Longarm 341

While Crazy Eddie stripped and staked the horses by the creek, Natcho and Wilbur Keats built a fire large enough to roast a sow.

Meanwhile, Sunflower went to work skinning the field-dressed rabbits with the quick assuredness of a practiced hunter, her breasts swinging back and forth behind her dress as she worked, grunting and slicing with her skinning knife.

She didn’t seem to mind the blood splashing her torn, smoke-stained dress and her hair. Her neck and the top third of her tits glistened gold in the firelight, offering Natcho and Keats a balm for their cuts and bruises as they spread out their saddles and blanket rolls a short distance from the crackling flames.

The nights got cold at this altitude, even in summer, but the large fire precluded the need for coats.

Crazy Eddie walked over from the creek, and Natcho broke out a fresh whiskey bottle. They passed around the bottle while Sunflower spitted the rabbits and Raven, who’d been rustling around inside the teepee, stepped out and moved toward Natcho.

The black-haired girl had thrown a gray fox skin around her shoulders. In one hand she carried a bowl reeking like kerosene, juniper, rose hips, and something else that could only be horse piss. In her other hand she carried a wad of burlap.

“Here comes Doctor Raven!” giggled Sunflower as she poked the last spit through the last quartered rabbit and set it far enough out from the fire that the meat would cook without charring.

Raven knelt beside Natcho. He smiled up at her, staring at her black eyes glistening with firelight as she dipped one of the burlap strips into the lumpy goo in the bowl. She removed the neckerchief from around Natcho’s hand, tossed it into the fire, then lowered her head to inspect the hand closely.

The bullet hadn’t broken any bones, but it had torn out a good bit of flesh between Natcho’s right index finger and thumb. Since he was mildly intoxicated by the women and the whiskey, it looked worse than it felt.

As she wrapped the poultice around his hand, Natcho stared at her breasts framed in ragged fox skin. They jounced as she worked. When she’d tied the burlap tightly around the wound, she gazed down at him, her eyes straying to his bulging crotch.

The corners of her mouth rising slightly, she raised his hand to her left breast. With his index finger, she traced a circle around the nipple pushing at the deerskin dress from behind. It felt like a small thimble at the end of the swollen globe.

“Does that feel better?” she asked huskily, her hair hanging down both sides of her regal face.

Natcho chuckled. He stretched out his fingers to engulf the entire breast in his hand. She rose slowly, the breast rising beyond his reach, her gaze holding his until she turned and moved to the other side of the fire, where Eddie reclined against his saddle.

Natcho’s jaws tightened. He glanced to his left, where Wilbur Keats sat on a log, elbows on his knees, regarding Natcho with a mocking grin. Natcho cursed under his breath.

Sunflower was dancing between the teepee and the fire, trying to catch glowing cinders in her hands as though they were snowflakes, her short skirt leaping about her long, bare legs, curly blond hair dancing on her shoulders. Her body seemed to move in several directions at once.

On the other side of the fire, Raven knelt beside Crazy Eddie, who’d been watching Sunflower, awe-struck, his blue black nose and swollen eyes resembling the exaggerated cutout features in a Halloween pumpkin.

Crazy Eddie smiled, a ghoulish expression on his battered face. “I think it’s just cracked. It’ll heal just fine. I done broke it before.”

Raven took the bottle from Eddie’s hand and lifted it to her own lips. She took a couple of long swallows, throwing her head far back on her shoulders. As she lowered the bottle, her lips made a hollow smack as they left the glass. She ran her hand across her mouth and thrust the bottle back at Eddie.

Eddie hesitated. He lifted the bottle slowly, took a pull. When he lowered it, his battered eyes looked skeptical.

She pinched his swollen nose between her thumb and index finger, and gave it a little twist. Even across the fire, Natcho could hear the sinewy crunch.

“Ohhh!” Eddie screamed, clapping both hands to his nose as blood streamed from the bits of cloth hanging from his nostrils.

“There,” Raven laughed, tossing several strips of the burlap over Eddie’s head. “All better now.”

Sunflower had stopped chasing cinders to squat in the grass between the teepee and the fire, knees together, elbows on her knees, cheeks in her hands. She appeared bemused by her sister’s ministrations. She kneaded the grass with her bare toes.

Raven stopped before Keats. He looked up at her sheepishly. His face was red, brows beetled.

