Longarm and the Wyoming Wildwoman Read online

  He slipped down the back steps and out through the stable without a word to anybody. He carried his load the long way 'round to the livery across from the depot and bet a colored hostler they wouldn't store it for him until after dark.

  Once he'd lost and seen his load safely stored in the tackroom, Longarm felt free to see what a man might be able to nibble, free, with an expensive scuttle of beer. He caught up with the town deputy they called Culhane at the free lunch counter in the Bullhead Saloon.

  Culhane said they'd carried the remains of the late Texas Tom over to the Cheyenne morgue and taken all the credit for him.

  Longarm agreed that had been the deal and asked in a desperately casual tone what a man who patrolled Central Avenue a lot might be about to tell him about Miss Covina Rivers at the notions shop.

  Wrapping a slice of rye around a twist of jerked venison, Culhane replied without hesitation, "She owns the whole building. Started in Cheyenne after her man was killed in Red Cloud's war up north. He was an army suttler. They jumped him as he was hauling goods up the Bozeman Trail from Fort Laramie. I understand the army surgeon refused to let her view the remains after he'd tried to put them back together without much luck. But old Covina was left enough by her man's lite insurance to start over on her own, and she's done well with the gals here in Cheyenne. My own woman shops there now and again. The prices seem right and the notions seem to be in fashion. I don't know why the gals change the way they dress every season. Do you?"

  Longarm shrugged, said he'd been getting away with the same tweed suit since he'd bought it a good spell back, and decided he'd try the boiled eggs and pickled pigs feet.

  Once he'd calmed the rumbles in his gut with free lunch and the surer knowledge he'd left little Daisy in fairly safe keeping, he still had time to wire Billy Vail about Texas Tom, unofficial but no doubt of interest to the old paper-pushing fuss.

  Retracing his steps to the Western Union, Long picked up a pad of yellow blanks as he casually asked the clerk behind the counter if by any chance there'd been any reply to that wire he'd sent off to Denver earlier.

  The clerk suprised him by nodding and telling him, "Your friend just picked it up for you, less than half an hour ago. Didn't he tell you?"

  A big gray cat swished its tail in Longarm's stomach, and he was tasting pickle-brine as he quietly asked, "A friend of mine, you say? Might this old pal you handed my wire to have worn a ten-gallon hat and had a gold front tooth?"

  The clerk shook his head and said, "Panama suit and a planter's hat. He was sweating just the same as he told me you'd sent him over from your place to fetch any messages. I naturally made him sign for it. I got his name right here in this pad and... let me see, ain't he called Bordon Knox and ain't he riding for the same outfit with you?"

  Longarm grimly replied, "I'll ask him when I catch up with him. I reckon we just missed each other back at my hotel."

  CHAPTER 9

  Longarm returned to the livery and got his Winchester '73 saddle gun before he headed for the vicinity of the nearby Pilgrim Hotel. It hardly seemed likely the sneak who'd signed for another man's telegram had used his own name. But Longarm did know a shady cuss called Knox--they called him Deacon Knox--from a friendly little game of cards in the Nebraska Sand Hills a spell back. That panama suit and planter's hat fit the way he'd have described the shifty tinhorn, too. But a Knox by any first name ought to stand out from tar roofing in white linen and bleached straw. So Longarm made his way along a back alley to another hotel across the way and catty-corner to the older Pilgrim. He broke out his federal badge and pinned it to the lapel of his denim jacket before he found a service entrance opening on the alley and strode on in.

  Nobody seemed to care until he'd negotiated a dark hallway and mounted a flight of back stairs to the top floor. That was where he scared a full-blood chambermaid headed the other way with a feather duster. She asked what he was doing up there in spite of the badge pinned plain as day to the infernal front of him.

  He hoped he had her nation right as he told her, "Hear me, I am Akicita. That is why I wear this maza on my chest. I have come because I am on a hunblechia and I have to get closer to mahpiya!"

  The moon-faced but nicely built young Lakota gal said, "Nunwey. Let me show you how to get up on the roof. Why do you try to talk our way, when I understand your words and you say ours so funny?"

