She demurely asked if such a loss might not drive a lonely older man to distraction, quietly adding she'd heard being alone, after at least a happy honeymoon, could leave anyone feeling upset.
Longarm replied, "I just said he might have good cause to miss the wayward sass. My point is that he's been chasing me for many a day, and he must have noticed by now that I just don't have her!"
As they rode on he brought her more completely up to date from the beginning in Denver, not wanting to confuse her with details about other women.
She still wanted to know if he'd messed with that young Indian gal, and he was glad he didn't have to fib. It was funny how easy it was to leap to conclusions when you weren't there watching. When you said newspaper reporter, schoolmarm, or army wife, it didn't sound half as suggestive as a Kiowa halfbreed in her teens packing her own gun.
By this time they'd turned into her farm, and they were too busy to worry about Attila Homagy for a spell as they stabled their mounts, went into the main house, and let her rustle him up the noon dinner he was overdue.
While he put away the steak and fried spuds, she said something about slipping into something more comfortable. But when next she appeared she was wearing a sun bonnet and one of those blue denim smocks artists and farm folks wore when they had messy chores to tend to. He'd forgotten those cows that had to be milked no later than, say, three or four.
She allowed they still had plenty of time as she sat down to have coffee and marble cake with him. He didn't have to say anything about his own tweed suit. She told him one of her hand's fresh-laundered bib overalls would likely fit him and that, seeing they were all alone that afternoon, it wouldn't hurt if he milked cows with no shirt on.
He said that made two folks he'd met that day who could think on their feet. She naturally wanted to know what he meant, and it seemed to upset her when he mentioned old Attila some more.
He assured her he didn't mean to reason with the cuss or shoot him before midnight, and asked to see those overalls.
She led him to her laundry shed out back, and got out the faded but soft clean overalls her tallest hired hand worked in. She left while he stripped naked and slipped the bib overalls on, a denim strap over each bare shoulder. He considered putting his gun rig back on. He decided it looked silly. He unhooked his double derringer from one end of his watch chain and stuck it in the right hip pocket of the overalls. Then, in no more than that and his stovepipe boots, he rejoined Cora in her kitchen.
For some reason her breath caught in her throat at the sight of his muscular bare shoulders. She gulped and said, "My, you do seem as manly as described, don't you? The cows haven't started to drift in for their milking yet. But we can gather some eggs if you like."
Nobody liked gathering eggs after the first couple of times. But it had to be done and it did beat forking manure. So he toted some of the baskets for her as they crossed the yard to enter her henhouse.
It was easy to forget the full meaning of the old army term "chicken-shit," or why so many farm youths ran off to become cowboys, when you hadn't tried breathing in a henhouse for a spell. Longarm was just as glad his strange hand made her leghorns spook when she suggested he just hold the baskets and let her feel for the fool eggs. For two hundred leghorns laid one hell of a lot of eggs, and shit a lot besides. They both washed up to their elbows with naptha soap at her yard pump after they'd stored the eggs in the damp cellar under their candling shack. Cora said the good ones would be carted into town by her hired help, come Monday.
Unlike beef cattle, dairy cows were only vicious to human beings when they needed to be freshened by a bull. Cows with full udders and no calves to suckle soon learned to seek out human hands at least twice a day for relief. So as early as three, Cora's cows began to come home to the barn and march into their stalls as if driven by invisible prods. The closest thing to that in the beef industry was the Judas cow that lead young and innocent steers up the slaughterhouse ramp. Cows were a lot like humans when it came to easy assumptions.
Longarm hadn't slaughtered or milked a cow recently, and so it brought back memories, pleasant and not so pleasant, as he helped the young widow woman out by milking close to a score of her cows. Cora milked a few more than he did, the experienced little thing. But she still said he milked pretty good for a lawman.
He only told her some of his reasons for coming West after the war as they poured the buckets into the galvanized coolers and got it on ice for the Sabbath. She said they sold mostly raw milk in town of a Monday, with folks wanting more butter later in the week. She asked him if it still bothered him to think about those neighbor boys killed in the war, and what it felt like to kill boys on the other side.
He wrestled the last of the milk into place in the chill darkness as he shrugged his bare shoulders and said, "It don't feel as bad, or as good, as some would have it. I reckon it would bother me to have a cold-blooded murder on my conscience. But so far, I've never had to gun anyone I could have avoided gunning. The sorry souls who get a thrill out of killing are tougher to fathom. I just don't see what the thrill might be."
She locked the milk away as she quietly said, "We had my husband's body on display in an open casket for two days and this is the first time I've ever told anyone. I didn't feel anything for that stranger in that box. I mean it looked like my darling, and I missed my darling, but I knew my darling was gone and I just wanted to get rid of that... thing before it started to go bad. I think a lot of the others were putting on a big act there too. I don't think any normal person is thrilled or excited by death."
They headed back to the house as Longarm quietly observed he'd been on some battlefields he'd found more depressing than thrilling. He said, "The only thing you feel that some might find comforting is how tall you seem with all those others spread out flat. Mayhaps the mad-dog killers amongst us kill to feel taller. A cuss growing up with a low opinion of himself might feel he could make a higher place for himself by shooting everyone else down. They are wrong, of course, but sometimes it takes a man with a badge and his own gun to convince 'em."
She was suddenly all over him, sobbing, "No, Custis, don't go in to meet that crazy man at midnight! I couldn't stand to see you in a casket like a thing, with everyone saying you just looked as if you were asleep."
He had to hang on to her lest they wind up falling down her back steps together. He gently moved her so her denim-clad rump was braced on the edge of the kitchen table as he said, "I wasn't aiming to wind up dead at midnight, Miss Cora. There was this younger pest over by Fort Sill, saying he was fixing to shoot it out with me on sight. Only, somehow he never got around to it when I offered. I just told you Attila Homagy has to know it wasn't me or even Zoltan Kun his wife ran off with, and..."
