and respectfully decline.
As the two or more of them went crashing back along the bank through the tanglewood, Mato Takoza hugged her naked breasts to his bare back and sobbed, 'They were looking for you! They said they were your friends and just wished to tell you something. But you had already told me about someone following you along the county road, and I didn't think you wanted them to know where you were!'
Longarm rose, getting a better grip on her as he shifted the cold-steel Winchester to his other side, saying, 'You thought right. Did you get any line on who they might really be, and how did you manage to get rid of them like so?'
As they moved back inside, her naked hip rubbing his bare thigh, Mato Takoza said, 'As I told you, they said they were friends of Wasichu Wastey, but neither offered me his name, not even a fighting name one offers a respected enemy, so I knew they did not want me to know who they were and I thought it might not be wise to press that.'
She reached coyly down to grasp his flaccid manhood in the dark as she added, 'I invited them to come aboard for the rest of the night. But then I had to warn them I might be tehinda, if they still followed the wakan of their elders.'
Longarm started to ask, then he recalled what tehinda meant and had to laugh. He'd heard Sandwich Islanders considered a gal having her period taboo, as they put it, although few Indian nations got that excited, and were content to just stay the hell away from a gal and her quarters until the bad medicine passed on and she could make herself acceptable again with a smoke bath.
But since they both knew that in this case Mato Takoza had only been fibbing, Longarm found it surprising when she insisted in proving she wasn't anywhere close to that time of the month by shoving two pillows under her brown bottom and having him hold the lamp close as she spread her legs invitingly again. He didn't really care as he found himself rising to the occasion.
CHAPTER 19
It got tougher to ambush a rider when you didn't know when or which way he'd be coming. So Longarm left early and rode high and wide for New Ulm, working his way through more than one drift fence as he circled out across the upland prairie between the bottomlands of the Minnesota and the more modest Sleepy Eye.
There were other less famous draws and a mess of tree groves a drygulcher might have found right handy, and a thoughtful rider had to consider each as he approached, his own saddle gun across his lap. But as Longarm had surmised from the start, nobody was laying for him where he hadn't told a soul he was headed, and he met nobody out that way but cows, mostly longhorn stock with a dab of Angus or white-face to tender up their beef for the eastern market, now that the Depression of the early '70s had faded to bitter memory and housewives could act fussy about the meat they put on the table again.
The aptly named Sleepy Eye met up with the even more logically called Cottonwood around ten miles west of New Ulm. So Longarm cut east across higher rolling range and, as far as he knew, made it all the way into the bluffs just west of town without being seen by a soul.
He rode old Smokey down a deserted pathway past a brick kiln nobody seemed to be working that morning, and drifted into town at a walk, occasioning no more than casual glances from the townsfolk he found up and about. For thanks to his long detour it was well past mid-morning, and even the residential streets were fairly busy.
Gunnar Kellgren had told him he could leave old Smokey in the care of that livery near the boat landing. But the blue roan was a pretty good mount, and Longarm wanted to make sure he still had the use of old Blaze before he cut himself entirely afoot. So he rode first to see if old Ilsa Pedersson had recovered from her awkward feelings about two dead bodies in her house to explain to the neighbors.
She hadn't. Longarm found her raking under the shrubbery in her front yard when he reined in and dismounted. But as he was tethering to her hitching post the widow gal came over, rake in hand and face all flushed under her sunbonnet, as she flustered, 'Good grief, Custis, what are you doing here in broad daylight?'
He frowned down at her uncertainly and replied, 'I sort of thought I was staying here. Correct me if I'm wrong, honey.'
She shot an uneasy glance up the maple-shaded street and murmured, 'Come back after dark, on foot, no earlier than ten, and we may be able to sneak you in the back way, darling.'
Longarm started to say it made little sense for a man to pussyfoot clean across town after he'd had to find another place to leave his saddle and such. But she might have thought he was acting proud, and a man just never knew before noon how he'd feel about going to bed with a particular gal after dark. So he just nodded and said he might or might not be back, depending on what they had for him over at the Western Union by the depot.
Ilsa almost put an anxious hand on his sleeve before she remembered her own rep and softly pleaded, 'Promise you'll come back for at least one proper good-bye before you leave town for good.'
'What about the neighbors?' he gently asked.
To which she replied with a Mona Lisa smile, 'Let them get their own friends to say good-bye to. I'm not cross with you, darling. It's just that I have to live on this street and, well, it isn't every day a respectable widow has to explain three strange men shooting it out in her hitherto respectable residence!'
Longarm had to smile at the picture, but assured her he followed her drift, and would have kissed her before mounting up again if he'd thought she wanted him to. For she'd been a good old gal, and it was making him wistful already to think of her as no more than another fond memory.
But that was the way things had to be when a tumbleweed cuss wore a badge and a gun in this old uncertain world, So he rode on over to the river, where, sure enough, they knew the Kellgrens at that livery and said old Smokey would be welcome out back in their corral until such time as somebody rode in to pick him up.
Longarm asked what they charged to leave a man's saddle and possibles under lock and key instead of their more casual tack room. The elderly Swede who ran the place said it depended on whether he was a customer or not. So Longarm told him truthfully he just didn't know whether he'd need to hire another mount or not, and they settled on ten cents a day as a fair rate.
Longarm was glad. Toting his Winchester all over town could be a bother, and there were other things worth stealing in his saddlebags.
Being he had the time as well as the small room in the back to change in, Longarm left the livery in clean but faded jeans and an old darker blue army shirt he sometimes used when he wanted to look a tad different at a distance. For sometimes the fractions of shooting time it could take a shooter to make up his mind could make one
