She moaned, "Oh, Custis, I'm so scared, and so excited between my thighs that I fear I'm about to climax!"
He said, "It'll feel just as good on the run. Get moving! This is a goddamn gunfight, not a time to start screwing, girl!"
She blushed beet red and jumped up to run off through the dappled shade as, down near those sunflowers, he heard someone shouting something. It could have been "agua," which was Mexican for water. A cuss stretched out on a dusty slope with two hundred grains of.44-40 lead in him would doubtless want some. But an Indian asking another Indian for a drink of water in Spanish? Longarm was backing out of the natural bow-wood hedge row as Minerva rejoined him, flopping to her knees in the dust beside him with her straw-colored hair half undone. She gasped, "Matty said nobody seemed to be moving in from her side! Oh, Custis, I'm so hot!"
He had to laugh, although not unkindly, as he handed her his pocket derringer and placed her awkward thumb on the break lever, pressing it as they broke open the simple mechanism together. She protested she didn't know anything about guns. He just extracted the two live rounds, thumbed them back in place, and twisted the tiny brass weapon in shape to fire both as he dug out some spare rounds for her.
He said, "They don't know how much you might or might not know about guns. They won't know what you're firing, at whom, if you just blaze away and roll somewhere else every time you spot any motion."
She sobbed, "You're crazy. I couldn't hit the side of a barn if I was standing inside it! You can't run off and leave me to defend this side!"
He said, "I ain't going far, and I'll be back like a shot as soon as I hear you fire one round. I just heard one of 'em call for water in Spanish. Lord only knows what Mex outlaws could be up to this far north. But they might not know any more than you about Kiowa, Comanche, and such, no offense.
He saw she was just kneeling there. So he set his Winchester to one side and placed a gentle hand on each of her trembling shoulders with the intent of steering her back through that bow-wood screen.
She seemed to misread his intent. It sure felt silly to wrestle with a kissy schoolmarm as she tried to haul him down atop her with a derringer in one hand and fistful of ammunition in the other. But he was bigger and stronger, as well as more worried about their lives beyond the next five minutes. So he finally had her posted belly-down and aimed the right way.
This left him free to scoop up his Yellowboy and move over to the grounded saddles near their tethered mounts in the deeper shade.
Opening a packsaddle, Longarm broke out a kindling hatchet and a ground tarp before he got to work on some lower oak branches. He found some dry duff sprinkled with acorns, and even a few dry twigs. But he broke open a couple of.44-40 rounds to sprinkle eighty grains of gunpowder on his tinder before he piled the green lengths of oak wood atop it. He thumbed a match head aflame to light his small pile of piss-poor firewood. Then he ran over to where Matawnkiha Gordon was holding the fort with a pistol in each small tawny fist. When he asked Matty how she was doing, the Kiowa, Comanche, and Scotch-Irish gal said things had been quiet as a graveyard on her side, and asked him what all that shooting had been about on his side.
He brought her up to date in a few terse phrases, and asked, "Seeing you speak both Kiowa and Comanche, no offense, do you recall any word in either lingo that sounds like agua, the Spanish for water?"
Matty thought, then shook her head and said, "Uka means to eat in what you people call Comanche."
Longarm shook his head and said, "My ears ain't that far off, and even if they were, a man lying wounded on a dusty slope would surely want some water to drink before he demanded a ham sandwich."
Matty said she didn't see why Mexicans would want to dress up like Kiowa Black Leggings and carry on so oddly. Longarm told her he was still working on it, and ran back to see how his smudgy fire was doing.
It was smoldering a lot, with much more dense gray smoke than visible flames. He nodded in satisfaction, set the Winchester aside again, and used the ground tarp to send up a series of smoky dots and dashes. Then he scooped up his saddle gun and rejoined Minerva, just in time.
Those two shots he'd heard on his way to her side had been fired blind, with the beginner's luck and natural aim of a gal shooting at a frightening target with both eyes shut.
She'd hit the half-naked cuss in the thigh, and he was still crawling back down an open stretch when Longarm called out, Como no, cabron! Alte o te voy a mandur pal carajo!"
The swarthy bare-chested cuss in black leggings kept going, so Longarm shot him in the ass and he didn't move in any direction once he'd finished flopping down the slope a good ways.
Longarm got himself and Minerva well clear of his own gunsmoke as he muttered, "I told him I'd send him on to Hell if he didn't stay put. Matty agrees with me that one of them was calling for water in Spanish before. So that fool we both shot should have known what I was saying."
Minerva moaned, "I'm about to come! Won't you even stick a finger in there for me, Custis?"
To which he could only reply, "Not just now. The next few minutes should tell the tale. I just sent up a pillar of smoke they ought to be able to see from Fort Sill. So those sneaks just down the way must have a much better view of it. Indian or Mex, they ought to be able to figure out why. So now they're making up their minds whether they want to charge like Pickett or ride for their lives. They know they don't have until nightfall now. I figure it won't take a full hour for my old pal, Colonel Howard, to order out a patrol once somebody points out our mysterious smoke signals. It might move him faster if you'd like to toss on more leaves and flip-flop that tarp from time to time."
Minerva grimaced and declared, "I've been taking notes on Indian customs. But I don't even know Morse code, Custis."
Longarm said, "Just try for any old dots and dashes. The cavalry are more likely to ride over and see who's sending lem up than they are to worry about decoding it!"
She didn't seem to be moving. He insisted, "Give it a try. A patrol from Fort Sill would be hard pressed to make it here in less than four hours if we got 'em started right now!"
She moaned that wouldn't be soon enough, and started to back out of the sticker-brush. He told her to hang on to that derringer and just let fly a blind shot from time to time in the two directions neither he nor Matty could cover. She got to her feet, bawling like a baby but heading for that smudge fire. So Longarm concentrated on the slope he hoped they'd choose to charge.
If the cavalry came at all, they'd be moving in from the southeast not much later than noon. He knew that down below they knew they had to shit or get off the pot a lot sooner. You didn't want a cavalry column less than two hours behind you as you lit out, even when you'd won. Admirers of either cowboys or Indians might not know it, but the well-shod and oat-fed cavalry stock selected by the Army Remount Service tended to outlast and overtake more casually cared-for ponies.
Staring down through the shimmering sunlight, Longarm tried to put himself in the other side's fix. it might have been easier if he'd had a better line on who in the hell they might be.
He composed some nasty Mexican insults with care, knowing how tough it was to cuss in Mexican. English enjoyed the luxury of words that were dirty all by themselves. You had to be more poetic in Spanish. Son of a bitch lost its sting translated into "hijo de perra," because you had to settle for a plain old female hound. "Cabron," meaning goat, was a meaner thing to call a Mexican because a goat, like a betrayed husband, wore big but nearly harmless horns.