Natcho guffawed. Even Eddie, still holding his nose with the burlap, tittered behind the wrap.

Keats grabbed the bowl out of Raven’s hand, cast an angry look at Eddie and Natcho, then stepped over the log he’d been sitting on, and stomped off in the darkness.

On the other side of the fire, Sunflower howled and rubbed her crotch. Raven chuckled, grabbed the bottle away from Eddie, then squatted down beside her sister. She took a long pull from the bottle, then handed it to Sunflower, who took a couple of long pulls before corking it and tossing it to Natcho.

The Mexican, surprised by the girl’s stength, caught the bottle above his head. Both women looked at him, laughing.

He laughed, then, too, removing the bottle’s cork and taking a long pull. He had a good mind to go over and take one of the women by force, but something told him they’d be more fun if they were willing.

They all lounged around the fire, smoking and drinking and chuckling. Laughter broke out when Keats strode out of the darkness, looking just as sheepish as before but walking a little less bow-legged.

He set the poultice bowl down beside Raven with a cordial nod. Drawing his breeches away from his crotch, he gave both Natcho and Eddie an owly look, wrinkling his nostrils, then grabbed the bottle out of Eddie’s hands and returned to his log.

They passed the bottle around the fire once more, then Sunflower, who’d been turning the meat and arranging the sticks around the flames, deemed it done. She tossed a rabbit quarter to each man, then gave one to her sister and plunked down in the dust and grass beside Raven again, legs bent before her so that they framed a diamond between them. She went to work on the sizzling meat in her fingers with the passion of a famished gandy dancer.

As he ate hungrily, hot grease dripping down his chin, Natcho looked at the girls’ bare legs, over which the dancing firelight flickered. As his hunger abated, his lust grew.

He snapped the bones and sucked out the marrow, then tossed the bones into the fire. Standing, he wiped his hands on his breeches, then went over to Raven and wrapped his right hand around her arm.

“I’ve had enough of your teasing, señorita.” He pulled her brusquely to her feet. She gave a clipped, half-surprised, half-delighted cry and dropped the rabbit carcass she’d been holding in her greasy hands.

Natcho drew her toward him, and to his surprise, he didn’t have to force her. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him hungrily, savagely, ramming her tongue into his mouth and grinding her crotch against his.

Raven suddenly pulled away from Natcho, giving his lip a final, painful bite, then turned away and, laughing, ran to the teepee and threw back the flap. She looked at Natcho. He walked to her heavy-footed, his shaft so hard that it pushed painfully against his trousers, his loins fairly exploding with desire.

Natcho didn’t give a shit. His eyes were on her heaving breasts, the cleavage glistening with perspiration, his mind roaming ahead to what she’d feel like pinned beneath him.

In seconds, he’d unbuckled the belt and let the pistol and holster fall. She grabbed his hand and pulled him into the teepee, which smelled like strange herbs and tobacco and musty hides. Several candles burned and dripped wax on a low shelf, offering meager light.

Raven scrambled over the bear hides and buffalo robes spread across the floor, and knelt before the row of candles. She crossed her arms before her supple body and lifted the dress up to her waist, revealing every inch of her slender legs and hips.

Pausing to adjust her grip, she raised her crossed elbows, and Natcho watched the deer-hide garment slide up her long, dusky body, jostling the dark-tipped breasts before passing over her face and climbing over her head, catching at her black hair as she cast the garment aside with a soft, windy rustle.

Raven’s hair fell back into place. Her full breasts jutted. She laughed and stared at Natcho, who wasted no time undressing, albeit awkwardly, grunting as he stumbled around the lodge.

The girl ran her greasy hands over her breasts slowly, sighing as she cupped them, kneading the grease into them, the nipples hardening. Then she squatted, rubbed the grease into her crotch. Natcho was ripping off his balbriggans as Raven ran her hands down her belly to her crotch, black eyes glistening like obsidian in the candles’ glow.

Her gaze smoldered like that of a half-wild animal with the springtime craze. Natcho’s heart pounded in his temples, made his ears ring.

Finally, he knelt beside her, took her shoulders in his hands, pulled her toward him, and closed his mouth over hers. He threw her back on the robes. She spread her legs for him, grunting and cursing, running her hands down his back, the fingernails digging painfully into his skin. She raised her knees high and wide.

“Come on, you greaser bastard,” she grunted. “Give it to me, you son of a bitch!”

