Longarm and the Arapaho Hellcats

by Tabor Evans

  The man shoved the gun barrel in and out of her slowly, sneering down at her, showing his teeth. As he continued moving the pistol in and out of her, he lowered his head to her bosom and raked his nose up and down her deep cleavage.

  “You bastard,” Cynthia cried, breathless. “Oh, you bastard!”

  The men by the fire had fallen silent now. Their heads were turned toward Cynthia and the other men. Their shoulders rose and fell slowly. One sighed heavily, shook his head, brushed a fist across his nose, and continued staring at the man fucking Cynthia with the cocked pistol.

  Finally, the ­half-­naked man raised the revolver.

  Longarm steeled himself, watching intently, his right thumb caressing the Winchester’s cocked hammer.

  The man aimed the pistol at Cynthia’s head as he shoved his pelvis and jutting cock toward her mouth.

  “You suck that,” he growled. “You suck that, you little bitch.”

  Cynthia shook her head vehemently from side to side.

  The man rammed the pistol against her left breast.

  “You suck it!”

  Cynthia lifted her head, turned it toward the man’s jutting member. As she let the man slide the shaft between her lips, Longarm swallowed. His mouth went dry. He shifted his gaze from Cynthia’s head to the pistol the man pressed against her breast.

  Longarm’s heartbeat quickened as the man slackened his gun hand. The pistol began to slide down off Cynthia’s chest.

  The man groaned.

  The other two men rose from their logs near the fire and turned toward their partner and Cynthia. They were silent, ­dark-­eyed, staring.

  The gun slid down off Cynthia’s chest, the barrel now aimed at the ground. Just as Longarm was beginning to rise from behind his covering log, the man near Cynthia let out a loud, shrill wail.

  “Oh, you bitch!” he screamed, jerking the gun up.

  Before he could get the gun raised to Cynthia’s head, Longarm snapped his Winchester to his shoulder, planted a quick bead on the man’s chest, and fired.

  The man stumbled backward, howling, dropping his revolver and falling flat on his back, quivering and clamping both hands over his crotch.

  The other two men shouted and jerked toward Longarm, dropping their cups with tinny thuds. One grabbed for the pistols on his hips while the other reached for a Colt’s revolver rifle leaning against the log on which he’d been sitting.

  Longarm’s Winchester crashed, spitting smoke and orange flames.

  The would-be rapist with the pistols dropped both weapons in the dust as one slug tore through his sternum, causing his shirt to billow, while a second slug punched into his left cheekbone. He spun around and dropped to both knees beside an aspen, as though in prayer.

  The other man had spun around as he grabbed his Colt revolving rifle and spun around again as he raised the rifle in his hands, sort of crouching over it and yelling, his face a mask of rage. He triggered one shot toward Longarm, who’d sidestepped to his left, and the slug went whistling off into the night before plunking into a tree.

  Longarm fired three more rounds, triggering and levering the leaping, roaring Winchester, until the man with the Colt’s rifle had tumbled off into the darkness beyond the fire, howling like a ­gut-­shot lobo.

  The man’s screams were ­short-­lived, as were those of the other two. As silence moved in over the clearing, Longarm lowered the Winchester and ran over to Cynthia, who lay staring up at him, her mouth open, eyes glazed in shock. Longarm set his rifle down and knelt beside the girl, ripping his folding barlow knife from the front right pocket of his tweed trousers.

  “Good Christ, girl!”

  “Custis.”

  “I’ll have you free in just a second!”

  As he leaned over her to cut through the rope tying her left wrist to the stake embedded in the ground, she said, slightly louder, “Custis, wait.”

  He stopped, hovering over her. He looked down at her. She stared up at him. Her mouth was open, and she was breathing slowly, heavily. Her eyes looked strange. Darker than usual. Deeper than usual. There was silent pleading in them.

  “Don’t,” she said from deep in her throat.

  Longarm bored his gaze into hers. He lowered his eyes to her parted lips. They trailed down to her breasts. The orbs rose and fell more and more sharply, the nipples distended.

