Longarm reminded her she’d borrowed the mare for the night, and added it was hardly likely to turn back into one of Cinderella’s mice at one minute past midnight. But she pleaded with him to pull his pants back up as she got dressed with an economy of motion that might have inspired rude questions about other hotel rooms from a man less considerate of adventurous blondes.
They encountered nobody else on the dark back streets as they walked the mare to its owner’s modest cottage and carriage shed near the more barn-like public schoolhouse. Longarm unsaddled and rubbed down the pony in the darkness of the shed, while Trisha tapped on the kitchen door and had a few words through the slit with a mighty sleepy Meg Campbell, who didn’t invite her in.
Trisha rejoined Longarm in the shed, giggling, to report she’d just been called an infernal sex-crazed night owl. Longarm warned her not to hoot too much when her friend woke up all the way and really wanted to know about the other sex-crazed night owl.
Trisha assured him his secrets were safe with her, as long as he meant to escort a lady to her own back door and treat her right.
So he did, and Trisha agreed it was even nicer to just get all the way undressed by candlelight, as if they were old pals, and start all over without the awkward fumblings of that first desperate desire to come before the other one changed his or her mind.
She said she’d never watched herself taking it that way in the mirror before. She said it made her feel like a total whore. But when he said he didn’t consider her a whore, she wiggled her tailbone and demanded, “What am I doing wrong, then? You just tell me what any whore has done for you that you liked better and I’ll just bet I can do it at least as well!”
He chuckled and assured her, “If you were moving that sweet little ring-dang-doo any better it would hurt. I take it you aspire to become a full-time professional after you’ve waited tables a tad longer? It’s more often the other way around, ain’t it?”
She moaned, “Faster! Deeper! I don’t want to be a whore who does it with just anybody. But I love to feel like the man I do want to do it with considers me a totally depraved slut! My mama always told me girls who really let themselves come were totally depraved sluts!”
“I’ve heard Calvinist ministers explain why boys and girls were created different,” Longarm told her. He didn’t ask who’d taught her to finger a man’s crack like that as he was trying to move in her with her legs locked around his spine. To prove he understood her better now, and to get her damned finger out of his ass, he withdrew just long enough to roll her over on her bare belly and sweet little cupcakes, shove a pillow under her lap, and enter her some more from behind, with her slender thighs down and almost together as he braced his own knees outside instead of inside her legs to move it in her, as no man had ever moved it in her before, she said, while he planted a bare palm on either of her finn buttocks to shove them open and shut while singing to her:
“You naughty girl, her mama said. You’ve gone and lost your maidenhead! There’s only one thing left to do, We’ll advertise your ring-dang-doo!”
It made her laugh like hell, and then she laughed even louder as she panted, “I’m coming! I’m coming hard and, oh, Custis, it’s never, ever, felt so amusing before!”
He thought it was fun too. So a good time was had by all, and it made them both feel sad and sentimental when they just had to stop a spell lest they screw one another unconscious.
But neither felt really sleepy just yet. So as they reclined propped up on her pillows and sharing a smoke, Trisha finally recalled how they’d wound up such good friends and asked him, again, where he and her friend’s pony had been earlier.
He told her as much as he knew, adding, “Whoever reported a heap of white strangers hiding out amid those old Indian ruins must have been blind. Or else disgruntled Jicarilla have wiped them out and nobody this far from the mesa noticed the considerable gunplay that should have taken place.”
She said she hadn’t heard about anyone, red or white, camping up in those dry canyons in any numbers. When she asked how he felt about Indians and white renegades being up to something sneaky as hell—in cahoots the way those Mormons and Paiutes had acted out Utah way—Longarm said, “Na-dene ain’t Paiute, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre was a sort of ill-considered brawl that nobody had spent all that much time in plotting. The Jicarilla leaders smart enough to plot worth a tinker’s dam are up at the Dulce Agency, trying to get as good a deal as they can out of the Great White Father. Disgruntled young bronco Apache don’t meditate dark deeds up a canyon with any white outlaws. They kill ‘em for their guns and horses.”
She took the cheroot from him as she allowed that was the way she’d always heard Apache behaved, too. Billy Vail had never sent her down this way to investigate conflicting rumors.
Longarm speculated, “Not much mystery about disgruntled Indians. I’ve often felt disgruntled by our willy-nilly Indian policy, and I must have a better grasp of our two-party system than your average Indian. What can you tell me about numerous new faces in or about these parts, honey?”
Trisha said there were lots of new faces around Camino Viejo, including her own, but that she’d never been up any canyons over by that mesa.
When he asked her what had inspired a gal so fond of… nightlife to come up this way from Santa Fe to begin with, she explained she’d heard things were booming up this way, just as the place she’d been working in, near the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe, had been shut down by the new, reform administration.
She said she didn’t know why. They’d never told the gals waiting tables out front what went on in the back rooms, but there’d been boomtown talk about a ghost town coming back to life up this way. Hence, here she was.
She agreed with Longarm that Camino Viejo was hardly more than a bigger stagecoach stop than most, with the stage company’s local relay station four miles farther on. But she said old-timers said it had been much less before Queen Kirby had come out of the blue to do wonders with her fairy wand, or ready cash.
Trisha explained how the mysterious redhead had swept in one day, three summers back, to find a few forlorn merchants and the slightly more prosperous hotel, serving the crossroads near a river ford and not much else. The Mexicans had been run off years back, and the more stubborn or stupid Anglo homesteaders had eventually found it discouraging to live more forted up, and lose more stock, than folks just a few miles up or down the valley in either direction.
Trisha said, “The way I heard it, Queen Kirby started by buying out a couple of failing rancheros, hanging on to their cowboys, and adding some hired guns of her own to make stock-stealing in these parts more threatening to one’s health. Then she plowed those profits back into her card house and less wholesome enterprises. Some of the cowboys say there were never all those whorehouses just off the coach road in olden times.”
Longarm blew a smoke ring and said, “I was over to her card house earlier. Money can be a lot like snow, once you get a ball of it rolling right. She might or might not have come by her first wad of seed money honestly. I’ve got no warrant to question that. I fail to see how any federal court would be interested in an old carnival grifter using the profits from one business to start up or buy out another. They call that free enterprise, and I can see how she got her first holding almost free. It was smart to revive a ghost town with a handful of private guns instead of building a town from scratch with a far bigger army of masons and carpenters.”