Matilda said, “I don’t think she was messing with either of those dead boys we just saw. You were right about redheaded hotel guests attracting notice, and that other one, Quinn, had another girl here in town.” Longarm brightened. “Are you sure? Might you know this other local lady with such poor taste in men, Miss Matilda?”
To which she demurely replied, “My friends call me Matty, and I don’t know why I’m attracted to rascals either., I don’t know the serving girl they say that handsome stranger in town had been seen with a lot. But her name is Sarah Something and she works for that Widow Farnsworth. Most everyone in town who doesn’t work for C.C.H. seems to be working for that rich widow these days.”
Longarm said, “I’ve noticed. I think I know the maid of whom you’ve heard gossip. She ain’t there no more. Let’s hope she turns up alive so I can question her about old Quicksilver. That does present a sort of pattern, when you study on it with your eyes half shut.”
The waitress held his arm tighter as she demanded, “What do you want with that sassy Sarah and her high- toned ways? Was that true what Peony told me about you and her the other night?”
He said he wasn’t sure what she was talking about, and was quick to explain, “Just before they killed her to shut her up, the gal we had down as Bunny McNee told a beanery serving a supper crowd that she’d had enough and wanted out. The maid called Sarah was sparking a hired gun and working for a lady who’d hired a man murdered by a hired gun. That might add up to a pair of scared quail all this gunfire flushed!”
She didn’t seem to follow his drift. He was still working on what it all meant in any case. So he asked if she knew a place where they might have that ice cream he’d promised her.
She laughed. “At this hour?” she asked, and suggested they just get on back to her place, where she just happened to have something stronger than ice cream on hand.
So they did. She said she felt no call to tell anyone they were back seeing it was almost closing time downstairs.
Once they were up in her small neat garret room, she sat him on the bed, bolted her door, and poured something in two hotel tumblers by the moonlight through the overhead skylight. It smelled like malt liquor and tasted even better. Matty said she’d bought it for female complaints. As she cast aside her shawl and sat down beside him to clink glasses, she had to allow that a gal sleeping alone at high altitude seemed to have a heap of itchy turning and tossing to complain about.
He gravely replied he’d heard the same from some Denver ladies only a mile above sea level. As they sipped the strong stuff, they agreed that an article they’d both read about thin air made some sense. For everyone knew ladies suffering from consumptive lungs got passionate as well as wan and lovely, like that Miss Camille with all those lovers in that novel by Mister Dumas. It seemed possible that feeling breathless made a natural gal feel, well, breathless.
As she poured another round, Matty confided she’d spent many a breathless night up there behind the false front. When she sat back down closer, she breathed heady fumes in his face as she demanded, “Why did you make Peony so breathless last night, you silly?”
To which he could only reply, “It was my understanding the chambermaid of whom you speak is a happily married woman, Miss Matty.”
The waitress giggled and said, “I’ll bet she is. She said it made her feel really swell when you hit bottom. She said nobody had been in her that deep since she was way younger and skinnier. Did you really do that to her, you dog?”
Longarm didn’t want to talk about doing it dog-style to a gal he’d never even kissed. He was mighty peeved at Peony for bragging on that with a husband waiting at home for her. He was peeved at himself for the way it was getting him hard, just thinking about that big rump of the cheating chambermaid moving in time with his thrusts.
He said, “I never talk about such private matters one way or the other. Careless talk can mess up another pal’s fish story when nothing happened, or make a pat feel like a fool when something did.”
She leaned even closer and purred, “You mean if I was to lose my head like Miss Camille you’d never tell anyone downstairs? I ain’t as coarse-natured as Peony. I could never look another in the eyes and say right out that I’d just kissed a bigger dick than my husband’s!”
He allowed that did sound sort of coarse. And then she was groping at his fly in a way that threatened his buttons, so he told her he was better at undressing his fool self. Then he rolled her in for a kiss that would have done the breathless Camille proud as they fell flat across her mattress together. But damn if she didn’t have his old organ-grinder out of his fly by now and damn if it wasn’t hard as a rock. So without preamble or taking off as much as her dining room apron, the breathless waitress rolled atop him, straddled his fully clad form, and just hoisted her skirts to haul the crotch of her newfangled and naughty French underdrawers aside and impale her warm wet innards on his raging erection as they both gasped deeply in that thin mountain air.
By the time she’d bounced herself to climax that way, she’d slipped off everything but her high-buttons, black little stockings, and fake silk underdrawers. He was glad she hadn’t been wearing the kind they trimmed with black lace. Once she’d come, she said his tweed suit felt mighty scratchy as well. So she rolled off to coyly remove everything as he rolled upright, undressed as fast as he could, and rejoined her in the middle of the mattress with a pillow under her bare bottom.
She gasped, “Oh, Dear Lord! You can plumb a girl’s very depths with that tool, can’t you! But Custis, dear, you do mean to keep this our only little secret, don’t you?”
He kissed her, and meant it. He’d been about to ask her the same thing, and it felt swell to just let go with a sensible pal who felt the same way about good old barnyard rutting.
The frisky little gal had some barnyard suggestions of her own regarding positions she said she’d always felt curious about but had never had such a swell chance to try. Longarm found this hard to buy, but never said so as she made a liar out of her mouth with her experienced hips. The contrast between her willowy moonlit form and the far more substantial curves of old Peony the night before made a man with a curious nature of his own feel mighty fond of the both of them as he pounded away in the small garret room.
Meanwhile, out on the edge of town, a rider mounted on a lathered pony reined in to report to another rider sitting his mount in a patch of shade. “I’ve hunted high and I’ve hunted low for that nosy lawman, Boss. Lord knows where he’s at tonight! He ain’t in any of the back rooms along Saloon Row. He ain’t with that new constable at the lockup or at home. I’d have been mighty surprised to find him with Widow Farnsworth, but I nosed about up yonder anyway. She’s still up and about, drawing on maps in her dining room with that colored man in charge of her track workers.”
