Bullet Creek (12 page)

Corncob pipe clamped in his teeth, Tio mounted his old mule named after the dearly departed patron, Francisco, and rode off toward the de Cava headquarters. Navarro wasn't worried about the old peon's abilities. He'd heard rumors of Tio's banditry during his younger days south of the border, and knew the old man still had some cunning.

Navarro drew up water from Tio's well, slaking his own thirst as well as the claybank's, then mounted up and continued on toward the Butterfield station, taking his time. There was no point in using up his horse when he didn't have to. Sanchez might not be along for several hours, and there was always the possibility—if Tio couldn't find him or it wasn't an opportune time for Sanchez to leave the rancho—he might not be along at all.

Navarro rode along a broad arroyo, heading southwest between two low, craggy ranges. A rifle barked behind him, making the claybank buck. The echoing report hadn't died when a man groaned.

Clawing the big Colt from his hip and thumbing back the hammer, Navarro reined the claybank hard left. At the top of a rock shelf twenty yards away, a man stood clutching his belly as his rifle fell from his hands and clattered down the slope. The man's chin dropped to his chest, his face etched with pain—the face of Derrold Emory, whose lips were still puffed and red from its impact with Navarro's rifle butt when he and Hought Ellis had attacked Hattie Winters.

Emory stumbled forward and fell head-first off the shelf, hitting the steep incline on his face then, rolling to the bottom, disappearing in rocks and dry desert scrub.

The rifle spoke again, echoing shrilly, thudding into dirt and rock to Navarro's left. Tom whipped his head that way.

Hought Ellis lowered his rifle and stumbled back from a low ridge, on the other side of the arroyo, his exclamations muffled by distance. Wincing, he ran over the lip of the ridge and down the other side.

Frowning, Navarro looked around for his guardian angel. Galloping hooves thudded and Tom turned his gaze to his backtrail. A long-haired rider galloped around a bend, the cream Arab shaking its head with excitement. Karla held a carbine across her saddle bows as she checked the Arab down a few feet away, her cheeks flushed and her eyebrows knit with concern.

“I got the first man, but I think I missed the other one.”

“That was you?”

“I was taking the shortcut over to Indian Head Ridge when I spotted two men on your backtrail. Decided to follow along, see what they had in mind.”

Navarro's face was hot with chagrin. Not only had he let himself get drygulched, but his life had been saved by a girl.

She must have read the expression in his eyes. Holding the Arab's reins taut in one fist, she said with a placating air, “It was you who taught me to shoot.”

The patronization was only an extra twist of the knife, but he didn't have time for self-flagellation. He had to teach Hought Ellis a lesson about drygulching.

“Wait here,” Tom said, unbooting his Winchester, cocking it one-handed and spurring the claybank into the arroyo.

He crossed the sandy bottom in five strides, put the horse up the opposite bank, and dismounted, dropping the reins. He scurried up the ridge, pushing off the ground with his left hand, loosing sand and rocks behind his slipping, scuffing boots.

Making the ridge, he stopped. He dropped the rifle's forestock to his left hand and, with his right index finger pressed firmly against the trigger, looked around sharply.

Directly below lay a steep gorge cluttered with rocks, brush, and stunted pinions. On the opposite bank, about twenty feet down from the ridge, lay a log-framed mine portal jutting six feet out from the yawning black hole in the chalky bank and covered with dirt from which spindly brown grass and yucca grew. The rock tailings were strewn like jackstraws along the bank and into the gorge below.

Hought Ellis was climbing the tailings, scrambling over the rocks and broken shrubs, his rifle in his right hand, his grunts and gasps rising on the hot, dry air.

Navarro grinned, crouched, and holding the Winchester out from his right hip, pelted the rocks around Ellis with six quick shots. Ellis narrowly avoided a seventh shot by scrambling behind a boulder. When the echoes had died, he leapt the last ten feet straight up and scrambled into the portal, dropping his rifle and reaching out to quickly retrieve it.

Navarro cursed.

Ellis's throaty voice shot out from the mine entrance. “You had it comin', Navarro. You done broke all my front teeth, bottom and top!”

“Apparently you didn't learn your lesson, Hought.”

