The third man leaned over Billie. Light from the hall reflected on the syringe in his hands.
“You sons of bitches!” Karla spat.
When Billie had collapsed, the man walked around the bed to Karla. She tried to fight them, but they held her fast to the bed.
“Bastard!” she cried as the needle moved toward her.
The needle stabbed her flesh, burned as the liquid spurted into a vein. The men held her down until her muscles relaxed. Her head spun once. She had a falling sensation.
Her head hit the pillow, and everything went black.
Chapter 21
In the late afternoon, Tom Navarro descended the ridge of a deep canyon about a mile or so wide, with a creek running down the middle and sheathed by ironwood, paloverde, and desert hackberry shrubs.
It was dry country he was traversing, heading generally southeast, and he hadn’t run across a water source since early yesterday afternoon.
Near the canyon’s bottom, he found a game path. He followed the trace around several rocky scarps and cedar snags, gradually descending the slope as he headed for the cottonwoods lined out along the cutbank. Rounding a hillock and hearing water, he turned to the creek on his left.
He looked away, then turned back quickly, jerking the dun’s reins taut, his right hand dropping automatically to the butt of his .44.
He left the gun in its holster as he peered over the cutbank. In the dark water dappled with sunlight filtering through the dusty cottonwoods, just this side of a low beaver dam, stood a naked woman. A medium-height, slender woman—tanned and full-breasted, with long red hair dripping wet and falling down her shoulders. Crouching, she was scooping water over her breasts.
Tom wasn’t a man to ogle naked women he happened upon out in the wild. But he hadn’t expected to see her here, and since she was only about fifteen yards away, it was really too late to turn his horses around and disappear without being seen or heard.
He’d opened his mouth to address the woman, but before he could get any words out, she glanced up. When she saw him, her eyes snapped wide. With a shocked exclamation, she straightened, crossed her arms over her chest, and stumbled back in the water, nearly falling.
“Didn’t mean to intrude,” Navarro grumbled, throwing up his right hand and turning his eyes discreetly away. “I didn’t know—”
A gun hammer clicked.
He slanted his gaze back to the woman. She’d grabbed a pistol from the clothes and the blue-striped Indian blanket piled atop the embankment on her left, and was aiming it now at Tom while covering her chest with a red plaid shirt.
“Who are you and what in the hell do you want?”
Before Tom could answer, the woman glanced over her right shoulder and called, “Mr. Hawkins!”
When she turned back to Navarro, she raised the pistol—an octagonal-barreled Thomas .45 revolver— even higher, aimed at Tom’s head. Presently, a man appeared, jogging around a bluff on the other side of the stream. He was ten or fifteen years older than Tom. Bearded, stoop-shouldered, and bandy-legged, with a weathered hide vest over a smoke-blackened buckskin shirt, duck pants, and an ancient pistol belt. Holding a revolver up near his shoulder, he halted on the lip of the bank, frowning across the creek at Navarro.
“This man’s been watching me bathe,” the woman said. “A bandit, no doubt. Or worse.”
“Some would say worse,” Tom said, “but I didn’t see you until it was too late to do much but apologize and turn around. Since you haven’t seen fit to let me do either, why don’t you put away that blunderbuss and let me introduce myself?”
The woman’s eyes softened ever so slightly and she lowered the pistol while still keeping it aimed in Navarro’s direction.
“I’m Tom Navarro,” he said. “Segundo for the Vannorsdell Bar-V brand, northeast of Tucson.”
“Hell, I knew it was you!” said the oldster on the bank. He glanced at the woman and lowered his own revolver to his side, pointing with his other hand. “Why, that’s ‘Taos Tommy,’ the gunslick and Army tracker!”
“A gunslick?”
“It’s okay, ma’am,” the old man assured her. “He’s never been known to shoot a man in cold blood.”
Tom glanced at the oldster. “Have we met?”
“No, I don’t reckon we ever have. But I was in Taos, muleskinnin’ for a freight outfit, that day you acquired the name. Those two deputies had it comin’, though, I’ll give ye that. They’d been raisin’ hob with the locals for months and it weren’t gettin’ no better.” He paused, smiling with admiration. “Where you headed? If you don’t mind me askin’.”
“Perhaps we could continue this conversation elsewhere . . .” said the woman, sliding sarcastic glances between the two men. The light glowed crimson in her wet red hair as she hunkered low in the water and held the shirt to her chest.
“You’re welcome to join us fer coffee,” the man said. Jerking a thumb over his right shoulder, he added, “Our camp’s back here, under the cottonwoods, well hidden from both ridges, good water and grass for the horses.”
