Longarm and the Wolf Women

by Tabor Evans

  Raven’s hair fell back into place. Her full breasts jutted. She laughed and stared at Natcho, who wasted no time undressing, albeit awkwardly, grunting as he stumbled around the lodge.

  The girl ran her greasy hands over her breasts slowly, sighing as she cupped them, kneading the grease into them, the nipples hardening. Then she squatted, rubbed the grease into her crotch. Natcho was ripping off his balbriggans as Raven ran her hands down her belly to her crotch, black eyes glistening like obsidian in the candles’ glow.

  Her gaze smoldered like that of a half-wild animal with the springtime craze. Natcho’s heart pounded in his temples, made his ears ring.

  Finally, he knelt beside her, took her shoulders in his hands, pulled her toward him, and closed his mouth over hers. He threw her back on the robes. She spread her legs for him, grunting and cursing, running her hands down his back, the fingernails digging painfully into his skin. She raised her knees high and wide.

  “Come on, you greaser bastard,” she grunted. “Give it to me, you son of a bitch!”

  Her voice was a vague rustle in Natcho’s ringing ears as he rose up on his outstretched arms and ushered his throbbing shaft through her furred portal. The rabbit grease made for easy going, and he slid into her quickly, plundering her core.

  “Ohhhhh!” she screamed, digging her nails into his shoulder blades and throwing her head back against the robes, mouth drawn wide.

  “Uhhnhhh!” he cried, pain mixing with passion.

  He thrust into her, and she ground her heels into his buttocks.

  Only a few thrusts later, his loins exploded. Holding himself deep inside her, he lifted his chin toward the teepee’s smoke hole glimmering with starlight.

  “Madre Maria!”

  His body convusled, his hips spasming, seed jetting into her.

  He slumped atop her and, when he found his strength, rolled onto his back, one leg crossing hers. He was breathing hard, his skin slick with perspiration.

  She lay on her back, running her hands through her hair, sweat-slick breasts glistening in the candlelight. With a laugh, she turned over and pressed her breasts to his chest, pinching his ears in her hands, jostling his head. “Don’t think I’m going to let you fall asleep, hombre. We’ve just gotten started!”

  She cackled wickedly and kissed him hard.

  Later, after they’d coupled two more times and the candles were nearly out, she rolled away from him. Her breaths grew long and slow.

  “Gracias, Jesus,” he muttered, thoroughly spent.

  Outside, Sunflower laughed. Eddie said something Natcho couldn’t hear. The fire was a diminishing glow beyond the teepee’s walls.

  Natcho sighed deeply and closed his eyes.

  A scream sounded.

  Natcho snapped his head up and automatically reached for his revolver, his hand finding only the fur robe beside him.

  Again, the man squealed and bellowed like a lung-shot stallion—the voice of pure terror and agony making the hair stand along the back of Natcho’s neck.

  “What the fuck?” he grunted, rising from the robes and crawling naked to the door flap. He fumbled with the flap’s rawhide stays, hearing Keats yelling, “What is it?”

  When Natcho finally ripped the flap aside, he poked his head out, blinking.

  The fire had died down, but there was enough glow for Natcho to see Crazy Eddie kneeling before his saddle and blanket roll. Eddie was naked except for the burlap cloth tied around his nose. He leaned forward, hands crossed over his lower belly. Blood splattered his chest and dribbled in thin rivers down the insides of his thighs.

  Sunflower was hunkered down on her haunches about ten feet in front of him, staring up at him. The girl was naked. Laughing, shoulders jerking, she covered her mouth with one hand while holding a bloody Arkansas toothpick in the other.

  Blood stringed from the ugly weapon’s curved blade to the dry brown grass below.

  Keats knelt on the other side of the log he’d been sitting on earlier. He wore his bullet-torn opera hat and balbriggans, several blankets from his bedroll hanging off his shoulders.

  He stared toward Crazy Eddie and the girl, his rifle in his arms, a befuddled, horrified look in his sleep-bleary eyes.

  “What the fuck . . . ?” Keats bellowed, lower jaw hanging.

  Natcho sprang off his knees.

