by Tabor Evans
He said, “If there were anyone else around who could track my wife and that savage of hers to their lair in the Shadow Montañas, I’d have him thrown in the guardhouse awaiting court-martial.”
Longarm said, “No, you wouldn’t.” He leveled a hard, threatening look at the man. “We’re heading for those mountains first thing tomorrow, Major. We’ll find your wife and Black Twisted Pine, and I’ll do everything I can to bring your wife back here to Fort McHenry. Those are my orders. But no one except you said anything about bringing the woman’s lover back, and I don’t answer to you.”
He walked to the door leading to the foyer and said without turning around, “Obliged for the meal, Major Belcher. I don’t expect we’ll be speaking again until me and War Cloud return.”
In the foyer, he donned his hat and went out.
He crossed the boardwalk running along in front of the married officers’ houses and stepped onto the parade ground. War Cloud and Magpie were walking away ahead of him. The sun was down but it was not yet dark.
Belcher’s front door opened behind him. Longarm stopped and swung back around to see Leslie step out onto the porch of the major’s house, drawing the door closed behind her.
“Longarm!”
Holding her skirts above her ankles, she hurried down the porch steps and ran to him, her rust-red hair bouncing on her shoulders, earrings flashing. She looked up at him with beseeching in her eyes green as amethysts. Those clear, lustrous orbs glinted in the fading salmon-gold light remaining in the clear sky vaulting over the fort.
“Please—I have to talk to you. In private.”
“What about?”
She shook her head. “Later.”
Leslie glanced around the parade ground. Uniformed men were walking here and there, silhouettes sliding around in the gloaming. The hum of separate conversations reached Longarm’s ears.
A few of the men turned their heads toward him and Leslie and stopped talking, nudging others with elbows. They were obviously interested in what the major’s beautiful sister-in-law and the federal lawman were doing together.
Rumors spread like wildfires on remote military outposts.
“There’s a wagon shed down by the stables, north side of the fort,” she whispered. “I’m going to get changed, and I’ll meet you there in a half hour.” She turned to walk away before he could object.
• • •
Longarm stood outside with War Cloud while Sergeant Fitzpatrick lowered the flag to the melancholic strains of a young corporal bugling taps. War Cloud didn’t seem to want to talk about Belcher, likely afraid of getting his neck up again, and that was fine with Longarm, who saw no need to get himself riled up again, either.
They had an assignment—one that was larger than both of them and Belcher, and one that concerned border security as much as preventing a flare-up of the Apache wars. They had to remember that Belcher wasn’t the only one capable of sending American troops into Mexico. Lucille’s father, the territorial governor, was even more of a threat.
Longarm and War Cloud had to do everything they could to get Mrs. Belcher if not back in the loving arms of her husband, at least safely back on the American side of the border.
War Cloud went to bed, grumbling. Longarm bit the end off a three-for-a-nickel cheroot and took a slow walk along the fort’s perimeter, chewing up time, smoking, and thinking, as he made his nonchalant way to the fort’s north side. An arroyo cut through a corner of the fort, and there was plenty of greasewood and mesquites for modest cover.
Not that he didn’t have the run of the fort, but to protect the girl’s honor more than anything, he didn’t want to be spied skulking around with Leslie McPherson.
He found the buggy shed just south of the arroyo, where the stock barns, hay barns, and corrals were sprawled across a broad pasture area along the twisting ravine. He came up to the shed—a long, low, pole-roofed building open on three sides—and sat on a covered rain barrel to await his coconspirator. He didn’t know what Leslie wanted to speak to him about, but he thought a safe guess would be her sister.
When he’d been sitting on the barrel for a good twenty minutes, he checked the time by starlight on his Ingersoll. Fifteen minutes late. He’d begun to grow concerned when he heard the crunch of gravel in the arroyo thirty feet straight out in front of him.
Before he realized it, his instincts had caused his right hand to quickly slide the Colt .44 from the holster on his left hip. Just after he’d clicked the hammer back, the girl’s voice rasped, “For God’s sakes, don’t shoot me, Longarm!”
