Bullet Creek (7 page)

Where trouble, at least from other men, was a long ways away . . .

Sitting in a hide chair on the porch, he poured whiskey into the tin cup from which he'd drunk coffee with his supper, then cut it with branch water from a stone pitcher. The water was fresh from his well, the original well that had never dried up and kept offering the best water on the ranch. He sat back in his chair, sipped the whiskey and water, set the glass on the small barrel beside him, then picked up his makings sack.

He was rolling a smoke when the slow clomp of hooves sounded from the wash.

“It's me, Tom.” Vannorsdell's burly, raspy voice lifted from the silvery shrubs. The rancher knew that Tom always smoked and drank whiskey on his porch after supper. He also knew that Navarro wasn't a man to vary his habits much.

“Well, well, well,” the foreman said when Vannorsdell appeared on the path angling up through the bushes, his horse sweating from the long mountain ride. “If it ain't the tinhorn who likes to ride alone in 'Pache country.”

“Oh, hush. It's 'Pache country no more. Nan-dash is dead, in case you hadn't heard.”

“Yeah, I heard.” Actually, Navarro had been nearby when the old Apache bronco was killed by scalphunters atop Gray Rock in the Dragoon range. Navarro had been trying to rescue Karla from Nan-dash's marauders when the marauders themselves were marauded by the slave-trading scalphunters, making Tom's mission even trickier.

He'd lost two good friends that night, and had had to track Karla and the scalphunters deep into Mexico, where he'd met Louise Talon and Mordecai Hawkins, who were tracking their own girl, Billie, nabbed by the same slave-trading scalpers who'd nabbed Karla.

“But the Chiricahuas are playing hopscotch with the reservation boundaries. And there's always the border bandits and the outlaws down from the Rim.”

“Shut up and pour me a drink.”

“You want it straight?”

“Is it rotgut?”

“Some of the worst I've ever tasted.”

“Cut it.” Vannorsdell had dismounted and tied his horse to the porch, and was mounting the steps heavily, fatigued and sore from the ride. “Why do you always buy the worst whiskey in the Territory?”

“Twenty-five cents a bottle, and it's not bad when you cut it.”

Vannorsdell picked up the glass and sat heavily in the squeaky hide chair on the other side of the barrel from Navarro. “Aw shit, I feel bad, Tommy.”

“Learn you to insult my liquor.”

“The old don's on his way out . . . and he's offered me Rancho de Cava.”

Navarro turned to the rancher sharply. “No shit?”

Vannorsdell raised his glass, sniffed the whiskey, made a face, and drank. “God, that's putrid crap!”

“You've been wantin' to get your hands on Rancho de Cava for as long as I can remember.”

“I know, but hell, you should've seen the sorry son of a bitch. The whole place has gone to hell in a handbasket. His boys have become owlhoots and his daughter—who doesn't even bother to greet me anymore—has become an angry old spinster at twenty-six. The headquarters is practically in ruins. Half his range has been overgrazed and half his creeks muddied up, because the vaqueros his boys hire aren't really vaqueros but border toughs. You should hear the way they talk to the old man!”

“Good water and grass over there, though. You've been wanting to bring in more white-faced bulls to breed with your longhorns. And if you start raising quarter-horses like you've been talking, those high meadows above Bullet Creek would be just right for foals. What do the don's boys have to say about it?”

“That's where I got this.” Vannorsdell jerked up his jacket sleeve and raised his elbow, showing the torn sleeve with dried blood.

“Might get worse than that.”

The rancher nodded. “The boys won't let Rancho de Cava go without a scrap, I'm afraid.”

“What'd you tell the don?”

“That I'd talk to my banker tomorrow. I'll be ridin' into Tucson.”

“So you're gonna buy it.”

Sipping his drink, Vannorsdell squinted his eyes and shook his head. He set the drink down beside him and swallowed. “Hell, I don't know what I'm gonna do. On one hand, I feel like a buzzard pickin' the old man's bones before he's even in his grave. On the other hand, if I don't buy the ranch, we could have an army of banditos for neighbors.”

“Could get bloody, tryin' to move Real and Alejandro off the place, not to mention Lupita . . .”

