Deeper! Harder! I've had to watch out for my reputation, and it's been so long and you're so long and, my God, I've never come this sooooon!'
Longarm had been in bed with sweet little Inky more recently than Rita had been with anybody, judging by the way she was chewing on him with her soft wet innards. So he got her to come thrice in the time it took him to feel the need for a smoke while he caught his second wind.
He'd lost track of that first cheroot he'd lit. It hadn't started a prairie fire under them. So he figured it was safe to light up one more and, while they had the time, strip down to the buff and sprawl friendly atop their duds in the springy but pricklesome dry grass.
As they did so, Longarm remembered his manners and said, 'You and your girlish deputies gave Pony Bodie the grand notion how he could get rich. Neither he nor his transient trash had anything to do with them first three wants you had your gals bring back dead instead of alive. They read about it in the Riverside News. Big Jim's only crime was a tendency to make mountains out of molehills. The way more modest Pony Bodie talked, an old boy laying over with Preacher Shearer, while laying him, to hold up that cattle buyer staying at the Pronghorn across the street from the Western Union. After pointing the victim out, Pony Bodie sat there spitting and whittling in front of everybody while the deed was done, gave you all a false description of the masked man fleeing the scene, and met him later under the church. ' She said, 'That would have been the late Trigger Woods we caught up with in Missouri, right?'
He said, 'You thought you caught up with him. Pony Bodie talked his old reform-school pal into leaving the loot with him for safekeeping and wiring for it once he got to a safe hideout.'
Rita said, 'Good Lord! Were all of them that dumb! Why didn't any of the others tumble to his simple duplicity as soon as we began to get those tips from the rascal they'd wired for their money?'
Longarm passed her the cheroot as he told her, 'You never got one tip from Pony Bodie. I don't know what he told Preacher Shearer, but Preacher Shearer would tell Big Jim, and Big Jim would puff out his chest and tell You. I still don't like him. But I don't have any more hard feeling for the Riverside News right now. Counting that serious stage holdup, when Rusty Mansfield scared the whole bunch by gunning Miss Ida Weaver's uncle, they pulled off a half dozen serious crimes and would have been caught sooner if other pests hadn't convinced MY boss and me we were up against a bigger mystery than there really was.'
As she moved his hand back where she liked it, Longarm told her, 'Everything went according to plan up to where Ida Weaver gunned Rusty Mansfield and the Denver papers reported I was mixed up in it. Bodie wired Rowdy Ruth, a Denver harlot he'd spent some time with for the novelty, and asked her to watch me. When she reported Ida and me had been to the federal building, Bodie put two and two together and came up with three. He hadn't used Ram Rogers up yet. So he ordered Ram to see if he could stop me from getting warm, and Ram recruited the older Texas Tom and Deacon Knox to blur the pattern for me some.'
Rita sighed and said, 'I feel so bad about poor Ida. You think they killed her because they feared Rusty Mansfield had told her something as he lay dying?'
Longarm nodded and said, 'It would have been easy. Bodie could have met her train and offered to walk her up to your place in the dark. He stabbed her and buried her in fresh-dug 'dobe when he had her alone up by the churchyard.'
He took the cheroot back for a drag and went on, 'Nobody did anything all that clever. They had me thinking I was playing a smarter game because rascals too dumb to beat me at checkers kept showing me independent dumb moves that I kept trying to string together. Making a personal enemy along the way didn't help. That poor crazy Swede was after me and me alone. But after I'd made it past Rogers and company in Cheyenne, Gus Bergman did me an unintended favor when he drew my attention to that church and churchyard by sniping at us from the best really high point handy. Bodie thought I was getting warm on purpose. So he figured it was time to close shop and hide his own tracks. He sent Rogers and Rowdy Ruth to a swell hideout. So he'd know where they were when he had Shearer tell Tanner who'd surely tell you where they were. He hoped you'd send somebody wilder than Smiley and Dutch.'
They'd gotten to where they could read each other's body movements without having to jaw about it. So Longarm took her up on her unspoken invite and rolled back in her love saddle as he added, 'After that he figured he only had to murder Shearer, who had to have known too much, and that old Indian gal, who might have known all or nothing at all. I see no point in speaking ill of the dead.'
Rita wrapped her thighs around him to croon, 'I've nothing ill to say about that poor crazy Swede bringing things to a head so soon. I don't see how we'd have ever gotten up the nerve to behave this wild back in town, darling.'
To which Longarm replied, moving his rump faster as the stars came out to admire it, 'Aw, we'd have thought of something.'
The End
