by Tabor Evans
Longarm continued to wrestle with the brake lever, encouraged by the hiccups he felt through the iron grate of the locomotive floor whenever he got the brake engaged, though he was having a devil of a time keeping it engaged. The girl climbed over the bulkhead, winced at the dead men lying around Longarm, and came over to where Longarm was clutching the lever with both hands and leaning far back toward the floor, grunting and sighing and cursing through gritted teeth.
Straight ahead, he saw the bridge and the canyon. It was sliding up on him fast as the train continued to barrel down the side of the pass, which was leveling out a little now though the train was still hammering along at forty or fifty miles an hour.
That was just too fast. He had to get the speed down to half that or they were all doomed.
The brakes screamed like a hundred terrified girls, but the jerking Longarm could feel meant they weren’t continuously engaged.
“Let me help!” the girl shouted above the wind.
She climbed on top of Longarm, her back to him, the brake handle between them. She propped her bare feet up on the front bulkhead, and pressed her body back and down against the brake handle and Longarm.
He could feel her round rump against his crotch. Her hair blew around his face in the wind. It smelled faintly like sage and chokecherries. Her dress blew up in the wind, exposing the long, creamy length of her legs clear to her hips.
The brakes screamed more shrilly than before. The engine shuddered violently as the jaws clamped down hard over all the iron wheels.
Longarm looked through the golden cloud of the girl’s blowing hair. The locomotive was nearly level with the bridge now, and it was still swooping toward them but not quite as quickly as before. To both sides, the trees were thinning out, exposing the clay-colored boulders of the ridge still angling down toward the gorge.
To the left of the rails, two gray coyotes watched the train from a stony ledge, ears raised curiously, one curveting as though it wanted to run but was too fascinated by the big iron, screeching contraption to hightail it just yet. Both brush wolves were wondering if the train would make it or pile up at the bottom of the gorge.
The locomotive jerked and shuddered. The brakes squealed so shrilly that Longarm thought his eardrums would pop. The girl screamed as she threw her head back against Longarm’s chest, grinding the heels of her feet into the bulkhead and pressing her supple body down harder against Longarm and the brake handle.
Longarm closed his eyes. He was about tapped out, the power in his body draining. His tense muscles were turning to putty.
Gradually, the shuddering continued until Longarm looked to both sides and saw nothing but clear, blue Colorado sky stretching from horizon to horizon. They were over the bridge. And they were probably not moving over fifteen miles an hour. Maybe less than that. The train was still hiccupping and the brakes were still screeching, but, by damn, they’d done it!
They’d gotten the train slowed. The bridge should hold.
“We’re over the middle of the canyon!” the girl cried.
Longarm kept his hands wrapped around the brake lever. He felt as though his knuckles were about to pop, his arms about to tear loose from their sockets. The girl’s hair in his face was a tonic, however. So, too, was her rump grinding against his balls.
When he felt the engine grind to a final halt, he looked to both sides. Red, rocky slopes rose around him, stippled with piñon pines and firs. He could smell the pine resin. It was like perfume. The locomotive panted like a dying dinosaur; the fire in its box hadn’t been stoked since the outlaws had killed the fireman. Now that its momentum had been broken, and it was stopped, it wouldn’t be going anywhere until it was fired up again.
“We made it,” the girl said in a sexy, husky voice, rolling off of Longarm, setting her feet on the floor and looking around with girlish delight. “We made it, mister. You did it. You saved us all!”
As though on cue, a great, victorious whoop rose from the passengers behind the tender car.
Longarm gained his feet, straightened. The brake remained now in the locked position. He squeezed his hands together, wincing as the blood oozed back into them, as the damaged tendons and muscles barked their complaints.
He looked at the girl beaming up at him. “Couldn’t have done it without you, miss,” he said, panting.
“Call me Matilda.”
He gave a weary half smile. “Call me Longarm.”
She leaped up and wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing her breasts against his chest, her lips against his mouth.
“Longarm,” she said, “when we get to Creede, you’re gonna get the biggest thank you that any girl has ever given a man!”
