Longarm and the Sins of Laughing Lyle (9781101612101) Read online

  He went back to the fire, kicked out of his boots, and rolled into his blankets. Sometime later, he opened his eyes and lifted his head, holding his breath and looking around. But it was the girl who’d awakened him. The fire had burned down to umber coals, but he could see her to his right rolling around beneath her blankets, groaning and muttering, “Comin’, Pa. Lyle’s comin’ for you!” She sobbed, groaned. “No, Lyle, you bastard . . . don’t you dare hurt Pa!”

  Longarm saw that her blanket was twisted around her waist. As she continued to groan and thrash miserably, he rose from his own hotroll, chucked a couple of good-sized branches on the fire to warm the camp a bit, then crabbed over to her. She lay on her back, muttering incoherently now, hair a tangled mass across her tanned cheeks and strong but delicate nose. Her shirt had opened a ways, and he could see the curve of a tender breast lightly sprayed with cinnamon freckles.

  Longarm pulled the blanket up to her neck, saying softly, “Shhh, Miss Jenny. Everything’s all right.” He placed the back of his hand gently against her cheek. “It’s just a dream, girl. Just a—”

  She sat up with a gasp, hair tumbling around her shoulders.

  “Easy,” Longarm said. “You were dreaming.”

  Her breasts and shoulders rose and fell sharply with each labored breath. “Oh,” she said finally, thinly. She turned to him, looked into his eyes, her own still bright with fear, and then she gave a sob and threw her arms around his neck. She clung to him tightly, her quick breaths warm and moist against his unshaven neck.

  He wrapped his arms around her, splayed his hand across her back, giving her a gentle, reassuring squeeze and trying not to notice the press of her tender mounds against his chest.

  “Just a dream,” he said.

  She drew back away from him and sighed. “Whew!” She smiled and looked around. “I dreamt . . . I dreamt that Lyle was. . . .”

  “It was just a dream, Jenny,” Longarm said. “You go back to sleep now. You’ll feel better once the sun comes up.”

  She gave a shiver despite the warmth pushing out from the fire’s dancing flames. “Cold,” she said. “I must’ve been sweating.” She looked up at him from beneath her brows, still quivering. “Would you lay with me for a bit? You’re so big and”—he eyes flicked across his chest—“warm.”

  Longarm hesitated. Of their own accord, his eyes flicked to her heaving bosoms and the spray of freckles in her cleavage. She clutched her arms and gave another shiver.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll lay here for a while.”

  “Thanks, Marshal.”

  “Friends call me Longarm.”

  She swallowed and lay back, and when he had dragged his own blankets over and lain down with her, pulling his blankets and hers over them, she buried her head in his chest and said, “All right, then . . . Longarm.”

  He’d almost managed to fall asleep when he felt her warm hands lightly massaging his iron-hard cock, which was painfully tightening his pants and long handles around his balls. For a moment, he thought she was dreaming, but then her little, warm fingers had unbuttoned his trousers. She slid one of her hands into his pants and through the fly of his balbgriggans to cup his balls, gently squeezing.

  Her small hand burned against him.

  Longarm groaned, blinking up at the stars that he couldn’t see for the warm vail of heart-thudding lust that had so suddenly engulfed him. She kept her head pressed against his chest as she delicately hefted his balls and then slowly ran her hand up the throbbing shaft to its head and down again.

  She wrapped her hand around it tightly and began pumping. As she pumped him, he could feel her head moving against him, hear her giving little animal grunts and sighs, feel her breasts pressing against him as her breaths grew more and more labored. Christ, Longarm thought, should I say something? Does she know what she’s doing or is the poor child asleep?

  Then again, he sure as hell didn’t want her to stop. She’d seemed so young and virginal, but she was handling his cock like she’d done it before.

  He lay back against her saddle, groaning as she manipulated him and made little grunting sounds. At last she stopped, rolled back on her butt, and began furiously opening her pants and then squirming around as she worked them down her legs. Longarm unhitched his own belt and followed suit, grinding his heels into the ground and arching his back while lifting his ass up off the ground far enough to get his whipcord trousers down around his ankles. He’d gotten them only as far as his knees, however, when Jenny swooped over him once more, shoving him back down against the ground and straddling him.

