro said as Bryson lit Tom’s cigar. Puffing smoke, the match flame leaping as he drew, Navarro said, “Daughter of the rancher I ride for. Nan-dash had her. Now the scalp hunters have her.” He raised his eyes to Bryson. “I’d appreciate your help, Phil.”