The grizzled train boss spat out into the darkness and opined, "There seems to be a lot of that going around since the papers first began to rank gunfighters as if they were competing athletes. Is it supposed to score higher if you beat a lawman to the draw instead of just another mean drunk?"
Longarm smiled thinly and replied, "War talk about a sober paid-up lawman is not only impressive but safer than, say, starting up with a morose cuss such as Clay Allison or Johnny Ringo. Either one would be delighted to blow you away and claim self-defense. But pests I keep bumping into seem to have boned up on what that High Dutch philosopher Nietzsche describes as the tyranny of the weak. That's the way women, servants, and hard-cases with a yellow streak get to sound off against gents they don't really want a fair fight with. A snotty schoolboy's safer sticking his tongue out at the teacher than the schoolyard bully. An armed and dangerous drunk in Dodge is safer challenging a sober lawman than another mean drunk. Neither that kid acting big in Amarillo a few nights ago nor this Quirt McQueen here on a dry army post really expected a grown man to slap leather on 'em just for acting like fool kids!"
Harry Carver thought, shrugged, and decided, "You must be right. I'd doubtless pistol-whup either one of the little shits if they was to talk like that about me!"
Longarm didn't want to go into all the bother it was after you got into a gunfight and won. He yawned on purpose and allowed he had to get a few winks before he rode over to the main Comanche agency in the morning. So they shook on it and parted friendly.
Longarm strode into the guest hostel to find nobody at the key desk. He didn't care whether the orderly had ducked out to take a crap or lit out for the night. He had his own key in a side pocket of his frock coat. So he just went on up to the top floor.
He found the hall dark, with the wall lamps trimmed or never lit that evening. As he groped his way along the doorways in the gloom, he decided someone had deliberately doused the lights. For someone was sure carrying on behind more than one door, and the place had been nearly empty when he'd arrived around sundown. He was paid to be nosey and would have been curious in any case. So he prowled about before he made for his own door. Moving quietly and listening sharp, he could tell almost every guest room seemed to be occupied, if not by a sudden influx of guests, then by couples who'd beaten him down here from that officers' club dance. He heard what sounded like male and female gaspings, male and male gaspings, and at least one set of female and female gaspings. It was small wonder someone had paid that desk clerk, or simply ordered him, to take the rest of the evening off!
When he got to his own room, he felt annoyed at himself for having taken that desk clerk for granted. Longarm had long made a habit, in strange hotels, of rigging a match stem in the crack of a locked door to warn him if it had been unlocked in his absence. But earlier that evening, anxious to make it to supper and unaware of that war talk about him on a damned old army post, for Pete's sake, Longarm had simply locked up and gone on about his business.
There was nothing he could do now but draw his.44-40 before, feeling like an old maid peering under her fool bed, he unlocked the damned door with his free hand and stepped into the darkness to slide swiftly along the wall as he kicked the door shut after himself.
He'd have shot the figure reclining across the room for sure if she hadn't giggled girlishly and whispered, "Where on earth have you been all this time? I was about to start without you, you slowpoke!"
Longarm laughed weakly with relief and whispered back, "Don't ever scare me like that again, honey. I figured you were gone and lost forever, like My Darling Clementine."
She started to ask who Clementine was, then giggled some more as she heard the distinctive sounds of a man undressing in the dark as fast as he knew how. As he hung his six-gun handy near the head of the bed, she started to explain why she was there instead of in her own quarters. But Longarm hushed her with, "Don't spoil the magic by excusing the feelings of a healthy young gal. I'll allow I felt a mite confused up the line at the dance tonight. But if you don't confuse me no more right now, we'll worry about the cold gray dawn when it gets here, agreed?"
She whispered, "Ooh, I was hoping you'd see it my way, you animal!"
So Longarm got rid of the last of his duds, and slid under the bed covers to find she was stark naked as well. He threw the fool covers down, lest they overheat, as he took her smooth nude body in his arms and hugged her tight for a welcome-home kiss.
