The Family Tradition

By Seamus

Author's Note:

This is a very long story, just short of 60,000 words. I think it's long enough to be considered a novella, in fact. If you only like stories you can read at one sitting, please pass this one by … or resolve to read only one or two chapters a day. This is Part One of a planned four part series, except it's looking like there might have to be five parts to tell all the story I want to. Three parts are complete and in the editing/proofreading stage, and a fourth part is nearing completion. We'll see about the fifth….

"The Family Tradition" started out as a chance thought, wondering about how our pioneer ancestors conducted themselves on the way West. From reading a number of journals written by men and women who traveled the Oregon Trail, for instance, I learned they wrote and spoke pretty much as we do today—a lot fewer contractions in the written word, but thoroughly intelligible to a modern reader. Then I began to wonder how like they were to our current society. In my mind, men back then were a lot like men today … women were women, and kids will always be kids.

These days, one reads of girls giving blowjobs to boys in middle school stairwells; they sext each other, and find innovative ways to get their various body parts together. I assume analogues for what is happening today existed back … well, whenever. Since mankind hasn't changed that radically since the pioneer days in America, I think men and women, boys and girls, were doing pretty much what modern day folks are doing. That is what I wanted to explore in these pages.

The following is sheer fantasy and meant only as such. Further, any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is an thoroughly unintended coincidence. I've written this from the standpoint of a not-too-terribly well educated fourteen-year-old boy living just a few years after the close of the American Civil. Where you find misspellings and improper grammar, chances are that is my attempt to convey that character's thoughts and speech as a boy back then might communicate. I think I may have been less successful in some places than in others….

I hope you enjoy this … call it a saga, if you will. It starts slow, but gains momentum later on.

* * *

The Family Tradition

Part One

-Westward The Wagons!

CHAPTER ONE

Our little wagon train weren't no more'n ten days out of Omaha, in the new state of Nebraska, when I found out my sister Grace wasn't wearin' nothin’ under her skirts. Well … she weren't really my sis—she was actually Chastity’s little sister. Chastity was my Pa’s brand new wife—my new stepmother—and I figgered that made Grace more an aunt by way of marriage than a sister, even though she’s some years younger than I am. But Pa said she was our new sis ... and what Pa wanted was generally the way things got done. So, a sister she became! That’s how us Richardson boys treated her.

Grace and me were off to one side of the wagon train, hunting buffalo chips for the supper fire. Iffen you don't know what a buffalo chip is, it's what comes out a' the south end of a northbound buffalo and lays there on the prairie for a long spell. When it got all dried out, the durn thing would burn, and that's what we needed. Out on the open plain there hadn't been too very many trees to begin with, and twenty-five odd years of pioneers moving along the Oregon Trail had already used up what wood for fires there had been.

Anyhow, Grace and I were pulling a big ol' burlap sack between us to collect the chips, and I was keeping my eyes peeled for Injuns—or more raiders like those who hit us a few days back. I only used my left hand to haul on that danged bag 'cause I had my rifle in my right.

We were doing OK too, if I do say so. At the time, I thought of Grace as just another twelve-year-old girl—kinda skinny, really ... one of those big-eyed, redheaded girls one sees everywhere around our old home in the Tennessee hills. She was a child—with her older sister's big flashing eyes but an impudent grin all her own. Grace was OK to work with—better’n my real sisters sometimes. She didn't shirk from doing her part in gettin’ all the buffalo chips we could find, even if those buffalo chips were nasty durned things to handle sometimes, and a big bag full of them was heavy and awkward to wrestle around.

I guessed later that whilst she was looking around at me to make sure I was still there or somethin’—I caught a glimpse of her face from the corner of my eye—Grace stepped into an old buffalo wallow. She tumbled arse over tea kettle a couple of times before she fetched up against the other side and she was still rolling when I got my head around and caught sight of what was happening to ‘er.

It wasn't that deep a hollow ... it looked to me like what happened was she just didn't see the drop-off at all and stumbled into it. I ran over to the little cloud of dust she'd raised, hoping she hadn't broke a leg or something, because there weren't no doctors out here. A broke leg could be a thing a body might not ever be able to get well from.

When I got to her, I stopped short and just gawked for what seemed to be the longest time, 'cause when Grace's body went somersaulting down one side of the wallow an' half way up the other, her dress—didn't. She was laying pretty much head down in the wallow, and the bottom hem of her dress was draped all up over her face and upper body.

She must a’ still been a little dazed, too, 'cause her hands were fluttering all around, twitchin', but she wasn’t accomplishing much. All her hands were doing was kinda clutching at the dirt one instant and pattin' around her skirt hem the next—an’ then back again—but they sure weren’t doing anything helpful.

And what I saw … whew! ALL of Grace’s body, from the tops of her shoes right up to the bottom of her young breasts was right there for me to look at. I'm here to tell ya, I didn't have any idea before that moment that Grace didn't wear any small clothes under her dress—no chemise nor petticoats, none of them new-fangled bloomers … no nothing!! Well sir, I didn't know what to do. To say I was one flabbergasted young feller wouldn't even come close.

I don't recollect getting’ down in the hollow an' kneeling a' side her, but I was suddenly there. I was kinda stretching my hands out, wanting to check and see if she was OK, but every time my hands got close to her body, I'd haul 'em back, 'cause I figgered if I touched her bare skin, Pa would tan my hide good, even if I was goin' to be fifteen years old, come my next birthday—an' I was already doing a man's work ever' day.

Somehow, my brain seemed to be rattlin' right on with what it does all the time … 'cause I was real impressed with the fact this here little twelve-year-old girl wasn't nowhere near as skinny as I'd thought. She was slender ... but that was OK…. Heck, that was fine! What astounded me more was seeing her most private place ... it was all bare and right out there in the open for ever'one to see, and it looked like it was smooth as silk. Her breasts weren’t all that big, 'bout the size a' little granny apples, but they were beautifully shaped … and tipped with the most beautiful reddish-pink nipples a man could ever wish to see.

I was that amazed. Where Chastity had that real dark red hair and creamy smooth skin like some a' them redheads got, Grace's hair was more auburn and she had little freckles in places on her body. Some a' them even on her groin and privates. My eyes were busy tryin' to get a look at ever' single freckle that she had.

About then, Grace recovered her senses a bit. Her hands moved with more purpose and she gripped the hem of her dress, which had flown up to expose her entire body south a’ her armpits. She flung the hem down the length of her body ('twas actually in an upward direction, 'cause her legs were up on the other rim of the wallow, an' her head down in the wallow itself). Anyhow, she was getting' busy tryin' to cover herself up. About the same instant she actually got that done, she saw me kneeling 'side her, and staring hard. I suspect, my chin was hangin’ down like a durn fool.

"JEREMIAH RICHARDSON," she screeched breathlessly at me. She was working herself around so her head was higher than her toes again, "don't you dare look at me!!" I didn't know 'til that second that a person could flush that particular shade of red—me … not her. Didn't seem like she was that embarrassed—not really; she was some annoyed, but not mortified. Me, on the other hand … I could absolutely feel the heat of a deep red flush rising up my neck and face.

Grace took to straightening out her dress, pushing it down even further and smoothing it out all around, now that she was upright again. Seemed to take her forever, but I guess it only took a couple of seconds from when I got over to her 'til she was sitting up an’ glaring at me like I'd done her a mischief of some kind.

I tried to make out like everything was normal. "You OK, Grace?" I asked, kinda lamely, making out like I hadn't just seen all of her private parts. "Anything hurt?"

My question did manage to break her chain of thought, which was good for me. She left off screamin' at me. Her eyes went unfocused for a bit while she set to work figuring out if anything was hurting, but it was only a temporary respite. She took my hand and I hauled her up to her feet, and then she recollected she was mad at me.

"If you ever tell anyone, I'll...!" she whispered vehemently.

I looked down at her—she was all frantic ... worried to death, it looked like to me—and I just had to set her mind to rest.

"Grace ... I ain’t a’ gonna tell nobody what I seen,” I told her earnestly. “Don't you worry none, hear?" I said it as sincerely as I knew how, and I actually did mean it.

Well, she didn't get a chance to answer back because right about then, my oldest brother, Jesse, appeared at the edge of the little hollow—he’d come running up from the wagon train with his rifle at the ready to fight off the Injuns, wolves, rattle snakes, hydrophobied skunks, or whatever else had made Grace screech so. Behind him, I saw my Pa and Mr. Conklin comin' up real fast.

"It's alright," I called to them. It was hot in the early afternoon sun and there was no need of them getting overheated. "Grace took a fall and landed hard," I explained, "...but she's OK—nothin' broke," I added, thinking fast.

And then they were all doing their best to help the young girl get herself together again and walk her back to the wagons. I was left to haul that danged sack of buffalo chips all by myself, but I didn’t really care. My mind was still full of visions of what I'd seen beneath Grace's dress an' I'm here to tell ya all that filled my dreams all night long ... an' the next one after that too.

* * *

We were the Richardson Wagon Train. I heard a storekeeper call us that while we were passing through a small town back before we even got to Council Bluffs, in Iowa, on our way west. It described us pretty well, so we used them words among ourselves now. We come out of southeastern Tennessee, fightin' bad weather all the way to Council Bluffs, and then across the wide Missouri River to Omaha, Nebraska which hadn't been an actual state in the union 'til just a couple a' years ago. We'd stayed a couple of days near Omaha, checkin' everything we had to make sure we lacked nothin' we were gonna need, 'cause Omaha was the last place we'd be likely to find anything that turned out to actually be necessary.

An' then we started west, out across what seemed like an endless prairie grassland with a brilliant, though uncarin' vault of sky overhead.

* * *

A few days after Grace took her spill down that buffalo wallow, my job was riding at the rear of the wagon train, keeping an eye out for anyone trying to sneak up on us. Pa rotated all the tasks of moving the wagon train along … best he could anyhow … so no one got stale at the tasks they were given … nor resentful about their duties. We had outriders on both flanks, as well as ahead of, and trailing along behind the train (that was me, today) to give early warning of raiders, Injuns or whoever else might be coming up on us from behind. Usually, the guard at the rear of the train rode a couple/three miles behind the last wagon, working out a mile or so to either side of the wagon train an' then over to t' other and keeping a good watch behind.

I kicked my heels lightly in my horse's ribs and put him to climbing a low rise. It was the remains of a ridge that must a' been old when Noah built his big ol' boat and it was an easy ride up the slope to a low, and for a wonder, a sort-of forested summit, though the 'forested' part might a' been more wishful thinkin' than anythin' else. I rode just below the crest all the way to its northwestern point and then reined that lineback dun gelding I was riding right into a little, bitty copse of stunted trees and brush. I brought the animal to a stop in the welcome shade of a young cottonwood.

It was on purpose that I did that, ya know. First, I needed to make sure there wasn't no one in them trees, watching us from close up ... and the second reason was 'cause I could see for miles around from up there and I could check our back trail real careful like. It was cooler under that danged tree too.

Me an' the horse were right up against a tree trunk so my and my horses’ silhouettes would kinda merge with the tree and brush … to anyone not standing right next to us anyway. We couldn't be easily seen where we were, so long as we didn't move—that was something Pa had taught me. I used the field glasses Pa bought for just the purpose of scouring the tall, waving grass on the land between me an' the far eastern horizon—near at first ... an' then far.

I was a little north of the train, but I could see everything for miles all the way from way north of me, down to several miles south, so I was still doing my job, even when I was cooling myself and my horse, and restin’ a mite. I put the glasses away and sat my horse with my hands folded on the saddle's pommel, watching the wagon train below me wind it's way along the shallow valley. I well doin' my job as well… throwing searching looks all around an' stayin' alert. The train was skirting a really tiny stream—couldn’t hardly call it a crick, 'ner nothing really. It'd prob'ly be a small, very dry gully in another week or two of summer heat.

* * *

From where I was, up on the knoll, our wagons looked like any other wagon train that had moved up the Oregon Trail any time in the last twenty years, an' more, I reckon ... but looks were deceiving. Them Conestogas I was watchin' down there for instance—they weren't really prairie schooners.

Oh, they'd been made by folks up in the Conestoga hills of Pennsylvania right enough—but they were some wider and longer, an' they had stouter undercarriages, wheels, an' higher sideboards than what most folks rode the trail with.

These wagons had been made special for Pa just this Spring, after Pa an' his friend, Hiram Conklin, went up to Pennsylvania an' told the builders what Pa had in mind. Mr. Conklin was an engineer trained an' he could draw up life-like sketches so the workmen could provide us with just what Pa had in mind. My Pa wasn't an engineer, but he'd been out here in the West in his youth and he knew exactly what he wanted for wagons.

Where a prairie schooner—as they called them—could carry somethin’ like two-thousand pounds of goods and food, ours could carry three-thousand pounds and a mite more. Our wagons incorporated some things most folks didn't have on their wagons too ... like good springs on the seats up front, and split tailgates. One side of each tailgate had actual steps built into it a' purpose to make getting up into the wagon a bunch easier.

We had built-in supports for thirty-gallon water barrels on the outside of the wagons an' racks for spare rifles an' shotguns positioned just inside the tailgate—close to hand if we were attacked. Pa even stocked one wagon with nothing but spare parts for wagons, tools, our weapons, and other equipment. The small parts were stored in carefully labeled drawers for all the inevitable breakdowns ya had to expect on a long trail. A couple a' other wagons had nothing inside but food sealed in big tins to keep what was inside fresh. There were lots a' cooking pots an' pans, an' stuff like that in those two wagons also.

Pa had decided to use oxen to pull the wagons. He could a’ picked horses or mules but those animals work better if fed on grain, which Pa didn't want to carry, an' mules were inclined to be cantankerous at times too.

Oxen, on the other hand, were gentle giants who wouldn't even know what to do with expensive grain mixed in with their regular diet of grass. They were huge, strong as an ... yeah ... strong as that. Our oxen, giants though they were, could also be ridden without them fretting about it, and they could be led by the smallest child. An' on our wagon train, children were doing a lot of that … 'cause we didn't have enough full grown men and women to go 'round.

Ours was a small train compared to some, but it was surely a rich one in the eyes of thieves and Indians alike. Brand spanking new wagons like ours, if nothin' else, would a’ made us a target for thieves and cutthroats, but we also had a bounty of oxen, mules, horses, and even some choice cattle that would make many a thief drool with desire—and that's not even considering the women in the train. But that had to be considered, 'cause we had an uncommonly large group of attractive women in the train, many of them related to me.

* * *

It was the rear guard on the third day out a’ Omaha, a week earlier—it was my big brother Jesse on that day, 'stead a' me—who brought word to the wagon train that we were being followed by a big bunch a' raiders coming right along, following the ruts our wheels cut in that Nebraska prairie sod. Pa had expected something like that actually happenin'.

It was another three hours before they caught up to our wagons, though—plenty of time for us to get ready for 'em, an’ by the time they got up to us, we were all forted up. Pa had found us a place where the left end—Pa called it our left flank 'cause that was what it was called when he was in the Union Army in the War. Anyhow, the left end of our line of wagons was right up against a deep, and fairly wide, ravine, and our right 'flank' butted up against some marshy ground next to a fast running stream that curved around behind us.

The ravine and the marsh were nigh on to impossible for horses to get through … and absolutely impossible to do so at any speed. If them riders crossed to the other side of the river somewhere, it would also be hard for them to come back across the stream's rocky bottom and gravely banks again to attack us. So our 'rear' was pretty safe, the river 'flank' was pretty well secured, and they couldn't dive down into that ravine and climb up the other side to get to us neither. We felt pretty good about where we were.

Between our line of wagons and the river was a couple of acres of good grass where we put our livestock to grazing. We even had us a couple of rifle pits dug back there behind our line of wagons, facing the river so some of us could watch over the livestock and also take care of any riders who might somehow manage to make it through the marsh or try shootin’ from over the other side a’ that deep gully. We also dug a deep trench off to the side of the ravine for the small kids, but up closer to the wagons. It was deeper than the biggest kid was tall, so they wouldn't be catching no bullets when the fur started flying.

Pa was a knowin’ man, and right careful to set things up like fortin' up where we were protected on both sides and our rear, so the bad ‘uns could only get to us from the front. He'd gone off to the War, callin’ himself the oldest ensign in the whole Union Army, but he come back a brevet Brigadier General of Volunteers. He'd been in command of a big brigade of infantry right at the end, and he’d made a name for himself that folks respected—an’ then the war ended. He come home to us and never looked back, though he’d been offered a regular commission in what was left of the army.

* * *

Pa said later it was likely some in that gang of thirty-five or forty renegades had raped and pillaged their way through Kansas with Bloody Bill Anderson or maybe Quantrill ... but if any of them had been, they hadn't learned about war nearly as well as my Pa did. When this big band a’ thieves and cutthroats coming at us finally broke into a charge less than two hundred yards from our line of wagons, we were more than ready for 'em.

From their point of view, I expect it looked like our line of wagons suddenly erupted in flame and smoke when our couple of dozen rifles opened up on 'em all at once. They hadn't been expecting that, no sirrreeee. From what they'd seen as we rolled through town, there was only half a dozen or so grown men in our wagon train—easy pickings for raiders like them. They probably thought real well about themselves—probably thought they were the meanest and scariest bunch of killers around these parts.

After we fired the first volley, only a few more shots rang out from our side. That showed no matter how well folks in our wagon train were armed, we weren't blooded soldiers like from Pa’s heavy brigade of Union infantry. It shames me to admit it, but most all of us fired a first round from our rifles ... an' then stood there, looking to see what them hooligans were going to do next. We were like country bumpkins, looking all around first time we ever went to town.

Pa and Hiram Conklin were the onliest ones who fired again quick like. Which stood to reason, Hiram had been a soldier too. He was an engineer, though, and hadn't commanded a bunch a’ troops in battle like Pa did.

"SHOOT!!" I heard Pa bellow. "SHOOOOOTTT!!" he roared again, exasperatedly. "DON'T LET 'EM GET TO THE WAGONS!!"

I'm sure my ears were turning red as beets—I felt like a danged fool. Long before these ruffians had come into sight, Pa had warned us what to expect and told us a bunch a' times not to forget to shoot and keep on a’ shootin’ ‘til the last of them were down or ridin’ hard away from us.

At least my Winchester was still at my shoulder; I was comforted by that—at least I wasn't a complete idiot. All I had to do was line up my sights on a likely target and I could get back to what I should have been doing all along.

We all fired again and this time, we kept on shooting. From the raiders point of view, the forted-up wagons must have just about disappeared behind a dingy, thundering cloud that kept on spitting lightning ... and .44 caliber hail. The wind was fairly light right then, so it wasn't blowing the gun smoke away very quick.

I knew I killed the man I shot at in that first volley. I was the best shot on the wagon train an' I always knew exactly where my bullets would hit. I was over on the left side of our line of wagons and I started lookin’ for someone over here who needed to be put down.

That first round I'd shot, was at a big, sloppy-fat man with a huge, bushy beard who'd been waving a cavalry saber around like a madman. The bullet must a’ went through the edge of his breastbone, prob'ly chipping off parts of it, and smashing right through the heart. Them .44 rimfire rounds were slow, but they hit almighty hard. I always tried to put my bullets into a deer's heart when hunting ... for a quick kill, so as not to cause undue sufferin' ... an' I figgered I could do as much for a human being, such as he was.

After Pa yelled at us to start shooting again, I found a man I in my sights, lined up on 'im, and squeezed off another round. Only ... that feller's horse must a’ climbed out of little dip in the ground right then. I didn't even know it was there because of the tall grass. Between the time I started squeezing the trigger and when the hammer fell, that horse ... and his rider ... came up nigh on to a whole foot taller in my sights.

That made my bullet go in low on the feller's body instead of at the level of his heart. It must a clipped the saddle horn too, which would have set it to tumbling something fierce, right into the man's belly. Them ricochets do tear a man up. Before I shifted my sights, I saw blood pumping out all across his stomach. The feller was already dead, but he'd take a long time with the dying.

Between my second shot and me working the lever on that Yellowboy for a third try, all hell commenced breakin' loose. Instead of coming at us head-on and cocky like they'd been ... sitting tall in the saddle and ridding straight at us, a yellin' and havin' the best a' times … the renegades, them that were left, anyways, were all of a sudden hauling back on their reins, turning their horses right or left, trying to slow down, or get up to a gallop, or whatever they thought would get them out of range the fastest.

Our first couple of volleys emptied ten or twelve saddles, and most of the fallen were dead before they hit the ground. Pa had taught all of us to aim at the middle of the man's silhouette, an' he'd drilled us on make-do firing ranges for months afore we set out. The later volleys didn't cut as many down because horses were moving ever' whichaway, riders were trying to hide behind their horses' heads, dodging around in the saddle, and everything they could think of to get out of the path of a lead bullet.

So … by the time I was ready to shoot a third time, the sight picture was kinda confusin'. I threw a quick shot at a feller riding hard from my left to right, but I think all I did was burn him across the chest muscles—I led him just a skosh too much. He yelped and grabbed at his chest; then he hauled his horse around and kicked it into a fast run right back the way he'd come. I fired again, sending a couple of rounds a snapping around his ears to hurry him along.

Right then, I caught sight of a guy fixing to shoot a pistol, an' that concerned me. He wasn't really close enough for a good pistol shot—none of them ever did get any closer'n about a hundred yards from our line of wagons—but I just didn't like the idea of him shooting into a wagon train with young'uns all around, even if the kids were huddling in a deep hole back behind our wagons.

I lined up my sights and shot that feller in the forehead—right between the eyebrows. I knew that was breaking Pa's training, but I wanted a quick kill before that man did murder amongst us. He just kinda collapsed all in on himself like a puppet getting the strings all cut at once. His shoulders came down, he dropped the pistol, with his arms both falling loose. His body hung there in the saddle for a second, then he slumped more and more to his left and dropped bonelessly to the prairie sod.

By then, the rest of them marauders was riding as fast as they could away from our rifles. The last I saw of them, they was going up them gentle prairie rises and down the other side, spurring hard and using their reins to whip their horses' flanks so's to get the horses to movin' just as fast as they could.

Except for that one I gut shot. His horse was just a’ walking, slow an' careful while the man held tight to the pommel, looking like a tired, tired old man. The range was getting to be a little long for my Winchester so I made a move to grab up the Sharps rifle I had close to hand, but I let it be when I thought about it for another second.

It prob'ly would have been more merciful to put him down with a bullet to the head, but I just couldn't do it ... didn't have it in me to shoot a man from behind like that—for sure, he couldn't hurt us anymore. He would prob'ly be dead before the sun went down, and it would have been a lingering, agonizing death.

"RELOAD!!" Pa roared, and we did, but no one expected them renegades to come roaring back at us. Pa was just playing it safe. That was his job as the leader of our little wagon train.

I took a couple of deep breaths. I could hear some of the young'uns crying a little, and some of the girls who weren't yet rifle-carrying age began tending to them.

I walked to the other end of the wagon I was behind and gave my big sister, Mary Ann, a quick hug around the shoulders. She glanced up at me and smiled nervously, swallowing hard. My twelve-year-old sister, Emily, walked up to us from her post behind a wooden crate of tools a little to the right of the wagon. Mary Ann 'an me included her in the hug too. We stayed that way for a moment, all three of us holding our Winchesters ready, though we did take them off full cock, and we was real careful about where our fingers got to, taking our forefingers off the trigger so we wouldn't fire off a round, accidental like.

We all held our places for a time, and I was some surprised to realize I was shaking something terrible. I hadn't been bothered when I was shooting but now that it was over, seemed like my body took control of itself. A couple of swigs from my canteen and some more walking around helped steady my hands some. I was keeping my eye on the tall grass in front of us, 'cause I was sure all of them what fell from their horses weren’t completely dead yet.

I couldn't see any of us that looked hurt—no one from the wagon train was lying on the ground or anything and there wasn't any screaming nor anything like that. Keeping the renegades at long range, like Pa wanted, had spared us the pain of losing any of our company. The only thing I could see was a couple of holes in the oiled canvas of a wagon cover ... on the wagon where I slept, as a matter of fact. Made me mad—those holes would have to be patched before the next rain, an' I knew exactly who was going to be doing that little chore. My hands weren't shakin' no more—they were down right steady now.

Pa and a couple other men climbed up on their horses and rode out onto the prairie beyond our wagon line to make sure them fellers on the ground was really dead. They found out some of the first ten or eleven raiders we downed had been killed two, three ... and in one case, four ... times over because more'n one of us had targeted them. Another amateur soldier mistake, I guess. We'd have to find a way to keep folks to shooting only at targets that were right square in front of them, should it become needful to protect ourselves in this fashion ever again.

There were a total of seventeen dead renegades a layin' out in that field. Two of them murdering thugs were still alive when Pa got to them, but they were bleeding out pretty quick. Wasn't nothing we could do for them ... they were too hard hit for even the best of doctoring. One 'of them never made a sound ... just glared at my brother, Jesse, something fierce ... but t'other one cussed Pa up one side, and down the other for the whole time it took him to die. I reckon he should have used up those minutes trying to make his peace with his Maker, but he didn’t see it that way. Didn’t much matter … a couple of minutes later, he was dead as the rock his head rested on.

There were also seven horses and one mule out there dead or dying. Our men ended their suffering with bullets to the head.

We hitched up the oxen and moved the wagons a couple of hundred yards away, just to get some room 'tween us and the bloody ground. Pa and them got ropes around the legs of them dead bastards an’ the dead livestock, an’ snaked the bodies over to the deep ravine and dumped ‘em in. Then we caved in the walls of the ravine over them and let that be done with. Them raiders weren't no real Christians and they didn't deserve Christian burials. We felt we done our duty just making sure the coyotes wouldn't get at them.

Then, by golly, we formed our column a’ wagons again, and moved away at the steady couple of miles ever hour. That was the pace at which the oxen could pull our wagons with ease for all day long, an’ we weren’t goin’ to be hurried.

* * *

Today … a week after that fight … I was looking down from the woody knoll at the wagon train and I was troubled. I hadn't let on to no one what I'd seen under Grace's skirt, but it seemed like I might just as well have, 'cause she sure treated me like I'd blabbed it all over. Like I said, Grace wasn't really my sister, but me an' her had at least passed the time of day ever once in a while around a campfire. At least we'd done that before what happened that day at the buffalo hollow. Nowadays, she didn't have a single word for me, kind nor otherwise. I shook my head ... I could not get the picture of Grace's unclothed body out of my mind.

I guess she really didn't believe me when I said I wouldn't tell. Lordy, for nigh onto three whole days, that red-headed twelve-year-old girl watched me like an ol' hooty owl watching a field mouse, watchin' an' waitin'. Sometimes she set across from me, on the other side a' the campfire, just a glaring at me plumb mean-like.

And then, tonight … well, nigh on to twilight, I come into the wagon circle after my turn was done watchin’ over our little group of wagons from behind. Walking around the outside corner of one of the wagons, I didn’t see Grace comin’ the other way an’ I almost knocked her off her feet. I reached out to steady her. I didn't know what to expect but, for a wonder, she didn’t spit at me ‘er somethin’ equally nasty. In fact, for the first time since her fall, she was actually looking me in the eyes, so I took the opportunity to say something that’d been on my mind a lot the past few days.

"Don't you know I wouldn't never do a thing to hurt you, Grace?" I said it just as soft an' gentle as I could, tryin’ to show her how earnestly I really felt. She turned to step back over the wagon tongue and leave me standing there. She stopped just past the tongue but she didn't turn around. I kinda figgered she had heard me, but she wanted more.

"I ain’t ever gonna tell no one," I added. "Never!" When she still didn't move, I said, "But ... I think what I saw was plumb bee-utiful." Don't know why I said it—just seemed like it needed saying.

She didn't look back at me, even when she went walkin' on, but there was a moment before she stepped off. An’ when she went on a walkin', I thought maybe her shoulders weren’t so rigidly held, like they had been before. Grace didn't stop 'til she was in the midst of all the folks bustling around the fire, working at fixing supper for the train so we could get bedded down for the night.

Later that evening, I saw she wasn’t scowlin’ at me like she done before, but she wasn’t smilin’ at me neither. So, I guessed my comment might a' been an okay thing to say, but pro'bly wasn't the best thing I could a' done. I thought of tryin’ to kick my own arse a couple a’ times but couldn’t figure out a way to do that without stumbling an’ falling down ‘er something. Maybe that would please her, though….

Grace hadn't said a word to me in the past few days, and didn't say nothing back to me this evening, so I was 'bout ready to give up and just let things be. I sighed to myself and found a stick to whittle; 'twas something to do, so I wouldn't have to think about such things.

* * *

Sitting on one of the camp chairs Pa’ d bought special for the westward move, I'd just finished cleaning my Winchester rifle and was running a little piece of linen through the barrel for the final time. I started thumbing .44 caliber rounds through the loading gate, counting them carefully as I slowly filled the magazine. Mr. Winchester was the feller who thought of putting a loading gate on the side plate of a rifle, and he was sure enough a genius. The rifles he built … like the Yellowboy I held in my hands, for instance, were beautiful things to behold. It was a LOT better than the cumbersome way a magazine had to be loaded with them old Henry rifles.

I patted the side plate of the rifle when the fifteenth round was safely seated and polished the gun metal side plate with my shirttail. The metal looked like yellow brass, but it weren't. Pa said gun metal was really a kind of bronze. But the yellow served as a way of identifying the new weapon. Yellowboy is what they come up with, and that was how everyone knew them.

I pointed the muzzle down at the ground and levered a round into the chamber, then carefully lowered the hammer. If I needed to shoot, all I had to do was thumb back the hammer and let loose.

The magazine would hold seventeen rounds, but Pa didn't like us loading more than about fourteen—he said the spring at the fore end of the magazine could go bad after a while if a body loaded the whole seventeen all the time. So I kept fourteen in the magazine, and another in the chamber ready to be fired.

Then I cleaned my Spencer and afterward, my Sharps, making sure they all were all three in top condition. My belt gun got the same treatment. I leaned back in the chair, just enjoying the evening and waiting for supper to be done. I wasn't on any work list for the whole rest of the day, an' didn't even have no sentry or night herd duty that night.

Then, just as I was sitting back down on my camp chair, with my lap full of a tin plate with a big antelope steak and beans, I happened to glance across the fire, and there was Grace, sitting on the ground instead of a chair. To my surprise, she was grinning broadly at me—I don't know how long she had been doing that, but I got the idea it had been for a bit. Then I saw her skirt was pulled up a mite, and she had her legs spread some.

That was nice. I liked that a bunch! I'd seen ever inch a' them legs that day and I knew how silky smooth and soft they were—well … how much they looked like that anyhow. Tonight, I could see her slender thighs right above her knees, and even a mite beyond. Then she looked right at me, twitched the hem a' her skirt up a bit more, and spread her legs wide as could be!

I dang near dropped my supper and I think my jaw hung loose like the village idiot. Grace was sure I noticed, 'cause she grinned even more wickedly and stayed just like she was for a long moment. Then someone happened to stroll by. When I looked again, her skirt was covering everything from her bare toes on up, an’ now she had the most innocent, childlike look on her face you ever DID see.

But when no one was looking, the little minx smiled happily at me, like she hadn't spent the last few days giving me the evil eye 'cause I saw something I shouldn't have. Now she was letting me see all that nice young girl-flesh up under her skirt—an' didn't mind me lookin'?

You need to understand, gals didn't much let a boy see much a' anythin' back then. A sight of a girl's ankles was considered kinda shockin', so this was a real daring thing for her to do. I know durned well she saw how I had to fiddle around with the way my pants was suddenly fitting.

Not ten minutes later, from the corner of my eye, I saw her talking with her big sister, and they didn't even look around—much less over at me—so I knew Grace was deliberately not seeing me again. They were giggling and laughing and having a fine ol' time, looking all around, an' smilin' at ever'one. I could see all that from where I was sittin' on a blanket and leanin' up agin' the rear wheel of my wagon. I wondered if Chastity knew what her little sister, Grace, had done across the campfire from me just a little while ago.

I sighed. I didn’t have no idea what Grace was up to, but she sure had my brain whirlin’ around and around.

When I curled up in my blankets that night underneath the wagon I shared with my best friend, Daniel Conklin ... what I'd seen at supper set me to thinking long and hard. That was 'cause Grace's private parts weren't the first I'd ever seen ... they weren't even the first I'd seen on this here wagon train!

I know it sounds odd, but it started with some of my father's oldest possessions.

Pa was a travelin’ man. He always had been. For one thing, he'd gone west when he wasn't but thirteen years old, having run off from his pa’s farm up in the North Carolina piney woods. Pa figgered he was going to go trapping the beaver up in the western mountains and make himself a fortune … a number of men had done just that. But by the time my Pa headed west, the era of big-time beaver-trapping was past.

