by Lou Cameron
She didn’t. “I ain’t letting any strange man in. This scattergun is getting heavy, and if you don’t light out right now, it just might go off, hear?”
Stringer put his hat back on and got out his wallet. “Look, I’ll show you my identification.”
But she shoved the gun muzzle further out at him. “Don’t bother. It’s as easy to take an honest man’s wallet as his watch, once you take to robbing folk.”
He sighed in resignation, and put his wallet away. Then, as he began to turn as if to leave, he grabbed the muzzle of her shotgun and pulled hard.
She pulled the trigger at the same time, and the ten-gauge made an awesome noise. But since he’d known better than to point a gun he was holding by either end at his fool self, the discharge only stung his hand. And then, since she’d been too stubborn to let go, she was sitting in the dooryard dust at his feet, blushing like a rose and trying to get her calico skirts down before anyone noticed she wore nothing under them and was blond all over. The ten-gauge was single-shot, so he leaned it against her cabin wall and moved out to help her politely to her bare feet. She let him, but called him a brute anyway. Then she said, “If you mean to rape me, try and do it more gentle than that. It’s been a spell since I’ve been with any man, even willing.”
He assured her of his good intent as she dusted herself off, and he noticed she was somewhat younger and not as tough-looking as he’d expected from her surly manners through a door crack. She was around thirty, give or take hard living and no recent trips to any beauty shop the Gibson Girl had ever visited. Her flaxen hair hung down in long braids on either side of her high cheekbones and slanty blue Slavic eyes. She was bigger in every way than poor little Opal, but her big-boned frame was firm from hard work, and for such a natural blonde, she tanned evenly instead of catching freckles.
Her thin blue calico dress, he now knew for certain, was all she had on. Her Junoesque torso hourglassed nicely, with no need for whalebone cinching. Her heroic chest measurements seemed able to defy gravity without any artificial help, either. He smiled at her. “As I was saying, the two of us together ought to be able to fort up behind those fine logs until help arrives, ma’am.”
“God damn your eyes,” she said, “you just dumped me in the dust like a sack of spuds, and I’ll bet you tore my dress!”
She turned her back on him, pulling her skirts tight across her considerable but shapely rump. “Is any of me showing back there?” she demanded.
“No, ma’am. Not any skin, leastways. Hold still and let me dust you some back there.”
She did, as he gave her a few good licks with his battered old hat. Then she giggled despite herself. “That’s enough, you rough-handed thing. You can see I’m not carrying a watch or any valuables under this thin calico, so if you don’t meant to ravage my fair white body out here, we may as well go on inside.”
They did. He picked up her shotgun as they did so and put it back in the gun rack by her door before he shut the same, saying, “I hope you have more shells, just in case.”
She’d moved to the far side of a deal table between the door and her cast-iron cookstove. She stared soberly at him in the dimmer light. “I must be getting touched in the head. I’m beginning to buy your story. You sure don’t act like no outlaw.”
He asked how many outlaws she might know, and she replied, “I’ve heard tell a cuss that’s been working in these parts by the name of Tap Duncan was really Kid Curry all the time. He came by a month or so ago to ask if I needed any more help. I said no because it was true and because I didn’t like the look of him, even before I found out he was wanted by the law. He wasn’t half as polite and clean-cut as you. Say, you ain’t Butch or Sundance, are you? They say both of them treats women polite, even if they do treat men sort of mean.”
He started to reach for his credentials again, then decided she might feel upset if he proved for certain she couldn’t read. “We’re not going to get along at all if you keep taking me for one of the gents who may be out to do us both some dirt,” he said. “So I want you to listen tight. Would I be out in these hills all alone and on foot if I was riding with the Wild Bunch?”
She shrugged. “Maybe not. But that tie-down holster sure looks odd on you if you’re so innocent. I grew up near Dodge while it was getting famous for serious gunfìghting, and lots of gents pointed out to me as killers never wore their guns serious as you’re wearing that one.”
