Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds by Tabor Evans Page B

this one time, she and Longarm seemed to be alone on the walk. But he offered her a free elbow and suggested softly, "We'd best duck into this slot and let me carry you on from the far side of the block, ma'am. It's been my sad experience that some sore losers are inclined to wait up ahead in the shadows after you think you've backed 'em down."
    The gal in dark velveteen slipped a gloved hand through the crook of his left elbow, and there was just room for the two of them to go side by side through some mighty dark shadows, dog-legging along that alleyway in line with the street out front, and then slip through yet another slot to the street beyond as he told her to hush every time she started to say something to him.
    Once they'd crossed to the far side of the residential street he'd led her to, Longarm told her, softly, "We can talk now, long as we talk soft and walk no louder. I'd be Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, as you seem to have guessed, and you still have the advantage on me, ma'am."
    She sighed. "I might have known you didn't remember me, Custis. You really were just being your gallant self, to a gal in trouble who was really what they said she was for all you knew."
    She hugged his arm to her nicely padded bodice and added, "They said you were like that, when you and me and the world were younger over in Dodge."
    There were no street lamps, and the moon was only a thin fingernail paring of light in the starry sky above. So Longarm had to stare at her upturned face a while, noting she was sort of pretty or at least not downright deformed, as he replied uncertainly, "Are we speaking of you and me in Dodge before or after I started packing a badge six or eight years ago, Miss Annie?"
    "Annie Newton, back in '72," she replied wistfully, and went on. "You were still punching cows and I was a skinny chambermaid at the Drover's Rest that afternoon you saved my virtue from yet another trail herder who'd come back to the hotel early to catch me alone upstairs, he thought."
    She laughed girlishly. "I can still see him flopping like a rag doll down those stairs you sent him, and I guess you did do it because you thought it was only right. For you never got fresh with me yourself, even after I'd called you my hero and got up on my tippy-toes to kiss you smack on the mouth!"
    Longarm broke stride to spin her around and bend closer as he marveled, "You're that bitty orphan child that drunk from my old outfit was scaring that time? Well, I never, and Lord have mercy if you ain't growed some since that day in Dodge, Miss Annie."
    She softly murmured, "I feel even older. For I've been scared a lot since. But they call me Amarillo Annie because I was working there until recent. I was dealing blackjack, just in case that matters to you, Custis. I deal cards these days at that Pronghorn Saloon up the street a ways. Sometimes I have the sort of trouble you just got me out of with idiots who think a gal willing to lie down with them for money would stay on her feet like that, hour after hour, for the commission the house pays a dealer."
    Longarm nodded. "I figured they were idjets too. So where would you like me to carry you from here, Miss Annie?"
    She said she lived up the slope and a couple of corners to the south. So that was the way they walked in the faint moonlight, with her doing most of the talking as she caught up on the more recent career of a handsome cowhand she'd once had a young girl's dreams about. It was her idea to confide that he could have had her virginity, once she'd kissed a grown man for the very first time and noticed how exciting it felt. He wasn't cruel enough to tell her he'd paid little attention to the shy lips of a little orphan gal. But as if she could read his mind, as they got to the gate of her hillside cottage, she confided, "I've followed your fame as a lawman in the papers, Custis. I was so surprised to read about you in that shootout shortly after you'd been so sweet to me in Dodge. But then I