He went on eating beans and cactus cross-legged as he told her to try and get some damned sleep, in any state of dress, while he stood guard. “I’ll wake you up in time for you to spell me on guard for an hour or so. Then we’ll be pushing those ponies, and ourselves, as if our lives depended on reaching the coast by morning, because they likely will.” She repressed a shudder, asked if he was trying to cool her off by chilling her blood, and then calmly slipped her thin white dress off over her auburn head and lay back on the cotton flannel to close her big blue eyes with an innocent Mona Lisa smile. He couldn’t help but notice she had auburn hair all over.
Her nipples were pink, and standing at attention on her small but nicely molded breasts. Her pale skin and slender build were surely new wonders to admire after his recent adventures with Rosalinda and Ampollita. But he looked away, lit a cheroot, and got up to stand guard on the far side of the tethered stock.
Of course, a man had to move about his post to cover all sides as he guarded it. So he naturally just had to catch a glimpse of her pale nude form from time to time, and then time again.
He had to laugh at himself for peeking. He muttered, “She knew you were close enough to just spread her thighs and enjoy as close a look as you wanted, if it hadn’t been so hot and in such a dumb time and place. Haven’t you figured her yet as what her own kind calls one of them chirladas? She wouldn’t go on and on about it if she really wanted it. Did Rosalinda? Did Ampollita? Did any gal back home who wasn’t a total prick-teaser? How many times have you told a pal not to waste his time and tips on a barmaid that swaps dirty talk with the boys bellied up to her bar?”
He took another drag on his cheroot and snorted, “Shit, even if it wasn’t true, trying to lay anything that nice in this heat would kill you dead as those four Yaqui!”
Chapter 10
As anyone who studies deserts knows, the hottest days are usually followed by the coldest nights, since air baked dry can’t hold much heat after sundown. Yet the night stayed balmy as the two of them rode the four ponies across trackless caliche at a pace that would have done the U.S. Cav proud. So Longarm wasn’t surprised to glimpse distant flashes along the southern horizon, or wonder why the desert breezes from that same direction were commencing to taste more like seaweed than greasewood. When Consuela allowed they seemed to be in for another gully-washer, Longarm said, “I sure hope so. A good rain ought to erase our trail. But just in case it don’t, let’s ride.”
They did, risking their mounts and their own necks on the thin edge of desperate. Mounted astride like a man with her feet braced in stirrups and her skirts hoisted scandalously, Consuela was a good rider. He knew she’d had more than livery stable experience when she didn’t question his frequent trail breaks and changes of mounts. Longarm kept the four-mile-an-hour average of a good infantry column in mind as he rested the ponies more often and trotted them a mite faster.
So by first light, a tad after five in the morning because of an overcast, they were winding their way downgrade through an ancient and wildly eroded lava field when suddenly, off to the southwest, they could see a real silvery sea and Longarm said, “We made it. Can’t be more than a dozen miles from the coastline and it’s downhill all the way.”
Then fat raindrops landed all around to make cowpats of mud in the powdery dust. You didn’t get caliche in a lava field. The chemistry was different as time and occasional but patient rainwater broke basaltic lava down.
Consuela sobbed, “We’re going to get soaked! What will people say if I ride into town with my nipples showing through a thin wet dress?”
Longarm replied, “They’ll say you’ve got great nipples. But hold the thought and let’s swing closer to yonder wall of black rimrock. We may be able to find some shelter from the coming storm.”
In such tricky light, it wasn’t as easy as it sounded, but they did—by the time they’d gotten good and wet. The cave-like mouth of a lava tube, paved with a flat bottom of black sand, gave them more room than they and any number of scorpions and bats might ever ask for. Dismounting, they led the ponies in under the overhang. Longarm handed Consuela some of his wax matches to explore deeper as he broke out the best canvas tarp they had and stepped out into the rain with it to spread it flat in the downpour.
It poured down on him too. But he was already wet, so what the hell. He moved back inside to spy an orange glow, and following it around a bend in the glass-walled lava tube, found Consuela had built a small but cheerful fire, using windblown tinder and some dry sticks she’d found back there.
Longarm didn’t ask why she was kneeling stark naked on a damp cotton flannel blanket. He glanced up at the shiny black ceiling and decided they could risk that much smoke for now. He knew her small blaze would die down to smokeless coals by the time it got light enough outside to matter.
He nodded down at her and murmured, “Tiene razon, I’ll fetch the saddles and we can drape stuff over the trees to dry some whilst we wait out this storm. You sure have tedious wet spells in this desert, no offense.”
He leaned the Big Fifty against the black bumpy glass and moved to shift the damp saddles and such back to the small fire. Then he picked up their water bags and headed back to the mouth of the tube.
Once there, he placed his hat and the Schofield on a fallen black slab, sat down to haul off his boots, then stripped naked before he picked up the bags and stepped out into the deluge.
It felt swell.
The tempest from the muggy Sea of Cortez still held a hint of the tropical clime it had come from, and had he only had a bar of naphtha soap he’d have thought he was taking a shower after a long night in the saddle. But he didn’t. So he was shaking out the now-clean tarp when Consuela, who somehow looked more naked, joined him there in the wet warm dawn to ask what they were doing.
Longarm sighed and said, “I was fixing to refill our water bags with the real stuff. I figured I could drape this tarp on the rocks so’s to funnel rainwater into the bags. I mean to dump what the poor ponies have left of their cactus juice first and … Miss Consuela, would you mind going back inside with that teasing torso? I’m trying to get some work done here, and to tell the truth, I find naked ladies sort of distracting.”
She laughed wickedly, reached down to grasp his semierection, and chortled, “So I see! Who said I was teasing?”
Then, as he really rose to the occasion, she gulped and added, “Ay, que grande! There seems to be more to you than meets the eye, and perhaps we should reconsider!”
So Longarm tossed the wet tarp on the gritty black sand, took her chilled wet form in his arms, and proceeded to lower the two of them to the tarp as she gasped, “No, espar-te. Todavia es temprano, and I did not expect you to take me this seriously!”