  “I’ve only done this once before,” she said in a voice pinched with desperation, “so you tell me if I’m doin’ anything, wrong, okay?”

  He grunted that he would.

  She had her own pants and underwear all the way off, and as she reached down and grabbed him and steadied him, she slowly lowered her pussy over the head of his cock. She squeezed her eyes closed and chomped down on her lower lip. “Shit!” she cried. “It’s so damn big!”

  But then she lowered herself further and fairly screamed. “Oh, gawd!” she cried as she clamped her knees tight against him and shivered as though chilled, though Longarm doubted she was cold any longer. Her skin was on fire. Her snatch felt like a pot of warm honey sliding up and down on his tender cock, nerves firing ripples of pure erotic ecstasy up through his belly and heart and into his throat and brain.

  As she continued to grunt away on top of him, he opened her shirt and slid it down her shoulders. She kept her eyes closed, oblivious to everything but her snatch, it seemed, as he lifted her thin, cotton chemise above her breasts. He cupped her breasts in his hands, flicked his thumbs across the nipples, then lifted his head and sucked each distended nipple in turn.

  “Ohhhhh!” she fairly sobbed, bobbing up and down on him faster, with even more desperation. “Ohhhh, God, that feels so good. Keep doing that, Longarm. I love how your mustache brushes against my tits! God, your tongue is so hot!”

  No hotter than she was, he thought, tensing himself and squeezing her breasts gently in his hands as he felt her grind against him, shaking like she was lightning-struck as she reached her climax. She opened her mouth to scream, but Longarm closed one hand over her lips and held her down close against him as he bucked up hard against her and let go of his own hot juices, and they lay there, shaking, Jenny continuing to grind his pussy against his spasming organ.

  They lay together for a long time, spent. She kept her face pressed against his cheek, occasionally moving her crotch around on his relaxed but still tingling member. Finally, she sandwiched his face in her hands and whispered, “Did I do it right?”

  “You did it just right.”

  “God, I needed that, Longarm!”

  She kissed him passionately, sighed, and rolled off of him, then rose and walked naked to the creek. Her bare ass and legs were pale in the darkness. He drew several deep breaths, then pulled his long handles and trousers back up on his hips and buckled his belt.

  When she came back, she dried herself with a scrap of cloth, pulled her pants back on, and lay back down beside him in the bedroll. She pressed her head to his ribs, curling her body into a tight ball against him, and soon her breaths were coming deep and regular.

  He woke later when she stirred. He opened his eyes and saw her standing over him with her rifle in her hands. Loudly, she racked a cartridge into the chamber and aimed the rifle at his head.

  Chapter 18

  Ah, shit—out of the frying pan and into the fire, Longarm thought, staring into the rifle’s bottomless black maw.

  Blinking sleep from his eyes, he followed the rifle up past its stock and her well-filled work shirt to Jenny’s pretty head, which was not canted toward him but facing off toward the north. The sky above the girl was smeared with the pearl wash of dawn. In the faint light, he saw
that she was not aiming the rifle at him, as he’d thought upon waking. She was only standing near him and holding it negligently across her hips, though she had the hammer cocked.

  Longarm nudged the barrel aside, wagged his head with relief, and said, “What is it?”

  “Something thrashing around upstream.”

  Longarm heard it, too—the snorts and snarls and snapping brush of the predators fighting over Jake and his kith.

  “Just coyotes,” Longarm said, rising stiffly with a grunt. “They’re enjoyin’ their breakfast, and I gotta say I’m right jealous. All I have is some jerky tougher than double eagles and some hardtack that redefines ‘hard.’”

  Jenny depressed the carbine’s hammer and leaned the rifle against a tree. “Longarm?” She looked at him shyly, then swept her mess of long, tawny hair back from her shoulders, arranging it into a ponytail. “About last night . . .”

  “Ah, hell,” Longarm said. “You don’t need to go feelin’ guilty, and I sure as hell . . .”

