by Tabor Evans
The separately dictated statements of Ram Rogers and a gal called Rowdy Ruth agreed fairly well and cleared up loose ends Longarm hadn't managed to figure by himself. Billy Vail had ordered him to meet with county officials he hadn't gotten around to. But he didn't think his boss wanted him wasting the time, seeing there was nobody left to arrest and it was up to the voters, come November, whether they wanted the same bunch running things.
He could have caught the last night train out to save himself some time getting back to Cheyenne. But he reflected the railroading he'd want to detail in his officious report, and after that he owed Bronco Bob in Dwyer a borrowed mount and saddle. He figured old Socks would be just as happy out on a moonlit prairie with him as moping in that livery across the street for days. So he left his room key on the bed upstairs and rode out of Keller's Crossing around suppertime, when he didn't have to bother about shaking hands with all creation.
Socks was happy to be loping into the sunset for home, and he let her have her head till they were past that drift fence and sailing over a rolling sea of tawny buffalo grass. But he didn't want to lather his mount with the literally cool shades of a Wyoming evening commencing to spread deep purple in the draws. So when they got to that cottonwood-lined creek, he reined her in and dismounted to water and rest her some, saying "We ain't in that big a hurry, Socks. You get me there by midnight, I'll still have to wait shivering on the platform for that night train to head back from Wendover, see?"
Socks just drank more creekwater. Longarm tethered her to a sapling, pissed on another one, and moved up the grassy slope away from any wood ticks to rest his ass by Standing tall as he lit a cheroot.
Rita Mae Reynolds called out to ask if that was him when she spied his match flare from afar, aboard her own cordovan Morgan. Longarm had to identify himself to an undersheriff packing a pistol. So she loped on over, reined in, and slid gracefully from her sidesaddle to demand, "Why did you leave without saying goodbye? How could you leave me just hanging like that, you brute?"
Longarm said he hadn't known he was leaving her hanging. But when he took her in his arms to kiss her, she laughed wildly and gasped up at him, "I didn't mean you'd left me hanging that way! You were going to tell me all about poor Preacher Shearer and his outlaw gang and why he had Ida Weaver killed and-"
Longarm said, "You got that all wrong, Miss Rita, You were there when I had it out with the mastermind, one of them really dangerous crooks smart enough to let himself be taken for dumb and ornery enough to act harmless. I told you this morning that justice had been done and there was no call to hang a lot of dirty laundry out to dry over the graves of dead folk."
She kissed him, this time, and said, "Come and sit by my side in the grass and tell me all about it from the beginning."
So he did. As they reclined on the grassy slope in the gloaming he told her, "In the beginning God created man, then Woman, then something more mixed up. Poor prim and scrawny Preacher Shearer was one of them mixed-up sorts. The army gives you a prison sentence and dishonorable discharge if they catch you behaving that way. The Indians allow some just can't help wanting to pretend they're gals, and so they let 'em. Indians almost never whip kids, neither. Sometime I get to wondering who's more Christian."
Rita said, "Big Jim told me all about the poor man being a queer. I can't for the life of me see what any man would get out of letting other men use him that way. Can you?"
Longarm said, "I never spent that much time in jail. No man I've ever met has anything I'd be that interested in."
She gasped. "What do you think you're doing with that fresh hand? You told me you were going to tell me all about those queer outlaws!"
He lay her back in the grass and kissed her again but eased off when he felt her stiffen some. He said, "I told you the villain was Pony Bodie. He assured me before I ever asked that he didn't go in for that sort of thing. That wasn't all he was fibbing about. He drifted into town a year or so back, as you may recall, fresh from an Alabama chain gang, which he forgot to tell any of you. He'd picked up bad habits in prison, and in no time at all he'd made friends with the only man in town who'd take the gal's part. He likely learned the preacher was prissy from some other saddle tramp. Poor old Shearer was too shy to ask gents such as Big Jim Tanner or the blacksmith."
Rita giggled at that picture and didn't stiffen the next time he put a friendly hand on one firm breast, noticing she wore nothing at all under her whipcord riding habit. She asked him to go on. So he started to unbutton her bodice as he said, "The preacher got his new-found secret lover a job delivering telegrams all over town for Western Union, with a chance to fiddle with the telegraph set late at night, acting the eager kid but having taken telegraph lessons in the reform school they'd tried on him first."
He kissed her lightly as he ran his hand inside her bodice to find her nipples already turgid. He said, "Remember Preacher Shearer didn't know this. He had no idea what Pony Bodie was up to behind his back, at first. His only crime was that he'd always wanted to be a pretty girl. Did anybody ever tell you how pretty your tits are in the soft light of gloaming, Miss Rita?"
She laughed and said, "Many times. I was married to a man who liked to sneak up on me, too. He had a drinking problem. Do I really need to say more?"
Longarm said, "Nope. Once you say a man or woman has habits they can't control, you've about described them all, including the poor old preacher. That innocent beanpole with the goofy grin had the older man wrapped around his finger. Shearer got him a job, gave him money from the poor box, and begged for more abuse from Pony Bodie and his pals."
She said, "Down, boy, You're moving in on me too fast, and I thought you said there was no gang."
Longarm left his free hand on her inner thigh, having established she wasn't wearing one of those infernal split skirts that could make it awkward as hell as you worked up a gal's inner thigh, and repeated, "Preacher Shearer was never in charge. He didn't know what Pony Bodie was getting him into until a whole mess of disgusting young owlhoot riders had taken to getting into him and hiding out under his church lest you or one of your kid deputies ask them what they were doing in your township."
