for nearly fifteen years, and you spoiled it all for a few moments of lust, you two-faced hound!' The battered lover looked up and snorted impatiently, 'Aw, shove a sock in it, you old fool! Your precious Meg has been giving it away since the two of you hit this post, if not before, and I only did my duty by taking pity on an aging beauty who was begging for some!'
The poor old major tried to go for his jeering junior officer. But the others stopped him and Longarm, seeing his own services weren't needed, eased back up the stairs, muttering to himself about beauties of any age who got poor weak-willed men in trouble. Then he felt a whole lot worse about them as he saw that room clerk and a couple of the interior guardsmen had lit up the hall to fling open each and every damned door along the damned hall!
Pasting a self-assured smile across his own face, Longarm strode to join them, trying in vain to come up with a damned good story in a damned short time as, sure enough, the fool clerk was opening the door he'd told that fairy godmother to bolt on the inside!
But as he joined them, the clerk just nodded at him and explained, 'The Corporal of the Guard said to check every room, Deputy Long.'
Longarm gravely allowed that he understood. His fairy godmother, like all the others, had obviously slipped into her duds and down the back way with a skill born of some practice.
As he bade the enlisted men good night and shut the door after them, he couldn't help feeling a mite tense about his fairy godmother's married name.
For that damned unwritten law could be a bitch when a man knew who might be gunning for him. He was going to feel dumb as hell if he'd come all this way to avoid one jealous husband, only to be totally surprised by some outraged total stranger!
CHAPTER 11
After a breakfast of bacon and flapjacks with butter and sorghum molasses, Longarm went across to the stables to see about getting to that Comanche Agency. The livery ponies he'd hired in Spanish Flats had been ridden some since then. So he asked the remount sergeant to lend him a cavalry mount that could use the exercise. The sergeant showed him a big gray gelding they kept as a spare for their mounted band. Cavalry bandsmen always rode grays, and doubled in battle as litter bearers. Nobody had ever explained the part about gray mounts to Longarm's satisfaction.
When he got his hired stock saddle from the tack room and cinched it up, he could see the critter stood close to sixteen hands high and had the barrel chest of a serious traveler. They told him the brute was called Gray Skies. Longarm didn't know why until he'd mounted up, fortunately inside the paddock, and suddenly found out what all those soldiers blue had been grinning about.
But he stayed on, cheating some by hanging on to the horn and locking his denim-clad calves against the gelding's big shoulders in a way few could have managed in cavalry stirrups with more natural legs. So after he'd settled down to sullen crow-hops, Longarm tore off his Stetson to whip Gray Skies across the eyes with it, yelling, 'Powder River and let her buck! You call this big fat puppy dog a horse?'
So, seeing the joke was on him, Gray Skies decided to be a sport about it, and they rode off across Flipper's Ditch as pals, or at a more sedate trot leastways.
They'd told him the Indian village he was looking for was better than a half hour ride. So he didn't slow down to take in the shantytown between. There seemed to be fewer Indians and more colored folks than you usually saw around Western military posts. The Tenth Cavalry was likely expected back once the current Apache scare wound down. It was none of his beeswax how any army men spent their free time. It hadn't even been his own notion to help that army wife enjoy herself the night before, blast her devious ways and wasn't it a shame they'd had to quit so early.
He hadn't ridden far across the prairie out the far side of the ragged-ass settlement before he heard a whip crack behind him and turned in the saddle to spy that B.I.A. ambulance, or light-sprung cross between a surrey and a covered wagon, following him down the ruts at a good clip.
Not wanting to be taken as a kid who raced with wagons, Longarm reined off the trail and sat his big gray on a slight rise to watch them tear on for Fort Smith. As they got closer he saw they had the canvas cover rolled halfway up on its hoops to let him see the passengers seated between the load in back and the jehu and shotgun messenger up front. They were going like hell and bouncing pretty good behind the full six-mule team. Neither Godiva Weaver nor the pouty kid up front with that Greener Ten-Gauge seemed to notice him as they passed. But the buckskin-clad Fred Ryan waved. So Longarm waved back.
He rode on through the settling dust of their passage, trying to compare the gyrating pussies of two different gals in his mind, even as he wondered why that seemed so tough. He'd long since noticed how easy it was to recall the ones who'd got away, or the very few who'd been really bad in bed. But it seemed to be the great lays a man got mixed up in his fool head. Sometimes he wondered if that might not be the reason some few gals just lay there like a side of beef. They just wanted to be remembered.
The grass all around had grown higher than one saw around Denver by the time it dried out and went dormant but still nourishing in the midsummer sun. For they were just east of the old Chisholm Trail and hence on what the grass professors called the mid-grass prairies. They meant the almost-perfect zone for growing winter wheat or beef, with neither too little nor too much rain. He could only imagine how the buffalo might have roamed before they'd been shot off this far east. He could see how the Indians had felt when they'd all wound up on the shorter grass of the Texas Panhandle and the hide shooters had still kept at it.
The Indians suspected, and Longarm knew, some of what passed for a heap of yahoo butchery had been deliberate government policy. Or at least the policy of General Phil Sheridan's pals in Congress. The old war hero and Indian fighter had only been half joshing when he'd told Congress they ought to issue a medal showing a buffalo hunter on one side and a surrendering Indian on the other.
Longarm couldn't help feeling sorry for both the buffalo and the Indians. But having done his share of scouting, he had to admit life on the High Plains could be more healthy when you didn't see as many of either coming over the skyline at you.
He topped a gentle rise to spy a dozen head of those longhorns he'd accompanied north from the Red River. A couple of Indian kids dressed like feathery cowhands were drifting them down the grassy draw as if to move them further from the traveled trace and yet another sudden surprise. Cows on unfamiliar range could spook and go tearing off a day's ride when somebody snapped his fingers at them the wrong way.
Longarm waved casually to the distant Comanche, and they waved back in as relaxed a manner. But it was too early to tell whether the B.I.A. and Quanah Parker were going to turn the most dangerous horsemen on the High Plains into peaceable stockmen or farmers.
In the meantime, the way they'd been acting seemed a welcome change from the way Comanche could act if
