He lost considerable interest in that one perky nipple when she calmly told him, “They already know I got away in the dark. They do not know about you helping me yet. If you mount up again and ride like the wind you may get away. If they catch you with me I don’t think they will be as worried about your chindi. I’m afraid they will kill you faster on the spot.”
As he followed her back through the trees, Longarm smiled dryly and said, “You’re afraid? I’ve seen the carved-up remains of old boys your hackis had killed about as sudden as they felt like. But I reckon we’d best stick together for now, seeing you’ve got on my best blanket.”
They were near the western edge of their pine-needle screen by then. So Kinipai pointed that way and told him to see for himself as she dropped the big blanket to the pinyon duff, revealing every bare inch of her short, finn, tawny body. He decided she’d likely wind up fat by the time she was thirty, but she sure curved swell at the moment. Then he saw she’d been asking him to look at the far-off puffs of white smoke hanging over the higher ridges to the west.
It wasn’t true, as some whites thought, that Indians sent a sort of Morse code in smoke. To begin with, few Quill Indians knew how to read or write in any alphabet. Moreover, they didn’t want strangers reading their mail. So they worked it more like white military men who agreed beforehand on passwords and countersigns. So many puffs in a row meant one thing or another that could change as the situation called for. Knowing this, Longarm wasn’t too surprised when he asked Kinipai just what that smoke-talk said, and she told him she wasn’t in that thick with the hacki, or warrior society, of her own nation.
He stared thoughtfully at the meaningless, drifting smoke puffs for a time. Then she hissed and said, “Over that way, to the north!”
He said, “I noticed,” as they both stared in total ignorance at far more distant smoke rising from a higher crest in the morning sunlight.
He finally said, “When I cut you loose, that bare gravel betwixt the rocks had already been churned up by your prancing feet. After that, we both moved across green grass that’d had time to gather a new dusting of dew and spring backup by now.”
She protested, “Those agency police ponies are shod. They will have left hoofprints, many hoofprints.”
He nodded but said, “Not too near that cleft they’d left you in. And would you be tracking down even Indian lawmen if you’d just put a witch to death? How do you know they are chasing you? Mayhaps they’re trying to get away. I don’t know about you, but I’d be scared skinny if I tied up a wicked witch on an ant pile and came back the next morning to find her gone and the ants in dreadful shape!”
It didn’t work. The frightened young gal threw herself against Longarm to bury her face in the front of his shirt and bawl, “I am not a wicked witch! I have no bishi to protect us, I have nothing—nothing—not even the medicine stones handed down from my poor old uncle, and how much bishi did he ever really have if that snake he was dancing with could kill him with just one bite?”
Longarm held her soothingly. It seemed only natural to pat such a pretty bare buttock as he replied, “I’m sure it was a big snake, knowing how modest your medicine men act. I told you we’d get you some more duds to wear. And those scared folks who took you for the real thing ain’t likely to assume you’ve lost any powers you ever had, seeing they failed as full-fledged way-chanters to kill one pretty little thing.”
She sniffed and said, “Thank you. I think you are pretty too. I wish we weren’t going to die so soon. To purify myself for that Night Way I had to avoid womanly pleasures, even with my own hand, for four whole nights. Last night was the fifth and I was rubbing—rubbing—as I sat that pony bareback with its spine teasing me but never quite enough!”
Longarm got a better grip on her bare behind and snuggled her a bit closer as he replied in a desperately casual tone that he hadn’t been getting any since leaving Denver.
So the next thing they knew they were down on that blanket, spread on springy pine needles, with her on top and bouncing up and down like a delighted kid on a merry-go-round while he was still shucking out of his duds. Like many an Indian or Mexican gal used to sleeping on floor pallets, Kinipai bounced with her haunches, with bare heels braced to either side of his hips as she braced her little palms against his hairy chest to slither up and down his beanpole in a delightful but sort of teasing way. So once he had his torso as bare as her own, with his jeans down around his booted ankles, he rolled on top to hook one elbow under either of her chunky brown knees and finish right.
She gasped that he was fixing to rupture her innards, but begged him not to stop seeing that they were both about to get killed in any case and this seemed a far nicer way to die.
After they’d both climaxed more than once and she found herself still alive and well, sharing a three-for-a-nickel cheroot with him as they lazed naked on the blanket in the shade, Kinipai giggled and confided, “I have never had anything that big in me, unless you want to count the time some of us were acting silly with corncobs when we were locked away to await the Pollen Dusting Way.”
Longarm just chuckled and enjoyed another deep drag. He didn’t need to be told how silly kids acted when they first found out why boys and girls had been built differently. Na-dene gals who’d started their first monthly period got locked up in a dark brush lodge to get over it together so their elders could throw them a fine dance and sprinkle them with corn, bean, squash, and tobacco pollen to make them strong and fertile women now that they were grown. Like the Pueblo they’d likely learned from, Na-dene set great store by pollen. It was never burnt as a sacrifice to the Holy Ones. To burn pollen was to destroy hope. But dusting a young gal’s hair and making her sneeze with such powerful medicine was meant as one hell of an honor for her. It wasn’t true Na-dene knowingly mistreated women. They just treated them unusually, by a white man’s standards. It was usually Anglo or high-toned Mexican gals who went insane after they’d been captured by so-called Apache raiders.
Of course, all bets were off when dealing with a witch. So they’d barely smoked that cheroot down before Kinipai was nagging him some more about that smoke-talk. She’d doubtless learned, while learning English, how white eyes put up with much more nagging before they hit a grown woman. Hitting children for any reason was considered sort of unmanly by most Indians. But any Indian could see a grown woman had no call to carry on like some bawling baby.
Longarm told Kinipai so, adding firmly but not unkindly, “Whether they’re looking for us or trying to get away from you, I doubt they have the least notion where we are right now.”
She whimpered, “Hear me, my people are the best trackers this side of the gray spirit world and we were riding ponies, steel-shod ponies, all this way!”
He stretched out his free arm for another smoke, saw that his duds lay an unhandy distance away on the pinyon duff, and reached down to feel her up some more instead as he replied, “You’re bragging a mite, no offense. Nobody tracks better than Papigo, as some of your Chiricahua cousins learned to their sorrow a spell back.”
He began to treat her friendlier down yonder as he added, “Don’t ever stop running once you raid Papigo. They can track a sundial’s shadow and cut its throat after sundown.”
She reached down for his private parts as he assured her, “I’d be able to brag on scouting and being scouted by heaps of nations, including your own, if I hadn’t been raised so modest. I made sure we rode across all the dry sod and slickrock I could find for us as we made her this far. We left that creek to cross gravel scree and mummified pine needles getting here.”