He lay on his back. The black-haired girl had her head on his chest. She was snoring softly, a little puddle of drool growing just below his left nipple. The blonde was curled up like a baby in the V between his legs, her head snugged up against his crotch, her hair tickling his balls. One arm was draped across his left thigh.
The fire had burned down to a dull, umber glow.
The only way to get himself untangled from these two vixens was to move in inches . . .
Holding his breath, he placed his hands on the ground and began sliding his torso to the right and toward the wall behind him. He'd moved maybe six inches when the black-haired girl stirred suddenly.
Longarm froze, wincing.
The black-haired vixen gave a frumpy sigh, rolled away from him and curled into a ball nearer the fire, pulling a blanket with her and drawing her knees up to her breasts.
Longarm smiled.
Now, for the other one.
Lifting his right leg slowly, he moved straight away from her head, creating a gape between his balls and her curly head.
She sighed, muttered something in her sleep. Propped on his elbows, Longarm stopped. She snorted, swallowed, then adjusted the blanket around her shoulders and nuzzled his left knee.
After a minute, he continued hoisting himself away from her, one slow inch at a time, staring at her, a perpetual wince balling his cheeks, willing her to stay asleep.
She groaned a couple of times, but after ten minutes, Longarm had freed himself of the blonde who lay as she'd been lying between his legs. He turned and, heart thumping wildly, crawled toward the rifle.
He could get to it now even if the wolf women awokeâhe'd fight them off with every ounce of strength remaining in his battered carcassâbut their yells would no doubt rouse old Magnusson.
Longarm wasn't going anywhere if Magnusson started shooting down at him from above.
He closed on the rifle, reached out with his right hand, and wrapped his fingers around the breech. His heart beat faster.
He was almost there . . .
He removed the Winchester from the wall and, still on his knees and enjoying the feel and weight of the steel in his hands, swung it toward the sleeping beauties.
Only they were no longer sleeping.
The blonde was on her knees, holding her breasts in her hands as she regarded him angrily through a curtain of rumpled hair. The black-haired girl stood before him, swinging the whiskey bottle by its neck. It smashed against Longarm's right temple.
He dropped the rifle, flew back against the wall, and dove into darkness.
Â
When Longarm woke, he lay on the deerskin, blankets drawn up to his chin. He tried to open his eyes but gray light pushing through the hole's opening made his head throb.
Dried blood lay crusted on his forehead. He felt as though he'd been thrown down a steep hill then beaten and fucked half to death by polecats.
Even his cock was sore.
He opened his eyes by degrees, till he could keep the lids open without feeling as though a sharpened axe had been plunged through his brain plate. His breath puffed around his head. Gray ashes smoldered in the fire ring. His bottle of Maryland rye stood propped in a notch at the base of the wall. He reached for it, bit the cork from the bottle lip, and threw back a couple of shots.
Instantly, the liquor warmed him, dulled the sharp throbbing in his skull. He rose, dressed quickly in the bracing morning air, and leaned his back against the wall.
What a rube. He'd let himself get hornswoggled by a couple of women. If this ever got back to Billy Vail, Longarm would no doubt be relegated to stamping envelopes and changing typewriter ribbons for Henry.
After a couple more swigs from the bottle, he started to feel almost human again. Sunlight seeped over the opening's lip, spreading a golden sheen across the floor. Something small and black lay in the dust. Longarm rose and walked over to the chunk of bear meat, picked it up, brushed it off, and took a bite.
Breakfast.
Chewing the cold, stringy meat, he looked up. He hadn't heard anything from above since he'd awakened. The meat had been tossed into the hole a while ago.
Maybe Magnusson and his daughters had lit out from the camp.
Longarm sat back down on the deerskin and ate the meat slowly, taking his time, letting the nourishment seep deeply into him, washing the food down with liberal swigs from his bottle. As he ate and drank, he gave a good bit of thought to his predicament, glancing every now and then at the skeleton grinning at him in the shadows to his right.
