Maybe they could sleep after that. They did.
At dawn, Wilma made the men food and they packed up. The two Indian scouts had not come back, so the whole party went looking for them. They wound up the narrow canyon and finally crossed over one pass. Near midday, Telman pointed to a cleft in the mountains far ahead. “That's where they should be.”
“I wonder why the scouts aren't back.” Slocum said to him.
“Strange. He sent good men.”
“I'm beginning to think something happened to them.”
“I don't know, but you're right, they should be back by now.”
Slocum booted Red up beside the soldier. “Those two've lived on their wits, I think, for a long time. They've killed several people since we began trailing them. The worst thing of all is the poor white woman they hold in slavery.”
The party held up at midday. Telman and an Indian scout were going ahead to see what they could learn. Slocum told the rest not to build any fires. There was grass in the clearing for their horses to graze. So they sat back to wait. Slocum had told Telman to be carefulâthose men were killers. Not satisfied, he walked back and forth, wishing he'd gone with them.
In a half hour, the buck who had gone with Telman was back on a lathered horse. The translator said the two killers were gone and the other two scouts they'd sent the night before had been murdered.
“Is the woman with them?” Slocum asked the boy. No one knew.
“You were right,” Wilma said, hugging his arm as they went for their horses.
Being right wasn't his goal. He wanted to prevent more people dying. But he hadn't and he blamed himself for the losses. Even as he caught Red and gathered in the packhorse's lead rope, he decided the two of them might be at the end of their chase. Their supplies were seriously low, and he couldn't risk taking Wilma farther into the wilderness. The idea of giving up rasped at his conscience, but some things in life were impossible.
In two hours, they were all in the camp that the killers used. Slocum had gone to view two corpses. The scouts had been brutally slaughtered. No sign of the poor woman hostage anywhere. They had gone on and Telman was sitting on a log holding his head.
“I thought we could get them,” he said.
“They're madmen,” Slocum said. “You can't think like they do. I've been tracking them for over six weeks.”
“What should we do?”
“Go back. I'm going to take her home.”
“I don't blame you. We'll watch for them. Maybe the Indians will take up their tracks.”
Slocum agreed, but he doubted they would. They acted more crestfallen over their losses than he was over the whole matter.
“You're down at the heels,” Wilma said, bringing him a cup of fresh coffee.
“I've got reasons. Our supplies are too low to go on. There is no place out here to replenish our needs. Obviously they could go on for months and miles. We're at the end of that rope.”
“Only so much you can do. I understand. What's next?”
“We can drop south, get out of the park, and work our way back to the Bighorns.”
She agreed with a sober look. “I don't know what else we can do.”
“I know something we can do.” He winked at her mischievously.
“Well, there's always that.” She laughed.
He hugged her shoulder. “Time to call it quits.”
“Yes.”
He looked at the forested mountains that hemmed them in. The ride home would be a long one. God be with that poor woman that they had. That pain stabbed his heart.
13
He changed his plans, feeling it was better for them to go out the east gate. They bought some supplies from the government outpost at Geyser Park. Then they wound their way eastward after deciding the route back to the east gate would be their best way out. They visited Captain Hightower for a night, then surveyed the great falls again, passed through the buffalo herds, and at last came off the mountain. The breathtaking descent to the valley below left Wilma so shaken that at the bottom, he had to set her down on a blanket. He made her take off her britches and then he rubbed the circulation back into her bare legs.
This workup led to an amorous session in the bedroll between them. But he was relieved to be off the mountain and down at the base again. They spent the rest of the day resting around their camp.
The next day, they traveled from the base and stayed over for one night at the homestead with the Wisconsin couple, Martha and John Jeffers, who were sad to know that despite their efforts, the young woman had not been rescued. But Jeffers said no one could question their efforts to find her.
On the move, Slocum and Wilma did not stop at the burned-out homestead and instead swept across the inner desert for Ten Sleep in six hard-pushed days. Stopping at Farr's General Store, he asked after the whereabouts of the remittance man, Houston.
“He was in here a few days ago,” the clerk said. “I guess he went back up the canyon to his base camp.”
Slocum thanked him and bought a few supplies and some candy. Then they used the store's campsite on the stream. Busy fixing them some supper over the campfire, Wilma rose and shook her head. “If I have to go over that damn canyon trail again, I'll stay up on top until I die.”
“Quit dreading it.” He got up and grasped her around the waist from behind. He found her tickle points. Soon his efforts began to work, and she was laughing and shouting for him to quit. He turned her around to face him and smothered her with kisses. When his tongue slipped into her mouth to tease her some more, her eyes flew open in shock.
“The food will burn.”
“Set it off the grill. We have more important things to do.”
“Oh, my God. You're serious.” She slipped out of his hold, knelt down to put the pans off the fire, and stood up, unbuttoning her blouse. He had his boots toed off and set his gun belt on the ground close to the bedroll they'd already laid out. She pushed the pants off her hips, and her white skin shone in the afternoon sun filtering down through the cottonwoods.
Both naked as Adam and Eve under the covers, Slocum was on top of her, eating up her right breast and his tongue teasing the large nipple until it grew stiff as a nail. She was shifting around, trying to get the growing erection directed inside her slit. At last she drove both of her hands under him and stuck his rod through her wet gates. She raised her butt off the ground and hugged him to her thick breasts.
“Oh, Gawd, that feels better than ever,” she whispered in his ear.
The head of his dick was stretched so tight by then, he decided it might split and explode. His butt made the drive in and out as her vise began to grasp him tighter and tighter. She was puffing for air and so was he, his balls slapping her ass with every stroke. He knew she was wild with desire for more and more, and he intended to give her all that he could. The going went harder, the friction tougher, and the pain increased in his hips and the head of his dick. But he was going to completely take her over the mountains and make her faint.
