Longarm and the War Clouds (9 page)

Longarm gave a wry chuff. She had to be joking.

But as she stepped forward, wrapped her arms around his neck, rose up on the toes of her boots, and mashed her lips against his, he realized she wasn't.

He rolled his eyes around as she kissed him, kept her breasts planted firmly against his chest. She didn't seem to be wearing anything under her blouse—he could feel the outlines of her warm breasts flattened against him.

When he was sure they were alone out here—he'd only spied a couple of hostlers putting the horses to bed—he wrapped his arms around her. He lowered them, flattened his hands against her bottom. She didn't seem to be wearing anything down there, either.

As he worked her skirt up around her waist, she groaned and pressed more tightly against him. When he'd had enough of her skirt to make the maneuver possible, he placed his hands on her bottom again to feel only smooth, warm skin. Nope, no under frillies.

She really was serious.

“You realize this is probably against regulations,” Longarm said, pulling his head away slightly. At the same time he ran his hand down the crack between her round, firm buttocks and touched the first two fingers of his right hand against her furred mound.

He gently parted the flesh.

“Oh,” she cooed. “Oh . . . oh . . .” She drew a breath and arched her back, spreading her thighs slightly, and pressed her hips harder against his pelvis. “Too late now,” she breathed.

They kissed some more while he probed her love nest with the tips of his fingers. His pants were growing painfully tight, so he said, “I think we can do better than this.”

When he removed his fingers from her pussy, she gave a little shudder and heaved against him once more. He let her skirt drop and then took her by the hand and entered the shed. He looked around, the starlight revealing the outlines of a dozen or so wagons—mostly heavy-wheeled hay wagons and lumber drays.

But there was one black, red-wheeled buggy with what appeared leather seats and a tasseled canopy. Likely the major and the major's wife's buggy, for those rare occasions the Apaches allowed safe travel to Benson or Tombstone for dinner and a show at the local opera house.

“This here looks comfortable enough,” Longarm said as with a grunt he leaned down and picked Leslie up in his arms.

He lifted her into the rear of the buggy. She flopped back, giggling delightedly, onto the rear, stuffed leather seat. Longarm stepped up into the carriage and removed his cartridge belt.

When he had the gun and belt coiled on the seat beside her, Leslie playfully slapped his hands away and, leaning forward, began unbuttoning his pants while looking up at him, her smile flashing like quicksilver in the ambient light filtering through the shed's three open sides.

“I must say, Longarm, your cock has been a bone in my craw ever since I stroked it earlier. I couldn't have gone to sleep tonight, thinking about how wonderful such an impressive organ would feel between my legs.”

She reached into his pants and balbriggans and withdrew the organ of topic. She cooed as she rubbed her cheek against the swollen head of Longarm's cock.

She whispered, “I take it you realize that both my sister and I have . . . um . . . rather strong desires. Out here at McHenry, it's been rather a dry go for me for a while. A girl can't waltz around a cavalry fort like a mare in season, you know, though some of these raw, young recruits have attracted my eye a time or two.”

She licked the tip of his iron-hard shaft and glanced up at him again. “I've managed to be good . . . until now. When I saw you ride into the fort earlier, I just knew I had to have you.”

“The visit to my room earlier wasn't totally innocent, you're sayin'?”

As she ran her tongue around the tip of his bulging mushroom head, she smiled devilishly and slowly shook her head.

Longarm laughed. It was cut off by a deep groan when she slid her mouth down farther on his cock.

After she'd sucked and lapped him for a while, he reached down, wrapped his hands around her arms, and lifted her to a standing position. He kissed her as he lowered his pants to his ankles. Sitting down on the seat, he lifted her onto his lap and twisted and pulled at her skirt until he had it up around her belly.

She was breathing hard now, staring down at him, her lips parted, eyes darkly erotic. He lifted her slightly and she reached between them, grabbed his cock and held it steady while he slowly lowered her bottom onto it.

