Legend With a Six-gun (9781101601839) (6 page)

He started feeling a little better. He'd most likely thrown up whatever it was, and it was time to reconsider living long enough to collect his pension.

Longarm got up, lurched over to the gunbelt he'd hung on a rusty nail, and drew the Colt he'd bought in San Francisco to replace the one the Manzanita constable had stolen from him. He hadn't had time to shorten the barrel or file off the front sight, but he thought he could manage a fast enough draw from under his pillow. The door to the deck outside was a flimsy-looking thing with jalousie slats for ventilation, but anyone busting through it would have to make some noise. Gun in hand, he walked naked to the door to slide the bolt in place.

The door opened before he could reach it.

Longarm whipped the muzzle of the gun up, trained it on the slim figure outlined in the moonlight, and snapped, “Freeze, you son of a bitch!”

Then he saw that it was Sylvia Baxter. She looked startled, which sort of made sense, even if nothing else did. Suddenly aware of his nakedness, he placed his free hand in front of his crotch and asked, “Don't folks knock in Boston, sis?”

“I did knock! What on earth is
wrong
with you, sir?”

“I've been shot at, thrown in jail, beat up, and poisoned. Now let's hear what's wrong with you. Are you in the habit of leaping at a person wearing nothing but his birthday suit?”

“Would you please stop pointing that gun at me? I only came to your cabin because you played a dirty trick on me back there in the dining salon. I had to pay for both of our dinners!”

He lowered the Colt, still covering his privates as he stepped back and said, “Come on in. My pants are hanging over there. You'll have to fish out my wallet and help yourself, because I've only got two hands.”

She laughed nervously and said, “I know, but it's a little late now.” Then she added, “Don't worry about it. I studied medicine for two years before they forced me out of it. I've seen naked men before.”

He backed to the bunk and sat down, pulling the edge of the blanket over his thighs as she turned her back on him to go through his pockets. He was grateful that it was almost dark in the room, for he knew he must be beet-red. He said, “It's too bad you didn't graduate. I could use a doctor right now—even a female one.”

She turned around and handed him his wallet, saying, “You owe me seventy-five cents plus the extra dime I tipped the waiter. I might have known you'd be like all the other men. Damn it, I would have been a
good
doctor! You men just don't seem to understand that a woman has a brain, too.”

He put the gun under the pillow and took out a bill, saying, “I'll give you a whole dollar and we'll call it square. As to your brain, I ain't actually seen it, so I can't say whether you've got one or not.”

She snatched the bill from him angrily and stuffed it into her purse as she sniffed, “I don't understand why a grown man should be afraid of a woman doctor. There are a lot of quacks and butchers who are men—name one who is a woman.”

“Don't reckon I can,” he concurred, not a little non-plussed by her belligerence. “Now look here,” he continued. “First of all, I said I'd be right glad to see
any
doctor just about now—”

“Even a female one,” she interrupted him acidly.

“Even a Paiute medicine man,” he continued. “I'm purely sorry about the eighty-five cents, but I was a mite confused and in just a smidgin of a hurry. You wouldn't have cared for it much if I'd stayed.”

To his surprise and further confusion, she sat down on the foot of the bed and said, “You know damned well it isn't the eighty-five cents; it's your whole attitude.”

This conversation was starting to make his head spin even more. He said, “Up to a minute ago, I didn't have any attitude worth mention, but I'll admit I'm getting one pretty fast. Just to set the record straight, as a U.S. deputy sworn to uphold the Constitution, I can tell you I'd arrest anyone trying to deprive any citizen—yourself Included—of his constitutional rights.”

“There, you see?” she exploded. “‘
His
constitutional rights'—it's even in the language.”

“Afraid I can't take responsibility for that,” he said. “I only talk it—I didn't make it up.”

“What about the right to vote?” she pressed on, leaning closer to him and jabbing a finger into the thatch of hair on his solid chest.

