Free Bullet Creek by Ralph Compton

to the Mex, drew the pistol back toward his own chest, and angled the barrel slightly left. He pulled the trigger.
    The pistol popped and bucked, drilling a smoky hole through the man’s left arm, halfway between his elbow and his shoulder. Screaming, the Mex grabbed the hole with his right hand and rolled onto his left shoulder, kicking his legs.
    â€œYou shot me, you son of a bitch!”
    â€œYou can take a message to Real,” Navarro said. “He touches one hair on that girl’s head, there’s gonna be more dead de Cava riders than rocks between here and the San Pedro.” Navarro ratcheted back his gun hammer again, planted the barrel against the writhing Mexican’s forehead. “You got all that?”
    â€œ Sí, ” the man grated out through gritted teeth.
    Navarro withdrew the pistol and looked around. Most of the Bar-V riders were out working the herd or cutting alfalfa along the river, but several, including the skinny German cook and the beefy half-breed blacksmith, who’d been assigned to headquarters chores, had gathered around Navarro, Vannorsdell, and the wounded Mex. Danny Torres had run down the Mex’s horse. The half-Pima, half-Mexican drover now stood ten yards away, holding the mount’s reins and watching the scene with wary curiosity.
    Grabbing the Mex’s pistol from the man’s holster, Navarro stuck the gun behind his own cartridge belt and jerked the Mex to his feet by his collar. The man’s sombrero hung from its thong down his chest. “Now get on your goddamn horse and fog it out of here!”
    Navarro gave the man a swift kick in the ass, and the Mex stumbled forward, nearly falling. Clutching his bloody arm, he glanced at Tom, fury mixing with the pain in his eyes, then grabbed the reins from Torres and awkwardly mounted his horse. Torres backed to the horse’s right hip and slipped the man’s Spencer from the saddle boot and looked at Tom, who nodded with approval.
    Before the Mex’s horse had galloped ten yards from the front gate, Vannorsdell jerked his eyes at the men gathered around him in the sifting dust. “What are you waiting for? Saddle your horses.” He singled out the middle-aged man who’d been sharpening the sickle rake with a mill file. “Oscar, take a fast horse and summon the others.”
    â€œWhat should I tell ’em, boss?”
    Vannorsdell glanced sharply at Navarro, then wheeled toward the house. “Tell ’em we got gun trouble.”

Chapter 7
    Forty-five minutes later, Navarro, Lee Luther, and a rider named Dave Watts, who’d been a sharpshooter for Longstreet during the Fight for Southern Independence, trotted their sweating horses along a dry wash east of the Bar-V headquarters. They ducked through a wind-carved tunnel in a sandstone scarp and came out the other side, blinking against the harsh light.
    Navarro reined his horse left, pushed through greasewood and willows, and halted the claybank between the wash and a sheer sandstone wall rising toward the brassy noon sky.
    Dave Watts and Lee Luther halted their horses off Navarro’s right stirrup. “What now?” Lee Luther asked quietly.
    Navarro swung down from his saddle. “Now you stay here with the horses while me and Dave do a little mountain climbing.”
    The kid’s eyebrows beetled with disappointment. “You mean, you just brought me along to hold the horses?”
    â€œThat’s right.” Navarro shucked his Winchester, jacked a shell into the breech, and off-cocked the hammer. “Count yourself lucky.”
    Watts had dismounted his blue roan mare and stood staring up the scaly, weather-pummeled, sun-blasted ridge. He was a slight, muscular man with thin, dark hair and a handlebar mustache. Many thought he resembled the famous tracker Tom Horn, who had helped ship most of the Chiricahuas off to Florida. While Watts was a good horseman who worked well with cattle, he had