  “No,” she said, lowering her hands and walking toward him, her hair secured with a leather thong behind her head. She placed her hands on his forearms and looked up at him. “Call me wanton or depraved or just a plain old bad girl, but I enjoyed it.” A smile lifted her mouth corners. “And I wanted to thank you for it. For taking my mind off Pa and Lyle and all, when there was nothin’ for us to do about ’em anyway. Like I said, it was only my second time, and . . . well, I hope you found some pleasure in it, too.”

  “Jenny?” Longarm said, placing his hands on her arms. “How could I not have?”

  He pulled her against him, hugging her, and she wrapped her arms around his waist.

  “In that case,” she said, pulling away from him and crouching over her saddlebags. “Let’s have us some breakfast. Ma packed bacon biscuits and fresh deer jerky. By the time we’re finished eating, it should be light enough for us to hit the trail.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Longarm said as his stomach rumbled. “That Ma’s a caution, ain’t she?”

  * * *

  Jenny had been right. When they’d built up the fire and heated the coffee, with which they washed down Ma Marcus’s biscuits and jerky, the sun had risen enough to make travel possible over the rough terrain ahead. When Longarm had turned the mounts of last night’s cutthroats’ loose, free to stray off to the nearest ranch, Jenny led the way up out of the gorge and back onto the main trail.

  A half hour later, they were following the shortcut she’d mentioned. It was a perilously narrow trail along the shoulder of a high mountain on which very little grew except short, brown grass, low-growing evergreen shrubs, and wiry wildflowers. The incline was nearly vertical, and the slope was covered with slide-rock, but the trail, likely carved out of the mountain by deer and elk, was wide enough to give passage, albeit a sometimes harrowing one. He and Jenny were about a thousand feet above a broad mountain park in which a blue lake nestled in a clearing among firs and lodgepole pines.

  The rising sun glittered on the water, from which, as Longarm glanced down, a blue heron took ungainly flight and swept off toward the east, toward a pass that stood among steep, toothy peaks.

  The trail wound around the mountain, then dropped down into a park not unlike the one on the other side, and Jenny led Longarm onto a rugged two-track trail that branched off away from the mountain and into a broad valley between humpbacked, fir-forested ridges. As they came out of the trees, Longarm saw a small ranch headquarters nestled at the bottom of the valley’s right slope, behind a peeled log portal decorated with elk antlers. A brand was burned into the portal’s overhead timber, but Longarm couldn’t see it yet from his distance of a hundred yards.

  From here, the ranch didn’t appear much—just a small, weathered-gray log cabin and a log barn, flanked by a privy and fronted by a windmill and three corrals, including a circular breaking corral. Smoke curled from the cabin’s stone chimney, which climbed up the near side wall, nearly as broad as the wall itself.

  There appeared to be a dozen or so horses inside one of the corrals, and two figures were moving toward it from the direction of the cabin. Something was wrong with one of the figures. The man seemed to be staggering, falling, then heaving himself back to his feet uncertainly.

  Angry voices rose on the cool, mid-morning air—one shriller, more pinched than the other.

  “Oh, no,” Jenny said softly as, holding her reins up high against her chest, she stared straight ahead toward the ranch.

  The pinched voice rose again, more clearly now: “No, you don’t, damn your worthless hide! I don’t care if you are kin of mine—you ain’t takin’ no more of my hosses, you gutless, low-down dirty dog!”

  The stumbling figure now lurched up off a knee and dove toward the other man, who was in front of him and striding slowly, arrogantly toward the corral with the horses in it. As Longarm and Jenny continued riding, the headquarters growing larger before them, Longarm saw Laughing Lyle’s pinto vest and the long, stringy, straw-colored hair hanging straight down from his flat-brimmed hat.

  Behind the men, another figure, who wore brown pants and a black vest, stood in the yard before the cabin, facing them, one foot cocked forward, a hand on a hip, taking in the skirmish with a casual, jeering air. Longarm recognized the supple, long-legged figure of Bethany Todd. She appeared to be holding a mug in her hand. Behind her, the cabin’s front door was open.

  “Pa, no!” Jenny screamed as Laughing Lyle spun suddenly and hammered the older man’s face with his right fist.