Longarm was beginning to wonder seriously what her game was, and he decided to feed her some more rope. “I'll allow that most
men
don't have the sense to pour piss out of their boots—excuse me, ma'am—much less vote. I doubt that women would do much worse, and maybe someday, when the country simmers down and gets less hectic around the polls—”

He noticed that her face was growing flushed and little beads of perspiration had appeared on her upper lip as she asked, “Does the Constitution say only you men have the right to sow wild oats? There's a parlor house in every town across the country, and you know very well that no man sniggering with the others at the pool hall would ever admit that he was a virgin.”

“Would you admit it?” he asked pointedly.

There was an unmistakable sparkle in her eyes as she replied, “It's hardly a problem. I told you I've been married.”

“And since I don't visit parlor houses,” he said, “I guess that more or less cancels out the entire issue.”

Longarm felt now as if he were floating in the air a little distance above the bed. He knew he needed to lie down, with her or without her. As usual, his amorous parts were behaving as though they had a life of their own, and he could feel himself swelling beneath the blanket across his lap. Longarm decided, with fireflies glittering before his eyes, that it was time to call her play. He placed a hand on her knee. She glanced down at his hand without moving away, then shifted her gaze to the prominent bulge at his crotch. Her eyes rose to meet his, and she asked, “Am I to take that as a challenge or a compliment, Mr. Long?”

He didn't answer. He couldn't answer. Suddenly the room was spinning around and he felt as if he were about to puke all over them both. So he decided to lie down and die instead.

*   *   *

He was in this funny big room with red velvet drapes. A bunch of naked women were coming at him from all directions. They had painted faces and high-heeled shoes and they were all grinning from ear to ear. But their grins were evil and they had guns in their hands.

He reached for his own gun, but he wasn't wearing his cross-draw rig. He wasn't wearing anything at all. He was naked and had a monstrous erection, and the painted women were laughing at it. A big blonde with a mouthful of gold teeth and a Mexican gunbelt riding low on her naked hips grabbed at him as if she intended to milk him like a cow. He stepped back and discovered that another naked woman had knelt behind him on her hands and knees. He fell backward to the thick red carpet and the big blonde jumped over the girl who'd tripped him, placed her French heels to either side of his chest, and squatted. Her aim was perfect and he felt his shaft going deeply into her as she shouted, “Powder River and let 'er buck!!”

It felt too good to be real. He decided he was having a wet dream. He wondered if he'd get to come this time, before he awoke all the way. The trouble with wet dreams was that he always seemed to wake up just as they were getting interesting. He started pumping back, but he couldn't quite make it and he knew he'd open his eyes in the little furnished room by Cherry Creek and discover that he had to take a leak. It was purely frustrating to wake up with a hard-on and nobody there to share it with.

*   *   *

He opened his eyes. For a long moment he wondered where he was. Then he remembered that he was on a steamboat. The stateroom lamp was lit. Sylvia Baxter was beside him, sitting up in bed and doing something funny to his eyelids. She was stark naked. Built better than he'd expected, too. Those starched lace dickies that women wore down the front of their dresses sort of flattened things out. Her pink nipples were turned up like her nose.

He said, “What happened? The last time we met, you had all your duds on. Then I must have passed out. I had the damnedest dream.”

“It was a dream for
me
, too!” she said. “I didn't know you were unconscious until a moment ago.”

“You mean we—?”

She smiled languidly. “Yes, darling, and I must say, you're better by reflex action than my silly husband ever was wide awake. I think you've got a concussion. Has anyone hit you on the head recently?”

He grinned wanly, and said, “Now that you mention it, doc, I did have a tussle with a big Irish wharf rat last night. He hit me with the wall of a whorehouse.”

She nodded and said, “That explains a lot. I didn't think you could be as crazy as you've been acting. Have you had sudden mood changes? Any nausea?”

“I threw up a while back. What do you reckon I should take for this concussion, doc?”

“There's nothing you can take. What you really need is a few nights of bed rest. If I'd known you were ill, I'd have . . . well, what's done is done.”

He grinned and said, “The hell you say! If I really did what I dreamed I did, I've got some catching up to do in the real world.”

