The first group of braves had traveled about a hundred yards when the second group flew off the hill behind them. I knew enough about the Indian's ways by now to know that they were not heading towards us to engage in polite conversation. I leapt off the wagon seat down in between my mules and yanked the lynchpin that held the double tree to the wagon's tongue, then ducked under the wheel mule and grabbed my Spenser. I kept my voice calm as I addressed Sonja.
"Get everyone over here under this wagon; we have big trouble brewing," I said.
Sonja did not hesitate for a second as she athletically hopped off the wagon and sprinted back to round up her companions. I ran to the front of my team, grabbed Zeke's halter and started him moving. "Go on Zeke, get out of the way," I hollered. Zeke followed the direction of my pull and the rest of the team followed him as he ambled in an arc toward the last wagon. All of this activity took longer to tell about than to accomplish. The Indians had only closed half the distance towards us by the time my clients were under my wagon and my mules were out of harms way. I was grimly aware that this was the worst situation I had ever been in as I grabbed my saddle bag, shotgun and Enfield and slid under the wagon with my wide-eyed clients. I controlled my fear and took a prone position behind one of the wagon wheels.
"What do they want Jeremiah?" Sonja asked, her voice amazingly calm. "Maybe if you gave it to them they'd go away."
I had to laugh at that, in spite of our precarious situation. I told her what I had figured out as soon as I saw the glint of sunlight reflecting off a spyglass the leader of the braves was using right before he sent the first wave forward. "I guess I could do that Sonja, except that you are what they want. You, Helena and Coleen are the only things of value to them I have with me."
Sonja gave me a startled look as the implication of what I said sunk in. Yet she still kept her composure. "Oh," she gasped, "so what do we do now?"
I told her to keep low and behind the wagon wheels as much as possible, and hope that I could make the proposition too costly for the Indians. "And prayer would not hurt," I added. She nodded and pulled out her odd little pistol. I had forgotten all about them. I asked her there range and was disappointed to hear that it was only effective out to twenty-five to thirty feet. I shrugged and drew a bead on one of the braves advancing towards us. They were within a couple of hundred yards now and riding low over the necks of their ponies. I did not let that deter me though, and shot the horse out from under the first rider. I figure that if an Indian survived the fall, he would still be easier to deal with on foot.
I worked the lever to load another round in the Spencer and cocked the hammer again. Another shot and another horse fell, I managed to hit one rider and five horses before the seven shot Spencer was empty. I tossed the now useless rifle aside and pulled my revolver. I tried to remain calm as I lay there, even as the second line of horses and three Indians on foot swarmed toward me. I cocked the Colt and fired it rhythmically; my objective was to kill as many of the braves as I could before they overwhelmed us. I made a good accounting of the five rounds that were in my pistol, and had actually managed to eliminate the first group of braves just as the second wave galloped up.
The second wave of Indians were hanging off the far side of their mounts as they thundered by, it was an amazing feat of horsemanship that they were able to loose a volley of arrows and two rifle shots at us as they passed. I can attest that the volley was aimed because one of the arrows sunk into my left forearm and one of the bullets ricocheted off the iron wheel rim next to my head and cut a groove above my right ear. The arrow in my arm made me drop the spare cylinder I was desperately trying to install in my Colt, and the bullet that grazed me had my head buzzing, but I still managed to pick up my coach gun one-handed and thumb back one hammer. I figured that I would take one more of the Indians to hell with me, when suddenly the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stood on end, and the Indians riding by tumbled from their mounts as if they were rag dolls cast aside by bored children. Amazingly, the horses the braves were riding kept on running, unaffected by the weird little weapons my clients wielded.
I was whispering a silent prayer for our miraculous delivery, when a keening wail caused me to jerk my head around. The sudden movement made me woozy, but my lethargy cleared instantly when I saw a sobbing Coleen crawling towards Jonathan, the shaft and fetch of an arrow protruding obscenely from his right eye socket. My feeling of euphoria for the miracle of our survival was short lived as Coleen somberly pronounced Jonathan dead.
It turns out that Coleen was the little party's doctor. She was a fine one too, with a satchel full of marvelous equipment and potions that had me fixed up and feeling as if I were slightly inebriated in only a few minutes. She pricked me with a pin that had a glass vial attached to it, cut the arrowhead out of my arm with a small blade and sewed me up with stitches that were as perfect as the ones that ma's new Singer sewing machine made. Coleen even patched up three of the five Indians who were still alive. She expertly set two broken arms and removed one of my bullets from the shoulder of another. I put the two uninjured men to work digging graves for their brothers. The three women took Jonathan's body and held a private burial for him. I offered to make a marker for his grave but they were firm about leaving it unmarked.