  He said he'd been trying to be polite as she led him just down the hall to what looked like a broom closet and opened it to let him see more stairs as she explained, "We don't want guests going up on the roof, drunk or sober. Are you the lawman my people know as the Washichu Wastey? You look as I have always pictured him from hearing others who have known him."

  Longarm modestly allowed some Lakota called him Wasichu Wastey, which would sort of translate as Good Trash, when you studied on it, because Wasichu was applied to white or colored folk with the same disdain by Lakota as some whites applied to folk of African ancestry. White reporters liked to translate Wasichu as "American" so that the great chief Wasichu Tashunka appeared in print as "American Horse" instead of "Stallion Stolen from Trash Enemies" as it fell on Indian ears.

  He asked the Indian gal's rear what her name was as he followed it up the steep stairs with his Winchester. She said to call her Sue. He wasn't sure whether that was supposed to be a joke or not. Indians didn't laugh out loud as much as other breeds, but they could enjoy a pun as much as anyone.

  Whether she'd meant Sue or Sioux, her trim figure was still outlined through her maid's black poplin skirting as she flung open the roof door to catch the afternoon sun from the west.

  He told her to stay put. But she followed him out on the tar paper anyway, allowing it was a free country, her hotel, and she'd been set to quit for the day after making all those damned beds in any case.

  Longarm didn't argue. He removed his distinctive Stetson in case anyone on another rooftop cared to take them for hotel staff, and when he didn't spot another damned soul on the lower roofs all around he asked her to hang on to his hat whilst he climbed the rungs of the water tower.

  She took his hat, but said, "I think you are going to fall off and break your neck."

  She didn't sound as if this bothered her.

  Longarm had to allow she had a point as he mounted the weathered wrought iron rungs awkwardly, thanks to the rifle he had to carry up with him if his trip was to mean toad-squat.

  By the time he'd reached the platform the big plank water tank was set upon, Longarm could see that despite the way it had puckered his asshole, his climb had not been in vain. For from up there he had a clear view of every other vantage point within rifle range of the front entrance of the Pilgrim Hotel across the way, and there wasn't a soul, in any sort of outfit, staked out as a rooftop sniper.

  He gingerly made his way back down, it wasn't as easy, and took his hat back with a nod of thanks as he told the Lakota gal, "I know a bad man of my kind knows I'm still checked into the Pilgrim Hotel over yonder. If he wasn't sure before, he found out when he conned a telegraph clerk into giving him a wire addressed to me at my own hotel. So where would you be, right now, if you were laying for me to come back to my hired room at yonder Pilgrim?"

  The weya calling herself Sue demurely replied, "I was not allowed to hunt with the boys when I lived on the reservation. That is one of the reasons I don't live on the damned reservation. Is it true you rode into one of our tipi circles, alone, after you had fought us and counted coup on young men you had killed?"

  Longarm grimaced and said, "I had to. A renegade outlaw was hiding out with that band. I've never counted coup on any men I've had to kill, young, old, red, or white. Gents who drive railroad locomotives get grease and soot all over 'em. Gents who ride for the law have to kill somebody now and again. You have to take the good with the bad in any line of work. I wonder if that mysterious stranger in a white panama suit could be holed up in another hotel room, across from the entrance to my own lobby."

  Sue said, "I don't k
now. I have not met many men who could count coup but I don't want to. I used to get so tired of listening to my father and brothers boasting about all the wonders they'd performed before they turned into fat reservation drunks with nothing better to do but brag and brag and brag!"

  Longarm didn't answer as he led the way back to the stairwell. He knew what she meant. He'd been invited to supper in a tipi more than once. Neither heroism nor modesty were the same to most Indian nations as they were to whites. Horse Indians such as the Lakota counted coup for acts of what might seem cowardly cruelty to a white man, or took chances that struck whites as downright loco en la cabeza because it seemed most admirable to do something astonishing as all get-out than to worry about the final results. So young men in search of a rep were inclined to do the most outlandish things they could come up with as they rode into battle, from snatching a baby from its momma's arms and smashing it against a tree to closing in on a full-grown armed enemy and just slapping his face to ride off, laughing.

