then slowing down to fifteen-or twenty-minute rests for each hour in the saddle as their confidence grew and their mounts got wearier. He knew an old-time Pony Express rider could have made it to the border by this time. But those hell-for-leather kids had gotten to change ponies every ten miles or so. Harmony Drake’s bunch had to get sixty or more before they’d be out of his jurisdiction.
He nodded to himself and decided, “They’ll play it cavalry style. They’ll call thirty miles a fair ride and hole up for the day no more than halfway to the border. So if I head after them after sun down, the way I’m supposed to, they’ll be crossing into Sonora about the time I find their damned midway camp at dawn!”
He stomped inside to find Rosalinda, naked as a jay, setting a plank kitchen table with their heroic breakfast.
She’d been enough to give a man pause in that black lace chemise. It hadn’t half shown how flawless her smooth tawny charms really were. A lot of gals that were still worth screwing had protruding or otherwise odd belly buttons, mismatched nipples, and so on. But Rosalinda’s casually displayed body was just plain perfection.
He tried not to comment as he sat down to inhale bully beef and tomato preserves with Arbuckle Brand coffee. But as she sat demurely bare-ass across from him, she felt obliged to tell him she’d stripped to keep from spattering her swell new dress.
Longarm laughed despite himself and said, “That black lace left behind as a red herring is meant to be worn as a combinacion, not a vestido for street wear, Miss Rosalinda.” She nodded and said, “You told me. Pero I do not intend for to wear it on the streets of Yuma. I intend to wear it for Papago friends and relations to admire. Do you really think my chupas are too big? I see you avoid them with your eyes and I am not used to this. Even my poor old husband liked for to look at the three of us as we served him his morning coffee in bed.” Longarm sighed and said, “Ain’t nothing wrong with your tits, Miss Rosalinda. It’s just that you’re a married-up lady and … Hold on, did you say you and your sisters served a Mormon coffee in bed, all three of you stark naked?”
She pouted. “Si. Then he asked us for to put on a naughty show for him. He was generous and kind, pero as I said, old. So perhaps he had trouble with his manhood and needed more inspiracien than most. As I told you, Fat Maria was willing. Pero Felicidad and me felt it would be bad medicine, as well as a mortal sin, if two blood relatives did such things to one another while he and a third mujer went reverso.”
Longarm cut in with a laugh. “Never mind the lip-smacking details. A dirty old man pretending to be a Mormon should have known how most Indians would rather indulge in cannibalism than incest in any way, shape, or form. He had to be pretending to be a Mormon because, whilst a real Latter-Day Saint might or might not make Indian wives wear that special Mormon underwear, he’d never let them serve him coffee, tea, or tobacco, in bed or anywhere else. How did he go about convincing the three of you he was marrying up with you according to the Book of Mormon?”
She looked blank, and then recalled the old trader had said something about writing their names in the flyleaf of his Good Book to make it all lawful and binding. Then she asked what was so funny.
He said, “You ain’t married up to nobody, Miss Rosalinda. If it’s any comfort to you, Goldmine Gloria doubtless pulled the wool over his eyes as well on the way in to Yuma. I’ll try to find out what happened to him and your elder sister when I catch up with the sass. So what say we quit messing around and get cracking!” She said that sounded like a grand suggestion, and swept the tin cup and plates from the table to climb up on top of it and spread herself in wide welcome by the dawn’s early light.
Longarm rose thoughtfully to his feet, unbuttoning his shirt, as he murmured, “Well, as long as it’s all in the line of duty …”
But he enjoyed it too, once he was pronging her hard and deep with his feet on the dirt floor, a palm braced atop the table to either side of her wriggling hips, and with her bare ankles over both his naked shoulders. For she was almost too tight for him, and he believed her when she bragged that she’d never had that much manhood inside her, or any man at all for some time. He told her she was built just right for him as well. So they naturally wound up back in her bedroom, and a good time was had by all as Rosalinda showed him what that imaginative old trader had wanted her to do with her sister. He had to allow it didn’t seem as sinful, seeing she’d just had a bath and they weren’t even distant cousins.
So between one swell position and another, it was broad daylight outside before they headed out, half satisfied and heavily laden, as the morning sun made short work of the cooling effects of that hot shower they’d enjoyed under cold water out back.
Longarm had suggested Rosalinda load up on gifts for her Papago kinfolk, seeing she’d be staying with them till it was safe for her and her one surviving sister at the trading post they likely now owned.
Aside from that Big Fifty and its bulky ammunition, Longarm knew how much more important water could be than other trail supplies in the country out ahead. So he helped himself to a couple of five-gallon water bags, but left them empty for now, with water weighing eight pounds a gallon and Rosalinda sure they could make her uncle’s summer camp on a couple of canteens. Longarm slung the Big Fifty and bandolier of buffalo rounds across his chest, and shoved all the trail grub he had room for in the two gunnysacks he’d packed with water bags, flannel blankets, canvas tarps, and so on. Then he tied the ends of the two sacks together and slung the knot over his left shoulder to take the lead Indian style. Indian men didn’t walk ahead of womankind to be rude. They considered it cowardly to let women and children stomp on the horse apples and rattlesnakes ahead of them. They walked with no load but their weapons so they could spot trouble faster than a gal trudging head-down with all their baggage. But there was no way a gal as small as Rosalinda could have packed both their loads on a level walk, even on a cooler morning.
Longarm figured it was now somewhere in the eighties, and he knew it would soon be a whole lot hotter. But with any luck they’d be able to make it by noon. Folks of any race along the border knocked off for la siesta by noon if they had a lick of sense and any reason to go on living. Folks from other parts were inclined to consider la siesta a lazy Latin habit. They were used to dividing their days up into hours set aside for working, resting, eating, sleeping, and so on. Both the Spanish-speaking folks and the desert dwellers knew better. Whether Moorish or American Indian, they divided their days up into times of being too hot or cool enough to move. This inspired them to keep hours others found odd. The same lazy-looking Mexican you’d find knocking off for the afternoon was likely to be open for business at midnight, or having a party at three in the morning. The hands of a man-made clock had less say than the rays of that ferocious sun up yonder in this part of the world.
But this early in the day, the southwest corner of Arizona Territory could get almost pretty in its own exotic way. Whether you called it the Yuma Desert or the northern reaches of the Sonora Desert, it was all trying to make up its mind whether it could best be described as lusher than usual desert or drier than usual chaparral. The flora and fauna of such long-established dry country had had time to adapt to it more ways than you saw in younger deserts. Cactus grew in all sizes and shapes, from bitty pincushions to the tall skinny organpipes and far more impressive saguaro, looming all about like holdup victims in green Robin Hood outfits.
Vicious jumping cholla tried to look like a cross between a cactus and a crab-apple tree, as if tempting the unwary traveler to get too close. There was lots of prickle-pear, and the knee-high barrel cactus that could save your life if you ran out of water and didn’t mind drinking what looked like warm spit and tasted like soapy dishwater.