The lawman depressed the Colt’s hammer. “Sorry, Leslie. Old habit, I reckon.”
He heard more gravel crunch and watched her indistinct shadow rise up out of the ravine. As he dropped down off the rain barrel and stepped deeper into the shadow of the barn, she came toward him, a Mexican-style shawl, or mantilla, wrapped over her head and shoulders. Beneath it she wore a black-and-white calico blouse, a long, dark skirt, and black boots. She stopped two feet in front of him.
“Piece of work, isn’t he?” she said, keeping her voice low.
“I’d bet my Colt against horse apples he don’t have a whole lot of friends.”
Leslie took one step closer. Her eyes beneath the lacy, black veil flashed in the starlight as did the ends of her front teeth revealed by her parted lips. “I love how you handled him. I’ve never seen anyone stand up to him like that before.”
“Frankly, the man needs a bullet.”
“I’d pay you to assassinate him but my father keeps a rather tight rein on my allowance, and I’ve never been adept at earning my own living.”
Longarm chuckled at that. “What’d you want to see me about?”
“I got to thinking that, since I may never see you again, we should finish what we started earlier.”
Chapter 14
Longarm gave a wry chuff. She had to be joking.
But as she stepped forward, wrapped her arms around his neck, rose up on the toes of her boots, and mashed her lips against his, he realized she wasn’t.
He rolled his eyes around as she kissed him, kept her breasts planted firmly against his chest. She didn’t seem to be wearing anything under her blouse—he could feel the outlines of her warm breasts flattened against him.
When he was sure they were alone out here—he’d only spied a couple of hostlers putting the horses to bed—he wrapped his arms around her. He lowered them, flattened his hands against her bottom. She didn’t seem to be wearing anything down there, either.
As he worked her skirt up around her waist, she groaned and pressed more tightly against him. When he’d had enough of her skirt to make the maneuver possible, he placed his hands on her bottom again to feel only smooth, warm skin. Nope, no under frillies.
She really was serious.
“You realize this is probably against regulations,” Longarm said, pulling his head away slightly. At the same time he ran his hand down the crack between her round, firm buttocks and touched the first two fingers of his right hand against her furred mound.
He gently parted the flesh.
“Oh,” she cooed. “Oh . . . oh . . .” She drew a breath and arched her back, spreading her thighs slightly, and pressed her hips harder against his pelvis. “Too late now,” she breathed.
They kissed some more while he probed her love nest with the tips of his fingers. His pants were growing painfully tight, so he said, “I think we can do better than this.”
When he removed his fingers from her pussy, she gave a little shudder and heaved against him once more. He let her skirt drop and then took her by the hand and entered the shed. He looked around, the starlight revealing the outlines of a dozen or so wagons—mostly heavy-wheeled hay wagons and lumber drays.
But there was one black, red-wheeled buggy with what appeared leather seats and a tasseled canopy. Likely the ma
jor and the major’s wife’s buggy, for those rare occasions the Apaches allowed safe travel to Benson or Tombstone for dinner and a show at the local opera house.
“This here looks comfortable enough,” Longarm said as with a grunt he leaned down and picked Leslie up in his arms.
He lifted her into the rear of the buggy. She flopped back, giggling delightedly, onto the rear, stuffed leather seat. Longarm stepped up into the carriage and removed his cartridge belt.
When he had the gun and belt coiled on the seat beside her, Leslie playfully slapped his hands away and, leaning forward, began unbuttoning his pants while looking up at him, her smile flashing like quicksilver in the ambient light filtering through the shed’s three open sides.
“I must say, Longarm, your cock has been a bone in my craw ever since I stroked it earlier. I couldn’t have gone to sleep tonight, thinking about how wonderful such an impressive organ would feel between my legs.”
She reached into his pants and balbriggans and withdrew the organ of topic. She cooed as she rubbed her cheek against the swollen head of Longarm’s cock.
