He commenced to rock the boy in the boat for her as he calmly went on. “If Miss Medusa Le Mat’s in town, she ain’t wearing her usual dress. Maureen Cassidy ought to be able to point out her Uncle Chester if he don’t watch out. You say she’s at your house right now?”
Pat moaned, “Oooh, that feels so lovely! Yes, I’ve left the kid in the care of my housekeeper, with orders she’s not to receive visitors when I’m not home. I didn’t invite you home with me because my housekeeper’s a self- confessed peeper with a dawning interest in these very pleasures. So would you please mount up and pleasure me again?”
Longarm cocked one leg over to massage her moist clit with the head of his semierection, noticing how soon it began to feel like a chore when the gal started giving the damned orders.
He said, “Silent Knight allowed he might have been by to court the gal often enough to get turned down. What do he and Lash Flanders really do, honey?”
She tried, “They’re top hands, riding for the Lazy Eight, and don’t you intend to put it all the way in, you teasing thing?”
To which he replied, “In a minute. I’m distracted. Call me a sissy if you must. But I find it hard to keep it up for a gal who’s telling me big fibs, Pat.”
She thrust her pelvis up to catch another inch of him by surprise as she sobbed, “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I’ve never lied to you about anything! Why should I?”
He rolled dead center and thrust it in as far as he could get it not all the way hard, and just as he’d hoped, she moaned in delight and started moving passionately under him.
But he was a big man, too heavy for her to really bounce in the saddle unless he helped some. So he just lay sort of soggy on top of her, enjoying her efforts a lot, as he calmly told her, “I want you to listen carefully to my proposition before you feed me more white lies.”
She pleaded, “Please, Custis, you have to believe me!”
He kissed her to hush her and insisted, “You ain’t been listening. I savvy machine politics. Neither Denver nor any other town is run on the level. Crooked politician is a redundant term. Honest Abe never got elected without telling many a lie. The voters always have to choose betwixt baby-kissers willing to give them the sort of government you’d expect, and baby kissers who just plain rob them. I know you were appointed undersheriff by the county machine. Nobody else could have offered you the job.”
She said, “Make love to me, damn you! The county board of supervisors are as pure as the driven snow and I’m hot as hell!”
He left it deep and throbbing as he insisted, “I just said I ain’t interested in local graft. I only want to know what Lash Flanders and Silent Knight do for the powers that be.”
Pat gasped, “Don’t tease me like this. They both ride for the Lazy Eight.”
He gave her a few good strokes, then insisted, “No, they don’t. I just met them way off their range on a workday, and Lord knows where they rode from there. When first we met they were clean across their own county line in Florence, arrested on an assault charge. I asked Hard Pan Parsons as I was getting my belongings back. You can hire a top hand for forty a month and found. You don’t have to keep bailing him out of jams he gets into on his own. So who do they get in jams for, Pat?”
She hesitated, then sighed and said, “Cattlemen’s Protective Association, as regulators. Now do it regular, you brute!”
He proceeded to, hotter than he’d been letting on, and when he came in her, they both moaned out loud because her climax started earlier and lasted longer, as if Mother Nature aimed to make up for the more complicated plumbing she’d designed for her daughters.
As he lay limp in her amorous embrace, Longarm muttered, “We have a team like that working out of my home office. We call ‘em Smiley and Dutch instead of Silent and Lash. Deputy Smiley’s smart but inclined to reason with a hair-trigger cuss, whilst Dutch would draw and throw down on his own mother if she stared at him mean. The two of them add up to one good lawman, just as Silent and Lash likely make for a smart but dangerous hired gun.”
Pat kissed him and said, “I said they were regulators, not hired guns, dear. You’re right that one political hand has to wash another, but neither the county council nor me would put up with paid assassins.”
He asked what they did if they weren’t allowed to assassinate anybody for the C.P.A.
She said, “Regulate. They encourage folks to act regular here in the Flint Hills range. There’s statute law and then there’s county custom. You’d have to be a cattleman to understand.”
Longarm had been a cattleman in his time. So he was commencing to understand. There was no law on the books saying a strange rider with no visible means of support but the running iron in his saddlebag could be arrested, or worse. Yet any honest cowhand could tell at a glance a cuss like that was up to no good.
There was nothing in the Constitution or your average state charter saying you owed it to your neighbors to search out the owner of a dogie following one of your own cows with another man’s brand on its fool hide, and you didn’t have to offer coffee and cake to any passing rider who stopped by to ask permission to use your water pump. You just acted regular if you wanted the folks for miles around to take you for regular neighbors.
Longarm finally rolled off the sated undersheriff to light them up a cheroot to share as he opined, “I ain’t too keen on vigilante justice or regulators dropping by to explain the facts of life to a new homesteading family from other parts. It can get out of hand when and if your lawfully appointed peace officers let it.”
She snuggled closer and assured him, “Silent and Lash are all right. Even judicious brutality from a badge- wearer has a way of falling into the pages of the opposition newspapers. But when you call it outraged public opinion, it’s accepted when a petty thief or wife beater gets what he deserved.”
Longarm replied, “I just said I knew what regulators did. What’s the story on that assault charge over to Florence?”
She took a drag on the cheroot before she declared, “It will never come to trial. The jasper Lash assaulted will surely drop the charges by the time he gets better and talks it over with a lawyer. The silly thing’s a traveling- notions peddler, traveling about with his one-horse cart to peddle ribbon bows and such to the women folks out our way. He seemed to have gotten fresh with some of the wives he came across alone in a soddy with neither their man nor older kids to protect them.”
