They’d barred the door and hung their guns up along with their hats, because that was what you did with guns and hats before you drank sitting down atop bedding. It was her notion to lean back on one elbow, hotel tumbler in her free hand, as she said, “Enough about my troubles. Thanks to you, I’m likely to be reappointed, Lord willing and our party wins the coming election. What about your case, and do I get a piece of it for my party machine if you catch Miss Medusa Le Mat?”
Longarm assured her, “You’ve already got a piece of it whether your tip leads to any arrests or not, Miss Pat. I’d have never come here to the Junction if you hadn’t wired Billy Vail about Buster Crabtree and his odd ways since getting out of prison.”
She sipped from her tumbler and sighed. “I was hoping you might not ask about him. We’ve lost him completely. As I told your boss by Western Union, there was all sorts of gossip when he failed to show up for a coming-home party but got spotted all over these parts by riders who knew him. Riders he seemed anxious to avoid.
Longarm freshened her drink as he asked, “How could they be sure it was Buster if he was avoiding them?”
She raised her drink in a silent toast and explained. “Buster is easier than most riders to recognize at a distance. That’s likely why he spent that time in prison after riding the owlhoot trail with some who got away. He’s taller than you, with flaming red hair and mustache. He rides a cow pony comically, posting in the saddle on short stirrup leathers, like one of those English dudes hunting foxes. Some say he was taught to ride that way by a momma in the old South. Lots of those plantation slavocrats had English airs.”
“You called him a Texican in your night letter to old Billy Vail,” Longarm pointed out with a thoughtful frown.
The lady who’d wired the information explained, “I said he hung out with the Texas crowd. As you likely know, most of the drovers who herded the longhorns up this way as the army cleared off Mister Lo, the Poor Indian, were inclined to crown their hats high and request ‘Dixie’ be played at wakes and weddings. It still makes my job interesting. Lots of Kansas cattlemen and even more of our farm folks hail from north of the Ohio back East.”
He said he’d tried to explain all that to a Wild West writer one time, to no avail. “She said the truth doesn’t pay and she was writing for as wide a market as she could manage. So she just glossed over details about religion, economics, or old grudges left over from the war, and had her Wild Westerners go at it like a bunch of schoolkids packing six-guns.”
Pat perked up. “She, you say? Am I to understand I’m not the first girl you’ve invited in for some drinking in the dark?”
Longarm chuckled and confessed, “I drink with gals in the dark as often as they’ll let me. Somebody ought to take a horsewhip to me, I know. But I’m a natural man with a job that don’t allow for the usual flowers, sweets, and such.”
She sighed and said, “I’ve heard about how dangerous you are to both sexes, you wicked thing. But I fear I know all too well what you mean about your job, and even when there seems to be the time, dreams just don’t come true. Why do you suppose the Lord gives us so many dreams and so little time to dream them, Custis?”
He leaned back on his own elbow, setting the bottle aside, as he soberly replied, “It’s our own free will to dream big, Miss Pat. Our mortal flesh lasts longer than most. A mayfly dreams its dreams and passes on in just one day. A dog or pony is dying of old age by the time a kid grows old enough to pester the opposite sex. I’ve been reading that Professor Darwin’s notions and if he’s right, it’s our own fault for evolving smart enough to figure out why we should feel so blue about our alloted four score and ten. Had we stayed up in the trees, scratching our few itches, we’d have never figured out we were getting older by the minute.”
The gal, who was at least five years older than Longarm, almost sobbed as she confessed, “I’ve tried scratching my own itches and it’s not half as nice as the real thing. Don’t you think I’m at all attractive, you mean thing? I heard about you and that French actress who was at least as old as me!”
There was no better way to answer than to take her tumbler from her unresisting hand, lay her back across the bedding, and kiss her some before he assured her he’d only been assigned to bodyguard Miss Sarah Bernhardt, nothing more.
It was Pat’s notion to move his hand further down her bodice as she demanded, “Is it true she sleeps in a coffin and bathes in a tub of goat’s milk every morn?”
He moved his hand further down on his own, as he kissed her some more and honestly replied, “I never got to sleep or take a bath with the lady. We were aboard this hired train as she toured the West, and I had my own compartment with a regular bunk bed in it.”
The undersheriff hauled up her skirts and took his wrist to guide his questing fingers into her underdrawers in the dark as she moaned, “Please don’t tease me like this, Custis!”
He asked her if she liked to be teased better this way as he found her clit already turgid between wet love-lips and began to rock the boy in the boat for her with two fingers.
She gasped, “Oh, Jesus! Why do your fingers feel so much better than my own! For God’s sake, don’t let me waste these feelings on your fucking hand!”
But he still made certain she was more than halfway there before he risked stopping long enough to shuck some duds. She sat up to haul her riding habit off over her head and slide her underdrawers down, to greet him in her boots, stockings, and chemise, thighs wide in welcome, as he rolled into her love saddle with nothing on but his socks.
It felt sort of flattering to hear an experienced older woman gasp and beg him to take it easy until she got used to more than she’d had any right to expect. After that it just felt good. For as old Ben Franklin had observed in that treatise on older women, women withered from the top, like trees, and many a dear old lady had the pussy of a bride to go with her eternal gratitude for an unexpected gift.
Pat Brennan was far from being a dear old lady, but she acted as grateful as a hog allowed to wallow on a hot summer day as she told him to forget what she’d just said about taking it easy. So he hooked an elbow under either of her knees, and a great time was had by all while she puckered on his shaft and tried to suck his tongue out by the roots.
But later, as they lay cuddled with her head on his shoulder and one thigh across his waist, groping for their second wind as the soft cross-ventilation cooled their overheated flesh, she murmured, “I hope you won’t misunderstand, dear heart, but sometimes I think I miss this part of going to bed with a man most. There’s more to this silly stuff than just scratching our itches, isn’t there.”
He reached out with his free arm for the shirt he’d draped over a bedpost with his gun rig as he murmured, “I follow your drift. I’ve often told myself a man with a tumbleweed job like mine would be smart to develop a taste for sheep, or even whores. But somehow, I’ve never been able to fully enjoy a sudden change of subjects, and seeing we’ve got to where we can level with one another now, I like women whether I’m screwing them or not. I like to talk with a smart woman I can understand rather than a French actress I can’t understand.
She kissed his bare shoulder and asked if he’d heard about the way French gals got it up for a man.
He assured her such common courtesy was not confined to just the French folks of both sexes, but added, “Let’s share a smoke and start fresh after we talk some more about Miss Medusa Le Mat, speaking of gals who behave scandalously.”
He lit a cheroot, took a drag, and offered her a puff as he mentioned her wire to Billy Vail. “You said there was talk about some strange lady in the market for riders, with other gossip about some serious crooked riding after dark in these parts?”