She wasn't listening. She was clinging to him like a limpet from the waist up while she moved everything below her waist with a skill few happily married women or determined whores could have matched. She'd intimated she hadn't had any for a spell, and as she felt him rising to the occasion through the faded denim between their fevered groins, she husked, "Don't tease me like this, Custis. Do it! Do it here and now!"
So he rolled her back across the table, and since he saw when she raised both knees she wore nothing under that loose smock but her natural fuzz, he just shucked out of the shoulder straps to let his bib overalls fall around his booted ankles as he spread her thighs wide with his hands and stepped right up to join her. She gasped, "Oh, Kee-rist!" as he literally walked his aroused old organ-grinder through the moist part in her black pubic hair.
He paused halfway out to assure her he meant no harm. That was when she locked her own booted ankles in the small of his bare back to haul him in farther than he'd meant to go at first.
She gasped, "Yes! I want you to hit bottom with every stroke, and please don't go back to town tonight, darling!"
He just kept thrusting until he'd made her come, she said, for the first time in years. Like most folks, she likely didn't count jerking off. He could tell she'd been keeping that swell plumbing in working order some fool way, for just such a time as this.
CHAPTER 23
It was even nicer, once they'd wound up in her four-poster bed with Cora on top, literally sucking it for him with her warm, wet, love-hungry crotch. He never wanted to stop either, but by sundown they were too spent to do much more than cuddle and smoke as, from time to time, she'd grab his limp dong again and beg him not to get it killed on her.
He promised nothing either way. He knew he had to be there when Attila Homagy came in out of the dark. But sometimes well-screwed ladies fell sound asleep after going this crazy with a man, and he'd cross that bridge when he got to it.
The crickets were starting up outside now. It sounded nice until they suddenly stopped in mid-chirp, along about nine-thirty.
Cora asked what was wrong as Longarm rolled his bare feet to her bedroom rug and reached for the six-gun he'd brought in from that laundry after their first fun in the kitchen.
He said, "There's something spooking them bugs outside. I wish you had a yard dog, honey. Dogs are more certain about intruders than old crickets."
She sighed and said, "We just lost a good old redbone hound to coyotes. He busted his chain, the poor thing, to go chasing off into the dark after a coyote bitch in heat."
Longarm eased over to the front window, gun in hand, as he nodded and said, "Lots of dogs get killed that way out here. Nobody knows for certain whether it's assassination or a crime of passion. Anything canine will flirt with anything canine of the opposite sex. But any dog that meets up with a pack of coyotes on the prairie is in a whole heap of trouble!"
He could make out moving shapes across the road, thanks to the full moon. But he waited until the moonlight bounced his way from a pair of spooky eyes before he decided, "Your hound's old sweetheart seems to be looking for him tonight with her big brothers. I make it four, no, five coyotes all told."
From the bed, Cora said, "Damn. I told Leroy to make certain he planted that calf deep!"
She went on to explain how they disposed of stillborn calves on a dairy farm. There seemed to be a small bovine graveyard across the way. She sold off her live veal, of course, once giving birth had the cow letting down her milk again.
Longarm observed coyotes had been known to dig up dead folks from graves dug too shallow. As he came back to bed he said, "That's how come they say six feet down. Albeit coyotes will seldom dig more than four. Takes a good sniffer to smell dead meat through even a yard of dirt."
She said she didn't want to think about death, and so he put the gun aside and they got lively as hell for a short sweet spell.
He had her coming dog-style when a distant rumble tingled the air all around them and she murmured, "Goody! It's fixing to rain again, and you won't find anyone waiting for you on the streets of Trinidad at midnight after all!"
He started to point out that the moon still shone outside from a cloudless sky. He decided it might be smarter to just screw her to sleep. So he did. He almost knocked himself out in the process, but unlike Cora, he knew he had something more important to do before the clock struck twelve.
He had her snoring softly with a contented smile on her moonlit face before eleven. She only murmured another man's name in her sleep as he rolled out of bed, gathered everything up, and got dressed in the kitchen to sneak out across the barnyard.
He might or might not have heard a woman wailing after him on the night winds as he loped into town, anxious to get set up before that Amarillo night train pulled in.
As he rode down the main street of Trinidad, things ahead were lit up as if it was way earlier on Saturday night. Longarm reined in and dismounted on the edge of the big crowd gathered in the street between the livery and his hotel. He saw firemen in leather helmets up on the roof of the Dexter, wading around through considerable smoke. He asked a townsman what was going on. The Trinidad man replied, "Big explosion across the way. Dynamite. Blowed a hotel guest through the roof and set off a fair-sized fire."
As Longarm whistled soundlessly, another townsman volunteered, "They got the crazy Bohunk anarchist who done it. Confessed of his own free will. Said he was after another Bohunk who'd been fornicating his old lady, ain't that a bitch?"
Longarm said it sure was, and elbowed his way through the crowd to break out his badge and pin it on before making his way across the tangle of fire hoses in the muddy street.
A county deputy sporting a pewter badge started to tell Longarm he had to stay back. Then he recognized Longarm's federal shield and they shook on it.
When asked, the Las Animas lawman allowed the victim had been the late Zoltan Kun, now only fit for a closed-casket service. The killer they had over in the county jail, the crazy dynamiting bastard, was one Attila Homagy, recently a blaster at the Black Diamond Mine.
The county lawman said, "He must have really wanted that other cuss dead. Laid for him upstairs till he got in tonight, and heaved eight sticks of forty-percent Hercules in after him. The coroner's boys say it rolled under the brass bedstead, and still went off with enough force to send what was left of old Zoltan Kun through the roof!"