He grunted and sighed as her warm insides, slick and wet, slid down, down until she was sitting flat across his hips, straddling him.

Her pussy contracted, grabbing at him, clutching him, causing sabers of sheer delight to fire through his belly and into his chest until his vision swam. He unbuttoned her blouse and slid both flaps back to expose her breasts. They bulged toward him, swollen with desire, nipples jutting. As she began rising up and down on her knees, he kneaded her breasts with his hands, rolling the nipples between his thumbs and index fingers.

“Oh,” she said thickly as she continued to rise and fall. “Oh.”

The buggy creaked slightly beneath them, the leather seat squawking faintly.

He could feel her warm fluid slither out around his shaft to lather his balls and the insides of his thighs.

Rolling her head back, causing her hair to slide around her shoulders and breasts, she made sounds that were somewhere between sobs of anguish and exclamations of excruciating delight.

“Oh, Longarm.”

Longarm grunted, thrust his hips up, shoving his cock up hard inside her, moving in perfect concert with the girl's own maneuverings. He buried his face in her cleavage, ran his mustache and tongue up and down that deep, mysterious valley, and then lathered her nipples and sucked them, feeling them growing even harder.

She wrapped her arms around his head, pressed her lips to his forehead, pulled at his hair and his ears, raked her fingers across the back of his neck.

As more warm fluids oozed around his cock and her womb clutched at him harder, she groaned and mewled softly, consciously keeping a handle on her love screams so as not to bring running all the soldiers at the fort. Longarm's cock had a massive heart throbbing in it. It throbbed harder and harder, aching wonderfully.

He grunted and groaned and squeezed his eyes shut as he ground his heels against the buggy floor. His passion was rising quickly toward a crescendo. He leaned back against the seat.

Leslie gritted her teeth and lifted her chin, slowing her pace, grinding against him more deliberately, shivering as though deeply chilled, before lifting the lips of her love nest again to the head of his cock, then down over it again and twisting around on her knees. He thought his iron-hard piston was going to slam through some barrier within the girl and dislocate one of her ribs.

“Oh. Oh, God. Oh, God!” She wrapped her arms around his neck, thrust her pelvis hard against his, and leaned her head back so that her long hair tickled his thighs.

She convulsed violently, sucking back her love screams through her gritted teeth. Longarm grabbed her around the waist, bucked up hard against her, and felt a bomb explode within him. The blast blew up the dam he'd built against his passion, and his hot seed jetted into Leslie like the lava spewing from an angry volcano.

She groaned from deep in her chest and tossed her head from side to side, raking her silky hair across the tops of his thighs.

Longarm hung on to the girl hard and tipped his own head back as he continued to spend himself, gritting out, “Christ!
Christ!
”

Then he was finished but for one more sweet spasm.

Leslie lowered her head with a sigh, hair spilling down her cheeks, shoulders, and breasts. She leaned forward and pressed those beautiful, hot, sweat-slick orbs against his face, running her fingers through his hair.

“Oh, yes.” She swallowed. He could feel her heart beginning to slow its hammering in her chest. She moved her shoulders, snuggling her breasts up tighter against his face. “Oh, yes—that will do nicely.”

Longarm felt her swing her head toward the front of the shed. She gasped.

Longarm turned his head, as well. A silhouette turned in the shed's opening. It was the silhouette of a slender girl in a doeskin dress, with a broad belt wrapped around her waist. Starlight glittered on a sheathed knife and gun handle and in Magpie's long, stygian-black hair.

War Cloud's daughter disappeared around the corner of the shed, and Longarm heard the near-silent thuds of her moccasins growing fainter as she walked away.

The arrow flew so close to Longarm's face that he felt the curl of warm against his nose before his ears registered the zing of the missile's passage. The dyed ash javelin thunked raucously against the stone outcropping rising on the left side of the trail.

Bang!

War Cloud lowered his smoking Spencer slightly. Longarm, his mind still whirling from his almost losing the end of his nose, jerked his gaze toward where his partner had fired.

