Longarm and the Wolf Women by Tabor Evans Page A

shoulder and tapped ashes from her cigar onto the floor. “Five dollars a day. Uncle Sam can afford that, can’t he?”
    â€œThat’s nepotism, Marshal.”
    â€œSure as shit, Longarm.” She glanced out the street-side windows, beyond which several men were laying Falcon’s dead gunnies out on the boardwalk before the women’s clothing store. “Too late to get started today, though. Besides, Uncle John’s sparking a widow lady over to Camp Collins. Won’t be back here till late tonight.”
    She stood and donned her hat, adjusting it atop her head, arranging her hair, taking her time as though to give Longarm a good study of her figure, full breasts pushing at the blouse and the lacy chemise exposed a good two inches beneath the top of her cleavage, nipples prodding the cotton like small buttons.
    Though she was a big, healthy-looking girl, she had a proportionately narrow waist and well-turned hips and thighs. Her long legs were the kind that set a man to imagining how they’d feel, wrapped around his waist.
    She glanced at Longarm and mashed out her cigar under her boot toe. “Forget it, Deputy. I’ve had enough trouble with men for one day.”
    â€œNothing to forget, Marshal. I never trifle with wildcats . . . no matter how pretty they are.”
    She set her hands on the table and leaned toward him, her blouse billowing out from her chest, giving him a bird’s-eye view of her cleavage. “Remember that when you go up the canyon tomorrow. It’s usually the big, handsome sons of bitches who are especially vulnerable.”
    She remained leaning over him a stretched second, giving him a good, long look of what she was denying him, then straightened, winked, adjusted her hat, and strolled out the batwings.
    â€œI can’t tell if I was just complimented or insulted,” Longarm told the barman setting up a table on the other side of the room.
    The man stopped, his sun-seared face flushed from exertion, a lock of hair hanging over his sweaty forehead. “Poison. That’s what that girl is.” He kicked a chair against the table. “Pretty poison.”
    Longarm stood, donned his hat, and headed for the batwings. His headache was back. He’d take some air and get the lay of the town. “Lot of it around here, ain’t there?”
    Â 
Longarm moseyed around town for a while, though there wasn’t much to mosey around but shacks and sagebrush; then he rented a speckle-gray pack mule and packsaddle from the Occidental Livery and Feed Barn.
    He purchased miner’s garb and a couple of picks and shovels from the mercantile for show, and camping supplies and foodstuffs. With his saddle horse, pack mule, and panniers secured in the livery barn, and a room rented at the Rutherford B. Hayes Hotel at the west edge of town, at the base of an anvil-shaped rimrock, he enjoyed a beer and a surprisingly good steak at a small brick-and-adobe tavern nestled in the cottonwoods along the Diamondback River. The place had been recommended by the livery owner.
    Longarm had intended to call it an early day. He and the marshal’s uncle would be heading out at first light. Besides, it had been a long train ride from Denver, and, having been otherwise occupied with Cynthia Larimer, he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before.
    But before he knew it, he’d become involved shooting craps with a couple of good-humored placer miners, who told him this and that about the river and the canyon he was about to traverse. He didn’t wander over to the Hayes until well after ten o’clock, with distant thunder and the smell of rain pushing in from the mountains.
    He shucked out of his clothes and crawled into the soft, albeit lumpy bed, and blew out his lamp. He watched lightning flash in the window for about two minutes before the rumbling thunder and the fresh smell of the rain and sage lured him off to slumberland.
    He wasn’t