Longarm tried to get her back on the tracks by moving closer to sing softly but correctly:
Oh, Peggy Gordon, thou art my true love. Come sit diee down upon my knee. Come tell to me the very reason, Why I’ve been slighted so by thee.
Then a gent in an undertaker’s suit and brocaded red vest stomped over to shove his red face closer than polite as he snarled, “I don’t want your rendition of ‘Peggy Gordon,’ you son of a bitch!”
Red Robin stopped playing as if someone had slammed the keyboard cover shut, and quietly but urgently said, “Don’t bite off more than you can chew, Johnny. You just now called the one and original Longarm a son of a bitch.”
Then she sweetly added, “Custis, I’d like you to meet Johnny Behind the Deuce, and please don’t kill him. I know he’s an asshole, but I owe him money and how would it look if an old flame gunned him before this child had made good on her word of honor?”
Longarm smiled thinly at the tinhorn, who seemed to have gone pale as a frog’s belly for some reason. Longarm held out a hand. When the tinhorn didn’t take it, Longarm quietly said, “In that case you’d be well advised to be out of my sight before Miss Red Robin and me finish our duet.”
Johnny Behind the Deuce started to bluster, then quietly turned for the door as Red Robin murmured, “Damn it, Custis. He just loaned me a double eagle!”
Longarm fumbled in his jeans, got out a twenty-dollar piece, and let her see it before he dropped it in her beer schooner, saying, “Pay him back if you’ve a mind to. I offered to be friendly until he’d acted the sore loser twice. Might you know what was eating him?”
Red Robin sighed and said, “You just called him a sore loser. I got here from Holy Cross broke, and had to borrow room-and-board money off the first cuss in town I knew.”
She struck a chord as if to make sure the keys were still there, and added, “I told him I’d pay him back as soon as I got that beer glass going. I suspect he had some other payoff in mind, from the way he’s been discouraging any sing-alongs.”
Longarm said, “Before we gather the boys around, you said that tinhorn was the first one you met up with here?”
Red Robin said, “Joker Joyce and the Faro Kid just blew in, along with Deacon Ellison and Pop Kenton. But we can talk about them high rollers later. I get off just after midnight and we got a lot of things to talk about, lover man!”
So Longarm finished his beer and ordered another, knowing it was going to feel like a million years, standing there watching a mighty nice sure lay with the answers to a whole new bag of questions.
For it was only a little after ten, he already had a hard-on, and what in thunder could all those professional gamblers have in mind at this time of the year in cattle country, for Pete’s sake?
Chapter 15
It sure beat all how two gals could be so different without one of them being uglier or a lousy lay. For old Pat, back in Minnipeta Junction, had been bigger and wider across the hips, but much firmer all over, than the paler and marshmallow-soft Red Robin, who moved as great, but differently, as Longarm parted the hairless lips of her smooth-shaven ring dang doo with his old organ-grinder.
Old Pat’s full bush had parted about as pleasingly, and hadn’t she been as warm and wet inside? It was hard to be certain as the sheer novelty of strange pussy enveloped a fresh erection. That was the nice thing about strange pussy, even though, in truth, he’d done this more to Red Robin, in more positions, than he and that undersheriff had gotten around to yet.
He thought about that, with a fond smile, when Red Robin locked her ankles around the nape of his neck with two pillows under her round white rump in the privacy of her hired hotel room. He’d had her in that position before, although never in the exact same surroundings, and not all that recently. As he considered teaching Pat to screw the same way with her longer, more muscular legs, his erection grew stiffer in Red Robin, inspired by the mental image of another gal as it slid in and out of the one at hand. For that was the way rutting flesh seemed to work.
As if she’d been thinking dirty underneath him, Red Robin suddenly said, “I suppose you think I owe you some explanation about that other man back in Colorado. I didn’t want to hurt either of you, Custis. But as I told you at the time, we’d made plans to ride over the Front Range together before you blew into town.”
Longarm thrust all the way in, ground it around teasingly, the way he knew she liked it, and calmly replied, “I told you at the time I understood the spot you were in, honey. I thought we agreed down in Texas, the first time we ever did this, that it didn’t mean the two of us were engaged.”
She hugged him down closer with all four limbs as she told him he was the most understanding man she’d ever met who could treat a gal so right. She said, “I was so afraid you’d never forgive me, seeing I left you all alone up there in the mountains like that.”
He chuckled, kissed her throat, and murmured “I’d tell you who I wound up with right after you lit out with that other jasper. But I ain’t one to brag.”
She laughed and sighed in mock anger. “I might have known you’d never be faithful to me, you brute. Could she do this with her pussy, Custis?”
He started moving in her faster, as any man would have with her smooth innards literally sucking on his shaft with hot wet contractions. He didn’t answer because, bless every one of them, it was always tough to decide between pussies when one enjoyed them all at different times. He could tell she was coming. He held back as long as he could, and then he made her moan like a paw-trapped she-bear when he really let fly with a grand gallop over the moon through swirling stars.
As they slowly drifted back to sanity, Red Robin crooned, “That was lovely. Can we do it some more?”
He allowed he needed some time and maybe a smoke to catch his second wind. So she said she’d as soon get on top as he relaxed just a bit.
It felt swell to lie there, propped up with pillows as he smoked a cheroot and let Red Robin sort of suck him off with her whole hourglass body, her round marshmallow tits gently bobbing in time with her posting on the saddlehorn. But by then they’d both gotten over the first frantic passion and he knew that, not unlike himself, Red Robin liked to chat with old pals as she screwed them.
So he asked her once more about those high rollers crowding into a dinky railroad stop, and she said the railroad stop was the key to the whole mystery.
He demanded, “How come? The spring veal has been shipped. The stock meant for the fall market has been marked, branded, and run out on the open range to graze far and wide for now. None of the outfits would be hiring, and a heap of them would be firing, or laying hands off for the summer leastways. So where would all this gaming for high stakes be likely?”
She answered simply, “I just told you. Here in Florence, where all those laid-off cowhands have to catch a train out to greener pastures if not home-sweet-home.”
Longarm started to make a dumb objection. Then he blew a thoughtful smoke ring at one of her tits, and as he watched it encircle the turgid nipple in the soft lamplight he said, “I follow your drift. When a hand’s been a good worker and you have to lay him off, it ain’t sporting to send him packing without some bonus money on top of his last month’s pay.”
He thought harder and added, “Everyone ought to be flush around the end of the month, but a laid-off hand with just enough to get home on is the kind of sucker Mr. Barnum crowed about.”
Red Robin moved her bare heels up under her center of balance to bounce even better as she casually remarked, “I’m glad my conscience will be clear when the last of those poor cowboys hops a freight out. I think it’s cruel to fleece a poor kid who’s worked hard as anything for no better than forty a month, don’t you?”