Read Online Bullet Creek by Ralph Compton - Free Book Online

another drink.

Chapter 6
    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.
    â€œCome 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.”
    â€œYour men haven’t even had breakfast yet.”
    â€œNeither have I.”
    â€œYou 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