Tom swung his horse forward and gigged it down the twisting canyon trail. After fifty yards, he turned the horse left off the main trail and followed a narrow game trail, spotted with deer and rabbit scat, high onto a pine-clad mountain shoulder. He rode up and over the shoulder and into another canyon.
Soft thuds rose from below. He glanced into the canyon. Several blacktail deer, led by a spike buck, clattered up the opposite slope, their white rears and knobby black tails bobbing as they scattered into the mesquite and pinions and disappeared over a rocky knob.
Navarro gazed after the deer and fingered the horn handle of his .44. Could be Apaches that spooked them. Possibly a bear. Navarro had killed a grizzly out here late last fall, after the grizzly had butchered several head of Bar-V beef. Or maybe they’d heard Tom’s own hoof falls. It was damn quiet out here tonight, with no birds singing, no coyotes howling the sun down.
Navarro was rounding a thumb of cracked andesite when, up the slope on his right, beyond a boulder snag, a horse blew. Navarro reined his paint to an abrupt halt and shucked the Winchester repeater from the saddle boot beneath his right thigh. Holding his reins in his gloved left hand, he cocked the rifle with his right and snugged the brass butt plate against his hip.
He sensed more than heard the bullet slicing the air to his left. Throwing his chest flat against the paint’s neck, he heard the bullet buzz over his right shoulder a split second after the rifle’s crack rose from downslope.
He reined the horse left and, staying low, swung his rifle toward the downslope side of the hill, where two men crouched in the rocks and shrubs. Navarro fired the Winchester. One-handed, he jacked another shell and fired another round.
His first round barked off a rock. His second took one bushwacker—a short hombre in a dirty plaid shirt and a straw sombrero—through the high right side of his chest. He only saw the man begin to fly backward down the slope when the second man fired. The bullet smashed into the paint’s chest with a cracking thump. As Navarro shook loose of the stirrups, the horse reared, twisting and falling as it screamed.
Navarro hit the ground on his right shoulder, dug his boots into the gravel, and flung himself forward and out of the falling horse’s path. The second bushwacker fired again, the flames stabbing from the end of the barrel, the bullet smacking a slender nub of rock two feet before Navarro’s face.
The rock finger disintegrated, but it had been enough of an obstruction to knock the bullet wide with an echoing spang, stinging Navarro’s face with only shards of rock and lead.
Cursing, hearing the horse’s final anguished throes to his left, Navarro rose to his left hip, aimed at the second bushwacker just as the tall slender gent in a floppy hat and buckskins levered another shell into the chamber of his Henry rifle.
Navarro shot the man low in the belly. As the man groaned and dropped to his knees, firing the Henry into the rocks at his feet, the Bar-V segundo remembered the sound he’d heard upslope.
Jacking another shell into his Winchester’s chamber, he pushed himself to his feet, ran across the trail, and crouched at the upslope’s base, behind rocks and twisted cedars.
He was edging a look up the steep, rocky grade when a bullet slammed into the rock a foot above his head, kicking up dust and stone slivers, which peppered the trail and dead horse behind Navarro like hail.
“Think you’re tough now, you son of a bitch!” The screechy, indignant voice of the kid from the cantina echoed around the canyon several times before it faded.
Pressing his back to the slope and clutching his rifle in both hands, Navarro swallowed the dry knot in his throat and fingered the Winchester’s trigger. The kid. The son of a bitchin’ stupid-ass kid!
The wiry little firebrand had found some amigos in Tucson, probably sleeping off drunks in the livery barn or the town’s lone boardinghouse. Intending to set up an ambush in the canyon, they’d taken a shortcut from town. Navarro had heard them on the ridge and busted their little fandango wide open.
Only they’d killed a good horse, one that Navarro had raised from a Colt and gentled in his own little paddock behind his cabin.
And the kid had the high ground. . . .
“Come on out here, you old duffer!” the kid called. “Think you can make sport o’ me now! Ha!”
The rifle popped. The bullet smacked the same rock the previous one had smacked, making Navarro’s ears ring.
Tom looked to either side. Straight above, the hill bulged, forming troughs on either side. From the angle of the kid’s shooting, he must be snugged up in the left trough. The hill’s bulge would prevent him from seeing what was going on in the right trough.
Navarro wheeled right and, crouching to keep his head below the bulge, began climbing the trough. The kid fired another round at his old position, the rifle’s report echoing. Navarro climbed between boulders, occasionally losing his footing in the chalky shale. Once he dropped to a knee, but pushed up and on, grabbing at boulders and shrubs for purchase.
“Come on outta there, ye old bastard!” the kid cried, his voice muffled. “Show yourself now, ye damn coward.” Another echoing shot.
Navarro climbed between two cracked boulders leaning away from each other, grabbed a pinion, and hoisted himself to the ridge top. Lots of gravel up here and spots of bobcat sign.
In the west, the sun was falling fast beneath fleecy golden clouds, bleeding deep into the jagged purple ridges.
On one knee and looking around, Navarro caught his breath, admonished himself to go easy on the rum-soaked Cubans Vannorsdell blessed him with on occasion, and scuttled around the rocky bulge, following the goat path down the other side.
The kid’s rifle had popped three more times before Navarro, heading downslope one slow step at a time and leveling the rifle out from his right hip, crept around a boulder and stopped.
The kid was hunkered behind a rocky shelf, his Spencer repeater propped in a notch of a flat rock. The kid yelled another jeering demand from behind his cover and jacked another shell in the Spencer’s breech.
Ten yards behind him, Navarro said, “Kid, you’re wild as a corncrib rat and dumb as a dog barkin’ at a knothole.”
The kid froze.
“I tried to educate you,” the Bar-V segundo said. “But it looks like I’m gonna have to put you down.”
The kid stayed where he was, facing the downslope, his Spencer cocked and aimed at Navarro’s old position. His right shoulder twitched. He didn’t seem to be breathing. Between the sweaty curls pasted to his shirt collar, his neck was growing crimson.
Finally, he whipped around, bringing the Spencer to bear, stretching his lips back from his teeth in an outraged snarl.
Navarro’s rifle spoke five times as Tom stood, gray eyes narrowed, feet spread, shooting and cocking, shooting and cocking.
The kid got off only one shot as Tom’s shots ripped through his chest, drawing a small circle over his heart. The kid’s head snapped back against the rock, eyes blinking rapidly, each shot holding him there for the next. After the last shot had blown through his spine, he sighed and slowly slumped to his right, relaxing, the Spencer slipping from his hands.
Behind him, the rocks dripped red.
At the bottom of the slope, a rifle barked. A horse whinnied. The rifle barked again. A man yelled.
Navarro climbed over the shelf the young firebrand had used for cover, and hurried down the steep, rocky slope, breaking his descent by grabbing pinion and mesquite branches.
Several more shots rose to his ears.