Her breathing grew louder. Her efforts to meet him were sapping her strength, but she was on a wild path to get everything that he had. He wanted her loop-legged when he finished with her. Then she cried out and he speeded up. The flow from her ran out in the narrowest space between his pistonlike dick and her walls. Then the knot in the end of his dick exploded, and she fainted to lie limp under him. He braced himself up, resting only on her muscled belly. One thing he noticed, she'd gotten in great physical shape in the course of making their long odyssey.
With her fingers, she parted the hair in her face and shook her head. “You could make any woman forget her name,” she whispered. “I'll make it over the trail 'cause I know there's another side up there.”
She clamped her legs together and squeezed his dick tight inside her vise. “You want supper?”
He punched his dick into her deeper, and she gasped for her breath. “Lord sakes, are we doing it again?”
He smiled down at her. “Who said it was over?”
She slapped her forehead and slow-like shook her head in disbelief, then pursed her lips for him to kiss her. He did, then began again, with his hips moving in and out to arouse her. It didn't take long until she was in rhythm with him. Her body began moving with his in unison, pleasure sweeping over them. They were off again on another soaring flight to pleasure's peak.
And then at last, his balls screamed with the ejection, and it flew out into her, and she melted away.
“Oh, my,” she whispered and then closed her eyes limply.
He sat up and tried to clear his head. The sun was dropping in the west in a fiery blaze. Standing up, he pulled on his pants and looked about at her cooking. He knelt down and shoved some wood into the hot ashes to rebuild the fire. She sat up, found a housecoat to wrap around her nakedness, then moved in and gave him a shove.
“I can get it going. You won't starve. I swear I won't let you starve.” On her knees beside him, she put the coffeepot back on the grill. Then she rose, threw her arm over his shoulder, and kissed him.
“You better?” he asked.
“Oh, God, yes. You're a miracle. Oh.” She hugged her arms and shuddered, then raised her eyes to the clear sky. “I know you'll have to move onâsomedayâbut I'll miss you, big man. I really will. I hope my memory don't ever fade about these days we had together.”
“Why's that?”
“So I can remember how neat these days have been.”
“You won't. I'm going down to the creek and take a bath while you finish fixing supper. I shouldn't be too long.”
She buttoned the garment up the front. “Fine. I'll call you.”
He nodded and, armed with a towel and a bar of soap, he went to the cold stream. His holster slung over his shoulder, he went through the head-high willows to the shore. He hung his gun on tree limb, handy if he needed it. He stripped off his pants. Bathing wouldn't take him long, but maybe he'd feel fresher by doing it. Besides, he needed to figure what he should do next. Lathering up his body, knee-deep in the stream, he heard the drum of horses coming from town. A quick rinse and, dripping, he had the six-gun in his fist.
Who was coming? He fought his pants on and then hurried toward the camp. He could see, from the cover of the willows, three men talking to Wilma. They were dressed in suitsâPinkerton men. Didn't they ever learn that when they dressed up in suits, outlaws and fugitives could see them coming in Wyoming before they ever landed?
“I sure don't know where you can find Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” she said, using her hand to shade her eyes against the sunset. “What did they do anyway?”
“Oh, robbed a half dozen trains and several banks.”
“Why, if they stole that much money they probably ain't in Wyoming. I sure wouldn't be. I'd be on Broadway.”
“Broadway?” the main Pinkerton man asked.
“Ain't that in New York?”
“Yeah, it's there. What are you doing out here?”
“Been looking for two killers the past two months who murdered my neighbor.”
“Where did they go?”
“We were all over Yellowstone looking for them.”
“Didn't find them?”
“Nope, they're gone like smoke.”
“Your man around?”
“Taking a bath.”
Pinkerton nodded. “We have to go. There's a ten thousand dollar reward on each of them.”
As she bent over to tend her food, she said, “I could sure use the money.”
“You find where they are, you just wire Pinkerton. The telegraph knows where we're at.”
The man remounted and they rode out. Slocum went back for his towel and returned. “How was your company?”
“Pinkerton men, looking for Cassidy and Sundance. Got the reward up to ten thousand apiece. Hell, for that much, some Mormon would turn them in for it.” She laughed and shook her head. “Guess they wondered why I was in a housecoat.”
“How is that?”
“They kept looking at me.”
Slocum laughed. “I told you that you looked much better since you straightened up your hair and took off a few pounds. They were busy calculating what was under that dress.”
She narrowed his eyes. “They were staring at my body?”
“Yes. You have a nice figure these days to go with the rest of you.”
She gave him a pained look. “You aren't just blowing me up?”
“No, ma'am.”
“Well, I sure didn't do much to get that way.”
“Wilma, you ain't half as tough as you think you are. You can't hide a nice figure, and those detectives didn't miss it.”
“Come eat. This food may not be too good recooked.”
“It'll be all right. I want you to dress and look nice tomorrow. We're going to find Houston.”
She made a sour face. “You pushing me off on that guy?”
“No. But he has money. He doesn't have to rut around for his living or means.”
“Now, why would I want to be his slave?”
“He ain't looking for a slave.”
“He won't never marry me.”
“You want to get married?”
“Not to him.”
“Then consider becoming his housekeeper. You could do lots worse.”
“I'll think on it.”
He put on his shirt. The night would be cooling off soon as the sun went down. They would be in Houston's camp by the next day. He wanted Wilma to be ready to consider a job from the remittance man. He felt sure Houston was going to ask her to become his housekeeper. He'd hinted some about itâenough so that Slocum imagined the question would be presented.