Even so, there were still furs to be had and he stuck to it, runnin’ trap lines way up in the tall mountains for a couple a’ years. Trapping was a hard life, though, and the beaver hides a man could manage to get back to the Eastern markets didn't sell for much of anything by the time Pa got into the trade. So two summers and one bone-chilling winter were all it took to convince Pa he'd made a bad mistake taking off to the mountains like he done.

An' then Pa's life got real interestin'. When he got back to North Carolina, his Uncle Jacob found him a berth on a schooner sailin' out of Boston and Pa took off aboard her to Europe.

Pa's bad luck was holdin' though. The danged schooner burned to the waterline in the French port of Brest, leaving the crew, including my Pa, to fend for themselves. Pa found a job working with a man printing a newspaper of sorts ... and that man was friendly with a feller who knew a guy by the name of Daguerre, who was trying to figger out a way to make a likeness actually appear on glass so he could make lots of exact copies of the original.

Well, sir ... he managed to do just that after a while, an’ he began to make likenesses of folks an’ sellin’ them to ever’one around.

Now—wouldn't ya know it?—before a body could turn around, other folks found how to do what Daguerre was doin’ and they started making images of nekkid women and selling them for whatever they could get. And Pa, I found out many years later, got into the selling end of that business, working the streets and keeping an eye out for the gendarmes and rivals. I know all this 'cause I seen some 'daguerreotypes' he brung back home with him! Pa eventually explained it all, but that was years after our trip west.

Strangest thing was ... it was Pa’s new wife, Chastity, who first told me and my friend Dan Conklin all about that fella Daguerre and the pictures he made—including the ones Pa brought home and kept all them years after leavin’ France! I hadn’t even known about them ‘til we were gettin’ ready to make our way west, Chastity let me and Dan in on the secret.

See ... me an' my best friend, Dan, were taking a lot of stuff out of heavy wooden boxes and putting things that didn't need to be kept from getting wet into them new-fangled cardboard boxes we had. Things like desiccated vegetables and potatoes, dried peas and fruit, flour, sugar, lemon juice, an' stuff like that were already inside big tin cans and sealed up tight and proper. Them tin cans didn't need to be kept out of the wet—they was already water tight. So cans of supplies like that we put in them cardboard boxes just to arrange them. It saved a bunch on the weight our oxen had to haul.

Them cardboard boxes were a caution, I'm here to tell ya. Pa run across them in France after he was dumped there as a kid. So, when we begun to talk about moving west, he special ordered a bunch of boxes that had to come all the way from Europe. Them boxes sure helped us ... kept the wagon organized with ever'thing in its place, but they were real light too.

Anyhow, Dan an' me were carryin’ a heavy wooden box down from the attic when the latch on the lid come open and we just barely did get it set down a 'fore some smaller wood boxes inside spilled out all over the floor. What Dan an’ me figgered was that all these little wood boxes were prime candidates to stow in cardboard boxes instead a’ leavin’ them in a heavy, bulky, wooden box, so we started sorting through the smaller items to see what they were.

Well sir, we was SOME surprised when we saw what was in them little boxes. Me and Daniel were still months shy of being fifteen right then. When we saw those daguerreotypes of nekkid women from France that was in them images, we didn't quite know what to do with ourselves. I know Dan's face turned bright red with excitement and I'm purty sure mine did too. I felt my heart begin to pound like a hammer against a anvil.

We went through a half-dozen flat boxes with one image in each—they were awful heavy and bulky—and each one was a caution! I noticed right off that most of the girls were pretty durn good looking too, not like whoever made these pictures just gathered up some dog-faced slatterns off a street corner, like you'd expect. Them calm-faced, smiling women were showing off their cunts and tits like it wasn't nothin' at all. NOTHING!!

We found one showing a real, real pretty young woman with big breasts, a quiet, confident smile, and not a SINGLE hair on her privates, when we heard a harsh voice right behind us.

"WHAT IN TARNATION ARE YOU BOYS UP TO NOW?"

It was Chastity, Pa’s new wife—my new step-mother—though she was near the same age as my oldest brother an’ not that much older’n me. She sounded mad and about ready to switch a couple of malingering boys ... but when we turned around, me and Dan saw she was smiling. Clearly, she could see 'xactly what we were looking at … and it didn't bother her none.

Well, my Pa’s younger-than-young wife set in to telling Dan an’ me all about them daguerreotypes, just as natural as you please, and she even had us open up another box that had what she called 'tintypes' of more nekkid women ... and in these, some showed men doing things of a private nature to the women.

Chastity said the tintypes were newer versions of what Daguerre had been doing with glass images and stuff … an’ they were a lot better. These particular ones were leftovers from a bunch Pa had brought back from the East when his brigade was mustered out after the war. Some hadn't traveled well and Pa had tossed them into the fireplace, but these were the ones that survived. Well, Dan and me—our chins were dragging on that split-log floor by now, and we were probably slobberin' like some danged fool dogs. We were totally flabbergasted and hanging on her every word.

I swear I didn't look down at the daguerreotype I was holding and then look up at Chastity's groin hidden by her long skirt, but she surely thought I did ... but it didn't seem to bother her none at all. She smiled slowly, staring right into my eyes.

"You don't know some girls like not having no hair down there, Jeremiah?" she asked softly.

I couldn't have spoken if my life depended on it ... not that I had any idea what I would a’ said if my throat wouldn't have been so dry.

Instead … me and Dan watched as Mrs. Chastity Richardson—my Pa’s lovin’ wife—slowly lifted the skirt of her long pioneer dress high enough to show the two of us boys that she didn't have no hair at all in her crotch ... just like the woman in the daguerreotypes and them tintypes. She held her skirt up for a long moment, then let it fall, smoothing it back down her hips and thighs.

Then she switched back into bein’ Pa’s bride, my stepmother, and spoke right briskly at us. She had Dan and me put everything back in its place in the boxes and load them in the Pa’s wagon without putting them in cardboard boxes or anything else. They were too fragile, she said, and needed protecting inside a heavy box.

Not ONE word about the whole incident did Dan or me EVER hear from my pa, though we'd been sure Pa was gonna have a fit about it. Curiouser and curiouser!

There was a few times when Dan and me would be together walkin’ around or just sittin’ an’ talking … and then we'd come across Chastity or see her off a ways, and we'd just look at each other before turnin' back to her. We didn't say much about the incident to one another. Come to think of it, the only time we did talk about what Chastity had showed us, I think we did it just to make sure neither we hadn't dreamed the whole durn thing.

I can't speak for Dan, but I locked the memory of Chastity's bare private parts back in corner of my mind and cherished it. Shuttin' it back behind a door in my head was the onliest way I could get over being red-faced and tongue-tied all the time around Mrs. Chastity Richardson, my dear step mom.

* * *

After Grace's teasing across the camp fire, I lay in my blankets on my cot beside the wagon I called mine and deliberately called up a recollection of the early evening’s encounter with Grace. I went through everything I could remember about those few moments, and I tried to see if there was anything else that seemed like it was tied in with the feelings bothering me tonight. I tried to reason my way through it all—but my thoughts were all scrambled up together. I kept thinkin’ of how it was Grace didn’t wear bloomers or anything else neither. And I thought of how smooth and soft her body had looked when she’d fallen.

And then, that memory came to me—of how Grace's big sister had a well-shaved groin also—an’ how smooth and soft it had looked too. An’ then, I started visualizing them images of those nekkid French women in the Daguerre images I'd seen, and the men and women in the tintypes. I didn’t know why my mind was churned up so, but it was … an’ ever’thing was all mixed up together. I didn’t know why, an’ it was just makin’ me six kinds a’ crazy, so I quit tryin’ to make sense of it. I started just letting things come to me without trying to fit it all into a finished puzzle where everything made sense....

First off, thinking back to that time in our old cabin, I figgered the only way Chastity could know of them daguerreotypes and the tintypes would be because Pa showed her. And that was a wonder all its own, 'cause men didn't even talk to their womenfolk about such things back then. At least ... I sure never heard nothing about such talk back in the Tennessee mountains we come from. I couldn't figger out how I should feel about Pa lettin' Chastity see such things, much less why she’d open up to Dan and me later on. With nothin' to work with, I let that whole question go by the wayside for the moment.

Now, you understand what men and women did when they was in a mood wasn't much of a mystery to me, nor most of the boys my age, so far as I knew. The log cabins we growed up in back in Tennessee didn't have a heck of a lot of privacy. It weren't possible. Ofttimes, a cloth draped across the room was the only separator between the living section and a bedroom or two ... so, when Pa was feeling frisky with my real Ma back then, we all knew about it. And if we was to take a sniff or two, we got us a nose full of what a man and woman smelled like when they was a' going at it.

Pa was a vigorous man with lusty appetites in all things, an' that surely included women. When Pa married my mother, Anna, over in France a long time back, he was just seventeen and she was maybe fourteen—the daughter of a man from Norway, of all places.

Marrying that young was a lot more common back then than today, but anyway, they began having kids almost right off and Ma, according to my big brother, Jesse, she was ready for loving any time Pa was. Jesse told me once, if Pa was tired or discomforted, she would get him in the right mood and they'd go at it for hours at a time. I don't know about that ... Jesse was six years older 'n me and I guess I just wasn't paying close attention back then.

When Ma and baby Priscilla were taken by the cholera in '63, Pa was grieved something terrible and it were only 'cause of the rest of us kids that he was able to get past the sadness. He still had the grief in 'im when he come home to stay for good, after the war. Pa would stand the loneliness as long as he could, then he'd go down the hills to one of the low-land towns and spend some time and money, with the ladies of the night there, then he’d come back home an’ be able to get along for another little while.

Then, on a trip, taking some corn to market one time, he come across Miss Chastity ... almost bumped her off the board walk, in fact … right outside a dry goods store to hear them talk of it. When she swished her skirts at him flirtingly, Pa smiled down at her—clearly delighted with her naughtiness—an' that was all it took to light a fire in the both of 'em. Pa brought his new bride home a month later. I do know Pa gets after his young wife just about as often as he can nowadays ... so I guess it was like that with my Ma too.

Chastity didn't have that good a reputation down where Pa met her. It was said she'd walk out with any fella what caught her eye, and she didn't much care what folks thought about it. Folks figured it was almost a scandal that she was twenty-two and still wasn't married 'cause girls back then got hitched when they was in their young teens, and Chastity was considered the next thing to an old maid by the time she met Pa. But … if you was to believe her flashing eyes when they looked at each other of an evening, Chastity matched Pa’s outlook on life … lust for lust, so to speak.

So here I was thinkin' that Chastity hadn't been a’ wearing anything under her skirts that day she caught me and Dan and neither had her little sister when she fell down the buffalo hollow. And Chastity hadn't minded us boys looking at her back then, nor lookin' at naughty images of nekkid women neither whilst she was a' standin' right there. And Grace hadn't minded me looking up her pretty thighs tonight, even if she had given me a rough few days beforehand.

Sooooo, what did all that mean? An' what did Pa think of all this going on in his wagon train heading west across the vast grasslands of Nebraska and points west? Or did he know any of it was happenin'?

* * *

Chastity, an' the way folks felt about her, was one of the reasons we were heading west. If we'd a’ stayed, Pa would a’ got into a shooting fight with some of the old boys back there, mostly 'cause a' the way their womenfolk were bad-mouthin' her.

The other, and by far the most important, reason we left was that Pa was a Union man an' most folks all around us were ex-Confederates, either by way of sympathy or having actually served in the rebel army. Things were a little tense from time to time, you might say.

Pa made his plans and we set out after he sold the three farms he owned outright, his half share in the general store ... and even the livery stable he won in a poker game. (The previous owner thought drawing to an inside straight was a smart thing to do, an' even I knew that was plumb stupid.) Anyhow, Pa recruited folks he wanted to go west with us, gathered together all the wagons and supplies he wanted, a little at a time, so as to not bring any attention to us ... and then we left.

Muddling through all this thinkin' and worryin' tonight, the Big Dipper swung all the way around up there in the blackness … an' I drifted off to sleep, wondering what it all meant.

CHAPTER TWO

Pa told us afore we ever started out, the prairie wasn't really flat—and it surely wasn't. There were all sorts a' gentle rises and folds in the terrain. But it sure weren't like being in the Tennessee mountains neither. A body could see FOREVER out yonder on the tall grass prairie! Back home, you could see as far as the next ridge over, and that was that.

I really think the terrible enormity of the deep blue sky out here and the god-awful, never-ending grass a wavin' in the breeze made all the folks in the families of the little wagon train much closer than they would have been otherwise. That was a thing that was happening inside each family, but also between all the wagon train families too.

It was like ... well ... it was us against everything and everyone else in the world. And—like when we didn't bury them danged raiders Christian-like—out here on the plains, some of the old rules still applied ... and some didn't.

* * *

I was on my way out to where the livestock were grazing down by the creek to see to the lineback dun I'd been riding. I was some concerned that the shoe on his left foreleg was getting loose and I needed to find out for sure.

Well sir, I passed by the open end of the wagon Grace and my two younger sisters used as sleeping quarters ... and there Grace was, sittin’ right on the tailgate washin' her bare feet and legs with a rag wet with water from a bucket sittin' beside 'er.

She smiled and just kept on with what she was doing ... and let me see her bare legs all the way from her toes clear up to her thighs ... and brother, that was a sight to see—all smooth, creamy skin an' such.

I gulped, jerked the hat off my head and didn't say nothing for the longest time. And then it come to me that one of us should say something and I did my best. I glanced down at her legs and what I could see of her slender thighs, and screwed up my courage to say, "I forgot to tell ya that day when you fell...?"

She looked at me curiously, not sure what I was gonna say next. But she didn't stop running that rag all over her legs and thighs.

"I forgot to say that I thought you have real fine looking legs," I told her, not sure I was telling it right. I never was real good with words like that. But she took it OK.

She smiled at me, more calm than I was. "Do you?" she asked softly. "...you really think that? You already said you liked my ... private parts? The way they look?"

"I do," I told her earnestly, bobbing my head up and down. I'm sure I looked like a dummy.

But, instead a’ laughin’ at me, she tugged on the fabric and her bulky skirt rose another three, four inches up her thighs. My heart began pounding something fierce. I swallowed hard, trying to clear out the sudden dryness.

"My legs aren't too skinny, you think?" she asked. She stretched her right leg out and moved it around some, examining it from different angles. To me it looked wonderful—slim ankles, a nicely curved calf ... and a slender, satin-smooth thigh....

"God no," I said hoarsely. "They're abso-goddamn-lutely perfect."

"I'm glad you think so," she said quietly, and reached out an' touched my belly with the toes of her bare foot. She smiled with more aplomb than a twelve-year-old should have. Maybe it's something females are born with, that ability to be so composed in situations like that ... some females anyway. Her foot slid lower 'til it was pressing against my cock, which I didn't even know 'til that instant had been growing hard and long just while we were talkin’.

I had to end this, and do it the right way, too. I just knew someone would be along in a bit, the moment would be over and done with, and there'd be problems, sure as shootin’.

Then, I had an inspiration. Bending at the waist, I swept my hat off, leaned over and touched my lips to the smooth skin a couple of inches above her right kneecap. I kept the kiss short, moved my lips another few inches north of where I kissed the first time ... then I did it again.

I straightened up, looked her right in the eye and stroked a few inches of creamy thigh. "Perfect!" I said again. Then, I had the sense to stand up straight an' tall, smile warmly in her face … an' then, by golly, I wheeled around and walked off toward the herd.

It must have been OK, 'cause when I looked around and lifted my hat to wave at her, she waved back, smiling.

Now if I just could do something about my danged cock ... it was about as hard as the barrel of my Winchester an’ just as ready to go off if somethin’ triggered it....

* * *

The next afternoon, the twelve-year-old seductress was a waitin' for me. When I walked around the wagon she called home, she was sitting on the wagon gate again, leaning back to her left, up against the side a’ the wagon, making the fabric of her dress stretch and tighten across the top of her body.

She was grinning and swinging those dainty little bare feet of hers—and her skirt was already hiked up above her knees. I looked around to make sure no one was in view, walked up to her side and leaned my shoulder on the same side a' the wagon she was on. The little minx was excited as all get out. I could see it in her eyes, and that got me exited too.

Maybe she was blushing a might, an' maybe I was too, but neither of us was backing down even a little bit. She moved her body around a mite, making her little boob rub a little on my shirt as she leaned in to me.

It felt like a branding iron moving on my chest. Well sir, I just naturally let my hand settle down on her left knee and then I let it drift a little higher up, caressing and stroking the silky skin of her thigh.

Her eyes widened and she glanced down to watch what was going on for a moment, but her head come right back up. She never even started to close her legs to keep me from doing what I was doing. That sassy little girl closed what little distance there was left between us and planted her soft lips on mine. And that felt goooood ... REAL good.

My hand slid further up her thigh. She didn't protest, she didn’t move, except to put her left hand on my forearm. She stroked my tanned flesh. Felt like her hand was hotter'n fire.…

So ... if she wasn't going to stop me—

When my middle finger touched her sex, I could feel some moisture already there, dribbling from between her pretty cunt lips to coat my fingers. I worked my fingers up, and then down, gently touching those plump little beauties the whole time.

She sighed, and spread her legs wider, making it easier for me. I took advantage, slipping a fingertip inside her. When I pressed deeper, I was surprised. I guess it showed on my face. She spread her thighs another little bit more widely.

Grace smiled naughtily and looked around to make sure no one was in sight. We were situated in the inside a' the wagon an’ no one could see through the wooden planks that made up the wagon box. Not only that, there was someone else’s wagon kinda overlapping this one and hiding us from the inside of the circle of wagons. For the moment, at least, no one could see us unless they came around the end of that other wagon all sudden like.

The danger didn't much matter to us right at that moment. It was exhilarating. It added to her, and my own excitement.

Reaching an arm back into the interior of the wagon, Grace dug around a while and then came back up, showing me a length of varnished wood, all rounded off an' polished real smooth. I sucked in a deep breath as the young vixen yanked her skirts up out of the way and gently pushed my hand aside so she could insert that fake penis inside her. She beamed at me, hunching over a little as she pressed it inward and trembling just a bit all over.

"Chastity gave this to me…," she sighed. She was quiet for a minute, but her hand never quit moving down there, a’ pulling the wooden thing out of her an' then pushin’ it back inside. It went deeper with each stroke an' her breath got more ragged.

"Emmy and Rachel are gonna sleep in Mary Ann's wagon tonight," she said in a soft, almost strangled voice.

Emily and Rachel were my sisters, twelve and ten-years-old, while Mary Ann was my sixteen-year-old big sister.

"So when you get back from guarding them horses and oxes tonight," Grace murmured in my ear, "you can put your thing in me where this is now…," she promised, "…if you want to," she added with a sultry smile.

I had to take a deep breath and swallow hard. "Darlin'," I said fervently. "There ain’t nothing else in the whole danged world I'd rather do!!"

She smiled. The fire in her eyes was something ancient ... somethin' girls and women have known since the beginning of time about men an' what they want, I reckon.

* * *

A little after midnight, I crept back to the circle of wagons from the little creek we'd camped beside ... in my skin an' nuthin' else. I was a’ carryin’ my boots in my right hand, my shirt an' britches were in my left. I didn't want to go to young Grace all sweaty an' smelling of horse so I'd took a quick bath in the cold creek water. When I carefully placed my clothing down beside the big rear wheel of the wagon, I scratched a fingernail on the canvas. Grace undid the drawstring that held the end of the wagon cover almost closed and pulled on my arm impatiently while I scrambled in.

Now, I weren't what you'd call unready to please this woman-child. I'd had some experience with women an' what they had 'tween their legs. I'd been there afore, you might say.

Back in the middle-Tennessee hills where I grew up, what I did with young Agnes Miller up in her widowed mother's barn hayloft wasn't what I'd been taught was angelic. And neither was what her mother did with me when Agnes was off somewheres else….

But all those couplings were quick, hurried things ... frustrating in a lot a’ ways. Neither Agnes nor her lusty mom ever did anything but reduce the number of petticoats and underthings under their dresses for me. They never once got nekkid nor anythin’ even close to that. Our couplings were no more than a lifting of skirts, a quick stand up against a wall or flopping down on their backs somewheres convenient, readjusting certain garments, hup, hup, hup ... and then it was over.

Tonight, with twelve-year-old Grace, I had an excited young female running her hands all over me and pressing as much of her bare body against me as she could get. There wasn't a trace of modesty in this girl ... and I couldn't help but give her just as good as I was getting.

"You're nekkid already?" she breathed hotly in my ear. I could hear the suppressed excitement in her voice. She was trying to be quiet but she was only successful part a’ the time.

"Washed up down by the crick," I whispered back, touching her lips with my fingertips. We dared not be too loud. There were folks all around—actually not that far away; kind a' like they was just on the other side of the thin canvas wagon cover.

She giggled a gurgling little laugh too soft for others to hear. "And you walked up here all NEKKID?" she whispered, her voice was tight with gleeful excitement. She could scarcely contain herself. She thought me striding around in the night, naked as the day I was born, was the finest thing in the world. "Ohhhhh ... I want to do that…," she breathed into my ear, making it a promise instead of a wish.

I finished retying the drawstring, closing the bowed opening of the canvas wagon top and sliding the curtain across for more privacy. We were enclosed by the body of the wagon that came up to about mid-thigh on me, but there was only an oiled canvas above that. The nearest group of sleeping travelers in our wagon train was only a few yards away.

She drew me backwards, her buttocks landing on the pile of quilts and blankets that served as her bed. In the dark, I had my knees on the edge of the blankets an' facing her. Grace kissed the knob on my prick, took it tentatively between her lips—and then accepted it whole in her mouth.

All of a sudden, I knew 'xactly what heaven was and where I could find it! I held myself still for a long moment, half bent over my knees in the gloom, glorifying in the feel of her tongue slathering all around my cock. And then, I knew what to do to her too, 'cause I'd seen it in one of Pa’s naughty daguerreotypes, and the poses of the two participants weren't in all that much different from than the position Grace and I were in right now. Well, the woman had only been half-lying back on a settee, an’ Grace here was flat a’ her back, and the guy in the picture was standing on one leg ... but he'd had his cock in her mouth and he was bent over kinda awkward like, and....

Bracing myself on my left hand, and then down on my elbow beside her body an' facing her feet, I ran the fingers of my right hand down her belly, settling on her heated slit. Instincts gave me some guidance where my experience left off, I reckon. I began a gentle little circling motion with my forefinger right at the top. She boosted her pubes up into my hand and whimpered most pitifully. Fortunately my cock in her mouth kept her from making a really loud noise, but her body was yelling at me, don’t ya know? It was saying it really liked what I was doing.

When I bent over her body and touched my tongue to where I'd had my fingers, she liked to went wild, pushing her cunt lips up to me and rubbing them all over my face.

I guess, when you come right down to it, I didn't know that much about what I was doing to her, but she didn't know much neither. Even so, we did right well for ourselves, and each other. It wasn't no time a’ tall before we were both having to hold back from moaning and groaning out loud.

After a few moments, Grace reared back and my cock slipped out of her mouth. Her hands were clutching at me, pulling at me to match up our groins. I managed to get there, but I don't know today how I did it without doing harm to at least one of us. You know … that gal weren't even satisfied until I was layin' atop her, an' I didn't have any problem with that a’ tall.

Once our mouths were close together, the twelve-year-old wanton pasted her lips to mine, even though lots of her own vagina honey coated my lips. Her hand was holding my prick like it was the handle to a hammer or something and she was rubbing the end of it against her sopping wet slit. Then ... just like we'd been doing it for years, she pressed my tool downwards and inside her. We adjusted our bodies and I sank my shaft into her. I braced my hands on either side of her shoulders, raised my body up off her ... and suddenly we were fucking.

I pushed deeper into her, got my knees closer up under her buttocks, and tried to get even deeper. She groaned softly, raising her feet off the blankets and rubbing the inside of her thighs all the way from my ribs down to my arse. Weren't no romance to it, nor any art neither. We was just slapping bellies as hard and fast as we could ... but it was really, REALLY good!

We didn't last long, neither one of us … not that first time, we didn’t. We were too fired up, we'd been waiting too long for what we were doing. Before I knew it, I was coming hard, my spendings were splashing inside her, and she was bucking and whimpering something crazy. Then she stiffened, held herself arched off the bedding, and then slowly collapsed back down on her bed.

Even though we was already breathing hard and dripping with sweat, we hauled another quilt over our heads so we wouldn't have to be so careful about breathing so loud in the still night.

We were laying on our sides, facing each other and our heated bodies plastered all up against each other, glorifying in our nakedness and just the whole idea of us a’ goin’ at each other like we just done ... so unrestrainedly ... without embarrassment, ya know?

Grace kissed me hard, wrapped both her arms tight around my neck and then relaxed, cuddling up against me. Every so often, one of us would raise up a mite and search out each other's mouth with ours while our hearts steadied and our breath eased.

"I wanted you to be my first," she said softly. "I just knew it would be extra special fine with you," she added.

She kissed my lips, her tongue darted out to flick at mine. That was new to me, but I liked it. We learned together—how to make kissing a hot, hot thing to do, on top of everything else we were doing. And whilst we were kissing and hugging, I was thinking too.

The sexy little girl had said, 'my first', which seemed to mean there was going to be a second feller, and then a third.... An' that kinda relieved me, ya know? 'Cause I hadn't done too much thinking before tonight, and none a’ tall, the past couple of hours—since I was in what folks call 'the rut'.

Her bringing it up gave me visions of getting hitched and being responsible for a wife and all kinds of scary things—things I didn't even know that had been sitting in the back of my mind, worrying away at me. Well ... she wasn't acting like she wanted to be a wife—not mine anyway—and it plumb took a load I hadn't even known was there right off a’ my mind. And then something else occurred to me, a shot of inspiration, you might say.

"Ah hah!" I breathed into her ear. "So a’ tumbling down that hollow wasn't just an accident, huh?"

She tensed up a mite in my arms, but when I chuckled softly, she relaxed. If anything, she snuggled a little closer.

"Mmmmmmm ... you have any idee how hard it is to fall accidental like, and then get myself all spraddled out like that?" she whispered back. She giggled lewdly. "An' I actually DID hurt my head a little when I fell and I was soooo worried when I screamed that every one in the whole train was gonna come a’ running."

I cupped one of her breasts. It wasn't much bigger around than a silver dollar, but there was enough rise some above her chest and plenty a' firmness to it to fit real fine in my palm. I wondered if her nipples was always this hard and standing up like they was.

"You scheming ... Bathsheba!" I whispered, wondering if it was too much. We were lip to lip anyway, so I kissed her long and deep.

It took her a moment, and I had my tongue tying hers up for a while, but like all mountain folk, she'd gone to Sunday meeting and even if she hadn't been in our—Pastor Abernathy's—congregation, the pastor where she HAD gone hadn't neglected the story of David and the woman he spied in her bath, accidental-like.

Grace caught my meaning right off and she laughed softly when I stopped kissing 'er. "THAT'S where I got my idea!!" she murmured, giggling into my chest. "I figgered if I showed myself to ya, then you couldn't keep on running away whenever I come close."

I really didn't remember doing any running, but maybe it seemed like that to her. 'Twas a fact, though, before she did the falling thing into that hole, I hadn't thought much about her. I saw her as nothing but a scrawny an' sometimes bratty little kid. Her tumbling down in that buffalo wallow had really opened my eyes, so to speak.

I laughed with her, our heads still under the blanket to muffle the sound. "I'm glad you did," I told her. I paused, wondering how far I could go. "I thought you were awfully skinny before," I said, "but you sure cleared that up!!" We chuckled. "And I think your cunt is the finest looking thing I ever did see!!" I added.

She giggled quietly. "You want to put that beautiful cock back in my pretty lil' pussy … pretty please?" she asked teasingly.

Now, that was the first time I ever did hear that word—it was just coming into use in the big cities and it hadn't made its way all around the mountains yet. But I knew exactly what she meant.

She stopped working the head of my prick into her 'pussy'. "You ever see any other ones, then?" she asked curiously. She'd actually been listening to what I was sayin'.

It didn't seem like she was angry, though, and she didn't seem like she was too ... ahhhh ... possessive, so I told her about Agnes and Agnes' ma. She thought that was a hoot.

"You mean you were doing this Agnes girl—did I ever see her? I don't recall—and she would go pick berries afterward to make it seem to her ma that that's what she'd been doing all along ... and while she did that, you were a’ going up to the house and fucking her MA?!!"

"And sometimes when her daughter really was out picking berries," I replied, chuckling softly at the memory.

I'd never told anyone about this, though my best friend Daniel Conklin knew ... mainly 'cause he was doing the same thing with them on the days I couldn't git to their farm. It felt good to be talking about such naughty, mischievous things ... an' with a girl to boot.

We laughed together. Grace told me more about how she'd done a lot a' planning to get me to see her naked, and then she talked some about her polished wood phalluses ... her dildoes ... that she got from her sister and busted her own maidenhood, which I found just abso-dang-lutely fascinating. Before Grace, I never knew a girl with her mind so consumed with sex. I didn't know how ... delicious ... it could be just knowing a nasty girl like her. I hadn't known how really, really good it felt to relax and just be ... naughty.

Before too long, we were humping each other on our sides, gasping for breath under those hot robes, humping and giggling as we went at it again. We were just learning about each other's body's ... where to touch, where to stroke or kiss. We spent the whole night finding out.

We did the same thing the next night, and the one after that, but then we had to slow things down 'cause I nigh fell off my horse on night herd when I dozed off and Grace come near cutting off a thumb whilst cutting a steak off an antelope haunch.

Grace said she really wanted to see my prick in the light, 'stead of the darkness of the wagon bed, so a few days later, she rode out wearing that same dark blue dress she'd fallen into the buffalo hollow, and she circled around to where I was, workin' as an outrider. We got naked right there on the prairie and fucked a fast and furious fuck with nary a thought for Injuns nor anything else. We both shoulda known better, but nothin' untoward happened. We were danged lucky, thinkin' back on it.

Couple of afternoons later, we found ourselves in a rare grove of cottonwoods beside a little creek, and she wanted me to do her standing up and leanin’ back up agin a tree, just holding up the hem of her skirt, like I done with Agnes and her ma. It was a whole lot more fun than doing it with Agnes's mother ... or Agnes neither.

CHAPTER THREE

A few weeks later, the wagon train come up on a small settlement, and me and Dan Conklin and my brother David went over to see what there was to see. We were sitting our horses on a rise, a’ looking down at the place, an' it sure weren't much.

It was clear a body could walk from one end a’ the town to the other in just a couple of minutes ... iffen you could haul your boots up out of the deep black pool of mud that was the only street. There weren't any sidewalks, like they had in the towns down in the lowlands where we went to on occasion in the old days, back when we was livin' in the Tennessee hills.

Down in this settlement, we could see there was a store of sorts, with a tavern built on one side of it, a livery stable with a sign saying folks could buy and sell hides there ... but there wasn’t much else in the whole danged town. I did spy a small building with a sign that hung lopsided over the door, saying it was a bakery. I marked that place down for a visit later on. Real close by to where we were up on the rise, there was a small group of Indian teepees nestled close to the white man's settlement, as if for protection.

We were here because Pa wanted to see if we could replenish some of our supplies, and he was particularly interested in finding any buffalo hides already cured and seasoned, ready to make into warm robes and even long coats for the winter ahead. Us boys…? Well, we were here to see what was happenin' in the tiny village. The three of us sat our horses, letting them graze, whilst we looked around interestedly. Pa was coming up behind us from the circled wagons, and some of the womenfolk were comin' too, but we'd come ahead to get the lay of the land.

Whilst we were looking, we saw an Indian woman come out of one of the tepees with a baby in her arms. The young mother took a notion to sit down on an empty barrel not far from the teepee entrance and right where we could see her real clear.

We could see she had on a short buckskin top of sorts; it came down to her waist, but not much further. Then, calm as you please, she tossed the front hem a’ the garment over her shoulder and commenced letting the baby suckle at her left breast. Seemed like she didn't think a thing about it, even with us so close by. We knew danged well she saw us; she couldn't a' missed seein' us up on the rise not fifty yards away. Even with me doing naughty things with Grace ever' time we could get away, the sight of that young woman's full breasts stirred the blood in me. She wasn't bad-looking a’ tall.

"Look all ya want, but don't be a’ touching," cautioned a voice. We all turned to see Caleb Struthers riding up to us, grinning broadly.

