duty. Longarm had to draw the line their last night on the trail together when she sucked it hard again for him.
He demurred, 'We're bedded down on a grassy rise with that water down in the creek too crowded for a midnight dip, honey.'
She insisted, 'I don't care. I've never had anyone built like you in me before, and I want to say you came again and again.'
She said, 'Let me get on my hands and knees, like a puppy dog, while you ravage me!'
So he did.
But when they finally rode into Fort Sill late the next day, he could sense a certain coolness in her manner, even before she broke free of the outfit to gallop on alone toward the cluster of frame barracks and outbuildings clustered around a flagstaff in the distance.
Longarm didn't chase after her. Aside from knowing how dumb a man looked chasing skirts at full gallop, he knew Harry Carver and his Running X riders could use all the help they could get right now. For like cowboys, although for different reasons, cows tended to get excited in the vicinity of any settlement. So you had to work harder to keep a herd together as you drove them on in.
But just as the cows were really commencing to act up, as was only to be expected, a dozen-odd riders came down the trail to head them off. As they rode closer, most of 'em seemed to be Indians or breeds, dressed like fringy cowhands. But their straw boss was a white civilian working for the B.I.A.
As he reined in by Harry Carver he explained they weren't supposed to drive the fool herd into the Fort Sill Parade, but downwind, to some corrals Chief Quanah had just flung up for the stock.
When Harry pointed out how he understood the beef to be meant for Kiowa consumption as well, the B.I.A. rider nodded but said, 'It sure is. But try getting a damned Kiowa to feed himself like any grown child. Chief Quanah has his Comanche meeting us halfway. He ain't but half Indian, you know. His momma was a white gal, carried off and raped by hostiles whilst on her way to California with a wagon train.'
This was not true. But Longarm only cut in to introduce himself and ask where Chief Quanah might be at the moment.
When the B.I.A. man suggested Quanah Parker might be visiting with his white uncle, Judge Isaac Parker, at Fort Smith, over beyond the Cherokee Nation, Longarm knew he didn't know. As any lawman had to keep in mind, witnesses who didn't know all the facts tended to fill in the blanks with guesswork.
Instead of saying this to a man who worked at Quanah Parker's own agency, Longarm asked the way to that agency. The B.I.A. man explained their main base was up in Anadarko, with a liaison post at Fort Sill and then substations further out in all directions on the sprawling Kiowa Comanche Reserve. So Longarm allowed he'd start at the fort, seeing how the army would want a report on that shootout in any case.
He shook hands with Harry Carver, rode back to pick up his hired paint and packsaddle, and rode on as the Running X riders drifted the herd around to where they wanted it.
Like Fort Cobb to the northwest or Fort Reno due north, Fort Sill had been built more as a small town for lots of soldiers than what Eastern folks pictured when they thought of a frontier outpost. Laid out in haste to enforce the treaty of Medicine Lodge with field artillery and the Tenth (Colored) Cavalry, Fort Sill had been neatly built on a dead-flat stretch of prairie where the grass grew stirrup-deep as well as emerald green well into summer.
This, as any plainsman, red or white, could have told you, was because the big grassy flat was a seasonal marsh, with the parade a boot sucking quagmire in wet weather.
A rare engineering officer of color, with the unlikely name of Henry Flipper, Second Lieutenant, U.S.A. Army, had salvaged the impractical site with ingenious drainage works, including the famous channel now called 'Flipper's Impossible Ditch' because an optical illusion made it seem as if water was running uphill after a heavy rain.
These moat-like ditches, along with enough fencing to keep man or beast from falling in, made up such perimeter defenses as they thought such a big garrison, backed by cannon and Gatling guns, was likely to need against sane Indians. Most of the really crazy Kiowa and Comanche had gone under in that last big buffalo war.
Longarm rode through the official 'Hog Farms,' the tolerated shantytown you usually found outside such an outpost's gates. A sleepy white trooper posted by the gate to give directions, it being an open post, waved Longarm on to the nearby guardhouse, where he could report in to the Officer of the Day. The cheerful young O.D. said the Tenth Cav had just left for the border to stalk Apache, and that neither he nor any of the other recent replacements from the East had heard a thing about Longarm's mission. He had a clerk take down Longarm's account of that brush with apparent hostiles and said that they'd file it, but that he suspected some young bucks had just been drinking.
The O.D. said they'd take care of Longarm's riding stock, and ordered one of his enlisted men to show their guest to the hostel set up for such surprises. It was across the dusty parade, between the sutler's store and officers' mess. The enlisted clerk inside showed Longarm to a tidy spartan room, handed him the key, and said they were already serving supper. So Longarm tossed his saddlebags and rifle on the bed, dug out his razor and a cake of naptha soap, and then got to work at civilizing himself.
It wasn't true they had running water in every guest room, but they did have indoor plumbing, with separate facilities for ladies and gents, out in the hall. So Longarm treated himself to a warm tub bath and shaved his jaws cleaner than he'd been able to manage along the trail, even in mixed company. Then he put on a fresh shirt and that somewhat rumpled but far more prissy tweed suit, with a shoestring tie. He had to tell the desk clerk who he was when next he appeared in the lobby.
They had no hotel dining room because civilian guests were such rare events. The clerk explained tidy white civilians got to grub at the officers' mess next door, and that he'd best get cracking if he expected his mashed potatoes warm.
He thanked the enlisted man for the suggestion and got right over to the officers' mess. An orderly by the door took his name down, and said the meal would cost him eighteen cents.
Longarm paid without arguing. He knew that despite the way some raw recruits bitched about rank and privilege in the army of a fool republic, the officers paid for their finer food and fancier beer all out of their own pockets. So eighteen cents was a bargain for the fine steak, mashed spuds, chokecherry pie, and extra coffee he wound up with.
He asked an orderly how come he seemed to be eating alone at such an early hour. He was told everyone had headed up the line to the officers' club, another proposition entirely.
