He proceeded to, hotter than he’d been letting on, and when he came in her, they both moaned out loud because her climax started earlier and lasted longer, as if Mother Nature aimed to make up for the more complicated plumbing she’d designed for her daughters.
As he lay limp in her amorous embrace, Longarm muttered, “We have a team like that working out of my home office. We call ‘em Smiley and Dutch instead of Silent and Lash. Deputy Smiley’s smart but inclined to reason with a hair-trigger cuss, whilst Dutch would draw and throw down on his own mother if she stared at him mean. The two of them add up to one good lawman, just as Silent and Lash likely make for a smart but dangerous hired gun.”
Pat kissed him and said, “I said they were regulators, not hired guns, dear. You’re right that one political hand has to wash another, but neither the county council nor me would put up with paid assassins.”
He asked what they did if they weren’t allowed to assassinate anybody for the C.P.A.
She said, “Regulate. They encourage folks to act regular here in the Flint Hills range. There’s statute law and then there’s county custom. You’d have to be a cattleman to understand.”
Longarm had been a cattleman in his time. So he was commencing to understand. There was no law on the books saying a strange rider with no visible means of support but the running iron in his saddlebag could be arrested, or worse. Yet any honest cowhand could tell at a glance a cuss like that was up to no good.
There was nothing in the Constitution or your average state charter saying you owed it to your neighbors to search out the owner of a dogie following one of your own cows with another man’s brand on its fool hide, and you didn’t have to offer coffee and cake to any passing rider who stopped by to ask permission to use your water pump. You just acted regular if you wanted the folks for miles around to take you for regular neighbors.
Longarm finally rolled off the sated undersheriff to light them up a cheroot to share as he opined, “I ain’t too keen on vigilante justice or regulators dropping by to explain the facts of life to a new homesteading family from other parts. It can get out of hand when and if your lawfully appointed peace officers let it.”
She snuggled closer and assured him, “Silent and Lash are all right. Even judicious brutality from a badge-wearer has a way of falling into the pages of the opposition newspapers. But when you call it outraged public opinion, it’s accepted when a petty thief or wife beater gets what he deserved.”
Longarm replied, “I just said I knew what regulators did. What’s the story on that assault charge over to Florence?”
She took a drag on the cheroot before she declared, “It will never come to trial. The jasper Lash assaulted will surely drop the charges by the time he gets better and talks it over with a lawyer. The silly thing’s a traveling-notions peddler, traveling about with his one-horse cart to peddle ribbon bows and such to the women folks out our way. He seemed to have gotten fresh with some of the wives he came across alone in a soddy with neither their man nor older kids to protect them.”
Longarm whistled softly. “A pest like that can be tough to discourage legally. Her word against his and what harm done, Your Honor?”
She demurely replied, “That’s why I told Silent Knight about it when more than one wife came into the Junction to complain. So now the dirty rascal is nursing his own complaints in a sick bed, and by the time he’s able to appear against anybody in court, what harm was done, Your Honor?”
Longarm said, “I follow your drift. So who have you sent them after this time, honey? That Uncle Chester young Maureen told us about?”
Pat blinked innocently and replied, “I never sent anybody after anyone, dear. As I told you before, I haven’t seen them today. They never came by to report that gunplay out by the old Nesbit place.”
Longarm took a drag on the cheroot and decided, “Mayhaps somebody else told them about Uncle Chester. Silent Knight told me he’d tried to court Maureen Cassidy, and Maureen told me about that dirty older man playing doctor with her when first we met.”
Pat repressed a shudder, and snuggled closer as she declared she’d hate to be Uncle Chester when and if those two caught up with him.
She said, “I doubt either of those bullies would trifle with a woman-child they knew to be a half-wit. They both seem to follow Old Testament notions on simple justice. But if you recall your Good Book, some of those notions about an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth make for simple justice indeed.”
He said, “I ain’t got much use for a man who’d molest a half-wit, and I’m sworn to uphold the Constitution. What sort of cruel and unusual punishments do you reckon those bible-reading bullies might have in mind for a dirty dog who’d hand his dick to an innocent young gal?”
Pat grimaced and reached for his as she said she doubted they’d treat his so gently.
Longarm didn’t mind what she was up to down yonder, but he told her, “I’d better see if I can catch up with Uncle Chester first. If neither Lash nor Silent are anywhere in town, they must have figured on finding the rascal somewhere else!”
She said she agreed on that, but failed to see why he really cared what the boys did to a degenerate who trifled with children. She told him, “Maureen is safe at my place. He can’t bother her there.”
Longarm said, “Ain’t worried about Maureen. I want to know what happened to her mother. I’d as soon ask Uncle Chester before they mess him up too much to talk.”
Pat started to stroke him harder as she mused, “We don’t know that saddle tramp did anything to Rose Cassidy, dear. Maureen says she seemed all right when she headed into Florence on business.”
Longarm said, “Florence is a fair ride off, and a heap can happen to a lady on the rolling prairies betwixt hither and yon. I figure Silent and Lash have come to the same conclusion. So I reckon I’ll just ride that way and see what there might be to see.”
She asked if they couldn’t do it one more time before he left. He told her he’d try to come in her twice, seeing he didn’t know when he’d be back. So she forked a naked thigh across him and got on top to take charge this time lest he torture any more political secrets out of a poor helpless girl.
Chapter 13
Longarm knew most country folks were free with cake and coffee and tight with gossip about folks they knew when asked by a nosy cuss they didn’t. So he didn’t stop at any of the few spreads he passed that afternoon, aiming to ride into Florence around nine or ten that evening, when others were less likely to notice.
So he made good time aboard a spunky chestnut Pat Brennan had loaned him, as if to make certain he had to get back to her before he left for good, with his case wrapped up or not.
But just before sundown, miles short of Florence, he crossed a timbered draw to meet up with Silent Knight and Lash Flanders coming the other way with a buckboard and a quartet of colored day laborers.
As he reined in to greet them, Longarm naturally asked how come. Silent Knight pointed at the cottonwoods and hackberry trees behind Longarm to say, “We’re out to solve us a murder. Or to find a murder victim leastways. For we’ve reason to believe Rose Cassidy lies dead and buried somewheres near.”
Lash chimed in. “We got to talking about it betwixt here and town. After we’d chewed it up and spit it out more than once, that draw is the only stretch worth poking about in. These rises all around us are nigh solid chalk under a few inches of sod.”
Longarm nodded and said, “I can see why you’d expect a dead body to be buried in the sandy bottom of a draw, gents. But how come you ever came to such a grim conclusion about Rose Cassidy? Her daughter says she was last seen alive and well riding into Florence on some horse-trading business.”
Silent Knight said, “Nobody in Florence admits to any recent horse-trading with her. And we were asking about her all the way in from Minnipeta Junction. It ain’t been a whole week, and you don’t get that many tolerable-looking women riding this open range alone.”