  Longarm felt a heaviness in his pants, a fire in his loins. He slid his gaze down past her expanding and contracting belly to the tuft of black hair between her spread thighs. It glistened in the orange light of the fire’s dancing flames.

  Longarm raised his gaze to hers. Her eyes were subtly, desperately pleading.

  She swallowed.

  “No,” he said weakly.

  She stared up at him with that deep, dark urgency. She slid her gaze to his swollen crotch, and her eyes widened, her jaws hardening.

  Longarm stood, kicked out of his boots and gun rig, and shucked out of his clothes, tossing them carelessly aside. His heart hammered. His blood stormed through his veins. Cynthia stared at his swollen, jutting cock as he hunkered down between her spread knees.

  She laughed almost savagely as he took his hand and slid the head of his cock against her sopping pussy.

  “Oh, Christ!” she groaned, lifting her chin, the cords standing out in her neck. “Fuck me,” she whispered, looking down at his cock slowly sliding into her. “Fuck me, Custis. Fuck me!”

  He shoved forward off his knees, pushing his throbbing hard-on deep inside her. He dropped his body over hers, squeezed her breasts in his hands, and closed his mouth over her lips as he started to slide in and out of her. When he lifted his head, continuing to thrust himself against her, she licked his lips and chin like a truckling dog, whimpering deep in her chest.

  “Fuck me!” she pleaded, straining against the stays that held her fast to the ground. “Oh, God . . . that feels so . . . wonderful!”

  Longarm felt his own blood rise as he toiled away between her legs.

  In and out.

  In and out.

  He varied his rhythm occasionally, pumping savagely, then more tenderly, pausing now and then to lick her breasts and kiss her lips and nuzzle her neck.

  After he’d fucked her for ten minutes he pulled out altogether and endured the nasty look she gave him, her cobalt blues brushed with the salmon light of the fire dancing behind him.

  He laughed and squeezed her breasts. She mewled and fought against the stays, causing the leather and the wood to creak, cursing him to continue.

  He straightened his back, sat back against his heels, and using his pelvis, shoved the swollen mushroom head into her pink, ­black-­tufted folds once more. He slid only the head in and out for a time. Cynthia tipped her head back, tensing all her limbs, and groaning like a lovesick ­she-­wolf.

  She flexed each knee in turn, wagged her head from side to side, her hair flying across her face and hiding her eyes.

  “Oh, Custis . . . please . . . !” she begged, dropping her chin to stare down at their joined crotches. “Shove it in . . . all the wayyy!”

  Longarm chuckled, sucked a deep breath, and then he rammed his shaft into her once more. Closing his hands over her hips, he pulled her against him while he rammed his own hips forward, thrusting in and out of her with gradually more speed.

  Suddenly, he felt her womb grabbing him like a small, warm, wet hand. She groaned more passionately, turning her head wildly from side to side, causing the sticks and the leather to creak and sigh.

  When Longarm could tell it was time, he leaned forward, hoisting himself up on his arms and his toes, and hammered them both on over the edge of the steep precipice they’d been teetering on, into oblivion.

  He felt her womb spasming against him, coating him with hot honey that oozed out from between both their bodies to bathe his balls and his thighs.<
br />
  Gradually, he stopped thrusting. He slowly lowered himself onto her and shoved his face between her ­sweat-­bathed breasts.

  From nearby came a soft thud.

  Cynthia lifted her head to peer at something over Long­­arm’s left shoulder. The fire blazed in her eyes as she screamed.

  Chapter 8

  Longarm wheeled, grabbed his Colt from its holster, and twisted around, clicking the hammer back. Two round eyes reflected the fire’s umber light from just beyond the fire, near where one of Cynthia’s three attackers lay. Above the eyes, large ears twitched.

  Longarm eased the tension on the Colt’s trigger and lowered the piece. “Horse.” He sighed. “Just a horse, Cynthia.”

  “Oh, God,” Cynthia said with a sigh, resting her head back against the ground.

  The three dead men must have hobbled their horses and one had come to investigate the commotion. Now it shook its head and backed away, out of the sphere of shimmering firelight.

