She kissed back with a passion suggesting she might not just be gripping his shaft that tight to prevent his arresting her. When they came up for air and he asked if she was sure they were alone in the house now, she gasped, "I told the boys to leave the dishes in the sink, but I don't care! I want you now. Right there on the rug, the way we used to do it when I was eighteen and we could have eloped if you hadn't ridden off with your damned regiment, darling!"
So they wound up on the rug with half their duds off, screwing the hell out of other folks long ago and far away.
Longarm didn't know who her darling was, once she'd wrapped plump but surprisingly limber legs around his waist. He decided she reminded him of good old Roping Sally, up Montana way, who'd had such a well-rounded rump they'd never needed any padding under it. Although, as this one thrust her twat in time with his thrusts, it felt different. He was glad they all seemed to feel a mite different. For if all of them felt exactly as swell, a man would have no call to ride on, and then where would he be?
An hour later they were in a small bed in what she described as their guest room. It didn't make him feel as dirty as it might have in a bed she shared with the colonel. He didn't want to hear how many "guests" she'd been this nice to.
Her shorter, plumper body didn't seem at all like Roping Sally's as they came again in the nude on top of the bedding. But he didn't care. Old Elvira had a lot to offer, once a man persuaded himself he was sacrificing himself in the cause of investigation.
Sharing a smoke with her as they cuddled in the dark like old pals, Longarm had little trouble worming the petty details of a familiar arrangement out of the no-longer-worried colonel's lady.
She had the colonel sincerely convinced it was better for their enlisted men to let off steam in Shanty Town than, say, some Indian settlement a short ride further out, where they'd be harder to keep an eye on.
In return for this reasonable attitude, Miss Spike and the other trash whites just outside the gates gave "presents" to a lady with appetites her husband couldn't afford on his army salary. Longarm was paid by the same government. So he had to agree President Hayes seemed mighty tightfisted.
He didn't go into the mostly civilian government officials he'd had to arrest for augmenting their modest civil service salaries with the graft almost built into the system. He didn't want to remind her how Washington gave petty officials almost god-like powers over richer folks and then paid them three-or four-figure salaries to get by on. He'd often thought it was dumb to pay a bank teller barely enough to eat on and then trust him with the combination to the vault too.
Once he'd convinced her they hadn't sent him all this way to see where the troops at Fort Sill got laid, Elvira seemed more interested in the case he was really on.
He snubbed out the cheroot and got his bonier hips between her plump thighs again, to slide it back in sideways half erect, as he repeated there were only a few details to clear up and that he was leaving them to the army and the Indians.
She thrust her own hips languidly as she said, "Oh, yes, this is a nice friendly way if the man's, ah, man enough. But why were those mysterious riders act so mysterious to begin with, dear?"
He shrugged a bare shoulder, thrust a stiffer erection, and told her, "When the cat's away the mice will play, as if I had to tell you that. Somebody heard Quanah's Indian Police were resented and not too well understood by the folks around here.
Meanwhile, Quanah was away on his own mysterious business, and this gave them the chance to move in and try the Black Hand flimflam from New Orleans."
She said, "I thought you said they were Mexican, or maybe Pawnee. Could you move a little faster, honey?"
He could. He rolled atop her as he explained in the same conversational tone, "They read about war paint in books. I ain't saying the mastermind is Indian or Mex. He adds up as some sneaky white. But as soon as any of 'em are caught, they'll doubtless talk. So like I said, I can't hang around forever to pull routine police chores."
She moaned, "oh, Lord, don't you dare leave before you make me come again! I'd forgotten how grand it can feel and... Jesus, Teddy, why did you have to get yourself killed like a mere human being in that bloody mess at Lookout Mountain?"
He started to tell her a lot of Confederate widows doubtless shared her distaste for that particular battle. But he never did. He knew Elvira was thinner and younger and coming with her Teddy right now. So he just thrust it in and out of her moaning flesh until they'd both gone to Heaven again. Then all hell Seemed to be busting loose outside in the night, and he pulled out of her as she gasped, "My God! We're under attack! That was gunfire just now!"