If ole Hank or Mike or Pete hadn't been able to get out of here, chances were slim Longarm would. But he had to try.
He studied the wall. It appeared mostly granite, striated with sandstone and clay. Solid in places, not so solid in others.
Longarm tipped the bottle back once more, washing down the last of the meat, then hammered the cork back into the bottle's lip and set it aside. As he did so, he heard what sounded like distant thunder. A single, muffled clap.
It sounded more like a dynamite blast than thunder.
He waited, peering up the hole, ears pricked, listening.
When only silence followed the explosion, he rose and walked around the pit, raking his gaze across the walls. When he found a stretch that seemed to offer the most possibilities for hand- and toeholds, he dug his fingers into a slight crack and pulled himself up with his right hand while digging his left boot toe into a notch.
The notch wasn't much more than a dimple, but it held . . . until he'd almost got his left hand into another crack.
Then the boot slipped. He dropped straight down, hit the floor awkwardly on both feet, and fell on his right hip.
“Shit!”
He felt pressure building. The panic again started closing in. His heart quickened.
He glanced over his shoulder at his pal, Ernie or Hank or Miguel, grinning at him, the long, horsey teeth glowing in the sunlight angling into that corner of the cavern.
With another curse, Longarm heaved himself to his feet, kicked out of his boots, then pulled off his socks. He ran his hands together as he studied the wall, picking out every pit, fissure, bulge, and dimple, plotting a course.
He found a way, tracing the route in his mind. Then, before any misgivings could plant themselves in his brain, he grabbed the first hold, levered himself up, and dug his right toe into a tiny fissure. When he'd planted the left foot along a slight ledge, he reached up, found a solid sandstone thumb, and planted the right foot successfully once more.
Gaining confidence, he dug the first three fingers of his right hand over a granite shelf below a layer of clay.
Up came the left foot. Then the right found a slight gouge.
His heart lightened. He could do it. He'd found a way. As he climbed, he looked up at the opening widening before him.
Then the ram's horn of granite he'd just grabbed with his right hand crumbled like old plaster. He clawed at the wall with his feet and left hand but couldn't gain a purchase.
He slid straight down the wall, tearing skin from his fingertips, hit the floor on his feet, and stumbled away from the wall before tumbling onto his back, the fall's momentum throwing his legs up over his head.
“Unggghhhhahhh!”
He let his legs fall back to the floor.
He squeezed his eyes closed against the billowing dust and the sand sifting down the wall.
A soft whistle in the air over the pit. Something hit his chest.
A familiar man's voice yelled, “Why don't you try a rope this time?”
Longarm opened his eyes. Two heads were silhouetted against the sky at the lip of the hole, staring down at him. On his chest lay the end of the catch rope sagging out from the wall. Longarm pushed himself to his feet and shaded his eyes with one hand, peering up the hole.
“Merle?” he said. “
John?
”
“You all right, Custis?” Merle shouted, staring down at him, her straight blond hair hanging down both shoulders, her olive plainsman hat shading her forehead.
Longarm chuckled.
Comanche John cackled, bearded cheeks stretched back from his gap-toothed grin.
“Don't just stand there gawkin'!” Merle shouted, her voice echoing around the pit. “Tie the rope around your waist before I decide to leave you down there!”
Chapter 19
Longarm donned his socks and boots then wrapped his cartridge belt and empty holster around his waist.
“You ready?” Merle called.
“Just about.”
When he'd grabbed his bottle and shoved the neck down into his holster, he wrapped the rope around his waist. “Get me outta here!”
Merle moved away from the pit. From above came a horse's nicker and hoof clomps, and then the slack was taken out of the rope.
Longarm let the rope lift him and swing him against the wall. He planted his heels against the stone, and the rope tugging and jerking as hoof thuds sounded from above, he walked up the side and over the lip, into sunshine and a cool breeze and a vast expanse of sky arching over bald, rocky knobs in all directions. A teepee stood on a nearby flat expanse of gravel, surrounded by junipers, potentilla shrubs, and bristlecone pines. The teepee's scraped hides glowed like a bleached skull in the high-altitude sunshine.