  At the same time, searing pain lanced his back, setting his entire body leaping and quivering. He screamed and swung around, his right elbow slamming against the side of Raven’s head as she raised the bloody skinning knife for another stab.

  She grunted loudly then mewed like an enraged wildcat as Natcho’s blow threw her back into the lodge’s purple shadows.

  Feeling blood flow from the wound beneath his right shoulder blade, he threw himself headfirst through the door. Eddie screamed again. Natcho caught only a glimpse of the blonde dancing around, wielding the knife as Natcho dove for the pistol in the holster lying in the grass where he’d dropped it earlier.

  Labored, animal grunts and thrashing brush rose on his left. He was about to turn that way, when Keats shouted, “Stop!”

  Natcho turned back toward the softly glowing fire. Keats was rising, his fat gut jiggling behind his skin-tight balbriggans.

  As he cocked his heavy-barreled Spencer and began ambling ahead and left where the girl was screaming and slashing Eddie with the toothpick, a large, bearlike figure appeared from the darkness behind him.

  A club rose. It arced downward, the heavy end smashing across the top of Keats’s head, pancaking his opera hat. Keats groaned and dropped to his knees, face pinched with agony.

  Natcho ran forward and cocked his .45, hesitating a moment as he tried to decide whom to shoot first—the bearlike figure with the club or the girl still dancing around Eddie, screaming, laughing, and slashing.

  The sounds of four running feet grew to his left. Raucous growls rose. A shadow flickered.

  He wheeled in that direction, swinging the cocked pistol. But before he’d turned full around, the huge, furry, red-eyed creature bounded up from a dead run, throwing itself toward Natcho.

  The Mexican triggered the pistol into the air as the beast slammed into his chest, lifting him two feet off the ground and throwing him backward.

  “Ugggaaaahhhh!” Natcho cried as the air left his lungs in a single rush.

  The back of his head hit the ground so hard that his vision blurred. The beast stared down at him, eyes blazing, long nose wrinkled as the hackles rose to show the long, sharp, sickle-like teeth.

  The beast jerked his head down, closed his jaws around Natcho’s neck, and tore his throat out.

  Chapter 12

  Camped along the Diamondback River, dozing against a rock with his rifle across his thighs, Longarm snapped his head up. He raised the Winchester and looked around.

  He’d heard something.

  It came again—a long wolf howl.

  The cry died slowly. Then there was only the rush of the river over the rocky bed behind him, and Comanche John’s snores around their near-dead fire ahead of Longarm and right.

  Longarm remembered the wolf dung John had spied along the trail. He cursed again. Less than fifteen minutes after returning to the trail after John’s encounter with the three men he’d fleeced at cards, they’d had to stop because John’s horse had thrown a shoe. Stopping had been the best thing. It was growing dark, and John had needed to bathe his cuts and bruises. But Longarm had been impatient to get on the trail of the wolf and the three unshod horses.

  The tracks and his own gut feeling told him that he and John were close to Magnusson and his wolf women.

  Now he flipped the tarnished lid of his old Ingersoll, tipped the face to the starlight. Only three o’clock. Two hours before false dawn. There was no point in getting started earlier than that, as there wouldn’t be enough light to pick up the sign they’d spied earlier—if the horses and wolf were even part of the same group.

  He smoked a cheroot and listened for the wolf,
hoping to get a sense of the beast’s direction from his and John’s camp. When he’d smoked half the cigar and the wolf hadn’t howled again, he gently ground the coal in the dust beside him and returned the cigar to his shirt pocket. He set the rifle across his knees, hunkered low in his sheepskin, crossed his arms on his chest, and closed his eyes.

  He dreamed that he and Cynthia Larimer were coupling on a polished walnut table, the girl writhing beneath him, screaming. But when he opened his eyes, Cynthia’s face was that of a grinning wolf, blood dripping from the long, curved teeth.

  Then the wolf became Merle Blassingame, and Longarm was running down a long flight of stairs while Merle was shooting at him from the top, the bullets whistling around his ears. Merle was naked except for Longarm’s hat, her huge breasts jouncing as she fired her long-barreled .44 while lifting a high, keening, mocking howl.

  A wolf’s howl . . .

