Longarm 341

When Natcho, Keats, and Crazy Eddie had retrieved their horses, they splashed back across the river in moody silence. When they’d gained the main trail hugging the canyon’s north wall, Natcho drew rein. Hunkered over his wounded hand, he gazed west, his eyes pain-wracked and fury-glazed.

He’d replaced his lost Colt in his holster with a spare from his saddlebags, as had Crazy Eddie. Wilbur Keats didn’t have a spare six-shooter, but he still had his saddle gun—a Spencer .56.

“Where the hell we goin’, Natcho?” said Crazy Eddie, bits of bloody neckerchief hanging from his swollen nose. Already, his eyes were turning purple. “We ain’t gonna turn tail on that son of a bitch, are we?”

“Listen, boys,” Wilbur Keats grunted, shifting uncomfortably in his saddle to make room for his swollen balls. “I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to write off my share of that five hundred dollar fleecin’. Comanche John’s partner”—the lumpy man shook his head grimly—“no thanks!”

“Shut up, coward,” grated Natcho through gritted teeth as he hipped around in his saddle to look back across the river.

“Come on, Natcho,” Keats said, wincing, his chubby, patch-bearded cheeks streaked with sweat and grime, “I think I might have some permanent damage. I’d like for a sawbones to check me out.”

Crazy Eddie laughed nasally and punched Keats in the arm. “Ah, what’re you worried about, Wilbur? You never had any balls in the first place!”

Natcho booted his horse westward. “Fall in, amigos. An old Ute woman works at the roadhouse up yonder. Uglier than Diablo’s bride, but she knows some healin’.”

“Ah, Christ,” grunted Keats, hunkered over his saddle horn. “I’d just as soon have a white man inspect my oysters.”

Crazy Eddie laughed again. “What—you think the ole dog-eater’s gonna cut ’em off?” He sobered as his horse followed Natcho’s high-stepping pinto. “I tell you what I want. I want another run at ole Comanche John and his friend that’s so handy with that long gun. I’m gonna take that Winchester of his, shove it up his ass, and pull the fucking trigger . . .”

An hour later, as the sun angled behind the toothy western ridges, they drew up before a roadhouse nestled in a little gap in the rocky, cedar-stippled bluffs on the north side of the trail.

“Ah, fuck!” Crazy Eddie complained as he ran his gaze over the hovel, its tin chimney pipe smokeless, the windows shuttered, a padlock on the door. There were no sounds from inside, no horses in the corral or lean-to stable flanking the shack’s right side. “No one’s here!”

Wilbur Keats leaned out from his saddle, studying the sheet of moisture-stained paper fluttering from a nail in the right door casing. He moved his lips, trying to sound out the words.

Natcho turned to Crazy Eddie, the only one of the three who could read. “What’s it say, Professor?”

Crazy Eddie leaned out from his own saddle, slitting his eyes. Haltingly, he recited the words penciled on the breeze-jostled leaf.

“I never heard nothin’ about it,” said Keats. “Ain’t been through this country in a time.”

“Crazy mountain man?” Natcho chuffed. “You ever known one that ain’t crazy?”

It came again, like a chime wafting on the wind. It was a woman’s laugh. No doubt about it.

Natcho hipped around in his saddle, trying to follow the sound to its source. It had come from the river. He stared at the scattered pines and aspens impeding his view of the Diamondback, the wind ruffling the leaves.

Suddenly, a horse’s head pushed through a low-hanging aspen branch. The horse mounted the bank, the branch swiping over it, two riders ducking beneath the rustling leaves.

The horse’s hooves clomped and rang off stones. When the mount had cleared the tree, the two young women on its blanketed back lifted their heads, giggling.

Natcho blinked as the women pulled the brown-and-white paint onto the trail and reined it up canyon—two young women, probably in their early twenties, one with light features and curly, golden hair, the other with the dusky red features and the coal black hair of a full-blooded Indian. The Indian girl sat in front of the blonde, holding the braided rawhide reins up high against her full breasts pushing at the low-cut deerskin dress.

Three large, gutted jackrabbits hung down from the saddlehorn before her—the fur bloody, eyes open.

The dark-haired girl turned toward Natcho and the others and halted the horse. The blonde followed her gaze, lips stretching back from her teeth in a grin.

The dark-haired girl smiled smokily, keeping her lips pressed together. She clucked the horse forward, continuing up canyon, hers and the blonde’s rich hair jostling down their backs.

“If you’re seein’ a couple purty women on a paint horse,” said Crazy Eddie, “then I reckon we’re both hallucinatin’.”

“You boys wait here,” Natcho said, reining his pinto after the girls. “Neither one of you is in any condition for romance.”

“Wait up, Natcho,” Wilbur called. “I think my oysters are beginnin’ to regain their natural size and color.”

“My nose just started feelin’ better, too,” said Eddie, booting his white-socked dun after Natcho.

When the Mexican was about ten yards behind the girls trotting their paint up canyon under a canopy of darkening aspen leaves, the blonde looked back, grinning.

The dark-haired girl turned toward him coolly while the blonde continued smiling at him over her right shoulder. The girl holding the reins checked the horse down and neck-reined it toward Natcho. The Mexican reined his own horse to a halt and poked his hat back off his forehead as he ran his eyes over the two incredible creatures before him, a hard ball forming in his throat.

Both were clothed in what looked like deerskin rags—if you could call it clothed. One strap of the blonde’s dress hung down to her right elbow, revealing all but the nipple of a hard, round breast, golden from where the sun had tanned it. Her dress was edged with rabbit furs and trimmed with talismans in the form of bear teeth and died porcupine quils and racoon claws shaped like the sun and moon.

