He couldn’t help wondering how many men had been killed and why and by whom, but he’d learn all that once he got back to Denver. That’s where he was heading now, by way of Leadville, where he’d pick up the Old Leadville trail and take it up and over Mosquito Pass to the growing, mile-high city sprawled on the plain at the foot of the Front Range.
It was getting on toward night, however, so he’d spend the night in Leadville and then head east again first thing in the morning. He’d have taken the same narrow-gauge contraption he’d saved from the Arkansas River Gang six days before, but the locomotive’s brakes were getting an overhaul at the Creede roundhouse and wouldn’t be up and running until late next week at the earliest.
So Longarm had hired a stable boy to ride back along the tracks and fetch the blue roan gelding he’d left when he’d boarded the train. After he and the horse had had a badly needed night of rest, and his clothes had been laundered by a capable Chinaman, who also sold a rather tasty lager by the bucketful, now Longarm and the horse were pounding the trails for home.
He’d decided that despite the need to rush back to Denver, he had to stop overnight somewhere or kill both himself and his horse. Why not treat himself to a luxurious bed and a good meal in the stylish Grand Hotel built recently by Horace W. Tabor?
He felt lousy about the dead lawmen—he wondered who they were and if he’d known any of them—but he could only move so fast, and after taking down an entire gang of yellow-fanged devils and saving a train full of innocent folks including five pretty doxies, he deserved one night in a down-stuffed bed provided by the silver tycoon, Horace Tabor. Never mind that most of the country’s newspapers had declared the man a hell-bent lecher, having divorced his wife and married one Elizabeth McCourt, deemed by the scandal-mongering newsmen and tabloid-reading public a home-wrecking charlatan.
It was said that old Horace had built the grandest hotel on the western frontier, and named it appropriately, providing luxurious furnishings and tasty grub to weary travelers. Longarm had also heard from those who knew him personally that Tabor was a right generous jake to the families who patronized his mercantile, offering credit left and right, and that he was just as fair and honorable to those who worked for him breaking rock in his silver mine, the Matchless, outside Leadville.
Yes, the weary lawman was looking forward to warm, succulent grub and a good night’s sleep. True to her word, the night before, the pretty, blond whore who called herself Matilda Nightingale had given Longarm about as much pleasure as one man could bear. But he hadn’t gotten a whole lot of sleep.
Matilda had also made his daylong ride today a little uncomfortable, sucking, as she had, nearly all the skin off his cock. Well, not really. It was just raw enough to make sitting a McClellan saddle all day a tad uncomfortable.
Her wonderful mouth had sucked him long and hard, though, and despite the day’s discomfort, he felt his balbriggans tent-poling a little at the memory of her soft and pliant mouth. Her warm, wet tongue had stroked him like a lollipop, causing him to grind his heels into the lumpy corn-shuck mattress provided by the madam who ran the crude but functional Creede House of Love & Other Sundry Pleasures.
Oh, yeah—a soft bed was going to feel good. Especially after he’d been fogging the trail of the Arkansas River Gang for the past three weeks, every night spreading his bedroll out in the rough-and-rocky.
An hour later, he reined the roan up in front of the Grand Hotel in Leadville, the cobblestone street around him alive now with the crowd that would soon be filling all the saloons and stomping their feet and whistling their delight at the night’s performance at the Tabor Opera House, just down the street from the hotel.
All types of westerners milled around Longarm—miners, drifters, gunmen, gamblers, Chinamen, blacks, soldiers, bib-bearded prospectors with the crazy eyes of men alone too long in the mountains, and, of course, the brightly dressed doxies showing off their wares from balconies.
The painted-faced girls resembled lovely birds of all colors of the rainbow, preening themselves for the ribald, rollicking crowd of half-drunk prospective clients whistling and yelling and applauding on the boardwalks below.
Some men threw scrip and specie at the girls, and then, when their chosen girl beckoned, ran through the parlor house’s propped-open front doors. A few triggered pistols into the air. Young boys in knickers and watch caps ran around, selling sandwiches from tomato crates attached to small wagons or wheelbarrows, dogs barking and panting after them.
It wasn’t yet seven o’clock, but the brick or wood-frame saloons were doing a brisk business, with burly, bearded men in overalls and hobnailed boots walking in and out of the batwings with frothy beer mugs clutched in their ham-sized red paws, conversing on the boardwalks in nearly every language Longarm had ever heard, and more.
The travel-worn federal lawman looped the roan’s reins around one of the several wrought-iron hitch racks fronting the Grand Hotel, unable to take his eyes off the well-named structure though he’d seen it once before. Built of red brick and trimmed in crisply painted white wood, with a mansard roof rising from its second story, sort of like a king’s crown, it resembled nothing so much as a lavish, triple-decker riverboat that plied the waters of the southern Mississippi.
“Incredible, isn’t it?”
Longarm turned to the woman standing on the broad, stone paving, between the hitch racks and their dozen or so tied horses, and the building itself. She was staring up at the hotel, as well, but also casting sidelong glances at Longarm. The tall, handsomely weathered lawman stared at her, and for one of the very first times in his adult life, he was tongue-tied.
He’d rarely laid eyes on such a rare and sumptuous creature as the ravishing brunette before him. Long-legged and cool as a snowmelt stream, she was a goddess sent from heaven to bless mere mortals with her presence while both captivating and torturing men with her beauty.
She somehow had that air about her, too, with her thick, rich hair piled high and secured with a gold comb atop her patrician’s head. Her eyes were hazel, set wide apart and accentuating the long, gallant line of her nose. Those polished hazel orbs matched the brocade and taffeta of her lavishly but tastefully appointed dress that was trimmed with cream silk sleeves, a cream silk collar, and an understated, gold, obviously expensive cameo brooch.
Her breasts were well concealed, as befitted a lady, but Longarm knew, as though he could see them through her dress and several layers of traditional under frillies, that they would be proud, firm, full, and perfectly shaped, with exquisitely jutting nipples.
One look at them, and a man would come in his trousers without her even laying a hand on him.
Quickly, realizing where his gaze had been, he jerked his eyes to her face. Too late. With a tolerant half smile, squinting those intoxicating hazel orbs and turning the beautifully clefted chin toward the hotel’s front doors, she said, “Excuse me.”
Holding her skirts above her fine ankles and teal, side-button shoes, she climbed the wooden steps to the hotel’s broad oak doors.
“Ah, shit,” Longarm said, the tips of his ears turning as warm as an overheated iron. “Fuckin’ fool…”
He continued to scold himself while the girl’s image continued to float around inside his brain, as though it had been emblazoned forever on his retinas. Girl? Young woman, rather, though he doubted that she was much over twenty. No, not more than a year past that, he decided, remembering how smooth her skin had been around her eyes and across her finely tapering cheeks, how its perfection, only slightly suntanned, seemed to soften the long, firm, yet delicate line of her jaw.