She whispered, “I take it you realize that both my sister and I have . . . um . . . rather strong desires. Out here at McHenry, it’s been rather a dry go for me for a while. A girl can’t waltz around a cavalry fort like a mare in season, you know, though some of these raw, young recruits have attracted my eye a time or two.”
She licked the tip of his iron-hard shaft and glanced up at him again. “I’ve managed to be good . . . until now. When I saw you ride into the fort earlier, I just knew I had to have you.”
“The visit to my room earlier wasn’t totally innocent, you’re sayin’?”
As she ran her tongue around the tip of his bulging mushroom head, she smiled devilishly and slowly shook her head.
Longarm laughed. It was cut off by a deep groan when she slid her mouth down farther on his cock.
After she’d sucked and lapped him for a while, he reached down, wrapped his hands around her arms, and lifted her to a standing position. He kissed her as he lowered his pants to his ankles. Sitting down on the seat, he lifted her onto his lap and twisted and pulled at her skirt until he had it up around her belly.
She was breathing hard now, staring down at him, her lips parted, eyes darkly erotic. He lifted her slightly and she reached between them, grabbed his cock and held it steady while he slowly lowered her bottom onto it.
He grunted and sighed as her warm insides, slick and wet, slid down, down until she was sitting flat across his hips, straddling him.
Her pussy contracted, grabbing at him, clutching him, causing sabers of sheer delight to fire through his belly and into his chest until his vision swam. He unbuttoned her blouse and slid both flaps back to expose her breasts. They bulged toward him, swollen with desire, nipples jutting. As she began rising up and down on her knees, he kneaded her breasts with his hands, rolling the nipples between his thumbs and index fingers.
“Oh,” she said thickly as she continued to rise and fall. “Oh.”
The buggy creaked slightly beneath them, the leather seat squawking faintly.
He could feel her warm fluid slither out around his shaft to lather his balls and the insides of his thighs.
Rolling her head back, causing her hair to slide around her shoulders and breasts, she made sounds that were somewhere between sobs of anguish and exclamations of excruciating delight.
“Oh, Longarm.”
Longarm grunted, thrust his hips up, shoving his cock up hard inside her, moving in perfect concert with the girl’s own maneuverings. He buried his face in her cleavage, ran his mustache and tongue up and down that deep, mysterious valley, and then lathered her nipples and sucked them, feeling them growing even harder.
She wrapped her arms around his head, pressed her lips to his forehead, pulled at his hair and his ears, raked her fingers across the back of his neck.
As more warm fluids oozed around his cock and her womb clutched at him harder, she groaned and mewled softly, consciously keeping a handle on her love screams so as not to bring running all the soldiers at the fort. Longarm’s cock had a massive heart throbbing in it. It throbbed harder and harder, aching wonderfully.
He grunted and groaned and squeezed his eyes shut as he ground his heels against the buggy floor. His passion was rising quickly toward a crescendo. He leaned back against the seat.
Leslie gritted her teeth and lifted her chin, slowing her pace, grinding against him more deliberately, shivering as though deeply chilled, before lifting the lips of her love nest again to the head of his cock, then down over it again and twisting around on her knees. He thought his iron-hard piston was going to slam through some barrier within the girl and dislocate one of her ribs.
“Oh. Oh, God. Oh, God!” She wrapped her arms around his neck, thrust her pelvis hard against his, and leaned her head back so that her long hair tickled his thighs.
She convulsed violently, sucking back her love screams through her gritted teeth. Longarm grabbed her around the waist, bucked up hard against her, and felt a bomb explode within him. The blast blew up the dam he’d built against his passion, and his hot seed jetted into Leslie like the lava spewing from an angry volcano.
She groaned from deep in her chest and tossed her head from side to side, raking her silky hair across the tops of his thighs.
Longarm hung on to the girl hard and tipped his own head back as he continued to spend himself, gritting out, “Christ! Christ!”
Then he was finished but for one more sweet spasm.