  As the two of them made it down to the top hallway, Sue told him she had a passkey to every room in the place. He allowed rooms that overlooked the entrance to the Pilgrim were most interesting to him at the moment. So she suggested they start at the far end and work their way closer to directly across from his own hotel.

  He agreed and they did, skipping more than one because, she said, she knew the folk who were inside, snoring or giggling, as the case might have been. Longarm told her the boys back home should have let her go hunting with them, adding, "I follow your drift about anyone aiming to do me dirt having to hole up in an officially empty room. You'd have known right off if any cuss in a white linen suit and planter's hat was checked in here open and above-board, right?"

  She unlocked one of the last chances, standing aside as Longarm covered the doorway with his Winchester, and said, "There is nobody like that staying here. But you got all the way upstairs without them seeing you down at the desk."

  The room was empty as well as small. He still moved across it to peer out through the lace curtains. He grimaced and moved back to Sue, saying, "Clear shot. But mayhaps clearer from the next one, on the corner of the building, right?"

  She shrugged and said, "It would be. But there is nobody there at this hour. The whore who rents that suite by the week is due back any minute. Her story is very funny. Every afternoon she goes up the street to make love to a banker in his office. The bank closes for the day at three. The banker goes home for supper at six after a hard day at his office. I know this because men count coup on things like that as well. The whore who spends her nights alone next door never told me. She is not a bad person, for a wasichuweya."

  Longarm said, "I'll take your word for that. I'd still like to see whether there's anybody else in there right now. It ain't quite suppertime, and if you know she spends her late afternoons at the bank, a sneak brassy enough to declare I sent him to fetch a wire addressed to me might know it by way of the same sources, see?"

  She did. She said she didn't like doing it. But it only took them a minute to sneak into the perfumed chambers next door and make sure the gal who'd stunk 'em up had no visitors or trespassers.

  As Longarm turned back from the window, the young Indian gal was holding up a mighty realistic dildo carved from ivory, albeit hardly from life, unless there really was a natural man, somewhere in this world, with fourteen inches.

  Sue waved the big ivory dick like a fan as she asked him what he thought it might be.

  He smiled thinly and replied, "If you ain't never seen the real thing, it might be just as well to leave you in blissful ignorance."

  She calmly replied, "Oh, I can see it's supposed to be some man's cock, and I've heard you Wasichu have big cocks, but do you really think even a whore with the winyanshan of an old pte could fuck a thing this big?"

  He said, "Put it back where you found it. The gal who lives here likely counts coup with it for visitors. I mind this one old gal with burro, down Mexico way, but that's a whole 'nother story and I don't want to be caught by anybody in here."

  They ducked outside and locked up. Longarm wistfully said, "So much for this hotel. I hope I can recruit me such a friendly guide with her own passkeys, next one over."

  Sue said, "You can't. I can. They pay Indian help even less next door. So their upstairs maid doesn't speak enough English and you don't speak enough Lakota to get along this well with her. But I told you I was through, up here. Why don't we sneak down the back stairs and see what we can do next door?"

  That was the best offer he'd had so far, and it went smooth as silk because it was just before quitting time, with the halls in all the neighborhood as empty as they tended to get.

  Sue led him out to the alley and around to another back entrance. They went down to the cellar, and Sue knocked on a door until a young but ugly Lakota gal peered out, sleepy or drunk, to mutter, "Anigni ktey, wincincala! Hehetchey!"

  Sue was cussing back while Longarm was figuring out the sleepy-eyed gal had told them to go to hell because she was through for the day, albeit anigni ktey translated literally more like "Evil she-spirit take you, someplace awful."

  Whatever she said back to the sullen thing, Sue soon had custody of another key ring by the time her cousin or whatever slammed the door in their faces and went back to bed or whoever.

