one another only what they themselves needed.
With that moist, mindless, momentary compulsion to couple brought to a boiling eruption—men and women retreated from each other, back to truly needing little else the other could give. Although married—as his parents were, as Able Guthrie and his wife were, as were all those who clung to one another in the sight of their God—a husband and wife struggled through their days together as no more than polite strangers come from different sides of the river.
He was certain no woman would ever understand what lay inside him, waiting to be spoken. He was sure no woman ever could. And for him to attempt to fathom the depths of a woman’s soul … why, he might as well climb to the highest peak in the mountains and with his rawhide lariat try to rope the moon.
Men and women were never meant to live together—that much was plain to him from the painful thrashing life had given him. Hell, there were few men he could live with day after day himself. But he was certain that unanswered, aching loneliness each man and woman must feel a’times compelled them on rare occasions to reach out and somehow touch a private place within one another, no matter how brief and short-lived that intimacy. Still, what troubled him was that as soon as each brief fever had passed, both man and woman went back to walking on alone. Went back to feeling little more than emptiness until they struggled to reach out for one another again.
As he felt his flesh hardening, Bass realized he had been asleep. Conchita was awakening him with her hands. He opened his eyes into slits and watched her in the slowly dancing candlelight as she held him between her two palms, rolling his responsive penis between them like tortilla dough a woman kneaded. Here she massaged his stiffening flesh into readiness.
As Conchita rolled onto one hip and kicked a leg over him, he savored the fleshy sway of those healthy, pendulous breasts as she straddled him, took his manhood in one hand, then settled down upon him with an earthy groan from them both. It fired him anew to find just how moist she was for him, so wet there was hardly any friction as she immediately set about her throbbing dance upon him. With every thrust she took upon him, Conchita became more furied, driving herself more wild, causing her breasts to dance and volve above him until he found himself so maddened, he seized them both—pulling her down savagely so he could suck on one as her hips continued to drive up and back, up and back.
A wild, feral sound was born low in her throat as she pounded herself so fast and hard above him that he knew she was going to flatten out the straw mattress stretched out beneath him on the earthen floor. So savagely did she hurl herself down upon Titus again and again that he knew Conchita was going to hammer him right into the ground itself before she was done with him.
Yet of a sudden he didn’t care again. His own rising fever boiled over in those last few moments before the mindless explosion overwhelmed him, causing Bass to lose himself in the soft coffee-brown flesh of her, tugging for all he was worth at her colorful striped skirt she had hiked up over her hips.
Conchita immediately stopped bobbing atop him for those few seconds it took her to reach down, untie the knot in the upper hem, and pull the long skirt away from her hips, flinging it over her head, where it landed against the nearby wall. Now she was completely naked but for her crude moccasins and that silver crucifix around her neck that rhythmically tapped against his cheek as he pulled the other breast to his mouth and began to suck.
“Mr. Bass!”
She tasted so good—pinon woodsmoke and
“Mr. Bass!”
Reluctantly he opened his eyes and gazed into her face, expecting that she would call out his name again in that muffled way he heard her call out before.
But Conchita’s head was thrown back and to the side, lost in the delicious passion … and she was biting her own lower lip as she continued to hammer herself down upon him so she couldn’t have spoken—
“Mr. Bass! Your union with that whore is over!”
Almost there. He felt himself like an overripe fruit about to burst, when more voices suddenly grew loud right at the edge of his consciousness. Exactly the way he might see something flit at the corner of his eye but—when he looked—it would be gone.
Just when he was certain Conchita was moistening even more around him and Bass sensed that first wave of release himself—
—a sudden rush of cold air flooded into the tiny room as the blanket was flung back.
She froze above him as he jerked up on an elbow.
In the darkened open doorway stood a figure wide of shoulder. A man.
“Conchita!”
Although she did not dare dismount from Bass, the woman nonetheless reached over and swept up her skirt, pulling it up to cover her breasts as the man in the doorway lumbered into the room, into the gently flutting candlelight, stirring shadows and hues of saffron as he came in two long steps and stopped, his arms hung at his side, his chest heaving, fists clenched as he snarled low foreign words at the woman.
Bass did not understand anything of what the man barked at her, but his meaning was never more clear. The import of the intruder’s words was as shockingly plain as the ominous bark of a strange dog encountered on the backtrails of Boone County, the warning growl of a cornered badger, the hostile grunt of a grizzly boar closing in on him.
The stranger took another step into the room as Titus searched frantically for his coat, his belt that had been wrapped around the coat, the scabbard that had been hanging from that belt—
Then looked up at the intruder.
The lieutenant!
“You son of a bitch!” Bass spat at the soldier who stood above him, bare-chested, wearing only his black pantaloons, held up by wide leather braces.
Conchita suddenly dragged herself off him, both of them still wet from their mutual release. He began to rise to meet the soldier who Scratch knew felt nothing but hatred and rancor for the Americans who had trailed the Comanche into the mountains to save what women and children they could.
In the hallway behind the sergeant shadows darted, voices called out, someone grunted and others screamed as a heavy object struck the wall outside. A man cried out in pain. Then a second, and a third body smacked against the side of the hall. And in those fleeting seconds as he rolled onto his hip, scrambled to his feet, and hurled himself at the soldier, Bass thought he heard the white-head barking in that dark, narrow tunnel of a hallway—grousing with fire and brimstone and a most certain eternity spent in hell’s own fire for those he found arrayed against him.
A solid thunk burst through the doorway from that hall, echoing with the sound of a heavy maul striking tight-grained hickory.
The sergeant met him in the middle of the room. Conchita screeched in horror as they grappled, arms and legs a blur. For a fleeting moment Bass was gratified that his opponent had burst into the room without a weapon … gratified, that is, until the Mexican cocked back a huge, hard-boned fist and drove it against the American’s temple.
With the light of a thousand shooting stars the darkened crib lit up as Scratch rocked back on his bare feet, then shifted his weight back farther still to keep from pitching over, when the sole of one bare foot landed on the wide band of thick leather. He stood there, blinking his eyes to clear them of stars as Conchita burst up from the floor, shrieking, her arms outstretched before her as she lunged for the sergeant’s arm curling in the wavering candlelight, in that hand a long double-edged dagger appearing right out of the air.
Ramirez swore at her while she struggled to pull the arm down far enough to seize the knife. Sobbing, she implored him as Bass blinked again, trying vainly to clear the rain-soaked cobwebs from his mind: hearing men banging the wall outside, the grunts and curses in a foreign tongue, McAfferty’s cries almost as foreign to his ears.
Then, as Scratch sank to his knees, his temple throbbing still but the shooting lights grown dim, he felt the belt beneath one hand. And beneath the other, the rock-hard rawhide sheath.
At the moment Titus seized the scabbard in one hand, gripped the knife’s handle in the other—he watched the sergeant clench his beefy left hand into a fist, drag it back as a man would cock the huge goosenecked hammer on a smoothbore, then fling it at the woman’s face.
