illustrated positions were just plain impossible, although others had sure been fun.
He knew it would be even tougher to go to sleep if he hit the two pillows with an empty stomach and a hard- on. So he put the dirty books back where he’d found them, snuffed the smoke, and trimmed the lamp. He lay there a million years, staring up at the darkness as his stomach growled. He was otherwise sleepy as hell, and he didn’t know where he’d be able to order a meal in such a small town this late at night. He cursed himself for not thinking about that earlier. Like most men of action, he tended to forget about eating and sleeping when he was up and about. So this wouldn’t be the first time he’d toss and turn a bit before he ever got to sleep.
So he was still wide awake a spell later when he heard somebody walking across the library floor above him. It sounded like somebody trying to walk soft, in high-heeled boots. Longarm slowly sat up to silently grope in the darkness for his .44-40 as, sure enough, those sneaky footsteps faded toward the rear of the main room above. Then he heard the cellar door’s latch click, and so he thumbed the hammer of his six-gun back. The side arm fired double-action with a good hard yank on the trigger, of course, but the trigger was hair-set if you cocked the hammer first, and a man sitting naked in a dark cellar with somebody creaking down the stairs at him just never knew how much time he’d have to work with.
Then a match flared and Longarm almost fired at the sudden glow before Ellen Brent called out, “Hello, Custis, are you there?”
Longarm eased the hammer back down as he called back, “Been here some time, ma’am. I’m in bed without no duds on, before you come any closer.”
She followed her flickering match flame around a high stack of books anyway, saying, “I brought you some sandwiches and a canister of lemon punch from the house, seeing you missed supper with us. We have to talk about poor Mavis and that sneaky hardware man!”
She shook out her burnt-down match, struck another, and sat down to perch her little round bottom on the rail of his cot as she struck another and lit the table lamp, adding, “I thought he’d never leave this evening! That’s why I’m so late. I couldn’t leave poor Mavis at the mercy of that Romeo!”
Longarm put his six-gun away, and reclined on that same elbow as he saw she’d indeed brought a picnic hamper along with her. As she began to pile food and refreshment atop the little table, Longarm asked her with one eyebrow raised, “What were you so worried about? Aside from those grown men boarding there, well within range of a good scream, a widow woman is by definition a lady of some experience with horny men.”
The unwed brunette said knowingly, “Remington Ramsay is too smooth to make a clumsy grab at poor unworldly Mavis. I know what he’s up to. They were up there poking and fussing at the walls and woodwork until he had her giggling like a schoolgirl. He means to take his own sweet time on all that repairing and redecorating, and then he means to come at her with flowers, candy, and a proposal of marriage!”
Longarm laughed out loud and asked, “You figure that’s a dirty way to treat a lady?”
To which she replied, offering him a ham-on-rye sandwich, “It is when that’s not what you’re really after! I told you I was keeping an eye, and an ear, on them. I heard him telling her he could repaper all of your room and the front hall cheap if she’d settle for new paper in some other design. He invited her right out to come over to his hardware store and go through all the pattern books he had to show off. But that was only the half of it! He got to picking at loose wallpaper hither and yon, like it was scabby, and then he marveled out loud that Mavis and her poor dead Martin had started out with all the upstairs walls done in old stocks and bonds.”
As she poured lemon punch in tumblers for the two of them Longarm said, “I commented on it when I saw all those pictures of Confederate officials and railroad engines. To tell the truth I’d worry more about a man without glasses pretending they weren’t there at all. Say, this is sure a swell ham sandwich, ma’am!”
She handed him his drink saying, “Thank you. I made it myself, in the dark, speaking of sneaks. I didn’t think you’d want me telling anyone where you were. Mavis asked if I knew where you were when you didn’t come back after that oily hardware monger left. Can’t you see he’s after her property, like that other wretch who trifled with her affections?”
Longarm washed down some ham and rye with the lemon punch she must have mixed in the dark as well. He grinned and said, “Lord love you, you put just the right amount of lemon juice in this rum, Miss Ellen. As to Remington Ramsay, aside from his bragging book, I now know for a fact that he already owns considerable property here in Pawnee Junction and he never had to marry up with anyone he didn’t like to get it. As a dealer in lumber and hardware who got in on the ground floor, he was naturally set to buy building sites and build on them cheap, for sale or rental. He must be rich enough by now. I haven’t had time to find out what those Credit Mobilier bonds and stock certificates are worth. I told you I’d try. How much time do you figure we have before the minister calls out for us to speak now or forever hold our peace?”
She didn’t smile back. She said, “This is serious, Custis. Mavis must be more hard-up than I thought. She barely knew Remington Ramsay, as a tradesman, and now he has her blushing and gushing as if they were already courting. You mark my word, he’ll be in her bed long before any minister has anything to say about it!”
Then she gasped, blushed darkly in the lamplight, and looked flustered. “Oh, I shouldn’t have spoken so boldly to a man! Whatever must you think of me?”
He said soothingly, “That’s all right. I’ve read what Miss Virginia Woodhull has to say about honesty betwixt the genders, and she makes a lot of sense. Albeit I ain’t sure I go along with her on women smoking in public. Not cigars leastways.”
The perky librarian had just taken a sip of the mighty strong lemon punch—she didn’t seem hungry—when her big sloe eyes took in books she’d left on the table. Longarm had replaced them on the far side of the lamp. The library girl gasped, “Good heavens, what are those books doing there?”
To which Longarm could only reply, “Somebody must have put them there. I know I never did. But to tell the truth, I’ve read them both before.”
She giggled and said, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Or does everyone in a big city such as Denver practice free love in the Oriental manner?”
He washed down the last of his first sandwich and reached for a second as he delicately replied, “Not all the folks in Denver, ma’am, just the high-toned folks on Capitol Hill and the low-lifes down on the flood plain of the South Platte. I read somewhere how prosperous middle-class folks worry more about Queen Victoria’s notions of prim and proper behavior than Queen Victoria seems to. Neither the folks with no education nor the folks with a heap of education seem to worry as much about such matters.”
She poured herself more refreshment as she confided, wide-eyed, how she’d read the same thing, asking in a breathless tone if Longarm thought those rumors about the Widow of Windsor and her burly Scotch butler, Mr. Brown, were true.