A young Chiricahua Apache in traditional deerskins and red muslin bandanna stood between two boulders on the escarpment about thirty feet up from the trail. The short, dark brave grunted as he dropped his arrow, which clattered down the rocks of the slope, and then slumped forward, clapping both his dark hands to his belly. His knees bent. He pitched forward from the ledge he was on and turned one complete somersault before landing in the trail about six feet in front of Longarm's and War Cloud's horses.

The mounts jerked with starts, nickering uneasily.

Longarm stared down at the brave who lay moaning, squeezing his eyes closed. The arrows that had tumbled out of his deerskin quiver when he'd fallen now crackled onto the rocks around him. They were fletched with the customary Chiricahua tribal designs. Blood pumped out of the hole in the brave's upper left chest.

Longarm reached forward and slid his Winchester from his saddle scabbard. He pumped a round into the breech one-handed, and held the rifle straight up on his right thigh.

Behind him and War Cloud, Magpie sat her buckskin tensely, pistol in her hand, looking around at the rocks lining this narrow corridor winding up into the higher reaches of the Shadow Montañas, the foothills of which they'd reached early the day before, two weeks after leaving Fort McHenry.

Until now, they'd seen no sign of the small band of wild Apaches who claimed these mountains as home.

“You see any more?” Longarm asked War Cloud, who was also casting his wary gaze around the escarpments looming on each side of the trail.

The scout shook his head.

Then he jerked his head around. Longarm saw the second Apache, then, too. The brave knelt between two boulders near where the first had fired from, drawing his nocked arrow back with a squawk of strained bear gut and ash wood.

Longarm snapped his rifle to his shoulder and fired at the same time the arrow went hurling toward War Cloud, who'd neck-reined his horse around tightly, narrowly avoiding the missile.

“Down!” Longarm shouted as, racking another round into his Winchester's chamber, he leaped out of the saddle to hit the ground flat-flooted. He rammed his rifle against his horse's left hip. The dun whinnied and went screaming up the corridor with War Cloud's and Magpie's mounts. Squinting against the dust, Longarm shouted, “Haul ass into the rocks! I'll cover you!”

He dropped to a knee and aimed his Winchester up at the basalt and granite monoliths rising on the trail's south side, studded here and there with cedars. He saw a snake slither through a crack in the rocks and poke its head into a hole. It gave its button tail a little quiver before pulling it into the cliff face, out of sight with the rest of it.

In the periphery of his vision, Longarm saw War Cloud and Magpie run into the rocks and begin climbing the cliff, weaving amongst boulders and brush clumps. A half second later, three or four more Apaches appeared at nearly the same time, filling the gaps between rocks about thirty feet up the ridge.

They loosed arrows with tooth-gnashing twangs and ensuing whines. Longarm fired once, twice, three times and was aware of one Apache falling back out of sight while another tumbled onto the trail.

Longarm bolted off his heels and ran up a gravelly trough amongst the rocks and boulders hanging precariously suspended along the cliff face, arrows cracking off stone all around him from above. One smacked a thumb of rock to his right.

He stopped and jerked a look at an Apache standing atop a finger of rock about twenty yards above and to his left. As the Apache reached to pull another arrow from his quiver, Longarm aimed and fired the Winchester.

The warrior was thrown back with a yelp. The last Longarm saw of him was his moccasins rising high in the air before dropping back down the other side of his perch.

Several shots rose on Longarm's left, in the direction in which War Cloud and Magpie had run up the ridge.

The lawman racked a fresh cartridge and continued running up the ridge, boots sliding in the loose shale. He gained the top, breathing hard. Only one more shot rose on his right, and then an eerie silence descended.

Longarm walked amongst the rocks topping the ridge, looking slowly from his right to his left and back again, tracking with his cocked rifle. The silence was ominous. There was no movement except the breeze occasionally lifting little swirls of dust.

Ahead, the gravelly slope dropped slightly. A corridor angled gradually off to Longarm's right.

