He left the tired horse off at the hotel livery and then walked around the hotel and into the lobby. At the desk, he left word that he wanted a bath sent up to his room and also a steak with all that went with it and a bottle of whiskey. After that, Longarm climbed the stairs to the second floor and went down to his room and let himself in and pitched the parcels he had bought at the general mercantile on the bed. His room and Sarah’s shared a connecting door. He unlocked it with a key and opened it slowly, giving a gentle rap as he did. She was up, sitting on the side of her bed in a kind of flannel nightgown. There was a bathtub still in the middle of the room with towels scattered about. She looked wan and drawn but still pretty even with wet hair and no makeup. He came forward, skirting the tub, and leaned down and kissed her lightly.
He said, “You look about tuckered out.”
She said, “I am. Did you have any luck?”
“I don’t know, honey. All I was doing was getting off a telegram to try and get some information. It will be a little while.”
“I thought I was going to go to sleep waiting for you,” she said.
“You should have.”
“I wanted you to hold me.”
He sat down on the bed beside her and put his left arm around her shoulders and held her close. He said, “You were a brave woman today.”
She looked up at him and smiled. “You were the brave one. You were the one that did it all. How did you make that bomb?”
He shrugged, smiling a little. “Mostly by guess and by golly.”
“It sure worked,” she said. “I see now why you wanted me to try and get under the bed. Gosh, did you see what it did to Miguel?”
Longarm said, “That even surprised me. In fact, I heard a couple of those pieces whiz over my head just as I was falling to the floor. If I had been standing where I’d been, me and them would have connected.”
Sarah said timidly, “Honey, I-” She stopped.
He said, “What?”
“I would like to but I don’t think I can.”
“What?”
She blushed slightly. “You know. Make love.”
Longarm said, “Oh, I reckon we’re both a little too tired for that.”
“Yes, but there’s this.” With hands that trembled slightly, she pulled her gown up past her knees and on up past her cream-colored thighs. She spread her legs slightly. The inside of her thighs were rubbed raw.
Longarm said, “My heavens. That’s terrible. We’ve got to get some liniment on that.”
“You see, I don’t think I could grip you with my legs.”
He smoothed her hair. He said, “Honey, don’t you worry about that. I’ll go downstairs in just a minute and get some kind of ointment.”
She said, “If I could just sleep.” Then she suddenly turned her head toward a table at the back of the room. “Oh, by the way, they brought your things from when you were here before.”
Longarm turned to look and there sat his valise, the one he had left in the hotel when he had gone to get a drink some days ago. The one he had used to go to Mexico City and come back. The valise contained clean clothes, his derringer, and another revolver, the mate to the one that Harding had taken away from him.
He slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “I’ll be damned. I just spent sixteen dollars on clothes, closer to seventeen actually, that I didn’t have to spend. Damn it. But at least now I know I have a pistol in there that I can make good use of.”
He got up and crossed swiftly to the valise and unbuckled it and opened it wide. There on top, where he had left it, was his .38-caliber derringer. He took it out and quickly shoved it inside his concave belt buckle, slipping it under the steel snap that held it in place. After that, he rummaged down through his shirts and jeans and found the mate to his missing revolver. It felt good as he pulled it out of the valise. He immediately took Chulo’s pistol out and laid it on the table and returned his own to its rightful place in his holster. Then he thought to take it back out, click open the gate, and spin the cylinder to make sure it was fully loaded. He rummaged around in the bottom of the valise and found the box of .44-caliber cartridges which was still half full. He opened the box and took out six and then six more cartridges. He put six in his right front jeans pocket and six in his right front shirt pocket. It felt good to be equipped again. He rummaged around in his clothes, feeling toward the bottom because that’s where the cleaner ones were, and pulled out a blue shirt that he particularly liked and then felt still farther until he found a clean pair of jeans. He laid those on the table and then searched around and got out some clean socks. Just as he was about to draw them out, his knuckles hit something hard, and to his delight, he found a full bottle of the precious Maryland whiskey. Now he remembered that he had been saving it for the happy occasion when he would finally get off the damned train and get loose from that damned Earl Combs. But things had been so rushed and jumbled that he’d forgotten about it and instead had gone to a saloon to buy a bottle of whiskey. There he had met a man who wanted him to go get a horse in Mexico and had ended up back in Laredo with a woman with chafed and chapped thighs. It would make a fine story to tell his grandchildren one day, if they were pretty broad-minded children.
Without pause, he walked over to the table beyond the bed where there was a pitcher and a basin and a couple of glasses. He took one of them, uncorked the whiskey, poured it half full, and then drank the lot of it down in two gulps. He said, looking at Sarah, “Aw, that tastes so good. Do you drink whiskey, Sarah?”
She shook her head quickly. “No, it’s too strong.”
“Did you get dinner?”
“Oh, yes. They brought me some nice roast chicken and some vegetables and a glass of wine. It was wonderful. They’ve taken the dishes away and they’re supposed to come back for the bathtub.”
Longarm said, “I’m going down now to try and get you some salve. When they come for the bathtub, tell them to pull it on into my room.”
She said, “If I can stay awake that long.”
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
In the end he had to make do with some Neet’s Foot Oil out of the livery stable. It was mostly used to grease saddles and to work into tender spots on horses’ knees and their hocks. He figured it would do Sarah some good on her chafed legs.
When he got back up to her room, he found that the bathtub had been pulled into his room and a bucket of steaming water was standing nearby. Also, his supper had been set up on a table and covered with a cloth. He ducked into Sarah’s room for a moment. She was already in bed under the covers more than half asleep. He sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled the covers back and carefully lifted her nightgown up. She seemed to barely notice. Her eyes only fluttered slightly, but never opened fully. He pulled her legs apart gently because he knew she was sore, and, as carefully as he could, he began to rub the oil into her bruised and tormented flesh. She had taken a bad pounding from the four-hour ride. But even as cruelly treated as her skin had been, he couldn’t help but notice the shapeliness of her legs, the purity of her skin tone, and the light brown thatch where her legs joined. He tried not to notice because the woman had had a rough time, but he caught small glimpses through the sparse thatch of hair of the faint pink and red of the vulva and lips of her vagina. He would not allow himself to become aroused. Instead, he coated her liberally with the oil before he pulled her gown down and pulled the covers back up and then tucked them around her neck. He kissed her softly on the lips and walked quietly out of her room, leaving the door open, and into his own.