Chapter 4
Two days later, riding north along a well-traveled stage road, Longarm reached into the pocket of his recently laundered tobacco-tweed frock coat, and pulled out the pink flimsy he’d received at the telegraph office in Creede. The missive had been sent in response to his request to have a few days off before heading back to the lawdog’s grind in Denver.
REQUEST DENIED STOP AZ RANGERS AND U.S. MARSHALS AMBUSHED IN ARIZONA STOP GET YOUR ASS BACK HERE PRONTO END STOP
It was signed by Longarm’s persnickety boss, Chief Marshal Billy Vail of Denver’s First District Court.
Longarm frowned at the flimsy and then stuffed it back into his coat pocket. “Back to the grind,” he muttered, and while he could have used a few more days to frolic with Miss Matilda Nightingale in Creede—he didn’t know whether that was her real name but preferred to believe it was—the news of the deaths of his fellow lawmen graveled him.
He couldn’t help wondering how many men had been killed and why and by whom, but he’d learn all that once he got back to Denver. That’s where he was heading now, by way of Leadville, where he’d pick up the Old Leadville trail and take it up and over Mosquito Pass to the growing, mile-high city sprawled on the plain at the foot of the Front Range.
It was getting on toward night, however, so he’d spend the night in Leadville and then head east again first thing in the morning. He’d have taken the same narrow-gauge contraption he’d saved from the Arkansas River Gang six days before, but the locomotive’s brakes were getting an overhaul at the Creede roundhouse and wouldn’t be up and running until late next week at the earliest.
So Longarm had hired a stable boy to ride back along the tracks and fetch the blue roan gelding he’d left when he’d boarded the train. After he and the horse had had a badly needed night of rest, and his clothes had been laundered by a capable Chinaman, who also sold a rather tasty lager by the bucketful, now Longarm and the horse were pounding the trails for home.
He’d decided that despite the need to rush back to Denver, he had to stop overnight somewhere or kill both himself and his horse. Why not treat himself to a luxurious bed and a good meal in the stylish Grand Hotel built recently by Horace W. Tabor?
He felt lousy about the dead lawmen—he wondered who they were and if he’d known any of them—but he could only move so fast, and after taking down an entire gang of yellow-fanged devils and saving a train full of innocent folks including five pretty doxies, he deserved one night in a down-stuffed bed provided by the silver tycoon, Horace Tabor. Never mind that most of the country’s newspapers had declared the man a hell-bent lecher, having divorced his wife and married one Elizabeth McCourt, deemed by the scandal-mongering newsmen and tabloid-reading public a home-wrecking charlatan.
It was said that old Horace had built the grandest hotel on the western frontier, and named it appropriately, providing luxurious furnishings and tasty grub to weary travelers. Longarm had also heard from those who knew him personally that Tabor was a right generous jake to the families who patronized his mercantile, offering credit left and right, and that he was just as fair and honorable to those who worked for him breaking rock in his silver mine, the Matchless, outside Leadville.
Yes, the weary lawman was looking forward to warm, succulent grub and a good night’s sle
ep. True to her word, the night before, the pretty, blond whore who called herself Matilda Nightingale had given Longarm about as much pleasure as one man could bear. But he hadn’t gotten a whole lot of sleep.
Matilda had also made his daylong ride today a little uncomfortable, sucking, as she had, nearly all the skin off his cock. Well, not really. It was just raw enough to make sitting a McClellan saddle all day a tad uncomfortable.
Her wonderful mouth had sucked him long and hard, though, and despite the day’s discomfort, he felt his balbriggans tent-poling a little at the memory of her soft and pliant mouth. Her warm, wet tongue had stroked him like a lollipop, causing him to grind his heels into the lumpy corn-shuck mattress provided by the madam who ran the crude but functional Creede House of Love & Other Sundry Pleasures.
Oh, yeah—a soft bed was going to feel good. Especially after he’d been fogging the trail of the Arkansas River Gang for the past three weeks, every night spreading his bedroll out in the rough-and-rocky.