  Longarm could hear the smack of the killer’s fist against his father’s face even as Jenny ground her spurs into her horse’s flanks and set off at a gallop.

  “Jenny, goddamnit, hold on!” Longarm yelled, reaching forward to slide his Winchester from his saddle boot.

  He rammed his heels against his buckskin’s loins and lunged on up the trail behind Jenny, seeing her father hit the ground hard with a loud yell as Laughing Lyle swung back to face the oncoming riders. Lyle clawed one of his two six-shooters from its holster, strode forward several steps, and raised the pistol straight out from his right arm.

  “Jenny!” Longarm shouted, cocking his rifle one-handed. “Get your damn head down!”

  The girl kept barreling straight ahead, hunkered low over her horse’s neck but not low enough to keep from getting herself drilled if Laughing Lyle’s aim was keen, and if he’d actually sling lead at his own half-sister. Longarm wasn’t all that surprised when, a half a second after Laughing Lyle’s pistol puffed smoke from its barrel, dust blew up only two feet away from Jenny’s lunging sorrel mare.

  Too close to be merely trying to scare her off.

  Longarm urged more speed from the buckskin and began to overtake Jenny’s sorrel as he aimed his Winchester one-handed and squeezed the trigger. The rifle shrieked, but the bullet was thrown wide by the shooter’s jostling perch, and dust puffed a good six feet to Laughing Lyle’s right, near the base of the breaking corral’s gatepost.

  “Jenny, get back,” Longarm shouted again, galloping five feet behind her as she tore under the portal and into the ranch yard.

  Longarm galloped into the yard behind her, just as Laughing Lyle’s pistol smoked once more. Jenny gave a shriek and went tumbling off her sorrel’s left hip, hitting the ground in a thudding pile only a few feet from Longarm’s buckskin. Longarm levered another shell one-handed into the Winchester’s breech, aimed the same way as before, and fired as he continued lunging toward Laughing Lyle, who’d turned his pistol on Longarm.

  The lawman’s next shot must have creased him, because the killer’s own shot spanged off a rock far wide of its fast-closing target, and then he yowled and spun around, grabbing his ear. Longarm barreled toward the man, triggering the Winchester twice more before Laughing Lyle snapped a shot at his father and took off running toward the cabin.

  B
ethany stood in the doorway, pumping a Winchester. One shot blew the lawman’s hat off his head a half second before the next one punched into the buckskin’s brisket.

  The horse screamed and dropped its head and withers.

  “Shit!” the lawman cried, throwing his rifle wide and then flinging himself free of the saddle.

  The heart-shot horse turned a complete somersault before landing with a crunching thud in the yard, making dust roil about ten feet from where Hy May sat up on one hip, clutching his other knee with one hand and shouting, “Jen-neeee!”

  Three more slugs triggered from the cabin’s doorway blew up dirt and ground horse shit in front of Longarm as he rolled onto his belly and brought up his Colt. He triggered three quick shots toward the cabin, blowing slivers from the casing and evoking a clipped shriek from Bethany, who lowered her carbine and ducked inside just as Laughing Lyle dove past her into the cabin.

  Longarm fired two more shots, but they only hit more wood as Bethany kicked the door closed. He could hear them both yelling inside as he glanced at the old man now calling for Jenny and crying as he lay on his side, legs curled beneath him. He’d obviously been badly beaten, for both eyes were swollen nearly shut and there were deep bruises and cuts on his patch-bearded face.

  “Gotta get you to cover,” Longarm told the old man as he quickly hooked his arms under May’s. The old rancher wore a ratty undershirt and patched canvas trousers and suspenders, and he smelled like old sweat and an entire vat of forty-rod. His hair was long and greasy, and it clung to his withered yet not unhandsome face.

  “He’s a devil, that one,” Hy May said in a gravelly voice thick from drink. “Pure-dee evil. Came here last night, beat hell out of me with a chunk of cordwood while that girl used my possibles to cook ’em supper. Left me piled up in my own livin’ room, detailin’ all the torment they’ve inflicted!”

  May cursed his son roundly.

  “Go to Jenny! Go to my daughter!” he sobbed as Longarm dragged him around behind the nearest corral.