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Like a yawn, she said, “I’m so glad.”
“Could I touch your bosom?”
She nodded.
Henry used his left hand and felt a softness that was the size of an orange. Hurrying more, he asked, “What’s your name?”
She turned her head away as he shoved faster. “Mildred.”
“This is so nice of you. Letting me do this.”
She was surprised but found he was serious. She giggled in spite of his chafing, then heard him groaning. She noticed the wet. “Are you finished?”
With embarrassment he said, “Afraid so.”
She felt between her legs. “My goodness, you were so pent up!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Was it good?”
He got up and adjusted himself. “Don’t have much to compare it to.”
She was using the towel. “So I’m your first?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that makes me feel real special,” she said, but he construed that was untrue.
The singing piano man at the upright Steinway downstairs completed “The Vacant Chair,” waited for applause that did not happen, and pursued a sketchy new tune that he wished to be “The Lost Lady Found.”
Mackie was leaning back against the bar, grinning at the Kid’s face. “Ye get yer pipes cleaned?”
“Yep. Had me a time of it.”
“We hae a job of work to do now, laddie.”
Which was just untying the reins on two brown, fifteen-hand US Army horses from the hitching post in front of McKittrick’s and riding them to Francis P. Cahill’s farrier shop. Windy was waiting there, and he smiled as he watched them uncinch both black McClellan cavalry saddles. The blacksmith folded the saddle blankets and handed each man a limp ten-dollar bill with a grim Daniel Webster on the left front and a vignette of Pocahontas on the right.
The Kid asked, “How much will the caboodle get you?”
“Oh, prolly fifty dollars.” He winked. “You’re wholesale, I’m retail.”
Without stirrups, the Kid and John Mackie stood up on a plank of the farrier’s fence to jump onto the horses, and they rode them bareback to a hiding place up Aravaipa Creek. “Ye’ll be needin ye ain horse, Kid. We’ll get one of these swapped out for ye.”
“I favor roan-colored.”
“Ach, roan it is.”
Walking back to their rooms in the Hotel de Luna, Mackie told the Kid horse stealing seemed to suit him, that they could continue it on a regular basis.
The Kid smiled. “And whoring?”
“With regularity.”
* * *
Success in thieving fetched the Kid his first horse, but he failed to name it, having none of the affection for the loyal animals that caused old hands to conjure poetry about Mackerel, Rusty, or Dan. A horse was just a ride to him, and he went through half a hundred in the next few years. Of greater importance to him was his purchase of a fine tooled, right-handed holster with a new 1873 Colt single-action Army revolver snug inside it, a Winchester Model 1873 rifle, which accepted the same .44-40 caliber cartridge as the six-shooter, and quite an assortment of fancy clothes—owning such being another one of the vices he was becoming accustomed to.