She asked, "What were they doing? Oh, Custis, what's that you're doing, you naughty thing?"
"Just trying to have a friendly conversation," he replied as he parted her pubic hair wider to cradle her Moist clit between the tips of two fingers, adding, "What they were doing was as much Petty crime as they could get away with with Pony Bodie scouting for them as a delivery boy who traipsed all over, delivering money orders overhearing gossip, and so on. As he started to get border he was still stuck with splitting the spoils or double-crossing pals close to his home base and having real messes to clean up, even if he won."
"Could you tell me the rest after you make me come, dear?" she cut in, coyly admitting, "I guess you know I've been hearing things about you and other lonely widows, grass or veiled."
So he shoved her skirts up out of the way and rolled into the wide welcome of her athletic bare thighs while she unbuckled his gun belt and helped him get his jeans down a piece after he'd entered her. Then she was begging him to take it out while she wrapped her long legs around him, thrusting her pelvis higher. Longarm was too delicate to observe that any poor simp who'd gotten drunk when he had something like this to enjoy had his total sympathy. He just acceded to her request as graciously as he knew how when she got to yelling, "Oh, yesss! Deeper! Harder! I've had to watch out for my reputation, and it's been so long and you're so long and, my God, I've never come this sooooon!"
Longarm had been in bed with sweet little Inky more recently than Rita had been with anybody, judging by the way she was chewing on him with her soft wet innards. So he got her to come thrice in the time it took him to feel the need for a smoke while he caught his second wind.
He'd lost track of that first cheroot he'd lit. It hadn't started a prairie fire under them. So he figured it was safe to light up one more and, while they had the time, str
ip down to the buff and sprawl friendly atop their duds in the springy but pricklesome dry grass.
As they did so, Longarm remembered his manners and said, "You and your girlish deputies gave Pony Bodie the grand notion how he could get rich. Neither he nor his transient trash had anything to do with them first three wants you had your gals bring back dead instead of alive. They read about it in the Riverside News. Big Jim's only crime was a tendency to make mountains out of molehills. The way more modest Pony Bodie talked, an old boy laying over with Preacher Shearer, while laying him, to hold up that cattle buyer staying at the Pronghorn across the street from the Western Union. After pointing the victim out, Pony Bodie sat there spitting and whittling in front of everybody while the deed was done, gave you all a false description of the masked man fleeing the scene, and met him later under the church. " She said, "That would have been the late Trigger Woods we caught up with in Missouri, right?"
He said, "You thought you caught up with him. Pony Bodie talked his old reform-school pal into leaving the loot with him for safekeeping and wiring for it once he got to a safe hideout."
Rita said, "Good Lord! Were all of them that dumb! Why didn't any of the others tumble to his simple duplicity as soon as we began to get those tips from the rascal they'd wired for their money?"
Longarm passed her the cheroot as he told her, "You never got one tip from Pony Bodie. I don't know what he told Preacher Shearer, but Preacher Shearer would tell Big Jim, and Big Jim would puff out his chest and tell You. I still don't like him. But I don't have any more hard feeling for the Riverside News right now. Counting that serious stage holdup, when Rusty Mansfield scared the whole bunch by gunning Miss Ida Weaver's uncle, they pulled off a half dozen serious crimes and would have been caught sooner if other pests hadn't convinced MY boss and me we were up against a bigger mystery than there really was."
As she moved his hand back where she liked it, Longarm told her, "Everything went according to plan up to where Ida Weaver gunned Rusty Mansfield and the Denver papers reported I was mixed up in it. Bodie wired Rowdy Ruth, a Denver harlot he'd spent some time with for the novelty, and asked her to watch me. When she reported Ida and me had been to the federal building, Bodie put two and two together and came up with three. He hadn't used Ram Rogers up yet. So he ordered Ram to see if he could stop me from getting warm, and Ram recruited the older Texas Tom and Deacon Knox to blur the pattern for me some."
Rita sighed and said, "I feel so bad about poor Ida. You think they killed her because they feared Rusty Mansfield had told her something as he lay dying?"
Longarm nodded and said, "It would have been easy. Bodie could have met her train and offered to walk her up to your place in the dark. He stabbed her and buried her in fresh-dug 'dobe when he had her alone up by the churchyard."
He took the cheroot back for a drag and went on, "Nobody did anything all that clever. They had me thinking I was playing a smarter game because rascals too dumb to beat me at checkers kept showing me independent dumb moves that I kept trying to string together. Making a personal enemy along the way didn't help. That poor crazy Swede was after me and me alone. But after I'd made it past Rogers and company in Cheyenne, Gus Bergman did me an unintended favor when he drew my attention to that church and churchyard by sniping at us from the best really high point handy. Bodie thought I was getting warm on purpose. So he figured it was time to close shop and hide his own tracks. He sent Rogers and Rowdy Ruth to a swell hideout. So he'd know where they were when he had Shearer tell Tanner who'd surely tell you where they were. He hoped you'd send somebody wilder than Smiley and Dutch."
They'd gotten to where they could read each other's body movements without having to jaw about it. So Longarm took her up on her unspoken invite and rolled back in her love saddle as he added, "After that he figured he only had to murder Shearer, who had to have known too much, and that old Indian gal, who might have known all or nothing at all. I see no point in speaking ill of the dead."
Rita wrapped her thighs around him to croon, "I've nothing ill to say about that poor crazy Swede bringing things to a head so soon. I don't see how we'd have ever gotten up the nerve to behave this wild back in town, darling."
To which Longarm replied, moving his rump faster as the stars came out to admire it, "Aw, we'd have thought of something."
The End