It was only about four thirty, with several hours of good light left. Tom hadn’t planned to hole up until sunset. A cup of coffee wouldn’t hurt, however. The horses were also ready for a rest. Besides, the woman was handsome, and he couldn’t help wonder what she and the codger were doing out here.
The old man said, “There’s a ford up yonder, on the other side of the dam.”
With an acknowledging grunt, Tom gigged the bay forward along the game path, the dun packhorse and the Arabian following, swishing their tails at the blackflies milling about the water. He tried to keep his eyes off the woman, but when he’d passed her still standing in the creek, he glanced back over his left shoulder.
Yes, a handsome woman, in her mid- to late-thirties, he figured. Still covering herself with the shirt and the gun, she’d quarter-turned to face him, offering as little bare flesh as possible, in water reaching only to her thighs. Flushing, Navarro turned back around.
When he’d crossed the creek and staked his horses in the grass along the bank, he walked over to the strangers’ fire and accepted a cup of coffee from the old man.
“Mordecai Hawkins is my handle.” He poured a cup of the oily, black brew for himself. “Hostler for the Butterfield station at Benson. Mrs. Talon, she runs the place.”
“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.”
“Let me see,” Louise said. Hawkins handed the glasses to Louise. When she’d given the town a scan, she turned to Navarro. “Well, what’re we waiting for?”
“Nightfall.”
“Why?”
“If this company town’s bringin’ in slave girls, it’s no doubt run pretty tight. See all those gray uniforms down there? Those are rurales. Rural police. I’d bet the ranch they’ve all been bought and paid for by the company, and they keep a sharp eye out for strangers—especially gringos who might come down here to see what’s become of their kids.”
“Riding in there by day, we’d be about as conspicuous as a Lutheran sky pilot at a prairie Injun sun dance,” Hawkins said.
Staring through the glasses again, Tom said, “That’s one way of putting it.”
Louise stared at Tom, puzzled. “I don’t understand, after all the hard miles we’ve put behind us, how you can just sit here. Can’t you imagine what must be happening to those girls . . . at this very minute?”
“Yep.” Navarro lowered the glasses and canted a glance at the redhead. “But I can also imagine how much good we’d do them locked up in a rurale jail. And how much fun the rurales would have with you.”
Louise held his gaze, slightly squinted one brown eye. “You’re a pleasure to have around, Mr. Navarro.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t relish bein’ here.” He turned onto his back, lowered his head, and tipped his broad-brimmed Stetson over his eyes. “No, we’ll wait for good dark before we go down there and start sniffin’ around all public-like.”
Louise looked at Hawkins, who threw his hands up and shrugged. “Time flies when you’re havin’ fun and crawls when you have a to
othache.”
Louise lowered her gaze to Navarro. His broad chest rose and fell evenly; his hands were clasped on his flat belly. She knew he was as anxious about his girl, Karla, as she was about her Billie, but he seemed to have just let go of everything.
She watched him, admiring in spite of herself the taciturn man who’d nearly run her ragged across these bald desert knobs.
Finally, taking his example, Louise lay back, as well, in the shadow of a large boulder. It took her a long time to quell the worries and wild imaginings before she finally fell into a doze. She had no idea how much time had passed before someone nudged her brusquely. Her eyes snapped open to an inky black sky speckled with stars.
“Let’s go,” Navarro said, looking down at her. He turned and headed down the slope toward the horses.
Chapter 22
Deciding they might attract more attention avoiding the main road than taking it, Navarro, Louise Talon, and Mordecai Hawkins rode back along the ridge, picked up the main wagon trace, and followed it into the valley and on into the town.
The streetlamps and torches had been lit, giving a surreal appearance to the two- and three-story wood-frame establishments still smelling of pine and wedged in amongst the ancient thatch-roofed adobe cantinas and restaurantes, on both sides of the cobble-stone trace buried in horse and mule manure.
The boardwalks swelled with rollicking miners, the Americans apparently restricting themselves mainly to the newer, Dodge City-style saloons while the Mexicans were bunched up before the low-slung cantinas from which mariachi music flitted, competing with the ubiquitous pounding of the stamping mill.
As they rode amid the shunting shadows, Tom spotted the whores, freighters, drifters, and cardsharps— gringo as well as Mex—attracted to any mining berg, company-owned or otherwise. Several farm wagons were parked before the cantinas, and campesinos in the traditional coarse cotton slacks, oversized blouses, and ragged-brimmed sombreros milled with the Mexican miners in duck trousers and hob-nailed boots. The mixed crowd was a good sign that he and Hawkins might not stand out as much as he’d feared.
Navarro Page 17