He sat up, reaching for his duds at the foot of the bed as he said, "Two six-guns, fired fast as possible but empty by now, with nobody shooting back. Stay here and I'll find out what's going on out yonder."
She didn't argue, but groped for her own clothes as he quickly got dressed, buckled on his own six-gun, and grabbed his hat on the way out. Nobody was looking his way as they all converged on the post's guest hostel down the parade.
Longarm had time to break out his badge and pin it to the lapel of his frock coat before he got to where he'd booked a room for the night. It was just as well he had. Two military policemen were blocking the front door to the simply curious. They let Longarm through. Inside, four uniformed figures were poking about with confused expressions. One wore the arm brassard of the Officer of the Day. Another had the gilt oak leaves you'd expect on a post provost marshal. Before they could ask Longarm anything, or vice versa, another officer and two enlisted military policemen came down the stairs, confused in their own right.
The shavetail in charge said, "We found the room clerk upstairs, Major. Shot in the back in one of the rooms. There was nobody else with him. But the bed had been shot up worse! Feathers all over the place!"
Longarm asked if they were talking about the corner room numbered 206. When the shavetail allowed they surely were, Longarm said, "It was me they were after. I'd booked that room for the night and hung on to the key. The killer or killers came in down here asking for me. The clerk must have thought I was upstairs when he didn't see my key in its pigeonhole. They made him lead them upstairs and open my door with his passkey. Then they just started shooting until they emptied their wheels or noticed I wasn't there. So what are we all standing here for? Whether it was the Quirt McQueen you all know or some other son of a bitch entire, he can't have more than a few minutes lead on you, and it's open prairie all around if he's not holed up in Shanty Town!"
The provost marshal roared, "You heard the man! I want four squads assembled on the double, fully armed! I want one to sweep this post inside the perimeter, just in case. I want that squatters' settlement turned over like a wet rock, and meanwhile, I want one squad riding north and the other south!
The O.D. asked what about east and west. The major said, "We are to his west. I don't think anyone but Indians would head for that Indian agency to the east."
He shot a questioning glance at Longarm, who suggested, "If Indians passed through your gates this evening, your sentries should have seen 'em, right?"
The major smiled thinly and said, "They told us you were good. Do you think that was why someone was out to kill you just now?"
Longarm started to say Quirt McQueen hadn't struck him as that deep a thinker. Then he remembered those other more persistent attacks, and contented himself with answering, "Don't know, Major. I sent me some questions by wire earlier. Reckon I'll head over to the Signal Corps and see if anything came in. Your wire is manned round the clock, ain't it?"
The provost marshal nodded and said it had to be. Longarm elbowed his way out and started across the parade in the tricky light, his mind in a whirl. For no matter how he kept collecting facts around here, he hadn't been able to fit any together worth beans!
He knew he was overloaded with more information than he needed. It had been simple to figure the less tangled motives Of, say, Spike Wilson, the colonel's lady, and even that cheating army wife who told tales out of school. He reviewed his simple transactions with all three of them. Old Spike was just selling sin at a price enlisted men could afford. That lady in the dark who'd wound up on her way out to Fort Douglas had just been getting back at her cheating husband, and old Elvira...? She was just getting fat as she pined for the impossible, a young love now dead and buried after falling in the vicious Battle of Chickamauga in the hills of Tennessee.
Longarm took another full step before he gasped, "Jesus H. Christ! That's it!" and swerved a tad to bear down on the B.I.A. liaison office instead. There was no light inside at this hour. But Longarm knocked anyway. And it was a good thing he was standing to one side as a whole fusillade of bullets tore through frosted glass and paneling from inside!
Longarm called back, "Give it up, old son! That's another time you missed me, and I got it all figured out. After that, you're smack on an army post and they've already called out the guard on you!"