Her voice was a vague rustle in Natcho’s ringing ears as he rose up on his outstretched arms and ushered his throbbing shaft through her furred portal. The rabbit grease made for easy going, and he slid into her quickly, plundering her core.

“Ohhhhh!” she screamed, digging her nails into his shoulder blades and throwing her head back against the robes, mouth drawn wide.

Only a few thrusts later, his loins exploded. Holding himself deep inside her, he lifted his chin toward the teepee’s smoke hole glimmering with starlight.

He slumped atop her and, when he found his strength, rolled onto his back, one leg crossing hers. He was breathing hard, his skin slick with perspiration.

She lay on her back, running her hands through her hair, sweat-slick breasts glistening in the candlelight. With a laugh, she turned over and pressed her breasts to his chest, pinching his ears in her hands, jostling his head. “Don’t think I’m going to let you fall asleep, hombre. We’ve just gotten started!”

Later, after they’d coupled two more times and the candles were nearly out, she rolled away from him. Her breaths grew long and slow.

Outside, Sunflower laughed. Eddie said something Natcho couldn’t hear. The fire was a diminishing glow beyond the teepee’s walls.

Natcho snapped his head up and automatically reached for his revolver, his hand finding only the fur robe beside him.

Again, the man squealed and bellowed like a lung-shot stallion—the voice of pure terror and agony making the hair stand along the back of Natcho’s neck.

“What the fuck?” he grunted, rising from the robes and crawling naked to the door flap. He fumbled with the flap’s rawhide stays, hearing Keats yelling, “What is it?”

The fire had died down, but there was enough glow for Natcho to see Crazy Eddie kneeling before his saddle and blanket roll. Eddie was naked except for the burlap cloth tied around his nose. He leaned forward, hands crossed over his lower belly. Blood splattered his chest and dribbled in thin rivers down the insides of his thighs.

Sunflower was hunkered down on her haunches about ten feet in front of him, staring up at him. The girl was naked. Laughing, shoulders jerking, she covered her mouth with one hand while holding a bloody Arkansas toothpick in the other.

Keats knelt on the other side of the log he’d been sitting on earlier. He wore his bullet-torn opera hat and balbriggans, several blankets from his bedroll hanging off his shoulders.

He stared toward Crazy Eddie and the girl, his rifle in his arms, a befuddled, horrified look in his sleep-bleary eyes.

At the same time, searing pain lanced his back, setting his entire body leaping and quivering. He screamed and swung around, his right elbow slamming against the side of Raven’s head as she raised the bloody skinning knife for another stab.

She grunted loudly then mewed like an enraged wildcat as Natcho’s blow threw her back into the lodge’s purple shadows.

Feeling blood flow from the wound beneath his right shoulder blade, he threw himself headfirst through the door. Eddie screamed again. Natcho caught only a glimpse of the blonde dancing around, wielding the knife as Natcho dove for the pistol in the holster lying in the grass where he’d dropped it earlier.

Labored, animal grunts and thrashing brush rose on his left. He was about to turn that way, when Keats shouted, “Stop!”

Natcho turned back toward the softly glowing fire. Keats was rising, his fat gut jiggling behind his skin-tight balbriggans.

As he cocked his heavy-barreled Spencer and began ambling ahead and left where the girl was screaming and slashing Eddie with the toothpick, a large, bearlike figure appeared from the darkness behind him.

A club rose. It arced downward, the heavy end smashing across the top of Keats’s head, pancaking his opera hat. Keats groaned and dropped to his knees, face pinched with agony.

Natcho ran forward and cocked his .45, hesitating a moment as he tried to decide whom to shoot first—the bearlike figure with the club or the girl still dancing around Eddie, screaming, laughing, and slashing.

The sounds of four running feet grew to his left. Raucous growls rose. A shadow flickered.

He wheeled in that direction, swinging the cocked pistol. But before he’d turned full around, the huge, furry, red-eyed creature bounded up from a dead run, throwing itself toward Natcho.

The Mexican triggered the pistol into the air as the beast slammed into his chest, lifting him two feet off the ground and throwing him backward.

The back of his head hit the ground so hard that his vision blurred. The beast stared down at him, eyes blazing, long nose wrinkled as the hackles rose to show the long, sharp, sickle-like teeth.

The beast jerked his head down, closed his jaws around Natcho’s neck, and tore his throat out.