My Pa knew Caleb from way back when Pa first hitched up with a company of beaver trappers making their way west. Caleb had been with that outfit a’ ready and Pa’s first job in his whole life was helping Cal with the pack mules and cooking and such.

Then, when we come outta the Tennessee hills on this trip, Pa chanced to see Caleb walking down a street as we was coming into Council Bluffs. You coulda heard them two whooping and carrying on a couple of counties over. We all thought Pa had gotten into some of his corn whiskey or something.

Caleb and the Lakota woman—some folks called the Lakota by the name a' Sioux—who he was traveling with, had been about to start back west to meet up with her folk when we met up. They just naturally delayed 'til we was ready and then came along with us. Cal and 'Laughing Maiden'—that was what her name was in the Lakota language—were always scouting around, making big circles around the train, trying to cut sign of any Injuns headed our way, or anything else we wouldn't like.

Me and Dan nodded together, my brother was only a second behind. "Diseases?" I ventured.

"Well, that too," Caleb said. "But you might just find ... these are Cheyenne here ... you just might find a brave who thinks that girl down there is his personal woman an' he might just be somewhare around a' watching you watch her. You could wind up with a slit throat, iffen ya wasn't careful," he remarked. He dropped the reins on his horse's neck and let the animal graze like ours were. The horse, being the social animal horses are, sidled a little closer to our mounts 'til we was all in a small group.

"Dang shame about white men a’ giving the syphilis to the Injuns out here, huh?" my brother said. I knew he'd learned that in school back home.

Caleb snorted. "Not so's you could tell it!!" he declared. "Most Injuns, even them up here on the high prairie already knew about the syphilis long afore the white man came. Truth is, they probably gave it to the white man their own selves ... they say that ol' Christopher Columbus' sailor boys took it back to Europe. Started a danged plague in Italy that spread out across all of Europe."

Well, I never heard of such a thing ... but Caleb was an educated man who ventured west many years before, and stayed because he liked it out here. He'd been a mountain man for a while, trapping and taking his furs to market, but then he'd decided to become a doctor. Did all the studying and such, but lost interest in the medical arts in favor of becoming a mountain man again. If there was anyone to know about such things, it would be Caleb.

"Did something else to us, too," Cal said thoughtfully, "least I think so," he added.

We looked at him expectantly, our attention divided between him and the young mother below who was taking an almighty long time getting her doeskin top rearranged proper over her breasts. The young maiden surely deserved at least some attention, and we gave it to her.

"Well," Caleb opined, "tobacco ain’t growed nowheres else but here, in what they called the New World back then." He took a long, appreciative look at the young woman, who'd set her baby down to play in the grass beside her. She still hadn't covered herself. "Anyhow, when I was in my studies, we was privileged—that’s what they said … privileged—to dissect … that means cut apart … the body of a fella who’d been a 'baccy farmer, and who smoked jest about all day long, every day. Wouldn’t ya know it, the feller's lungs was black as coal, an' he had a cancer on them too. It was an ugly, ugly sight to see," he told us. "I think the man finally just couldn't breathe and that's why he up and died."

It gave us something to think about, that's for sure. Now, the only time I ever tried to smoke a pipe of tobacco, I had what you could call an unfortunate experience. Only other thing like that ever happened to me was when I swallowed a mite of Pa’s corn liquor. I wasn't an idiot… least I didn't think I was… so I didn't smoke nor drink these days, and I had no inclination to ever do so again. What Caleb was telling us sure made a man think.

We walked our ponies on down the gentle slope, the Indian woman having gone inside the tepee—to our disappointment, you might say. We separated at the bottom of the hill where the little town’s ‘street’ began, each going about his own business. We agreed to meet up at the store in mid-afternoon. I went to look in at the blacksmith a’ working at the livery. I even lent him a hand for a bit ... getting some metal rims on a big wagon wheel. It just felt good to get my hands on some iron and a hammer for a while. Pa had let me work with a real good blacksmith for a while back home, and I kinda liked working with my hands that way.

To reward myself, I spent a good thirty minutes eating doughnuts and even some cupcakes in that little store—the sign outside said it was a 'Bakery and Confectionary'. I didn't rightly know what a 'confectionary' was, but everything sure tasted prime. It was right next door to a place where the sign said there was a dentist, which I took to be someone's idea of bein' funny.

Afterward, more than a little pleased with myself, I moseyed on down to the building with a big sign saying it was 'Frazier's Store'. It seemed to be the main reason for the settlement's existence.

I strolled in, stepping real quiet in the moccasins I'd taken to wearing on the trail, to find my sister, Mary Ann, and Grace pushed up against the grocer's counter by four rough, heavily bearded men. They was reaching, getting ready to do God knows what with the girls, when I walked in.

Now, where we come from, almost nobody thought nothing about carrying a rifle everywhere they went. Out here in the west, folks did jest about the same, though some favored a short gun tucked behind a belt buckle. Seemed like it was how things were meant to be. In a way, it seemed to me my whole life, I’d been around folks … men, boys, and most nigh all the womenfolk … who had a firearm somewheres close to hand all the time. I'd heard tell it warn't the same in really big towns … but I'd never been in one to see for myself.

So, anyway, when I saw what was going on in that general store, I jus' naturally brought the muzzle of my Winchester up and laid it behind left ear of the meanest looking one ... the one who had my sister backed up to the counter. He was bellying up against her, holding her wrists captive in his big hands, and I took exception to that.

The feller had a bushy, unkempt beard that covered most of his face and long, greasy-looking hair that probably hadn't been washed in a month a’ Sundays. With the muzzle touching the side of his neck, I eared back the hammer and let that do the talking for me. I looked at him with distaste.

Well sir, I reckon there weren't but a couple of fellers west of the Mississippi who didn't know what the metallic, snicking noise of a hammer pulled back into full cock sounded like ... and this guy weren't one of them pilgrims. He stopped what he was doin’ and froze in place. He didn't move a muscle for the longest time.

He turned his head, just a mite, a’ trying to see around the muzzle. He caught a glimpse of me standing there. "Hell," he said disgustedly. "You ain’t nothin' but a sprout … a lil' kid," he taunted. "You ain’t goin’ t’ kill me. You ain’t got what it takes...."

"There be three 'er four piles of bones on our back trail would tell you some different," I said quietly, not backin’ down any so’s you could tell it. I wasn’t real happy about what I said … killing a person is a fearsome thing an' I hadn't liked doing it back at the river when them thieves and murderers had come to us. They was the first human beings I ever kilt—but they came looking for it and I wasn't averse to adding to the total, should it be needful right here.

"Anyway, how growed up I got to be ... just to pull this trigger?" I asked curiously. I held on to the hammer with my thumb, and then I pulled the trigger. I let the three other gents see 'xactly what I was about.

"Now…,” I said softly. “…the only thing in the world that’s keepin you from getting a big hole blowed clean through your mangy head is my thumb. An’ if I get too nervous ... or tired or something ... you're dead as last year's corn crop," I told him.

His sidekicks were beginning to move around restlessly, so I jes' naturally drew the Navy Colt my brother Jesse had rechambered to use .44 rimfire cartridges—just like our Winchesters—from behind my belt buckle with my left hand. I cocked it and pointed it in their general direction.

"You dasn't," the bearded one said, but I don't think he believed it himself.

I was going t' ask him why I wouldn't dare, but I got interrupted.

"Jere, I'm real hurt you throwed a nice party like this ‘un and didn’t invite me!" Caleb remarked from behind me and to the left. I could tell he was somewhere over by the doors.

"We was just about to start the dance," I assured him. "Glad you could make it."

Right then, Mary Ann wrenched her hands free and reached in her dress pocket to pull out her .32 caliber pepperbox. Mad as a wet hen, my sister put the muzzle of her pistol right under Mr. Shaggy Hair's chin and cocked it all the way back.

"Mary Ann," I said, "you best be careful, pushing that gun up in that scroungy danged beard of his ... there might be something ALIVE up in there."

"I'll be careful," she answered. "If I feel anything moving, I'll start shooting and I won't stop 'til it ain’t moving no more."

"Mister," I chuckled, "was I you, I wouldn' even swallar hard, else my sister might take it the wrong way."

Grace, not to be out done, had her derringer out now, cocked … and she was pushing it the ear a’ one of the three other gents. "You're so purty," she cooed to the guy, "or you would be if you ever took a bath." She was close to him, pushing her body up against his. "But I bet if I shoot you right here...," She screwed the muzzle of her derringer a little deeper in his ear. "...your own mama wouldn't know you when you was buried."

"Grace," I said to her, "iffen you shoot now, you're a’ going t' get what he calls brains all over them brand new hand-me-downs on the shelf yonder." I pointed with my pistol at the shelf with some denim pants and wool shirts. "Be a shame to mess up some of them wares I'm sure this here store keeper would like to sell to someone, once these varmints is gone."

Right then, Pa come in the door with my brother David and cut off my funnin’. Just as well, I guess. No one was laughin'.

Pa was carrying one of them Colt 10-gauge revolving shotguns, and he held it on the three friends of this fella I had my rifle on. I could see from the corner of my eye those guys were looking mighty sickly. A shotgun does that to folks—gets their attention in a hurry! Makes 'em awful polite too.

"If it's a’ right with y'all...," Grace's captive remarked carefully. He was whiter than one of my poor deceased Ma’s linen tablecloths. "...I'll just kinda hold my hat down on top my head with both my hands and walk real slow out of here." He cautiously linked the fingers on both hands together on the brim of his hat, careful not to alarm the innocent-looking twelve-year-old girl holding a gun to his head … nor the man holding a shotgun on him neither.

"Alright by me," I answered. "How 'bout you, Pa? Grace? Whatcha think, Caleb?"

"Let him," Pa replied shortly.

Grace nodded, maybe a little regretfully. Caleb never answered, but he moved his gun off the feller's belly a mite.

"Want I should give ya my belt gun?" the fella asked.

"Nah," Pa said shortly, "You get a notion, go 'head and pull it. Mr. Colt done give me the cure for that."

The man started moving, walking slow and careful to the outside doors

Well, in another minute, each one of the four had each slowly walked hisself out the door and across the street, with Pa an' Caleb watching every step. The one who'd had Grace's derringer in his ear unbuckled his holster with his left hand and dropped it on the stoop as he walked out.

He never once looked back at it neither. Smart feller.

"Mary," I asked my sixteen-year-old sister, turning back to the two girls, "you ladies about done shopping?"

My sis took a deep breath and blew it out. "Most nearly," she replied, a little shakily. She put her pistol back in her dress pocket, her hands trembling a mite, and turned back to the sweating storekeeper and began ordering more canned goods from him to replace some we'd used on the trip west. The cans would be smaller than the big tins we brought from Tennessee, but we had the extra space now for lots a' them.

"You folks know that was Billy Durham and his crowd?" a customer asked from a few feet down the counter.

"Nope," Pa told him. "Good to know, though, in case we have to put it on a marker over his grave—if we have the time to dig one. Didn't have time back yonder, this side a' Omaha. Too many of 'em to dig too," he added.

The customer never said another word.

"Prob'ly should a’ killed him and been done with it," Caleb allowed. "Someone'll have it to do one of these days."

"Wasn't in the mood," I told him ... mostly for the benefit of the store's other patrons, "woulda got his brains and blood all over my sisters' clothes, too ... and that stuff's danged hard to wash out."

* * *

Pa gave a man some gold coins for a tall stack of buffalo, bear and deer skins that were already cured and tanned. He got some more from the Cheyenne camp nearby too. Some a’ the hides would become warm nighttime coverings and some would even be cut into coats come winter.

We knew the gold coins would mark us. Thieves would assume Pa had more he wasn't showing, but we needed the hides and fur, and we needed the supplies Mary bought too. The food we were bringing along with us was likely going to be eaten up, either before our trek was over or soon afterward. The buckskin included in the stack of hides was going to be useful pretty soon too. If nothing else, shoe leather was getting mighty thin on everyone's boots ... and all the ladies wanted pretty moccasins like Caleb’s woman, Laughing Maiden, wore.

All the canned goods we bought? The storekeeper had been glad to get shut of that too. Most of it was overstock he kept in the back room since he didn't have the shelf space to put it out. He'd been thinking he never was gonna sell it all and he was ready to make us a pretty good deal.

Same for the buffalo hides. The livery owner had bought them from a trader, hoping to make a quick profit from settlers headed west, but it just hadn't happened. Pa got the hides—and a wagon to haul them in—for a real good price.

Then, when we were durned good and ready, we rode out of town with our rifle butts resting on our thighs and ridin’ tall in the saddle and watchful—ready should Mr. Durham and his friends come wanting to make a fuss.

Never seen hide nor hair of 'em ever again, though.

* * *

Pa turned our wagons due north right out of that mean little settlement and we rolled that direction for a good five days. On the sixth morning, we set our faces back due west an’ moved on over what looked to be virgin grassland.

The buffalo hadn't come up this far north this year, most of the Lakota and Cheyenne villages had gone way down south to find them, and we were pretty much left alone on the vast prairie. We didn't even know if we was even still in Nebraska or not. It had only been a state for a couple years but no one rightly knew where the exact boundaries were.

The day after we made the turn back west, it commenced to raining.

CHAPTER FOUR

Lordy, Lordy, Lordy! Did it ever rain! Four days straight, it rained, and we never saw the sun even once. There weren't that much lightning and thunder ... but my goodness, did it pour.

When it started into raining so hard we couldn't see much beyond the lead ox's nose, Pa called a halt. We had to, 'cause after just one afternoon hauling the wagons over a prairie already soaked by the downpour an’ fast turnin’ into a bottomless quagmire, the oxen had completely exhausted themselves. We had a few spare teams a' oxen in our little herd to give the animals a break from time to time, but it was clear they’d only get exhausted too, and then we’d be stuck in the mud and filth.

Before halting entirely, we crossed one last river. We’d got caught up discussin’ whether was best to have a river (that was probably goin’ to flood sooner or later) in front of us … or behind us. Before the discussion got too far along, Pa made hisself a General again, in a manner a’ speaking, and he cut the talk short, saying we had to move fast and drive the oxen hard so's not get caught in mid-stream.

The river bottom was good, a nice surprise on that day—there weren’t too many other nice things about it—and we were all over on the other side purty quick. From Pa and Caleb said later, the best rule was to always cross over fast running water so it was behind you and not an obstacle in front of you. Pa’s wisdom in gettin’ that done was proved right, just minutes after we crossed. While the last wagon was still climbing the rise out of the little valley the river had cut over the years, the water started in to rising. Weren't no big wall of water, just a danged fast swelling that would have done us in, had we been just a mite later. In minutes, the river was running way out of its banks. It would have been an impassible barrier in front of us if we’d stayed on the other side. It was something to marvel at, wonderin’ where all the water had come from, 'cause it didn't seem to be comin' down that hard.

There was some mighty pale faces in the crowd that turned back around to face west, I'm here to tell ya!

When we stopped for good, not too much further on, we were 'bout a third the way down the side of a long hill an' well away from any creeks or streams that might flood. Being from the mountains, we knew better than to chance lightning strikes by stoppin' atop the summit.

We built a brush corral for the oxen and the horses off a ways, close enough to keep watch on them, an’ far enough off so their complaining wouldn't bother us none. We were ready to move them every day to new grazin', but they showed little interest in eatin', preferring instead to just turn their backsides to the wind and rain … an' then just endure 'til it was done with. Actually, they did tolerably well.

As for the humans in the wagon train, we did OK too. We all—every man, woman, and child—had rubberized slickers to keep us dry, courtesy of Pa's selling off all his properties back in Tennessee. Wearing them, we assembled the awnings on the side of every wagon. They gave us a place to gather and talk and even socialize while the water ran deep all through the camp.

The rain was coming near straight down as made no difference and the awnings did their duty danged well. We had them Mackintosh rubberized slickers for personal protection from the rain, and even some rubber boots ... but not many wore the boots. They tended to get sucked down into the mud, and leave the wearer barefoot. It was actually kinda sensible to start out barefoot—didn't have to deal with the loss of valuable footwear that way.

Mackintosh's had been around for nigh on to fifty year, but the company had made a special point a’ goin’ around the armies during the war and selling a much improved version of the old vulcanized rubber gear. That was when Pa seen 'em. He liked them, and bought some for his own self and when we decided to move west, he special ordered enough for all of us.

The rain gear was good, I guess ... but when the rain comes down the way it was, t' ain’t no slicker gonna keep a body dry, not really. So we spent a lot a' time layin' back inside the wagons.

Thinking back on it, it was a good rest—them days and nights of rain. Caleb and his woman, whose whole Lakota name was 'Laughing Maiden Who Walks In The Moonlight’ both told us no self-respecting warrior would venture out in weather like this so we felt OK about not venturin' out our selves, even to set guards and such. No one could see more than a few yards in any direction anyway, so guards would have been pretty useless.

We spent most of our time in the wagons or under the awnings, listening to the rain hitting the oiled canvas and playing card games or just talking … reading when the urge took hold. Laughing Maiden, 'Ehawee', in the Lakota language, showed us some Indian games that helped keep us occupied too. It was impossible to get a cook fire going of course—all the buffalo chips just kinda dissolved in the rain. So we started eating the canned vegetables and fruit … mostly peaches … right out a' the can. We gnawed on deer and buffalo jerky too for our meals.

It wasn't like I cared much about whether it was a’ raining or not. Every night, Grace would convince my sisters, Emily and Rachel, to abandon their normal sleeping quarters an' go sleep with their oldest sister or whichever one of the Conklin girls they were best friends with at that moment.

I tell ya, I was getting used to sneaking over the high tailgate and inside the wagon cover's bonnet to be with my naked little lover. We'd spend the next few hours experimenting and practicing what we'd already found out about our bodies, an' learnin' more all the time. We'd lay there, listening to the rain pound on the wagon cover over us, then one of us would think of something new to do to one another, and away we'd go. The pounding rain and thunder drowned out much of the noise we made, so we figgered the rain was our friend.

Towards the end though, even as comfortable as folks in our wagon train were, compared to the normal settler wagon trains, I think the rainfall started driving everyone a little crazy. We were making jokes about looking up the measurements for an ark from Pa’s big Bible. That joke got less and less funny as time went on. So far as meals went, that tough jerky we were stuck eatin' was getting on everyone's nerves.

When the weather broke, the morning of the fifth day, we were more than ready to be going somewhere—anywhere! It was still too wet to move that day, but the day after, we moved the whole wagon train a couple miles northwest to a mostly flat, mostly rocky outcrop on the side of another hill. Since that surface drained better'n lowland prairie, it was soon nearly dry. It would have been too dangerous to be there when the storm was breaking 'round our ears with the constant possibility of lightning, but now it was a place where a misplaced foot wouldn't sink out of sight in rain-drenched sod.

We let the livestock graze pretty much wherever they wanted to now. The brush we'd been corralling them with hadn't been too substantial to begin with and was now almost all washed away. With plenty of grass nearby, the oxen—an' the horses too—had no desire to stray, so we hobbled the mules and horses and let that take care of the problem. We resumed our night herd duties, though, and I saw less of Grace than I wanted to for a couple days.

Once night, though, Grace come out to see me on night herd ... stepping light and graceful, nekkid as the day she was born except for the moccasins Ehawee helped her make. When I saw her coming, I thought I'd bust a gut getting off my horse and over to the tree where she wanted me to take her whilst she was a’ standing up.

Then ... I don't know where she got the idea … but that horny danged nymph wanted me to get all nekkid too, and let her sit on my lap while I was in the saddle and circling the herd.

I did it too!! Shouldn't have, but I did.

Half-way around, I backed my butt up agin' the cantle and she took me inside her. Then, with every step that horse took, Grace grunted and moaned something fierce. I was afraid the saddle horn might do her a mischief but she told me to mind my own business. She said not to stop or talk or anythin’ else, and 'specially don't stop doing what I was doing … just make sure the horse didn't step in a hole or something.

We were on ol' Hinto (Lakota for 'Blue Hair') 'cause he was a roan gelding who'd become my most favorite mount. I kinda considered him my horse, nowadays. Grace and I went around and around the herd that night with Grace groaning and moaning like she was suffering the worst torture man ever devised. She wouldn't let me stop though—no sirrreeee—not even for a minute.

I was a tired young feller when that night ended. Not only that, I had to keep my saddle away from everyone for a week afterwards, 'cause the durn thing needed a LOT of cleaning. Maybe, come to think of it—nah, there was no maybe to it—me and Grace were getting too bold and a tad careless in what we were doing.

But it was a mighty hard thing to stop. Seemed like the more sex we had together, the more we wanted.

* * *

Our family, and all the others in the wagon train, had been purty much ostracized by folks back in the Tennessee mountain country. Even before the War of Secession, there were those who resented the fact that Pa owned three farms outright, along with the general store in town. They didn't pay any attention to the fact that Pa had worked hard and for some mighty long days for the things he had. They fastened on the fact that we was Union folks, and figgered it was that what made Pa all his money.

When he won the town's livery stable in a card game, folks were plumb resentful—not understanding that it was Pa who'd put up his hard-earned money to bet against the livery's deed and that he, of a right absolutely should get a return off of his risk. Seems like some folks are always ready to blame their own shortcomings on the successful ones, huh?

Years after the war, things actually got worse than they was when the war ended. Pa knew the commander of the Union cavalry who garrisoned our little part of Tennessee durin’ what they called Reconstruction, and most folks around bitterly resented that too. As time passed, things got steadily worse. It finally got to the point where the Klan from down in Pulaski even organized a Den up by us and word a' what they did to others out night ridin’ tended to make us right cautious. They never actually hit us, but there'd always been the chance. Pa had begun gathering folks who agreed with him around him purty soon after the war, and now we were all together in one wagon train working its way westward.

The incident at the settlement emphasized how different we'd become and how much more we refused to rely on anyone else, ‘cept our own selves. The mammoth rain storm had done nothing but increase the feeling of isolation we felt. We hadn't been able to see more'n a few yards for days on end, 'cept for each other.

Heck, for all we knew, the whole rest of the world had disappeared and we were the only living things on earth. Toward the end of the rain, we'd even been cracking jokes about just how long a 'cubit' was and how many of them cubits of boards it took to build a raft ... an' where would we find boards anyways?

Now the sun was shining bright and the land was drying out, but we still hadn't seen another human being in a long while. The sheer immensity of the enormous prairie, the massive vault of blue sky over a endless expanse of grass was having its effect, pushing us ever closer together. Some folks we'd talked to back in Council Bluffs had told us about that vastness, the horrible arc of dazzling sun and infinitely wide prairie. Some had feared it an' tried to convince us to turn around.

But, somehow, for us, instead of being cowed by the openness and the isolation, it seemed we were becoming a part of the vastness—and growing 'til we fit comfortable-like into it.

* * *

One of the things that made us a different group from most other wagon trains, was the women who made up most of the adults. For one thing, they were all darn pleasin' to look upon. Whether a growed up woman, teen, or young'un, they were all clean of limb, shapely, and mighty pleasing to look upon. There wasn't a butterball figure or shrewish personality among 'em. Not a one. Our ladies all stood straight an' tall, walking proudly beside a man 'stead of behind him. In conversations, the men of our train talked with the women, not to them.

Before we even put the mountains of Tennessee behind us, Pa talked all of the women and girls into wearing split skirts and riding astride a horse, 'stead a’ sidesaddle like most women did. They wore flat-crowned hats, too—'stead a’ bonnets—'cause bonnets cut off a woman's vision to each side and riding sidesaddle was awkward if a woman was t' need to work livestock or such. The womenfolk took to Pa’s ideas like ducks to water, and even built on 'em.

Then, when Pa got me to start teachin' everyone to shoot better, the women and girls blossomed like wild flowers. They already knew how to shoot—durn few ridge runner women didn't—but they became that much better from the practice. In fact, the next best shot to me was 'Aunt Maye' Tillotson, who was Hiram and Helen Conklin’s nanny.

When I was done teaching, even Kittie, Hiram's oldest (and married) daughter—she was nineteen and had a five-year-old daughter—could hit a man-size target nine times out of ten from two hundred yards. Before I started teaching her, she couldn't hit the broad side of a barn ... from inside it.

* * *

Caleb's Lakota wife was awfully easy to look upon—there just was NO doubt about that! Full of life and merriment, she was. Ehawee was young, maybe eighteen or so (she really didn't know), and raised by missionaries back in Virginia after her village had been destroyed before the Civil War. Her black eyes were always dancing and she wore a saucy grin on her lips from dawn to early dusk.

About the time we got out of sight from any of the settlements back in Nebraska, Ehawee went to wearing homespun cotton shirts and doeskin skirts that weren't nowhere near as long as what women considered necessary back in Tennessee ... or anywhere else back east for that matter. To the delight of all the men on the train, them skirts got a LOT shorter when Ehawee straddled the back of her mare, an' she didn't pay no never mind to us boys and men ogling her. She just didn't care ... and neither did her husband Caleb. He caught us watching her sometimes, but he just grinned and sometimes, when he was feeling his oats, he’d tell us those thighs were just as purty all the way up ... and then he'd walk away, laughing at us.

There was ONCE that Caleb was forced to notice how much of her smooth, light caramel skin she was showing off when she mounted her mare right in front of him and all of the rest of us an’ the doeskin skirt rose high enough to show everyone what a creamy arse the woman had to go with them legs.

"See here ... you think you 'bout showed ever one here how big that butt of yorse is?" he asked challengingly. He reached out and smacked his wife's arse ... though it was covered again by deerskin by that point—jes' barely—an' it wasn't that big neither. It actually looked just fine to me ... really fine.

Well, Ehawee whirled her horse around and reached out to return the favor, but Caleb had already thumped his heels into his horse's flanks, encouraging the horse to carry him out of range. He didn't stop but raced all through the camp, yelling "Help me boys!! Help me! Don' let 'er git me!!"

Ehawee come running her mare right behind 'im with a determined look on 'er face.

Pa watched briefly, then stood up on the wagon seat.

"SLOW DOWN YOU DERN IDJIT!!" he yelled at Caleb. "YOU SEE THE LEGS ON THAT WOMAN? LET 'ER CATCH UP, FER GOD'S SAKE!!"

Caleb, Ehawee, and the whole wagon train broke up laughing ... and the moment passed. That was just a little sign of how much we had changed in our journey. Jokes like that would have been frowned on back up in the hills where we came from. Out here, they was just fine … nuthin' but good-natured funnin'.

Thereafter, Ehawee seemed to care even less about modesty, and us boys ... and the menfolk too ... didn't bother hiding our appreciation of her exposing her smooth, creamy-tanned thigh and calves. The womenfolk took notice ... an' more than one female, youthful or mature, carried a thoughtful expression on her face, instead of disapproval.

Gradually, the hems of skirts began to be taken up and more young female flesh was to be seen in the wagon circle in the evening. It was a real happy wagon train.

* * *

I REALLY liked the awning I was sitting under. I was moved to look up and just smile at it, I was so pleased. It weren't nothing but a long sheet of oiled canvas a little wider than our wagons were long, stretched from the top of the two end bows of all our wagons and with the other side of the canvas held up by two tent poles stuck out in the prairie a ways. The tent poles could even be steadied with some ropes tied to stakes if necessary, like during the heavy rains a few days ago.

But that simple arrangement did a ton a’ good for being so simple. It had been Mr. Conklin’s contribution—said he got the idea from some picture of an Egyptian princess being shaded from the desert sun by an awning made of cotton. I dunno ... never saw that picture myself, an' I sure didn't know any Egyptian princesses ... but our awnings were danged useful in the hot sun, 'cause there was a real shortage of trees out here. They kept the rain off us too, like when it came down in buckets last week.

Grace and me and Daniel Conklin, and three or four others were passing the time under my wonderful stretch a’ canvas, watching out over the almost-steaming prairie and wondering if we'd be moving on tomorrow or not. Pa was still waiting for the prairie land to dry out a little more from the horrible rains we'd had and there wasn't really that much for a body to be doin' right now.

Folks drifted away as time passed—one of the boys had to go relieve another one watching the herd, and others found something or other to do. Finally, it was just me and Grace and Dan laying propped up on cots Pa had bought. He'd become familiar with cots, back when he slept on one as a brigade commander in the War. The things had one end on a hinge and that part a' the cot could be braced up so a person was just leanin' back at 'bout forty-five degrees, 'stead a' layin' flat.

We was talking back and forth—then, all of a sudden, Dan got up and looked all around, includin' inside of the wagon before and the one after us to see if anyone was in there. Then he came back to sit with Grace an' me. Only, instead of laying back down on his cot to rest, Dan sat there, just a’ watching Grace an’ me on our cots.

"You two a’ courting?" he finally demanded, cutting Grace off from something she was gonna say about how wet everything still was. I could tell Dan was fretting about something. He an' I was the same age, give or take, and he wasn't any good at hiding a bad case of the nerves. His hands were working in his lap, twisting around one another like snakes in a den.

"How come you ask that?" Grace asked, just as calm as could be. You'd a’ thought she was fourteen and he was the twelve-year-old … actually like she was twenty-four and he was twelve, she was so composed.

"I saw you sneak into her wagon night before last," he said, looking right at me. "And if you two ain’t sparking, I want...."

Well ... he couldn't say it ... but it was clear he wanted what I was gettin’ and he looked like he was gonna be stubborn about it. He and I had 'shared' Agnes an' her Ma too, back in Tennessee, and it looked like he was includin' himself in here too. I knew that was what he was thinking.

Well ... I just didn't know what to do. It came to me that I might should be a little sore about what he was saying. I was getting ready to be all pissed off ... should he get just the least little bit more aggravating. I glared at Dan something fierce, but he ignored it.

Grace wasn't that surprised. Heck, she may have been thinkin’ about something like this since she tumbled down that buffalo hollow. Or before ... who knows?

"We don't just do it in the wagon," she said thoughtfully, a’ looking at him with those big, soft, innocent brown eyes of hers. You'd of thought she was talking about the clouds up above 'er head or something like that. "We do it whenever we can, riding out on the prairie ... or when Jeremiah works night herd too, you know...."

Well, my friend Daniel didn't have anything to say for a bit. His eyes were as big as saucers and all he could do was stare at the young girl.

"No," Grace said with a superior air, "you didn't know that, did you," she remarked, grinning. "You think you want to do naughty things with me, Daniel?" she asked, leaning closer and dropping her voice into a low purr.

Dan nodded dumbly, swallowing hard.

"Well ... it just wouldn't be fair," Grace said, cocking her head to one side. "Now would it? I mean, Jere has gotten used to putting his big ol' cock in me whenever we can get together ... and you'd take some of that time away from the two a’ us, wouldn't you?" she asked accusingly.

"Ahhhhh.... Well … maybe you can...," she began, and cut herself off. "…no, you'd never do that just so you could be with me…," she said, half to herself.

"I will!" he said fervently. "I will, I promise! Whatever you want me to do!"

"Well," Grace said contemplatively. She tapped a front tooth for a second with a fingernail. "If you want to, you know ... stick your cock in my mouth, or my cunt ... like, maybe day after tomorrow, if we can get away ... I think the only fair thing to do would be to let you do it."

Dan looked like he was figgerin' Christmas had done come early this year.

"...IF you bring some girl with you so Jere won't be alone," she added.

Dan froze in place, unable to think of a thing to say. He really, really wanted what was being offered ... but, boy, it was sure a high price he was going to have to pay..

"But ... but ... I don't have ... I don’t know—" He shut up and just sat there, a’ staring at her.

I had to hide a grin when I saw the vixen was up to her old tricks. Grace's skirt was climbing higher, inch by inch. When she finally swung her legs off her cot and sat on the side facing him, the hem of her dress was way above her knees ... and her knees were spread uncommonly wide. I knew what Dan was seein’ now … and I could see the view had the same effect on him that it had on me.

"You could do it ... if you really wanted to," Grace coaxed. Her knees gaped even wider. "If you really want me to suck on your prick...," she said. "Or put your cock up here...?" She brushed her hand up her thigh a few inches to indicate where Dan might want to put his penis. "I'm sure you can find somebody," Grace cooed, "can't you?"

Dan was almost in a stupor, unable to drag his eyes from Grace's legs. When she spread her knees another inch wider, Dan moaned.

"Jere likes it when I don't wear anything under my dresses," Grace told him. "How 'bout you, Daniel Conklin? Do you like me all nekkid under my dress?" she murmured saucily, smiling a bawdy little grin.

Dan nodded. He lept to his feet. "I'll find someone," he vowed and then fled. His pants weren't fitting quite as well as they had been a' fore we started this talk, and he was in a rush to get somewhere to fix them ... or something.

