"I'd rather have you to myself," she said fondly.
"Yeah, I'd rather it be that way too," he agreed, "but if they've come from the country where we're going then we ought to have a talk so we can see what lies ahead."
They met the travellers but discovered that one was an Apache girl. Logan identified her from a distance, uttering a grunt of bewilderment; when they got closer to the travellers they saw that the girl's hands were bound with strips of rawhide and then fastened to the horn of her saddle.
"Santos Alba, a su servicio," the man with the girl said, grinning widely and doffing his hat.
Logan introduced himself and Gloria, speaking in Spanish; he passed Gloria off as his wife again. He explained that they were travelling to Tombstone and expressed a wish to confer about the difficulties of the trail ahead. Gloria watched the Indian girl while the men talked: she had never seen an Indian woman before and she was puzzled why the girl would have her hands tied. She looked to be seve'nteen or eighteen and, under the grime of travel and the big bruise on her left cheek, she might have been exceedingly beautiful. She wore a pair of leggings and a voluminous skirt which would have fallen to mid-thigh had she not been astride a horse. Her eyes, large and dark, measured Gloria with interest.
"Looks like we've got company for the night," Logan said after a short conversation with Alba. "They've come from Sonora, almost, and Senor Alba's gonna tell me all about the trail."
They made a dry camp there beside the track. Alba released the Indian girl's wrists and gestured toward the pack animals; she went over to unload the packs and hobble the animals.
"She's a little skittish yet, that's why I've got to keep her tied up while we're riding," Alba explained. "Found her up in the foothills of the Sierra Madres. I know a feller down in Monterrey who'd give a pretty sack of pesos for something like her, once she's all cleaned up and made to look decent. He's got a real sweet tooth for young Indian girls, that man has. He's going to like this little wildcat!"
They lay back against their saddles as they ate their jerky and pinole. Logan produced the remnants of the mescal he had traded for in Boquillas; he and Alba shared it with gusto. The Indian girl ate readily and once, when Gloria looked over, she glanced up with a glimmering of warmth in her dark, expressive eyes. Gloria smiled tentatively and the girl returned the smile.
After they had stowed away their foodsacks, Logan said something to the girl, switching into a soft, guttural language. The Indian looked up in surprise but spoke in return. Alba's dark eyes narrowed and a grimace of disgust creased his broad, whiskered face.
"You speak their language!" he grunted. "What does she have to say.'"
"I was just asking her where her tribe was, where she came from," Logan replied. "Her father's Nacho, a Chiricahua sub-chief. I've heard of that bunch; they're a tough lot."
"I found her wandering through the hills," Alba said. "No other Apaches within miles that I could see. I would appreciate it, Senor, if you would not speak to her except in Spanish. She understands that well enough."
"Can't see it was doing any harm," Logan mildly objected.
"Neither was it doing any good," Alba told him. "She is my property and I will not have it."
"I don't hold with one man owning another," Logan said. "I reckon I'll talk when I want and how I want!"
Alba snarled out an oath and reached under his coat, but Logan had anticipated the move. He drew his.44 and thumbed off a shot before Alba had even brought his own pistol into the open. Alba pitched over backward and lay crumpled, not making a sound. Gloria watched it all dumbly; it happened too quickly for her to comprehend the rapid sequence of events.
"H-h-he's dead!" she gasped.
"He'd better be," Logan drawled, punching out the empty shell and reloading. "I aimed for his gizzard and I reckon I got in a pretty good shot. But I reckon he'd have done the same to me if I hadn't got him first, so it's about even, I guess."
"But why?" she asked. "Why would he want to kill us?"
"Not us, me," Logan corrected her. "I've heard of him, it seems to me; he's been up to a good bit of mischief along the border for the past four or five years. He'd have shot me, then taken you and the Indian girl both down to Monterrey, the way I figure it. I guess he'd have gotten a real pretty price for the pair of you."
"You mean he'd have sold us? Like slaves?"
"That's about the size of it. It's just as well he made his move then. I sure wasn't liking the idea of sitting up all night and I'd sure never have closed an eye as long as he was around. And besides, I think we've just gotten ourselves a ticket to Tombstone, going first class all the way."
"Eh? What do you mean by that?" she demanded.
Logan ignored her question and directed a volley of Apache at the girl. She replied in kind, plainly grateful that Alba was now dead. Logan listened carefully. His face gradually broke out into a broad smile and when he turned back to Gloria, she could see the elation in his eyes.
"I couldn't have wished for anything better," he crowed happily. "Listen to this. Nacho's her daddy, like I said, and he's some kind of power amongst them Chiri-cahuas. But she got married last year, took up with a young buck named Bravo. Seems that Bravo and her, they fell in with a hunting party and headed off down into the Sierra Madres, down in Mexico. They met up with a band of Warm Springs Apaches there and settled down to winter.
"Well, this Bravo, he didn't prove to be quite the buck that Lita-which is her name, by the way-had expected and she wasn't getting nearly the amount of loving she wanted or needed. Instead of slipping off into the bushes with some other buck, the way a dissatisfied wife would generally do, she started making time with a young girl who'd been made a widow. Yeah, them two Indian girls was sucking each other to a faretheewell! So old Bravo, he waltzes into the midst of 'em one afternoon when they was sucking up a storm and it just about wrecked him to see his own wife eating another woman's pussy and getting her own slit tongued out at the same time!"
