By the time they were sharing some coffee she was thinking clearer on a fuller stomach, and decided Horst Heger had indeed skipped out on his pals with all that money. She stared morosely at the telegraph poles alongside the nearby railroad as she said she knew the feeling.
He shrugged and said, “I’ve run across such tales of woe a heap in my travels. Folks who never set out to betray a trust just find it too tough to be trustworthy, feeling broke and desperate with temptation winking and pointing down the primrose path.”
She murmured, “That bitch said I was her one and only friend in this cruel world. Those wheat farmers have seen the last of that bribe their pal was supposed to offer Roxanne and me, unless … Oh, no! What if that Dutchman did get through to Roxanne, behind my back, and that was why we left Cedar Bend so suddenly? I never actually heard any of those corn growers telling us to leave!”
Longarm blew a thoughtful smoke ring at the dying fire near their feet before he said, “Works either way. You’ve about convinced me you haven’t been eating regular as your average rich lady. But forget anything they ever told you about honor among thieves. Old thieves tell that whopper to young thieves. You’d know better than me how well you really know your older pal, Miss Roxanne.”
Rowena laughed, in an oddly dirty way, and softly replied, “I’d been led to believe we were more than pals. Adventurous women can’t afford to take too many men into their confidence. But I guess when you get right down to it, anyone with confidence in you is a mark to a confidence woman, but damn it, she told me she really loved me!”
Longarm whistled softly and quietly said, “I’m starting to see why she left you feeling so teary-eyed. I’ve noticed how many shady folk seem to wind up more than friends. I’ve never decided whether you get that way being locked up so long with nobody of the opposite gender, or whether owlhoot riders who can’t afford to be too trusting find the notion more practical.”
He blew another smoke ring and continued. “I recall reading about this Greek general, Alexander, who ordered his army to satisfy one another as best they could at night rather than let barbarian gals wander all about their fortified camps after dark. That Was what the old-time Greeks called these white folks who behaved a mite like our modern Indians, barbarians. But our army gives you a dishonorable discharge if they catch you in the same bunk with another trooper, Indian country or not.”
“I’m not a lesbian,” Rowena pouted. Then she added, “At least I don’t think I’m a lesbian. What do you call a girl who only pleasures herself with another girl when, like you say, they have her locked up or surrounded by stupid hayseeds?”
Longarm shrugged and replied, “Practical? it works both ways, you know. Your erstwhile partner in pluviculture could have been scratching her own itches the same way and, now that you’ve run out of work, lit out with the proceeds. But if it’s any comfort to you, I doubt she’d have been so mean if she’d had all that money from Horst Heger. When I talked to her she struck me as smart, and it would have been dumb to strand you like this if she was running for the hills with real money.”
Rowena was too smart herself to need diagrams on any blackboard. She nodded thoughtfully and said, “Fifty dollars or less would have taken us both far and wide before she ducked out on me, and so you’d never have been having this conversation about her with me.”
Longarm didn’t answer. There was no call to say she was right when they both knew it.
Rowena borrowed the cheroot and took a deep drag on it before she handed it back and said, “Well, thanks to you and the way my brain is starting to tick again, I suppose I’ll just sit tight till I’m sure she’s not coming back. Then I’ll get dressed and go into town to see who’d like to buy all this useless gear and be on my way back East. I was planning on trying my luck as a stage dancer before Roxanne sold me this bill of goods and taught me some other bad habits. Maybe it’s not too late for me and the stage.”
Longarm had finished the cheroot. He ground it out in the dirt with a boot heel and declared, “I’m sure you’ll make a great stage dancer. You’ve sure got the build for it. It’s been nice talking to you, but like I said, I was up all night and I have a hired bed waiting for me at my hotel, so …”
“What’s wrong with catching a few winks here?” Rowena asked, bold as brass. “I mean, we’ve plenty of room inside, with Roxanne gone and all.”
He laughed incredulously and said, “But I thought you were a lesbian!”
To which she demurely replied, “Maybe I am. Why don’t we find out?”
Longarm searched his mind for a reason not to, decided he’d wind up sore at himself in either case, and helped her up those steps by playfully pinching her firm bottom.
The innards of her circus wagon were partitioned into two rooms, with the smaller one in back the bedroom. He saw what she’d meant about the space her missing pal had once taken up. The bed filling most of the chamber was ample for two, and it was the only bed there was.
Rowena was on it, naked and giggling, before he could even shed his hat and gun rig. But he sat down and she helped him shuck the rest in no time, and then they were both in the center of the bed, atop the quilts, and she was starting to cry some more. So he stopped just in time to ask what in blue blazes was wrong now.
She said, “I’m sorry. I’m trying to respond like a sweetheart, but my last man abused me and scared me, and it’s been a while since I’ve done it with any sort of man!”
He didn’t offer to roll off and get dressed. He didn’t like to make promises he couldn’t keep. But he did lay side by side with her in the nude and kiss her, more gently, in the soft rainbow glow from her small stained-glass skylight.
She kissed back, less shyly and with more tongue, as he let her get used to his strange body pressed to her own. She didn’t resist as he ran his free hand down between them to part her pubic hairs with two fingers and softly strum her old banjo. She tried to return the favor and then, finding herself with a delicate hand filled with throbbing cock, marveled, “Oh, you’re already hard and yet so considerate! That other brute made me suck him hard and then he’d shove-“
“I don’t want to hear,” Longarm said, shushing her with a warm wet kiss as he commenced to strum faster in jig time. As he did so Rowena gasped, “Oh, Lord, You’re making me so hot, darling!”
So he just rolled into her welcoming love saddle, and it sure felt swell to sink his raging erection into its overdue reward with his eyes closed and two young gals taking turns up and down his shaft with their tight hungry love maws. But he remembered who he was supposed to be doing it with when Rowena suddenly gasped, “Roxanne! We weren’t expecting you back.”
Longarm didn’t stop. He might have, with a gun to his head, but he was fixing to come as he craned his head to smile sheepishly up at the older and darker gal in the doorway and said, “Morning, ma’am. I would stand up in your presence but, just now, that might be sort of embarrassing to both of us!”
Roxanne laughed harshly.
Rowena wasn’t able to stop moving her hips either, but she was sobbing as she declared, “I wasn’t messing with a mark, darling. I thought you’d run out on me and this one is the law!”
Her older and darker lover demurely replied, “I know who this is. Albeit he had his pants on the last time we spoke. Heavens, will you look at those muscles ripple. How is he hung, honey?”
Rowena gasped, “Gloriously! And I’m comingggg!”
That made two of them. So Longarm wasn’t keeping track of anything but the sweetest tightest pussy in the world as Roxanne was explaining how she’d sold their mules and had a possible buyer for this particular wagon.
As she got in bed with them, naked as a jay, she said, “Nobody I tried seems to have any use for the old signal corps gas generator. Why don’t we go sixty-nine while he takes turns pronging us or, better yet, throws a good old-fashioned long-donging into the survivor?”