Just then, the flap to his tub room opened, and the Chinese man entered, holding his clothes in a neatly folded pile in his hands. He was flushed and nervous, and his wife, who stood little higher than Longarm’s breastbone, entered behind him holding a double-barreled shotgun that must have weighed as much as she did.
She scowled at Longarm and prattled away angrily, but when her eyes dropped to his dong, which was at half-mast now, she fell silent.
The man shuffled over to the bench, bowing anxiously and not meeting Longarm’s gaze, and set the pile of clothes on the bench. He swung around quickly, like a chicken running from a dog, and started back to the flap, where his wife stood, holding the shotgun down in front of her and staring wide-eyed at Longarm’s manhood. Her husband prattled at her and turned her toward the door, and she shuffled out in front of him, turning her head to get one more look at the well-hung man behind her.
Then they were gone.
Longarm took his clothes in his lap and sat down on the bench. Haven’s shadow was still moving around on the other side of the canvas wall. Suddenly, he felt more confounded than amused.
“Oh, for pete’s sakes, don’t you think this is rather silly? Don’t see no reason why we couldn’t meet up again. What’s it gonna hurt? We’re both professionals. We can have fun and still do our jobs.”
She was shrugging into her duster. Turning, she grabbed her hat off the peg and carefully set it on her head with both hands, carefully adjusting its angle. She said nothing but was being overly fussy about the hat.
“You got what I want, and I got what you want,” Longarm said. “Why not admit it? We had fun once.”
She lowered her hands from her hat and stood staring at him through the canvas wall. He could see her chest rising and falling slowly, heavily as she breathed.
As she thought it over.
She was as confounded as he was…
“No,” she said resolutely. Then louder as though convincing, reprimanding herself. “Not ever again.”
With that she turned and strode out of the tent.
“You got nothin’ to be embarrassed about!” Longarm called after her. Then he stuck the cigar back in his mouth and said mostly to himself, because the girl was gone, “Hell, we all got wants. It’s only natural!”
Chapter 15
Fully dressed and with his rifle riding one shoulder, his saddlebags slung over the other, Longarm slipped through the tent flap and out into the refreshingly cool air of the late afternoon, early evening.
The Chinese couple was still tending their laundry. They must wash clothes for nearly the entire town of Broken Jaw.
The Chinaman was removing dry clothes from one of the lines, folding them neatly, and placing them in a handcart. The woman paused in her stirring a pot of boiling clothes with a long paddle, giving Longarm a speculative, vaguely amorous look, a lock of black hair sliding back and forth above her right eye in the breeze.
Longarm flipped the woman a three-dollar gold piece.
“Sorry for the trouble.” He pinched his hat brim to her and then walked on down the street in the direction of the hotel.
The street was busier than it had been earlier. There were two saloons in town, and cow ponies stood droopy-headed before the hitch racks of each. Horseback riders in the traditionally colorful, billowy neckerchiefs and dusty, weathered sombreros of the Arizona cowpuncher rode back and forth along the street, meeting each other and calling out or pinching their hat brims, laughing with the relief of the end of another long workday in the blazing Sonoran sun.
They’d have a few drinks, maybe a woman, and buck the tiger or play a few rounds of cards, likely losing every penny they’d made that day, before mounting their ponies again and riding back out to their respective bunkhouses.
A breeze rose, swirling the dust and bits of straw at Longarm’s feet. It jostled a few of the tumbleweeds that had blown into town earlier that day. The breeze would die soon, as soon as the sun had sunk behind the Rincon Mountains in the west, and then the stars would come out to flash like near beacons.
Already the colors of the sunset were showing over the brown western peaks and ridges.
Longarm stopped at the ranger post to get directions to where Big Frank Three Wolves had claimed the cache of stolen gold was buried. With a pencil provided by Ranger Roscoe Sanders, he marked on the map that Big Frank Three Wolves had drawn for him where the dead rangers and U.S. marshals had been found, as well, near a creek about a hundred yards from the general area in which the gold was said to be buried though no one had discovered its exact location and retrieved it.
At least, no one the ranger or Big Frank knew about. A lot could happen in three years.
The stolen gold was supposedly on land that was part of the Double D Ranch of Whip Azrael, the headquarters of which was farther on down the streambed known as Defiance Wash, which could have been renamed Dead Man Creek, for it was the same creek around which the dead lawmen had been discovered. Defiance Wash ran through the little ghost town of Holy Defiance as well as the Azrael Double D Ranch eight miles to the west of the town, tucked inside a valley of the Black Puma Mountains.
Longarm pocketed the map that Three Wolves had scribbled on simple lined notepaper from memory, a copy of which the now-dead lawman had used to find their way twenty-five miles south to what had become the end of their trail in more ways than one. Leaving Sanders playing checkers with Three Wolves through the big half-breed’s cell door, empty supper plates on Captain Jack Leyton’s small, cluttered desk, Longarm headed out for a meal of his own.
Later, he went on over and paid for a room at the Arizona House, a two-story adobe-brick affair framed in weathered pine no doubt hauled down from the White Mountains when Broken Jaw had still been burgeoning. The hotel sat on the north end of town, nothing but sage and greasewood rolling up toward high, salmon-colored mountains to the north.
A few years ago, this country had been terrorized by the Coyotero and Lipan Apaches, and Longarm remembered stepping carefully, with a hand on his pistol’s grips, waiting for an attack at any moment. Because that’s how they’d come—hard and fast, anytime, anywhere, the savages wanting nothing more than to rid their territory of the white invader.
It had been a bloody time across several decades, many ranches raided, stagecoaches run down and burned, men tortured, women raped and murdered. Secretly, Longarm sympathized with the Apache plight, but he was glad that the bulk of those depredations seemed to be over. Now and then, bronco Apaches led by some war chief who couldn’t bring himself to be heeled by some Indian gent and the cavalry, would bust off their reservation and go on a wild, killing tear, but those “red cyclones,” as he’d heard some settlers call them, were happening less and less frequently in these slightly more civilized times, thank God.
The most formidable war chief of them all, Geronimo of the Chiricahua Apache, had finally surrendered only the year before and had been taken with his family to Fort Perkins in Pensacola, Florida. Just as Longarm sympathized with the Apache plight—no one wanted to be driven away from their homes and plucked from the only way of life they knew; the cavalry was trying to make them farmers, of all things!—he admired the tough, crafty old leader, Geronimo, who, though sorely outnumbered and ill-equipped, had given General Crook and General Miles fits for many long, hard years.
When Longarm had signed his name in the guest register manned by a stocky German with a tangled bib beard, he headed on up the narrow stairs to his second-floor room. It was nearly dark now, and a couple of candles in wall-bracketed sconces offered a flickering, shadowy light.