Bullet Creek

Table of Contents

 

 

Real looked down at Vannorsdell. He and his brother were half turned away from Navarro so Tom couldn't see their faces. “Told you to come alone, you murdering old bastard.”

“I didn't kill your father.”

“No? Then who did? You rode up the ridge with him. You were the last one to see him alive. We find him dead, his brains blown out.”

“You want the rancho,” Alejandro said, holding a rifle down low across his thighs.

“I'd have to have some pretty big cajones to kill your father on his own land. And I'd have to be a pretty miserable friend.”

Alejandro turned to his older brother. “Shoot him, Real. You do it or I will.”

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First Printing, August 2005

Copyright © The Estate of Ralph Compton, 2005

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eISBN : 978-1-101-10007-3

“They smell the springs,” yelled Tom Navarro. “Turn 'em east!”

The Bar-V foreman, his craggy, sun-seared face shaded by his wide-brimmed hat, hunkered low in his saddle and turned his galloping claybank hard right. The horse ate up the ground, weaving around saguaros and clay-colored boulders, leaping sage and barrel cacti, until it had raced out ahead of the two west-galloping leaders—a big dun with a cream-speckled rump and a bay with an evangelical fire in its eyes.

“Hee-ya now,” Navarro called, throwing up his right arm and reining the claybank gently east. “You
git
now!
Mooove
your ornery asses!”

Both leaders jerked their heads stubbornly and slowly turned south, Tom hazing them along with his coiled lariat, yelling epithets and yammering coyotelike, until the entire remuda of twelve half-wild, mountain-bred mustangs was once again trotting and loping east.

The kid, Lee Luther, appeared out of the dust sifting over the catclaw and greasewood on Tom's right, and put his buckskin into step beside Navarro's claybank. The lad looked sheepish under his battered Stetson, his faded red kerchief bibbing over his hickory shirt, his chaps flapping on his knees. “Sorry, Mr. Navarro. I forgot about the springs!”

“You gettin' tired, Lee Luther?”

“No, sir, I ain't!”

“Oh, then you must've been sayin' your prayers back there in that canyon, when I looked over and you had your chin on your chest.”

The kid, sixteen years old and fresh and new to the Bar-V role, looked outraged. “Wha . . . ? I never . . .” He paused, then looked away as he and Navarro trotted abreast, heading east along the stage road between Tucson and Benson. “I reckon I mighta nodded off there for a minute. Sorry, Mr. Navarro.”

Tom didn't say anything as he rode along behind the remuda's bouncing butts and dusty manes flashing in the midafternoon sun. Having grown up in the saddle himself, he knew how Lee Luther felt. A green drover never liked to be out alone with the ramrod. There was damn little fun in it, and too much pressure. Lee Luther would have preferred making this trip with Sparky or Bill Tobias or Ray Fisher or even Bear Winston, the big Welshman who'd never been known to smile.

“I reckon I had you up a little late last night, foggin' Tomahawk Wash for strays.” With that, Navarro reined out around the remuda's left flank to gather up a meandering paint and to begin turning the group slightly south.

“I'll do better next time,” he heard the kid call over the clomps of galloping hooves.

“I know you will,” Navarro said, amazed at himself. Christ, was he getting soft . . . or just old?

Ten minutes later, the Butterfield station rose from the liquid mirages and the chaparral, the long, low cabin puffing smoke from its field rock chimney and the corrals swaying up against the split cordwood behind the barn. Navarro saw that Mordecai Hawkins had the main corral gate open. He waved to the old man, who returned the gesture.

Deftly maneuvering their well-trained cutting ponies, Tom and Lee Luther rode back and forth along the remuda's left and right flanks, hazing the herd with their lariats and barking orders, breathing into the neckerchiefs and squinting their eyes against the dust.

They strung the horses out single file, three or four wide, and guided the leader through the gate. Not a minute later the entire remuda was inside the corral's peeled log fence, blowing and shaking their heads.

The dry dust and manure sifted. A big cream in the adjoining corral lifted its long snout and gave an obstinate whinny, setting off several answering nickers and deep-throated chuffs in the new remuda. The big bay pranced around the corral with an insolent, exasperated air, as though looking for a fight.

Mordecai Hawkins, an old hide hunter who'd started hostling for the Butterfield company a half dozen years ago, choked on the dust as he closed and latched the gate. The portly oldster—a good ten or fifteen years older than Tom's fifty—wore torn duck pants, suspenders, and mule-ear boots. His hide hat sat crooked on his salt-and-pepper head, slanting a shadow across his bearded face. “Nice-lookin' stock, Tom. Damn nice-lookin'. But can they pull a stagecoach?”

“That's your job, Mordecai,” Navarro said. “When you don't have nothin' else to do around here, you can break 'em to the hitch.”

Hawkins offered a snide grin. “When I don't have nothin' else to do . . .”

“This is Lee Luther,” Navarro said, leaning forward on his saddle horn and nodding toward the boy riding up on his right. “Lee Luther, Mordecai Hawkins. Mr. Hawkins is the hostler here.”

“And chief Indian fighter and horseshoer,” Hawkins said. “When I ain't repairin' windmill blades or—”

“Don't listen to that old reprobate,” a woman's voice said. “I have to roust him out of bed with a shotgun most mornings and fire over his head every so often to keep him from nodding off.”

Navarro turned to see a svelte, brown-eyed woman with cherry red hair walking toward them from the cabin. Her hair was pulled back in a French braid, and her dress, a shade darker than her hair, clung to her long, high-waisted body in all the right places. The low neckline, revealing a modest peak of freckled cleavage, was trimmed with white lace. The cameo pin on her right lapel winked in the desert sun.