  Sue led Longarm and his Winchester up the back stairs only the hotel staff was supposed to use. That didn't mean he shouldn't keep a round in the chamber, of course. But they made it to the top floor without incident and, this time, started with a room almost directly across from the entrance to the Pilgrim.

  Sue told him her pal in the cellar had said none of the top floor rooms were in hire that evening. That left them a seven-door chore with a heart-stopping moment for each and every damned doorknob.

  Longarm moved over to the window, which was half open because of the season, and glanced casually down at the street as it commenced to fill with quitting-time traffic. Then he gasped and moved back from the curtains as he spied a planter's hat coming out of the Pilgrim with a rumpled white panama suit under it.

  As the Indian chambermaid joined him closer to the curtains and asked what was wrong, he pointed down at the outstanding figure in the crowd to declare, "That sure as shooting looks like a tinhorn called Deacon Knox that I know from Nebraska. But I'm missing some pieces, here. Deacon Knox was a card cheat and a con man, not any hired killer, the last time I looked and... thunderation, he's ducked around the damned corner, and I have to get down there before he gets away for good!"

  It was the born food-gatherer who pointed out, "Hear me, rabbits run in circles, but fast. Too fast to chase, once they are out of sight. But if you wait they may circle back again, ohan?"

  He started to object, nodded, and said, "When you're right you're right. All this time I've been pussyfooting around up here, he's been laying for me down yonder, in my very own lobby!"

  Sue said, "He has found out you are not upstairs. He has started to wonder why you have not come home. Or maybe he has gotten hungry, himself. I think he is going to scout around the places one can have supper near the center of Cheyenne. The town is not too big for one man with good legs to scout. When he sees you nowhere else, he may come back to your hotel to see if you came back while he was looking for you. If you go looking for him on the streets of Cheyenne in the suppertime, the two of you might never meet before or after dark!"

  To which Longarm could only reply, "I have a damned night train to catch, too. I wonder if that's where he's headed right now. Seeing he's been so free about reading my messages."

  She pointed out, "You have no way to cover both the railroad and that hotel. But hear me. When he does not see you getting aboard any train, he might come back here to see why. Let him be the rabbit who runs in circles, Wasichu Wastey. From up here you can see whether he comes back here after you or not."

  Longarm started to ask what happened if the mysterious tinhorn never came back at all. But he knew that was a dumb q
uestion. He'd be no worse off and it was likely safer to stay put up here where none of them could expect him to be, until such time as he could figure out where even one of them might be.

  He told her as much. She moved to the hall door and bolted it on their side as she murmured, "Nunwey. I am glad. Help me move this bed over there by the window."

  He naturally asked how come.

  She said, "Don't you want to keep one eye on that entrance across the street?"

  When he allowed he did, she asked, "Don't you want to have some fun with me while you're laying in wait for your enemy? In the Shining Times our young men often had to lay in wait for days at a time, and it was the custom of us Lakotaweyan to lay there with them and keep them from finding it too boring."

  CHAPTER 10

  Longarm helped the enthusiastic upstairs maid shift the brass bedstead over to the window, as most men would have, but he felt obliged to warn her as they worked together that he might have to leave on short notice and couldn't promise he'd ever get back to her.

  Sue said, "I know this. That is why I have not been waiting for you to blow your nose-flute outside my father's tipi or come by with a string of ponies. I don't want to marry any man before I have seen more of life as a woman running with the wind. I heard about that time you spent with some other Lakota women up in the land of the Great White Mother. I want to find out whether they spoke straight about Wasichu Wastey who never beats a woman and never leaves her feeling hungry, hipi!"

  Longarm might have remembered hipi meant "here" if she hadn't let go the bedpost to grab at her old ring-dang-do and rub it good through her thin poplin skirting. For some reason that made him feel like rubbing at blue denim, but he refrained, being a man who could wait for his supper until he'd set down to the table, when it seemed they meant to serve it right!

  The bedcovers came almost dead level with the windowsill, once they had the bedstead lined up with the same. Longarm didn't want to risk his Winchester rolling out the open window. So he put it crossways at the head of the bed, against the head rails, where it would be out of the way or handy, as the occasion warranted.