“Elena,” Pablo announced with a wide smile.
“Elena? Really?” the miners enthused.
“Elena… Elena… Elena…” The name rippled excitedly throughout the campsite, like an echo.
A beautiful white woman was one thing. A beautiful white whore would be quite another to these sex-starved young men, Rafe realized.
“And she belongs to us,” Sancho told them, patting his pistol for emphasis.
“Will you sell her favors?” one grizzly trapper asked, scratching the groin of his buckskin breeches with anticipation.
“Maybe later,” Sancho said generously.
“After she’s corkscrewed us a few dozen times,” Pablo stressed. “And done the ‘gargle’ and the ‘forms’ on us.”
There was a communal sigh of, “Aaah, the corkscrew!” Then, they all inquired, at once, “The gargle? The forms?”
Pablo explained, with relish, the new sexual tricks Elena could do for her customers.
“I’ll give ya fifty dollars fer one night,” the trapper offered.
“A hundred,” another yelled out.
“Two hundred, if there’s an extry corkscrew.”
“Five hundred, but she takes on the two of us,” a pair of towhead twins, better suited to an Iowa farm setting, threw in, blushing profusely at the hoots of their friends.
“I’ll buy her from you for five thousand dollars,” a steely-eyed man with a French accent offered suddenly, throwing his cigar to the ground and stomping it with a polished leather boot. Rafe heard someone whisper that this was Pierre Lamoyne, who ran a brothel in San Francisco.
That last cash figure caught Ignacio’s attention, and he halted his horse until they caught up. “She ees not for sale… yet,” he told Lamoyne. “And your price ees much too low”.”
“Ten thousand, then,” Lamoyne countered, stepping close to examine the merchandise.
Ignacio licked his lips greedily in consideration. “Perhaps — ”
“Like hell!” Rafe shouted, and Helen jumped, seeming to come out of her trance. “She’s my wife, and no one’s touching her.”
“I’ll sell the puta if I want to,” Ignacio asserted, tossing aside the blanket, exposing his gun pressed to Helen’s heart.
Rafe’s blood turned cold at-the peril. Ignacio might pull the trigger on a whim. Rafe bit his tongue to force back more angry words. Calm down. Take it easy. Wait for the moment. The opening. Don’t panic.
“His wife?” the miners asked. “Who is he?”
“El Angel Bandido,” Pablo said.
“Ooooh,” a number of the men said, and backed away.
“I’m not the Angel Bandit.”
“Who said anything about selling me?” Helen wanted to know, suddenly alert. Fearlessly, she pushed Ignacio’s pistol aside with her bound hands and twisted in the saddle to look back at the bandit. “Did you dare to tell these men that I’m for sale?”
When he just glared at her, she jabbed him in the stomach with an elbow. “You male chauvinist pig! When I get loose, I’m going to pull out your tongue and karate chop it off so you’ll never be able to lie again.”
Ignacio clamped his mouth shut real tight, but he pressed the gun back against her chest.
“I’m not the Angel Bandit,” Rafe repeated.
“What’s a shove-nest-pig?” the two farm boys asked.
“I wouldn’t sell you,” Pablo assured Helen ingratiatingly. “If I talk Ignacio out of selling you, will you gargle me tonight?”
“I do not gargle,” Helen shrieked.
“Yes, you do,” Rafe said. “Remember this morning…” His words faded off at the expression of outrage on her face.
Uhoh.
“I… do… not… gargle… men,” she said real slow, so he and all the men would get the message loud and clear.
Rafe did. He wasn’t so sure about the others.
“Exactly how does a woman gargle a man?” one of the miners asked another.
“Damned if I know,” his friend replied.
They both turned to Rafe.
“It’s a Deep Throat kind of thing,” he started to say, then stopped at Helen’s hiss of fury. “I mean, I’m sure Pablo is mistaken. There’s no such thing as sex gargling.”
Pablo turned wounded eyes on Rafe. “But you told me — ”
BAM!!! A pistol shot rang out.
Everyone gawked at Ignacio, who had aimed into the air.
“Enough! I am taking the Angel Bandit into Sacramento City to collect the reward. Perhaps we weel have a hanging tonight.” He waited out the murmurs of enthusiasm at that gruesome prospect. “After that, mis amigos and I weel enjoy Elena’s charms. All night long. Tomorrow, she weel be sold to the highest bidder. One night of corkscrewing at a time.”