He sank slowly down to one knee as he tried to decide what he was looking at, near the very limits of eyestrain in the moonlight. Then one of them stood up to stretch near that big moonlit boulder, and Longarm proceeded to crawfish backward, slow as h.e.l.l for a white eyes who'd just spotted painted Apache!

He figured they'd been posted there because that boulder overlooked the trail below. He knew he was moving so slowly because you weren't supposed to move at all near Jicarilla without getting spotted.

But his luck seemed to hold. It wasn't always clear whether Indians had spotted you or not. Then he'd made it back down to the schoolmarm's borrowed pony, and he'd run it over a mile before he reined in to pat its warm neck, saying soothingly, "I know. You had to have been up there with me to savvy why we left so fast. But let's just set this rise and listen for a spell."

They did, but all Longarm heard was the panting of his mount and the pounding of his own heart. So a million years later he decided they'd best get it on back to town.

He was tempted to lope the s.p.u.n.ky mount some more. But he never did.

He knew Trisha would have to answer for any needless wear and tear on a borrowed pet. So he trotted it down slopes and walked it up slopes as they made good enough time. They hadn't gone near as far as he'd told Trisha they might. For while a lone lawman might or might not be able to sneak up on outlaws, he wasn't about to try it on Quill Indians in canyon country without a cavalry column backing his play.

They soon saw the lights of Camino Viejo ahead of them, and by now the winded pony was breathing naturally and the dry night winds had blown most of that sweat away. He knew he could get by with just watering it before Trisha took it back if he walked it the rest of the way to cool it down easy. So he did, remembering that cautionary poem about mistreating borrowed horseflesh as they poked along. He recited it to the pony:

"I had a little pony, its name was Dapple Gray. I lent it to a lady, to ride upon one day. She whipped it and she lashed it, She rode it through the mire. I wouldn't lend my pony, now, for anybody's hire!"

When the pony he was riding didn't seem to notice, he confided, "I've known gals who ride like that. I reckon it's because they let us fool men worry about the rubdowns, whiplash wounds, and loose shoes. But we won't be returning you too stove in, considering some of the other little ponies you met on the trail tonight!"

There was no other stock at that hour in the small corral out behind his hotel. But there was water in the trough along the north rails. So he tethered the saddled mare there for the moment, and snuck himself and his Winchester up the back stairs.

Trisha answered his second knock. As he stepped into the dark room she said she'd thought he was gone for the night. So she'd gone to bed. He could see she hadn't wanted to wrinkle her underwear in the very short time it took him to strike a light, say he was sorry, and shake it out.

She hadn't seemed quite as blonde down yonder, but few men would have complained. Like a lot of gals who seemed a tad skinny with their duds on, Trisha Myers had a body that would have worked fine cast in plaster for one of those Greek G.o.ddess gals.

She stammered, "Shame on you! Or should I say shame on me? I'm all confounded and still half-asleep. What time is it and what did you find out, Custis?"

He rebolted the door and leaned his carbine against the wall, and tried to tell her it was time to get dressed so they could take that pony back. But she somehow sat him down beside her on the rumpled bedding.

He said, "It ain't midnight yet, but your schoolmarm chum may be asleep already. So with any luck we'll be able to put her pony safe in its stall out back without disturbing her."

Trisha moved his hand to her bare lap with both of hers as she demurely replied, "Never mind how disturbed Meg Campbell needs to feel right now!

I'm so disturbed I've been feeling myself down here, and they say too much of that can make a girl go crazy or blind!"

Longarm put his other arm around her, and stretched them both across the mattress so he could finger her more friendly as they kissed. But when she took his hat off and commenced to fiddle with his gun rig he said, "What about that mare out back?"

To which Trisha replied, b.u.mping and grinding, "Screw the silly pony.

Let her get her own swain. Or better yet, screw me, for I've not had any since I first came up from Santa Fe last winter and I'm a naturally warm-natured woman, as you may not have noticed."

