Footfalls sounded within the infirmary. Lantern light spilled onto the porch. The doctor poked his head through the door, between Navarro and the would-be assassins, holding a shimmering bracket lamp high above the boards. “What in the name of Christ is going on here?”
The light momentarily blinded Navarro. He blinked against the glare, leaned his head to the right, trying to see around the lamp. “Go back inside, Doc!”
Sullivan jerked the lamp back, retreating, but the young shooters had already taken advantage of the distraction. They’d leapt for their guns, both pivoting at their hips and throwing themselves groundward—one right, one left.
“Shit!” Navarro railed, leveling his revolver on the two flying shadows. “Boys, don’t do it.”
It was too late. Light shimmered on the weapon the lanky kid raised from a crouch. The gun exploded, stabbing flames. Navarro had thrown himself right, and the bullet barked into the porch post in front of him.
Navarro’s own Colt jumped. The lanky kid grunted and stumbled backward. Navarro turned left and peered through the smoke. The towhead was hunkered on his heels, thrusting his revolver out from his chest and yelling, “Die, you—!”
Navarro’s Colt exploded once more.
From the way the kid’s head snapped back, knocking his forage cap off, Tom knew the bullet had plowed through his forehead. The towhead triggered his revolver into the ground as he fell straight back in the dust and lay stone-still, not even twitching.
Men yelled to Navarro’s right, and he turned to see two sentries running toward him, Springfield rifles raised. Several windows surrounding the parade ground were lit, and more soldiers were spilling out of the barracks in various stages of dress.
“Drop the gun, ye son of a bitch!” the sergeant of the guard yelled as he approached the infirmary’s north end—a stocky Swede in a tan kepi with a pinned-up brim. His gold chevrons shone in the light from the doctor’s lamp, once again hovering over the smoky porch.
Tom holstered his pistol and raised his hands. “It’s Tom Navarro, Sergeant. These privates tried to ambush me.”
The sergeant lowered his pistol slightly as he approached the two dead soldiers sprawled in the dust. The two sentries marched up on Tom’s right, flanked by a dozen or so soldiers rousted by the gunfire, several looking panicked and wielding firearms. As this was Apache country, they’d probably expected to find themselves under Indian attack.
“Schultz and Ball,” the sergeant muttered, glancing over the bodies while keeping his pistol half trained on Tom. “What the hell happened here, Navarro?”
“Yes, what the hell’s going on?” Tom turned to see Phil Bryson wedging through the crowd of half-dressed soldiers, ignoring the obligatory salutes as he knotted the belt around his robe and ambled up to the edge of the porch. Navarro still stood by the bullet-pocked post, hands half raised, in his long johns and pistol belt.
Tom shuttled his gaze from the major, looking over the dead men one more time, a look of distaste lifting his weathered cheeks. “Same ole, same ole, Phil. The past came a-gunnin’. Two more dead.”
“They’re dead, all right,” Sullivan said, crouched over the lanky kid’s sprawled carcass. Dressed in striped pajamas and leather slippers, he looked at Bryson. “He had no choice, Major.”
Navarro saw the look on Bryson’s face. He’d seen the same look before, on the faces of lawmen in whose towns he’d been prodded to defend himself against those seeking fame. Regret. Disgust. Scorn tempered by a general liking for the man at the trouble’s heart, knowing it wasn’t Tom’s fault, but wishing he’d saddle a horse and ride, after all.
“Well, I reckon you as good as plugged that ‘Q,’ ” the doctor said.
He turned, went inside, and sat down on his cot. Captain Ward had lighted the candle on his footlocker. He lay propped on his pillow, arms crossed behind his head, watching Navarro sitting on the edge of his own cot, his face in his hands.
The captain didn’t say anything to the lean, silver-headed tracker, but he watched him for a long time.
Navarro removed his gun belt, coiled it on his locker, lay back on his cot with a long, weary sigh, and closed his eyes.
Ward blew out the candle and listened to the crowd disperse outside his window.
Around eleven the next morning, Karla rode slumped in her saddle, her hands snubbed to the horn. Her head hung low, pressed down by the heavy weight of the interminable desert sun and by the deadening fatigue of the trail.
The hat and clothes the bandits had given her protected the top of her head and her body from the brassy orb seemingly hanging just a few feet above. But the intense light and the dust-laden wind had managed to burn her face, hands, and unprotected feet, causing the skin to blister and peel. Long miles from home, tied and prodded like an animal by fifteen of the most savage men Karla had ever seen, she was being herded even farther into the bowels of remote, lawless Mexico—with eight other girls even unluckier than she, because they’d endured the slavers’ abuse even longer.
Karla thought of Juan, Tommy, Dallas, and Charlie—and her chin dipped even lower, eyelids pinching down below the brim of her tattered hat. For Juan she felt a deep, relentless grief. For Tommy and the other ranchmen, grief as well as guilt. If she hadn’t made the impetuous decision to ride out after Juan, the Bar-V men wouldn’t have had to ride after her . . . and die needlessly.
As the procession rode single-file through a brush-clogged break in the rock wall of a sandstone ridge, six hardcases rode ahead of the eight girls, while six others rode behind. This country was honeycombed with Indians and other men just as bad as the slavers, and worse, so two scouted ahead while another rode behind, watching the group’s flank.
At noon, the leader, whose name Karla had learned was Edgar Bontemps, called a halt at the base of a pine-clad slope, where a shallow creek trickled across alluviated sand. The girls were untied from their saddles and allowed, one by one, to wander off behind nearby shrubs for nature tending. The men peered through the branches, hooting and laughing.
When the girls returned, they were tied ankle to ankle along the shaded stream and tossed moldy jerky and stale crackers as though they were dogs. Several avoided the food, choosing only the cool springwater, sprawling prone and dipping their faces or cupping the water to their lips with their hands.
Karla drank deeply, then sat up and regarded the strip of jerkey near her knee. She took a bite, wrinkling her nose against the rancid taste, and stuffed the rest in her shirt for later. She hadn’t eaten since the slavers had tossed the girls scanty pieces of prairie chicken last night. She’d eaten only a wing, but she still wasn’t hungry. She wondered if she’d ever be hungry again. She felt so defeated that part of her wanted to just curl up and die.
“All right, ladies,” Bontemps said when the men were finishing their coffee and kicking dirt on the lunch fire. “I know how eager you are to get goin’, so let’s ride!”
A couple of the hardcases brought up the girls’ horses, from where they’d been tied in a grove of desert willows a few yards downstream. Three of the girls had been set atop their saddles, two of the bandits tying their wrists to the horns, when a short hardcase named Dupree—thin and dark, wearing a ragged black beard on his sharp-featured face—reached for the skinny little fourteen-year-old whose name Karla had learned was Marlene.
The girls who hadn’t mounted their horses yet had been untied and ordered to stand. Marlene, however, had remained on her knees, silently sobbing, her chin on her chest.
Dupree prodded the girl’s thigh with his boot toe. “Come on, girl. On your feet.”
Marlene continued sobbing. When the man kicked her again, harder this time, she sagged sideways in the sand and drew her knees up to her chest. Her sunburned cheeks were pinched, her eyes tightly closed. Tears squeezed out from beneath the lids, staining the sand under her face.