  Longarm holstered his Colt, picked up the barlow knife where he’d dropped it, and cut the ropes binding Cynthia to the four stakes. When she was free, she sat up and threw her arms around him, burying her face in his bare chest.

  “I’m sorry, Custis. I guess I acted a little impetuously when I rode out here. I just couldn’t stop thinking about Casey.”

  “You never should have come out here, girl. Damn foolhardy.”

  “I just wanted to pick up their trail, so they couldn’t get away. I knew you had your hands full with the fire . . .”

  Longarm drew her more tightly against him and kissed her forehead. He pressed her badly mussed hair back from her face and looked at her. “You all right?”

  She nodded. “I think I’ll go wash in the creek.”

  “Me, too. Then we’d best pack up, camp a little farther upstream. The rest of the gang might have heard the shooting, might come to investigate. We don’t need to be taking on twenty men alone in the dark.”

  Cynthia nodded. Longarm rose, took her hand, and together they walked over to where the creek bubbled over rocks. They both knelt and cupped water to their faces and their privates, washing themselves.

  Longarm was aware of Cynthia casting occasional, furtive glances at him. He cast his own at her, sheepish and also incredulous about what had just occurred between them.

  Love bred by violence.

  He chalked it up to their anxiety, then took a long drink of the cool water, and returned to the camp and dressed. When Cynthia had also dressed, Longarm kicked dirt on the ­near-­dead fire, retrieved his horse from where he’d left it downstream, and then saddled Cynthia’s horse. He confiscated two of the dead men’s bedrolls and some coffee, jerky, and biscuits they had in their saddlebags, freed their horses, and gave Cynthia a hand up onto her steeldust’s back.

  They rode upstream about a thousand yards, at a narrow spot in the canyon, and set up camp in a small horseshoe of the creek, in a nest of rocks and junipers. Longarm did not build a fire. The light would only attract those of Drummond’s gang sent to investigate the shooting.

  He and Cynthia unsaddled their horses and spread their bedrolls in the soft grass, in the lee of their saddles. She sat down on her blankets, leaned back against her saddle, and drew her knees up. She wore a long, green wool riding skirt and ­high-­topped brown boots. She smoothed the dress down against her legs. The temperature had dropped down to the low fifties or so. Thin tendrils of vapor trailed around their heads as they breathed.

  “What those men were doing to me,” she said in a thin, pensive voice, staring off toward a ­powder-­horn moon climbing over a black ridge, “is probably what the rest of the gang is doing to Casey.”

  “Don’t think about it.”

  “Over and over.” Cynthia shuddered.

  “I’ll get after them in the morning, do everything I can to get her away from them coyotes.”

  Cynthia looked at him. “We will. I’m going with you.”

  “No.”

  Longarm had dug his bottle out of his saddlebags. He popped the cork and handed the bottle down to her.

  She took the bottle. “Custis, I’­m—”

  “No,” he said, putting steel in his voice. “Take a drink of that. It’ll warm you up and help you sleep.”

  Cynthia tipped the bottle back. She didn’t take a very large sip before pulling the bottle back down. She made a face as she swallowed, then ran the back of her hand across her mouth. “I don’t see how you drink that stuff.”

  She’d always been more of a port drinker.

  “It’s not going to help me sleep.” She handed the bottle back to Longarm. “I won’t be able to sleep, knowing that Casey’s with those . . . men. Going through what she’s going through and knowing that Ryan is dead. I wouldn’t doubt it at all if she simply gave up, knowing that even if she does get away from those killers, she has nothing to go home to but heartbreak.”

  Longarm took a long pull from the bottle. He looked around, pricking his ears. Hearing nothing more than the horses breathing where they were tethered nearby, he took another pull from the bottle and then sat down beside Cynthia. He wrapped an arm around her, squeezed her reassuringly.

  “I know it’ll be hard, but try to get some sleep. It’s late. Mornin’ will be here before we know it.”

  She sighed and squirmed against him, wrapping both her arms around his waist and burying her face in his chest. She gave a sob, and then he felt her slump against him as her exhaustion overtook her.

  Soon he could tell from the lack of tension in her body, and her slow, regular breaths, that she was asleep.

