The door opened wider. She wasn’t Miss Medusa Le Mat. She was a mighty pretty gal of twenty or more, with the mind of a slow child.
The confused yard dog ducked into the soddy through the partly open door as its mistress stood there barefoot in a flour-sack shift, her wavy black hair unbound and down around her shoulders as she stared like a blue-eyed owl and said, “Don’t you go talking sweet to me now. Momma says that once you let a boy talk sweet to you, there’s just no saying what he’ll want to do next. Have you been messing with that other lady you’re looking for, mister?”
Longarm truthfully replied, “She was the one who acted wicked the last time we met. You say your mother’s off somewhere, Miss Maureen?”
The simpleminded beauty nodded soberly and said, “Trading horses, I reckon. She told me she would be coming back from Florence as soon as she sold some buckers to a Wild West show. Nobody wants to buy a bucker to rope calves, you know.”
Longarm soberly agreed he’d heard as much, and asked when Maureen expected her mother back.
The dim but pretty little thing replied, “I don’t know. Sometimes she comes right back, and sometimes she can be gone so long I start to cry. It’s lonesome out here with just the stock and old Rex. Would you like to stay here with me until Momma comes home, mister?”
Longarm started to say he’d better come back later. Then he had a better notion, and allowed he might stay long enough for some coffee if she had any to spare.
So the next thing he knew he was seated at a table in the kitchen cum dining-and-sitting room of the two-room soddy, sipping a tin cup of fair coffee and enjoying a stale sponge cake as well while Maureen and her yellow dog wagged their tails at him.
He hadn’t wormed his way inside to see how friendly he might be able to get with a cur dog and a half-wit. He’d wanted to make sure she was telling the truth.
It was beginning to look that way, since he could see into the smaller bedchamber, where two bedsteads against opposite sod walls bespoke no more than two souls sleeping there regularly. But there was one jarring note to the otherwise natural atmosphere of a soddy quartering a mother and daughter. Longarm sniffed deeper, and quietly asked if her mother by any chance smoked a pipe.
Maureen innocently replied, “Oh, that’s Uncle Chester’s tobacco you smell. Momma and me don’t smoke, chew, or dip. Momma says women who smoke, chew, or dip are shanty.”
Longarm didn’t ask her any more about her “uncle.” Pat Brennan in town would know more about such goings-on than Rose Cassidy would be likely to explain to her childlike daughter. It was possible Uncle Chester was really kin. But women told their kids overnight guest were uncles because it was natural for real uncles to loiter about the premises, stinking it up with pipe tobacco.
Then Maureen spoiled it all by blurting out, “I’ve been hoping Uncle Chester would come by to keep me company while Momma was away. I like Uncle Chester. But Momma told him never to come by when I was here alone.”
Longarm washed down the last of the cake and cautiously asked how come. He wasn’t too surprised, being a lawman, when the bright-eyed and innocent woman-child said, “We were playing doctor and Momma got mad. I don’t know why. Uncle Chester wasn’t hurting me. It felt nice when he zammed my ring dang doo with his fingers, like a doctor. He said he was trying to find out if I had worms. I don’t think he found any, even though he felt all around in there and zammed his boy-thing with his other hand. Have you ever zanimed a girl, mister?”
Longarm soberly replied, “Not for worms. What might this uncle’s last name be, and do you know what outfit he rides for, Maureen?”
She soberly replied, “His last name is Pitt. He’s my Uncle Chester Pitt, and I don’t know where he lives when he’s not staying here with us. Momma let him sleep in my bed and fixed me a floor pallet out here by the stove when he stayed over. At least, she did before she got mad at him about something. I asked Momma why she was mad at him, but she just hugged me and said I was too young to understand. Momma doesn’t count so good. Sometimes she thinks I’m only six or seven years old, even though I’ve got titties and hair all around my ring dang doo. Do you want to zammen my titties, mister? Momma says I’m not to let anyone look at my ring dang doo.”
Longarm soberly assured the pretty little half-wit that he’d take her word she was a woman grown. Then he thanked her for the cake and coffee, rose to his much greater height, and said he had to get back to town.
As he headed outside, the barefoot woman-child with eyes of blue tagged after him, idly asking where his pony was.
When he said somebody had shot his paint mare on the far side of that draw, she looked as if she was fixing to cry. But then she proved her mother knew what she was up to, leaving a gal like Maureen in charge of a stud farm for days at a time.
The woman-child offered to drive him back to town in their buckboard. When he hesitated, then said that sounded like a grand notion, he barely had to help. For stupid as she was about sexual matters, the pretty kid knew horseflesh and harness, which never changed the rules on a simple soul.
So they soon had a spunky bay hitched up, and Maureen drove with skill as that yellow dog, Rex, tagged behind.
She did bawl some as they passed the remains of his drygulched paint mare. But he assured her he meant to have somebody come out from town for all that hide and dog food. So they drove on in, and he asked her to rein in out front of the undersheriff’s office.
When she did so, Pat Brennan and a couple of her deputies came outside to see what was happening. Longarm dropped off on his side and soothed the suspicious look on the lawlady’s face by murmuring, “Somebody might have told me. I found her out yonder alone. She can’t say where her mother might be, and what do we know about some disgusting saddle tramp called Chester Pitt?”
The undersheriff frowned thoughtfully and said, “Never heard of him, and I’m paid to know every rider in these parts. What’s the charge, ah, Buck?”
Longarm said, “Carnal knowledge of a feebleminded female, if not worse. Her mother chased the rascal off after catching him messing with the kid. Now the kid don’t know where her mother might be. So add it up!”
Pat did, and her suspicious expression changed to motherly concern as she called out, “Come inside and we’ll send for some soda pop, Maureen. I’m Undersheriff Brennan and I’m a friend of your mother’s. So you’ll be staying here in town with me until she gets back, see?”
As Longarm helped the woman-child down and a deputy took charge of the buckboard, Maureen replied uncertainly, “I don’t know about that, ma’am. Are you a Roman Catholic, and who’s going to take care of our livestock if I don’t go right home?”
Pat Brennan replied in mock severity, “You let my boys worry about your ponies, and ‘Hail Mary, full of grace.’ Ain’t it grand we’re all Irish?”
As the older and taller woman led her inside, Maureen said she wasn’t allowed to play with shanty Irish, and asked if Pat was by any chance lace-curtain Irish, adding that she wasn’t sure what that meant or how a girl could tell.
Pat said she was as lace-curtain as the Gentle Geraldines of the Killdare Hunt and that she could tell the difference.
Going inside with her new-found friends, Maureen confided that they’d moved away from Texas because her momma had been having trouble with some shanty Irish who kept trying to steal her stock and peep in the windows on bath nights.
Pat went over her mother’s probable whereabouts with Maureen a second time, left her sipping soda with a fatherly deputy, and took Longarm aside to murmur, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Longarm said, “It works both ways. She does know more about the running of the spread than you might think just talking to her. If the lover her mother ran off for messing with her did the mother in, how come he never came back to mess with her? She told me she liked her Uncle Chester and enjoyed it when he finger-fucked her.”