Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance Read Online Free PDF Page A

Chinaman, who also sold a rather tasty lager by the bucketful, now Longarm and the horse were pounding the trails for home.
    He’d decided that despite the need to rush back to Denver, he had to stop overnight somewhere or kill both himself and his horse. Why not treat himself to a luxurious bed and a good meal in the stylish Grand Hotel built recently by Horace W. Tabor?
    He felt lousy about the dead lawmen—he wondered who they were and if he’d known any of them—but he could only move so fast, and after taking down an entire gang of yellow-fanged devils and saving a train full of innocent folks including five pretty doxies, he deserved one night in a down-stuffed bed provided by the silver tycoon, Horace Tabor. Never mind that most of the country’s newspapers had declared the man a hell-bent lecher, having divorced his wife and married one Elizabeth McCourt, deemed by the scandal-mongering newsmen and tabloid-reading public a home-wrecking charlatan.
    It was said that old Horace had built the grandest hotelon the western frontier, and named it appropriately, providing luxurious furnishings and tasty grub to weary travelers. Longarm had also heard from those who knew him personally that Tabor was a right generous jake to the families who patronized his mercantile, offering credit left and right, and that he was just as fair and honorable to those who worked for him breaking rock in his silver mine, the Matchless, outside Leadville.
    Yes, the weary lawman was looking forward to warm, succulent grub and a good night’s sleep. True to her word, the night before, the pretty, blond whore who called herself Matilda Nightingale had given Longarm about as much pleasure as one man could bear. But he hadn’t gotten a whole lot of sleep.
    Matilda had also made his daylong ride today a little uncomfortable, sucking, as she had, nearly all the skin off his cock. Well, not really. It was just raw enough to make sitting a McClellan saddle all day a tad uncomfortable.
    Her wonderful mouth had sucked him long and hard, though, and despite the day’s discomfort, he felt his balbriggans tent-poling a little at the memory of her soft and pliant mouth. Her warm, wet tongue had stroked him like a lollipop, causing him to grind his heels into the lumpy corn-shuck mattress provided by the madam who ran the crude but functional Creede House of Love & Other Sundry Pleasures.
    Oh, yeah—a soft bed was going to feel good. Especially after he’d been fogging the trail of the Arkansas River Gang for the past three weeks, every night spreading his bedroll out in the rough-and-rocky.
    An hour later, he reined the roan up in front of the Grand Hotel in Leadville, the cobblestone street around him alive now with the crowd that would soon be filling all the saloons and stomping their feet and whistling their delight at the night’s performance at the Tabor Opera House, just down the street from the hotel.
    All types of westerners milled around Longarm—miners, drifters, gunmen, gamblers, Chinamen, blacks, soldiers, bib-bearded prospectors with the crazy eyes of men alone too long in the mountains, and, of course, the brightly dressed doxies showing off their wares from balconies.
    The painted-faced girls resembled lovely birds of all colors of the rainbow, preening themselves for the ribald, rollicking crowd of half-drunk prospective clients whistling and yelling and applauding on the boardwalks below.
    Some men threw scrip and specie at the girls, and then, when their chosen girl beckoned, ran through the parlor house’s propped-open front doors. A few triggered pistols into the air. Young boys in knickers and watch caps ran around, selling sandwiches from tomato crates attached to small wagons or wheelbarrows, dogs barking and panting after them.
    It wasn’t yet seven o’clock, but the brick or wood-frame saloons were doing a brisk business, with burly, bearded men in overalls and hobnailed boots walking in and out of the batwings with