He said, "Why, no, I figured you learned to screw so fine from reading romantic books. Have you read that new novel by Mister Zola about that frisky French gal Nana? I'll bet you hundreds of young gals are trying out those wild positions Nana and her frisky female roommate got into in that one chapter right this very minute!"
He chuckled and added, "Gives a man a hard-on just to picture those two pretty frustrated things trying to screw one another without a pecker to their name!"
Godiva reached down between them to gently take the matter in hand as she sniffed and said, "At least we don't have that problem. I'm not sure I want to be compared to Emile Zola's fallen women of the Paris underworld."
As she started to jack it up for him, she added, "I'll have you know I don't do this with every man I meet!"
"Nor I with every gal," Longarm primly replied as he found himself rising to the occasion. Then he moved his own free hand down her smooth belly to part her damp pubic hair with skilled fingers as he murmured in a more serious tone, "Don't give away all the magic by telling me all your secrets. You don't really want to know who taught me to strum your old banjo like this, do you?"
She sobbed, "Jesus, that feels good! Just keep that up until I'm almost there, and finish me off with this lovely thing I have in my own hand! I promise, I won't say a word about anyone else!"
CHAPTER 9
So a good time was had by the both of them, all the way up to Fort Sill. A good time at night anyway. Days on the trail with a herd of cows could get tedious.
It could have been worse. The Running X had contracted to be paid by the head, half in advance and half on delivery. So Harry Carver was only worried about getting them up the trail alive. With Quill Indians still skulking out yonder, for all they knew, that made for a faster pace than most market herds were driven. But less than a dozen drovers could only get cows to move so fast, and so the one day's hard ride on horseback stretched out to almost another seventy-two hours on the trail, meaning two more nights bedded down to one side after dark. Godiva could really get acrobatic on a clear cool prairie night with no covers in the way and nobody but Longarm to watch her wriggle and jiggle.
He wriggled and jiggled a heap himself, of course, but by the third night he was tempted to ask her to quit showing off and just enjoy it with him. For, not unlike that Nana gal in Mister Zola's sassy novel, she seemed to be working harder to pleasure him than to please herself, and while he was getting it all free and had no call to compare her with the hookers in that book, he recalled with some discomfort how they only relaxed and let themselves go all the way with old pals they felt more comfortable with.
He tried to make her feel more comfortable with him. During the sunlit hours on the trail he let her ride along beside him as he rode flank for old Harry Carver, and despite riding sidesaddle, the newspaper gal and erstwhile army brat got to where she could head off a straying yearling pretty fairly. When complimented, she sniffed and said it was no great wonder they called gents who did this as a full-time occupation cowboys. Longarm was too polite to start a stampede and show her how a top hand was occasionally called upon to earn his forty a month and beans.
It was after dark, with her duds off, when Godiva reverted from high-toned Eastern gal to dirty past the line of duty. Longarm had to draw the line their last night on the trail together when she sucked it hard again for him.
He demurred, "We're bedded down on a grassy rise with that water down in the creek too crowded for a midnight dip, honey."
She insisted, "I don't care. I've never had anyone built like you in me before, and I want to say you came again and again."
She said, "Let me get on my hands and knees, like a puppy dog, while you ravage me!"
So he did.
But when they finally rode into Fort Sill late the next day, he could sense a certain coolness in her manner, even before she broke free of the outfit to gallop on alone toward the cluster of frame barracks and outbuildings clustered around a flagstaff in the distance.
Longarm didn't chase after her. Aside from knowing how dumb a man looked chasing skirts at full gallop, he knew Harry Carver and his Running X riders could use all the help they could get right now. For like cowboys, although for different reasons, cows tended to get excited in the vicinity of any settlement. So you had to work harder to keep a herd together as you drove them on in.
But just as the cows were really commencing to act up, as was only to be expected, a dozen-odd riders came down the trail to head them off. As they rode closer, most of 'em seemed to be Indians or breeds, dressed like fringy cowhands. But their straw boss was a white civilian working for the B.I.A.
As he reined in by Harry Carver he explained they weren't supposed to drive the fool herd into the Fort Sill Parade, but downwind, to some corrals Chief Quanah had just flung up for the stock.
When Harry pointed out how he understood the beef to be meant for Kiowa consumption as well, the B.I.A. rider nodded but said, "It sure is. But try getting a damned Kiowa to feed himself like any grown child. Chief Quanah has his Comanche meeting us halfway. He ain't but half Indian, you know. His momma was a white gal, carried off and raped by hostiles whilst on her way to California with a wagon train."
This was not true. But Longarm only cut in to introduce himself and ask where Chief Quanah might be at the moment.
When the B.I.A. man suggested Quanah Parker might be visiting with his white uncle, Judge Isaac Parker, at Fort Smith, over beyond the Cherokee Nation, Longarm knew he didn't know. As any lawman had to keep in mind, witnesses who didn't know all the facts tended to fill in the blanks with guesswork.
Instead of saying this to a man who worked at Quanah Parker's own agency, Longarm asked the way to that agency. The B.I.A. man explained their main base was up in Anadarko, with a liaison post at Fort Sill and then substations further out in all directions on the sprawling Kiowa Comanche Reserve. So Longarm allowed he'd start at the fort, seeing how the army would want a report on that shootout in any case.
He shook hands with Harry Carver, rode back to pick up his hired paint and packsaddle, and rode on as the Running X riders drifted the herd around to where they wanted it.
Like Fort Cobb to the northwest or Fort Reno due north, Fort Sill had been built more as a small town for lots of soldiers than what Eastern folks pictured when they thought of a frontier outpost. Laid out in haste to enforce the treaty of Medicine Lodge with field artillery and the Tenth (Colored) Cavalry, Fort Sill had been neatly built on a dead-flat stretch of prairie where the grass grew stirrup-deep as well as emerald green well into summer.
This, as any plainsman, red or white, could have told you, was because the big grassy flat was a seasonal marsh, with the parade a boot sucking quagmire in wet weather.
A rare engineering officer of color, with the unlikely name of Henry Flipper, Second Lieutenant, U.S.A. Army, had salvaged the impractical site with ingenious drainage works, including the famous channel now called "Flipper's Impossible Ditch" because an optical illusion made it seem as if water was running uphill after a heavy rain.
These moat-like ditches, along with enough fencing to keep man or beast from falling in, made up such perimeter defenses as they thought such a big garrison, backed by cannon and Gatling guns, was likely to need against sane Indians. Most of the really crazy Kiowa and Comanche had gone under in that last big buffalo war.
Longarm rode through the official "Hog Farms," the tolerated shantytown you usually found outside such an outpost's gates. A sleepy white trooper posted by the gate to give directions, it being an open post, waved Longarm on to the nearby guardhouse, where he could report in to the Officer of the Day. The cheerful young O.D. said the Tenth Cav had just left for the border to stalk Apache, and that neither he nor any of the other recent replacements from the East had heard a thing about Longarm's mission. He had a clerk take down Longarm's account of that brush with apparent hostiles and said that they'd file it, but that he suspected some young bucks had just been drinking.