Vannorsdell shook his head and finished off his drink, making another face. “Christ, are you sure that ain't some Injun remedy for the pony drip?”

With a curse, the old rancher stood, slipped the reins from the porch rail, and mounted his horse. “By the way, my granddaughter told Pilar she's in love with you.” Pilar was the rancher's Mexican housekeeper. “What are you going to do about that?”

“Nothing.”

“Good.” Vannorsdell rode through the shrubs, into the wash, and away.

Navarro poured another drink.

The next morning, as usual, Karla Vannorsdell woke at the first wash of dawn. And, as usual, she dressed for the trail in her duck riding slacks, lime green blouse, leather vest, and low-heeled riding boots.

She brushed out her long chestnut hair, gathered it into a ponytail, then set her man's cream Stetson on her head. The Stetson was a birthday gift from Tom, because, riding as she did nearly every day in the desert sun, she needed a broader brim than those offered by most women's hats. He'd had it specially made in Prescott, with rawhide stitched around the brim.

Karla opened her door, padded quietly through the still-dark hall of the big house's second story, down the stairs, through the vast sitting room with its heavy masculine furniture and field-rock fireplace, and onto the broad front porch.

She paused at the edge of the porch and glanced around.

Morning, with the freshness of the greasewood and sage, the lavender mountains rising in all directions, the last stars fading in a vast green bowl. Across the sloping yard, smoke curled from the bunkhouse chimney, tinging the still air with the smell of burning mesquite and the coffee, eggs, and side pork of the drovers' breakfast.

When Karla had first come here from Philadelphia, she thought the Sonoran Desert as ugly and hellish a place as she'd ever seen. She'd been through some bad times in it, namely her capture by the slave traders when she'd gone chasing after the young vaquero she'd fallen in love with and whom her grandfather had sent away. She'd come upon Juan's tortured body buried in an anthill by Apaches, only his head protruding, and she'd shot him to put him out of his misery.

Bad times . . .

Still, she couldn't imagine living anywhere else but this high desert plateau, with its bald barrancas, hidden springs, bewitching sunsets, and vast moonscapes spiked with greasewood and saguaro. Her grandfather had grumbled about possibly sending her back east to a finishing school, but somehow she'd have to talk him out of it. She and Vannorsdell had had their difficulties, but their skirmishes had grown more and more amicable.

Karla crossed the yard to the stables, saddled her Arabian while talking gently in El Diablo's ear, making him nicker and lower his head, bashfully squinting his eyes. She removed her pistol belt from a wall peg near El Diablo's stall, and wrapped it around her waist. The desert around the ranch was relatively safe, but there was always the threat of rattlesnakes and mountain lions.

Urging El Diablo to take one more drink from his stock trough, Karla mounted up and rode off through the chaparral behind the stables and corrals in which nearly a hundred mustangs milled, staring toward the bunkhouse, ears like cones, awaiting the stable boys and breakfast.

“Come for a morning ride?” she said when she brought the Arab in front of Navarro's squat cabin.

The rangy foreman was splitting wood in his denims and gray undershirt. A cigarette angled from the right corner of his mouth, spats hanging loose at his thighs. His short silver hair, still tufted from sleep, was set off by the shadows and his mahogany features, cheekbones sharp as carved wood.

He was fifty, but he had the body—long-muscled, heavy-shouldered, and taut-bellied—of a much younger man. That wasn't why she loved him. She didn't know why. His courage? His strength? The way his eyes twisted up at the corners when he rarely smiled?

Navarro brought the mallet down cleanly through an upright mesquite log. “Some folks have chores.”

“Your men haven't even had breakfast yet.”

“Neither have I.”

“You can eat with Pilar and me when we get back.”

Navarro shook his head and held the mallet in both hands. He glanced at the girl, sitting there atop her high-stepping Arab with its cocked tail and the regal U formed by its neck. Karla's slacks were drawn taut across muscular thighs and a round bottom, and pulled snugly over the tops of smooth brown boots with stars dyed into the leather where the toes tapered toward points. The girl filled her blouses right nicely these days, and she had a subtle, coquettish air that drew looks from even the surly German cook. She enjoyed being the only female about the place, aside from her father 's rotund Mexican housekeeper, Pilar.

