“Louise Talon,” the woman said as she approached through the cottonwoods, taking long, graceful strides. She was dressed now in the red plaid shirt and dark brown riding skirt, the colors matching her damp hair, which she’d pinned behind her neck, several strands curling about her cheeks.
“I’m sorry I was short with you, Mr. Navarro. This country makes me a little jumpy.”
“No harm done,” Tom said, as Hawkins tipped the charred pot over his cup again. Louise Talon had a firm but feminine handshake. “You folks are a little off the beaten path, aren’t you?”
“Might say the same thing about you,” the woman said, tempering her steady gaze with a smile.
“I’m looking for a young lady nabbed by slave traders in Arizona. I was told they were heading southeast.”
Louise Talon’s face blanched. Hawkins narrowed his eyes at Navarro. “You don’t say. . . .”
“Have you seen ’em?”
“No, we haven’t seen them,” Mrs. Talon said with amazement, the light leaving her eyes. “But we’re looking for them, too.”
“They took our girl, Billie, who worked at the stage station,” Hawkins said. “Been trailin’ ’em just over a week now. We ’bout rode our horses to death, ridin’ in circles the last coupla days. Stopped here to rest ’em . . . and ourselves.”
Navarro glanced around the camp. Three horses stood tied to a long picket line back in the tree shadows. Saddles and a wooden pack frame lay nearby. “You come all this way alone?”
“We had no time to form a tracking party,” said Mrs. Talon, a trifle defensive. “As it was, we lost the trail several days ago, anyway.”
“We’re tougher than we look,” muttered Hawkins as he blew ripples on his coffee, and sipped. “Might as well throw in together, though. We’re all headin’ the same direction. Me, I can shoot and trap and field dress a griz or buff in the time it takes most men to crap—uh, sorry, Mrs. Talon—but I can’t navigate fer shit in these desert mountains.”
Tom glanced at the woman, sipped his coffee. “I reckon not,” he said, throwing the dregs of the coffee out and extending the cup to Hawkins. “I appreciate the joe. There’s several hours of good light left. I’ll push on.”
He pinched his hat to Mrs. Talon and Hawkins, who’d taken Tom’s cup, then turned and, adjusting his cartridge belt on his hips, strolled back toward the creek.
“You don’t believe in sharing the trail with a woman—is that it, Mr. Navarro?”
Tom turned to the woman, who stood by the fire, staring at him with a flush burning behind her suntanned cheeks. “Not in this country, ma’am. There’s enough trouble without calling it in.”
He turned again and waded into the stream. He hunkered down on his haunches, doffed his hat with his left hand, and cupped water to his face with his right. On the tea-colored water beside him, the woman’s shadow slid out from the bank.
Water dripping down his sun-charred features, Navarro glanced over his shoulder. The woman stood behind him, fists on her hips, hard determination in her eyes. “I’ll admit, coming down here where women stick out like sore thumbs is risky, and I’ll also admit that having me along might attract trouble to you. But Mr. Hawkins and I have been having some difficulty following our map.” She paused. “Billie is like a daughter to me. I’ll do anything to get her back.”
“You don’t even know me, ma’am.”
“If you’d had untoward intentions, I would have seen them back at my swimming hole.”
“You had a gun.”
“It wouldn’t have stopped a badman.”
“You ought to go home.”
“I’m not going home without Billie. I took that girl in, and I’ve raised her like my own daughter.”
Navarro sank back on his mental heels. He understood how the woman felt. He felt the same way about Karla. He glanced around the woman at Hawkins standing behind her, his cup of coffee in his hand.
“This is a headstrong woman,” Tom remarked.
“She is that.”
Navarro turned to the horses. Scowling thoughtfully, he replaced the bridle bits in the horses’ mouths and was adjusting the pannier straps on the packhorse when he turned suddenly to Mrs. Talon and Hawkins awaiting his answer. “Wait a minute—you mentioned a map. What kind of map?”
Mrs. Talon said, “We met a couple pilgrims the other night, drifters heading north from Baconora. They drew us a map.”
“A map to where?”
“Baconora,” she said, as though speaking to a slow child.
“What’s in Baconora?”
Walking slowly toward him, his coffee cup in his right hand, Hawkins said, “According to the pilgrims, that’s where the slavers are takin’ the girls. To a whorehouse down there for miners.”
“Didn’t you know?” asked Mrs. Talon.
“No. I’ve been trying to cut the bastards’ sign.” Tom was thoughtful, his heart clenching and unclenching. He’d had an idea why the girls had been taken, but hearing it spoken rang a bell in his head. His stomach churned, making him feel a little queasy.
“For miners?”
“There’s an American- and British-owned gold mine down there,” Hawkins said. “Apparently, the mine manager sends away for Mex girls to pleasure his American miners, and American girls to pleasure the Mexicans. Keeps all the peons, greasers and gringos alike, happily workin’ for little but pennies and piss water.”
Tom stared at the man so hard that Hawkins rolled his lips inward, blanching.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said to Navarro. “I’d assumed you knew.”
Tom looked at her sharply. “Let me see that map.”
Hawkins stepped forward, reaching into a back trouser pocket and producing a folded sheet of lined tablet paper.
“Wait,” Mrs. Talon said, holding up a hand to Hawkins. To Navarro, she said, “Will you help us find this place?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Hawkins extended the map, and Tom snapped it from his hand.
Two days later, in the late afternoon, with the air fresh from a passing shower, Tom lay atop a ridge with a pair of good German glasses held to his eyes. The town in the canyon below, strewn out along a narrow, winding stream, was an amalgam of crumbling old adobes and new, unpainted board structures the mining company had apparently slapped together for stores, saloons, dance halls, cafés, and bunkhouses.
Navarro figured the town had probably been an eighth its current size before gold was discovered on the slopes rising southeast of the town, and from which a wide road reinforced with logs and boulders snaked down through the sparse acacias and long-leafed pines from three broad mine portals yawning impressively from the cliff face.
A steady stream of heavy Murphy freight and Owensboro mountain wagons, loaded with ore, was drawn down those gradual switchbacks by four- and sometimes six-mule hitches. Leveling out at the base of the slope, the wagons and lumbering mules ran out along the stream on the other side of the town, heading apparently for the stamping mill Navarro could hear, the rock crushers sounding like relentless thunder blasts, somewhere among the craggy slopes over west.
A permanent smoke haze hung low in the valley dappled with cloud shadows. With the mines running around the clock, most of the stoves in town were no doubt stoked nonstop for hungry, thirsty miners between shifts. Below the stamping mill’s monotonous pounding, a piano banged away in one of the several saloons.
“Those pilgrims give you any idea where the girls were being held?” Tom asked as he studied the layout of the town.
“I didn’t think to ask,” Louise said, belly down on her elbows to Tom’s right.
Lowering the glasses, Navarro turned to Hawkins on his left. The oldster shrugged. “How many whorehouses could there be out here?”
Tom held the glasses out to him. When Hawkins had glassed the town for a minute or so, he lowered the binoculars and growled, “I’ll be damned. Regular little Gomorrah down there.”