“You’ll notice I don’t really have it tied to my fool thigh,” he said. “I never bought it. I took it off that Wild Bunch rider I just told you about.” “How’d you manage that?” she asked.
He shrugged modestly. “I killed him with a rock. I tried to hide his remains, afterward, and I don’t think I left much sign in the dry grass and forest duff I’ve walked over since. But it wasn’t far, and I don’t see how we’d have met at all if he hadn’t been hunting me. Do you have any long-range weapons around here, ma’am?”
“Not now,” she said. “The boys rid off with my late husband’s Henry and the Winchester one of ‘em already owned. My name may as well be Tanya, seeing you don’t work for me and may not be an outlaw after all. Have you et yet this morning?”
“Well, I found some wild onion at daybreak.”
She smiled softly. “I noticed. I’d best rustle us up some steak and onions in self-defense. Set yourself down and mayhaps I can find us some cider as well.”
Stringer hauled a three-legged stool out from under the table to do as he was told. As the big blonde bustled over her stove, he learned more about her. Her name was Tanya Dillinger. It was her late husband who’d been German. Her folk had been Russian immigrants who’d homesteaded down near Dodge in the ‘60s after the big war back east. Karl Dillinger had won this spread off a gent they called Sam Diamond in a game of high-stakes stud. Neither Dillinger nor his new bride had known, until they got up this way, that old Sam Diamond hadn’t known much more about raising beef than playing cards. She bitched that, as Stringer could see, their spread was too cut up by wooded ridges to hold a big enough herd without hiring more hands than might be profitable. But by the time she and her husband had sold out and moved all the way up here, they figured they were stuck with the damned place. Sam Diamond hadn’t even warned them about that part-Jersey breeding bull, and she said she was glad Stringer hadn’t killed it, since it was the only bull she owned.
He asked if that might be the cause of her being a widow, and she didn’t turn from her stove as she sighed and said, “No. It was another card game, in Hydrate, with a sore loser. They strung him up for me, of course. But I don’t mind saying it ain’t been easy running this spread on my own since I buried my man.”
She brought the steak and onions to the table and put tin cups and a cider jug beside the main course. Her place servings were a mite rustic as well. But he’d eaten steak before with a bent fork and a paring knife, so he didn’t complain. He hadn’t realized until he dug in how hungry he’d really gotten since those beans in Kid Curry’s camp. The rare steak and raw onions tasted grand. But when he went to wash them down with cider, he gasped in surprise. “How did you get this cider so hard, Tanya?” he asked. “I didn’t notice a liquor still on your property, coming in just now.”
She sipped her own ferocious drink like it was table wine. “Don’t need a still in these parts if you’re at all patient and temperate. We get the cider sweet in town in the fall. I generally get enough to last from one harvest to the next. Come winter time, say around Christmas, the cider’s turned hard all by itself in the jugs.”
He shook his head. “This stuff has been distilled to no-fooling applejack. Just left to ferment, it can’t get much harder than wine. It’s a simple law of nature.”
“I don’t have to run it through no still,” she said. “I let Jack Frost distill it. It’s a trick my daddy learned in the old country. He said in Russia lots of folk pour cider in tin buckets and let it freeze in the cold outside. It don’t freeze solid, no matter how cold it
gets. The water in the cider is all that turns to ice. So all you got to do is take the ice out and throw it away and what’s left in the bottom of the bucket is more like brandy.”
He laughed. “I noticed. It’s small wonder you have trouble controlling your hired help if you’ve been serving ‘em such fire water. Were they sober enough when they left to mention when they might be coming back?”
She shrugged. “I told ‘em not to come back if they rid off like that with my best ponies and Karl’s old repeating Henry. Neither one of ‘em was worth spit to begin with. I should have known better than to hire sissy boys.”
He washed down his applejack with the last of his steak. “I hope I have your permit to smoke. I sure need something cool in my mouth right now. How come you call them sissy boys? I’d call it mayhaps thoughtless, but hardly sissy, to go riding off after train robbers, Tanya.”