The corners of Karla's mouth drew back, dimpling her cheeks. She regarded Navarro with that wry, candid look that always made him squirm a little.

He needed to talk to her about what she'd told Pilar, but where would he find that brand of eloquence? Maybe he'd have Pilar talk to her. She had to shed those silly ideas. First setting her hat for a vaquero who could barely speak English and now for him, a man old enough to be her father.

“Your last chance,” she said, broadening the smile a little, narrowing her eyes.

“Be careful.”

Her lips shone now as the lips drew back even farther, and she patted the short-barreled pistol on her hip. “I'm packin'.” She ground her heels against the Arab's ribs, giving the horse what it had been waiting for, and bounded off through the brush, heading west between the canyon and the wash.

A quarter hour later, she put the Arab through a cut between two steep, boulder-strewn banks, about to trace a horseshoe route back toward the ranch headquarters. Down the grade ahead of her, from behind the right bank, two men in serapes and high-crowned sombreros stepped into her path. Both wore pistols on their hips. They held rifles across their chests with a menacing air.

The one on the right—stocky and broad-shouldered, with a malignant grin on his round, mustachioed face—was Real de Cava. She'd seen him only once, when she'd ridden over to Rancho de Cava with Navarro and several other Bar-V riders, with a wagon load of feed. He wore two engraved pistols butt-forward, gunslick-style.

Karla halted the horse ten yards before the two men. They broadened their smiles, but there was no benevolence on either face. Her heart beating rapidly and the short hairs prickling beneath her collar, Karla slid her right hand toward her .38. Another hand closed over hers, stopping it.

As Karla whipped her head around, she caught a glimpse of another vaquero a split second before the man shucked her pistol from its holster, tossed it into the brush, then reached up and grabbed her by both arms. He whipped her down from her saddle so quickly that her stomach bounded into her throat, making her head spin.

She found herself standing in the middle of the trail, the indignant Arabian pitching around to her right, facing the vaquero who'd unseated her. He stood two heads taller than she, grinning down at her lewdly.

Her face heated with outrage. “What the hell do you think . . . ?”

“Well, well, what do we have here?” someone said behind her.

She whipped around. Still giddy from her unseating, she nearly lost her balance. Real de Cava moved toward her. “Senorita Vannorsdell, you have joined us at a most opportune time!”

Laughter rose, and she shunted her gaze to see at least twenty more sharp-eyed, unshaven Mexicans standing off in the shadows between the boulders and greasewood shrubs, rifles clutched in their fists.

 

Tom Navarro and Paul Vannorsdell were drinking coffee in wicker chairs on the big house's front porch, a map spread out on the low table before them. They were discussing the best places to dig more stock wells, a job they'd begin after roundup later in the autumn when the summer's severe heat abated.

Navarro had set his cup down and was about to draw an X in the crease between Navajo Basin and Rattlesnake Bench, when the sentry atop the house yelled suddenly, “Rider comin' hard!”

The Arizona Territory was still a generally lawless land, with Apaches still wild as mustangs, so Vannorsdell kept a sentry posted atop the house at all hours of the day.

“Who is it?” the rancher yelled, lifting his chin toward the porch roof.

“A Mex . . . and a cream Arab! Looks like Miss Vannorsdell's horse.”

Navarro and Vannorsdell rose quickly. The rancher reached to set his coffee cup on the railing but missed. The mug hit the stone tiles with a pop. Ignoring it, Vannorsdell followed Navarro down the porch steps and into the yard, both men gazing toward the open front gate, hands on the butts of their holstered pistols.

Beyond the gate, dust rose along the curving desert trail. The thud of hooves grew louder. The rider galloped around a clump of pines—a tall Mex in a red calico shirt and high-crowned sombrero. Behind him, trailing on a lead line, loped Karla's cream Arab, twitching its ears angrily, shaking its head and fighting the bit. The rider jerked on the rope as he checked his own mount down to a trot and came on through the gate, crossing the yard and drawing back on his bridle reins as he approached Navarro and Vannorsdell.