"There is no need to draw attention to the fact that he was here," Sonja said. "Instead, we'll hold a memorial for him when we return home."
We tied our Indian prisoners to the wheels of the wagons and took turns standing guard over them throughout the night. The women insisted on feeding them and treating them humanely, even after the savage attack. The women were sad and subdued, but adamant about continuing the trip up to Evil Spirit Mountain. They did not put up their fancy tent for the night. Instead, we all slept around the fire. Two of us were awake at all times. Helena was my watch partner and the two of us talked quite a bit as we tended the fire and kept an eye on our prisoners. Helena was very distraught over Jonathan's death. She told me that he was the first person she'd ever seen die from violence.
I ended up holding Helena most of the night as she cried on my shoulder. I did some thinking while Helena leaned against me, her body occasionally wracked with sobs. I thought how strange it was that a woman my age had never been exposed to death. Then I started thinking about myself. Had I become callus towards visits by the Grim Reaper? Not yet, I finally decided, and never if I could help it. I was determined to keep my humanity and not truckle to the devil. Once I decided that, lord help me if my thoughts did not turn unbidden to the woman I held cradled in my good arm. Despite all that had happened on this miserable day, my manhood decided to tell me in no uncertain terms that I was sitting next to one heck of a desirable woman. To make matters worse, Helena had her hand resting on my thigh as she leaned against me. I squirmed in uncomfortable embarrassment when little Johnny Reb Jeb decided to pitch a tent in my Levi Strauss half overalls.
Helena drew away when I shifted around, and looked at me in concern. Her brown eyes looked absolutely huge in the flickering firelight. "Am I hurting your arm, Jeremiah?" she asked.
I mumbled a negative reply as I blushed a scarlet brighter than our campfire. I guess that would have been the end of it if Helena had not looked down at my left hand where it rested on my other thigh. Between her hand and mine, rose a teepee that would have done a Shoshone Chief proud. Helena's eyebrows arched up, her mouth dropped opened in surprise and she let out a small "eek". I moved both my hands over my shame and tried to apologize. She shushed me with a finger over my lips, "It's okay, Jeremiah. I was just surprised because it is the first spontaneous erection I've ever seen. I completely forgot that was still possible here. Actually, I am most flattered." I was too mortified to let her know I had no idea what she was babbling about.
I was less confused when she leaned against my shoulder with her firm bosom and gently pulled my hands off my staff. She looked down at the lump and then back up at me. She had a strange gleam in her eye and when she spoke, her voice was breathy and husky. "Let me see it, Jeremiah," she whispered. Her voice was so seductive I did not think twice about not doing what she wanted. I immediately started wrestling with the fasteners of my Levi Strausses. I fumbled around some, but finally managed to fish my pride and joy out the slit in my long johns. When I moved my hand off him, Helena gave a little gasp. "You are not circumcised," she hissed. "And it's so large." I had never heard the word 'circumcised' before, but I was pleased she thought me to be well endowed. She reached out as if to touch me, then looked up at me questioningly.
When I nodded, she took me in her long slender fingers and lightly explored. She was fascinated with my foreskin for some reason, and kept pulling it down to expose more of my crown. "I've never felt one with this extra skin," she said, "all our men are circumcised at birth." I winced when it dawned on me that this circumcised of which she was speaking seemed to refer to removing the foreskin. Well, needless to say, that little conversation cured the object that provoked it. Jeb Junior wilted like boiled greens. I might have imagined it, but Helena seemed disappointed about the turn of events. In any event, the spell was broken. Helena gave me a soft kiss and trundled off to wake our relief.
The following morning, we set the Indians free as soon as we broke camp. I felt no remorse for leaving the Indians without horses or weapons, as I knew they would find a way to survive. I was hoping that my strange California clients and I could do the same. The women were somber and subdued, but they were determined to continue with whatever it was they had planned up on Evil Spirit. I had serious doubts about the whole enterprise by now, but Georgia Jeb did not quit a job he hired on to do. So I kept my doubts to myself as I clucked old Zeke into action.
Coleen had insisted on riding with me when we moved out so she could keep an eye on my wounds. I told her I was as fit as a fiddle, thanks to her doctoring, but she would brook no argument from me. As we plodded along, I thought about my conversation with Helena the evening before. I figured Coleen could give me some unvarnished information about it, her being a doctor and all. "Uh, Miss Coleen, I hate to be indelicate, but I have some questions about this circumcise that your men folk have afflicted on them," I said. Coleen gave a bubbly laugh and told me that Helena had made her and Sonja privy to our conversation. "It is no big deal, Jeremiah. It is done when the men are infants, for hygienic reasons mostly, although it also desensitizes the penis, which helps in the overall lessening of the male's sexual and social aggressiveness."