A muzzle flashed in the gaping black mine entrance. The rifle cracked as the slug spanged off a rock two feet to Navarro's right.

Glancing around and quickly deciding a course of action, Tom ran left, hurdling rocks and shrubs, until he'd wound around the gorge's steep ridge. He stood on a broad, flat boulder and gazed directly down on the dirt- and grass-covered roof of the mine portal, twenty feet below.

When he'd caught his breath, he scrambled down the slope, leaping off rocks, and stepped out onto the portal's roof, gently testing his weight. If he could distract Ellis by throwing a rock to the right, he could thrust his rifle over the roof's left side and pop a couple tablets into Ellis's sorry hide, voiding the possibility of future drygulchings and Navarro's need to be rescued by an eighteen-year-old girl.

Tom had taken two steps onto the roof when Ellis cut loose from below, firing into the ceiling, blowing up dust and making the roof shake under the dirt and cactus.

“I know what you're thinkin', Navarro. It ain't gonna happen!”

The drygulcher fired two more shots, one slug finding the crease between two ceiling logs and spraying up dirt and gravel. Three feet ahead of Navarro, a shrill hissing rose. It took a couple seconds for Tom to distinguish the rattlesnake from the sand between a sage bush and a yucca plant at the roof's lip.

The snake lifted its flat, diamond-shaped head, its body coiling tightly, its sage green scales glistening, the rattle rising and vibrating.

Below, Ellis fired two more shots. A split second after the first shot, the snake struck at Tom, its head springing forward as the body uncoiled, its jaws opening and closing, reaching for flesh. It was a young snake, with more balls than savvy. The head landed two feet away from Tom's right boot.

As Ellis shouted another curse and loosed another shot, making the roof jump, Navarro slipped his rifle barrel underneath the snake, sweeping up and forward. The rattling, S-shaped viper disappeared over the roof's lip, landing on the portal floor with a light thud.

If Ellis was where Tom thought he was, he was no more than three feet from the snake.

Another shot. “Ahh!” Ellis cursed. Four shots popped, one after the other.

Silence.

“Oh, Jesus.” Louder, shriller: “Jesus Christ, the son of a bitch bit me. I'm snakebit.
Navarro, youson
of a bitch, I'm snakebit!”

“Couldn't have happened to a nice feller,” Tom said, turning back to the ridge and beginning to climb.

“Navarro, don't leave me here. That snake bit me twice on the leg!”

Tom rose upon the rocks, breathing hard.

Behind him, Ellis called, “Tom, goddamn it, I need medical attention.”

“I'll send out the next doctor I see,” Navarro called without turning as he crested the ridge and began moving back the way he'd come.

Walking down the other side of the ridge, he spied Karla waiting between two cacti, flanked by her Arab and Tom's claybank. The claybank watched him and nickered.

“The other one dead?” she asked as Navarro approached.

“No, but he's gonna wish he was in about one hour.”

“Can I come with you now?”

Navarro chuckled and slid his Winchester into his rifle boot, then collected his reins. “That was indeed good shootin' girl, and thanks for savin' my bacon. But you turn around and ride home before I take you over my knee.”

He mounted up, rode ten yards away, stopped, then half-turned in his saddle. “Don't let me catch you on my backtrail.”

Her lips curved a smile. “That whippin' might be fun.”

He shook his head and booted the claybank into a gallop. In seconds, the chaparral had swallowed him.

Forty-five minutes later, Tom trotted the claybank into the stage station yard, inhaling deeply the smells of coffee and venison stew on the mesquite smoke wafting from the chimney of the main cabin. As he reined the clay up to the hitch rack, Louise appeared in the cabin's doorway, the heavy timber door propped open with a chair in case a breeze should happen by.

Wiping her hands on her apron, Louise stepped onto the porch. Her hair was pinned up, but several strands flitted around her flushed, perspiring cheeks. “Two visits in one week—to what do I owe the honor, Mr. Navarro?”

Tom swung down from the saddle, loosened the saddle cinch, tossed his reins over the rack, and mounted the porch. “Trouble.”

Dread darkened her eyes. “Indians?”