  Longarm woke with a start and looked around, his heart thudding. Milky dawn light silhouetted the eastern ridges.

  He chuckled at himself.

  No wolves or wolf women or crazy mountain men. Just him and John’s snores and the cold seeping through his pants and balbriggans and into his legs and butt.

  He rose, stretched the stiffness from his limbs, and tramped over to the camp where Comanche John was curled up in his soogan beside the long-dead fire. Longarm prodded the man’s hip with his boot toe. “Wake up, John. We’re burnin’ daylight.”

  The old man jerked up suddenly, eyes wide and wild. He reached for his rifle and tried to lift it, but Longarm had clamped his left boot over the breech, cementing the gun to the ground.

  The old man’s crazy eyes found Longarm. They lost their snaky, sleep-soaked glaze, and he grinned, showing the gap where he’d lost a tooth in the previous day’s fandango.

  “I sure hope those girls don’t get you, Longarm,” John grated. “I done growed right fond of you.”

  “That makes two of us, John.”

  They fixed a hasty breakfast of jerky, biscuits, and coffee, then hit the trail well before sunrise, their breath still puffing before them, the horses well rested and light-footed.

  They hadn’t ridden far before Longarm, studying the dusty two-track trail beneath the sorrel’s hooves, said, “Looks like your poker partners are still headed west, John.”

  “Maybe they’re looking for a digging,” John said.

  “It’d be just my luck, them shootin’ me when you’re the one who fleeced ’em at cards.”

  John winced, his face a mask of cuts, purple bruises, and swollen lips. “Ah, shit, Longarm, I done told you I was sorry about all that. I don’t normally go around cheatin’ at stud, but I didn’t have two coins to rub together, and they plainly weren’t rubes. I’d never cheat a rube. I say if you can cheat a seasoned stud player, then, by god, he deserves to be cheated!”

  Longarm laughed. “John, I think you’d make a case to St. Pete on behalf of Old Scratch.”

  John chuckled sheepishly, and then he and Longarm continued in silence, by turns trotting and loping their mounts, trying to make up time for last night’s early stop.

  They followed the tracks of the threes shod horses up to the roadhouse nestled in the hollow on the right side of the trail, read the note pinned to the door, then continued on past the roadhouse a few more yards before Longarm drew rein once more.

  He frowned down at the trail.

  “Well, shit,” John said, stretching his big torso out away from his saddle as he peered at the ground. “Two unshod ponies.”

  “They came up out of the riverbank there.” Following the unshod hoof tracks with his gaze, Longarm spurred the sorrel forward, then checked it down to a fast walk when he saw where the three shod horses overlaid the tracks of the two unshod ones.

  “Think they’re ridin’ together?” Comanche John asked.

  “I’m payin’ you for trackin’,” Longarm pointed out, keeping one eye skinned on the trail, the other on the brush and rocks and fir-carpeted slopes around them, wary of an ambush.

  “All five of ’em had a little powwow back there,” John said, lifting his voice above the clomps of their own four mounts. “Now, I’d say the three are hound-doggin’ the two, and the two are splittin’ ass!” They rode a little farther, John still studying the trail. “They seem to be foggin’ at roughly the same pace, judging by the horses’ strides.”

  A few minutes later, the canyon opened out, and then all five sets of tracks swerved off the trail, heading into a side canyon. Longarm and Comanche John had followed the tracks for nearly fifteen minutes, heading past several tapped out mines and abandoned placer diggings, when John reined up suddenly, his dun pitching slightly and giving a frustrated whinny.

  “By yupiter, there’s wolf prints!”

  Longarm had ridden several yards ahead. Now he reined around and booted the sorrel back to John, who was studying a patch of green grass growing among black, mica-flecked rocks.

  “Around that spring,” John said, nodding his head. “See in the mud there? Wolf tracks. Two of ’em. Plain as a whore in church!” He removed his hat to scrub his forehead with his buckskin sleeve, then pointed with the hat. “See that bent grass comin’ out of the aspens yonder? Someone done rode out of them woods and joined the trail right”—John swung his head this way and that, raking his lone eye across the area, then pointed with his hat again—“there!”

  “Another barefoot horse,” Longarm said.