  He leaned back against his saddle, holding her. A few times he dozed, but mostly he sort of half lay there against his saddle, holding her, watching and listening, thinking about how he was going to run down twenty men and pry a girl out of their viselike grip.

  If Casey was even still alive by the time he found her, that was. Men like those in Drummond’s bunch would likely use her and cast her away like an old newspaper. Longarm knew that it was entirely likely that he’d find Casey Summerville lying dead in a ravine somewhere along the trail to the Never Summer range.

  He looked down at Cynthia slumped against him, her eyes lightly closed, lips parted as she breathed in a deep, dreamless sleep. At least that hadn’t happened to Cynthia. He’d never given much thought to love before, but he figured that to have been as fearful as he’d been for the heiress’s fate, love must have found him, after all.

  At the first pale brush of the false dawn, Longarm slipped out from beneath the beautiful, sleeping girl and gentled her back against his saddle. Quietly, he scoured the brush for deadfall. He’d build a fire and make some coffee with the supplies he’d confiscated from one of the three men he’d killed.

  He could risk a fire now, with day coming on. Drummond’s bunch was most likely headed south toward the Colorado border and the maze of mountains beyond. They’d hole up amongst those rugged peaks and wait for their trail to grow cold before heading on out of Colorado, spending their loot all along the way.

  Then they hit another bank or a train, maybe a stage, take another girl or two . . .

  Longarm built a fire, filled a pot at the creek, and set coffee to boil.

  Dawn became a pale lamp gradually glowing brighter around him, and birds began chirping in the trees. He sat on a rock near his small, crackling fire, a cup of hot, black Arbuckles in his hand, and watched Cynthia sleep, one cheek pressed against the palm of an open hand.

  The girl stirred, lifted her head with a start.

  “Easy, girl,” Longarm said. “All’s well.”

  She blinked. When her frightened eyes found him, they softened, and she smiled. “That coffee smells good.”

  “Damn good. And just what the doctor ordered. I’ll pour you a cup.”

  Cynthia stretched, rose, winced, and pressed
a hand to her back. “Stiff,” she said. “I can’t imagine how you sleep on the cold, hard ground as often as you do, Custis.”

  “You get used to the creaks. No choice but to, I reckon.”

  As Longarm filled a second cup, Cynthia came over with a blanket draped around her shoulders. She hugged Longarm from behind, kissed his ear and his cheek. “I’m gonna go freshen up. Be right back.”

  He watched her walk away, her round rump swaying enticingly behind the tight, slitted riding skirt that offered a teasing glimpse of one long, pale leg. Her long, black hair hung free down her back to nearly her waist. The stygian tresses were prettily mussed and tangled, lending the refined young heiress an ever-so-vaguely savage air.

  Longarm remembered the mad rutting of the night before, her three attackers lying freshly dead around them. A vague guilt prodded him when his member stirred.

  Cynthia returned to the camp, and they had a cup of coffee together and chewed biscuits and jerky. When the golden sun was beginning to poke above the eastern horizon, sending buttery spears across the sky, they saddled their horses. Longarm slid his rifle into his saddle scabbard and then walked over to where Cynthia was adjusting her left stirrup.

  Knowing their parting was imminent, and that there was no way he was going to let her ride along with him on the trail of her kidnapped friend, Cynthia looked ­frustrated. Longarm wrapped an arm around her waist, kissed her cheek. “You head straight back to Arapaho, now, girl. Your aunt is probably beside herself.”

  “I want to ride with you in the worst way, Custis. Casey needs me.” She turned to face him. “But I know when you’ve made up your mind.”

  “Don’t let me catch you on my back trail,” he said, pointing an admonishing finger at her.

  “You won’t,” Cynthia said, nodding. “I promise. I’ll ride straight back to Arapaho and wait.”

  Longarm engulfed the girl in his arms and squeezed her.

  “I just hope you find her alive, Custis,” Cynthia said.

  “Me, too.”

  Longarm helped her into her saddle and watched her ride off along the creek, heading northeast. He watched until she was out of sight, and then he climbed into his own saddle and reined the horse through the woods and onto the trail that angled southwest, toward the Colorado border.