As he got out the makings and started to roll, the big blonde explained, “They ain’t sissies about fighting or even working, if I keep an eye on ‘em. They’re sissies about one another. I try to keep an open mind about what others may or may not do in bed, as long as it ain’t with me. But I’m sure young Danny would have minded me and stood put here if that wilder Pete hadn’t been so anxious to ride off with that posse. Pete seems to think he’s some kind of hero, even if he does have a lover-girl everyone else calls Danny.”
Stringer whistled softly, then licked the paper to seal it. “I can see why you might feel annoyed with ‘em,” he observed. “It’s just another fact of nature that lots of cow drifters drift into that style of lovemaking. Hands don’t get into town that often, even when they’re good-looking and not shy about real women. You hear tales about certain riders in every cow camp. It isn’t often that anyone lets such notions show, however.”
He lit his smoke and shot her a thoughtful look. “It may be just as well, in this case. You’re a mighty handsome gal. Things could have wound up even more awkward out here, alone with two young cowhands, if they’d felt more like most men do about even ugly women.”
She grimaced. “I’d never let my help trifle with me. It’s the wrong way to run an outfit. I hired sissy boys with that in mind. They had to come to me for a job, or fight better where they’d worked before. My mistake was that I figured it would be sort of like hiring a married couple. I didn’t know they’d gang up against me when that silly Pete decided to go chasing after train robbers like a hero. Why on earth do you reckon a knowed sissy boy would want to be a hero in the first place, Stu?”
Her guest winced. “Call me Stringer. I know it’s a dumb nickname but it still doesn’t sound like cow-camp mulligan. As for old Pete’s quest for glory, mayhaps he doesn’t like being called a sissy boy. There’s this brain doctor over in Vienna town who’s been writing lots of stuff about such matters. He suspects a lot of men who dash about killing tigers and brushing their teeth with steel files could be sort of making up for the fact that they played the gal’s part in boarding school before anyone told them how queer that sounded.”
He took a cooling drag on his smoke and added, “Some famous fighting men never bothered to hide the fact that they liked boys as well or better than gals. I’ve never understood such ferocious fairies, but on the other hand, I’ve never seen any sense in looking for needless trouble to begin with. Mayhaps you have to be a mite crazy to be any sort of hero.”
She rose from the table, moved over to the bedstead in one corner, and patted the counterpane at her side. “This is the only comfortable place to sit around here. For a man who just owned up to killing a gunslick with a rock, you sure talk modest, ah, Stringer.”
He left his hat on the table, rose, and went over to join her on the bed. The rope springing sagged them closer together than he’d meant to sit. But she didn’t move away. So he didn’t either as he explained, “That was different. A man has to defend himself. The ones I’m confused about are the men who go out of their way to get in fights. Most men know how to fight. If they’re at all good at fighting, they know how easy it is to get hurt, and even when you hurt the other gent, it’s not as if it felt like making love or eating chocolate.”
“I know what it feels like to make love or eat chocolate, as seldom as I’ve gotten to of late,” she replied. “What does it feel like to kill a man? That’s one thrill I’ve never had a crack at.”
He shook his head. “It’s not a thrill. Not if you got your head screwed on right. You just feel glad it was him and not you. Maybe you feel a mite sorry for him. I don’t buy those tales of nightmares and remorse some old boys brought back from the war with Spain, either. I sometimes suspect that when a war vet weeps about having to do it because it was him or me, he’s really telling you he was never in action. I had to kill a mess of Spanish soldiers down in Cuba a few years back. I wasn’t even supposed to. But they paid no attention to my press patch, and after I’d done what I had to, I just thought they’d acted dumb and surly.”
She suppressed a shudder. “I think men like you may be more dangerous in the end than the ones who brush their teeth with steel files. Have you ever made love to another man, the way Pete does to little Danny?”