I grinned at Grace. "You got him all in a fever, ya know that?"

She nodded and giggled.

I looked at her directly, catching her eyes with mine. "Now ... you figger you're really ready to do what you said you'd do? What if he comes back with one or t'other of the girls and calls your bluff?"

Grace smiled at me for a long moment, looking at me almost tenderly. "I wasn't bluffin’, darling Jere," she said softly. "Will you be ready? When he brings someone to where we can meet ... whoever it is he brings?"

I thought about it for a moment. "Yeah ... yeah, I surely will, sugar," I assured her with a grin. I was already wondering who in the wagon train my buddy might talk into a such a naughty meeting with me an' Grace.

* * *

It was actually three days later, after we got on the move again, that Grace and I saw a chance to meet up a ways out from the wagon train. We'd struck a river flowing from the west and we were following it, replenishing the barrels of water we carried in each wagon every day with fresh water direct from the stream. We were fishin’ too, to give ourselves a break from antelope, deer, an' the occasional meal of buffalo meat. None a' us had seen a soul for an awful long time—not even a footprint—and we felt we were as safe as we could be.

What Grace and I planned, was for me to ride a ways upstream, saying I was going fishing, and find a nice protected spot. I'd carry a blanket along with me, besides the one normally tied in the slicker behind my saddle so's I could be comfortable while I threw a line in. Grace was going along to go flower picking or something and that's how we'd both get away without anyone noticing we were workin’ together. I seen her whispering in Daniel's ear an' I knew what she was telling him, 'cause his ears got red as all get out.

I didn't go too very far ... but we were hidden pretty well from anyone just wandering about on horseback. Grace rode up after a little while, having made a wide circle out of sight around the circled wagon camp. I lifted her down from the saddle an' she giggled out loud. She kissed me lustily on the lips and threw her arms around my neck, all bubbly an' jest about trembling with suppressed excitement.

"Wonder if he'll make it?" I asked. "What do you think?"

"He wants this really, really bad," she retorted, lifting her dress hem to show me her bare cunt. "He'll find someone!!"

I couldn't help but grin. I would a' busted a gut tryin’ to find someone—anyone—to come along as Grace had demanded, if I was in his place. I didn't know who, just off the top of my head who I'd try to talk into doing what he had to talk a gal in t' doing, but I surely would find someone.

When Dan rode up through the trees, winding and turning this way and that in the saddle to find us, he had someone sitting a horse behind 'im. Curiously, my gut was as tight as any kid on Christmas morning, a’ wondering what I would get. And when I saw, I was more anxious than ever.

Dan had brought his big sister, Esther. Now, Esther was fifteen-years-old, almost sixteen, and she was just cute as a button; a head a' thick, brown hair she kept groomed all the time. She had breasts that made a big mound in her dress; lush, strong haunches; and long legs too—I didn't have a problem with none of that. And she was full of life, popular with everyone too. No problem with that neither.

But ... the girl lived to talk. An' that did worry me some.

The girl's lips didn't stop moving from the time she woke up 'til her head laid down on at night. An' her family said sometimes, not even then. At sight of her, my first thought was that she was sure to tell someone what we four were up to ... by accident if nothing else.

Well, there weren't anything to do about it now. She clearly knew what this was all about, 'cause she jumped off her mare and marched right up to me, grinning like the cat that just ate that pretty bird in the cage. Dan was left all by himself to hobble the horses in a grassy spot nearby.

"Hi, Jere!" was all she said before she got up on her tiptoes to wind her arms around my neck and clamp her lips to mine. When she finally let me come up for air, she cuddled close to me, her hand searching busily in my crotch.

Evidently, Miss Esther Conklin hadn't been wasting all those evenings at the Saturday night dances any more'n her brother Dan or I had. Pro'bly was a wonder I hadn't bumped into her out in the dimness at one or another a' those dances….

She turned to look around at Grace and Dan, who were settin’ in to do pretty much the same thing. Esther looked over to the shade of a big ol' cottonwood where Grace and me had spread out a couple a’ blankets. "Which one's ours?" she asked brightly. "Unbutton me," she ordered without waiting for an answer, turning her back.

I did, and Esther shucked herself out of that dress, kicked off her moccasins—most everyone had taken to wearing 'em these days—and stretched her dress out on a convenient patch a' prairie grass. She wasn't wearing a danged thing under her long dress, which I was beginning to think was normal ... at least for the girls on the Richardson wagon train.

I got my shirt and pants off in nothing flat. An' I just had a moment to be grateful I wasn't a’ wearing any long johns neither. Didn't need 'em for warmth since the season was so balmy, and they just got in the way when I was with Grace ... an' they would have been in the way when I was with for Dan's sister, Esther, too.

Well sir, there wasn't any need to get young Esther ready for me to enter her neither. She'd come here ready ... and she'd apparently been ready for a while, the way she was acting. Before I knew it, she was pulling me down atop her on the blanket Dan an’ Grace wasn’t using and my cock just naturally found her love sheath and drove deep inside of her like a hot knife plunging through soft butter.

Esther groaned, she craned her neck, pushing her chin up at the sky, and just hauled me in deeper. Her arms were around my shoulders, clutching at me, and she got her heels a’ hind my butt and was using her legs to bring me down into her. "Oh, God," she wailed, "fuck me Jere ... fuck me hard, honey ... fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!!"

And brother, did I ever! The girl just plain inspired me, you might say. In a couple of minutes I had my knees up against her butt and I was half-raised up, bracing my hands on the ground beside her shoulders and I was slamming my cock up her cunt with gusto, I'm here t' tell ya. We was a’ grunting and groaning—we was makin’ a fearsome racket, what with Esther talking me through the whole thing, step by step like I didn't know a lick about what we was doin'. I told ya she was a talker!

After a few minutes of me slamming my tool deep in her snatch, Esther howled her way through a series of hard little orgasms that hit her like someone was punching her in the tummy ... and then her vagina just clamped down on me like she was milking me for my spending. Well, she got every bit of pearl-gray come that I had in me before she went all limp and just lay there, moaning for a bit.

Some time later, Esther was laying full length on top of me, with my prick still in her sheath, resting from the THIRD time we'd done it. She couldn't stop smiling and wriggling her hips around, and moving her tits around on my chest, just to be naughty. She was taking incredible joy in her new found freedom to just be a plain ol' wanton an' lewd ... according to the way folks was taught up in the hills back East.

"I just KNEW your ... cock would feel soooo right inside me," Esther told me. "I feel ... so ... danged good!!"

I shot a quick glance at Grace, who had her chin propped up on Dan's chest from his left side while she was fondling his cock in her left hand. She was watchin’ me and Esther like a hawk watches a pair of rabbits scampering around.

There was a wicked little look in Grace's eyes. She was planning something ... I just knew she was. I thought maybe I knew what it was too. Maybe I was getting to be as naughty as she was ... or maybe I was just gettin’ to know her so well, I could figger out what she was thinking.

Dan wasn't near so intent on watching me with his sis. In fact, you could say he was doing what he could to ignore his big sister and her nakedness. Esther was glorying in her new-found freedom but Daniel was trying not to notice just how much she was enjoying it.

Now, Dan didn't have similar problems looking at Grace and poking his thing deep inside her. I'd vaguely heard him groaning and moaning while he was fucking her. It was just that he was having a mite of trouble dealing with the fact that his big sister was enjoyin’ what I was doing to her, even though he was doin’ the same thing to Grace. I ain’t sure what he’d thought things were goin’ to be like when he talked Esther into comin’ out here....

Looking Grace in the eyes, I motioned with my chin at the girl laying on me, and then I pushed my chin out in Dan's direction. He was turned away so he didn't see, and Esther was too involved in feeling a cock slide around inside her twat lips to notice.

Grace nodded and grinned broadly. Told ya I was learning how she thought!

"Hey, let's wash off, OK?" Grace suggested, rising quickly off Dan, leaving him ... unprotected, you might say. Now he could be seen, and he had to see. Seeing meant he had to notice his nekkid, horny, big sister prancing around in her birthday suit.

We all trotted over to the stream and, for a while, we splashed water from the stream up on one another, then we laid down in the water for a while. Us guys rinsed our johnsons off and the girls cupped cool water in their palms and washed themselves with soap we brought from the wagons.

"You know," Esther observed, looking at the slow moving water, "all this is gonna go downriver, right to where the wagons are, right?"

Grace shrugged. "The water'll just taste a little sweeter for them, that's all," she said, smiling and wrinkling her nose at Esther. She giggled. "Ain’t I just the nastiest girl you ever did know?"

We all nodded solemnly. I, at least, was smiling and enjoying what I was sure Grace was orchestrating. We all played around in the water for a while, and then I gave Grace a nod an' a wink that Dan and Esther didn't see.

Grace walked deliberately over to the bank and climbed out to stand on the bank. She turned, her hands on her naked hips and lewdly exposed herself to our gaze in a way I was suddenly sure no one else in the world could do, excepting maybe those French girls in those daguerreotypes I'd seen in Pa’s boxes. I licked my lips at the memory.

Grace grinned naughtily at us. "Let's do it again," she called out to us.

Esther grinned and was getting out of the water before the last word left Grace's mouth. Me and Dan weren't too far behind neither. The problem for Dan was that Grace intercepted me ... and held her lips up for one of the steamy kisses we'd been practicing for the last few weeks. Hunching over just a mite, she cupped my balls in her right hand grabbed my cock in her left, pumping it and making the effects of the cold water disappear that much quicker.

After a moment, Grace broke the kiss and looked at Dan and his sister standing there awkwardly. She beamed, pretending not to see the discomfiture in their faces. "OK with you if we switch off, Esther, honey?" she asked innocently.

Well, whatever Esther thought about the idea of switching partners, it wasn’t OK with Dan. The look on his face said he was gonna go just so far and no further, and no one was gonna make him, neither. Grace let me go and walked up to Esther, taking Esther's hands in hers. She led the naked girl over to her brother, setting Esther so the brother and sister were chest to chest, so to speak. The closer Esther got, the more dubious she appeared to get.

"See Daniel's prick?" Grace asked softly. Esther's eyes involuntarily dropped, but they came back up instantly. Grace moved around so she was behind Dan and she motioned with her chin for me to get behind Esther and I did, grabbing a couple handfuls of round, firm buttocks.

"Dan has a prick just like Jere's," Grace breathed, reaching around Dan's body and grasping his penis right at the root. She waved it around like it was a lure, makin' it flop around like a live thing for a bit. Esther glanced down once more, and this time she gave herself a longer look. She licked her lips and swallowed hard.

I was busy stroking Esther's smooth back, rubbing my re-hardened cock up between her butt cheeks and doing it all nice and slow and gentle like. That weren't no chore either, let me tell you. I'd always thought Esther was a mite plump but I’d been wrong. A body had a tendency to look in her laughing eyes and listen to her happy babble instead of looking at her like she really deserved.

Her breasts were a lot bigger than Grace's, but she then, she was older ... stands to reason they would be. They filled my hands like big apples off farmer Henderson's trees back home, and Esther's tits were even more sensitive than Grace's. When I lightly pinched her nipples, Esther commenced sighing and wriggling her hips around and around. Her buttocks were more fleshy than Grace's, firm and rounded, and they just begged to be kneaded in a man's hands. With me stroking an' kneading and makin' a lot a' skin-to-skin contact, Esther was beginnin' to lose control of herself.

"Touch it, honey," Grace urged a no-longer quite so resistant Esther.

Esther took ahold of her brother's cock cautiously with her right hand, but she soon had her fingers wrapped completely around Dan's shaft. The purple knob of Dan’s penis was in the heel of her hand an' she held it like she would a tool of some kind, but she didn't do anything else for a while.

"I think our men folk deserve us taking them in our mouths, don't you?" Grace asked, slipping around Dan's body. Dan didn't look nearly as set against doing something with his sis as he had been a minute ago. I reckoned it was 'cause his hard-on was doing most of the thinking for him now.

I backed away from Esther's lovely body and turned to meet Grace's advance. She dropped down on her knees on the grassy creek bank and took me in her mouth like she'd been born to it. In seconds, my hard prick was harder and thicker.

Grace looked around at Esther. "Bet I can make this one harder than yours," she said, giggling wickedly. She threw back her head and laughed at the sky. "I just love being naughty," she told the world. She looked Esther dead in the eye, daring Esther to enjoy herself as much as Grace was.

Well, that was the tipping point, you might say. Esther had been going on about how wonderful it was to be free to be naughty, out by a stream all nekkid and fucking and all. And now she was being challenged. The question Grace was askin’ was whether Esther really meant what she’d been saying. Like a poker game—put up or shut up, right?

Well, sir, that sure enough did the trick. Esther sank down on her knees, still holding her brother's cock in her hand. She threw a look up at his disbelieving face, and then bent over his cock. Opening her jaws wide, she let her brother's prick slide deep into her mouth. She choked a bit, let him slide out from between her pretty lips, then sucked him back in and began bobbing her head up and down. With every bob, she took more of her brother's rod into her mouth, and did it easier each time too.

She wasn't very expert at it, but Dan couldn't have cared less. In a matter of seconds, all his doubts and reticence about doing it with his own sister dissolved completely. His fingers were twined in Esther's brunette hair, urging greater depth and faster strokes. His eyes were closed and he was moaning at the sheer pleasure his sister was giving him.

"Now it's our turn, Esther," Grace announced, pulling her lips off my penis so abruptly, I grunted. The comparative coolness of the open air was startling. But I knew this was part of the schooling she was giving the two siblings, so I didn't complain.

Grace dropped her butt to the ground and rolled backwards, letting the thick grass cushion her fall. She spread her thighs as she went down. The minx was smiling up at me expectantly, waiting for me to come down and tongue her sweet little slit.

Esther looked shocked as she watched me fall to my knees, and then sprawl full length with my face in Grace's groin. I kissed Grace's pretty slit from top to bottom and then lapped it up and down for a long moment.

When Grace gave out a husky moan, Esther was convinced. She was on her back in seconds, her hands clamped on Dan's wrists and pulling him down atop her.

"It's easy," I explained to Dan. "Just like in that there ... daguerreotype ... picture thing 'member?"

He nodded, his face brightening. He began lapping his sister up and down like a thirsty dog. Dan looked up at his sister's face ever so often, as if not quite believing it was her he was a’ doin’ this to. For her part, Esther propped herself up on her elbows looking intently down the length of her body at his shiny face, his chin covered with her juices. They groaned in unison, startling themselves ... and then they laughed delightedly ... enjoying the completely wicked thing they were doing. The crisis was past.

"SWITCH!" Grace called out merrily.

It took me a minute, but I scrambled up when it dawned on me what she was doing and Dan was only a little behind me. I dropped down to Esther's cunt and began stabbing my tongue between her hot inner lips. Then I tongued the spike of her clitty, sucking at it and nibbling at it with my lips. Esther's senses were under assault from feelings she'd never experienced before and she fair whimpered as I licked her slit from top to bottom.

"SWITCH!" Grace yelled again.

I had to look to see what she meant this time. I was prepared to be a mite disappointed 'cause I was really getting into a fine rhythm, making Esther's hips buck up into my mouth with the intensity of her pleasure.

I saw Grace rolling up and settling back on her haunches to take Dan's cock in her mouth. And Esther was coming up fast to do me. I was fine with that.

Another few minutes passed this way, and both Dan and me were soon groaning and moaning ... our bodies giving little jerks as a tongue touched a particular spot....

"SWITCH!!" Grace bawled breathlessly, turning her back on Dan and going down on all fours. She wriggled her whole body at Dan, her hips wiggling hypnotically from side to side, so anxious was she to get Dan's cock inside her.

"I LOVE to fuck this way," she told Esther, panting. "You will too," she promised.

Esther got down on her hands and knees instantly, using Grace as her model. Impulsively, Esther crawled closer to Grace—with me following close behind, you might say—and kissed the twelve-year-old seductress on the lips. Grace was surprised, but in a moment she was returning kiss for kiss and enjoying the extra little bit of nasty pleasure.

Well ... I was determined to do my best and make Grace's promise come true. I knelt behind Esther and fisted my cock, rubbed the head around a little bit on her cunt lips and then pushed it home. In no time at all, she was humping back at me just as hard as I was thrusting in and it didn't take any time at all before all four of us were bucking and shuddering our way through another orgasm. Only a few moments later, I was behind Grace and Dan was enthusiastically taking his sister. He didn't show even a moment's hesitation this time.

* * *

"I sure am glad we started doing like Ehawee said the Lakota do ... taking baths every day," Grace commented as we cleaned ourselves up. It was time to head back to the wagon train.

"I liked the getting dirty part myself," Dan commented, chuckling. He was doing good, coming right out of his shyness about fucking his sister. He was looking at her body with a certain amount of calculation now, clearly wondering what he and she were gonna do next ... and when.

"Well, that too," Grace replied. "But it's so nice for us to be ... ahhhh ... fresh and clean for each other, don't you think so?" she asked.

I had to agree. There was a time or two with Agnes that I'd been right glad she was wearing a dress and a couple of petticoats and I made the coupling as fast as I could manage so I wouldn't have to officially notice....

"I like it!" I said with conviction. "Makes things a lot more fun." I was struck by an idea. "Actually, cleaning up is fun too ... would be even finer iffen the water was warmer," I offered.

There was a murmur of general agreement.

Grace went down on her butt to put on her moccasins and paused in a most unladylike position, what with her pussy lips on full display, but it was a view I personally liked a lot.

"What did you mean ... when you was talking to Daniel back then ... what did you mean when you said 'daagerotype' ... what's a daagerotype?" she asked curiously.

"Daguerreotype," I said, tryin' to pronounce it more correctly for her. "It's like a tintype picture ... only it's really heavy glass, and they're kinda old. My Pa has a few a’ them from France ... and some tintypes too. They show folks ... ahhhh ... well, doing what we just got done doing," I told the surprise girls.

"Pictures of folks ... fucking???" Grace said in a strangled voice. "REAL pictures!! REAL ones??"

I nodded and a strange look came over her face. I'd already seen her fondness for showing off her body, and the thought of her body being seen by many unknown men by way of a tintype was making the juices flow inside her more strongly than ever.

She licked her lips, then saw me smiling at her, and she flushed slightly, aware I knew what she was thinking.

"Uh huh," Dan continued where I left off. "Men poking their pricks into women's cunts and into their mouths and licking their cunts. And some women licking other women's cunts too," he added musingly.

The girls were astounded all over again.

"What?" Esther asked in a shocked voice. "You mean girls licking another girl's private parts?"

Dan nodded. "Looked ... ahhhhh ... interesting," he told her, with maybe just a little leer.

The girls looked at each other, Grace with a knowing smile and Esther with an uncertain expression on her face. Esther's dubious look faded after a minute or two. After all, she'd just had sex with her brother so ... why not? She grinned back at Grace and made a kissy face at her.

Dan threw a fleeting glance at me and grinned. We both knew these two were going to experiment with some girl-on-girl stuff, and probably do it pretty soon, too.

"Anyway," Dan continued, "it made me and Jeremiah hard just looking at those kinda tintypes," he said, grinning like a wolf.

Now ... Dan and me turned fourteen years old earlier that year, afore Spring had sprung actually. Him saying we got hard wasn’t no great shucks. Heck, we got hard if we got downwind of a girl, even if she was all trussed up in a long dress and six layers of petticoats, for Pete's sake.

What he was up to, was sealing the deal! If either girl had any doubts about doing something with each other, they'd do it to make us boys' penises harder to fuck them the better. They glanced at each other and turned back to Dan and me with resolute expressions. Dan had made his point with the girls.

I never knew before how sensual a promise a smile could convey, and I couldn't keep from beaming right back at them. I didn't know how or when we'd get together again, but it promised to be a humdinger of a party when we did! And then something else occurred to me.

"Your sister knows Pa has them, Grace," I said with what you might call a studied thoughtfulness. "Kinda surprised she never mentioned them to you."

Grace gaped at me. "My sister knows your pap has dirty, naughty, tintypes and such?" she asked in a strangled voice.

"Well ... he's kinda your pap too ... stepdad, and all ... well… sorta."

She gave me a distracted look. "You never told me that," she said accusingly. I knew she meant about the stuff we’d found in the wooden box.

"Forgot all about it, what with your pretty little cunt and everything," I told her. I was doing real good. Saying that kinda deflected her away from what could have become an ugly temper tantrum.

She nodded. "My sister ... ungh ungh UNNNGGHHHH!!" she said, half to herself. She was furious with her older sister. She looked up at Dan and me. Her eyes narrowed. "What else?" she demanded, divining something in one of our expressions.

I wet my lips. I didn't know how this would go over. "Well ... your sis kind a’ ... showed us she shaves her cunt smooth ... like yours," I said.

"She showed YOU?" Grace squealed. She couldn't believe it. A thought occurred to her. "When?" she demanded.

"Before we left Tennessee," I assured her. "It was just to show us a real girl shaved themselves smooth like some of the girls in the tintypes."

Grace sat there, thinking. "Well ... I knew she shaved her cunt lips," she mused. "I help her do that sometimes," she continued, "but I sure didn't know she would show you!"

"How come you didn't do my sister when she showed you her cunt?" Grace demanded suddenly.

" 'Cause she's my step mom," I answered quickly. Actually, I hadn't even thought about having relations with Chastity at the time. I had thought about it since then, but there'd never been even the slightest hint she’d let me do anything like what Grace was suggesting....

"So … I'm your step sister," she shot back. Actually, she was my aunt by marriage ... but pointing that out wasn't going to get me anywhere.

"Different," I said quickly. I had actually thought this thing through on one of those nights laying beside Grace when she was being quiet for a spell. "She's Pa’s wife ... it's like she's decided not to ... go further than a certain point, an' it just wouldn't be right for me to even try."

She considered that for a moment. "But you'd do her if it was OK with her ... and OK with your Pa, wouldn't you!" she asked in an accusing tone.

"I should smile!" I said, adopting one of Caleb's old-time mountain man phrases.

Grace glowered a bit. She cocked her head to one side. "You'd do Ehawee too, wouldn't you?" This time it was an accusation.

"I should—" I stopped before I got myself in too deep. "Well … yeah, danged right I would, if Caleb didn't mind," I said. My mouth watered, just thinking of the erotic way 'Laughing Maiden' walked, all lithe and saucy and sensuous lookin' an' all. Her hips were always a’ swingin' and her tits were bouncing an'....

Dan chimed in with hearty agreement. His eyes were kinda unfocused … prob'ly same as mine….

Grace really didn't like that much. She'd been fine with doing Dan. She hadn’t minded including him in the going's on that she and I were doing purty regular these days ... and she hadn't had a problem with Esther joining in at the same time.

But her scheming had been one-sided, thinking about how she would get more men sniffing after her. She hadn't considered she might have competition for my … and now Dan’s … attentions. She thought it would all be on her terms and it was a bit of a shock to find out it weren't so.

"You help your sister shave her cunt?" Esther interjected, seeing her chance to move the conversation back to an earlier topic. "Dang ... now that sure would make it easier ... to do it to each other ... wouldn't it?" she said, contemplating how it would go. "Maybe we should bring a razor with us next time?" she suggested with a half-smile and a faraway expression.

"You know what else you could bring along?" I asked. I was all for changing the subject while Grace got used to the new ideas I'd brought into our relationship ... or relationships, plural … now that there were four of us.

Esther looked at me expectantly.

"You girls can bring whatever ... ahhhh ... dildoes and such that you have," I suggested.

"You know about them?" Esther said, a little shocked.

"I showed him one of mine," Grace said, smiling mischievously. She was happy again, back bein' the center of attention.

"You know what would make a fine tintype picture," I put in, my mind filled with a sudden image. "You two putting dildoes up your cunts, a’ layin’ side by side and smilin’ to beat the band...." I stopped to consider the beauty of the scene I had proposed.

"Mmmmmm. How do we get one of these camera things?" Grace demanded.

'That a girl!' I thought to myself.

Our horny, happy Grace was back to normal.

CHAPTER FIVE

The next evening, I was leaning back atop my cot with my stockinged feet gettin’ some air and enjoying jus’ plain enjoyin’ my last few minutes of rest before relieving the afternoon herd guard. My horse, Hinto, was grazing just outside the wagon circle, no more'n a couple yards away, already saddled and getting a mite restless. In fact, all the animals were acting skittish-like tonight. Caleb and Pa thought a stray wolf, coyote, or maybe 'twas a big rattler movin' around out there somewhere. The crews on night herd duty tonight were going to be doubled tonight.

Anyways, I was setting there, watching folks walking and bustling around, kids playing and womenfolk getting supper done. I don't know if the sex I'd been getting from young Grace, and now Esther, was affecting me, but I seemed to be just now noticing things about the womenfolk that I'd not taken notice of before.

Take Helen Conklin, my friend Dan's step-mom. Dan’s step-mom was a mite younger than Mr. Conklin. Most wives were back in that time. As I lounged there, Helen come from behind one a’ the wagons and started sauntering ‘cross the inner circle of the wagons.

It came to me that I'd never taken the time to notice how graceful and supple she was as she walked. Like now, for instance, she was almost ... gliding ... across the circle of wagons from one of the supply wagons back to one of the cook fires. Her head up, back straight, she was smiling at everyone and takin’ the time to bend over and speak to her little daughter Sally, and just striding along like she was part of the prairie and knew every bump and low place in it, instead of stumbling and tripping on things all the way across … like I was wont to do, as a matter of fact.

Real elegant, Mrs. Conklin was, in a white blouse and dark blue skirt. And man, she sure filled out that blouse. I could see plainly she wasn't wearing no corset underneath, neither. Her full breasts were swinging free an’ they were just a’ swaying and bouncing around happily with each step she took. Not that she needed a corset, you understand—her tits were perched high and proud on her chest, a mouth watering sight, I'm here to tell ya.

It come to me that my best friend Dan was an awful lucky young man, having a step-mom like Helen. AND … if that wasn’t enough … Daniel had six awful cute sisters too, counting his stepsister, Sally, who was Helen's by her first husband, Cyrus. (He'd died at the battle of Chickamauga back durin’ the war.)

Dan had had sex just yesterday with one of his sisters, Esther, for the first time ... but he had five more sisters to go. Now, understand—that five included Kittie, who was married and had two kids of her own, but she was still his sis. The important thing in Dan's world was that he had found out, just yesterday, that sisters could be a whole lot of fun. The thought made something stir in my guts and I couldn't help but smile.

Over yonder … there come young 'Aunt Maye', walking behind Helen with three-year-old Martha, (Helen and Hiram Conklin's little girl together) in tow. Maye was a puzzle to me, an' just about ever one else too.

The woman was somethin' else. I figgered she was a good six-foot and more. She acted kinda tetched in the head, but if you caught her unawares, her blue eyes were just as clear as anyone's, and Helen sure trusted Maye with her baby girl. Now, what mother would do that if Maye really was unbalanced?

Thing 'bout Maye was she always wore a loose-fitting, formless, blouse over a dark skirt—with what undergarments, I didn't know. Her hair was always a mess and she gave off an air of sloppiness. But I was fascinated with her.

She was a fantastic shot. I was the only one in camp who was better than she was at shooting at a distance, so I knew it required discipline as well as native skill to be a good shooter. And all that just didn't fit the disheveled, uncoordinated individual Maye showed the world. Personally, I thought it was an act … but I didn't know why she'd be doin' that.

I studied her for a moment. Big an' tall she might be, but there was no clumsiness to go along with her sloppy appearance, and ... I let my eyes go unfocused for a minute. Judging by her face, her hands an' arms, Missy Maye was just not carrying any excess weight on her body. I'd noticed before how a person is either real chubby all over, includin' the face and fingers, or they're not. Ever onct in a while, you see a girl with a little baby fat about the face, giving it a rounded look, but with a body that was slender as all get out.

But Maye wasn't like that. I was pretty sure I'd never seen a girl with high cheekbones and firm chin like hers have a fat body under her dress. No sir, ever'thing about Maye tol' me her body looked to be in proportion to her facial features beneath those baggy clothes—slim and graceful. I wondered—not for the first time, neither—what Maye actually looked like beneath that shapeless bodice and overly full skirt. Did the mannish boots she always wore hide some trim ankles like the ones the other girls in camp were ever more willing to display? From her face, sometimes nearly hidden behind unkempt hair, she couldn't be more than eighteen or nineteen. A very interesting woman....

"You ready to eat, Big Guy?" Melinda Lafferty called to me from over by the cook fire. Her cheerful voice brought me out of my wool gathering and galvanized me into action, 'cause a lot a’ the reason I hadn't gone out to the herd yet was that I was a hungry, growin' boy who needed his supper… and maybe another meal later on, sometime around midnight or so.

"I'm a’ coming!" I yelled, getting to my feet and walking quick to get my plate—loaded with some elk steak and beans before someone beat me to it. The first shift of night herders was supposed to be fed first anyway, but some of the other growing boys around the camp might just grab my dinner before I could get to it if they had half a chance, an' they'd run off with it, laughin' at me for bein' too durn slow to claim it as mine. In fact, Melinda was having to shield the tin plate piled high with grub meant for me with her arms and body, making sure Dan Conklin didn’t grab it away from her.

I grinned into Melinda’s flirting eyes and thanked her for holding to the plate for me and she grabbed me on the forearm with right hand and even stroked my arm a bit. Then she squeezed my biceps with her other hand while she assured me when she had something for me, by golly it was just for me.

Now ... that wasn't normal, not even for Melinda. Sure, the woman flirted dang near all the time, but I never took it serious before, and I don't think none of the other fellers did neither, 'cause she always flirted a bit and the next minute she was cozying up to her husband. But here she was upping the ante some… and I surely didn’t know what that meant.

I went back to my cot and watched her for a spell while I shoveled antelope meat and beans down my gullet. I washed them down with some lemonade made from juice we hauled in our wagons all the way from Tennessee and fresh water from the crick nearby. Pa had learned from his time at sea that lemon squeezings or oranges helped keep a body from developing scurvy and such, so he bought up a bunch from a Florida trader afore we set out. It tasted mighty good, a nice change from plain water or coffee, whether it helped keep a body healthy or not. Maybe it did help, though—none a' us had that scurvy disease.

I didn't know much about Melinda, 'cept she was just cute as a button, as anyone could plainly see. I knew she had a eighteen-month old baby girl who was the darling of the whole camp 'cause the child would flash a huge grin at anyone and everyone if she caught you looking in her direction—she loved attention. Melinda herself weren't but about sixteen her own self.

She and her husband, Edmond, had come into the our Tennessee hill country a couple of years ago, aboard an old wagon held together with baling wire and nightly prayers. Edmond had apprenticed under his pap in the carpentry skills afore he left home, an' that was a skill my Pa never could get the hang of.

Pa set Edmond to making all kinds of furniture, an’ shelves an most everything else Pa had needed for his newly bought store. When Edmond finished with the store, there was the livery stable to make presentable, when Pa got hold of that, an' then there were more projects like that. There just never seemed to be an end of things Edmond could be set to work on. When Pa learnt Melinda was as sociable as any female he'd ever known, he set Melinda up as a waitress in a little restaurant he was a part owner in, an' the cute young girl started bringing in business hand over fist—and she could cook too ... she could cook danged good!

When we started talking about coming West, Pa just naturally included Edmond and his wife, Melinda, if they wanted to come along. Pa figgered the two of them had skills that were valuable to the folks in the wagon train and to folks we’d meet out here in the West. Pa set store by Edmond and Melinda an’ they returned it in kind. Heck, in some ways, the couple acted like Pa was both a' them's father, they were that close to him.

Anyhow, Melinda was awful cute, bubbly, always smiling ... and saucy as all get out. But tonight was the first time I recollected she ever looked up at me from under them dark lashes, like she done a bit ago, and then reached out to touch me, skin to skin like. Every so often, as I ate, I could see she was glancing over at me an' smilin' a secret little smile right at me—first time for that too. Made me feel kinda unsettled way down in my guts.

I looked around, wondering where her husband was, and danged if he wasn't setting on a little boulder over by Helen Conklin ... and they was having a real good conversation, judging by all the leaning toward each other ... all natural like ... and then back again. I shot a peek back at Melinda and I caught her actually smiling at Helen and her husband. I didn't have any idea what to think of that. I'd seen some Tennessee women get purty irate at their men for doing a lot less than that, back up in the hills afore we left to come out here.

Well, as I sat there, something was coming to my mind, but it wasn't quite all there yet. Seemed to me, like I said afore, it was like we were all a mite closer than folks usually were because we were well and truly beyond any the reach of any kind of civilization and its ever'day conventions. If I sat down and toted them up, it was clear that lots a' the rules and customs we'd followed back home were falling by the wayside out here.