Tufts of grass and twisted cedars grew amongst the rocks that had obviously been spilled here during a long-ago eruption of a massive volcano—one of many that made up the Shadow Montañas, which were a maze of black volcanic rock mixed with occasional basalt or sandstone outcroppings.

Squeezing his Winchester in his hands, crouching, Longarm walked slowly around the bend.

Just as the trail began to straighten, he caught movement in the periphery of his left eye. He jerked his head and gun around in time to see a shirtless, middle-aged Apache with long, black, silver-streaked hair aim a Colt's revolving rifle at him. The Apache squinted as he triggered the rifle, which must have been new to him—he'd probably swiped it from a prospector or some other white man he'd found interloping in these sacred mountains of the Chiricahuas—and missed Longarm by a foot.

The bullet plowed into rock ahead and above the lawman, spanging wickedly.

Longarm's Winchester roared twice. He watched the warrior jerk back against the rock wall behind him, snarling and triggering his rifle into the gravel near his knee moccasins. Blood pumped from the two holes in his leathery hide drawn taut across his ribs.

Something moved along the corridor ahead of Longarm. The lawman threw himself to his left a half second after an arrow broke against the rocks where he'd been standing a moment before.

He rolled off a shoulder and snapped the Winchester's rear stock to his cheek, taking quick aim at the Apache running toward him down the corridor, grimacing anxiously as he reached over his left shoulder to pluck another arrow from his quiver.

Longarm drew a bead on the Apache's chest over which a red-and-white calico blouse and medicine pouch billowed. The Apache howled wickedly, dark eyes flashing. When the brave was ten feet away from Longarm, the lawman squeezed the Winchester's trigger.

The hammer fell with a benign ping against the firing pin.

Longarm cursed.

The Apache stopped, grinned, and loosed his arrow. The missile was a blur hurling toward Longarm, who had no time to dodge before he felt the hot pain of the strap-metal head burying itself in his upper left arm.

Longarm yelped and dropped his empty rifle. He glanced at the arrow. About a foot of its back end protruded from the front of his left arm. The rest, including the blood-coated, strap-metal head, protruded from the back of that arm.

“Fuck!”

Should have counted your shots, dumbass . . .

Longarm rose to his knees and slid his Colt from its holster. But before he could get the weapon aimed, the Apache was on him.

The warrior kicked the gun out of the lawman's hand. The Colt barked, hurling its slug skyward before it went flying high in the air and careening back down the corridor in the direction from which Longarm had come.

The Apache took one step back and, crouching and grinning, slid a big bowie knife from a beaded sheath under a red slash on his right hip. He grinned wider, showing nearly a full set of large, crooked, yellow teeth, his long hair blowing in the breeze.

Longarm heaved himself quickly to his feet, stifling a yelp against the searing pain in his left arm, feeling the blood ooze out from both the entrance and exit wound. He spread his boots and squared his shoulders at the Apache, who crouched like a cat about to pounce. The Indian expertly flipped the knife in his hand and held it up slightly to show Longarm the razor edge.

Longarm's pulse hammered in his temples.

This didn't look good. This didn't look one bit good. The Apache, short and muscular, with cunningly slanted eyes, appeared to be damn good with that knife . . .

There was nothing quite so fortifying as feeling as though you're teetering on a precipice with death yawning from the darkness below. As the Apache lunged toward Longarm, the lawman parried the blow with his left arm, screaming against the fire flaring in that arm when he knocked it against the Apache's knife hand.

The lawman lurched forward, hammering the Apache's left cheek with his right fist.

He'd found the strength to land a sledgehammer blow to the Indian's face. It scrambled the Native's brains for a valuable split-second, enough time for Longarm to deliver an on-target kick to the Chiricahua's crotch. He'd put enough adrenaline behind the kick that the Apache screamed and dropped the knife as he bent forward and clapped both forearms over his battered balls.