As a matter of fact he hadn't. But seeing a lady he'd mistaken for a mousy small-town waitress was slithering all over him while she flat out begged for it, he figured it wouldn't hurt that pony to loiter in the moonlight out back for a few more minutes.

Chapter 13.

The wise and doubtless French philosopher who'd said no human being is ever more sane than right after they'd enjoyed some good food and a satisfying screw had doubtless met up with someone like Trisha Myers in his travels. Because she'd no sooner come, begging for him to do it faster and swearing she'd kill him if he dared to stop before they were both old and gray, than she commenced to stew about what her friend, the schoolmarm, was going to say if they didn't get her pony back to her before midnight.

Longarm reminded her she'd borrowed the mare for the night, and added it was hardly likely to turn back into one of Cinderella's mice at one minute past midnight. But she pleaded with him to pull his pants back up as she got dressed with an economy of motion that might have inspired rude questions about other hotel rooms from a man less considerate of adventurous blondes.

They encountered n.o.body else on the dark back streets as they walked the mare to its owner's modest cottage and carriage shed near the more barn-like public schoolhouse. Longarm unsaddled and rubbed down the pony in the darkness of the shed, while Trisha tapped on the kitchen door and had a few words through the slit with a mighty sleepy Meg Campbell, who didn't invite her in.

Trisha rejoined Longarm in the shed, giggling, to report she'd just been called an infernal s.e.x-crazed night owl. Longarm warned her not to hoot too much when her friend woke up all the way and really wanted to know about the other s.e.x-crazed night owl.

Trisha a.s.sured him his secrets were safe with her, as long as he meant to escort a lady to her own back door and treat her right.

So he did, and Trisha agreed it was even nicer to just get all the way undressed by candlelight, as if they were old pals, and start all over without the awkward fumblings of that first desperate desire to come before the other one changed his or her mind.

She said she'd never watched herself taking it that way in the mirror before. She said it made her feel like a total wh.o.r.e. But when he said he didn't consider her a wh.o.r.e, she wiggled her tailbone and demanded, "What am I doing wrong, then? You just tell me what any wh.o.r.e has done for you that you liked better and I'll just bet I can do it at least as well!"

He chuckled and a.s.sured her, "If you were moving that sweet little ring-dang-doo any better it would hurt. I take it you aspire to become a full-time professional after you've waited tables a tad longer? It's more often the other way around, ain't it?"

She moaned, "Faster! Deeper! I don't want to be a wh.o.r.e who does it with just anybody. But I love to feel like the man I do want to do it with considers me a totally depraved s.l.u.t! My mama always told me girls who really let themselves come were totally depraved s.l.u.ts!"

"I've heard Calvinist ministers explain why boys and girls were created different," Longarm told her. He didn't ask who'd taught her to finger a man's crack like that as he was trying to move in her with her legs locked around his spine. To prove he understood her better now, and to get her d.a.m.ned finger out of his a.s.s, he withdrew just long enough to roll her over on her bare belly and sweet little cupcakes, shove a pillow under her lap, and enter her some more from behind, with her slender thighs down and almost together as he braced his own knees outside instead of inside her legs to move it in her, as no man had ever moved it in her before, she said, while he planted a bare palm on either of her finn b.u.t.tocks to shove them open and shut while singing to her:

"You naughty girl, her mama said. You've gone and lost your maidenhead!

There's only one thing left to do, We'll advertise your ring-dang-doo!"

It made her laugh like h.e.l.l, and then she laughed even louder as she panted, "I'm coming! I'm coming hard and, oh, Custis, it's never, ever, felt so amusing before!"

He thought it was fun too. So a good time was had by all, and it made them both feel sad and sentimental when they just had to stop a spell lest they screw one another unconscious.

But neither felt really sleepy just yet. So as they reclined propped up on her pillows and sharing a smoke, Trisha finally recalled how they'd wound up such good friends and asked him, again, where he and her friend's pony had been earlier.

