“Clean.”
“You can’t see it.”
“It’s some fuzzy, but I can see it,” Navarro said, flipping the gate open and removing the spent shell. “As a matter of fact, I can see two of ’em.” He plucked a fresh shell from his cartridge belt, thumbed it through the loading gate, spun the cylinder, and returned the .44 to its holster.
“When I can see only one, and hit the son of a bitch, I’m heading to Mexico.”
That night, Major Bryson came by with a bottle and two tumblers. He did nothing to convince Navarro not to go after Bontemps. The major knew he had no jurisdiction in the matter, beyond friendship, and even if he had, convincing Navarro to give up his search would have been like trying to reroute a river with a handful of sand.
When he’d finished his cigar and had signed a requisition to supply Navarro with two Army horses—a packhorse and a saddle mount—the major raised his glass in salute. “To a safe journey, Tom. But frankly, I don’t expect you’ll have one.”
They touched glasses, and drank.
The major ambled back to his lonely quarters feeling owly and depressed—the frontier was losing too many old salts like Tom Navarro—and turned in early with a dime novel and a bottle of cheap whiskey.
The next morning, Navarro took another shot at the medicine can. Again, he missed his target but noted there were only 1.5 cans now instead of two, and he was getting closer to blowing the Q out of QUINAE. He celebrated with a drink at the sutler’s saloon, then hobbled toward the stables to see about his horses.
He was ambling along the path through the sage and saguaros, sweating in the hot sun, when two young privates—a freckle-faced towhead and a lanky kid with a limp—headed toward him from the quartermaster’s barn and corrals.
The two soldiers saluted and smiled as they approached. Navarro nodded back. The path was narrow, and the two privates made way for him, but the kid with the limp moved back onto the trail too quickly, his right foot clipping Tom’s crutch.
Losing the crutch and tripping over a sage bush, Tom cursed and, limbs akimbo, fell in a heap.
“Oh, gosh, oh, shit, Mr. Navarro!” the gimpy kid lamented, scrambling back and forth between Tom and the fallen crutch, not sure which one to pick up first.
“Look what ye done, Dwight, ye damn fool!” the towhead admonished. “Ye done tripped, Mr. Navarro!”
“Oh, jeeze!”
“Fool! Grab his crutch, for christ’s sake!” The towhead crouched over Navarro. “You all right, sir? Should I send for the doc?”
Tom had propped himself on an arm. “No need for the doc, fellas. No harm done.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Navarro,” the gimpy kid said, reaching for the crutch and fumbling with his duck-billed forage hat, doffing it, dropping it, picking it up, and holding it across his chest.
“Give him the crutch, you moron!”
“Here, Mr. Navarro—and let me give ye a hand. . . .”
Navarro shook his head. “No harm done.” He maneuvered the crutch beneath his arm and, as the towhead helped from the other side, levered himself to his feet.
“You sure you’re okay, sir? I’d be happy to—”
“I’m fine. Fit as a fiddle. Tight as razor wire.”
“Dwight here don’t move along so well his own-self,” the towhead explained, sliding his blue eyes toward his friend. “Since he took that ’Pache arrow last month, he’s had a gait like a three-legged horse trottin’ over hot coals.”
“My sympathies, son. They have you on a recovery string?”
The lanky kid nodded and bunched his lips. “Yeah, can’t do much. The sergeant’s got me cleanin’ windows some, but mostly I just whittle and hobble around chattin’ up the girls over to Suds’ Row.”
“You could do worse than chat with the ladies on a soldier’s salary,” Navarro said, giving the lanky kid an encouraging shoulder pat, then turning to continue down the trail.
“See you, Mr. Navarro,” the lanky kid called behind him. “Again, my apologies.”
“Be well, sir,” the towhead yelled.
Navarro threw his right arm up and hobbled around a dogleg in the hard-packed trail.
The two privates continued in the opposite direction, walking side by side. As they approached the parade ground where the guidon snapped and popped in the breeze and a sergeant dressed down a corporal for drunkenness, the lanky kid suddenly lost his limp.
He snickered. “Did you see the old bastard fall?”
The towhead laughed and exclaimed in a mocking rasp, “So sorry, Mr. Navarro!”
“How good you think he can shoot with only one leg to balance on?”
“ ’Bout as well as he could outrun a jackrabbit.”
The soldiers chuckled.
The lanky kid sobered. “Tonight, we see how well he can outrun a bullet.”
When Navarro had picked out a long-legged bay for riding and a thick-hammed, white-socked dun for packing, he spent some time buttering up the remount duty noncom, a prickly, red-bearded Norwegian named Jasper Dahl, by complimenting the man on the cleanliness and orderliness of the barn, hay-loft, and tack room.
“A place for everything and everything in its place,” Navarro commented, nodding with approval. “Why, hell, I’d drink out of those water troughs myself!”
“Horses perform better when they’re well-cared for,” Dahl said. A fuzzy kitten was crawling on his broad shoulders. “It’s the Army way. You seen the barns at Fort Bowie? I don’t mean to stab no one in the back, but the quartermaster over there has gotten a little sloppy. These horses shit, and I or my boys is right there with the shovel.”
They chatted over a cup of coffee, Navarro offering his appreciation for the horses, buttering the man up further. Though the middle-aged Norski didn’t actually own the animals himself, Navarro had never known a remount man who didn’t consider the horses his own. Besides, Navarro wanted the bay and the dun fed plenty of oats and corn tonight and ready to ride at dawn the next day, when he hoped to leave.
“That won’t be a problem, Mr. Navarro,” Dahl said, shaking Tom’s hand when he’d grabbed his crutch and stood up from the sergeant’s battered card table. “I’ll give ’em a little extra and throw a few pounds in a feed pouch.”
“Much obliged, Mr. Dahl.”
“Oh, watch that dun’s right forefoot if you’re on a narrow trace somewheres—in the mountains, say. He tends to throw it out to the side. Hate to see him end up in a canyon. That’s the best packhorse in my remuda.”
Navarro waved and thanked the man again as, leaning into the crutch, he split the barn doors and headed back to the parade ground, where he bought a shave and a haircut in the post barbershop.
After stripping and removing the bandage from his lower right leg, he lounged in a tub in the barber’s back room. Lifting the leg from the soapy water, he ran his right thumb across the wound, probing and inspecting it.
The entry and exit holes looked like hell, stitched and swollen, but the wound looked a lot better since the last time Sullivan had lanced it. The puss had dried up. More important, Tom could put full weight on his calf. He’d mostly been using the crutch to hasten the healing, so it wouldn’t be as apt to open up once he was on the trail.
It was his head that had grieved Navarro the most, but while the frequent headaches were still blinding, they were short-lived, and his vision was only occasionally blurry. He hoped riding wouldn’t set him back, but he had to chance it.
Every hour took Karla another hour beyond his reach. . . .
“Hear you’re goin’ after Edgar Bontemps,” the barber said as Navarro was leaving. The man shook his bald head and clipped away at the auburn-curled lieutenant in his chair. “Only a polecat woulda mammied that skunk.”