Leslie lowered her head with a sigh, hair spilling down her cheeks, shoulders, and breasts. She leaned forward and pressed those beautiful, hot, sweat-slick orbs against his face, running her fingers through his hair.
“Oh, yes.” She swallowed. He could feel her heart beginning to slow its hammering in her chest. She moved her shoulders, snuggling her breasts up tighter against his face. “Oh, yes—that will do nicely.”
Longarm felt her swing her head toward the front of the shed. She gasped.
Longarm turned his head, as well. A silhouette turned in the shed’s opening. It was the silhouette of a slender girl in a doeskin dress, with a broad belt wrapped around her waist. Starlight glittered on a sheathed knife and gun handle and in Magpie’s long, stygian-black hair.
War Cloud’s daughter disappeared around the corner of the shed, and Longarm heard the near-silent thuds of her moccasins growing fainter as she walked away.
Chapter 15
The arrow flew so close to Longarm’s face that he felt the curl of warm against his nose before his ears registered the zing of the missile’s passage. The dyed ash javelin thunked raucously against the stone outcropping rising on the left side of the trail.
Bang!
War Cloud lowered his smoking Spencer slightly. Longarm, his mind still whirling from his almost losing the end of his nose, jerked his gaze toward where his partner had fired.
A young Chiricahua Apache in traditional deerskins and red muslin bandanna stood between two boulders on the escarpment about thirty feet up from the trail. The short, dark brave grunted as he dropped his arrow, which clattered down the rocks of the slope, and then slumped forward, clapping both his dark hands to his belly. His knees bent. He pitched forward from the ledge he was on and turned one complete somersault before landing in the trail about six feet in front of Longarm’s and War Cloud’s horses.
The mounts jerked with starts, nickering uneasily.
Longarm stared down at the brave who lay moaning, squeezing his eyes closed. The arrows that had tumbled out of his deerskin quiver when he’d fallen now crackled onto the rocks around him. They were fletched with the customary Chiricahua tribal designs. Blood pumped out of the hole in the brave’s upper left chest.
Longarm reached forward and slid his Winchester from his saddle scabbard. He pumped a round into the
breech one-handed, and held the rifle straight up on his right thigh.
Behind him and War Cloud, Magpie sat her buckskin tensely, pistol in her hand, looking around at the rocks lining this narrow corridor winding up into the higher reaches of the Shadow Montañas, the foothills of which they’d reached early the day before, two weeks after leaving Fort McHenry.
Until now, they’d seen no sign of the small band of wild Apaches who claimed these mountains as home.
“You see any more?” Longarm asked War Cloud, who was also casting his wary gaze around the escarpments looming on each side of the trail.
The scout shook his head.
Then he jerked his head around. Longarm saw the second Apache, then, too. The brave knelt between two boulders near where the first had fired from, drawing his nocked arrow back with a squawk of strained bear gut and ash wood.
Longarm snapped his rifle to his shoulder and fired at the same time the arrow went hurling toward War Cloud, who’d neck-reined his horse around tightly, narrowly avoiding the missile.
“Down!” Longarm shouted as, racking another round into his Winchester’s chamber, he leaped out of the saddle to hit the ground flat-flooted. He rammed his rifle against his horse’s left hip. The dun whinnied and went screaming up the corridor with War Cloud’s and Magpie’s mounts. Squinting against the dust, Longarm shouted, “Haul ass into the rocks! I’ll cover you!”
He dropped to a knee and aimed his Winchester up at the basalt and granite monoliths rising on the trail’s south side, studded here and there with cedars. He saw a snake slither through a crack in the rocks and poke its head into a hole. It gave its button tail a little quiver before pulling it into the cliff face, out of sight with the rest of it.
In the periphery of his vision, Longarm saw War Cloud and Magpie run into the rocks and begin climbing the cliff, weaving amongst boulders and brush clumps. A half second later, three or four more Apaches appeared at nearly the same time, filling the gaps between rocks about thirty feet up the ridge.