Now … Nebraska had only been a real state for a couple of years. But even if it was a state that stretched near all the way to the foothills of the Rockies, most everyone lived over by the Missouri river. Out where we were, there weren't nothing but wilderness—thousands and thousands of square miles of a great, big empty. Was that what was causing…?

I was working my way through these ideas ... wondering if the solitude wasn't pushing us to make up our own conventions to live by ... and also, ya know, maybe some of our new rules wouldn't set to well with folks back East. They seemed to be just fine with all a' us, though. I didn't see anyone complainin' at all.

Fact is, we all seemed to be getting' more comfortable with each other and more given to more personal, almost intimate, relationships. Tonight, Melinda stroked my forearm and squeezed my upper arm just a little too ... familiarly—an' just a mite too long also. She done it deliberate too.

And it seemed to me, her husband didn't mind—he was doin' about the same thing over yonder with Helen Conklin. Melinda—I seen her—she noticed what they were doin', and didn't bat an eye … actually grinned when she saw how close they was. Didn't bother none at all.

I didn't want to forget that delicious young Indian girl, Ehawee who liked showing us guys her lovely thighs. And there was Grace an' all her doings' ... and now Miss Esther was ready and willin' to do me—an' her brother too! It made a body wonder what all was going on on this wagon train out in the middle of nowhere. Wow!

Everyone began gathering 'round the campfire, moving over towards the knot of designated cooks for tonight, and I saw another thing that made me take notice. Now ... it was normal for really young girls to wear kinda short dresses around, and folks never took no notice. Usually, though, they had wool or cotton legging's on that covered their legs from their shoes, or boots, all the way up to their waists. But I couldn't see hide nor hair of any cloth legging's on any of the young girls around the camp fire tonight. Lots a’ young female flesh on display. Which was real, real nice.

Now, I understood a lot of our clothing was wearing out ... the trip was hard on cloth, and shoe leather too ... but did that really explain why all them young girls was showing a lot more bare leg nowadays? Or was it connected to everything else I was noticing goin' on?

The girls had all put together a bunch a' new skirts an' dresses to wear on the trail, an' I guess if I measured things, their new hemlines weren’t that far above the knee. But anything above the ankle 'twas a thing I knew ol' Pastor Abernathy back to home would’ve strongly disapproved of, and the fine ladies of the congregation would a’ had a fit were they to see what I was lookin' at.

Some of the girls were even wearing tops and skirts, or short dresses, made of buckskin ... like Ehawee wore. In fact, I recollected seein’ her helping out the other womenfolk, showing anyone who asked how to make moccasins and simple clothes like her people had done for … who knows how long? An’, like I said afore, her skirts were always short enough to show off considerable thigh to eager watchers ... like me, for instance. Could it be that the girls were all takin’ their cues from Ehawee and shaving a few inches off their skirts because Ehawee did … and no one seemed to mind when she did it?

And tonight, over there was my friend Daniel's nineteen-year-old—and very married—sister, Kittie, wearing a skirt at least as short as Ehawee's was. Her legs were long and beautifully shaped, her thighs firm and slim, and her ankles delicate as anyone could wish. If anyone had asked, I'd have said Kittie's legs of a right, should be on display … tonight and every night, and all day long, too. Thing is, Kittie never wore a skirt like that back home—her pa prob'ly would a' whupped her somethin' fierce if she'd even thought about such a thing. But here, tonight, out here in our sheltered little wagon train community, Kittie was nonchalantly exposing herself to just anyone who wanted to look her way, even if she was a married woman.

And … Kittie's five-year-old daughter was a’ setting on Kittie's lap with an even shorter skirt on that left the young girl's legs bare purty much all the way from her crotch down to her toes … and no one was showin' any sign of bein' aware of it, much less objecting to the display.... So I had plenty to think of, wondering what all was going on, while riding ol' Hinto out to the herd.

All them distractions ended up costing me plenty, they surely did.

* * *

We wasn't holding the herd all that far off from the wagons, just far enough so we wouldn't be disturbed by their lowin' and moving around at night, so it was only a little time after leaving the wagon circle before I was calling out to Sam Owens that he could go get himself a bite to eat. I rode Hinto around the herd a couple of times, just to get the lay of the land.

We herded all the animals all together ... oxen, milk cows, horses and mules... they were all pretty well trail-broke by now, and usually they weren't much problem. Tonight, though, they was all kind a' restless and I didn't know why ... couldn't find nary a reason.

It come to me that maybe we was about to have our first bit of Injun trouble, so I kept my Winchester in my right hand, with my finger resting on the trigger guard and letting it rest across the saddle horn in front of me.

I was skirting an outcrop of boulders on my third circuit around the herd when I heard a roar—a deep, indignant bellow from a clump of bushes off to my right front. My roan horse jumped like a scared cat to the left without no warning a’ tall. Hinto hadn't been all that calm this evening anyway ... I’d thought he was picking up the mood from the restless herd. Anyhow, he threw me off like I wasn't even clamping my legs around his barrel, tight as I could—he was that sudden.

I managed to get situated and find my feet. I got myself turned around just in time to see a big ol’ black bear a charging at me, coming on quicker'n greased lightning.

Now, black bears are the smaller ones of the bear family ... and they're supposed to be inclined to run t'other way when they feel threatened, even sows with cubs. But Caleb had already warned us that the only certain thing 'bout bears was that nothing was certain. I reckoned this 'un hadn't got the word 'bout black bears running from trouble 'cause he surely … didn't!

By the grace of God, I still had my rifle, and I put it to my shoulder and started firing as fast as I could work the lever. I was hitting him, I knew that—'cause I hit what I aim at. But a black bear weighs in at three-four hundred pounds. I found out later, this one come closer to five hundred pounds than four hundred ... an' even the littler ones can soak up a lot of lead afore it makes a difference.

My last shot caught the animal in the left eye, and when they skinned him out, it was clear that slug kinda rattled around in his skull for a mite and just purely scrambled his brains. But the kill shot come mighty late. It killed 'im, but they had to tell me about it later on, 'cause that sorry danged critter slammed into me with his last breath and knocked me ass over teakettle into the boulders I had been reining my horse around not much earlier.

The lights went out and stayed out for a long while.

* * *

Ol' Hinto threw me, but I had to give 'im credit when I heared about it later. Scared as he was, he come back to me, blowin’ hard and dancin’ around, nervous as all get out with the dead bear being way too close for his comfort. But that horse stood o'er me long enough to guide Pa, my brothers and half the wagon train who came charging out a' camp to where I lay senseless ... with my left arm all doubled up under me and a’ pointing off in a direction it shouldn't a been able to do. To top things off, there was blood just pourin’ out of a scalp wound.

I didn't wake up 'til the next day ... and I was sorry I did that then, 'cause I hurt ALL over. Caleb, having studied in his younger days to be a doctor, hadn't had any trouble getting my shoulder back into its socket, an' he'd sewed up the flap of scalp that was hanging loose over my right ear, but he couldn't do much about the bruises and muscle strains all over the left side of my body.

When I woke, I found myself laying in the bed of a wagon on a remarkably comfortable pallet made up from a slew of finely cured buffalo and deer hides. The coarse buffalo hair was covered with a familiar patchwork quilt, one I'd had on my bed back home, and another one covered me up to the waist.

I didn't want to move an' it turned out not movin' was the best idee I'd had in a month of Sundays.

"HE'S AWAKE!" squealed a voice that was way, way too close to my left ear. I flinched ... and groaned with the sudden pain that lanced through my shoulder and seemed to go all the way down to my toes. Instinctively, I held myself still until the hurtin' backed off a mite. I opened one eye to peer around and there was Evelyn Conklin, Hiram's eight-year-old girl sitting beside me and regarding me with concern.

"Are you gonna be alright?" she demanded loudly.

"I reckon…," I whispered. It hurt just to breathe, but nowhere near as much as it had when I jerked away from Evelyn's shriek.

She looked around at the rear opening at the end of the wagon—she didn’t see anyone coming in response to her call. "HE'S—"

"EVIE ... honey…," I said desperately—my head was pounding something fierce—"go to the tailgate and yell at 'em from there, OK?"

"Sure!" she said abruptly in that sudden way children have of agreeing. She whirled around to go call out the news from there, but she never got the chance. By the time she got there, the horseshoe-shaped bonnet opening over the wagon body was full of smiling faces of well-wishers and there was no reason to yell any more.

Seemed like I had to assure each and every man, woman, and child in camp I was gonna be fine before they would believe it, and I think some came back for a second asking. I'm purty sure my nine-year-old brother, Ellis, came back half a dozen times to make certain sure.

Finally, Ehawee, the 'Laughing Maiden' shooed everyone away, re-tied the bonnet, and dropped the flap so that I ... well, we ... had a little privacy. I was exhausted.

"Are you my nurse?" I asked the young, buxom Lakota woman, in a whisper. It was all I could manage right then. I lay back on the extra thick pile of hides that had been gathered under my upper body.

"I guess!" she answered merrily. "Caleb's showed me a few things to do for those who ‘er ailin’ an I kind a’ take over when he's got hunting and scouting to do," she said.

I was immediately apologetic. "I reckon I'm sorry about all the trouble I'm causing everybody," I said, trying not to wince as I struggled to sit up higher in preparation for getting up.

"Silly boy!" Ehawee scolded. "You killed a bear and got hurt ... you came through it a LOT better than he did," she remarked. "There's a lot of men who haven't lived through that particular experience, sugar," she added. "Would you like a drink?" she asked, changing the subject.

All of a sudden, I was parched. "Yes'm, I surely would," I answered.

She brought over a jug and I thought at first it was some of Pa’s moonshine, but it was just some cold spring water. I drank and drank while Ehawee held it to my lips. I do admit that I took a couple-three swallows after I was really done ... 'cause with Ehawee bent over the side of my pallet like that, the top of the doeskin dress she wore today was fallin’ away from her body ever so nicely. I couldn't actually see her bellybutton, but it was down there somewhere.

When she saw I was looking, Ehawee smiled. "You just go ahead and look," she told me, smiling. She stayed hunched over for a moment longer. "You deserve it for what you did for Grace an' your sister back at the settlement AND for killin' a bar," she added.

I didn't understand why she was bringing up the incident in the little village, but it was fine with me if she thought 'bout things in that way … and would let me look down her top that way.

I nodded, tired beyond anything I'd ever experienced before. I was too exhausted to even be embarrassed about having been caught a-looking.

Maybe it was the fever I was feeling, I don't know. "I really like looking at legs more'n I do tits," I told her, without feeling the slightest need of being polite nor respectable. "Long, shapely legs, creamy smooth all over and nice to the touch," I added dreamily.

Ehawee took that in without even blinking. She smiled down at me, and there was a warmth in her eyes that told me she wasn't taking my words in a bad way. "Well ... maybe you earned seeing some of that too, killing that bear like you did," she whispered. Standing sideways right beside my pallet, she lifted her skirt until I could almost see her pussy, and she held it there for a long moment.

"You should sleep now," she said, and kissed my forehead. "When you wake up, I'll bring you a steak from the bear you killed," she promised.

I nodded and moved my upper body gingerly, snuggling down in between the patchwork quilts. "You have real purty legs, Ehawee," I said just before I slipped back asleep. It seemed to me to be quite important to get that said before surrendering to the need for sleep. I didn't know why, but it did.

* * *

A few days later, I could sit up in reasonable comfort. The ugly black and blue bruises down the left side of my body and the outside of my leg were slowly fading to a nasty and very dark purple-green-yellow mixture that looked worse than it felt ... and even my recently dislocated shoulder was feeling better.

I felt like I could have gotten up from bed and helped out at least a little bit. Work on a wagon train was a never ending thing, even in our circumstances, which were more fortunate than was the plight of most settlers heading West. But Pa and ever one else told me to just stay where I was and concentrate on getting better. My absence meant that ten-year-old Morgan Conklin was promoted from ox driver to guarding the herd —but only in the daylight—an' my ten-year-old sister, Rachel, was given a switch and hoisted up to the back of the left wheel ox and told to pilot my wagon down the trail. Neither could a’ been happier nor prouder.

Rachel, for her part, kept coming into the wagon ever time we stopped for a trail break to see how I was. She made sure to urge me to be careful about doing too much, too soon. It was perfectly clear she liked her new job … and its accompanying higher status … an’ she wanted to keep it as long as she could, so I never even smiled at her serious face an' I always remembered to assure her I was gonna be careful not to rush things.

By now, Ehawee had stopped riding in the wagon with me all day long, but when no one else was around, she’d come visiting an' she didn't seem to mind me touching her thigh on the outside and back, stroking over the well-toned muscles an' marveling at how silky smooth her light caramel colored flesh was.

Me an' Ehawee talked a bunch at first, there being not much else to do while the wagon rolled over the prairie, up increasingly taller hills and down the other side and her keeping her balance wasn't always perfect. A couple of times, though, she just gave up and lay on the pallet on my right side parking her tits against my ribcage and throwing her right leg over mine while we talked. I’m pretty sure Miss Ehawee speeded up the healing process by a bunch—I know I sure felt better after a visit from her.

I was reminded again that this Lakota woman spoke English a whole lot better'n I did. She started correcting me when I was being lazy with the ending of some of my words and stuff like that. I always repeated the correct way to say those words to her, but her trying to teach me likely wasn't gonna take ... and I told her so. Pa was a bear, no pun intended, about education, an’ I could read and write, an’ I could cipher well enough for anything I was likely to ever come upon.

Pa made me go to the school house down in Brooks Hollar for a good six years. Trouble was ... none of it interested me. I could read Shakespeare and the Good Book, and some other books travelers left with us sometimes, but I was a man who liked to work with his hands. Being out hunting and fishing all the time was coming to mean more a lot more than reading was to me.

When I tried to stroke her lovely butt one afternoon, Ehawee slapped my chest playfully and got up, saying I was clearly healing fast and she wasn't needed as a nurse any more. I protested, but she leaned over and kissed my lips, even letting me get an eyeful of two lovely Lakota breasts for a long moment as a parting gift. Then, when she went to straddle the tailgate, she paused to let me appreciate the beauty of her lovely thigh exposed for nearly its whole length—and then she hopped off to the ground and I was left to my own devices. Gettin' well wasn't all it was talked up to be.

I struggled to let down the tailgate myself that evening and hobble down the side with the steps ... after the wagons halted for the night ... and it tired me out so much, I had to rest for a while, layin propped up against a log for the longest time. I stretched my legs out, enjoying the feel of being outside the wagon for the first time in days. Everyone found a moment to come up and shake hands ... every durn woman and girl in camp gave me a nice hug ... and many of my visitors set down and visited with me for a spell to catch me up on all the news.

We were getting into higher terrain now an' the going was a bit slower. Trees and water were gettin’ to be a lot more common than down on the rolling prairie. The practice a' gatherin' buffalo chips for our camp fires was abandoned in favor of the far sweeter burning' wood. Instead of shoving buffalo chips into the canvas sheets under the wagons, they were tossing limbs and branches in there … and there wasn't too much need for that. Increasingly, ever' place we stopped, whether just for a nooning or for the night, there was plenty of wood to be had close by.

Even if we'uns didn't quite know where we were, a wandering trader Caleb Struthers came across one day knew 'xactly where he was, and that helped us a bunch. The trader told Caleb that Fort Laramie, down on the Platte, was a ways off to the south where we camped that night. It was August already and it was high time to figure out where we were going to winter.

Pa and Caleb were working on that. In fact, they'd been pointin' us a little bit more north of due west for a while now.

We all learned we was heading for a hidden valley Pa and Caleb knew from their trapping days. They said it wasn't all that far into the mountains, but it was up high and out of the way, kind a’ .... well, it sounded like heaven to all the rest a’ us. We come from the mountains and were always vaguely uncomfortable without any around.

Tomorrow, Caleb was gonna take off on a long scout, looking for a way he was certain he remembered. He and Pa were pretty durned sure they knew how to get to the valley. But wind and rain, flood runoffs and boulder shifts along with forest growth changes the look of the land some with each season, never mind a couple a' decades.

Finding their valley might not be all that easy. All a' us in the wagon train were mighty thoughtful around the camp fire, come nightfall.

CHAPTER SIX

The next day at our nooning, Edmond Lafferty came by when the wagon train stopped to water the animals and to give me a plate of warmed-up leftovers from last night's supper for my lunch. I was sitting outside in the sunlight and fresh air on a nice little straight-backed chair I had handed down from inside my wagon before climbing down myself. Edmond brought me a necklace made from the claws from that danged bear. His wife, Melinda, had made it for me an' she’d just got finished with it. I was touched and I told him so—told him to thank his wife most kindly for me.

Right toward the last a’ the conversation, Ed sidled up close to me, making sure no one else was near, and reminded me how his and Melinda’s wagon was the one right in front of mine—an' that I could thank Melinda my own self whenever I wanted. I thanked him most sincerely for the reminder, but I didn't really know why he done that. I already knew whose wagon was in front a’ mine, an' didn't need no remindin'. I actually knew whose wagon was behind mine too. I didn't know what I was gonna say if Ed decided to remind me who all that was, seein' as how he'd been so insistent about tellin' me who was in front… well—anyway.

Must a' been Edmond figgered it was important, though. When he left, he said a couple of times that he and Melinda looked forward to seeing a lot more of me ... which was a mite odd 'cause we hadn't been that close before I got hurt. He was a good six years older'n me. Even if Melinda weren't that much older than me, he was—and we just weren't in the same group … though, to be sure, none of us on the train were strangers to one another by any stretch a' the imagination.

Before I could figure out why Edmund was acting so weird, thirteen-year-old Sophie Owens, sister to Nelson and Samuel, came by to set and visit for a while. She sat on a three-legged stool from the wagon, and when she sat, by golly, her new Lakota doeskin skirt rode way up on her legs. I thought she was squirming around on her stool an awful lot, for no good reason, an' it made the skirt ride up even higher on her legs. Was she doin’ that a purpose so I could see? I surely did appreciate it, whether she was doin' it deliberately or not. I really did like catchin' sight of the female body.

I knew a little bit about Sylvie from things Pa told me. Her sixteen and seventeen-year-old brothers were along because they'd been workin' their pa’s farm back in the Tennessee hills for a number of years now. Their family was even making a pretty decent go of it. But the farm was going to be left to their pa’s twenty-year-old son ‘cause that’s the way their family had always done it—there wasn't going to be anything left over for Sam and Nelson to inherit.

Now … some folks were born to farming and some weren't. Me? I couldn't grow grass, but the Owens boys were darn good at puttin' in a crop and comin' up with a fine harvest, come the Fall.

On t'other hand, they were forever getting in trouble come Saturday night. They didn't have a lick a' sense when it came to some things. Like, when they started sparking the Ayers twins, they didn't know them girls wasn't but eleven years old, and that only a few weeks past. I kinda sympathized with them; they sure didn't look like they was eleven years of age. Anyhow, it came to the point where the girls' father started talkin' around, wonderin’ out loud just what a shotgun charged up with a bunch of nails and such might do to a body.

The boys made a quick decision; they took my Pa’s offer of the loan of a wagon, and good pay just to drive it all the way West. They were extra hands, good shooters too, and you can't have too many fightin' men on a journey like ours.

Like her brothers, Sylvie had a hunger for the opposite sex that had apparently blossomed some time back when she discovered boys and girls were different in the best kind of ways. Maybe it subsided she went to sleep. I'm not really sure. Sometimes I thought she and Grace were sisters from different mothers.

Word was, the very day the two brothers were leaving home to meet up with the rest of the wagon train, Sylvie got caught up in the loft of her pa’s barn, taking care of three boys by turns with her mouth. Exasperated, her Pa up and tossed her up onto the seat of her brothers' wagon and told the brothers to take 'er with ‘em; he was givin' up.

* * *

When Sophie saw that everyone else all around was doing something to take care of their wagon or the campsite and not paying us no mind, she cuddled up to my side and whispered in my ear that 'Esther, Grace, an’ them all said hi, and they wanted for me to get well soon so we could all play more games real soon'. Then the little minx kissed me on the lips, squeezed my cock through my denims, and skedaddled away like a whirlwind blowing through.

Esther, Grace, and them? 'Scuse me? Who was ‘them’? Well ... like I said, I can cipher well enough and I put two and two together to get to four. Actually, I come up with about a zillion … ideas.

Apparently—from what I gathered from Ed Lafferty's remark earlier and Sophie's playful squeezing just now—the happy naughty foursome of me, Grace, Esther an' Dan … well the four a’ us were now.…

Heck, I didn’t know how many were in on the secret. My best guess was that our happy little group had grown a lot while I was laid up in the wagon. Things was spreading like wildfire, I guess. I didn't know if I was happy with that or not.

For instance, if I was a readin' things rightly, Ed and Melinda were part of the group now, even though they were married and already had a child. I thought about that for a while ... but I figgered out it was that they were grownups that was botherin’ me.

Deep inside me, all this just didn't seem right. Things were getting' out a control like. Things were simple back when it was just Grace an' me started out playin’ with each other. Then Dan and his sister Esther joined in, an' now, with a married couple involved—and God knew who else—and it was gettin' complicated.

I didn't rightly know that I liked where things were headed now. An’ it all got away from me because I got stove up wrestlin’ with a danged ol’ bear.

* * *

All the fires were banked and left smoldering some to cut down on the skeeters a mite, and the stars were out an’ shinin’ bright. I lay awake on my supremely comfortable pallet of prepared buffalo hides in my wagon, and contemplated what I increasingly saw as an air of ... well ... downright lewdness that was coming over the whole durn wagon train.

Take Mrs. Conklin, my friend Dan's step mom. Today, she'd sauntered around in a blouse that had three buttons undone right at the top ... and she had on a pair of Ehawee's special moccasins, them with the red fringe at the top. Mrs. Conklin weren't shy about showing them moccasins off … an' her legs and those well-turned ankles too. As my mind was noticing that, I had to chastise myself—I hadn't even thought about the fact that her skirt was way shorter than it had been just a few weeks ago in order for me to be admiring her ankles, much less her thighs.

On top of that, I saw my own Pa setting with Kittie Bronson, Hiram Conklin’s nineteen-year-old daughter and just talking up a storm. Her little five-year-old daughter, Sarah, was setting on his lap. The whole time, if his hands weren't a patting an’ stroking ever' inch of that child's pretty little thighs ever' chance he got, then my eyes were failin' long time afore they was due!

I was shocked ... but maybe not so much after a moment's reflection. Seemed to me a lot of the ol' ... ahhhh ... inhibitions were falling by the wayside out here, and we was making some new rules about what was proper and what wasn't.

It was for danged sure, my Pa wouldn't a put hands on any little girl back in the hills, pattin’ and caressin’ places on the little girl that were of a sensitive nature. No sir, he wouldn’t a done it back home. But out here, he was a doin’ it without any care a’ tall—right out in plain view—an’ no one was battin’ an eye. Most curious of all, even little Sarah's mom didn't seem to have a problem with it....

All I saw was the little girl giggling a lot and leaning back up against Pa’s chest. The child didn’t mind a bit, her mom didn’t mind, and no one else seemed to either. So … why was it bothering me? Or DID it bother me? Was I just like Dan had been when he confronted me and Grace … was I, deep down, wishing it was me stroking little Sarah’s thighs and lettin’ the giggling toddler cuddle up against me?!!!

I was trying that idea on for size when the wagon bounced on its suspension just a bit. I was already rolled up on my left elbow, layin' on my pallet of animal hides, so all I had to do was look up to see who my visitor was.

I was hoping it was Grace. She hadn't come to see me since I'd got better and for a minute, I was really hopeful she'd finally come ... or maybe Esther....

Nope. The moon came from behind a cloud and the moonlight revealed my sister Mary Ann climbing over the tailgate. She was carrying something in her hands, and I knew what it was right off. There weren't nothing bruised about my sense of smell and my mouth started watering afore she was half-way inside. My dear sister had brought me some of the dried apple pie we'd had for supper and that was a mighty nice thing for her to do. I couldn’t never get my fill of pie, be it apple, ‘er whatever.

She set the pie down on a shelf built into the side of the wagon down by the tailgate and came to stand beside the pallet where I lay. She was just in her nightdress, barefoot in the moonlight. Tonight the moon was shining bright and we didn't need a candle. Pa didn't like them inside the wagons anyway ... too much chance of one tippin' over or something and starting a fire.

Mary Ann was standing between me and the almost luminous wagon cover and I could see her silhouette clearly, an' for the first time in my life, I looked!

At sixteen, my big sister, Mary Ann, was almost woman grown. I couldn’t see well in the dimness, but she was a pretty girl with coal black hair that fell down to her waist in back, lovely blue eyes, and a few little freckles dusted across her cute, little up-turned nose. Her hips were more mature than Esther's, and a lot more than Grace's. When she turned, her full breasts bobbed and swayed most enticingly under her nightdress … an' her nightdress was all she wore tonight.

Them breasts looked to be nice handfuls, even for a fella with big hands like me. The nightgown she wore was last year's ... and didn't come down her long, pretty legs anywhere near as far as it used to. I wondered how far Mary Ann had walked through the camp in a nightdress that ended above the knee. If I liked it … for all the wrong reasons … then others among the men and boys in the train would too.

Mary Ann stood there in the moonlight for a long moment, as if posing for me, and I wondered if I should say something so she’d know the moon was behind her like that. I mean, she was my sister and all.

Then, moving quick—like she'd made a decision an' wasn't going t' delay any longer—she reached up behind her neck. Her fingers were busy for a moment. When her hands came back down, so did the nightdress ... and I was sure she could see my jaw drop, I was that shocked. All of a sudden, I was presented with the same choice Esther and Daniel had faced not that long ago ... and I started to appreciate the difficult decisions me and Grace had forced them to make that afternoon.

Mary Ann had already made her decision, though, an' I could either agree or ... well, fact is, she didn't really give me no way out. She lifted the cover off me—I didn't have a danged thing on underneath that blanket—and put her right knee down beside my sore left hip, then threw her left leg over my body. Bending low and scooting back a mite, my sixteen-year-old sister bent over and kissed my burgeoning penis, making it swell and lengthen like nobody's business. Dragging her breasts up the length of my body, she hovered over me. I felt her hot breath on the side of my face.

"Grace got lots a’ chances to thank you for saving us girls back at the settlement," she murmured in my ear, "but I never got MY chance," she breathed. She kissed my cheek, worked her way across to the bridge of my nose and then down to my lips. All the while, she was moving from side to side, then up and back the length of my body. I was sure her hard nipples were drawing white-hot streaks across my chest that were gonna stand out like newly burned tracks come tomorrow morn.

Her hips settled down slowly, nestling my cock between what I could feel were hairless outer lips. I guessed that ever' girl on the Richardson wagon train was using a straight razor down there, and often too.

We kissed deeply—my hands went to her breasts and I fondled them for the first time in our lives. Those hard choices Dan and Esther had had to make? Well, I found I never had to make them. Those were already decided, mostly by Mary Ann, but I went along with ever'thing.

"Promise me you'll keep getting into trouble," I suggested, "so I can 'save' you again and again and...."

She chuckled. "Huh-uh! Takes too long," she told me. "Much ... much easier just to come an' attack you in the middle of the night," she giggled.

Hunching her hips upward, she reached a hand down between us, stood my cock upright, and slowly sank down on me. In seconds, we were coupled and her hips began rising and falling, seemingly working their own will while her breasts and lips were mine to enjoy separately. My still-sore left side wasn't bothering me a danged bit—I never felt a thing.

My sister's cunt was a raging inferno inside, and she was soon pounding me with complete abandon, slamming her groin down over my penetrating prick again and again, faster and faster until the exertion made her gasp for air. The wagon was swaying a bit. I'm sure the wheels made a little squeak every so often, and the place where the tongue met the inside yoke was surly doing it too.

But the wagon ahead was the Laffertys' and the one behind was the Owens' and someone or other from both of them families had visited me earlier in the day. Thing was, from what they'd told me, and the way they'd said it, I knew they wouldn't care a fig about what they heard in the night ... and it might even stir up something of their own in their own wagons.

In only a few moments, Mary Ann's hammering was gettin’ awfully ragged and there was no art to it no more. She was simply banging away, trying her best to get her brother and herself to an orgasm. When it came, it was almost a painful thing, how her vagina clamped down on mine and milked the pearly stuff right out of my balls. We strained together for a long moment, trying to work my cock into her one last fraction of an inch ... and then my sister collapsed on my chest, breathing like one of those steam engines we'd seen at the end a' big paddlewheel river boats on the big Missouri River back east.

* * *

Later, when we recovered a mite, Mary Ann lay relaxed atop the right side of my body, her chin on my chest and my right leg captured between her two. She was gently, slowly humping my thigh and making it awful slippery wet. I thought that was just fine.

We talked for while, more comfortably than I would have thought possible. What I'd been concerned about when Daniel brought Esther along as his contribution to the little sex party the four of us had had going, well, it turned out I was dead on right. Esther had told Mary Ann, swearing her to silence, of course. That hadn't worked to well, since she also swore three-four other girls to silence and told them the story—or stories, rather, 'cause they kept gettin' more and more exciting … and less and less grounded in fact.

The story about me and Grace fuckin' on the back of a horse was apparently now a favorite among the wagon train's younger set … and it had gotten a little more complicated. Now it was said Grace also laid out one time atop one of our oxen and I took her time after time while the animal grazed.

"You really take Grace out one time and bent her across a big rock and took her like a doggy?" Mary Ann asked curiously.

"I don't recollect that," I said after thinking for a moment. "There was that little grove a' cottonwoods that one time, Grace leaned back and hauled her skirts up for me to get to her cunt and fuck her good … but I don't recall any rock at all," I told her truthfully. "Sounds like a danged good idea, though!"

Mary Ann giggled deliciously at the naughtiness of us talking about fucking. "An' you were doing Widow Miller and her daughter too, back home?" Mary Ann asked in an excited tone, "and neither one knew about the other gettin' serviced by you guys?"

It was then I figgered out Esther Conklin wasn't the only Conklin who talked outta school on occasion, 'cause I danged sure hadn't never talked to her about doing Agnes Miller, nor her mother neither. That had to come from Daniel or Grace, 'cause they were the only other persons to know about it who was here on this wagon train. My money was on Daniel.

"We absolutely were," I retorted. "Young Master Daniel and me were both keepin' the two of them satisfied, not just me," I told her firmly. Mary Ann was delighted. She giggled quietly, then moved in for a few kisses that grew hotter as they got more numerous. It was effective. I'd been getting' a little hot about Daniel blabbing about things we had agreed to keep quiet—but … what the heck. That was all old stories, compared to what me an' Daniel had been up to lately….

I chuckled. "Daniel tell y'all what we done the day afore we all left home to come out here?" I asked quietly. I could feel Mary Ann' thick mane of hair move on my chest as she shook her head.

"Well, me and him went over to the Miller place and they was both in that ol' cabin a' theirs," I said speaking softly. "They was both there and we told them a-sittin' there how it was that Daniel and me knew about one another getting to 'em, when they each thought the t' other boy didn't know anything 'bout it." I chuckled.

"An' we told them how both a' us knew Agnes didn't know about her mother getting' poked by us boys, an' her mother didn't know 'bout Agnes doin' the same thing. We told 'em they should just start askin' a boy, or a couple-three boys to start comin' around regular-like and then both a' them could take care of the boys right there in the cabin where ever one could get nekkid and enjoy themselves so much more."

Mary Anne laughed softly. "That all you told 'em?" she asked interestedly.

"Nah…," I replied, "…we also suggested they should take a bath a little more often, 'stead a' just every other Saturday night.," I told my sister. "Sometimes they was just a little ripe, you know what I mean?"

Mary Anne gagged. "Ooh, my goodness," she replied. She was quiet for a long while, then cleared her throat. "You do know, little brother, that I take a bath whenever I can, Saturday night or not, every time we camp 'side a creek or something, right?"

"I do," I told her, "and from now on, I'm goin' to be up on that crick bank a-watchin' to make sure you get all the nooks and crannies washed carefully, whatcha think about that?" I laughed.

"You need to get down off that bank and get in the water to help me get all squeaky clean," she shot back. I liked that idea and I was sure she could tell that, even in the dimness. We laughed together.

"I have a message for you," my sister told me softly, stroking my chest lightly.

"Mmmmm?"

"Uh huh ... Esther says you gotta get better soon so you can get out to one of our ... get-togethers. She says she needs you to fuck her again, and again, and again...."