  “Shit!” John exclaimed, cackling with delight as he whipped his ratty sombrero against his thigh. “I think those three privy rats who cost me my purty smile are about to git fleeced again . . . if they ain’t already!”

  Longarm reined the sorrel on a dime and booted it up trail, jerking the pack animal along behind. The prospect of putting an end to the evil doings of Magnus Magnusson and his crazy daughters thrilled him. Besides, if he could wrap this case up today, he could be back in Denver by the weekend, before Miss Cynthia Larimer left for points east again on Monday!

  Following the trail, which now included three unshod horses, three shod ones, and the occasional prints of a large wolf—a male wolf, John proudly insisted—they put nearly one entire watershed behind them before they cleaved a narrow, winding canyon. They followed the game trail along the canyon and a narrow stream for a hundred yards before a pine-stippled scarp slid away to the right and a clearing appeared along the right side of the stream.

  The clearing was flanked by a rimrock, cedars and stunt junipers growing from fissures along the steep, stony slope. A lone cottonwood stood at the far right side of the clearing, its lime green leaves glinting in the brassy noon sunlight. Unseen magpies screeched.

  The riders moved their mounts forward, both running their gazes along the sandy ground by the creek, deep-gouged with milling horse prints, and along the thin, brown grass stretching from the edge of the sand to the rimrock.

  Longarm gigged his horse up toward the ridge. Thirty yards from the creek was a large fire ring mounded with gray ashes, chunks of fire-blackened logs, and bits of rabbit fur. The grass around the fire ring looked as though brown paint had been splashed in it. In several places, thick, liver-brown gobbets of blood glistened, semi-wet, in the sunlight.

  Longarm wrinkled his nose at the coppery stench, holding tight to the reins of his shying horse.

  Twenty yards nearer the stone wall, matted grass formed a circle. Small holes had been dug into the ground along the hole’s periphery.

  “Teepee,” said Jack. “Judging by the grass, I’d say it was here about a week. Razed a few hours ago.”

  Longarm sat up straight in his saddle, casting his gaze back and forth across the clearing, noting the freshly cropped grass where several horses had been staked near the creek; then along the fissured, crenelated stretch of rimrock. At the cottonwood tree in which several magpies perched, crying raucously, his gaze held.

  He squinted through breeze-brushed weed tips, his eyes picking out several strange objects lined up at
the base of the tree.

  He booted the sorrel forward. As he approached, a magpie gave an indignant screech then winged up from the ground—its metallic blue and tar black feathers flashing, a chunk of fresh, red viscera hanging from its beak—and lighted on a stout branch.

  Longarm stopped near the tree and peered down, his lips stretching slightly.

  Comanche John rode up beside him. The mountain man gave a surprised grunt but didn’t say anything. Like Longarm, he just stared at the three men sitting side by side against the cottonwood’s bole.

  All three were naked except for the one on the far right, who wore a smashed opera hat. Their skin looked obscenely white in the sunshine, the blood from their wounds nearly black in contrast.

  The Mexican had had his head nearly ripped off his shoulders when someone or something had torn out his throat. The skinny man had been gutted. The big man with the opera hat appeared to have had his skull crushed. The blood had dribbled down his face in streaks from beneath the battered hat, forming vertical bars down his bearded, heavy-lidded face.

  For a bizarre joke, someone had draped the Mexican’s left arm around the skinny gent’s shoulders, and tipped their heads together. The man with the opera hat had a corncob pipe drooping from the right corner of his mouth. His stiffening arms were crossed on his chest, his head tipped back slightly, as though he were putting his face to the sun.

  All three sat there as if posing for a photograph.

  “Those three—they can’t win for losin’,” John said without mirth.

  Longarm spat to one side, then reined the sorrel around, drawing a deep breath to rid his nose of the death smell.

  “Ain’t we gonna bury ’em?” John called behind him.

  “No time.” Longarm rode back out toward the creek and began sweeping the ground with his gaze, trying to pick up Magnusson’s trail.

  He didn’t like leaving the dead—even three dead bushwacking sons of bitches—to the magpies and coyotes, but there would be more dead prospectors if Magnusson and his kill-crazy daughters weren’t stopped.