him chasing skirts! I swear I think he'd have his wicked way with a snake if he could get some other rogue to hold its head for him! He'd get my broom across his wicked face if ever he darkened my door at supper-time or any other time!' Longarm naturally opened the back door for her. As she marched through, chin at an indignant angle, she continued. 'That snip of a dishwater blonde he's involved with now can't be a day over fifteen, and even a rogue with Longarm's rep ought to know better than to mess with bitty virgin girls!'
As he followed her into her neatly kept kitchen, he smelled fresh-baked bread and something sweeter. He said, 'Leaving the virtue of the maiden to her own conscience, fifteen does seem a tad young. She ain't reached the age of consent under Colorado law. He'd have to get her legal guardian's permission to even come courting.'
Cora took his hat and sat him at a scrubbed pine table near the window as she asked, 'What's poor Bela Nagy supposed to do, challenge a notorious gunfighter with a badge to a duel? That wicked child's poor father is a coal miner who barely speaks English and wouldn't want trouble in any American court in the unlikely event he won!'
Longarm murmured, 'I've noticed ignorant folks can be easy to cow with even a mail-order badge. I just got done exposing some fake lawmen over in the Indian Territory. According to a wire I got just the other day, the real Indian Police have rounded up a bunch of 'em and have 'em singing their little hearts out about home addresses in the Cherokee Nation. It's easy to round up fake lawmen once you notice they're fake.'
She placed a bowl of stew she'd had warming on her stove in front of him, along with a pound of butter and some of that fresh bread he'd been smelling, as she sighed and said, 'I hope you'll forgive me this once for offering so little. I'll make it up to you with a proper dinner tomorrow, if you aim to be in town that long. Why did you just suggest Longarm is a fake lawman, Deputy Crawford? For all the dreadful things they say about his way with the ladies, nobody I know has ever suggested he's not a real federal lawman like you.'
The real Longarm said, 'I'm going to have to catch up with him to be dead certain. But I'm fixing to be surprised as well as chagrined if the bully pestering Bohunk miners' wives and daughters turns out to be the real thing, Miss Cora.'
The young widow sat down with her own serving across from him and insisted, 'I'm sure Longarm is a real lawman. It was only a few weeks ago we were reading in the Rocky Mountain News about the way he'd been in yet another gunfight and won!'
Longarm said, 'I read that edition too. Those newspaper reporters go on a heap. I just read a copy of the New England Sentinel on the train this afternoon. So I know for a fact that a reporter gal who couldn't have interviewed the one and original Quanah Parker in Fort Smith, Arkansas, just published a long interview with some fool Indian. You got to take Miss Weaver's word about him being a big chief.'
Cora asked, 'Are you suggesting Longarm was never really interviewed by that reporter from the Rocky Mountain News? Why aren't you eating your stew? Is it too salty?'
He said, 'That reporter interviewed the survivor of that gunfight, ma'am. I was raised with better manners than to slurp my stew without a proper invitation.'
She started to ask a dumb question, fluttered her lashes, and dug into her own serving as she confessed, 'I'd forgotten what the etiquette books say about the hostess taking the first taste. I guess you think I'm mighty countrified.'
He dug into his own grub, saying, 'Nobody was ever raised more country than me. I had to read that in a book myself. There ain't no shame in just not knowing. But once you learn there's a right way and a dumb way to act around ladies of quality, it would just be rude not to bone up on 'em.'
She blushed becomingly and murmured, 'Go on, I'm nowhere near a lady of quality. I'm just a farm girl who's made out all right in butter and eggs.'
'By hard work,' he insisted. 'I got an eye for whitewash and clean sweeping, Miss Cora. Takes a tidy eye and honest sweat to keep a spread this size this neat, even with help, and a lady who'd give her help an evening off before sundown is a lady of quality in my book.'
She insisted, 'You're making me blush. I swear you're as big a flirt as that dreadful Longarm, albeit I don't feel as frightened as I would if it was him across this very table from me!'
The man of whom she was speaking said, 'I'm sure going to have to meet up with this womanizing wonder. You say he can be found in the company of some fifteen-year-old kid from Bohunk Hill?'
Cora said, 'Eva Nagy, and we're not certain she's that old. I doubt you'd find Longarm anywhere near her parents' humble home after dark, though. They say he drives off into the hills in a curtained buggy, with all the greenhorn girls he can get to go with him.'
She got up to fetch the fresh-perked coffee from her stove as she added, 'Accuse me of having a dirty mind, if you like, but I am a widow woman who's not entirely ignorant of human anatomy and that child he's been molesting can't be... fully developed yet.'
Longarm could only glance out the window at the lengthening shadows as he murmured, 'Well, they say some gents like their olives green because it makes 'em feel... more manly.'
She poured mugs of coffee for both of them as she exclaimed without thinking, 'They say Longarm's hung like a horse, and she's such a tiny thing!'
Then she realized what she'd said, blushed beet red, and sat down to cover her face with her apron, sobbing, 'Oh, Lord, I must really be going mad from living alone, the way I read in that book about the lady who lived in a tower in olden times!'
Longarm said, 'That yam about the Lady of Astolat was only a fairy tale, Miss Cora. Even if it was true, she never went loco en la cabeza from living alone up in her tower. She was hankering for Sir Launcelot in particular. Only he never knew it because she couldn't just call out an invitation to come up and stay a spell whenever he rode by in his tin suit. They did things the hard way in those days. Sir Launcelot never knew the Lady of Astolat hankered for him whilst he, in turn, was hankering for King Arthur's wife.'
Cora laughed despite herself and said, 'That sounds a lot like Colorado these days. That adultery at King Arthur's court led to a really nasty brawl in the end, didn't it?'
Longarm nodded soberly and said, 'It often does. The unwritten law calls for blood and slaughter all out of proportion to the fun anyone could have had. Poor old Arthur threw away his kingdom and his life, Attila Homagy is wandering the world like that Frankenstein monster seeking revenge, and a certain colonel I know has just transferred junior officers to miserable postings because of a few minutes' slap and tickle.'
He sipped some coffee and wearily added, 'Lord knows what he'll ever do if he finds out about his own lady's