"I see," I said amusedly. The message wasn't from Esther. It was from Mary Ann, and she was telling me she knew all about the group of kids doing naughty things with each other ... and she was telling me she was a part of it too … and that my agreement, or disagreement, didn't mean a danged thing. She was saying she liked the fucking she had just gotten from me and wanted to make sure I knew she was gettin' it from others and I didn't have a thing to say about it.

"You really been fucking Grace all along?" Mary Ann asked interestedly, continuing the conversation. There wasn't no wasted time building up to the question neither. Yep, it was clear my dear sister was a full member, in good standing, of the group of young happy humpers on this wagon train. She even knew part of the history.

"Ever since she took that 'fall' into the buffalo hollow," I said after a tiny hesitation. Under the new rules, there were no secrets ... not between members of the new society anyway ... well, not any lewd, naughty secrets that were fun to talk about.

She caught the emphasis on the word 'fall'. "She faked that, huh?"

"She surely did," I confirmed. "Planned the whole thing."

Mary Ann chuckled, able to imagine things she hadn't actually seen. "And you didn't suspect a thing, did you?" she asked brightly.

"Nothing!" I told her. "I didn't see anything but her bald cunt ... but I had that on my mind all day an’ night long 'til she invited me up into her wagon the first time!"

Mary Ann laughed again, smothering it by pressing her mouth to my chest. It was an interesting feeling.

"Wanta do something naughty?" she asked, suddenly breathless and excited. I could hear it in her voice. "I'm not hurting you am I," she asked quickly, abruptly remembering what I was recovering from.

"Nah … huh-uh!" I replied, a little surprised myself. My shoulder hadn't bothered me a bit while we were fucking, and the bruises on my hip and leg weren't giving me any problems neither. Who knew sex was good for a separated shoulder and other badly bruised body parts?

Thus reassured, Mary Ann sat up, casting aside the covering patchwork quilt. She jumped up and recovered the slab of apple pie, coming back to me and scrambled up atop me again. Leaning back against the shelving up by the front of the wagon under the seat, she asked, "You hungry, little brother?" She picked up a big hunk of pie and mashed it all over her cunt. "You hungry, Jere?" she asked once more, teasingly.

Now, I'd already gone down on two girls—Grace and Esther—like in Pa’s naughty tintypes and daguerreotypes, and I didn't have a problem with pleasing my own sister in that fashion ... but if I did it tonight with my sister, I'd not only be slathering up her womanly juices, but some a' my own spendings too—

Oh what the hell!!

I switched around, put my chin on our impromptu mattress with her wide-spread silky-smooth slot right in front a’ me. I commenced to lap up our juices and the apple pie too. Dried-apple pie and fresh cunt honey, with maybe a slightly salty taste, too—I dealt with it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The next afternoon, I was doing well enough to walk for a while beside the wagons and I found during the walk that I could move my shoulder much easier than even the previous evening. Clearly, sex with my sister Mary Ann had a certain 'healing' quality all its own. I was looking forward to more of her medicine, though she gave me no hint of when that might be.

For all these weeks, we'd been moving steadily along, making ten or twelve miles a day easily. Some days we traveled more. On the other hand, there were some days, like during bad weather, we did quite a bit less. I recollect one day, we traveled all day long in a heavy rain ... and camped that night in sight of last night's site—an’ a’ course, there were them times we didn't move an inch when the rain poured down for days on end. And, more than once, we stopped in the early afternoon upon reaching a particularly favorable place to set up a camp.

This afternoon, we struck a sparkling little brook with some tall cottonwoods lining the bank. It was only an hour or so after our nooning, but it was so entrancing a place that Pa didn't hesitate to encircle the wagons around a huge solitary oak tree standing near the bank. The big oak gave us a center for the circle and provided shade from the direct rays of the afternoon sun too. We were going to give the stock and the train’s travelers a good rest. We had been climbing gradually over the past couple of weeks and now we'd left much of the insect life ... including clouds of black flies that marred some of our evenings ... well behind in the lowlands.

After helping as best I could with unhitching the oxen and turning them into a quickly fashioned, brush corral, I still felt strong and resolved to walk around a bit more before confining myself to my cot or the wagon. I was getting better fast and was getting restless, though the strength in my left shoulder was still lacking at times.

Mary Ann appeared, coming from between two of the Conklin wagons, as I made my slow way around the circle. "Want t' go for a walk?" she asked brightly.

Pa was nearby and smiled his approval. "Go!" he advised. "The walk will do you a world a' good," he added. I thought so too, remembering last night's good medications, so Mary Ann and I strolled off arm in arm—just the nicest picture of sibling amiability a parent could wish for. No one could see the carnal thoughts racin' around in my mind.

I carried my rifle, Mary had her pistol and we each had a pocketful of extra ammo, of course. Since the run-in with the bear, Pa didn't let anyone out of sight without being well armed.

"Some of the kids found a spring up here a ways," Mary Ann whispered in my ear as we entered the cover of a thick growth of oaks and cottonwoods. "You too tired for a party?" She giggled, instantly slapping her hand over her mouth and looking around to see if any of the adults noticed.

We walked on a few steps on a path that led us around the thicker clumps of bushes that abounded. When I turned and couldn't see anything of the camp, I stopped Mary Ann and whirled her around into my arms and proceeded to kiss her hard. She responded just as passionately.

"Got anything on under that skirt?" I asked, a little out of breath.

"Nuh-uh," she said teasingly. "See?" My sixteen-year-old sister pulled the front of her skirt up until only the waistband stopped further exposure. I could see her pretty cunt was indeed shaved bald and smooth as an egg. To make sure, I cupped the lovely mound with my right hand and kissed her again.

In a moment, a now-breathless Mary Ann broke our kiss and caught my right hand in hers and she began pulling me along. "We're going to be late," she explained.

She leaned close to whisper in my ear. "Sophie ... Owens ... is going to be there," she said. "She really wants you to ... fuck her," Mary Ann said with relish. She wasn't accustomed to using lewd language in the daylight and out in front of the whole world but, based on her grin, she clearly liked the sound of it coming off her tongue.

We hurried along the dim path, then switched to a lesser one when it seemed the one we'd been on wouldn't bring us to the spring according to the directions Mary had been given. We were quiet, not wanting to give ourselves away to any of the adults, or younger kids, or those not yet initiated into our little group. So it was that we were able to come soundlessly up behind a tall, bulky figure, peering at something deeper in the woods.

It was Maye ... 'Aunt' Maye who helped Mrs. Conklin with the kids when Helen was otherwise occupied, and she lent a hand to anyone working around the camp too. I glanced at Mary Ann, who had a sick, terrified expression on her face. My sister plainly thought the group of young revelers was undone, discovered by a spy who would report back to our Pa. Mary Ann pulled at my hand, seeking to draw me away before we were discovered and included in what Mary Ann thought would be a mass humiliation and punishment.

I wasn't so sure. Maye wasn't acting like no avenging angel out to capture a bunch a' children havin' some naughty fun.

Displaying a confidence I really didn't feel inside, I put my finger to my lips to shush Mary Ann, and handed her my rifle to hold ... and stepped forward until I was right beside and a little behind the peeking woman.

I'd thought so from the way Maye was standin', and from where I was now, I could see Maye's left hand was holding her long skirt up, and her right hand was working industriously beneath it while she struggled to breathe quietly. I made a quick judgment that Maye wasn't even a little bit interested in telling on the kids she was watching.

I looked back and motioned to Mary Ann, pointing at Maye's groin area and pretending to rub my crotch. I gave Mary Ann a 'come here' gesture and she reluctantly paced forward 'til she saw that I was pointing at. She relaxed and grinned broadly.

"Wouldn't you like to join them, Maye?" I asked softly. I was only a few feet away from her, but the tall woman hadn't heard us coming.

She jumped and whirled around to confront us with a wild, desperate look on her face.

I pretended not to notice her distress. I stepped closer and was able to catch a glimpse of several nude girls and boys entertaining each other on a sandy beach surrounding a pretty, fresh water spring. None of them had heard Mary Ann an' me comin' up on them, any more'n Maye had.

"Looks like fun," I suggested.

Maye backed away, preparing to bolt.

I held my hand out to her, palm up, trying to make sure it wasn't a threatening gesture. "It's OK, Maye," I said soothingly. "No one's angry ... no one's going t' tattle on you for peeking ... and we won't tell anyone what you're doing with your fingers right now, will we, Mary Ann?" I gestured to Maye's lower body, where her right hand was still trapped under her skirt.

She looked down, horrified, and jerked her hand away from her body. I could see the sheen of her juices covering her fingers and Mary Ann saw it too. She smiled warmly at the frightened woman.

Not sure what to do, Maye crouched there, her wet hand outstretch toward me as if to ward me off.

"Would not telling anyone be OK with you?" I asked, motioning to her hand. Maye didn't know what I was asking. She looked at her hand, and when she did, I slipped closer. Moving slowly, I touched her wrist, and gently brought her hand to my mouth ... and began licking her juices off her fingers. I held her eyes with mine, smiling at her between licks, and slowly gathering every bit of moisture I could get. "You taste wonderful," I told her quietly.

I smiled gently, still holding her hand in mine, studying this amazon of a woman. Maye was bigger than me—taller, anyway ... but maybe not too much heavier than me. I tilted my head to one side, taking in the long skirt she wore. The hem touched the ground and it was frayed but I already knew she wore unattractive men's boots on her feet from having watched her clomp around camp. Her blouse was really a man's shirt, overly large ... and buttoned all the way up to her throat.

I wondered at the sheer bulk of the woman. She had a belly that bulged out in front of her but her fingers were slender and well shaped … finely boned cheekbones and a cute little nose and … well … a bunch a' things that just didn’t fit with the image she showed ever'one of an overweight, sloppy woman. And the quick glance I'd had of her legs before she'd dropped her skirt weren't those of a flabby woman.

"I know a secret about you, Maye," I said delicately. I didn't want to frighten her away. "You hide yourself away," I continued softly. "This isn't who you are," I said, making a gesture that included all her bulky clothing.

I reached slowly to her face and brushed locks of hair aside to show her face more clearly. Her brilliant blue eyes watched me warily.

"How tall are you?" I asked as I worked to put her hair to some order.

"Six foot, and a inch more," she whispered as softly as my question had been.

I nodded, smiling.

"I been a ... a monster ever since I was nine, she continued in a low voice. "No man will have me," she said. A little bitterness had crept into her voice.

"Ahhhh ... but there's this secret you're keeping, you see," I replied calmly, finishing brushing her hair. I had only my fingers, but her hair ... which really was a beautiful brunette color ... was in much better order now. "That's how you really are," I commented surveying her. "How tall are you when you're laying on your back, Maye?" I asked. I clearly had taken her unawares.

"I ... I don't know," she replied, confused.

I smiled reassuringly. "I think you would be just the right height, lying on your back," I told her, "for any man."

She digested that, her eyes unfocused a bit in consideration.

"Mary Ann," I said a little louder. "I think its time for you to get undressed for the party, don't you?"

Mary Ann nodded, though her face showed how confused she was. Mary Ann leaned my rifle against a tree and began undoing her blouse slowly, but without hesitation. Maye watched her closely.

In time with Mary Ann unbuttoning her blouse, I undid Maye's shirt, careful not to move too quickly. Maye looked at Mary Ann, then down at my fingers almost wonderingly. When Mary Ann reached her bottom button, I reached Maye's.

"Help me?" I asked Mary Ann. She stepped closer and helped me lift the shirt away from Maye's body. The bodice Maye wore under her shirt was an old style ... I had no idea where she could have found it.

"See my sister?" I whispered to Maye. "Aren't her breasts beautiful? They're very sensitive too.”

Mary Ann took my hint and shrugged her blouse completely off her shoulders and put it on a low branch nearby. She hefted her breasts, cupping them from underneath and used the thumbs and forefingers of each hand to tweak her already erect nipples, stimulating them to become harder and longer.

While she held Maye's attention, I was behind the Amazon, untying the monstrous corset-like thing she was wearing. When it was undone, I moved around to her front and drew it off her body. With it came a bundle of cloth that did naught but serve to make Maye's belly look fat.

I was astonished. Maye's breasts were huge—melon-sized beauties. Red marks crisscrossed them, showing where the tight material had bitten into the soft flesh.

"You bind them up, hide them from everyone," I whispered to Maye, "but they shouldn't be a secret," I scolded. "They're beautiful," I continued. "You've hidden from us that you're one hell of a lot of woman under your clothing for too long, Maye," I said, gently chiding her.

"Your skirt," I whispered, turning to Mary Ann.

My sister nodded and unbuttoned her skirt at the waist. Holding it up for a second, she let it drop to the ground and stepped out of it, now wearing only the moccasins everyone seemed to have on their feet these days.

I was fumbling with the buttons on Maye's skirt, trying to undo it, when Maye's fingers replaced mine. In a trice, her skirt was held only by her hands ... but she didn't let go right away.

"Go ahead, Maye," I said gently. "Let all the bad times fall away, honey."

She considered that for a heartbeat or two and then let the skirt drop limply to the ground. The two petticoats she wore beneath followed as quickly as she could untie them and then, a very tall, but beautifully proportioned young woman stood in front of Mary Ann and me.

Her huge breasts swung ponderously from side to side, up and down, swaying with every movement of her body. Long though her legs were, they were wonderfully sculpted, her calves descended beautifully into—dang it ... I had to get those clodhoppers off her.

I knelt in front of her. "May I?" I asked, indicating her boots. She nodded, turning a little pink. I unlaced them quickly, suddenly in a rush. In a moment, she was standing there in the woods, naked in all her loveliness. She did indeed have the nicely turned ankles I'd wondered about days ago, and her calves were rounded, well-shaped delights. I stood up.

"You are one HELL of a woman," I told her, and she blushed even more.

"Maye?" I said slowly. "Will you join our party," I asked, nodding my head at the spring and the frolicking young people around it; they still hadn't seen the three of us. "I still want to see how tall you are lying down," I added.

I began stripping off my own clothes, beginning with my shirt. When I winced slightly working my shirt over my left shoulder, Maye quickly stepped closer to help. Her nipples touched my chest for the first time. She blushed deeper, but that faded when I bent my neck to kiss each nipple in turn. They grew more erect, thickening quickly into hard pinpoints of desire.

I didn't even wait for the answer to my question. Kicking off my pants, I took each woman by the hand, and stepped through the bushes toward the spring with them.

When we came out of the brush, Maye was an instant magnet for everyone's attention. She blushed madly, but held her ground somehow. Everyone not already fucking someone else crowded around us.

The boys marveled at Maye's mammoth breasts, grinning happily as they touched and kissed them ... they sucked on her prominent nipples. The girls commiserated with her, saying their breasts got all marked up sometimes too in confining clothing.

Esther kissed the side of Maye's left breast where a crease in the fabric had caused a lengthy red mark in the flesh. Maye's eyes got big, but she impulsively reached for Esther's left breast and touched Esther's nipples ... thumbing them into greater erectness. When Esther sighed happily, Maye smiled broadly, and relaxed, shedding the last of her reserve, and her inhibitions.

I broke the circle of interested boys and girls around my innocent Amazon and led her over to a blanket spread over a pile of last year's leaves. "Do you want to go through with this?" I asked softly, just to make absolutely sure. She nodded. "You have to say it," I told her.

"I want you to," she answered.

"You're whispering?" I asked. "What was it you said?"

"I want you to," she said more strongly.

I cupped my hand behind my ear.

"I WANT YOU TO," she said loudly. She was grinning, understanding the joke.

"Want me to what?" I asked, pantomiming confusion.

"I - WANT - YOU - TO - FUCKKKKK ME!" she said emphatically. "FUCK ME NOW!!" She seemed to be coming out of her shyness quite nicely.

In a flash, Maye was on her back, her nipples pointing at the sky from breasts that were too firm to flatten, even in that position. I squeezed one, then the other, marveling at the soft, taut globes, at the smoothness of the skin that was so translucent that I could see the faint blue lines of her veins.

I pretended to measure her height from where her back touched the forest floor to the tip of her right breast. "Ahhhh, three hands ... very good!" I said, grinning.

She swatted at my hands, blushing, but smiling broadly too. She pushed and pulled at me until I was between her splayed thighs.

I hesitated. "Have you ever...?" I asked.

She blushed deeper, but nodded. "When I was ten," she said, "I looked old enough to ... you know...."

"Fuck?" I asked, not beating around the bush at all. I was still grinning.

"Yes!" she said emphatically.

"You probably were!" I assured her. "…But I'll bet they weren't very nice about it, huh?"

She shook her head, looking around at the young folks engagin' in much raunchy, sex play. I got the point. There'd been enough said about that time in her life.

I put my knees close up to her buttocks, slightly spread so as to make our private parts of an equitable height and fisted my cock, preparing to thrust it deep in her. I already knew her vagina was soaked ... I'd already tasted her honey. Her knees rose, I think without her really knowing it, until her thighs were caressing my hips. She whimpered impatiently, wanting me to hurry.

I heard a rustle of leaves and bushes as a stray breeze moved them. I glanced up, peering into the underbrush … to find the underbrush was looking right back at me!

CHAPTER EIGHT

I'd thought all the surprises were over for the day. An idea flashed through my mind that my pap or one of the other adults had caught the bunch of us and my life was over, perhaps literally. I'm sure my face blanked and I must have turned white as a sheet under my tan.

And then the bushes parted and the prettiest young Indian girl in the world stepped daintily out. She smiled at me and looked curiously at my cock where it touched Maye's cunt lips. She nodded approvingly and smiled again.

"Jere!" Maye said urgently. "DOOOOO it!" She hadn't yet seen the strange young Indian girl.

"We got company," I said tightly, motioning.

Maye's head snapped up and back. She looked at the stranger upside down for a long moment and then scrambled to her feet, pushing me off pretty easily, if the truth be told. The girl had a lot of strength in that big body.

The Indian girl's eyes widened appreciably at the sight of Maye's big, dancing tits. She grinned and pursed her lips as if to suckle at one of Maye's teats.

This was all very curious, and unexpected. But … I wasn't in the least afraid.

Maybe I shoulda been. After all, she was an Indian. Indians were savages. Indians were mean and vicious. Indians were the enemy.

But not her—I never considered her so; not for even one moment. For one thing, this Indian girl's eyes were as green as mine were blue. I hadn't known before this moment that there were Indians with green eyes ... beautiful, laughing eyes that I could feel myself drowning in.

While Maye stood there, still exposing herself to all the world, the brush moved again and a line of young Indian children stepped out, led by a teen-aged male—a slender fellow, no longer a boy but not quite a man—kinda like me, I guess—'cept I was some huskier. The boy of teen years had eyes as green as the young woman's were. I watched the Indian children step out of the bushes. They didn't smile, not really, but there wasn't even a hint of hostility coming from them—not right then anyway.

One of the last girls to come out … I guessed she was about six years or so … also had green eyes, but she was the only one besides the first girl to come out and her brother—her brother! Hmmmmm. I didn't have anything to actually tell that was so … perhaps the eyes … but I instinctively knew they were brother and sister. Interesting.

All the other children had dark eyes. I was already assuming the three with green eyes were of one family, and everyone else was from a different family … or families. After the last one stepped out, we all waited for a bit, but no more young Indians came out of the brush. There were no adults in their group at all, an' I didn't even think to wonder why ... I just accepted it.

Part of the reason I wasn't as alert as I should have been was that first Indian girl came striding right up to me with no sign of belligerence. She almost put her breasts against my chest and looked ready to kiss me, and I was sure enough ready for that.

She looked me right in the eye and launched into a whole series of words and, apparently, questions ... but I didn't understand a thing. The signs she made with beautiful, slender fingers to accompany her words weren't among those that Caleb and Ehawee had taught us, but I loved watching her hands as they moved gracefully about.

The young girl was clearly irritated that I couldn't understand. The look she gave me said I must be some kinda idiot or something. I know I blushed a little, an' maybe I looked a little sheepish, 'cause she relented and gave me another of those warm smiles. She and the green-eyed warrior had a fast, spirited conversation.

"They gonna kill and scalp us?" Mary Ann asked in a low voice. She was standing at my right shoulder. I hadn't noticed when she came up. My sister was holding her skirt in her hands, letting it brush my naked flanks. I nodded, but not in reply to her question. What Mary Ann was doing was taking care of everybody, like I should a been. Her pistol was in her pocket but my rifle was leaning against the tree back over yonder where we'd left it. I was a mite ... chagrined, you might say. Damn fool stunt it was, gettin’ separated from my rifle like that.

"If the young brave there was to be makin' the decision, I think we just might," I answered. The half-grown young man wasn't smiling at us. His whole aspect had changed. Right now, he was purely glaring a hole through my forehead. I wondered what I’d done to him— I couldn't recall whatever it was right off.

"But my sweetheart with green eyes here doesn't seem to want that," I added speculatively. I didn't exactly know what was happening but the Indian girl just wasn't hostile to us. "Think you could distract the warrior guy a little bit, Sis?"

"Where in the world did she—I mean where did they get those eyes?" Mary Ann marveled. She turned to the brave, putting her hands on her hips, she was openly inviting him to examine her naked body and her hairless sex.

Mary Ann's tits bobbed and jiggled most delightfully, and the Indian brave's eyes snapped away from me to look at my sister … rather appreciably too. Showed he had a goodly share of common sense, in my opinion. Mary Ann's glance sharpened and she began to regard the young man more closely. She smiled and there was some heated anticipation in her grin.

"He has green eyes too," Mary Ann mused, a warming interest in her voice. She glanced around. "And her too," she added, pointing at another, much younger girl. I'd already noticed, but that was okay.

I saw the line of young Indians had made their way completely into the clearing now. A total of four boys and seven girls were standing around, shuffling their feet and looking interestedly at the collection of naked white girls and boys, who were lookin’ right back at them … and everyone there seemed to be communicating jest fine with just their eyes.

Pretty Green Eyes ... I'd already named her that in my mind ... said something else to me in a fast staccato. She sounded aggravated.

I turned back to her. She was pretty enough to keep any man focused on her, for sure. I don't have no idea why, but I felt completely at ease with her. For the first time, I was confident enough to smile. Not understanding her words though, I shrugged, a twinge in my hurt shoulder made me wince a little. She glanced at my shoulder, and down the length of my body where the bruises had faded from black and blue to an ugly greenish-yellow.

I wondered how I would explain. Suddenly inspired, I growled and raised my hands like claws. I raised my chin, sniffing the air, and growled again as ferociously as I could. Then I dropped to all fours and did my best to pantomime a charging bear. I stood, tapped my chest and mimicked a man with a rifle ... I aimed, and fired, then stood looking at a bear carcass that wasn't there and thrust my right fist in the air as if in triumph. I made the sign for meat that Ehawee had taught me. I could a' shown them the necklace of claws Melinda had made for me, but I'd left it back at the wagon. I resolved to make sure I wore it from now on.

The girl looked impressed, and so did the young warrior, though he tried hard not to. I liked that. I wanted to impress this young woman a lot—didn't care that much whether he was impressed, but it couldn't hurt....

I studied our unexpected visitors. Our contacts with Indians so far on the trip had been limited, but I was learning the plains Indians tended to be a little taller than most of the other nations, their limbs were clean and straight, with well-toned muscles. Ehawee had told us the Lakota bathed every morning, and used sweat lodges too, to cleanse their pores ... and their minds.

Among the male Indians I'd seen in our travels so far, high cheek bones were the norm and I'd even seen one old brave whose cheekbones were so incredibly wide and his chin so narrow, his face looked like a triangle.

Indian girls, though … particularly the younger ones … had more rounded, softer faces. Their cheekbones blended well with the remainder of their faces ... attractively so in many cases. And this young, green-eyed Indian girl was a shining example of just how good-looking Indian girls could be. I smiled more broadly, spreading my hands to show I couldn't understand her words.

She stamped her foot, exasperated, and I looked for the first time at her moccasins. Except for a total lack of decoration, they were spitting images of Ehawee's, except for the fact that Ehawee made hers with a red-dyed fringe sown to the uppers. I pointed at the girl’s moccasins and then swept my hand around to indicate the whole group of young Indians.

"Lakota?" I asked. From Ehawee, I knew the people of the Lakota nation didn't like to be called 'Sioux'. It was a bastardized Cheyenne word meaning 'Snake'. All this and more, Ehawee had explained to us over many a camp fire. Nobody likes to be called a snake.

Amazed, the green-eyed Indian girl shot a stream of words at me. I think she was irritated, thinking I'd been feigning ignorance of the Lakota tongue and was only now revealing my deception.

I held up my hands helplessly. I pointed at her moccasins, then at Mary Ann's. Mary Ann helped by stepping close to my little Pretty Green Eyes and setting her left foot next to the Indian girl's moccasin. The similarity was obvious.

Pretty Green Eyes shot another question at me and thinking fast, I decided she was probably asking me where Mary Ann got them, or something like that. I turned and pointed in the direction of our wagon train, wondering if any of it got through.

She sighed, not understanding me at all. She asked me another question, gesturing at Mary Ann … then making a gesture that seemed to include herself and the green-eyed young warrior nearby. I rocked my head on my shoulders from side to side and held my hands up, palms uppermost, indicating I didn't know what she'd said. Her lips tightened and she studied me and Mary Ann for a moment. Then she stepped up to us and took my right hand in hers, then placed it in Mary Ann's left hand as if readying the pair of us for walking—readying us for something, anyway. Pretty Green Eyes looked expectantly at me and Mary Ann. She shook her head when she saw we weren't understanding her meaning.

Then she had an inspiration and made a sign that needed no explanation. Making a circle of her left thumb and forefinger, she inserted her right forefinger inside the circle and sawed it back and forth. She touched my chest and then Mary Ann's. She looked expectantly at me.

Well, I understood that. I nodded, smiling. I took my cock in my left hand and reached out with my right to touch Mary Ann's mound. I waggled my prick around a bit. My Pretty Green Eyes smiled happily. Finally, something we both understood.

She called the half-grown brave over to her side and made the fucking gesture again, smiling at me the whole time. She grabbed his wrist and held his hand to where her groin would be beneath her deerskin dress.

It irritated him a mite. He spoke rapidly to her for a long moment. I got the idea his tone and expression meant he was objecting to us white folk knowing that they were having sex—he apparently thought we had no business knowing such things. She cut him off with a wave of her hand and he shut up mighty quick. He was bigger, and looked a mite older, but she sure ruled the roost.

She held out her hand, palm up and pointed her fingers first at me, then Mary Ann ... then took Mary Ann's left hand at the wrist and placed it on the brave's right hand.

He didn't move.

Exasperated, Pretty Green Eyes flipped up the brave's breechclout, unwrapped the front from around the strap about his waist and let it drop between his legs to hang loose from in back.

The green-eyed Indian brave's penis was hard as a rock. He shifted uneasily but didn't pull away while she harangued him.

I could see where this was heading. I made a sign to Pretty Green Eyes, the same sign one she'd used of a finger fucking through a circled forefinger, and I put my right hand gently on her bare forearm.

"How 'bout it, Sis," I turned around and asked Mary Ann. "You ready for your first Lakota warrior fuckin’ ?"

"You bet!" she replied brightly, and eagerly stepped right up to the tall, well set-up young brave and smiled prettily up into his face.

I was pretty sure these Lakota didn't understand our language any more than we did theirs, but I guess the tone of our bantering voices ... and Mary Ann's smiling invitation took care of the translation for us. Pretty Green divided a happy smile between me and Mary Ann, and then calmly put the boy's cock in Mary Ann's waiting hand.

Mary Ann took it casually, held on, and began walking backward until she reached a blanket spread on the grass. Stopping at the edge of the blanket, she went behind her new friend and figured out how to undo the breechclout belt there and dropped it on the ground ... then stripped his buckskin shirt off. Stepping back around to his front and kicking off her moccasins, my sister simply dropped to the blanket and pulled him down on top of her.

He didn't need any instructions on what to do from then on.

I turned back to my green-eyed Indian girl to find she'd shucked out of her buckskin dress while I was watching my sister and … her brother? She was lovely. Her skin was lighter where the dress covered her, a creamy smooth caramel, and wonderful to the touch. Pretty and slim as a reed, her legs were beautifully sculpted. Her breasts were about as round as apples, but a lot more interesting. Those perfect cones were perched high on her chest, capped with light brown aureolas and tipped with ruby little nipples that were already erect.

She stood proudly, letting me examine her, not flinching when I touched my fingertips to her tender mound and traced the length of her slit. I touched my fingertips to my lips and smiled. She was already wet down there and I could taste her sweet honey on my tongue.

She swallowed and looked around.

I figgered she was trying to find an unused blanket, so I led her to an unoccupied one behind me and sank to my knees, planting kisses over her breasts and down her soft belly as I went. Tilting my head back and leaning in, I touched my tongue to the top of her love slot and used it to divide the smooth peach halves.

Pretty Green Eyes moaned, evidently surprising herself. She laughed delightedly.

I tugged her down until she was kneeling with me and I kissed her lips for the first time. Now, I'd heard the Indians didn't hold with kissing and such, but if that was true, she was a maverick amongst 'em ... and a quick learner too, if she'd never done it before.

Without knowing quite how it happened, I was atop her and she was guiding my hard cock down into her beautiful slot. In only a moment, we were rocking back and forth, taking and giving pleasure to each other. When I could feel her climax coming, I held back as long as I could ... and then we were coming off hard together. Her vagina clamped down on my cock, squeezing my spending from me. Exhausted, we slumped down on the blanket. I was only just able to avoid falling on her. My hurt shoulder had taken just about all the exercise it could take for one day.

I sat up and looked around. With Pretty Green Eyes directing the action for Mary Ann and me, I hadn't had given much thought to anyone else, but it appeared I didn't need to be concerned.

Maye had a total of three young boys on top of her rangy body as she lay flat on her back. One of the Indian boys was stroking just as hard and fast as he could into her cunt, Morgan Conklin ... who I hadn't even known was in our little band of happy fuckers 'til this moment ... was pushing his young cock in and out of Maye's mouth, and another young Indian boy was industriously sucking first one nipple and then the other. There was a beatific smile on the big woman's face. She was prob'ly about as happy as she'd ever been in her life.

One of the Indian boys was laying flat while Grace straddled his hips and ground her cunt right down on his prick. I saw a couple of the Indian girls on top of, or under, white boys, and there were a few mixed threesomes happenin’ too. There was nothing I needed to do about any of it. I lay back down to find my head was now between the widely separated ankles of a young Indian girl who was standing over me and grinning down at me. She was stark naked.

"Well, hello there sweetie!" I quipped, looking up at her upside down face. She looked to be about nine, already with nicely rounded little mounds on her chest where full breasts would be some day. "Is there anything I can do for you?" I asked the naked young girl. I was grinnin' happily.

Taking little baby steps, she turned herself around so as to be facing me, and then she straddled my head. She was still grinning maniacally down at me and pooching out her mound.

She leaned over, almost bending double to plant a kiss on my lips and then raised quickly up, giggling all over herself. I looked over at Pretty Green Eyes and she nodded, making the circle and fucking forefinger sign again. The giggling little Indian girl held her hands out over my body and repeated the sign. Seemed like that signal was catching on.

I braced myself up on my elbows and stretched my neck so I could kiss the young girls' outer love lips ... to her surprise and obvious delight. When I stopped for a rest, she tugged my head back up and I licked her for another few minutes. She wasn't giggling any more. She was pushing her little cunt down on my mouth and making whimpering noises.

Pretty Green Eyes slapped at my arm and when I looked, she made the fucking sign and touched the little girl's groin. When I made a doubtful face, she nodded, and repeated the gesture.

I got up to my knees as the little girl scrambled to get down on her hands and knees. Spreading her thighs, she backed up into me and waited. She had a beautifully rounded little ass that I quickly discovered was firmly muscled. This little Indian maiden might grow from pleasantly plump to distressingly fat in the years ahead, but for right now, her firm little haunches were a mighty pleasing sight.

Pretty Green Eyes took my cock in her hand and rubbed it around the little girl's cunt lips, making the little girl ... and me ... sigh contentedly. Then, giggling, she introduced the end of my prick into the girl's slot and urged me forward. The little girl had had things inside her before, but maybe my cock was the biggest 'cause there was a lot of grunting and wiggling around before I was seated as deep as she could handle me.

I'm sure I was smiling from the sheer enjoyment I was getting from experiencing all this. Just the fact that the younger girl as so enthusiastic about sex was pleasing all in itself ... and she was vocal about it too. I had to chuckle. I didn't understand a word she was saying, but it was clear that none of it was a complaint. She was a happy young girl and didn't care who knew it.