The dark-haired girl’s dress was similar but simpler, and instead of talismans adorning it, she wore a necklace of white trade beads and bear teeth around her long, regal, adobe-colored neck.

While the blonde’s hair hung around her head in deliciously messy curls streaked with trail dust and seeds, the dark girl’s coal black hair hung straight down her back, glistening with bear tallow and trimmed with a faint spray of Indian paintbrush. Her breasts, too, were full and round, the low-cut dress exposing the deep cleft between.

The girls’ legs were exposed from their knees down, the long calves muscular and smooth. Both were barefoot, their feet dusty.

The blonde, her blue eyes sparkling, stared at him while speaking to the girl in front of her. “He has a question for us!”

Natcho had been about to ask them about the Ute healing woman, but their beauty was like a direct blow from an axe handle. He chuckled as the other two men rode up behind him, their horses blowing, their silence revealing how deep down their throats their tongues had slipped, awestruck by the girls’ beauty.

“Yes, ma’am,” Natcho said, removing his hat with a flourish then holding it across his heart, “I was just wondering to what blessing of fate do my compañeros and I owe the honor of sharing the same trail as such a beautiful pair of señoritas.”

“What’s he jawin’ about, Raven?” asked the blonde, wrinkling the bridge of her nose as she stared at Natcho. “I didn’t understand a word.”

“I think we have been complimented, Sunflower.” For the first time, the dark-haired girl called Raven smiled, her perfectly sculpted cheeks dimpling. “I think we are being what the white-eyes call courted.”

“Courted?” Sunflower laughed throatily. “Does that mean they want to fuck us?”

Natcho’s face warmed. The blonde laughed again, harsher than before. Raven’s smile grew, her almond-shaped, black eyes slitting alluringly.

“Christalmighty!” whooped Crazy Eddie, his smashed nose making it sound more like a bull elk’s raspy bugle. “Sunflower and Raven!”

“Only if the, uh . . . fucking so delights you, of course,” Natcho said, bowing his head slightly at the women, the corners of his mouth drawing up.

Raven shunted her dark gaze around the three men before her. “If you are looking for the healer, she and her man pulled foot a month ago.”

“Afraid of the . . . what was it?” Natcho glanced at the abandoned cabin behind him. “Wolf women?”

“And the crazy mountain man they run with,” said Sunflower, leaning forward and speaking in a loud whisper, as if sharing a secret. “Pure-dee kill-crazy, we hear.” She winked.

“Ugly creatures, too, I bet,” said Wilbur Keats, finally finding his tongue. “Prob’ly an old prospector’s tale!”

“Of course,” said Raven. She returned her gaze to Natcho. “Follow us, if you wish, and we’ll tend your wounds.”

She threw her hair back and gigged the paint forward. “It just so happens we are spending the evening alone.” She flashed a devilish smile over her right shoulder. “And we are lonely!”

Natcho stared after them, heart pounding, his loins heavy. He glanced at the two men behind him. Both Crazy Eddie and Wilbur Keats looked as though they’d been struck by lightning as they stared after the girls.

The girls set a harried pace as they rode up canyon a good mile then turned right off the trail and headed into a broad, off-shooting ravine.

Several times Natcho lost sight of them as they galloped through rolling, broken country. They were even harder to keep pace with once the sun went down.

He wasn’t sure where in the hell they were. Wariness was beginning to prick at him, when a pale, triangular object came into view about thirty yards ahead, at the base of a high, rock wall, just beyond a starlit, murmuring stream. The two girls and the paint horse were swaying and dodging silhouettes in front of it.

A teepee, Natcho saw as he crossed the stream and drew rein before the girls’ blowing horse. There was a large fire ring before the teepee. From a high, stout branch of a nearby cottonwood, a large, hide-wrapped bundle hung fifteen feet off the ground. Probably a grub cache out of the reach of coons and bears.

Natcho kept his hand on his revolver’s grips as he looked around, Crazy Eddie and Wilbur Keats reining up on either side of him, men and horses breathing hard from the cross-country run through the darkness.

“I thought for sure my horse was gonna break a leg!” Keats said, wiping sweat from his face.

“I ain’t so sure about this,” said Crazy Eddie. He, too, had his hand on his pistol. “How do we know these two ain’t . . .” He let his voice trail off as he looked around the bivouac and the creek.

“Wolf women?” said Natcho, teeth showing against his dark face in the darkness. “Do they look like wolves to you?”

Raven walked toward them as Sunflower began leading the paint into the trees left of the teepee. Raven threw an arm out to indicate a pile of wood beside the fire ring. “You men build a fire. Sunflower and I will provide food and medicine. You may spread your bedrolls out around the fire. You can stay here this evening.”

“You can stay here this evening!” laughed Sunflower as she and the horse disappeared in the darkness. “Build a big fire,” she called above the sound of crunching weeds and branches. “I like big fires!”

“Prospectors or hunters?” asked Natcho. It was damn odd for men to leave women—especially a pair as beautiful as these—alone out here. But maybe that’s why they left them in such an isolated place. Besides, in spite of their obvious femininity, these two looked capable of taking care of themselves.

Natcho remembered the womanly curves he’d spied beneath the torn, dirty dresses, the full breasts fairly spilling from the deer hide. They’d smelled like something wild.

“Stake the horses, Wilbur,” he said as he swung down from the saddle. “Me and Eddie will get started on that big fire!”