Laughter rose.
Navarro had just shifted his gaze from Karla’s horse to the cabin when the front door opened. A man came half stumbling, half running into the yard. He tripped over a rock and dropped to a knee—a lanky Mexican in pajama bottoms but no shirt or hat. A burly man stepped through the door, staggering, a bottle in his right hand.
He extended the bottle at the man on the ground and berated the skinny gent in Spanish, warning him to hurry or he’d kill his brother. The stout man in the doorway, wearing a dark brown poncho with bandoliers crossed on his chest, turned drunkenly. He bounced off the doorframe, then disappeared back inside the adobe, leaving the door open behind him.
Peering around the rock, Navarro watched the slender man climb to his feet, and limp across the yard to the covered wagon parked before the corral. He reached through the back flap and pulled three bottles out of the wagon. Cradling the bottles carefully in his arms, he hurried back to the cabin and disappeared through the door.
Another shot erupted inside, followed by the sound of breaking glass . . . followed by angry shouts and another pistol blast.
Navarro studied the draw, arranging a plan for approaching the cabin without being seen. He stood, retraced his steps down the ridge, stubbornly refusing to limp on his healing right leg, then made sure his horses were both tied fast. Rifle in hand, he left the horses tied to the shrubs and scrambled along the ridge’s base, heading east.
After a hundred yards, he climbed the ridge again and scrambled down the other side, then along a shallow ravine that led around behind the cabin, to the ridge on the opposite side.
He climbed halfway to the ridge’s crest and hunkered down in the rocks behind the adobe, amid the goats. The animals stopped foraging to eye the stranger warily.
From here, Navarro had a clean view of the cabin’s rear. There were a door and a window on this end, but mesquite logs and brush had been piled high around the window. If he approached the adobe from the southeast corner, he should be able to make the hovel’s rear door without being seen.
That was what he did, ignoring the pain in his right calf. He pressed his back to the hot, bright adobe wall left of the rear door hammered together from thin planks and cheap nails.
Inside, a gun continued its intermittent bark, followed by raucous laughter. Whoever had come calling on the poor goat herders was having one hell of a time—at the goat herders’ expense. Probably whiskey peddlers or scalp hunters. The wagon he’d seen parked beside the corral had looked like those run by that brand of border tough, as thick in this country as flies on a fresh dog plop.
Laughter and pleas spewed from the adobe walls and windows, punctuated by pistol shots.
Navarro stole around the building’s northeast corner and sidled up to a chest-high window in the north wall. Crouching, he slid a quick glance into the room, where six men and one young woman milled. Four of the men, sitting at a small wooden table, were tangle haired, bushy bearded, and armed with prominently displayed guns and knives. Bottles, glasses, and coins littered the table.
One man held an Indian-dark, round-faced woman on his lap and was nuzzling her neck and squeezing her breasts through a loose-fitting doeskin shift. The woman sat stiffly enduring the assault, looking away from the man, her face taut with disgust and anger.
Navarro’s glance was so quick that he wasn’t sure what the other two at the table were doing, but the third was aiming a Merwin and Hulbert .44 at a gray-haired Mexican man tied to a chair before a window on the other side of the room. The man wore no shirt, and his lean, muscular arms and birdlike chest bore the scars of a dozen old knife wounds.
An empty, dented vegetable tin stood atop the man’s gray head. The man aiming the .44—his elbow propped on the table, head lolling drunkenly—was the hombre who’d sent the other goat herder out to fetch more whiskey.
The young man who’d done the fetching was crouched before the stone fireplace in the back wall, stirring beans in a bubbling pot with an air of desperation and casting wild-eyed glances over his right shoulder. His black hair hung in his eyes, one of which was noticeably lower than the other.
Navarro slid his head back from the window as the older Mexican tied to the chair screamed in Spanish, “Please . . . in the name of all the sain—”
The .44 barked. A tinny thud, followed by a squeal. Shrill laughter rose.
In Spanish, a man at the table yelled, “Miguel, that’s another centavo you owe me, you son of a three-legged nanny goat!”
Navarro inched his right eye once more across the window’s edge. From this pinched angle, he could see only the right side of the room. The gray-haired man screamed and cursed and fought against the ropes tying his hands behind the chair back. His right temple shone with a three-inch line of bright red blood. The can lay on the floor behind his chair. He was as angry now as frightened, and his pleas were laced with curses salty enough to make the Devil take note.
Navarro slid his head back, dropped to his knees, crawled forward along the wall below the window, then rose and stalked around the adobe’s northwest corner and sidled up to the open front door. He raised the Winchester in both hands.
Just beyond the door, the gray-haired man was pleading for his life while the man with the gun ordered the cook to replace the can.
One of the other traders laughed as though at the funniest joke he’d ever heard. The girl squealed and struggled, the chair creaking as though it were about to break.
The smell of fresh tortillas, frijoles, and gunsmoke wafted through the door beside Navarro’s right shoulder. He waited, listening. A chair scraped back. Boots scuffed across the hard-packed floor, moving toward him.
When Tom heard them moving back toward the table, he waited until the gray-haired man began pleading again in earnest, then jacked a round into his Winchester’s breech. He turned through the door and snapped the Winchester up. He drew a bead on the big man taking rheumy-eyed aim at the older man with the can on his head, and fired.
Blood burst in a fine spray from the big man’s shoulder. He flew back in his chair, dropping the pistol, his beard-enshrouded lips making a broad “O” as he raged.
Two of the other three men had been sitting in a near-catatonic state of drunkenness while the fourth pawed the round-faced woman. Now, seeing Tom burst into the room, the woman howled. The man whose lap she adorned bolted up and forward, throwing the woman to the floor in a squealing heap and clawing his pistol off the table.
Tom yelled, “Stop!”
When the man kept coming toward him, raising the pistol and thumbing back the hammer, Tom drilled a round through his left thigh, just above the knee. The man dropped to that knee, his own screams joining those of the big man as he rolled onto his left hip, dropping the pistol and wrapping both hands around his leg.
Ejecting the smoking shell casing, Navarro took another step forward and raised his rifle to the other two men at the table. One froze with his right hand on his right hip. The other sat to his left, both hands lying flat on the table, fingers splayed and digging into the wood as if to gouge a sliver. Both stared at Tom fearfully, their jaws hanging.
The man on the floor before the table snapped his gun off the floor, cursing. He raised it toward Tom. Tom dropped the Winchester’s barrel and shot him through the right temple, spraying the floor with blood, brains, and bone.
Navarro jacked another shell and raised the rifle in the general direction of the two men sitting frozen behind the table. “You hombres want daisies growin’ out of your jaws, or do you think we can palaver like civilized folk?”
The man with his hands splayed on the table squinted at Tom and grumbled thickly in Spanish, “What do you want to talk about, amigo?”