Then, even though he went on kissing her, being only human, Longarm stiffened in surprise as it came to him that, whoever she might be, she couldn't be Godiva Weaver of the New England Sentinel!
The only other obvious suspect didn't work either. For the naked gal in his arms was neither as willowy as Godiva nor as short and plump as the colonel's lady. She was a gal of average height with a firm but junoesque figure. One suspected she hourglassed even better with a corset on. From the way she grabbed for his old organ-grinder with a skilled and friendly touch, one doubted she could have been one of the younger wallflowers looking so neglected at the dance earlier. That meant, no matter how you sliced it, he was in bed with some officer's lady and already stiff as a damned poker, with her cocking one long leg across him and crooning, "Ooh, is all this I have in my hand for little old me?"
It sure seemed to be as Longarm, seeing he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't, allowed her to impale her warm wet self on his raging erection, moaning, "Oh, yesss! You're everything they said you were and, praise the Lord, I knew I'd get to do it at least once with a real man before I died."
There was only one way a gent could respond to such a flattering lady. But when he rolled her on her back and spread her long legs with an elbow hooked under either of her knees, she sobbed, "Oh, not too deep! Give a girl a chance to get used to all this! I've only been married to a mortal human long enough to sense I was missing something, and to be frank, the few times I've done this with someone else, I've been bitterly disappointed!"
Longarm had to move faster in her to keep from going soft as he growled, "I thought I asked you not to spoil the magic. I don't want to share this moment with other men. But since you brought it up, I can't help feeling curious about this they you were jawing with about my physical endowments. I don't recall disclosing them to any of you Fort Sill ladies."
She wrapped her long legs around his waist and purred, "That's where you're wrong, you naughty tomcat. When Elvira Howard came in to tell us you'd broken up with that newspaper woman, a certain member of our little group who used to be somebody else in Denver volunteered how sweet you were when she told you she'd gotten the chance to marry a certain cavalry john."
Longarm thought back and silently nodded as that meshed with what had once been a henna-rinsed barmaid who'd doubtless changed some in the past few summers. Since this one dismissed a lieutenant as a john, it was safe to assume her man was at least a captain.
That was all he needed, after being sent all this way to avoid a showdown with a coal miner over a wife he'd never trifled with. He told himself this was as far as he wanted to go with any fool captain's wife, but then they were coming and, try as one might, it was tough to keep from saying stupid things and making empty promises while you pounded the rolicking rump of the most beautiful gal in the universe against the rosy clouds of heaven with a host of angels singing dirty to the both of you. He realized he'd been humming in time with their humping when she began to croon in his ear, to the same frisky tune:
Oh, some folk'l say he is a knave, Some folk say he can't behave, He screwed a virgin to her grave, With that old organ-grinder!
Then she pleaded for him to screw her to death because she was coming some more, and so he did his best until, as all good things must, it ended for now in a great gasping shudder of painful pleasure and they just floated down from the stars like thistledown, too satisfied to say anything until, still soaking in her, he asked her if she smoked.
She murmured, "I dip snuff too. But I don't want you to strike a match, darling. I've been thinking about what you said about magic."
He kissed her soft throat and gently protested, "That's not fair. You tracked me down to commit premeditated fornication knowing all my secrets, and I don't know your name or even what you look like!"
She kissed him back and moved her hips languidly as she murmured, "Just think of me as your fairy godmother, you good little boy. I'm not sure I'm ready to tell you who I really used to be. I'm afraid you may have just turned me into somebody else."
He said he didn't follow her drift.
She hugged him tighter with her crossed legs and softly told him she wasn't certain what she meant either. Then, before he could ask or she could explain further, some other gal was screaming fit to bust and all hell seemed to be busting loose out in the hall!