I leaned back with a grunt after she spewed that mouthful of malarkey. Until I met these bizarre folks, I had thought I was a fairly well read and knowledgeable man. Yet, for about the hundredth time, one of them said something of which I understood not one word. Coleen might as well have been speaking Greek. I asked her to clarify what she said, but she refused. "I've probably said too much already. If you want to know anything else, you need to ask Sonja."
We arrived at the base of Evil Spirit Mountain at two in the afternoon. We set up camp and I tended my mules, while the women prepared for the next day. I watched with interest as they pulled the shiny trunks from the wagon and started checking their equipment. Most of the items I caught sight of appeared to be gussied up standard prospector's equipment. I recognized shovels, pick axes and rock hammers, even though the items were made of some dull looking metal and had folding handles. One item I did not recognize was another of those small shiny metal boxes that Helena dug out of one of the trunks. The box had a couple of gauges on it, not unlike the pressure gauges on the boiler of Captain Pritchett's riverboat. Helena pressed a lever on the box and it began emitting a sound that reminded me of a chicken clucking. She swung the box around to point it at the mountain and the clucking grew louder and faster.
"The radiation signature from up there is huge but I'm still reading a sine wave that is text book for Hawkingium!" Helena exclaimed excitedly. For some reason, her proclamation made the other women smile and nod.
I spent thirty minutes getting my mules situated for the night, then the women and I walked around and collected some deadfall from the sparse local vegetation to start a fire. The trees down here at the base of the mountain were stunted, twisted and gnarled. They were covered with tumors and had wart-like growths on them, as if they were all infected with some sort of disease. Once we had a nice cooking fire crackling away, I took the time to study the mountain that loomed above us. Evil Spirit was a jagged looking peak that appeared as if someone had blasted about half of the eastern face away. Sonja came over to stand by me as I surveyed the rough scrabble slope.
"A large meteor hit this mountain about two hundred years before now. The meteor contained an element not found on earth. The element has some amazing qualities that we desperately need back where we are from. We traveled an impossible distance by a means never before attempted, just to collect a few pounds of it," Sonja said.
I had to wonder why the metal was so important, but I did not ask. I was hired help for these unusual folks and they were paying me good money. I figured if they wanted me to know, they would simply tell me. I did ask one question though, because I was concerned about them bringing something off that mountain that would harm me or my mules.
"How are you going to bring that stuff off the mountain if it is so dangerous that no one can live near it?" I asked.
Sonja was quick to reply. "Hawkingium is not dangerous. The problem is that when the meteor hit, it somehow set off a small thermonuclear explosion. Prolonged exposure to the radiation still present from that explosion is what causes the sickness people who come here suffer."
I tried to look as if I understood even one or two of the words she spouted, as once again I had no idea what she was saying. Californian was sure a different dialect from the normal English that I was used to hearing. At least I understood the part about what they were returning with not being dangerous, and that eased my mind a bushel and a peck.
It took the California women an hour to put their kit together for tomorrow. After that, they joined me around the fire while I cooked my evening meal. I decided to cook up some Johnny Cakes. I had saved the ingredients for the cakes from the supplies Ma had sent with me for the trip. I usually made the cakes on my last night on the trail, which would have been this night anyway, had I not run up on my new clients. Like I said before, I make a mean Johnny Cake. I put my big skillet in the fire with some fatback while I mixed the ingredients. The women watched in awe as I fished a couple of cackle berries carefully packed in hay out of my wagon, and pulled a corked bottle of buttermilk out of my water barrel.
I cracked open the eggs and stirred them up with the buttermilk. When I had a nice fluffy mix, I added a couple of cups of cornmeal and half a cup of sugar. I fried the cakes up in the grease from the fatback and slathered them up in cane syrup from a small jug I carried. I was pleased as punch when Sonja asked if she could try one of the cakes and grinned like Zeke eating an apple when she raved about how good it was to the other women. Both Coleen and Helena enthusiastically seconded her opinion when they each tried one.