He laughed incredulously. “I’ve never been in jail or out to sea that long. What difference would it make to you? You’d have a time being a sissy boy even if you wanted to.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s what I keep telling myself late at night, when I’m alone, here, and those two are out back in the lean-to, doing Lord knows what and enjoying it considerable from the way little Danny yells. Do you reckon I could be turning into a queer old gal, stuck up here in these lonesome hills?”
“No,” he said. “But we’d best change the subject. For we’ll likely be stuck here alone together some time, and it just so happens that I do like gals.”
She lay back across the bed with a sad little sigh. “I like boys too,” she said, “and it may be just as well we don’t have no rubbers here. If we did, I ain’t sure how long I could hold out.”
He laughed and took off his gun rig. “You may find this hard to believe,” he replied, “but it just so happens…”
But after they’d come that way together once, clothes and all, Tanya sighed and said, “Oh, take that fool thing off and let’s do it right. Let me out of this damned old dress while you’re at it.”
He did, and while it was darker in her cabin than outside, he could still see enough to inspire him to renewed rising to the occasion. Her naked body was a passionate melody of curves and interesting dimples, and when he entered again—the way nature had intended—it was like starting fresh with a brand-new partner who, even better, had gotten over the first shyness. He was sure they were going to bust the ropes under her mattress as she pounded up as hard as he could pound down. But they didn’t and when they’d finally climaxed with her somehow on top, she kissed him so hard it nearly bruised his lips.
“Oh, glory be,” she panted. I didn’t know I was that hard up, and I’ve been hard up as hell for a coon’s age!”
He’d had another woman in a lot less time than she could be talking about, but he felt sincere when he told her she’d been on his mind this way before they’d ever met.
“I know,” she said. “I’ve been dying for a man hung like you since before I got married, and I’d just about decided no man born of mortal woman could do it to me that fine!”
He rolled her off him, if only to breathe easier. “Let me get my second wind, and this day may not drag as much as we expected, after all.” He cocked his head and added, “Those chickens outside sure are noisy.”
“Screw the chickens,” she said, “or better yet, screw me some more. I fed the fool birds hours ago. They’ve no call to fuss, unless they’re jealous, you old horny rooster.”
He sat up to reach for his duds and gun, saying, “Hold the sweet thought. I’d best have a look about. I’ve seldom heard chickens sounding off like that this close to high noon without a good reason.”
She sat up and hugged hi
m. “Just one more time and I’ll let you get some sleep, honey. It’s likely just a hawk. They fly over all the time. But they never swoop down through the treetops all about.”
He gently disengaged from her embrace and stamped on his boots without the socks. “I’ll do better by you in a minute if those birds are only clucking at a hawk. Is there a back way out of here, Tanya?”
She said there was no back door. But he found a rear window would do just as well in a pinch. He dropped out and dashed across such open space as there was between the cabin and the granite rocks it nestled amidst. He moved up a cleft to the pillow-shaped tops, .45 in hand, and had a good look-see all around.
He didn’t see anything to worry about, and the chickens off to his right had calmed down as well. He glanced up at the sky, saw it was empty, and muttered, “Well, if it was a hawk, it gave up, and Lord give me strength. For the sun says it’s still early, and that poor old Russian gal’s been saving up for the rest of this very day.”
Then he heard someone cough.
He’d only heard one. But it was enough. He eased off the rocks on the uphill side, away from the cabin, and on the balls of his feet started working his way through the dappled shade and juniper brush. As he eased around the last big boulder framing Tanya’s spread to the east, he spotted Slim, crouched in a clump of brush with his Winchester trained on Tanya’s front door.
Stringer moved into point blank range behind the lunger before he spoke. “Morning, Slim. I don’t want to gun you, so why don’t you just stand up slow, without that rifle?”
Slim didn’t move or answer for a moment. Then he gently lay his saddle gun in the grass, as if he didn’t want to get grit in the action, and slowly got to his own feet, hands out to his side. But as he slowly turned with a sheepish grin, Stringer saw Slim wore his pistol, low and ready.