In seconds, I was pushing in and she was pushing back just as eagerly. She was a panting and moaning in no time. I could feel her little vagina start to contract rhythmically and I just let go and sprayed her immature little cunt with what was probably her first white man's come. She barked out something unintelligible and ground her butt around in a little circle on my cock … then did it of couple of more times.

She almost collapsed on the blanket and I followed her down, finding the last bit of strength in my left shoulder, I supported myself on knees and hands to pump a few more times into the young girl's body, spewing a final few drops of pearly semen into her ... and then I was done, completely spent.

After resting for a while, the three of us tottered over to the spring and began washing ourselves off. The two Indian girls were accustomed to cleaning themselves, but they weren't used to the perfumed soap the kids from the wagon train had brought along for the party. I didn’t know what they were saying, but the tone of their voices were pretty much what a couple of girls of any description would sound like. They liked the soft odor of the soap and applied it liberally. I helped.

Mr. Conklin made the soaps from oil and scents according to ancient recipes he said were set down in Arabic writings before the time of Jesus. I didn't know about none a' that, but the womenfolk all liked it—and I had to admit I liked smelling clean and fresh after a bath.

The Indian girls took to the soap bars immediately, especially the bars scented like perfume and flowers. Guess that proved the wants and needs of the female of the species didn't much care whether their skin was a dusky tan or ivory white. As for me, I tended to use the bars that didn't smell of anything.

When we were all dressed again, we kinda looked at each other, not quite knowing what to do next. I knew the sign language for meat ... for food, water, and rest. Ehawee had taught me that much, so I pointed in the direction of the wagon train and gave them the signs for meat and water.

They discussed it ... the oldest boy was decidedly against it ... but Pretty Green Eyes gestured around at the Indian children and made several sharp comments that he didn't counter. When Mary Ann walked up to him, took him by the hand and simply started walking down the trail towards the wagons, he wilted completely.

I took Pretty Green Eyes’ right hand in my left, and motioned to the rest of our group pick a partner and do the same. Before another minute passed, we were all of us were paired up … or tripled up, in a couple a' cases. We formed up in a long line, making our way hand-in-hand through the woods down toward the campfires and the wagon train.

CHAPTER NINE

"They're Hunkpapa Lakota, first among the council fires of the Lakota nation," Ehawee told us around the campfire. "They're from a band who went further south than usual to hunt the buffalo ... a small village with not many warriors." She spoke rapidly to Pretty Green Eyes for a moment. "Ahhhhh," Ehawee said slowly when my pretty young Indian maiden replied, hanging her head. "The Pawnee attacked their village early in the morning and, as far as these kids know, killed everyone but these children." She waited for more words from Pretty Green Eyes.

"The young children were already out picking berries and hid in the brush beside a river when the Pawnee attacked. The young man was away from the village hunting for deer.

"She and Mika, 'Small Raccoon' ... the young warrior here ... guided the children away from the place and they’ve been leading them north and a little east … she says … ever since, looking for kinfolk.

"They were awful glad to find some other people their own age and they are very glad we are so friendly," Ehawee told us. She waited for another burst of speech. "Ahhhh, things were getting grave. Mika killed a small female buffalo calf four days ago, so they've been eating good ... but his last arrow was broken and they would have had to stop to make new ones."

"How far have they come," Pa asked.

Ehawee asked the Indian girl.

"They don't know. However far twenty suns would get them."

"This fella has brought them this far from Pawnee country?" Pa asked, "...was trying to do the hunting for ... eleven growin' kids ... all by himself? You say the girl wouldn't let them try to go back south to their village?"

"Right!" Ehawee answered. "It seems the girl here is a spirit leader—a medicine woman—or at least her father was, and she will be. She and the young warrior—they're brother and sister—planned things together ... but he did all the hunting and guiding them across the prairie and such."

"Well, they'd have run into some Teton Hunkpapa sooner or later, assuming they didn't starve first ... or get found by a Blackfoot war party or something," Pa said musingly. "They were surely headed in the right direction anyway."

" 'Mika’ did all this," I asked Ehawee. The Indians all looked at me when I spoke. Ehawee nodded.

"Is there a Lakota word for 'wise and brave warrior'," I asked Ehawee.

"Enapay Wahchinksapa," she replied quietly.

I looked at the young man across the fire. "Would you tell him for me I am not wise in the ways of his people, but I think he should not be called 'Mika’, the raccoon, any longer. He is 'Enapay Wahchinksapa’ ," I said, speaking the strange words slowly, "for bringing the young ones through all this way and keeping them safe."

Ehawee looked at me for a long moment then turned to the young man and spoke slowly, gesturing toward me near the end. The young warrior got to his feet, said something very guttural and very short to Ehawee and turned to walk away into the dimness beyond the wagons.

Ehawee said. "He says it was only his duty to his people."

"Still...," I began.

Ehawee made a chopping motion with her hand.

"He cannot let the girls and women see his eyes," she said. "But he appreciates you honoring him as you did far more than you can know, Jeremiah Richardson."

I nodded, understanding completely.

The Indian girl spoke softly.

"She asks what you would call her," Ehawee said.

"Pretty Green Eyes," I said instantly.

“Wasté Thózi Ishtá,” Ehawee translated.

The Indian girl lowered her head, then looked up at me. She smiled and nodded, letting loose with a long string a words I didn’t understand.

"She likes it," Ehawee translated when Pretty Green Eyes finished speaking. "She says she is a woman now and it is time she set her child name aside."

I didn't need anyone to tell me she liked it. I could see it shining brightly in her eyes.

* * *

Well, the young warrior and Pretty Green Eyes were indeed brother and sister ... and they'd figured out when we met that Mary Ann and I were siblings also. We did favor one another quite a bit.

The other green-eyed little girl was a cousin of theirs ... but I couldn't figure out whether a first or second cousin. Among them, things like ‘second cousin’ didn't seem to mean exactly what they did in our society.

Not much was said around the occupants of the wagon train about how it came to be that us kids found and brought eleven young Hunkpapa children back to camp from the forest, though it had to have been quite a shock. Pa and Mr. Conklin took in the story us kids had concocted about everyone wandering around looking for berries or somewhere to fish and coming across the Indians accidental like. When asked what happened to the berries, we had to say real quick that we shared them with the Indian kids and we hadn't actually managed to catch any fish. After the first questioning, nothing was said.

I kinda wondered what they really thought about a passel of kids coming in all at the same time ... and all of the girls, Lakota and white alike, smelling like rose petals and all the boys looking suspiciously clean too—I mean, how often does that happen in this world? None of the adults said a danged thing though! I thought that was very … very curious when I got a chance to think about it. At the time, I was just plumb grateful.

Right off, most of the kids from the wagon train, an' me too, started learning the Lakota tongue from the Indian kids and teaching English right back at 'em. Pa and the other adults didn't know it, but we got started by naming body parts to each other and working from there. In a couple of days, we had a working vocabulary, you might say, and it was growing fast. Verbs were a more difficult, but bodily functions ... such as fucking ... served to give us a head start there too. Pointing to one's lips, teeth, nose, hair, an' so on, worked wonders.

Ehawee told me the words for brother, and sister too. When we had some time without grownups around, me and Mary Ann talked with my Pretty Green Eyes and her brother, Enapay Wahchinksapa. The brother and sister looked very much alike when their faces were in repose. When Enapay Wahchinksapa was in one of his ‘me fierce warrior’ modes, he didn’t resemble Wasté Thózi Ishtá very much at all. Me and Mary Ann clearly looked like one another, and they'd seen that, spying on us from the brush that first day.

After separately asking Ehawee, all innocent-like, for a few key words, me and Mary Ann got it through to Pretty Green Eyes and Enapay that they couldn't talk to Ehawee or anyone else about what we were all doing. Pretty Green Eyes assured me they wouldn't ... well, actually she looked at me like I was a danged fool to suggest they wouldn't know that already. But I shrugged, and smiled my way back into her good graces.

We didn't have enough words in common to find out how they had started having sex with each other, and we couldn't tell them how Mary Ann and me got started, but that night, the four of us made sure once again that each of us understood how things were.

Me and Enapay, as I began calling him, shortening his name up considerably, mounted the girls several times each. We swapped gals a couple of times, and thoroughly exhausted ourselves, but it was wonderful. Everything came so danged easy and comfortable amongst the four of us.

* * *

We were getting into higher terrain now, actually closing in on one of the several huge chains of mountains they call the Rockies. Caleb got in from his scouting trip one evening and rode right up to Pa with a big grin on his face.

Seems like we were pointed just a little too far north of where they'd planned to go all along. Making the course correction was an easy thing to do—a matter of picking up our wagon tongue, walking a pace southwest and then dropping the tongue again on the right bearing. There weren't no big rivers nor mountains in the way nor anything.

When I got a chance, I asked Caleb about how three of the Lakota children could have green eyes. He grew thoughtful and sat on a stump to light his pipe.

"Wall...," he said reflectively, taking a deep puff. "Of course, the French voyagers and British traders were out here a long time before Americans were," he opined. "And, you know, men being men and women being women, a lot of babies was getting made and some a' them were born with green eyes ... and a few with blue eyes too." He stopped and puffed out a couple clouds of smoke.

"An' then, I recollect my pap telling me his great-grandpa, I don' know how many times removed, wrote in his journal about coming ashore back about the time of the Pilgrims ... and they was already some green-eyed Indians even then—some blue-eyed ones too. Don't know how that could a happened, but there it is," he told me.

I thought that over while he puffed. I was worried about the Lakota kids. There were folks in this part of the country who were dead set against the whole Lakota nation.

The Fetterman massacre had happened back in '66, not too much north and west of where we were—but the war with Red Cloud had been over for a spell and his band of Lakota were on the reservation now. But Red Cloud wasn't chief of all the Lakota, not by a long shot. Whites kept on pushing through Lakota territory ... we were doing that also, probably ... and I didn't know how much that friction was going to affect our relationships with the kids.

"You think it will be war with the Lakota nation?" I asked.

He studied on that a moment. "Yeah," he said finally. "I expect the treaty our government signed with the Lakota nation isn't gonna last too durned long. There’re too many whites wanting to settle on land the Lakota claim as their hunting ground and, from their side of things, the young warriors don't much want peace neither.

"See ... the Lakota were doing some farming way back when, over around the Great Lakes somewheres a few hundreds a’ years ago. When horses stole from the Spanish down in the southwest began showing up in the northern prairie, the Lakota got their hands on some and they left all the farming behind. Nowadays, the Lakota men don't do nothing but war and hunt. That's the only way they see they can make something of themselves, become powerful and get more women."

He smoked on for a moment, then he rose and shook out the burned tobacco on the stump. "And… tellin' the truth, they don't wanta go back to bein' farmers nor nothin' like that. I reckon if you take fighting and counting coup away from the Lakota warriors ... they'd figger they just don't have that much left to look forward to," he concluded.

He marched off down the hill, leaving me to wonder where that left us. I was more confused than ever.

* * *

I had me a talk with some of the older kids like Mary Ann, Esther, and even Ed Lafferty. I didn't think we should have any more big 'parties' out in the woods or where other folks could sneak up on us. This time it was eleven kids no older'n us, but it coulda been a war party—an' we knew for a fact the Pawnee were out. I felt like ... maybe two or maybe even three couples getting together close by … and for just some quiet get-togethers that wouldn't attract any attention was the best way to go for right now.

Everyone agreed … reluctantly. The word that Pawnee warriors had attacked these Indian children’s village not all that very far south of where we were right now was causing considerable concern. I played on that anxiety to include a healthy fear that the adults might find out about us and that would be a real, real bad thing to happen to us. It wouldn't just mean the end of something we were coming to really look forward to, but some of us ... Ed Lafferty, for instance ... could get in a heap a’ trouble. Men have been hanged for less than what Ed Lafferty was doing, pretty much on a daily basis, with one or more of the younger girls.

No one was happy about dispensing with the big parties and frequent couplings, but everyone finally, unenthusiastically, agreed with the necessity to take more care. Everyone found a way to come up to me when there weren't any growed up men or women around and let me know they wouldn't be sneaking off for another big get-together like the one where the Lakota children had come up on us. It was just too danged dangerous, they said. It was nice to hear my words coming back around and said to my face.

Didn't stop the younger generation from finding ways to get together, though. At night, there was a ton of moving around and lots of stifled gasps and moans that I could just barely hear. Sometimes I thought there was a lot more movement and ... noise ... all around me than just a few kids moving around could account for. I didn't know how Pa and Mr. Conklin and the others failed to hear all the commotion, but nothing ever came of it.

On the second night after I had my talk with Caleb Struthers about the Lakota and war, I heard a rustling at the tailgate end of the wagon and I wondered who was paying me a visit tonight. The wagon I stayed in now was the old Conestoga Pa had bought and loaded full of hides and furs back at the prairie town. It wasn't as big as our own special-bought wagons—but it was comfortable enough. We were steadily using up them hides—had already made quite a dent in them, in fact. There was plenty of room for my pallet and I just naturally stayed on in there after I got better from the bear attack.

In the gloom, I couldn't tell who it was, but a whine told me quick enough. Mrs. Melinda Lafferty had come to visit, and she brought her baby with her. They came naked. I guess they just hopped off the Lafferty wagon, scooted back along the line of wagons one space, and climbed up my wagon's step stairs, big as you please. I snuffed out my candle and stood up beside my bed.

Now, Melinda Lafferty was all woman, even if she was barely five foot tall. If she had been a mare, she'd have been talked about as being short-coupled—that is, short of back, but quick of movement. Short coupled horses made fine cutting horses to work cattle, for instance. They had quick reactions and seemed unusually adept at moving around with grace and agility.

That was sixteen-year-old Melinda to a T. She had big, big breasts that seemed too large to fit inside the silhouette of her ribcage, and she wasn't shy about pushing them into a man's body to get him doin' what she wanted him to do. Right solid too … not chubby, mind ya … there wasn't much baby fat left on her frame, being quite firmly packed instead. When she bumped into Nel Owens one time when he wouldn't get out a' her way, he bounced off the shoulder she put into his ribs and he wound up on the ground wondering what had happened to 'im.

"I want you right now!!" Melinda whispered urgently in my ear when she come up to where I stood. She got up on her bare tiptoes and pasted her lips to mine. Our tongues dueled for a moment but Melinda was hungry for something more … and soon, too. She undid my pants with practiced fingers and pushed them down. Belatedly, I grabbed for them, remembering the almost-two-year-old girl Melinda had brought with her.

"What about Phoebe?" I asked.

"She's seen it before," Melinda answered carelessly, and giggled.

"Phoebe?" she called gently to get the child's attention.

My eyes were getting used to the darkness. Little Phoebe was standing unsteadily on the pile of hides and furs I called home. I saw the toddler turn to her mother expectantly.

"Jeremiah has a cock, just like daddy," Melinda said coaxingly.

Phoebe turned to me and abruptly sat down on the pallet and scooted her little behind to the edge. She examined my rising penis, not so much dubiously as appraisingly. Then she reached out, took my prick in her tiny hands and leaned forward to plant a wet little kiss right on the tip.

I couldn't help but groan. I could barely see what little Phoebe was doing. The moon was only just now rising and there wasn't much light yet. But what I could see was plenty. The tiny girl couldn't begin to take my big cock in her mouth, but she could put it to her lips to the end and suck for all she was worth. The sight made me harder than the gun barrel on my Winchester.

Melinda giggled. "Isn't she just the sweetest?" she asked.

I shakily agreed.

"Grace said to show you this," Melinda said. While she stroked my back and buttocks, she held up a bag of some kind. She held it up and I saw it was a bladder of some sort, from which animal, I didn't know. Looking close in the dim moonlight, I could see a rubber tube with a wooden valve-thing fastened to one end.

"OK...," I said, mystified.

She giggled. "It's for an enema," she explained ... which didn't explain a durned thing to me. Couldn't recall ever having heard the word before.

"This end goes up my bung hole," she said brightly, holding up the wooden part, "and I squeeze this end to squirt soapy water … or fresh water … up my butt!" she said gleefully. "And I did! … just before I come over here," she added. "Cleans me right out, by golly."

I could see how that would do the trick alright.

She held up a bottle that I hadn't seen her bring in, any more'n I seen the enema thing. Guess I was concentrating on what her baby was doing to the end of my cock.

She poured a quantity of something from the bottle. "This oil," she said quietly, hefting the bottle, "goes on THIS," she continued, putting a hand on my hard prick, "and THAT goes in HERE!!" She turned around and wiggled her ass at me. She bent over double and reached back to finger her butt hole to make sure I figured out what she meant.

I could just barely tell where her finger was in the dimness, but the moonlight was getting stronger—clouds were drifting away from between us an' the moon, I expected.

I knew what she wanted, but….

"I never did...," I started hesitantly. In Pa’s tintypes, there'd been a couple showing a man fucking a woman's ass hole, but I'd never done it myself. Hadn't even thought about doing it yet.

"I'll take care of everything," Melinda said briskly.

And so she did. She spent a couple of minutes slopping oil all over my penis and her butt crack and then she climbed up on the pile of hides. On her knees and elbows, she pushed her butt up in the air and eased backward until she could feel my cock poking between her buttcheeks. Then she surprised me by pulling her baby girl in front of her face.

Melinda ducked down to lap a minute or two at her daughter's baby slit. And THAT sure enough lit a fire in me!

"You just hold still," she cautioned me, resting her face on her baby's belly for a second. She reached under herself and handled my cock, guiding it right up to her bottom hole. "You let me back up onto your cock," Melinda said thickly. Her hands were quivering when she touched me.

It was the first sign I'd seen that she was in the grip of an extra powerful excitement. I found out later Melinda didn't want to be butt-fucked often, but when she did want it, there was nothing else that would satisfy her ... and she wanted it tonight.

She started easing back, still holding my prick in her hand and setting the right angle for it to dive deep into her nether chute. "I put a dildo in me butthole for a while afore I came over here," she said faintly. "Takes too long if I don't."

A little while longer, and she had the whole of me inside her chute and she was beginning to rock back and forth on her knees. It took her a bit, but she was soon moving smartly and still managing to lick baby Phoebe's cute little pussy lips at the same time.

I experimented, moving my cock in tight little circles inside her clamping bowels. She gasped and grunted, but it didn't seem to be a painful thing. I did it again, setting my hands more firmly just above her bottom globes, and then gripping her hipbones.

"Fuck my arse, Jere!" she pleaded hoarsely.

I took her at her word and took more control, holding her rump in place with my hands and rocking my groin forward and then back. I tried different speeds, tried spilling a little more oil on the place where my cock drove into her backside, and then I rammed inward, deeper and deeper. Melinda seemed content to lay there and groan into her daughter's cunt, which delighted the toddler no end.

In a few moments, I figgered out that the more I could wind my cock around the entrance to her butt hole like I was a corkscrew, the better she liked it. We settled into a gasping, snorting, pounding rhythm and tore at each other for a long while.

All of a sudden, Melinda squealed into her daughter's tiny cunt and began slammin' back at me harder than ever. I leaned over her back and pushed a hand down to her cunt from the front and fingered her clitty.

She went berserk and started jerking around something fierce ... and when my cream began spraying inside her bowels, she spasmed hard, lost her balance, scrambled around for a bit, and tumbled down to the pile of hides beside her girl child. She lay there on her face, whimpering and trembling uncontrollably for a long moment. She gave out a heartfelt sigh and was still. I pumped another volley of semen up her ass tube and then fell on top of her, fighting for breath and hoping no one in the other wagons could hear my heart pounding like it was. Little Phoebe gurgled and clapped her tiny hands gleefully.

* * *

After a while, we sneaked out of the wagon, trying to be quiet and went down to the stream to clean up. In her little bag of tricks, Melinda had also brought soap and she cleaned my penis and her backside carefully, while the baby splashed happily in the shallows a bit further upstream. I hadn't really wanted to take this chance, but cleaning up was a really good thing to do in my mind, considerin' where my johnson had just been. Turned out, we weren't the only naked people on the creek bank—there was at least two other couples a cleaning up too.

I very carefully did not try to figure out who they were, and nobody spoke, but they were short, so I figured they were kids in our licentious little group. Right toward the end, I thought I saw a tall, shadowy figure back up in the trees like, but when I crouched and concentrated on looking up that way, there wasn't nobody there. I was just scaring myself.

Back in the wagon, Melinda wanted to cuddle a short spell. and she was a sturdily built little woman, not plump or anything, just ... comfortably fleshy ... and it felt good to press the length of my body up against hers. In a while, the baby got restless and finally broke free of Melinda’s arms. Holding on to my nose—of all things—to steady herself, little Phoebe straddled my head and sat down on my chest. Then, in case I didn't get the idea, she scooted up and butted her baby cunt lips on my chin.

"You know what she wants, right?" Melinda said amusedly.

I planted a kiss on Phoebe's tiny cunt lips. "Indeed I do," I replied. "And if her mom would care to mount my cock, Phoebe can ride my tongue to her heart's content."

No sooner said than done. Melinda got aboard without any fanfare nor any wasted time neither, and away we galloped.

Naked flesh slapping naked flesh and naughty slurping sounds were the only noises in that wagon for a long while and then ... then, I swear it, I think young Phoebe actually started trembling her way through a baby orgasm. I didn't even know a girl-child this young could get one, but she surely was happy with what was happening to her body.

When she finished quivering, the little one seemed to be completely exhausted and fell off to my left side. She inserted a thumb in her little mouth and went fast asleep.

Melinda moved her baby onto a separate pad of fox furs toward front of the wagon box and came back to me, ready to keep on fucking. We did it twice more that night, or maybe it was technically three. I think once she just refused to stop even though she came hard, 'cause after a tiny break in her rhythm, she resumed thrusting her groin back up at mine and I pounded right back.

Sex with Melinda wasn't an artistic kinda thing. It was more like one of those 'football' matches the Eastern colleges were putting together. An athletic event, you might say.

In the end, Melinda wanted me on top of her, all my weight laying flat on her whilst my cock drove deep inside her. She was kicking my buttocks with her heels, spurring me on as I strained to drive my cock hard and ever deeper in her while she bucked her cunt back up to me like a woman possessed. That last time left us both fighting for air and trembling with fatigue.

When it came time for my visitors to leave, Melinda was so tired, I had to help her back to her wagon in the pre-dawn darkness. I wasn't sure her unsteady staggering would have led her back to her and her husband's wagon ... nor whether she'd of been able to carry her baby all the way. She had to come back the next day and get her enema thing.

I kept the half-used bottle of oil, though ... just in case she and baby Phoebe came back some day.

CHAPTER TEN

Two days later, we were taking our mid-day meal after watering the stock when we caught sight of Caleb running his horse hard, just a fogging it. He was waving the bow he used for hunting over his head like a mad man, tryin' to get our attention. He was screeching something none of us could understand.

He was a long way off—we could see pretty durn far up the gentle slope of a Rocky Mountain foothill to where he was. Then we saw following him, a couple hundred yards back, a big band of fifty-odd ... maybe more ... painted savages riding just as hard as he was.

The shots they started firing, once they saw we were forewarned, at the retreating mountain man were completely useless. Durn fools. Nobody can hit nothing from the back of a galloping horse, excepting the ground maybe ... and not always that.

With the oxen already hitched to the wagons in preparation for moving on after our nooning, all Pa had to do was direct us to circle up around the small herd of cattle and horses that had already been gathered together in a small group ready to herd them onward.

Now, mind you, some of them wagons had drivers no more 'n ten years old, but by golly, they did what they had to and did it durned well. We had time to string rope from the front of one wagon up to the rear of the one just forward, making a workable corral to keep the livestock in place.

So, there we was. Thirty-one of us whites ... a couple a’ dozen of us armed—the adults and us older kids—with rifles, shotguns, and pistols ... plus eleven Lakota children, survivors of a Pawnee massacre, one with a bow and arrow ready for use, an' one with a Winchester rifle I'd just given her three days afore. My Pretty Green Eyes was proving to be a durn good shooter with the weapon—which pissed her brother off somethin' fierce 'cause he wasn't!

Anyway, all of us were inside a circle of wagons, holding our live stock safe inside the circle and folks takin’ shelter behind the solid bulk of the wagon boxes. Soon, the whole perimeter bristled with Winchester repeating rifles.

The Indians saw some of the rifles were wielded by youngsters and, contemptuously, they charged just about the time we had our circle complete. Everyone let loose. I'm sure some of us fired all fourteen 'r fifteen rounds Pa let us load in them Winchesters.

The attack must of lasted all of three seconds 'cause them painted heathens lost four or five men killed right off … an' some more had blood showin’ from wounds. Lead must of snapped by many an ear too. Just as if they'd planned on doing it, every single one of them wheeled their mounts around at the exact same moment and they run back off about twice as fast as they'd come in at us.

Pa proved why he'd gone off to war a very junior company officer and come back a General commanding a full brigade. We had a little time to regroup and Pa got us working on improving our situation right quick-like. He didn't let us rest until we had our oxen unhitched and turned into the center of the circle, extra ammunition handed out, and more ropes strung between the wagons to make a better barrier against charging horses, just in case. We were actually astride a shallow creek, so these wild Indians couldn't cut us off from water, and we had a good view all around so they couldn't sneak up on us.

"Blackfoot," Caleb said laconically, now on the ground after turning his horse into our rope corral and grabbing up one of his rifles. What he said told us pretty much all we needed to know. They were deadly enemies of the Lakota, and us … and they'd just as soon take all a' our scalps as look at us.

Seeing they couldn't take us with a rush—they'd already lost more warriors than they were comfortable with—they decided they wanted to parley. So we let a trio of 'em come close to the wagon circle and make all kinds of loud talk and wild gestures by way of talking sign.

Caleb spoke some Blackfoot and he could fill in the spaces 'tween the words he could understand by readin' sign. Seems what they wanted was the Lakota children they'd already seen in our camp, and all of our horses and cattle, including our oxen. Then they said we could go on our way.

Pa spat on the ground in front of the fella we figgered was the chief. It was a deadly insult, but there wasn't a thing to be gained by being polite. Pa’s hands moved in the sign for refusing a parley and the look of contempt on his face was something the warrior couldn't abide.

Clearly furious, the warrior turned and walked away, his eyes darting in all directions. When he detoured toward one of the Lakota girls peeking out from behind one of the wagons, I stepped in between him and the girl, and I leveled my Winchester at his bare chest and eared back the hammer. If he'd taken another step, I'd a killed him ... and he knew it. I was takin’ up slack in the trigger when he finally gave it up.

He turned his black-painted heathen face away and trotted right back to his horse outside the circle. He lifted a high-pitched scream, raised his rifle above his head and led his band off to a little rise, quite a distance away from the nearest wagon.

They sat there a while, haranguing one another and probably trying to come up with a way to kill the lot of us without loosing any more men. After a while, Black Face stood up on his horse and faced away from us, bent over and showed us his bare buttocks. No one needed Caleb's explanation that it was gesture of scorn.

Well sir, we had a few Sharps rifles in camp, and one of them was mine. It was special-bought by Pa, one of the sporting rifles Sharps built with a thirty-two inch barrel and Creedmore sights. I pulled it out a' my wagon and took a look at Pa to make sure he was OK with what I was about to do. Then I put the barrel on top of the nearest wagon box and aimed up the hill at that Blackfoot chief.

The open ladder sights on that Sharps were manufactured for a variety of distances, the longest setting was supposed to be good for about 1,200 yards ... but I knew I could lay the weapon on a target even further if I had to…. Looked to me that, today, I had a shot of right at a thousand yards or so to take care of business. I pulled the set-trigger ... the front one was now ready to fire the rifle if someone was to breathe real hard on the trigger.

There still wasn't no wind, and they were only slightly up hill ... I let out some of my breath, steadied my heart, and let my hand slowly contract, like I would if my hand was full of Mary Ann's left tit. When the walnut butt of the rifle slammed back into my shoulder and nigh knocked me sprawling, it was almost as much a surprise to me as it was to everyone else, just like it needs to be for good shooting.

Took a little while to get there, and I couldn't see much through the black powder cloud, so I stepped to the side.

That Blackfoot warrior-chief was still bent over waggling his ass at us when the bullet struck 'im. The big .52 caliber round smashed into his spine a little ways above his hips and ripped on upward at an angle through his body.

When it exited his body, it made a huge hole in his chest. Parts of heart and breastbone sprayed everywhere in a reddish cloud we could easily see from where we were. He just kinda pitched forward, like somebody'd punched him right smartly from behind, and he tumbled right over the horse's head. He had to have been dead before he hit the ground.

Those Blackfoot warriors didn't know what to do for a bit. They scattered, then come back together to look at the chief's body for a bit. They looked real mean down the slope at us for a while, talked and yelled at each other and carried on something fierce. Then, after a while, they just rode off.

Caleb said the long range shot, which showed them they wasn't safe even that far off, along with the dead they'd already suffered, meant their medicine wasn't good that day, particularly against us, and they decided to pass us by.

A couple of them did come back later on, their face and bodies clean of paint and a mite more respectful. They took the bodies of all the dead away. We let 'em, though I did put one of the wounded horses out of its misery right whilst they were standing beside the animal, just to remind them they were there on sufferance.

I wasn't allowed to fill my own plate at the cook fire for a week. I got lots of late night visitors too, particularly from a certain young Lakota girl who said she'd seen eleven summers.

It must of been a very instructive eleven summers, and she went to a lot of trouble to see that I got the benefit of every single one of them.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

We knew we were somewhere north and east of Denver, but not as far north as Soda Springs, and not on a trail where we'd wind up in either of those two places. The mountains that had seemed so far away when we started out from Council Bluffs in May, were stark and clear on the horizon now in August, and the going was considerably harder.

We took precautions, keeping scouts out in front and behind too, with outriders on our flanks when the terrain allowed. Mostly, these days, it didn't ... like now.

We were working our way through a narrow valley with walls so steep, it was almost a canyon. There was no cover on the mountain slopes on either side for an ambush to get set up, so it was just front and rear security, as Pa spoke of it, that we had to be careful of.

We went slow, only a few wagons at a time through the narrowest, most difficult part, and that meant some wagons had to wait. And mine, the older Conestoga Pa had bought back at the settlement, was one of the last.

I was riding rear guard with my Sharps in a saddle boot, and my Winchester resting on the saddle horn, when Ed Lafferty come riding up and told me I should get for'rd to see to my wagon. One of the wheels was squeaking something terrible, he said, an’ likely to fall off any time.

When I got there, Pa and my oldest brother, Jesse were letting the front left of the wagon back down. They'd already re-greased the durn thing and it was ready to go. They rode off again, wanting to catch up to the front of the wagon train and make sure things were good there.

I went down to the little crick that meandered through the valley and washed off most of the dust kicked up by the passage of the wagons. And then I took off my boots and let my dogs cool off a little in the cool water. Pa said to let Lafferty stay back of the wagons in my place ... he volunteered for some reason ... and I could stay here, keeping my rifle handy, of course.

I went back up to the wagon but I hadn't no more than picked up my towel to dry off my feet before there was a call from outside.

"Jere...? You in there?" I knew it was Grace ... and my first reaction was to grin. I could keep my rifle close, and still enjoy the company of the insatiable young girl. Somebody's cock might not be inside her up under her skirt right at that moment, but she liked to talk dirty whilst keeping an innocent face. That was fun too … and she would make up any number of naughty games as she went along.

"Jere ... the girls want to come in and show you their new dresses," Grace called.

I was disappointed. The only wagons left were mine, the Lafferty's, and behind theirs was the wagon Grace and my sisters all three slept in … 'cept Grace kept finding excuses for my sisters to sleep elsewhere. I figgered the girls she was talking about were my sisters, Emily and Rachel. "Sure ... come on in," I said loudly.

That's who it was. My twelve-year-old sister Emily and ten-year-old Rachel, along with the lover I shared with many of the kids in camp, twelve-year-old Grace, came in over the lowered tailgate.

All three of 'em were in newly stitched-together Lakota style dresses made of the softest buckskin. My sisters stood in front of Grace, proudly displaying their new outfits with skirts that ended some distance above the knee. They were smiling happily at me. I thought they looked very pretty in their new outfits and I told them so.

"Pa liked 'em too," Emily told me ... which cleared up one question I had in my mind. If Pa had already okayed the display of young girl flesh, there wouldn't be any repercussions later on. I could enjoy what I was lookin' at.

"Close your eyes, Jere," Grace instructed. When I did, I heard a little rustle but I never paid it no never mind. She went on. "Now ... do you like Emmie and Rachel in their new dresses ... or like THIS??"

When I opened my eyes, you can imagine my astonishment to find my two little sisters were now naked as the day they was born a standing right in front of me. I just gaped at them for the longest time. All of a sudden, I was presented with a thing I hadn't let myself think of before ... but there was a part of me that had known all along this moment was looming just out of sight.

