So he laughed like hell and lowered her to the bedding. But then, as he flopped down beside her and reached for a friendly feel, the apparently rough and ready old gal sobbed, “No! Kiss me first. Treat me like a Wasichu girl who means something to you, before you get up and ride on, you brute.”
He said he’d get up right then and there if she thought he was being brutal to her.
But she pulled him down against her and felt friendly as hell as she confided she liked it sort of brutal once she warmed up.
Chapter 7
It felt like he was waking up in a thunderstorm. But as Longarm gathered his wits together, he saw that that frisky Osage gal had started up again on top, and the way she was bouncing the bed with her brown shapely torso accounted for the way the dawn light through the one little window behind her flickered. The bedsprings creaking under them and the way she kept licking his face like a pup, Indian style, accounted for the impression of rain. He was thrusting his now fully aroused organ-grinder up to meet her downward bouncings when the air outside was rent by another definite roll of thunder.
He didn’t care. He rolled her on her back and hooked a bare elbow under each of her tawny knees to spread her wider and enjoy her deeper as she panted and gasped, “Heya oh toe kaw hey! I am starting to come again!”
That made two of them, and since she’d assured him more than once by then that she admired a man who could let himself go crazy in her, Longarm enjoyed a long thoroughly selfish climax in her quivering wet innards. As she milked the last drops from him with her astoundingly strong vaginal muscles and crooned, “Pee-la me-yeah!” he kissed her collar bone and replied, “Well, thanks your ownself, you hot-as-hell thing. Is it really raining outside this morning?”
Olive said, “It’s dry as a bone. Those Wasichu witko are setting off sky bombs again. But don’t leave yet. I know I promised, before we went to sleep, I wouldn’t cry when this time came. But now that it has, I want you to make me come again before you go.”
He said he was running low on ammunition, but figured he could fire another salvo dog-style. So she coyly rolled on her hands and knees to let him stand behind her with his bare feet on the braided rug as he admired a broad view of her he’d never had before. He could tell she rode astride a lot. Nothing else pounded a gal’s rump to be so firm and sort of mature-looking below such a slender waistline. As she winked her rectal muscles up at him, she giggled and confessed she’d always envied a mare being served by a stud up until now. He’d wondered how she’d learned to arch her spine and pucker like that.
She allowed he’d been taking lessons from horny critters as well by the time they’d managed a protracted mutual orgasm in such an unromantic but practical position.
Then she served him breakfast in bed to show she wasn’t sore when he allowed he had no hard feelings for her. It sure beat all how a widow woman who made love so rough and ready could scramble eggs so delicately. He sensed her ulterior motives in treating him to such a swell breakfast when she got back in bed as he was enjoying his second cup of coffee, knelt between his bare ankles and the foot of the bed, and went down on him with her lucious wet lips.
So it turned out he might be able to lay her one more time, as she entreated, after all. But he sure felt stiff, and had a time walking right when they finally got around to saddling up those ponies so a lawman could carry out his damned duties with the sun now scandalously high.
He didn’t look back as he rode out. Olive had asked him not to. So there was no saying whether she was waving at him, just standing there, or playing with herself, as she’d threatened she might.
That orange balloon was more like a black dot against the sunrise now, as it slowly rose with yet another charge into what sure seemed a cloudless sky that would have done the Mojave or Sonora deserts proud. As he rode south past the last yard fences, he decided the two sisters had to be new at flim-flammery.
The flint cornstalks to either side as he rode between fenced-in forties were still green, but wilted. He spied a sunflower windmill spinning further up the wagon trace. Curious in spite of Billy Vail’s orders, he swung the paint he was riding that morning off to where he could peer over a fence into chocolate-colored streaks between the dustier corn rows. They had the crops under groundwater irrigation this close to the creek bed a few furlongs back. But that one windmill, in such cranky winds as they were getting in early high summer, was barely keeping that hardy flint corn alive. Nobody had ever gotten rich on skinny stock or half-parched cash crops. Barley or rye still had half a chance. But that corn needed rain and a heap of it pronto. A light sprinkle that’d leave the ground firm enough for mule-drawn reapers and steam-powered threshers just wasn’t going to revive the local corn crop, not if a halfways irrigated field already looked so desperate!
The higher country between mapped water courses was cut up by a confusion of shallower, drier, nameless draws and washes, as a nation calling itself Tsitsissah had taught strangers who called it Cheyenne in a serious of nameless but bitter little skirmishes in these same parts a few short summers back. So Longarm was down in a draw, out of sight of town and vice versa, when the Ruggles sisters set off another blast high in a cloudless sky.
“Greenhorns,” he repeated, reining in to light a morning smoke as he considered other quacks he’d met up with in his travels. Even Hopi rain chanters knew enough to wait until rain seemed possible before they offered to try. West of longitude 100’ you got enough overcast days, or even weeks, with nothing falling from those damned stubborn clouds. But at least rain was possible when you saw some sky water up yonder. There was nothing you could do in or about a clear, dry sunny sky but wait for some damned clouds. He wondered idly if those self-styled pluviculturists really believed in their patented method of making noise.
There was no telegraph office in either Cedar Bend or Sappa Crossing. He’d asked. The Grange had been drumming for a rail spur or at least more modern communications north of the Smokey Hill River without much luck so far. But wait, if Horst Heger had sent that wire from the county seat twenty miles east of Sappa Crossing …
“Forget it!” Longarm warned himself aloud. Nobody’d asked him to investigate buxom rainmakers who might or might not be kin to the real Dan’l Ruggles and might or might not believe in what they were up to with all that noise in a cloudless sky. He’d meant it when he’d told that one sister he didn’t have jurisdiction over pesky threats to the local economy. It was a good thing too. For how would it look if a federal deputy showed up every time a Gypsy dealt out tarot cards or Miss Margaret Fox held another spirit-trapping seance by cracking a double-jointed toe under the table? Folk were supposed to know better than to pay good money for harmless pranks. Lawmen had enough to keep them busy chasing the dangerous crooks.
Somewhere out ahead hid a really dangerous furriner, trained to kill by one of the best military machines in the business of killing folks. It didn’t matter whether Ritter still had that monstrous LeMat or not. The rascal’s bloodstained records allowed he could kill with any sort of gun, a cavalry saber, a bowie knife, or in a pinch, his bare hands.
So Longarm rode on, and when those loco sisters set off yet another sky bomb less than an hour later, he didn’t even glance behind him. Old Dad Jergens had said they’d likely hear those blasts clean across the prairie in Sappa Crossing. It was their misfortune and none of his own, as long as nobody got in his damned way.
Chapter 8
The ride would have been no more than a dozen miles on a crow But following a wagon trace across constantly rolling prarie made for a longer row to hoe. So when they topped a rise and Longarm spotted a new-looking windmill, spinning merrily off to the west with blades winking back at the morning sun, he knew somebody had a cattle spread or homestead up here on the higher range. When he spotted a black Cherokee cow with a calf to match, he had a better grasp on that distant pumping machine. Cherokee beef was bred from Texas longhorn and chunky black beef cows from back East, adding up to a critter that could manage to survive on marginal range without butchering out so dry and stringy. The original longhorn the Western beef industry was based on had never been bred for meat on the table. The North African Moors who’d introduced the hardy breed to Spain ate lamb or mutton when they could get any, while everyone knew Spaniards and Mexicans cottoned to pigs and chickens or even goats for eating. So the longhorns down Mexico way had been intended for hides and tallow. Spanish-speaking folks used leather a lot more than most, while their night-owl habits in a sunny climate called for a whole lot of tallow candles.