Horses and mules, including Longarm's sorrel, were tied among the bristlecones, near where a spring bubbled up around chalky orange rocks.
Besides the gnarled, low-growing bristlecone pines, no trees grew in the area; only shrubs. They were obviously above the timberline. It was a lunar landscape, the sky scrubbed, the air clear and crisp, the sun painfully bright.
Comanche John stood beside the hole, his saddled dun ground-tied behind him. A heavy band around his waist pushed out his blood-stained buckskin tunic. The right leg of his breeches was bloody down to the knee.
“They didn't kill you, you son of a bitch,” Longarm said as he lifted the rope over his head.
Merle rode toward them on a paint horse, the catch rope dallied around her saddle horn.
“Fixed me up swell, they did, then stuck me in a hole over yonder. 'Nother diggin' just like this one. I reckon they decided we had other uses.” John laughed and winked at Longarm. He cut the laugh short when Merle's shadow angled over him.
“If you two have had enough fun, we might be able to catch up to 'em. I've been hearing explosions off and on.” She jerked a thumb over a burnt orange, mushroom-shaped nob to the northwest. “Seems to be coming from that way.”
Longarm remembered the explosion he'd heard earlier. He'd heard a couple more since then, but they'd barely registered, as he'd been in the desperate throes of trying to free himself from the cavern.
“They must have a mine hereabouts,” Longarm said, pulling the bottle from his holster.
“They do,” John said. “The blonde told me so. That's why they were keepin' us alive. They needed two strong men to work the mine for 'em . . . once we healed.”
And in return we'd get our ashes hauled, Longarm did not say aloud. He remembered his dead pit partner. No doubt the poor gent had been forced to help out in the mine till he either got sick or flat-out refused to be enslaved any longer.
Or was fucked to death . . .
“We'll get after 'em as soon as I've regained my wits.” He held the bottle up to Merle. “Drink?”
She reached for the bottle, took a drink, then handed it back to Longarm. He passed the bottle to Comanche John but kept his eyes on the marshal of Diamondback.
Merle Blassingame looked fit, if a little trail-dusty, in her white, pin-striped shirt, red and black vest on which her marshal's star was pinned, and the black denims artfully tracing the long curve of her thighs and stuffed into her boot tops. Her silver-plated .45 rode high on her right hip, pearl grips glowing in the air as fresh and clear as champagne at this high altitude.
“What the hell are you doing here, anyway?” Longarm asked her. “You're out of your jurisdiction.”
“I started losing sleep, worrying that you two idiots might not be able to resist those crazy wolf women, so I deputized one of the townsmen and came looking for you. I thought I was just bein' a flighty female till I found Uncle John hogtied in that digging yonder.” She curled her nose. “And you trying to crawl up out of your own pit like a damn crab from a bucket.”
Longarm glanced at John.
John shrugged, sheepish. “Wasn't me that raised her.”
Longarm grabbed his bottle away from the old mountain man, a sour expression on his face. He felt guilty for enjoying his deerskin dance with the wolf women. At several times before they'd snuffed his fire with a whiskey bottle, he could have wrung their necks but had chosen not to.
The marshal was right. This hadn't been his best work. But any man in his situation, even Billy Vail, would have done the same thing.
He scowled angrily at Merle and grumbled, “Instead of just sitting there insulting me, why don't you and Uncle John try to cut their sign while I saddle my sorrel?”
He finished the bottle, tossed it into the brush, cursed, and tramped off toward the horses.
“What'd they do to youâthose crazy wolf women?” Merle asked Longarm as they followed the trail of three horses around the shoulder of a sun-blasted, rocky bluff.
Longarm bit his cheek and stared straight ahead, fishing for a story.
Picas squeaked and scuttled among the rocks and the short, alpine sedge grasses lining the narrow trail carved by mountain goats. He'd found his revolver, rifle, and saddle in Magnusson's lodge. His hat had hung from a lodgepole.