Longarm in the Lunatic Mountains by Tabor Evans

Author:Tabor Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Looking across the table at the two beautiful women seated across from him at the dining table of Dragoman Lodge was like having an especially stout Apache warrior punch a hole in Longarm’s chest, then reach in and squeeze his heart while twisting it counterclockwise. Cynthia and her cousin, Miss Lucy Dragoman, were truly living jewels.

And Longarm didn’t mind at all that the gowns they each wore were so low-cut as to reveal all but the nipples of their opulent breasts, shoved up and secured by tight bodices. They were so tightly packed into their confines that Longarm could see the veins showing through the pale skin at the tops of all four.

As though to confirm he really wasn’t dreaming the visions before him, the supercilious, cow-faced Mrs. Wannamaker sat to Longarm’s right, just around the corner from Charles Dragoman, whose ears she talked off as she ate, assuring the man that her taste was impeccable and that she was thoroughly capable of enjoying the elk haunch that the man’s cook—a burly, moody Scot named McCallum—had roasted in wild onions, black pepper, and a sauce made from lemons and chokecherries. The wine that Dragoman served with the meal had lifted a flush in the woman’s fat cheeks, and put a slight tremble into her oddly smooth and high-pitched voice, raising it another grating notch.

That was it for the diners, though to Longarm’s left at the heavy timbered, white-clothed table that was large enough for a dinner party twice again the current one’s size, was an unused place setting. The plate and wineglass had been placed there, Dragoman had explained when they’d all first been seated, in the event his son, “who fancied himself a cardsharp, could pull himself away from the hired men’s bunkhouse long enough to grace them with his presence.”

That hadn’t happened yet, and Longarm had a feeling it wouldn’t. Maybe the young Dragoman had spied Mrs. Wannamaker waddling her way into the dining room and decided that poker in the hired men’s bunkhouse would be a more desirable way to spend the evening.

“So, Marshal Long,” said Lucy Dragoman, looking across the table at him from beneath her thin, sandy brows, “Cynthia tells me that you’re quite a noted law bringer around the West. Do you enjoy your work?”

The cook had just cleared away the main course leavings and set out a big bowl of bread pudding with a bottle of cognac before limping, customarily taciturn, back to his kitchen.

Longarm glanced at Cynthia. “When my assignments are as much fun as this one ... and I’m served good vittles like these . . . how could I possibly say I didn’t?”

“Perhaps you would join Cynthia and me and Mrs. Wannamaker, of course, in the parlor for an after-dinner drink? And you could relate a few stories? I don’t get out of these mountains much, I’m afraid.” Lucy slid her lightly admonishing gaze to Dragoman. “But I’d love to hear what goes on in the exciting and, I’m sure, rather violent world of a deputy United States marshal.

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