An hour later, he reined the roan up in front of the Grand Hotel in Leadville, the cobblestone street around him alive now with the crowd that would soon be filling all the saloons and stomping their feet and whistling their delight at the night’s performance at the Tabor Opera House, just down the street from the hotel.
All types of westerners milled around Longarm—miners, drifters, gunmen, gamblers, Chinamen, blacks, soldiers, bib-bearded prospectors with the crazy eyes of men alone too long in the mountains, and, of course, the brightly dressed doxies showing off their wares from balconies.
The painted-faced girls resembled lovely birds of all colors of the rainbow, preening themselves for the ribald, rollicking crowd of half-drunk prospective clients whistling and yelling and applauding on the boardwalks below.
Some men threw scrip and specie at the girls, and then, when their chosen girl beckoned, ran through the parlor house’s propped-open front doors. A few triggered pistols into the air. Young boys in knickers and watch caps ran around, selling sandwiches from tomato crates attached to small wagons or wheelbarrows, dogs barking and panting after them.
It wasn’t yet seven o’clock, but the brick or wood-frame saloons were doing a brisk business, with burly, bearded men in overalls and hobnailed boots walking in and out of the batwings with frothy beer mugs clutched in their ham-sized red paws, conversing on the boardwalks in nearly every language Longarm had ever heard, and more.
The travel-worn federal lawman looped the roan’s reins around one of the several wrought-iron hitch racks fronting the Grand Hotel, unable to take his eyes off the well-named structure though he’d seen it once before. Built of red brick and trimmed in crisply painted white wood, with a mansard roof rising from its second story, sort of like a king’s crown, it resembled nothing so much as a lavish, triple-decker riverboat that plied the waters of the southern Mississippi.
“Incredible, isn’t it?”
Longarm turned to the woman standing on the broad, stone paving, between the hitch racks and their dozen or so tied horses, and the building itself. She was staring up at the hotel, as well, but also casting sidelong glances at Longarm. The tall, handsomely weathered lawman stared at her, and for one of the very first times in his adult life, he was tongue-tied.
He’d rarely laid eyes on such a rare and sumptuous creature as the ravishing brunette before him. Long-legged and cool as a snowmelt stream, she was a goddess sent from heaven to bless mere mortals with her presence while both captivating and torturing men with her beauty.
She somehow had that air about her, too, with her thick, rich hair piled high and secured with a gold comb atop her patrician’s head. Her eyes were hazel, set wide apart and accentuating the long, gallant line of her nose. Those polished hazel orbs matched the brocade and taffeta of her lavishly but tastefully appointed dress that was trimmed with cream silk sleeves, a cream silk collar, and an understated, gold, obviously expensive cameo brooch.
Her breasts were well concealed, as befitted a lady, but Longarm knew, as though he could see them through her dress and several layers of traditional under frillies, that they would be proud, firm, full, and perfectly shaped, with exquisitely jutting nipples.
One look at them, and a man would come in his trousers without her even laying a hand on him.
Quickly, realizing where his gaze had been, he jerked his eyes to her face. Too late. With a tolerant half smile, squinting those intoxicating hazel orbs and turning the beautifully clefted chin toward the hotel’s front doors, she said, “Excuse me.”
Holding her skirts above her fine ankles and teal, side-button shoes, she climbed the wooden steps to the hotel’s broad oak doors.
“Ah, shit,” Longarm said, the tips of his ears turning as warm as an overheated iron. “Fuckin’ fool…”
He continued to scold himself while the girl’s image continued to float around inside his brain, as though it had been emblazoned forever on his retinas. Girl? Young woman, rather, though he doubted that she was much over twenty. No, not more than a year past that, he decided, remembering how smooth her skin had been around her eyes and across her finely tapering cheeks, how its perfection, only slightly suntanned, seemed to soften the long, firm, yet delicate line of her jaw.
As he lifted his saddlebags off the roan’s back and slid his Winchester from its sheath, setting the long gun on his right shoulder, he realized he had a semi hard-on. Grimacing, he brushed his hand across his crotch, adjusting his whipcord trousers so not to cripple himself.