As if to prove his point, that young O.D. and a quartet of his interior guard, with bayoneted rifles, were running his way until he waved his own drawn.44-40 and yelled, "Don't line up with this doorway! We got us a sore loser inside!"
As if to prove the point another shot rang out inside, and then a familiar but unexpected voice called out, "Don't shoot. I got him! What's going on around here, for Pete's sake?"
Longarm yelled, "Open up, Ryan."
So Fred Ryan did, wearing no more than his pants, a sleepy-eyed expression, and a smoking Walker Conversion as he said, "I was asleep in the back when I heard young Rogers blazing away out here. When I asked him what was going on and who he'd been shooting at, he turned on me with his two guns and I had to shoot him!"
Longarm mildly asked, "How come? I counted twelve shots just now." Ryan said as calmly, "That's doubtless why I'm still alive. He had the drop on me and I was half asleep when I fired my own gun. Come on in. You can see for yourselves how it was."
As they all filed into the smoke-filled office after him, Ryan turned up a lamp someone had trimmed to a blue flicker earlier. As it flared to display the Cherokee clerk on the floor behind the counter, facedown and bare-ass with a pistol in each dead hand, Longarm followed Ryan through the gap in the counter, observing, "You made good time to Fort Smith and back, Fred. We weren't expecting you this soon."
Ryan said, "I just got in this evening. That's why I went right to bed without making a speech about it. I never went all the way east to Fort Smith. That newspaper gal did, looking to interview Quanah Parker for her readers. I only had to pick up some mail-order stuff of a... personal nature at the freight depot in Akota."
Longarm said, "I could keep asking questions and you could keep slithering slimy as an eel all night. But it's over, Fred. I got to arrest you for all sorts of things now, starting with the murder of this Indian ward of the government on the floor."
Longarm hardly expected any sane man to throw down on the law and three armed soldiers blue. But Fred Ryan didn't look too sane as he said dreadful things about Longarm's mother and started to swing the drawn gun in his hand into position.
He never managed it, of course. Longarm sent him spinning across the office with a round of.44-40, and then as Ryan bounced off the far wall, he was hit in the face with a.45-70 rifle ball that really messed him up.
The O.D. was fussing at the trooper who'd fired without orders by the time the Indian agent stopped twitching on the blood-slicked floor. So Longarm said, "No harm done, and I'm writing you boys up for an assist in my official report. The son of a bitch we just shot used to work at the Cherokee Agency in Tahlequah, two thirds of the way to Fort Smith. He knew all about ordering police uniforms and such from Saint Lou. He'd done so earlier for the Cherokee Police, and whether he stole some or ordered more after he'd transferred out is a matter we can work out later. Them mystery riders he had pretending to be Comanche Police or Kiowa raiders were Cherokee crooks. The Five Civilized Tribes that were out here earlier have had plenty of time to pick up white habits. They never learned to set up a proper tipi ring or savvy the sign lingo and paint of Horse Indians because the Cherokee were never Horse Indians when they lived in the wooded hills of Tennessee."
The O.D. asked, "Who told you all this, Deputy Long? No offense, but you didn't seem to know that much earlier."
Longarm said, "I'd forgot some things I knew. I jumped to hasty conclusions, trying to fit Mex bandits into a pattern that wouldn't work. I didn't even get it when Agent Conway persuaded me I'd heard an Indian say someone was dead, not that he needed water. Wichita or Pawnee raiders made a tad more sense than Mexicans. But not much, and it only came to me a few minutes ago that Tennessee used to be Cherokee country and that I'd been told, marching through it, how Chickamauga, where we fought that battle, meant Dead River in Cherokee!"
He pointed his warm pistol barrel at the naked Cherokee cadaver as he said, "Cherokee is related to Iroquois and Pawnee the way Comanche is related to Shoshoni, Aztec, and such. A lawman would play hell trying to account for Shoshoni building cities down Mexico way. But at least Pawnee were possible around here."