The big man lay propped against the far wall, clutching his bloody shoulder and breathing hard as he stared at Navarro. Tom glanced right. The man who’d been cooking was now on both knees before the fire, his arms around the woman who lay at his feet. Her round eyes in her round, dark face regarded Tom cautiously.
“You own this place?” Tom asked the young man who’d been cooking.
“Sí.” He looked at the man tied to the chair behind Tom. “With my brother.”
“That your wife?”
“Sí.”
“Untie your brother. Then all of you go outside and get yourselves cleaned up.”
“Amigo,” said the Mexican with his hands on the table, lifting them and shrugging reasonably, “we are only settling a debt. Vincente and Alonzo bought whiskey from us last month on credit. We came for our money, and they didn’t have it. . . .”
Navarro glanced at the young man again, jerked his head at the gray-haired man. When the young man had untied his older brother, and they and the girl had gone outside, Navarro walked over to the table, Winchester extended from his hip. He looked at both drunk Mexicans sitting before him, still frozen in their chairs, bloodshot eyes rolling around in their sockets.
“Toss your guns in that corner. All of ’em—hideouts included.”
When the two men at the table had tossed five pistols into the corner behind the door, Navarro walked over to the man lying behind them. He removed a pistol from his cartridge belt, one from a shoulder holster, and a bowie from a boot sheath. He tossed the weapons into the corner with the others, then regarded the three whiskey traders coldly. They stared back at him in kind.
“Who belongs to that white Arabian out in the corral yonder?” Navarro asked.
When none said a word, Navarro approached the table. He swung the rifle back and forward, laying the barrel soundly against the head of the man on the left. The man was nearly thrown from his chair. He clutched his ear, drew the hand away, and looked at the blood smeared on his fingers. “Son of a whore!”
“I’m gonna ask you one more time, and I better get a straight answer. Who bel—”
“It’s his!” cried the man with the torn ear, jerking his head back to indicate the man lying against the wall.
The big man lay glaring up at Tom with flared nostrils. Blood puddled the floor beneath his shoulder.
“Where’d you get it?” Tom asked.
The wounded man shrugged his good shoulder. “Cabelludo cazadores.”
“Where’d you run into these scalpers?”
“Rio Bavispe.”
“Which way were they heading?”
“They head south. Traded the horse for whiskey.”
“They have Yanqui girls, gringas, with ’em?”
The wounded man nodded slowly. “They have gringas.” He made a lewd gesture and spread a grin. “Bonita gringas.”
A half hour later, when Navarro had learned the direction Bontemp’s men were headed, he sent the whiskey traders off in their wagon.
He left their guns with the goat herders and headed south. Karla’s Arabian followed on a lead line.
Chapter 20
Two hours after good dark, Bontemps’ slavers herded their captives single-file through high, pinion-studded buttes and deep-scored canyons. Hooves clipped rocks, saddles squeaked, bridle chains jingled. Gassing to kill time, the men snorted occasional laughs and were shushed by Bontemps, wary of Indians or bandits having spied the female flesh.
They’d been riding ten hours since sunup when the renegade leader called a halt at the lip of a wide, deep valley. Karla lifted her head from a doze, and glanced below, where stars shimmered off a stream curving at the valley’s bottom. Loud booms sounded in the distance, like giant hammers pulverizing rock.
“Home, sweet home.” Bontemps rode among the girls clumped at the lip of the ridge, slumped in their saddles, hands tied to the horns. “Boys, give our girls a long drink of water. I want ’em lookin’ fresh for Sister Mary Francis.”
“You got it, Edgar,” one of the men said. He and two others kneed their mounts up to the girls and held canteens to their parched lips.
Karla was too fatigued to be thirsty, but she drank the warm water, anyway. Strange as the name sounded, she didn’t ask who this Sister Mary Francis was. She was too dispirited to care about anything except curling into a ball and drifting into dreamless sleep.
When she and the other girls had finished drinking, Bontemps turned his horse to the ridge, throwing an arm forward. “Let’s go down and turn our booty in, then see about some women and panther juice!”
The others whooped and yelled as, tugging and kicking at the girls’ mounts, they followed their leader over the ridge and down the valley’s steep wall. Karla leaned back in her saddle to keep from being thrown over the horn. Her horse followed Billie’s, switchbacking along the slope toward the lights of a town twinkling at the bottom, spread out along both sides of the stream.
When the trail finally leveled and widened into a road, Billie glanced at Karla riding up on her right. It was too dark for Karla to see much of the girl’s face, but she sensed Billie’s terror. Her own fear sparked beneath her fatigue, her heartbeat quickening, nudging away her dolor.
What awaited her and the other girls at trail’s end?
The eager slavers urged their mounts into a jog as they headed toward the lights clumped ahead along the stream. They met several heavy wagons, with wheels taller than most men, clattering over the pot-holes. As they passed, the bearded wagoneers shouted jubilant greetings while raking their glances across Karla and the other girls and yelling bawdy epithets to Bontemps’ men, who responded in kind.
“Nice bunch you got there, Edgar,” a driver called as the group traced a slow bend in the trail, passing an old mine portal yawning from a slope. “A very nice bunch indeed!”
“Glad you’re pleased, Aldo!” Bontemps returned, waving his battered bowler.
The procession passed several shacks and corrals buried in the rocks and sage, then split two lines of adobes and false-fronted clapboard establishments throwing lantern light onto boardwalks and the dung-littered street.
Pianos clattered behind brightly lit saloon windows. Two dogs ran out from an alley to bark and nip at the horses. Men standing along the boardwalks—broad, bearded men in cloth caps and low-heeled boots and suspenders—held out their drinks and cheered.
“Nice to see white girls again, Edgar!” one man shouted in a heavy German accent. “Ole Chris here has started lookin’ as purty as a Frisco dove. Ha!”
Karla’s horse followed Billie’s around a dry fountain. A few seconds later, she found herself sitting before a vast stone church standing dark against the sky. There was a seven-foot-high wall around the church, with several saddled horses tied to hitchracks.
Beyond a wrought-iron gate, a man holding a rifle rose from a chair. The man opened a door and disappeared inside the church. A minute later, the door opened again. A stocky woman in a long dress stepped out, silhouetted by the lantern light behind her. The first man and two others, with pistols on their hips, stepped out behind her.
The three men dwarfed the woman in height but not in girth. She paused before the open door. Dark hair was piled atop her head. A cigarette smoldered in her right hand. She took a puff and blew out the smoke. Then she and the three guards moved down the flagstone path and out the squeaky gate.
“It’s about time you’re gettin’ in,” the woman said to Bontemps, who was sitting his horse ahead of the others.
“Nice to see you, too, Sister Mary Francis,” the renegade leader returned, his voice thick with irony.