Longarm said, 'You weren't listening. We call it a process of eliminating when one particular address gets more wires than anybody else from particular parts of this vast country, see?'
Pony Bodie grinned and said, 'I reckon I do, now. Maybe I'll be a lawman instead of a telegrapher when I grow up. I dasn't poke about in files until Old Wilbur leaves for the night. You just talked to him, and you should have seen what a prune he is. I get along better with the night man, Herb. I fetch sandwiches and suds for him after dark, and in return he's been showing me how to send dots and dashes when things get slow. He's even let me send night letters when nobody else was around. I reckon I can check these dates out for you, later, after I've fetched him them suds.'
They shook on it and Longarm went on in to pick up his wire from Billy Vail and ask about supper. They served plain-and-simple off the taproom grill. So he ordered a T-bone with home-fries and forget the damned turnip greens. He read the wire from his boss as he waited to be served. Vail wasn't able to tell him anything he didn't already know. But old Billy agreed that a missing witness and repeated attempts to stop a totally ignorant lawman meant they were likely worried little Ida Weaver might have given something away. Billy agreed that if the gal was still alive, she'd have been able to convince them by this time that she hadn't. He wanted to know if Longarm had the least notion who might be holding Ida Weaver, or her body, where. It was sort of comforting to see that even a paid-up U.S. marshal could ask dumb questions. He topped off his supper with serviceberry pie and went easy on the coffee because he'd had a long hard day, likely face another one, and a man had to sleep now and again, even alone in a strange bed.
He went over to the tobacco shop near the railroad platform to buy some bed-reading and make sure he had the time table on that line right. Then he headed back to his hotel as the sun was setting, sort of glad they'd shut down all the rowdy saloons in town because it was easier to turn in early when everybody else had to.
But when he got upstairs with his new edition of Police Gazette, he spied a match stem on the floor where no match stem was supposed to be unless some sneaky son of a bitch had opened his hired door while he was going about more honest chores!
He had the key to the damned door in his jacket pocket. Before trying it in the lock, he cautiously twisted the knob to see if the door was locked. He found it wasn't. So he flung it open to dive through and roll across the rug with his six-gun drawn and the pink pages of the scattered Police Gazette fluttering in every direction.
He kicked the door shut behind him with a bootheel as he yelled, 'Freeze, you mother, and I don't mean mother dear!'
'Custis, is that you?' a surprised familiar voice called back.
Longarm was surprised, too, as he stared up at the womanly outline seated on his bed against the gloaming light from the window to reply, 'What in thunder are you doing up this way, Miss Covina? I never sent for young Daisy yet!'
The widow woman said, 'Thanks for reminding me I'm not young. I thought you'd want your derringer back, and you can't send for young Daisy. She seems to have been born restless. I'd have worried about a kidnapping if she hadn't cleaned out the till while I thought she was tending shop for me.'
Longarm got up and put his gun away with a sheepish grin as he said, 'I'll see if I can get my outfit to make up your losses for you, Miss Covina. I knew right off she was a tramp. But I thought she was too smart to bite hands that were feeding her that well, and I needed her help up this way.'
He tossed his Stetson on the nearby dresser and began to pick up the scattered pink pages as Covina replied, 'Wasn't that just like a man to put all his eggs in such a trashy basket? I thought that I'd better warn you she was gone before you sent for her. So I caught the noon combination, and I've been here a while. I didn't think you'd want me to tell them we were plotting something when I checked in downstairs. Would you care to tell me what we're plotting now?'
He could see her better as he tidied up closer to the window with the light coming over his own shoulder. She was wearing a silk brocade kimono with green and gold dragons crawling all over the black background. It was open enough at the top to prove what Ben Franklin had written about women and trees withering from the top. Her sweet face wasn't all that wrinkled, despite the mop of steel-wire hair.
He said, 'I see you left your travel duster and other baggage in your own room. How did you get in here without a key, Miss Covina?'
She demurely replied, 'The door wasn't locked. When I knocked and nobody answered, I tried the door and found it opened. So I assumed you'd be back soon, and here I've been sitting for what seems like a mighty long time. Do I get to hear the big secret now?'
Longarm grimaced and moved over to the saddlebags he'd brought up from the tack room. As he went through them, he confided, 'The one who picked that lock left me all my spare socks and such. I reckon he, she, or it was after the papers I've been packing on me, personal. Are you sure nobody downstairs knows you're in here with me?'
She said, 'I don't see who could have told them. I never mentioned you when I told them I was up this way from Cheyenne on business and couldn't say how long I might be here. How long might I be here, you secretive thing?'
Longarm moved over to the door again and threw the bolt as he told her, 'Ain't sure. We're waiting on a tip about another secretive cuss. I'll be mighty surprised if somebody doesn't suddenly tell Undersheriff Reynolds where Ram Rogers has run off to.'
Covina Rivers sighed and said, 'I saw you and that other man talking to her up the street from my own window, earlier. I asked a chambermaid who that glamorous young thing might be. I can see why you men are so interested in her. What does that female judge look like?'
Longarm knew better than to describe Edith Penn Keller, J.P., as anything worse than fat and opinionated. The old but nicely built shopkeeper sniffed and said, 'Poor thing. According to our Daisy, you only seem to go for the young and inexperienced ones.'
Longarm laughed incredulously and replied, 'I'd hardly call Daisy inexperienced. But if she told you I'd been messing with her, she was a bare-faced liar. I ain't no innocent schoolboy, and I'll allow she was tempting. But I wanted her to help me catch crooks more than I wanted to play slap and tickle with her, bless her devious hide.'
Covina leaned back on her elbows, one bare knee peeping out at him through the folds of her silk kimono as she calmly asked, 'Does that mean we get to play slap and tickle after I help you catch some crooks?'
Longarm gulped as he considered his options. Then, seeing he was as damned if he didn't as he'd be damned if he did, he decided he'd as soon cuss himself in the morning for acting natural than cuss himself for sending her away mad.
But as he flopped across the pillow beside her, the widow gal, being a gal, gasped, 'Custis! Can't you take a little teasing?'
To which he could only reply, taking her tenderly but firmly in his arms, 'I reckon we've teased each other long enough. If the two of us are going to work as a team, we'd best get this bullshit out of the way.'
'Oh, Custis, you're so romantic!' She giggled as he ran his free hand inside her kimono to discover, as he kissed her, she was built as girlish as that sneaky little Daisy or even Inky Potts at the Riverside News. But picturing little Inky in this same position, with his hand inside a printer's smock instead of a kimono, inspired him to slide said hand down Covina's trembling bare flesh to part the thatch betwixt her thighs without considering how gray it might be while she tried to cross her legs, muttering, 'No! Not yet! It's been so long, and I have to get used to the idea and...' But he'd whipped it out and rolled atop her in his duds to let nature take its course, and as it did so Covina sobbed, 'Oh, my lands, it is so long and a girl could sure get used to this! But don't you want to take your clothes off, darling?'
He said he sure did. But she had to help him some, and he still had his jeans down around his booted ankles when they came, and then came some more, as only a healthy young man who hadn't had any the night before and a sweet little old lady who hadn't had any for even longer could manage, sobbing in mutual sincere ecstasy.
'Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!' the shopkeeper sobbed as he lay limp betwixt her surprisingly springy thighs, letting it soak in her as her warm wet innards pulsed around it.
He began to move his hips experimentally as he got his breath back and said, conversationally, 'It ain't that I'd be ashamed to be seen in public with you, Miss Covina. But it's important we keep it a secret that we've met before, see?'
She thrust her pelvis up to him as she replied just as calmly that she'd already assumed that much.