Navarro shook his head and told her about the killing, Karla's kidnapping, and the dust-up at the Bar-V. He told her he'd sent for Sanchez, hoping to meet the segundo in neutral territory. He didn't tell her that he'd wanted to see her again, too.

“Do you mind?”

“Of course I don't mind. Is Karla all right?”

Remembering how the girl had saved his ass earlier, Tom said wryly, “She landed on her feet, as always.”

“I'm always glad to see you, Tom. I've been alone all day. Mordecai and Billie went to Tucson for supplies.” Louise squeezed his hands and smiled up at him, her brown eyes flashing in the afternoon light. “But I wish this visit were under better circumstances.”

Tom leaned toward her and there was an awkward moment as he decided whether he should kiss her on the lips or the cheek, opting finally for the lips. He wasn't sure he'd made the correct choice until he began pulling away. She stopped him. Leaning toward him, she laid her hand against his cheek, prolonging the kiss.

When she pulled back and dropped her hand, she offered an intimate smile, which warmed him deeply.

“Come on in inside,” she said, taking his hand in hers and leading him toward the door. “I'm making stew for the next stage.”

Inside she gave him coffee, stew, and two thick slices of buttered bread. The stew was thick and deftly spiced, with plenty of venison chunks and vegetables from Louise's kitchen garden, the best stew he'd tasted. He told her so, yelling into the kitchen, where Louise was knocking pots and pans around and making the range door squawk.

Tom spooned in another mouthful. “When we go north, you can cook for me full-time.”

Suddenly, silence. Her head appeared in the kitchen door, flushed and beaded with perspiration. She smiled. “I'd like that.”

“Pay won't be as good,” Tom warned.

Her smile broadened. “Yes, it will.” Blushing, she pulled her head back into the kitchen, and the clatter of pans and slam of cupboard doors rose once again.

Tom could feel the heat emanating from the stove, unrelieved by the open door through which no breeze penetrated. He could feel the heat in himself, as well. He wished suddenly that he and Louise were already married and heading for the spruce-covered crags of the northern Rockies and their own horse ranch nestled in a grassy, aspen-studded valley. To their own cabin, their own bed . . .

In his mind's eye he saw her again the way he'd seen her the first time, knee-deep in that Sonoran stream, long red hair dancing about her slender shoulders and full, pale, lightly freckled breasts. He'd come upon her by accident, as he'd rounded a bend in the stream, and she'd scared him nearly as badly as he'd scared her.

Now, unable to fully suppress a devilish grin, he finished his stew while casting expectant glances out the cabin's front windows, watching for Sanchez. Louise walked out of the kitchen, blowing stray wisps of hair from her face and carrying an empty cup and the big blue-speckled coffeepot by its wire handle.

Tom wiped all traces of the grin from his lips as she set the cup on the table across from him, replenished his coffee, then filled her own cup to the brim. When she'd returned the pot to the kitchen, she sat down across from him, smoothing the dress beneath her legs and taking a deep, weary breath, thrusting out her lower lip and blowing hair strands from her forehead.

They drank coffee and discussed the de Cava problem. When Tom had rolled a cigarette and was about to scratch a quirley to life on the table, he stopped and turned to the window. Outside rose a muffled yell and the staccato clatter of a heavy wagon.

“Oh, my gosh!” Louise exclaimed, placing both hands on the table and pushing herself to her feet. “The stage is early, and I don't have the food on the table!”

Tom waved out the match and dropped the unlit quirley into his shirt pocket. “I'll give you a hand.”

“Oh, I couldn't ask you,” she said, half running toward the open kitchen door.

Tom followed her into the kitchen, and in a minute, he was attempting to slice one of the six loaves set out on a cooling rack. When Louise saw that his hammy paws were squashing the bread, she told him to set the table instead. He went swiftly to work on that, setting out plates, cups, and silverware, then carrying out the butter bowl and a big stone plate piled with bread, the slices still curling steam toward the cabin's cottonwood beams.

He was bringing out the stew pot when the stage thundered into the station yard, the adobe-colored dust dripping from its steel-rimmed wheels, the driver leaning back on the reins as the horses stopped before the cabin, their heads drooping wearily. The sun glistened off the sweat coating their hides.