"I ... you can't ... I mean...." I stumbled around for a bit, searching' for the right thing to say. "You're too little...." They was prepared for that, the sneaky little devils.

"Girls, show 'im!" Grace said imperiously.

The girls moved past me ... twelve-year-old Emily almost shouldered me out of the way in her hurry to get to my sleeping pallet. They laid down on their backs, took a couple of dildoes from Grace's hands and proceeded to insert them inside themselves ... just like they had been doing it their whole lives long. In less time than it takes to tell, my little sisters were laying side by side and working lacquered wooden phalluses in and out of their sweet cunts.

I was THAT surprised. I shot a quick glance at Grace. My sisters were in the very position I'd suggested she and Esther could get in for a tintype. Grace just grinned impudently right back at me. She knew exactly what I was remembering.

"Girls....," I said hoarsely. "Y'all just can't...."

"Grace gave us these," Emmie interrupted. "Don't you think we look pretty with them?"

They lay there, beaming up at me, unable to keep from wriggling their hips all around. They were excited already from the sensations they were creating in themselves.

I studied them for a second.

Now ... a body gets used to seeing folks in one certain way, ya know? Like … in my mind … my twelve-year-old sister, Emmie, was a still a little girl, slender as a reed, who delighted in dancing all about the room, up on her toes and whirling around like an ballerina. Like as not, it were an image I had in my mind from a couple of Christmases ago when she undertook to entertain all of us on a frigid winter night by tickling everyone she could see, mugging at them prettily, and just bein’ cute as the dickens. My view of ten-year-old Rachel was that of a bright-eyed, happy little girl—still a little chubby from the baby fat she carried—who loved to be tickled, hugged, and made much of every chance she got.

Well, sir ... neither image in my mind was right. Emily wasn't near as slim as I thought, not any more. With dark blonde hair she wore half-way down her back, she had a pair of breasts about the size a’ small lemons, long, long legs and dainty, well shaped ankles and pretty feet. My twelve-year-old sister was cute as the dickens too. I reckoned she was gonna break a bunch a’ hearts in her time … and she’d be startin’ real soon.

Ten-year-old Rachel wasn't near as plump as I thought she would be beneath her pioneer dress neither. The clothes hid a body that still had some baby fat on her, but not very much! Little Rachel had a little more meat on her bones than her sister, but not displeasingly so, and her young breasts were actually a little bigger than her older sister. Her tits were like young apples, perched high on her chest ... she was a little prairie hen ... always pushing her burgeoning breasts ahead of her.

They both were more grown up than I thought possible, and they both had beautifully shaped legs, well sculpted by the hundreds of miles we'd walked on the way West—and nice little body curves too ... not the exciting hourglass figure of full-growed women, nor even the shapeliness of sixteen-year-old Mary Ann, but still ... very, very nice.

"I'm near as old as Grace is," Emily said quietly. She was watching me real close and she was about to cloud up and rain all over me if I didn’t see the light. I was taking too long, and over-thinking things that I'd really known would play out this way, sooner or later. Too many kids in the wagon train were already involved—it hadn't been just me and Grace for a long time now. It stood to reason my little sisters would join the group and take the leap into having regular sex.

"I know you are," I replied, letting out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. There was nothing to do but agree with what everyone else in the wagon train seemed to be feeling. I undid my belt and let my trousers drop to the bottom of the wagon. Both girls' eyes fastened on my half-hard penis as it came into view. Their breaths began to come faster.

The pallet of buffalo hides had been waist high on me when I'd first been injured, but they'd been flattened out some by me laying on them so many nights since. I stepped out of my pants and shuffled up to the pile of hides and bent forward to kiss young Emmie's cunt lips for the first time. I was fingering Rachel's cunt at the same time, so in about two shakes of a lamb’s tail I had both of them groanin’ and moanin’, and wriggling around on the patchwork quilt I used for a sheet. Then I switched around and Rachel commenced to cooing and whining while Emily hunched on the two fingers I had sliding in and out of her.

Rising, I moved over in front of Emily and pulled her pretty butt right to the edge of the pallet, spraddled my legs just a tad to adjust my height in relation to her cunt, and put my cock to her outer lips. I didn't know how long the girls had been waiting for me today, but it was apparently long enough to start their honey flowing and stretch out their vagina opening, so I didn't wait any longer.

My cock glided into my twelve-year-old sister's sheath like it was a spear sinking into soft butter. I paused when the knob of my prick passed through where her maidenhead had once guarded entry.

She and I both sighed heavily. I could feel the hot, delicious tightness around my cock and I dare say Emily could feel the heat of her brother's penis filling her up and stretching her inner lips so wonderfully.

When my feet were set, I pushed deeper, steadily and unhurriedly, driving my cock deep into her. Her feet rose in the air and I levered them over my shoulders to give me even deeper access to my twelve-year-old sister's cunny. When I touched bottom, we both moaned softly.

I retreated, pulling everything but the big knob of my prick out of her to glisten slickly in the light. And then I slipped it back in—not fast, but not delaying either.

Emily gave out a little groan and her left leg slipped off my shoulder. Planting her foot on the coverlet, she used it for leverage and, for the first time, began to hump back up at me. After a bit, she got her right leg under her too and we got into a rhythm of thrust and counterstroke that soon had us a’ gruntin’ and groanin’ like two animals in heat ... which I reckon is exactly what we were.

It didn't last too long for neither of us. I was too hot from just the thought of doing my sisters, and she'd been using the dildo for a mite too long to be able to stave off her comin’. After not many minutes, Emily's first climax with me started rippling through her ... and it was all I could do to stop my pearly-white come from spraying all over the inside of her cunt. She squealed, bumped her arse up in the air a bit ... and then dropped back to the quilts and lay there, with only enough strength remainin’ to smile happily up at the wagon bows and canvas cover, not that she saw neither one.

I stood there a pantin’ hard, tryin’ to drag enough air into my lungs so I wouldn’t get too dizzy. The air this high up in the mountains was something a body had to get used to.

"Did you come off in my sister?" Rachel demanded, her eyes just of dancing as she stood on her knees and pretended to scold me.

"I did not!" I replied, chuckling. "Our dearest Emily did everything she could ... but I knew I had another lovely young pussy wanting me to pay her attention," I said, gently withdrawing from Emmie's tight, velvet smooth sheath. "And I want to pleasure that pussy too," I added, turning to face Rachel directly.

I took a moment of rest, trying to catch my breath, and took the opportunity to cup Rachel's firm breasts in both my hands and fondle them. They felt great in my hands ... firm, but oh, so very soft. The flesh was creamy smooth, save for her pebbled, quarter-sized aureoles ... and the sharp spikes of her nipples. Rachel closed her eyes and savored the sensations washing up and down her body. She whimpered, caught her breath, and moaned again.

"Is it OK for me not to go wash up first?" I asked her gently.

She opened her eyes, uncomprehendingly at first. "Sure!" she said succinctly. "Me and Em' have tasted each other lots already," she added. "I taste the bestest."

"Do not!" Emily whispered, but without much energy behind her words. She needn't have bothered defending herself. Rachel wasn't paying attention.

She scooted around on her knees to present her backside to me. "Grace says it feels really good if you do it from behind, she offered. "Want to?" she asked over her shoulder.

I did. "Uh huh," I answered. "But you're too high on your knees for us to ... ahhhh ... spread your knees wide and get down low ... that's it ... little more ... right there, honey. " I told her. The ten-year-old flopped face first on the quilts and wiggled back a little so her knees was right on the edge of the pile, her thighs spread wide as wide could be and her little pussy opened up nicely for me to plumb with my cock.

"Let me, Jere," Grace cooed breathlessly in my ear.

I hadn't thought of her in what seemed like a long while, but there she was, as naked as me and my sisters. I did what she wanted, seeing as how my hands were both occupied, holding on to Rachel's hips. Grace spread Rachel's puffy outer lips with her slender fingers and deftly introduced my penis between them. Rachel groaned and groaned again when I pushed my hips forward to slide into her volcano-like cunt.

Grace stood beside me, fondling Rachel's lower regions with her left hand and reaching behind me to reach 'tween my legs to massage my balls with her right. She was grinning manically all the while, and trying to time my lunges into Rachel so she could hump my left thigh too. About then, Emily recovered enough to sit up and shift her right hand to cup Grace's mound and begin fingering her friend's cunt.

The wagon suddenly jolted into motion and I 'bout had a fit! I slipped almost completely out of Rachel's cunny and danged near fell flat of my face. If I hadn't been hanging on to Rachel's legs, an' if she weren't holding on to the patchwork quilt, we'd a’ both slid all the way back past the tailgate and right out onto the trail.

The ride smoothed out after the jerking start, but it continued. "Who the heck is driving?" I demanded.

"Oh!" Grace exclaimed. "I 'most forgot." She started clambering over the pallet to the front of the wagon. "That would be Clay," she tossed over her shoulder. "I promised to suck his cock if he drove us while y'all were fucking," she explained. She lifted the canvas sheet that kept the back end private from the front seat a' the wagon.

Clayton Roberson. Helen Conklin’s naked ten-year-old son by her first marriage, grinned back at us and waved. I didn't know anyone had invited him into our little circle of young fuckers. Oh well....

I waved back, maybe a little uncertainly. I was still getting used to the idea of fucking my baby sister while moving down the trail.

Grace squirmed her way up between the wagon seat and the front of the wagon box until her head was right between Clay's naked thighs and facing him. Without any fanfare at all, she about swallowed Clay's ten-year-old penis and he let out an anguished howl that echoed from the valley's close walls. Grace just smiled around his cock and kept sucking and bobbing her head. Clay kept groaning.

I saw Melinda Lafferty glance back from where she was using her switch to guide her left wheel ox. She was off to the side just ahead. She could see everything. The minx laughed out loud. "COME OFF IN HER MOUTH, CLAYTON, BABY," she yelled at the top of her lungs.

I cringed, but the world didn't end, so I guessed—correctly as it turned out—that there was no one else around who wasn't in the group. The wagon behind us was the one Emmie, Rachel, and Grace slept in ... or sometimes did... and it was being driven by a naked 10-year-old Morgan Conklin on the left wheel ox with a just-as-naked little Lakota girl riding right in front of him. I didn't know that at the time, but it was so.

In a moment or two, I collected my senses and began fucking more strongly into Rachel's young cunt. I don't know if the sight of Grace sucking young Clay's cock helped, but it wasn't too much longer that my seed was boiling out and flooding Rachel's insides. She slammed her arse back at me a couple of times and then we were both done for.

A few minutes later, we all three slipped off the back of the moving wagon, still naked except for moccasins, and we padded down to the creek to wash up. Took us a minute or two ... an' when we caught up, we just naturally slowed down to help Morgan mount little Magaskawee, Graceful Maiden. I reckon it was the first time that ol' ox ever had two young children have sex whilst on his broad back as he trod patiently down the trail.

Before we got to the narrowest and roughest part of the passage through the valley, Clayton and Morgan had both gotten their naughty little pricks into my sisters, while I drove the wagon. Grace bounced up and down on my lap 'til she came too ... she nearly fell off the wagon seat ... and I got to finger little Magaskawee into a fine little orgasm too.

Melinda smiled and thanked me when I offered, but she really didn't want anything this afternoon. Said she was still sore in the arse from the other night and needed to rest. Good thing, I think, 'cause I was just about tuckered out. As I look back on it, it was a real good thing we was out in the open doing all this, or otherwise the odor of folks fornicating as fast and hard as they had been doing would of been overpowering.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Things were coming to a head. I could see it coming; I knew Mary Ann and some of the others felt it too. I didn't know exactly what was coming, but things couldn't keep on the way they was. If what we was doing was to come to light back in the Tennessee hills we come from, hanging was the remedy the older boys would get ... and the girls would of been ostracized forever—most likely run out of the county too.

At the same time, things in general around the wagons showed there was a loosening of many of the rules we observed, back home in Tennessee. It seemed there was a definite lack of inhibitions in all of us, and that included the adults. Mrs. Conklin, for instance, was a’ strolling around camp these days with two, sometimes three, buttons undone on her blouse ... and I could remember, real clear, her having them all buttoned up under her chin when we set out on this trip.

Them buckskin skirts were taking over too. Back in Tennessee, womenfolk dressed in dresses with the bottom hem all the way down below the ankles ... and it wasn't unusual for dresses to even brush the floor.

In our wagon train, newly-made Lakota skirts, and dresses ended right above the knee—and some girls were wearing theirs a little higher—but not only that, the girls were cutting slashes in the skirts on the side so they could move around easier. That exposed a lot more girl flesh every time they took a step and it seemed the top of those slashes were a getting higher every day. I had no idea where it would end. Didn't bother me none, ya know ... I liked seeing lots of girl leg myself, and most of the growed up men seemed to appreciate the new attitudes amongst the womenfolk also.

Speaking of the men, we did without our shirts a lot of the time in the late evening or when we were working chopping wood into a size to fit a cook fire or anything like that. With the warm weather yesterday, my brother Jesse come out of his and his wife's wagon wearing a pair of homespun cotton breeches and nothing else—he said it was just too durned hot for wool pants and heavy shirts ... and who was gonna see, anyway?

This evening, for Pete's sake, I think every man in the camp was wearing something like them breeches, except some of the guys didn't have breeches and had just cut a pair of pants off short ... some of them were some ways above their knees. Scissors were getting a workout amongst the folk on the Richardson wagon train.

I saw several circular bands of buckskin getting tossed in the fires, cut from the bottom hem of buckskin skirts ... and there come Mrs. Conklin a traipsing through with a new buckskin outfit on that ended a good four inches above the knee—and that don't count what a fella could see through the slit on the side that was cut still higher.

Mrs. Conklin had a set of right nicely turned ankles and lovely calves for a woman her age—heck, she must be getting near thirty and all. What I really didn't know what I thought about was that her husband was setting right there and making talk about how wonderful she looked and how he thought all women should quit holding back and let themselves go a mite. I wasn't sure what all Hiram was of talking about, but I did like his wife letting go like she was.

I got up and headed into my wagon. It wouldn't take no time at all to cut a pair a’ ol' corduroy breeches of mine down to something more ... in tune with our new outlook on clothes an’ such.

* * *

Well sir, the next night—after Pretty Green Eyes left my wagon with her six-year-old cousin (she was the third child with green eyes in the party of Lakota kids)—I was feelin' kinda restless and I couldn't get to sleep no matter how hard I tried. So, I took my rifle and wandered around for a while outside the circle of wagons, went up a low rise and circled back around the wagon train. I finally settled down against a big ol' tree trunk and I resolved to puzzle things out.

I was on a little knoll, hid pretty good in the deep darkness under some tree branches. I could see every wagon in our train—they weren't that far off. Ever' so often, one wagon or another would begin to shake and rattle around a mite, and moren' once, I thought I could hear muffled cries and some grunting and groaning. I had to shake my head ... I was half amused and half scared Pa or someone would hear them. If he heard any of those kids havin’ sex, I figgered he’d raise a little corner of hell and correct things inside a couple a’ heartbeats.

I saw Hiram Conklin’s wagon start to rocking too ... and its sagging springs squeaked a for quite a while before there was a pause—and then it started all over again. Had to grin about that. I recollected the way Helen looked a’ walking around all saucy like she done after supper, and I couldn't blame her husband for mounting her about a hundred times or so.

Well sir, I was leaning back up against that big ol' tree and I know my silhouette blended right into the bulk of that trunk—unless a body came close enough to touch me with the muzzle of a rifle, couldn’t nobody see me. Long's I didn't move none, I was plumb invisible.

I'd got me many a deer that ways, holding myself still and not rising up with a bow to pump an arrow right behind a front shoulder until the animal was within a few yards. When I was hunting with a rifle, I didn't bother, a’ course.

Anyways, I just lay there, enjoying the night and watching and feeling pretty good about the world in general. An’ then—it was along about three in the morning, judging by the stars—I saw some things I wasn't supposed to. A figure ... a woman without even a night dress on ... climbed down from the main Conklin wagon and strode unconcernedly over to my Pa’s wagon, and climbed right on in.

Now ... I knew Chastity's way of walking and I was sure it was her I was a’ watching. A few minutes later, Hiram Conklin’s oldest daughter, Kittie, got down from Pa’s wagon—which was one of them that had been a rocking and bouncing a while before—and she went over to where her and her husband's wagon was. Then … I'll be durned if Kittie didn't start hugging and kissing on another woman who came out of Kittie's wagon, and this last one woman was Helen Conklin!

About that time, Ehawee climbed out of my brother, David's, wagon—stark, staring naked. She just stood there, basking in the glow of the moon an' drinking something. Couple of minutes later, David and my other brother, Jesse, climbed down an' joined her. I didn’t need that bright moon to tell neither David nor Jesse had a stitch on neither. My older brothers crowded in real close to Ehawee; each one took one of her breasts in hand and began fondling the woman both front and rear. The licentious trio broke off and scrambled back into David's wagon, which commenced to rocking and bouncing around crazily.

I was just plain stunned! I didn't know what to think. It occurred to me to wonder what was happening in Caleb's wagon whilst his woman was cavorting with my brothers an' I sneaked up close on that side of the wagon circle. So it was that I saw Jesse's wife, Cynthia, kissing Caleb and wandering back to Jesse's wagon a little while later.

The moon went behind a cloud and I couldn't see much of anything after that, but I could sure hear a bunch!

* * *

My Pa and me were a ways out to the north side of the wagon train, up on a low hill from where we could see all the wagons nestled up against the trees next to a fast flowing stream rolling deep with icy cold water. We were in the valley Pa and Caleb had been aiming for all along. We were probably gonna move a little more up the valley to find a bench that Pa remembered as a good place to build a settlement, but the urgency was gone. We were here, and with a goodly amount of time to build shelter for the coming winter.

"Pa ... we need to talk," I said, talking fast to cover up how nervous I was.

He took the pipe out of his mouth and studied me for a bit. "OK ... what about?" he asked casually.

I wet my lips. "…About Chastity coming out of Mr. Conklin’s wagon early in this morning without no clothes on ... an' Kittie coming out of yourn later ... and Ehawee being with Jesse and David an' ... Lord, I don't know what all is going on," I answered, my heart in my mouth.

Pa didn't say anything at first. He examined his pipe bowl for proper drawing and calmly tamped down one side with his pocketknife.

"Do tell?" he asked coolly.

I plowed on. "Well, who came out of your wagon the night before ... morning before ... and maybe we should talk about just who's doing what and who they's doing it to," I continued.

"Whom," he said. "To whom they're doing it," he expanded.

I got it. But there's a time to correct a feller's language and there's a time to let it lay. "Pa, dang it, you can't put me off that way."

He grinned. "Yeah, I know, son. I was just thinking for a moment." He took a few puffs off his pipe and swung around to point it at me. "Got anything you want to tell ME?" he asked suddenly.

"Nearly all the kids in camp are at it too ... and for durn sure, all the half-growed ones too ... like me," I said tightly. The icy lump in my belly was growing by leaps and bounds.

"Mmmmm ... by now you've probably been with your sisters, eh?" he said, not even accusingly. I’d a’ thought he’d be ‘bout ready to grab a big switch and take to beating me with it … if he even suspected I might have done such a thing.

"By now…," I retorted, "so have most of the boys in camp," I retorted in a strangled voice.

"I see ... well, I thought they been looking a mite peaked lately," he commented. "You been with most of the other girls?" he asked.

"Most," I muttered. "All…," I said after reflecting a bit. I couldn't think of a single young girl I hadn't been with, now that my two younger sisters had taken my cock inside their pussies.

"Well, I guess you're right," he remarked. "We need to talk, but it's the whole dang wagon train that needs to talk ... suit you?"

I nodded, rather uncertainly I expect. Pa rode off to the north where his horse could get down a slanting slope to the flats where the wagons were. Pa didn't seem that concerned, an' I was left wondering what just happened an' what was going to happen this evening.

* * *

"My son, Jeremiah, tells me…," Pa began, his voice raised so it would carry.

We'd had an early supper. Word had spread we was having a meeting and everyone was a little nervous. I saw even Grace was holding her urges down. She wasn't giving any of us flashes of what she had under short skirt of hers for the first time in a long while.

Pa was sittin’ on the tailgate of his own wagon, casually swinging a foot back and forth ever’ so often. He’d turned the wagon so that, instead of it being aligned along the circle of wagons, its back end was pointed in towards the center of the camp. A canvas sheet hanging from the back end cut off the view inside.

"...My son, Jeremiah, tells me we have a problem on this wagon train," Pa said, starting over. "My son says there's too much moving around in the night—too many men sneaking out of wagons where other men's wives should be sleeping with their husbands, he says ... and too many women sneaking out of other husbands' wagons."

Pa paused here for a bit, fussing with his pipe and seeming to be concerned about how it was drafting. Near to set my teeth on edge was what he was a’ doin’ to me! On the other hand, when I looked around, I didn't see any of the wives or men appearing to dread what Pa might say next.

I frowned. Didn't look like none a’ the adult women and men were anxious a’ tall. Which was a curiosity.

"My son is correct," Pa remarked. "There is way too much sneaking around in the wee hours," he said. "Men, women ... and children too, sneaking around and doing things Pastor Abernathy back home wouldn't have stood for us doing."

The Lakota kids weren't understanding much of this, but Ehawee was busy translating for them. Her fingers were fair flying as she signed to them.

"But Pastor Abernathy isn't out here amongst us,” Pa continued conversationally, making a little 'throwing away' gesture, dismissing the things Pastor Abernathy might have thought or done. “...And there aren’t any of his congregation out here with us to pass judgment on what we do, what we say, or how we act with one another.” He paused again and looked out over the silent crowd of people.

“Consider this,” he continued. “It's not likely any of us will be seeing Pastor Abernathy or any of his flock ever again." He let that sink in. And what he said only confirmed what a lot of us had been thinking. We were truly cut off from all the folks we’d grown up with, played with, sold goods to and bought from … cut off from anything to do with all of them forever. It was quiet as the dark a’ night in our wagon circle. No one had anything they thought they could add to what Pa had pointed out.

"So, I say…,” Pa went on, “…I say … we make our own rules and we do as we wish according to our wants and needs."

He stopped speaking and let folks digest that for a long moment. I looked around. Amongst the kids, faces were brightening where they’d been mournful and apprehensive before. If we were to set up our own rules, I could see kids were thinkin’ one of those rules would be that they could keep on doing just what we’d been doing with each other. The adults in the crowd were just waiting … most of them were smiling faintly.

"So, as of tonight," Pa said, "I propose we all stop sneaking around at night ... men, women, girls and boys should all just move around naturally—no sneaking, no worrying about being discovered ... and no clothes either, if you don't want to be wearing any!"

I don't think anyone moved for the longest time. No one made a sound. As for me, I just quit breathing all together. What Pa said told me he knew purty much all about us kids fornicating all the time … and he didn’t have a problem with it. I didn't know what was going to happen next—I didn't know what I was going to do next—I didn't know nothing!!"

"HUSBAND!!" I heard Chastity holler from behind me. I turned to see Pa’s wife standing on the tailgate of one of the Conklin’s wagons. My jaw dropped and I gapped at the lovely young woman. Chastity didn't have nothin’ on a’ tall. She was just a’ standing there, completely unconcerned—not the least little bit. She was hefting her breasts in both hands, squeezing them an' playing with her nipples.

"YES, WIFE?" Pa yelled back.

"I SECOND YOUR PROPOSAL!" Chastity shouted.

An' that was a strange thing for her to be saying. This wasn't no meeting of the legislature, for Pete's sake. But we were going to be voting on something here? Not hardly....

"AND WE SECOND THE PROPOSAL AS WELL!!" That was my brother Jesse and his wife Cynthia—

Pardon me—that was my naked brother Jesse and his naked wife Cynthia walking out from behind their wagon. Cynthia had her naked two-year-old daughter, Constance on her hip.

For a long moment, other 'seconds' echoed over the camp as other adults came forth, some of them shucking their clothing as they stood among all of us kids. All of them seemingly wanted to show their support of my Pa’s suggestion.

Every adult in the wagon train was shortly in full view, including Edmond and Melinda Lafferty. Looked to me like my earlier doubts about including them in our young folks' games was entirely correct. But that was something to deal with later. It was clear to me this was a setup … all a’ the adults had been primed to ‘second’ Pa’s proposal.

There was quiet in the stand of trees where our wagons were parked. The only sound was the gurgling of the stream.

"IS THERE ANY AMONG THE YOUNG PEOPLE WHO WOULD SPEAK?" my Pa roared. Seemed to me he was being awful formal for an occasion where none a’ the adults had a stitch on.

Wouldn't ya know it? I was still trying to puzzle my way through this and I looked up to see every danged person under the age of eighteen ‘er so, lookin’ right, square at me! Didn't seem fair—all I done was suggest to Pa some things needed working on. Seems that was plenty in just about ever'one's mind.

I glanced at the group of Lakota children. My Pretty Green Eyes gracefully strode over the grass to stand beside me. She signed that she and I were one. I gestured at the naked adult men and women standing all around. Pretty Green Eyes repeated the sign and took me by the shoulders to point me at my father ... who was now naked himself ... and still waiting for me to say something, for it was clear I was to be the one speaking for the younger crowd.

"I WOULD SPEAK!" I bellowed. It was probably too loud.

Pretty Green Eyes put a gentle palm over my lips, smiling all the while.

"I ... SECOND THE PROPOSAL!" I called. I wasn't as loud, but I had a voice that carried. Everyone heard it real clear.

"HOT DAMN!" a shrill voice yelled. "Who wants me first?" Grace demanded. "You want to fuck me ... PA!!??"

I stared in shock at my first lover on the wagon train. But Grace was Grace. She'd have been the first to recover her wits in a situation like this, no matter what.

"I can say damn and fuck and suck an' all them words, right Pa?" Grace called, staring around at everyone as they stared at her. She was pretty cool about it. Heck, she was grinning up a storm.

"I don't see why not," Pa replied calmly. "And yes ... I do want to fuck you, sister of my dear wife," he added. "Will you come up here, please?"

Grace stood up, yanked her buckskin dress over her head and tossed it on a nearby camp cot. She jogged to Pa’s wagon and jumped up beside him, grinning mischievously down at the rest of us.

When he looked appraisingly at her, she took Pa’s johnson in her hands, bent over and planted a juicy kiss right on the tip. She looked out at the rest of us and laughed delightedly. Everyone was watching and the attention was something Grace always craved.

The children of the wagon train were still watching me so I glanced at Pretty Green Eyes and I took my shirt off and dropped it atop the chair I'd been sitting on. My denims followed after I got my boots and stockings off. I turned to Pretty Green Eyes, but she was standing there without anything on already, smiling and waiting for me. It was a bunch easier to yank one a' them dresses up over one's head than it was ever'thing that I had to take off.

Kids all around were throwing clothes ever which a’ way, getting nekkid as quick as they could. There was a lot of excitement on everyone's face. I'm sure my expression was the same as theirs.

I turned, lookin' all around until I found Ehawee standing naked beside Caleb by their wagon. Caleb took off right about then, on his way over to my sister, Rachel. She jumped up into his arms, threw her hands around his neck and started in to kissin' him.

I glanced at Pretty Green Eyes, gestured at Ehawee with a questioning arch to my eyebrows. She nodded excitedly and we went to Ehawee's side. The lovely Lakota woman saw us coming and met us halfway across the circle.

Together, the three of us made our way to my wagon where we dragged a couple buffalo hides outside onto the tall grass. We didn't leave that buffalo hide until all three of us were thoroughly satiated ... an' that wasn’t 'til long after dark.

* * *

That night, the Richardson wagon train declared its total independence from the mores and restraints of the society in which we’d been born. The foot traffic was just about as busy as it had been the previous night when I'd finally tumbled to what was goin' on, but there was no sneaking around. The camp fires were burning bright and everyone saw every single thing that was going on.

When me and Pretty Green Eyes and Ehawee were sated ... Ehawee had certain definite ideas of what she wanted done to her and in what order ... we all went down by the crick and to wash up. It was so much easier now, what with lanterns lighting the way and having towels and soap already there.

Pretty Green Eyes an' I washed each other clean before walking hand-in-hand back to my wagon. That was our first whole night together, sleeping under the covers, all peaceful like. Excepting those times we're not in the same neck of the woods, we ain’t slept apart since.

The folk on the Richardson wagon train didn't even try to hitch up our oxen and get on with the trip ‘til three days later. We were all way too busy exploring our new carnal freedoms to even think of completing the journey. I recollect at one point, I was fucking twelve-year-old Grace from behind while she was busy licking her big sister’s pussy … and one other time, Maye was a’ layin’ on her side, sandwiched between Pa and me—Pa was fuckin’ her arse and I was in her cunt, and Maye was screechin’ and carryin’ on somethin’ fierce, she was that happy.

It didn't turn out to be terribly important to keep on moving 'cause two days after we did get moving, we rolled right up to that wonderful place Pa had aimed us at. It was so remote and hard to get to that we immediately fell in love with it. Now there was no way anyone could stop us from practicing our new style of life.

EPILOGUE:

Turned out, the reasons for our moving to the West was a combination of several issues coming to a head at very nearly the same time and Pa helped me understand it all, speaking of it to me for the first time. First, I hadn't known it, but way back in Tennessee there had been a very real danger of KKK riders beginning to raid our part of the state. Pa, who'd been a high-ranking Union officer would have become a target, probably very shortly. That placed our whole family, and friends, in grave danger.

Second, Pa and Hiram Conklin had become used to the fleshpots in and around the city of Washington in the latter stages of the war, and they didn't really want to stop sampling a variety of women and pleasures. Hiram was a widower after the war and married his cousin, Helen, whose husband had been killed in the Chickamauga campaign.

Helen, we kids found out, had known a number of men, in the biblical sense, before settling down with Hiram and she liked bein' with a variety of men, just the same as her husband and my Pa did women. After a time, Pa had married a much younger woman, Chastity, who was anything but chaste. Her carnal appetites mirrored Pa's—they were a great match even though there was a big difference in ages.

Socializing together, the two couples eventually came to the point where sharing their bodies amongst the four of them became a routine thing to do, rather than a guilt-ridden exception. The two couples began to gather like-minded people around them. Us youngsters never noticed because the adults were careful and very, very discrete.

When we met up with Caleb Struthers and his Indian wife, Ehawee, they joined in the fun and games without a second thought. An' those two … heck, they actually stood guard a number of times—though we never saw them—against hostile Indians or marauders along the trail whilst us kids explored our sexuality.

Edmond and Melinda Lafferty had enthusiastically joined in the licentious sex soon after we set out from Tennessee. Also, right about that time, my two brothers, Jesse and David, were recruited for the adult group. Abruptly there were several members of the same family having sex with each other's wives and that contributed to the rest of the adults observing, approving, and joining in on the sexual goings on.

The Laffertys were a special couple, and I was right to have been suspicious of Edmond. He was a grown up man and Melinda was his wife—they were a pair. That made the two of them grown-ups. Their advantage was that Melinda was no older than some of us in the younger crowd and could move between the adults and the children's groups without comment from anyone. I guess that was natural as could be. But she didn't have no loyalty to us kids, like Maye did. Maye was part of the young group, despite her age. Melinda was not. When she first discovered the children of the wagon train were taking advantage of the isolation to become sexually involved, she took that information straight to my Pa. I tried to get exercised at what she done, but just couldn't quite work up enough mad.

Anyway, when the adults became aware of the sexual games in which the younger generation was engaged, they protected the kids while the young folk figured out what they were doing and how they wanted to do it. It worked out well. If we kids were doing everything we could think of to sneak away from the adults after the sun went down, the adults we were doing their best to accommodate us.

The Laffertys performed another service when they proposed the two groups be merged because that inevitably brought on a discussion of whether incest should still be taboo, or not. But … Helen was Hiram's wife, and she was also his cousin. Their testimony that incest didn't mean one's children would be born with two heads or somethin' equally horrible, it didn't rot one's soul, or attract random lightening strikes went a long way toward normalizing sex between family members.. It was a short step for that group to decide all us fornicating youngsters should be brought into the fold, and the inevitable incestual relationships be accepted as nothing but exceedingly enjoyable games.

After that was decided upon, everything else that happened to the community traveling westward with the Richardson wagon train was pretty much inevitable. Sometimes great things happen, if folks are receptive to a little change….

The End of Part One of The Family Tradition

* * *

Coming in Part Two: Getting To Know The Neighbors

Comments? Tell me what you think of the story, please. You can reach me at: caleboflannery@yahoo.com

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