After dinner, we all sat around the fire and talked for a while as the sun dropped rapidly to the west. The women were much more direct in their questioning now, and some of the questions were quite personal. They seemed to be very interested in how relations between men and women in this part of the country worked. Their questions confused me somewhat, because as far as I knew, relations between men and women were the same everywhere. On this night I learned that, according to my guests, things were astonishingly different in Paradise Valley, California. I haltingly but honestly replied to their questions about my relationships with women. I think the concept that caused them the most problems was that men and women here had sexual relations whenever the mood struck them. I asked why that idea seemed so foreign to them, and Sonja answered me.
"Where we are from, Jeremiah, there is no casual sex, even between married people. We learned long ago that men's sexual nature was a symptom of their destructive over aggressiveness. It took decades for our medical science to find a way to alter that, but now our men's bodies don't produce the chemical triggers that lead to sexual arousal, violent behavior and combative competitiveness," she said.
My jaw dropped open in amazement at her matter of fact little speech, because, even discounting the weird combination of words she used, this time I understood what she said.
"You geld your men!" I yipped.
Coleen jumped into the conversation then and said, "We don't geld them, Jeremiah, they still have all their reproductive equipment. However, in order to achieve an erection, they must take a certain medicine and those meds are strictly controlled."
I was struck speechless. Of all the strangeness associated with these Californians, this last little bit took the cake. When I found my voice, I told them what I thought of all that. "Your men folk might not be physically gelded, but they have lost there manhood nonetheless," I sputtered.
The women took issue with what I said, but they were preaching to a deaf choir. I did not accept for a second the idea that their men were actually better off, because what they termed 'self destructive' behavior was no longer present. Finally I had heard enough. "Why not put them out of their misery and get yourselves one of them fancy French lap dogs instead," I growled as I stalked off to fetch my fiddle.
The rest of the evening was uneventful until bedtime. I decided that we needed to keep watch again that night, so we used the same teams as the night before. As soon as the other women were abed, Helena snuggled up next to me by the flickering remnants of the cooking fire. I could tell she was still thinking about our encounter of the night before, when out of the blue, she asked, "What does a woman have to do to cause you to become erect?" I chuckled at her question, but answered her truthfully. "Sometimes, not much at all, it depends on the woman, I reckon." Then I upped the ante. "For instance, every time I am near you, I get aroused."
Helena's brown eyes opened wide at that and she smiled as if the thought did not displease her in the least. Then she frowned in concentration. "What do you do when that happens so regularly Jeremiah? Surely you can't procreate every time it happens." I was struck afresh at how little these very educated women knew about the most basic matters. "It depends on the situation, Sweetie Pie. Sometimes my little friend gets what he wants, but most of the time he simply goes back to sleep." She digested that tidbit of information and asked another question. "What of the woman that arouses you? What if she is not ready for intercourse?"
As she was talking, Helena seemed to be having trouble sitting still. I had a fair idea by now exactly what was causing that. I suppressed a smile and continued her education. "If she is not ready, he goes back to sleep again, simple as that. I would never force myself on a woman, even if I were married to her. But sometimes a woman might want to accommodate her man. In those cases, there are ways to help a woman get ready. Being a healthy young woman, I cannot imagine you not knowing that." As soon as those words were out of my mouth, I realized where she was from that might not be the case. "How do relations between a man and woman work out there in California anyway?" I asked.
Another question, another astounding answer. "In our time, women select a potential partner and apply to the high council for a script for the libido drug. The application must contain a genetic profile of the potential partner. If the application is approved, the woman receives a month's supply of four doses of the medicine. She administers the meds to her partner and they couple. She can refill her prescription monthly, as long as she is with that same partner. If the couple split up, the prescription is cancelled."
The parts of her speech I understood were by far the dangdest things I had ever heard. Two things she said caught my attention. One was the four times a month limit, the other I asked her about.
"What did you mean when you said 'in our time'?" I asked.
Helena looked startled at my question and stammered a reply. "I meant at our home in California." Her answer sounded fishy, but I did not pursue it, because Helena's flushed skin and erratic breathing indicated that she was as attracted to me as I was to her. I figure the way to make my point was by demonstration rather than explanation. I told Helena as much, "Let me show you what I am talking about. If anything I do bothers you, tell me and I will stop. Is that all right with you?"
I had Helena in my arms, my lips fused to hers, before her head completed the first affirmative nod. In fewer than five minutes, Helena and I were on top of my bedroll, naked as the day we were born. Even with my gimpy left arm, everything was going along swimmingly and I was as aroused as I had ever been in my life. I quickly brought her to her peak with my fingers and tongue and was about to join with her when someone yanked me off her by the hair of my head. I landed heavily on my side and started to scramble to my feet, when a bolt of lightning hit me and turned my muscles to mush. I vaguely heard Helena scream out, "NOOO!" before my world turned black.