He put up the shay's folding top against the overhead sun before he helped her up to the cozy seat. He handed her the ribbons, and got out his knife to politely lock the livery door again. When he climbed up beside the mock redhead, he discovered the seat to be cozier than he'd expected. Ruby's rump was either wider than he'd judged it to be under her flouncy calico skirts, or she'd slid it to her right as he got in on that side.
There was no discussion as to who was to drive. No man was about to sit back and let a woman drive him about as if she were his coach servant. So she handed him the ribbons without him having to ask, but told him which way to go as he clucked his tongue at the bay and lightly flipped its big brown rump with some slack in the ribbons. As they lit out and he let the pent-up pony stretch its legs in a handsome trot, he assured its owner he knew north from south. "I suspect I was on the regular coast road last night. It was flooded in some stretches by that gale and I had to swing way inland but... Lord have mercy, was it only last night I was driving down the other way? It feels like at least three days. I can generally stay up a good seventy-two hours before I feel this tired. Reckon it's all the excitement since I got into Escondrijo this morning. But once I settle a few things out to that Coast Guard post I might be able to catch my own siesta."
She said, "It's not too late to turn back, if you'd really like a nice long nap in the nice soft bed in my private quarters."
He chuckled and declined her kind offer with a gallant observation about just how much sleep a man might get amid such exciting surroundings.
She didn't answer for a time as they trotted on out the north end of the tiny town. When she did, she sighed and said, "I see you drive with a firm but gentle hand, Custis. You're allowing Chocolate to set his own pace, but we all know exactly who's in command of this expedition, right?"
He shrugged and replied, "I've never held with being harder than I need to be with a critter taking me the way I wanted to go in the first place, ma'am."
Ruby nodded. "So I've noticed. Even some of the purer folks we've been trying to help back there in that icehouse haven't been able to resist comical comments about Doc Richards' nursing staff. But you called us ladies and acted as if we were, until I as much as told you right out that I liked you!"
He said, "I like you too, Miss Ruby, and I mean that sincerely. I never said I didn't want to go to bed with you. I only said I had a mess of chores to tend to."
She said, "I'll bet. I just said I admired the polite way you got exactly where you wanted to go, with no straying from your very own determined course. Did you think I was inviting you up to one of the cribs in the... hotel I usually work in?"
He shook his head and said, "I know all sorts of ladies like to keep their own private notions in their very own quarters, ma'am. I ain't all that pure. I've made all sorts of friends along the way, and one of 'em was that very Colorado gal of easy virtue I was speaking of back yonder. They called her Silver Heels up in hardrock country. Some say she was a miner's young widow, whilst others say she wound up doing what she had to do because some worthless rascal ran off and left her stranded in a mountain mining camp."
Ruby leaned closer, as if someone might overhear her above the clopping hoofbeats in the middle of a deserted street, as she told Longarm, "She was either out to punish herself, or punish some man who'd betrayed her former true nature, or she just plain liked it. Nobody can turn a gal wicked against her will, no matter how she might lie to you men afterwards."
Longarm noticed some thoughtful souls, likely old-time Mexicans, had planted cottonwood, or alamo as they called it, along either side of the wagon trace outside of town. Cottonwood grew fast, but he figured it had been planted a while back, judging by how the fluttering leaves of the overhead branches shaded clean across the road in places while providing at least dappled sunlight most everywhere else. He really liked thoughtful souls. So thinking back to how a soiled dove called Silver Heels had turned out, he told Ruby the bittersweet story of a sister in sin as they drove on through the uncertain light.
Silver Heels, so called for the silver heels of her dancing shoes because she refused to give her real name, had been making money hand over fist as the prettiest and some said friskiest whore in a mining camp that varied some with the teller of the tale. But everyone who told it, one way or another, agreed it was smallpox, breaking out in mid-winter when the trails were closed, that made things get grim as all hell. Some said there was no doc in town at all. Others said there might have been, but not unlike Norma Richards, he'd been overwhelmed by the plague, and so Silver Heels had pitched in alone to help. In either case, it had been that one lone whore, working round the clock serving soup and cleaning the fevered, pussy bodies of half the folks in camp, who'd saved the fifty or sixty percent who'd come through alive. So later on, the grateful miners had picked out a particularly pretty peak and named it Mount Silver Heels. Longarm assured this other good-natured whore, "There's no doubt about where Mount Silver Heels is today. You can find it on any large-scale map of Colorado."
"Where might the real Silver Heels be found today?" asked Ruby in a pensive tone.
Longarm shrugged. "Nobody knows. She just left the hardrock country with the smallpox and the next spring thaw. You hear some say she had to quit whoring because her pretty little face had been scarred up hideously by the pox she caught helping so many others fight off. Others say she married a miner who'd struck it so rich he could afford to keep her and her frisky favors all to himself. I've even heard tell that today the former Silver Heels is a respectable and highly respected young matron of Denver high society."
"What's the truth, Custis?" Ruby asked, as if she felt sure he'd know.
He did, and it was a sin to lie when you didn't have to. So he told her, "Let's just say her story had an ending a lady asked me not to tell anyone else. My point was that a nice gal is a nice gal, no matter what others may think of her."
Ruby told him he was awfully nice too, and snuggled closer as Longarm drove on through the dotted line of sunlight and shadows. When he suddenly reined in, Ruby sat up with a start to gaze all about and ask why. They'd passed the last corn milpas north of town, and the tree-shaded wagon trace was surrounded by spartina reeds to seaward and thickets of gumbo-limbo saplings on the higher ground to their left. When Ruby asked why they'd stopped, pointing out the Coast Guard station was almost in sight ahead, Longarm told her, "I know where we are. You could doubtless see the station from here if it wasn't for all those cottonwoods and the way this wagon trace curves just enough to follow the natural lay of the land. I'm a lot more concerned about the way we've just come. I thought I heard some other hoofbeats behind us. But when I reined in just now, somebody else might have too!"
She leaned out her side to peer back around the oilcloth cover, saying, "I don't see anybody, Custis. Even if I did, this is hardly a private road, is it?"
To which he replied more soberly, "Innocent travelers on a public thoroughfare don't stop at least two furlongs back when someone out ahead reins in. So let's see if we can skin this cat some other way."
She assumed they were going on to the nearby Coast Guard station when Longarm clucked the bay forward some more but kept a tighter hold on the ribbons to just walk them along the wagon trace a ways. Then, leaning out his own side first, he swung them off through the rank Bermuda grass between the cottonwood holes, apparently heading right at a solid wall of close-packed saplings.
She said, "Chocolate can't pull us through that tangle of second growth, Custis!"
He said, "I know. It ain't second growth. Gumbo-limbo never grows much bigger. It can't make up its mind whether it's a big bush or a small tree. Meanwhile, that ain't exactly where I'm heading."