As he put an arm around her, Sylvia drew back and insisted, “Not in your condition. Maybe later.”

He said, “My condition right now is hard as a poker and, what the hell, it ain't like we're strangers!”

She was still insisting that he was too weak as he rolled her to the mattress and started to mount her. Then, as he got his hips between her smooth ivory thighs, she went limp and breathed, “Do be careful, dear heart. I don't know what I'd do if you killed yourself with this foolishness!”

He got a hand between them and guided his shaft into her moist warmth, saying, “Yeah, it'd be a tough thrill to follow, wouldn't it? A gal who'd once come with a dead man in her would never be able to top it for an interesting experience!”

As he slid all the way into her, she gasped in mingled pleasure and annoyance. “I think I liked you better unconscious! Must you be so vulgar about it?”

He laughed and started moving. “Hell, lady, if you didn't want it he-man style, you never should have started it.”

“I didn't start it. Oh, stop talking like a fool and
do
it!”

The fireflies were back again and the room was spinning like a merry-go-round, but he knew he wasn't going to black out. He gritted his teeth and muttered to himself,
Listen, God. I'm likely to take it personal if you don't let me do it right this time.

This time, God listened.

*   *   *

Sylvia couldn't ride to Manzanita in the stage with him because her brother was meeting her at trackside in the mountains. So they kissed goodbye as the boat docked in Sacramento the next morning, and Longarm promised to look her up when he arrived in Manzanita.

He went to the Wells Fargo office and bought a ride to Manzanita. The agent told him he had a couple of hours to kill before the stage hauled out for the High Sierra. He had most of the background material he needed, but Marshal Vail and the treasury boys might have missed a thing or two, so he moseyed over to the land office to refresh his memory.

Longarm introduced himself to an elderly clerk as a deputy U.S. marshal, without mentioning what district court he worked for. The clerk was a friendly sort who didn't even ask to see his badge, which was just as well, since some son of a bitch had it up in the hills somewhere.

As he started pawing through the files, the clerk said, “I can tell you just about anything you'll find in there, Deputy. I came out here in '49.”

“I'm interested in the Lost Chinaman claim, up in Calaveras County.”

“Hell, son, I was washing color in the headwaters of the Stanislaus when Mark Twain wrote that fool story about the frog.”

“You ever meet the frog?”

“Nope, but I met Mark Twain and Bret Harte when they was just starting to tell all them lies about us. You see, the gold rush started down here in the low country, when they found color washed down off the Sierra in the creek beds.”

“I know about the gold rush, old son,” Longarm told the man.

“No, you don't,” the old clerk contradicted him. “Not if you been reading Harte and Twain. Like I said, we started washing color in the low country. By the fifties, we'd followed the gold up the streams and found the Mother Lode—a big, wide belt of gold quartz running a couple hundred miles up there. The color we'd found in the creeks was just what had washed out of the real lode. It was the hard-rock miners who had the capital to move mountains to get at the good stuff.”

“How many mines are still in Bonanza up in Calaveras County, pop?” Longarm asked.

“Bonanza? Not a one. Most of the veins petered out some time ago. A man named Hearst has a working claim in Calaveras, a mine called Sheep Ranch. But he's hauling low-grade out these days. Hearst is a big shot who got in on the big Virginia City strike, on the other side of the Sierra. He's got the capital to crush his own ore. Angel Camp's about dead. Murphy has a low-grade mine nobody's interested in these days. They had a copper strike up there a while back, but it never amounted to much. Copper's too cheap to haul over all them ridges and they just couldn't compete with Arizona Territory.”

“So let's talk about the Lost Chinaman. I understand the owner is a man named MacLeod?”

“That's right. Nice young jasper, for an Easterner. Him and his pretty little wife bought the mine for next to nothing. It seemed to bottom out a good six or eight years back, but MacLeod's some sort of geologist and he hit a vein the others overlooked. They say he's been shipping tolerable ore.”

“He may be shipping it,” the deputy agreed. “It's not getting anywhere, though. You got a railroad map of the county?”