Longarm and the Contrary Cowgirls by Tabor Evans

Author:Tabor Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Chapter 20

As they were unsaddling the gray back at that livery, the sultry Wendy Delgado shyly asked if he’d heard about the Conferternity Dance that evening. When he allowed he hadn‘t, she allowed a swain who’d asked her to ’tend it with him had asked less than three days before the dance, the poor sap.

Longarm smiled down at her smouldering brown eyes to say, “Just my luck I hadn’t heard there was to be such a dance. No decent gal would ever accept an invite the very day of the event, right?”

She said, “Oh, I don’t know, seeing you’re a stranger in town. It’s not as if I had to worry you’d asked somebody prettier, first, and settled for me.”

“I don’t know any other gals in town well enough to ask,” Longarm replied, which was the simple truth when you studied on it. So she told him it might be easier to meet right there after suppertime and stroll down the way to the rectory hall of Sankt Josef’s in the cool of the evening.

Longarm smiled uncertainly and said, “Hold on, Miss Wendy, we’re talking about a dance at that Austrian Papist church down the way?”

She said, “Not in the church, silly. Their Conferternity Society meets in a sort of barn behind the quarters of Father Paul. My own folk ’tend Santa Rosas most of the time, of course, but Father Paul and Padre Alejandro agree members of the Santa Fe should know one another, and so we all attend the Conferternity affairs at the new Austrian church.”

He said, “That sounds reasonable, to me, but were those Lutheran Zimmer twins aware of your Santa Fe whilst you were wrangling for ’em way back when?”

Wendy said, “I suppose so. It never came up. I didn’t ask them how they said their own prayers, and, to tell you the truth, I’ve never been one for praying all that much. None of us younger girls worry as much about the hereafter as the poor old shawly ladies you see mumbling their beads in the gathering dusk as the sun goes down on yet another of their days.”

Longarm grimaced and said, “I’ve noticed old gents seem to get more holy or more horny-acting as their days grow shorter. But this day, we have to share figures to drag on forever before I can squire you on down to that dance, Miss Wendy!”

She blushed under her dusky cheeks, and they shook on it before he asked if he could leave his saddle and bridle in their tack room.

When she allowed he sure could, he bade her auf Wiedersehen as Wolf Kruger and told them that was who he was when he dropped by the Drover’s Savings and Loan to jaw with a prune-faced loan officer.

Not wanting to show his badge and ID, Longarm fibbed about some daydreams involving a cattle spread of his own, down the draw a piece.

The banker stared at his faded denims in ill-disguised dismissal to declare, “A quarter-section claim with all-year

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