Longarm rolled from between her bare legs to land on his bare feet between the bedstead and one window. As he peered out into a mess of swirling gloom his mysterious visitor hissed, "Come back here and don't get into it! It sounds as if they're fighting over some other army wife, and it's not as if anyone will be looking for this one, darling!"
But Longarm was already hauling on his pants as he told her, "I wouldn't bet any eating money on that. I'm a peace officer, and at least a dozen others are disturbing the peace considerably right outside that hardwood door!"
As if to prove his point, something at least as large and solid as a human head thunked against the far side of the door, followed by an anguished moan of, "Take it easy, for Gawd's sake! You know I can't hit back, you crazy old goat! And I haven't done a thing a lot of your other junior officers haven't done, damn it!"
Then the brawl rolled down the hall in a series of loud thuds as Longarm shucked into his shirt, pinned his badge to the front of it, and strapped on his six-gun, muttering, "Bolt the door after me and don't open up to another soul, hear?"
She started to protest as, somewhere in the night, a voice rang out, "Corporal of the Guard! Post Number Nine and all is not well by a long shot!"
Knowing the military police were surely on the way, the half-dressed federal deputy stepped out in the hall to spy other guests gaping at nothing much. The action had apparently spilled down the stairs while he was getting up.
He moved down the stairs in his bare feet, his.44-40 undrawn on his left hip as he eased in on all those loud voices ahead. A voice of authority had just assured one and all that it was in full charge. But a sardonic Irish brogue replied, "Faith, and begging the major's pardon, me darling, general orders say that after Guard Mount and until I've been relieved as Corporal of the Guard, I'm to be after taking orders from the Sergeant of the Guard, the Officer of the Day, and nobody else, with the possible exception of the Regimental C.O. I forgot to ask about that. But sure and since you can't be any of the officers just described, I'll be placing you under arrest, sir. By this time Longarm had moved down far enough to take in the sad scene. A muscular stark-naked man reclined on his rump in a far corner, covered with bruises and bleeding from the nose and mouth as a half-dressed fellow officer tried to help him with a damp kerchief. The obvious Corporal of the Guard and two other enlisted members of his interior guard had a little old gray-haired and fully dressed major against the lobby desk. He seemed twice as mad and three times as confused as a gamecock caught by one leg in a rat trap. When the Irish noncom spotted Longarm and his badge, he nodded and told him, "The O.D. told us you'd checked in here and ordered us to keep an eye on you. So who might you have slept with after that dance, and what's the story about you and that darling Quirt McQueen?"
Longarm laughed lightly and replied, "I can promise you that shotgun messenger never walked this child home from any dance. I take it these other gentlemen were fighting over somebody else just now?"
The corporal shrugged and said, "I ordered one of me boyos to sneak her out the back and escort her home for now. It will be up to the colonel to decide whether she and the major here still have a home on this post."
The elderly field-grade officer protested, "See here! I was the one who was wronged by that smooth-talking Casanova I had every right to shoot down like a dog!" Whirling on the younger man still bleeding in the corner, the outraged major half sobbed, "You know you deserve to die, don't you, Chalmers! My Meg and me had been married for nearly fifteen years, and you spoiled it all for a few moments of lust, you two-faced hound!" The battered lover looked up and snorted impatiently, "Aw, shove a sock in it, you old fool! Your precious Meg has been giving it away since the two of you hit this post, if not before, and I only did my duty by taking pity on an aging beauty who was begging for some!"
The poor old major tried to go for his jeering junior officer. But the others stopped him and Longarm, seeing his own services weren't needed, eased back up the stairs, muttering to himself about beauties of any age who got poor weak-willed men in trouble. Then he felt a whole lot worse about them as he saw that room clerk and a couple of the interior guardsmen had lit up the hall to fling open each and every damned door along the damned hall!
Pasting a self-assured smile across his own face, Longarm strode to join them, trying in vain to come up with a damned good story in a damned short time as, sure enough, the fool clerk was opening the door he'd told that fairy godmother to bolt on the inside!