"Good heavens!" Gloria exclaimed. "I didn't know Indian women did that!"
"It's kinda rare amongst the Apaches," Logan said, "but I've heard of a case or two. Anyway, it put them Apaches up a stump. If a wife's caught screwing another man, they'll cut her nose off and turn her into a kind of slave. But they just flat didn't know what to do with a case like that, so they turned Lita out, sent her off and had done with her. She was trying to get back to Chirica-hua country when Alba surprised her one morning."
"But how is this going to be to our advantage?" Gloria asked.
"Easy. First, she already knows the country," Logan explained. "And you just can't beat an Apache, man or woman, for knowing the lay of the land. She can guide us to all the waterholes, help us avoid company we don't want. And the second thing is, should we stumble across some Apaches, she might could stand up for us and tell 'em how we kept her from being sold for a whore. I got a feeling that she just might be worth a whole lot to us. She can guide us toward Tombstone and then we'll give her a hand back to her own people."
"I see," Gloria said with a nod of approval. "In other words, we'll be doing her a favor and protecting ourselves as well!''
"That's about the size of it," Logan said. "Now I reckon I'd better see about burying our bad man here."
There were no shovels in their equipment so he had to be satisfied with dropping Alba's body in a gully and piling stones over the corpse. He rifled the man's pockets, finding a small bag of gold coins and another of gold dust, which he added to their collection of valuables and appropriated Alba's pistol and knife. When he rejoined the two women he presented Lita with the pistol and knife. She strapped the big Colt around her waist, settled the knife into the beaded sheath at her hip and smiled happily.
"She says she's a real pistolero now," Logan explained after she had made a short speech. "I think we've convinced her that we're going to help her. I'll tell her what's on our mind."
He explained their intent to the girl, who listened quietly and nodded happily when he had finished. She returned the volley of guttural Apache.
"She says she'll guide us and if we can get into Chiri-cahua country she'll make sure that Nacho treats us like kings," Logan explained. "We won't have to worry about her none!"
Neither Gloria nor Logan felt in the mood for sensual endeavors that night and they soon curied up in their blankets, Lita at their side. The sudden death, the explosion of violence, had altered their sensibilities and they were in no mood for levity, not even of the sensual kind they had grown to love so well. They set out early the next morning and added Alba's pack horses and saddle horses to their own.
"We meet up with some Apaches that don't want to fight, we could use them for trading or presents," Logan explained.
He began giving them both lessons in Spanish as they rode. Lita's command of the language was as limited as Gloria's, but they faithfully repeated the words he taught them. In midafternoon they came upon a small creek. Finding a deep pool in one portion, they decided to make camp there and avail themselves of the opportunity for a good wash. Lita threw off her smock without a trace of shame, displaying a pair of exquisitely sculpted breasts which Gloria found herself envying. They were small but as firm as apples; the nipples were dark brown cones sitting atop large maroon circles that covered nearly all the breast. The leggings came up almost to the tops of her thighs anJ looped over a thong circling her waist. A small patch of jet black hair, almost straight, covered her pussy.
"They jm't much for covering up," Logan said as he watched with frank interest. "Indians figure that nature made 'em that way so they shouldn't be ashamed of it."
Gloria undressed too and, strangely enough, found that she did not mind exhibiting her naked body in front of a stranger. Lita's eyes grew big and round with curiosity when she saw the big breasts swinging from Gloria's ribcage; she had never seen a white woman before and obviously she found the experience very interesting. When Gloria reached into a saddlebag and brought out the bar of laundry soap they had acquired in Boquillas, Lita's dark eyes glowed with appreciation. Logan also stripped and they walked down to the pool together.
"I think she's rather taken with that cock of yours,' Gloria told him as they waded into the pool. "So I guess she hasn't entirely given up the hope of making love with men!"
"She was giving you the eye pretty good too," Logan pointed out. "I'd bet that she'd be glad to head in between your legs without much encouragement!"
Gloria blushed at that, but she could not get the thought out of her mind. When she imagined the Indian girl's lips roaming over her belly and thighs, firing her cunt with rabid desire as Logan loved to do, and then proceeding to the highly inflamed slit and lapping up the moist oils from the juicy furrow, she quivered with delight. When she lathered her loins and ran her fingers over the lips of her pussy they responded with strong signals of readiness. The feeling of eagerness mounted even higher when she saw Lita squat in the shallows, lather her pussy into a rich foam, and then begin working the suds into the mouth of her cunt with two fingers. The girl washed herself thoroughly and then sank lower in the water, rinsing off the soap and allowing it to wash up into her cunt, which she held open with the two fingers. She looked up at Gloria and Logan and muttered a phrase in her native tongue. Logan chuckled appreciatively and turned to Gloria.
"She says she's trying to get rid of all of Alba's come," he said. "Seems he wanted to test her out before he got her down to Monterrey. She didn't like it a bit, even though it had been weeks since she'd had a fuck ith anything but her tamer."
"Her what?" Gloria asked.
"Oh, it's a little gadget a lot of Apache women use," he explained. "They call it the 'woman tamer.' It's just a strip or two of rawhide, braided together with a knot in the end. It looks sort of like a prick and they use it on themselves when they ain't getting enough from their men. Get one of them up you and you can have a wild time of it for sure!"
"My God, you make her sound almost as bad as me!" Gloria exclaimed. "I believe that you have a positive talent for finding the most depraved, immoral women in the whole world, Dick Logan!"