He turned back quickly toward her. “No, nothing that is important.”
She said, “Then, perhaps you would allow me to cook you supper at my house Friday night. I’d hate to think of you going off to some dreadful place that you don’t want to go to without an enjoyable evening the night before.”
His heart leapt. As he looked at the swell of her breasts and the flare of her hips, thinking in his mind’s eye how delicious they would look free of the constricting material of her clothes, he said, “Mrs. Dunn, that is a fine idea. I cannot think of anything that I could possibly enjoy more.”
“Then it is settled. You will come to my house and we shall eat supper. I am a good cook, you will be surprised to know.”
He shook his head. “No, ma’am, there is nothing about you that would surprise me. What time shall I arrive?”
She said hesitantly, “Would seven o’clock be too late? The shop here
…”
“No, no, no. Seven would be fine. And please, don’t go to any trouble.”
“it won’t be any trouble.”
He told her good-bye, and turned and went out the door. His spirits were lifted high despite the dismal trip to Texas before him.
He lived in a set of rooms not far from her shop and he walked there with a happy heart. He even felt so exuberant as to run up the stairs to his second-floor quarters. It was the fourth or fifth set of rooms that he had lived in in Denver since he had been assigned there years previously. It wasn’t important to Longarm where he lived since he was gone so much. He could have gotten by with just one room with a bed and a place to keep what few clothes he owned. But since on occasion he did entertain visitors, mostly ladies, he had a parlor and a bedroom and a bathroom that did well enough for his needs. He suspected that sometimes his landlady, when she knew that he could be off for considerable lengths of time, would let his rooms out on a short-term basis to visiting drummers and such itinerant peddlers as came through town looking for cheap accommodations. More than once, he had found evidence of someone else’s occupancy of his quarters, but he didn’t really care.
By the time he got to his rooms, he was cursing himself for having called Shirley Dunn a pussy cat. He said to himself half aloud, “That was really dumb, Long, really dumb. You could have likened her to a crystal figurine or something. Why a pussy catt?”
He poured himself a drink of whiskey, sat down in a chair by the window where he could see the street below, and lit a cheroot. For a moment, he let his mind roll over the delectable Mrs. Dunn. She had light brownish hair which she wore swept up, making him hunger to see it down and displayed in all of its glory. She had smooth, regular features except for her eyes, which were large and brown. She had a cupid’s bow of a mouth, which she rouged, that he was dying to give a good kissing to.
But more than the look on her face, he ached to see what was beneath the severely cut suits and frilly blouses and no-nonsense dresses that she wore. From the look of her, he knew that it would be something to see.
Longarm was very much an appreciator of women. Except for the widow of a long-dead comrade, he had never, however, kept a permanent relationship with any. It was clear to him that he would be a poor husband, not only because of his dangerous job, but also because of the extended absences and the far-flung missions that were part of his job. From marriage, it would be a simple step to children, and he didn’t think that children should grow up without some benefit from their father. Billy had once joked about some imagined wife of Longarm’s trying to describe her husband to the children. Billy had said he figured that the poor woman would make a botch of the job, on account of it being so long since she had seen Longarm that her memory had grown dim. Billy had said, “What you’ll have to do, Custis, is get a whole bunch of tintypes taken of yourself regularly and have them posted around the house so that your family can remember you.”
But in his own mind, he knew that it was more than that. There were, he reckoned, some men who just weren’t cut out for marriage and he speculated that he was one. He was a man who liked to be true to whatever he promised, and if he set out to be married to one woman, then he would expect himself to be faithful, and he wasn’t sure that he could put such a hardship on himself. Many a time he had been taken with this woman or that one, to the point that he’d had a quiet talk with himself about marriage. In the end, he had seen more minuses than pluses. He might intend to be faithful, but during an extended trip away from home, a trim pair of ankles or a rounded bosom might undermine all of his good intentions in the flash of a second. He knew that he was a man easily tempted by women, and he didn’t see any point in putting himself to any test.
But most of all, it was his considered opinion that a man in his line of work shouldn’t be married. Of the five or six friends that he had had in the law business who had been married, all had been killed. He calculated that being a man with a wife and family gave you something to think about at a time that you shouldn’t be thinking about anything else—just reacting.
He figured that a man with a family was carrying extra weight that might slow him down at just the instant that he needed to be at his very fastest.
He guessed that as long as he was married to the marshal service, he would just have to be content with whatever women came his way.
Even in that, he lived by a strict code. If a woman was too naive or too inexperienced, he would not touch her. To the best of his knowledge, he had never taken a virgin in his life. The same applied to married women, he would not invade another man’s home any more than he would steal another man’s horse. A woman had to be available, experienced, and interested. He also drew the line at prostitutes. He had never laid out a dime to sleep with one and had no intention of ever doing so. His view was that what he had was just as good as what a woman was carrying between her legs and that one wasn’t any good without the other. He had once told a woman who had turned out toward the end of the evening to be a Prostitute that he could make her a deal—he wouldn’t charge her if she wouldn’t charge him.
He finally concluded that sitting there thinking about women was not the best procedure for his peace of mind. In a little over forty-eight hours, he would be having supper with the luscious Mrs. Shirley Dunn. He had no idea what the evening might bring. In fact, he didn’t even want to speculate on it, so with a discipline rare for him on that particular subject, he closed his mind of the fairer sex and settled down to the business of wondering why the citizens of San Angelo didn’t want money-spending soldiers near their town, and especially why they didn’t want them enough to set into killing them. It was the damnedest proposition that he had ever heard of and he was becoming, in spite of himself, more interested the more he thought about it.
He had no idea how he would go about his investigation. He reckoned that he would show up and have a conference with the fort commander, making him aware of his presence, and then just hang around and listen as best as he could. As far as his cover story was concerned, that offered no trouble. He could always pretend to be a