He told her as much as he knew, adding, "Whoever reported a heap of white strangers hiding out amid those old Indian ruins must have been blind. Or else disgruntled Jicarilla have wiped them out and n.o.body this far from the mesa noticed the considerable gunplay that should have taken place."

She said she hadn't heard about anyone, red or white, camping up in those dry canyons in any numbers. When she asked how he felt about Indians and white renegades being up to something sneaky as h.e.l.l--in cahoots the way those Mormons and Paiutes had acted out Utah way--Longarm said, "Na-dene ain't Paiute, and the Mountain Meadows Ma.s.sacre was a sort of ill-considered brawl that n.o.body had spent all that much time in plotting. The Jicarilla leaders smart enough to plot worth a tinker's dam are up at the Dulce Agency, trying to get as good a deal as they can out of the Great White Father. Disgruntled young bronco Apache don't meditate dark deeds up a canyon with any white outlaws. They kill 'em for their guns and horses."

She took the cheroot from him as she allowed that was the way she'd always heard Apache behaved, too. Billy Vail had never sent her down this way to investigate conflicting rumors.

Longarm speculated, "Not much mystery about disgruntled Indians. I've often felt disgruntled by our w.i.l.l.y-nilly Indian policy, and I must have a better grasp of our two-party system than your average Indian. What can you tell me about numerous new faces in or about these parts, honey?"

Trisha said there were lots of new faces around Camino Viejo, including her own, but that she'd never been up any canyons over by that mesa.

When he asked her what had inspired a gal so fond of ... nightlife to come up this way from Santa Fe to begin with, she explained she'd heard things were booming up this way, just as the place she'd been working in, near the Governor's Palace in Santa Fe, had been shut down by the new, reform administration.

She said she didn't know why. They'd never told the gals waiting tables out front what went on in the back rooms, but there'd been boomtown talk about a ghost town coming back to life up this way. Hence, here she was.

She agreed with Longarm that Camino Viejo was hardly more than a bigger stagecoach stop than most, with the stage company's local relay station four miles farther on. But she said old-timers said it had been much less before Queen Kirby had come out of the blue to do wonders with her fairy wand, or ready cash.

Trisha explained how the mysterious redhead had swept in one day, three summers back, to find a few forlorn merchants and the slightly more prosperous hotel, serving the crossroads near a river ford and not much else. The Mexicans had been run off years back, and the more stubborn or stupid Anglo homesteaders had eventually found it discouraging to live more forted up, and lose more stock, than folks just a few miles up or down the valley in either direction.

Trisha said, "The way I heard it, Queen Kirby started by buying out a couple of failing rancheros, hanging on to their cowboys, and adding some hired guns of her own to make stock-stealing in these parts more threatening to one's health. Then she plowed those profits back into her card house and less wholesome enterprises. Some of the cowboys say there were never all those wh.o.r.ehouses just off the coach road in olden times."

Longarm blew a smoke ring and said, "I was over to her card house earlier. Money can be a lot like snow, once you get a ball of it rolling right. She might or might not have come by her first wad of seed money honestly. I've got no warrant to question that. I fail to see how any federal court would be interested in an old carnival grifter using the profits from one business to start up or buy out another.

They call that free enterprise, and I can see how she got her first holding almost free. It was smart to revive a ghost town with a handful of private guns instead of building a town from scratch with a far bigger army of masons and carpenters."

Trisha said Queen Kirby had a building contractor working for her now.

"You can't get hardly anything new built here in Camino Viejo without Queen Kirby turning a profit on you. Why did you say she was a carnival grifter? I thought you said you'd never courted her down San Antone way like she said."

Longarm explained, "That was a carnival grifter's trick. I heard about it from another carnival gal one time."

Trish pouted. "A younger and prettier one than Queen Kirby, I'll bet, you rascal!"