He nodded at a sign hanging beside the one announcing the price for a bath. The second sign offered TOOF PULL for a mere dime. Another little sideline that the Chinaman had going, apparently. For the convenience of the customer with a grievous tooth, there was a wicker chair situated in the shade beside the tent, opposite the side on which the wash was hung. Pliers and a bottle of whiskey sat on a tree stump beside the chair.
“No teef poo,” Longarm said, shaking his head and smiling tightly. “Just bath, please, amigo. Not too hot, not too cold.” It was too hot for a hot bath; he wanted the water just warm enough to cut through the trail dust.
The Chinamen extended an arm to the bathhouse, and Longarm ducked through a flap and into one of the place’s two rooms equipped with a stylish copper tub sitting on a slatted wooden floor. There was a long wooden bench and a row of pegs for hanging clothes on. The canvas was so old and thin in places that he could see through it to the outside street.
It was warm and musty in here, smelling like boiled burlap, and Longarm quickly shucked out of his clothes and tossed them by the front flap. A few minutes later he was soaking in lukewarm water, and the Chinese couple was washing his clothes outside, for an extra four bits. He figured that with the air being as dry and as hot as it was even this late in the day—around five—the duds would be ready to go by six.
That had no more to do with the girl than the bath did, he reminded himself. It just made good horse sense. Why clad a clean body in soiled duds?
With his own horse brush and an egg-shaped cake of lye soap, he scrubbed himself from scalp to toe, singing, “O, Susanna, o, don’t you cry for me! I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee!”
Finished soaping and scrubbing, he whistled for the Chinaman to come in and pour another bucket of lukewarm water over his head, to rinse off the soap. When he sat back in the tub, the Chinaman offered him a fresh cigar for a nickel. The price was a little steep given that Longarm could buy three for that much at a little drugstore just down from the Federal Building in Denver. But the Chinese family was in business to make money like everyone else, and it wasn’t a bad-quality cigar.
Grinning and bowing and speaking rapidly in his undecipherable tongue, the bathhouse proprietor cut the end off the cigar, stuck it between the lawman’s lips, and lit it with a long stove match, bowing like a waiter in a fancy restaurant. He stayed long enough to make sure that the cigar was to his customer’s liking, and then, giving one last, resolute head bob, he shuffled back out the tent flap to his fire.
Longarm sat back in the tub. While he’d been washing and getting rinsed off by the Chinaman, he’d heard voices outside—the Chinese woman’s and someone else’s. Now he saw through the threadbare stretch of canvas forming a wall between his tub room and the one to his left, someone moving around. He had to lean forward a bit in his tub to see through a particularly thin part of the canvas. Normally, not being the sort who peeked on other bathers, he’d keep his eyes to himself.
However, in the back of his male brain he was remembering that one of the voices he’d heard outside a minute ago had sounded vaguely feminine. He’d thought he’d heard a soft, familiar, female laugh. Now as he stared through the threadbare patch of canvas, he felt the cool tip of an unseen tongue rise up out of the floor of his tub and gently touch his ball sac.
He winced from the pleasant shock.
The silhouette he could see beyond the canvas wall was clad in a long duster, which she was just now removing, along with her hat, and hanging on a wall peg. The Chinese family’s fire was on Agent Delacroix’s side of the tent, and its light through the wall beyond her silhouetted her in alluring mystery, all the more so when she stood in profile to Longarm, threw her long hair back, drew her shoulders back, and thrust her breasts forward, stretching.
Longarm’s cheeks warmed with shame, staring through the tent like a devilish child watching through a parsonage window as the preacher’s pretty wife skinned out of her Sunday duds, but he couldn’t help himself.
His heartbeat quickened. His rod began to stiffen under the soapy water when Haven—what was she doing here; he’d thought she was going to bathe at the hotel?—raised her hands to her chest and began unbuttoning her shirt.
Longarm licked his lips. He was on the verge of clearing his throat and announcing himself. That’s what an honorable man would do. Instead, he found himself sucking his lower lip and watching intently as the girl peeled out of her shirt and then her camisole and bent forward to lay the garments over the bench on the room’s far side, beyond the tub.
She’d sat on the bench to remove her boots when the Chinese woman said something in badly broken English.
“Come in!” Haven called.
The Chinese woman entered, carrying two buckets by their handles. She filled the tub, prattled off some broken English mixed with Spanish, then shuffled back out the tent’s front flap and secured the flap behind her.
By the time she’d left, Haven, who’d been continuing to undress, was down to her panties.
Leaning toward Longarm, her full, firm breasts slanting away from her chest, and silhouetted by the amber firelight and fading sunlight behind her, she daintily slid the panties down her legs, stepped out of them, raising each long, slender leg in turn. She dropped the panties on the bench and then leaned far forward, her back to Longarm, to pick up her gun belt and holstered LeMats, which had slid off the bench and onto the floor.
Longarm sucked a sharp breath as he stared at what appeared a gopher looking out from between her legs, up high near her comely, round ass. His cock lifted its purple head above the surface of the soapy water between his legs, and nodded like an old man waking from a short nap.
He stifled a groan.
She turned toward him, and he sat back quickly, water splashing against the sides of his tub. His heartbeat quickened further. Had she seen him? He was in deep shit now if she found out he was over here.
He leaned forward, felt a slight wave of relief. Facing him, she was pinning her hair up on her head, chin lowered. He could have sworn she was looking right at him, but she must not have been or by now she’d have filled her fists with her LeMats. Her breasts were pulled up slightly, bulging back against her chest, spilling slightly over the sides, both nipples aimed right at him.
His mouth turned to dust as she stepped into the tub, sat down in the water and gently splashed it over her shoulders and rubbed it into her breasts, caressing each orb in turn. His cock became fully erect as he watched her stand and soap herself—not quickly, just to get it over with, as he’d done…but slowly, enjoying the sensation of the soap and her soft brush on her fine, smooth skin.
He watched her breasts jostle as she turned this way and that, lifted each leg to wash it, and then reached behind to run her hand gently up between her butt cheeks. She closed one hand over her breast as she massaged the soap slowly, tenderly into the hair between her legs.
She groaned softly, sighed luxuriously.
Longarm drew a slow, deep, calming breath.
She sank back down in the tub and then called to the Chinese woman to come rinse her off. When the Chinese woman had come and gone, Longarm’s heart thudded. He saw Haven resting with her head back against the back of her tub, as though dozing. Knowing that he couldn’t leave here until his clothes were dry, and that she was bound to find out sooner or later that he was over here, he began splashing loudly and sing, “O, Susanna, o, don’t you cry—!”
Her loud gasp cut him off.
“Marshal Long?” she said.
Longarm feigned a surprised grunt. “Holy moly—is that you over there, Agent Delacroix?”