He consciously wrestled the girl’s image from his mind and, only partly succeeding, stiffly stepped onto the stone paving, climbed the hotel’s entrance steps, and pushed through the heavy, giant, castle-like doors into the broad, high-ceilinged lobby.
There she was, ahead of him, apparently picking up her room key at the block-long, horseshoe-shaped front desk of gleaming cherry trimmed with silver and with ornate mahogany inlays. Over the lobby and between ornate balconies with rails of the same material as the front desk, hung a crystal chandelier the size of a Concord stagecoach.
Longarm only glanced at the lobby’s fine appointments, having found the young brunette to be as breathtaking as anything that humans could ever construct. Just now the liveried, gray-haired lobby clerk handed her a small parchment envelope, which she opened, slipping out the note tucked inside. She bowed her lovely head to read the missive as she made her way to the wine-red carpeted staircase with its gleaming, polished rails.
The liveried oldster twisted a corner of his waxed handlebar mustache as he watched her go, dipping his chin just enough to tell Longarm that he was admiring the girl’s ass. Longarm found himself admiring it, too, as he strode across the polished slate floor, saddlebags over one shoulder, Winchester hiked atop the other.
As the woman made her way up the stairs, slowly at first as she read the note, then more quickly when she’d read it, turning at the second-floor landing, Longarm set his gear on the desk and said, “Who in the roaring flames of the devil’s hell is that?”
The oldster gave him a disapproving glance, jerking his black silk waistcoat down. “I do apologize, sir, but I’m not predisposed to give out information about the Grand’s clientele.”
“Well, excuse me all to hell.” Longarm caught one last glimpse of the charming waif before she disappeared up the second leg of the stairs. “Don’t suppose you’d be predisposed to renting a room to this tired old jake for a night, would you, friend?”
He hated uppity folks, especially those he knew to be little better heeled that he himself was.
The middle-aged desk clerk gave the tall, sun-weathered, dusty, rifle-wielding gent before him the critical up and down before saying with a haughty sigh and a slow, reproving blink behind steel-framed spectacles, “If you can pay in advance, such arrangements can be made, I suppose.”
Longarm plunked the right amount of coins onto the desk, signed the register, gave the nasty old clerk instructions regarding the tending of his horse as well as his own perso
n in the form of a hot bath delivered to his room, then pocketed his room key.
“Later, amigo,” he said.
“Of course, sir.”
“And don’t be skimpy on the roan’s oats,” he said as he crossed to the stairs, not looking behind him. “I need him rarin’ to ride first thing in the mañana.”
As he made his way to his room, striding along the second floor’s carpeted hall lit with gilded bracket lamps, he stopped suddenly, frowned, and glanced over his right shoulder. A door latch clicked, as though a door had been opened slightly, quietly, but not so quietly closed.
As if someone had been spying on him.
The girl?
Longarm’s broad face with its late-day beard shadow acquired a wistful expression. “Hmmmm.”
Chapter 5
Longarm lounged in the hot water that the young porter had filled his copper tub with, sitting back and smoking a three-for-a-nickel cheroot and sipping straight from the bottle of Maryland rye whiskey that the lad had also hauled to his room.
The lawman, grateful for the rare rye and to be able to sit right here in his nicely furnished digs without having to hammer the boardwalks looking for a tonsorial parlor or bathhouse, flipped the kid a three-dollar gold piece, and the kid—tall and gangly and looking like the sensitive black sheep of a mining family—left grinning.
When Longarm had scraped his jaws with his ivory-handled razor, he rinsed with a bucket of clean hot water the porter had also provided. Finding himself as hungry as a prisoner working the rock quarries, he scrambled out of the tub. He dressed in clean underwear from his saddlebags and then wrestled into the rest of his duds that he’d given a quick dusting with a horsehair brush. He’d cleaned his low-heeled cavalry stovepipes with a little spit and a gun rag.
He wrapped his gun and shell belt around his narrow hips, dropped his double-barreled, pearl-gripped derringer into the right pocket of his fawn vest, slid the old turnip watch into the opposite pocket, donned his hat, and headed down to the hotel’s stylish dining room to sup.