for!'
Then she lowered her pretty face to his lap to wet her lush lips and proceed to give him a French lesson that would have cost a week's pay in New Orleans!
As he stiffened in pleasure, surprised at how hard she had him after all that time in old Covina's experienced flesh, Longarm moaned, 'Let's get undressed and do it right! I don't want to come this way, you pretty little thing!'
She stopped sucking long enough to grin up at him like a mean little kid and said, 'Later. After I get off work this evening. Right now we don't have time for a proper orgy. So let's come fast as well as wicked. You'll never guess what I'm doing to myself down here while I'm sucking you off up there!'
Then she couldn't talk with her mouth full, and he didn't much care what was going on in her ring-dang-do if it couldn't be with his old organ-grinder. Then he was coming, and, as always, it was driving him wild with mingled desires to be in every possible position at once as she took it all the way down her throat with her tongue licking the balls she'd pulled out of his jeans.
Then, as abruptly as she'd started, Inky Potts withdrew her smiling face from his lap, saying, 'That's enough, for now. I have to get back to my job while I still have one!'
He could only lay there with his dick hanging out as he watched her tidy herself up, cool as if she'd just gotten up after a night alone.
As she brushed and pinned up her long hair, seated beside him on the cot, Longarm saw the red wax candle she'd left on the rug between his boots had been rounded off and molded sort of sassy at the thick end. He took some comfort in the modest dimensions of the candle she seemed to know better than him. He'd read somewhere that both men and women who took to using dildos or substitutes for the real thing tended to work their way up to bigger and bigger insertions until a real dick wasn't nearly enough to satisfy them.
She caught the direction of his interest and flushed slightly to confess, 'I told you I've been doing without for months. I'm only a woman, not a saint or the kid sister Mr. Tanner seems to take me for.'
Longarm said, 'I thought I heard you say a wandering printer gal has to worry about men trying to get under her skirts.'
To which she replied, 'it all depends on who might be trying to do so, when. You men have the strangest sense of time and place. How would you like it if some girl made a grab for your buttocks when you were bending over to pick up an anvil?'
Longarm chuckled and said, 'A heap of anvils would no doubt be dropped on heaps of toes. I'm glad you thought this was the time to grab my dick, Miss Inky. But that wasn't the favor I was about to ask of you.'
She said, 'I know. I told you you'd have to wait until I came home from work if you wanted to go all the way with me. That is what you really wanted, and I will find you here when I get back, won't I?'
Longarm's dick was soft enough to put away for the time being as he assured her he'd stay right where he was. So she kissed him, said she couldn't wait for closing time, and told him to help himself to anything else she had to offer before she lit out on him.
So Longarm never had to tell her that was what he'd been meaning to ask if he could do. He needed a place to hide out in Keller's Crossing while he let his plot with good old Covina take shape. You didn't have to lie to folks when they didn't see you and might even think you'd left town, satisfied.
So Longarm took off his duds and got into Inky's bed to read the telegrams and news clippings while he waited for her to come back and give him some real satisfaction.
CHAPTER 20
Inky did. It was just as well he'd had a whole afternoon's rest and heaps of sugar and chocolate to keep him going, once Inky had cooked him a fine supper and undressed entire for dessert.
It was purely a marvel, he thought, as he mounted the sweet young thing with two pillows under her firm little ass, how different gals could get and still seem lovely with two pillows under their asses.
For Covina had been a pale-thighed novelty after Lakota Sue, and the frolicksome fullblood had been nothing like the more sedate-looking but just as passionate Portia Parkhurst, attorney-at-law. He decided Inky reminded him more of that young wagon train gal from Poland, save for having different-colored hair, no Polish accent, and, come to study on it, a different way of moving her ass. It was only her ass that reminded him of that other sweet kid from Poland.
She took it dog style more like good old Roping Sally, save for Inky being built way smaller and good old Roping Sally being dead.
Thinking of dead gals reminded him of that Deputy Ida Weaver who'd shot Rusty Mansfield in front of him down in Denver. Looking down at a dead gal in this position would be awful, but he couldn't help wondering what he'd missed by treating her with so much respect. The poor thing might have still been alive, taking it dog style, had not he been ordered to tail her at such a discreet distance.
When Inky got on top with the late sun painting tiger stripes of light and shadow through the blinds on her pale bouncing body, she didn't do it at all like old Covina, and he was glad. He'd be meeting up with old Covina in a day or so, and it would be as bad as being married up if all the gals a man went to bed with screwed the same.
Inky fucked him all the different ways she could think of, and, as the old trail song went, if she'd have had wings she'd have fucked him flying. But they had plenty of time to smoke, talk, and even catch up on their sleep before she was shaking him awake by his dick and demanding he tell her where the night had flown.
He said he didn't know how high up went or how long forever was, either. So they tore off a morning quickie, had bacon and eggs, and she left first, warning him to be discreet, as she put it, when he let himself out.
Longarm tried to be. He waited until nigh nine, when everyone would be at work, and slipped out and along a shady alley, fully dressed, to circle around to the vomit-green house of old Edith Penn Keller, J.P.
He found the black-robed fat lady telling a young boy she couldn't issue him a wedding license no matter how much he loved the little gal next door. When it was Longarm's turn, he said he'd come for a writ of exhumation. He had to explain that was a permit to open a grave. One got the impression their J.P. had never attended Harvard Law.
She said it was jake with her if he wanted to dig a hog farmer up. She rang for her clerk, a little brown sparrow, and told Longarm to just spell out what he needed.
So Longarm did and a few minutes later he was over at the churchyard with a couple of stable hands from the hotel. They'd allowed they had the time, and he'd already noticed they had shovels.
Finding his way to the tombstone of the late Nathan Hemmings as they followed, Longarm pointed down and declared, 'Like Brother Brigham said, this is the place. Like I told you, you'll find the 'dobe ain't been soaked and sun baked since they buried him.'
One of the stable hands sank his shovel in the bare dirt mounded over the coffin far below and said, 'You're right. It feels more like digging bird gravel. Almost as loose packed, least ways.'
As the recruits began to get down to business they were naturally joined by others. It seemed you could hardly have a gunfight or dig up a grave in a small town without others coming over to ask what you thought you were doing.
Longarm saw Big Jim Tanner and young Pony Bodie, among others, as things got sort of crowded around the hog farmer's last resting place. So he said, 'I wish you'd give us more room and be careful of them other graves, gents. How come so many of you are still packing guns?'
Pony Bodie replied, 'I told you. We're on the prod for the persons unknown who cut up poor Preacher Shearer and his squaw.'
Big Jim volunteered, 'I keep telling the boys you shot the killer right next door. But who listens? Why are we exhuming poor old Nate, Deputy Long?'
Longarm said, 'We ain't. I don't expect we'll have to dig down as far as the coffin lid. The killer wouldn't have had time to dig down more than a yard or so at the most.'
The newspaperman demanded, 'What killer? Gus Bergman? He wasn't in town when we buried the old timer in that grave.'
Before Longarm had to answer, one of his stable hands called out, 'I've hit something soft and mushy here.'
Longarm moved over to stare down at a scrap of floral-print calico visible amid the dusty 'dobe clods and said, 'Brush the dirt off her gentle, boys. She'd have wanted it that way.'