Instantly, the Indian straightened, tears glistening in his eyes from the pain he was trying to shrug off. He balled his fists and quartered around Longarm. The lawman reached around his left arm with his right hand, and screamed as he broke off the end of the arrow and tossed it away. He pulled the end out of the front of his arm with another bellowing yell that rocketed around the canyon.

He held the splintered end of the arrow in his right hand, blood dripping off the finger of split wood jutting from the main shaft.

“Here, you son of a bitch,” Longarm raked out through clenched teeth, “maybe you'd like this back!”

The Indian had watched in hang-jawed amazement as the white man had removed both ends of the arrow from his own arm. That's why he was slow to react when the same big man with the bloody left arm bolted toward him, hammering his left fist with another echoing scream across the Apache's right cheek.

The Apache grunted and stumbled backward.

The big lawman was on him in a second, grabbing him by the back of his neck and pulling his head forward while he rammed the splintered end of the bloody spear into the Apache's throat.

The brave stumbled back, screaming and clawing at the bloody shaft in his neck. He fell back against a wall of the canyon and, choking, frothy blood pumping from his neck, dropped to his butt before falling onto his shoulder and jerking as the last of his life bled out.

Two more figures appeared in Longarm's field of vision. He scooped the Apache's bowie knife off the ground and held the knife up in a ready crouch. But it was the War Cloud father and daughter standing there looking at him in mute amazement.

An Apache warrior was down on all fours in front of them—a tall, bony young man with an eagle feather headband. Obviously the War Clouds' prisoner, he too was staring skeptically up at the tall white man in the blue shirt and string tie, wielding the knife.

Longarm lowered the knife and straightened with a sigh.

“Where you two been?” he said. “And who's your friend?”

He'd barely gotten that last out before the ground started to pitch around him. Several clouds must have passed over the sun, because shadows skittered along the rocky canyon around him. He looked up. The sky was clear. His brain was only just then catching up to his body, realizing the throbbing pain hammering him as blood continued to ooze out of both holes in his arm.

“You best sit down and rest, brother,” War Cloud advised, glancing at Magpie with the unspoken order to watch their prisoner, and strode toward the lawman. “You don't look so good. Ouch—that arm's gotta hurt!”

Longarm glanced at the bloody appendage. “I gotta admit it's a might on the uncomfortable side.” He looked around at the ridge walls. “We get all of 'em?”

“For now. There will likely be more. I don't know how large the band is that lives in these mountains—I haven't been here for many years, not since I was a wild young brave—but the Chiricahuas will try everything they can to keep trespassers away. Especially away from Blood Mountain, where they believe their witch god lives.”

He peered toward the large, arrow-shaped formation that they'd been heading for in the southwest though the large, bald, black granite peak couldn't be seen from this vantage.

War Cloud took Longarm's good arm and led him over to the shaded side of the canyon. The scout shoved Longarm down onto his butt and pushed him back against the relatively cool stone wall. War Cloud looked at the two dead men, and then he looked at Longarm and shook his head.

“That was a piece of work there, brother.” He chuckled and looked at Magpie, who offered a rare smile, her dark eyes flashing in the sunlight.

Longarm looked at the Apache brave whom Magpie was holding a pistol on. “Who's he?”

War Cloud looked at the Apache, whose left eye was swelling closed. Blood dribbled down from the young brave's left temple. “He will not tell me his name. Magpie knocked him out with a rock. He has been shamed. But do you see those two eagle feathers?”

“Someone important?”

War Cloud nodded. “Likely the son of the band leader—whoever he is. I figure if we have the leader's son with us, we will have an easier time reaching Black Twisted Pine.”

“Good thinkin'.”

Magpie said something to her father. War Cloud frowned at the girl and then, apparently to appease her, he walked back to stand over the young Apache, aiming his carbine at the brave's head.

Meanwhile, Magpie walked over and knelt down beside Longarm. She said something in her tongue that sounded like German being spat out around a mouthful of rocks, and lifted his wounded arm slightly. She lowered her head, squinting her eyes, evaluating both wounds.