Negative thinking leads to a negative life, the pundits of psychology shout from their well-appointed consulting rooms. Time spent on envy, regret, self-pity or remorse is time wasted, they add. Only positive thinking can bring positive results. Like success breeds success, money makes money, and the man who is truly determined to make it carries around with him an aura of that determination that vanquishes all opposition. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre made the same point more elegantly in his doctrine of Existentialism. Professor A.J. Ayer and the Logical Positivists had a word for it too.
But while it is true that the optimist is much more likely to meet with success and the pessimist is almost certainly doomed to meet with failure mere determination not to be pushed around is not in itself enough: it is the core, the base, the inner conviction on which the optimism is founded, that counts in the long run. Or, to put it a little less esoterically, positive thinking is fine as long as you're being positive about the right thing!
Kent Delaney's gripping new novel, Fire In Her Blood, illustrates this dictum in a fashion that is as horrifying as it is true. Belle Devlin, a tempestuous and untamed young American girl, inherits an ailing lumber business in northeastern Canada. Without means of her own, she moves up into the forest country she has loved since girlhood, determined to accept the challenge and bring the business back to life. But no sooner has she arrived than sinister forces are seen to be at work against her. The mill overseer, her only friend, is killed in a mysterious accident. Key workers walk out on her. Unexplained accidents hold up the progress of the work itself. And, worst of all, Belle is subjected to a terrifying series of persecutions culminating in a vicious double rape. At the same time, a crooked small-town lawyer pesters her to sell the property at an unrealistic price.
Evidently somebody is determined to make her life so difficult that she will be glad to get out at any price. But why should anybody want to acquire a business that has been failing for years?
It is only when the conflict has polarized between Belle, determined to stay and fight it out, and Louis Burger, the unscrupulous mayor of the town, equally determined that she should go, that the fight resolves itself into a battle between two strong personalities each of which is convinced of the strength of its case. The young girl wins through in the end because she knows that she has right on her side but not before she and a mysterious young man who decides to help her have been subjected to a series of ordeals without parallel in modem thriller writing, culminating in a life-or-death struggle against the most implacable of natural forces: fire!
And in the final analysis it is not Belle's victory over the bigotry and suspicion of a small town that counts, but her victory over herself and the limitations of her own sensual nature which have been shown up by the challenge.
The Publishers
PROLOGUE
Townsend never saw the man who pulled the switch lever that sent him hurtling to his death. He was bent over a huge log that was secured to the traveling carriage feeding the mill's great circular saw, trying to free a little white kitten that had somehow gotten itself trapped between the log and the iron platform holding it. Overseers of Townsend's experience don't usually make a habit of clambering over timber that's already positioned for the saw, but there were good reasons for it in this case.
First, it was Saturday afternoon and the mill wasn't working. There had been days, when Bartlett's Creek was one of the key lumbering towns in Canada's northeast, when there would have been two extra shifts working Saturday afternoon and Sunday, too. In those days, the lumber schooners sailed into the bay three times a week to load up the cut of the mill by the lake. But there had been no overtime worked at the mill for ten years. The nearer slopes were covered with second-growth forest and most of the big logs were rolled down to the river on the far side of the ridge where they were formed into huge jams and floated down to the automated mills on the shores of Lake Superior and the St. Lawrence.
Secondly, the boats only called at Bartlett's Creek twice a month now, and there was already enough lumber stacked in the yard to fill the next shipment scheduled in three days time so the saw wouldn't be operating even when the men reported for work on Monday.
And thirdly, of course, there was the fact that Townsend was crazy about animals. Just crazy. There was a tame fox in the backyard of his house on the outskirts of town. Hamsters, guinea-pigs, a marmoset, a pet goose and a djerbah imported from North Africa shared his bachelor living room. He had once kept a pair of otters for two whole years. There were two spaniels, a beagle and a pointer in the spacious kennels at one side of his stoop. But most of all he loved cats. Neighbors who bred pigeons or kept songbirds in cages swore that he had several dozen prowling around the place, but in fact there were never more than nine or ten at any one time on the Townsend property.
It was natural enough, though, for Townsend to react that Saturday afternoon when he heard the unmistakable cry of a kitten in distress.
He had come down to the mill to look over a temporary repair to one of the drive-shafts in the mechanism operating the saw. There had been two saws once. But the second saw, together with its carriage and all the rollers, wheels, belts and machinery driving it, had been dismantled and hoisted aboard one of the lumber boats two years ago, when things had begun to go from bad to worse and old man Devlin, the owner of the mill and all the forest around it, had been sickening for his last illness. Now, although the place was running at a greatly reduced capacity, the remaining saw was overworked: despite the small amount of lumber they produced, there was never time to rest it long enough for the overhaul it needed. So Townsend figured he should check out the repair to make sure the machinery wouldn't break down and louse up even the small amount of business they had.
He had just jotted down a couple of queries to put to the engineer on Monday when he heard the piercing mew of the kitten. It seemed to him to come from somewhere in the yard outside. Stuffing his notebook back into the pocket of his jeans, he hurried outside and stood listening a tall, heavy man with iron-gray hair and a surprisingly mild expression on his weather-beaten face.
The cry was repeated...a thin wail of panic that cut through the thundery heat of the afternoon like a knife.
Townsend looked anxiously around the yard. Beyond the big wooden mill building on its white limestone foundation, the one-story bunkhouses, the company store, the eating house and the mill offices stood silent in the hazy sunlight. The store and the commissary building were closed Saturday through Monday, and nobody used the bunkhouses now; all of the men who worked there lived with their wives and families in the neat new development on the other side of town. What in hell would a kitten be doing here on the lakeshore a mile away from the nearest houses?
The puzzled overseer listened again, his eyes squinting against the glare of the sun as he stared unseeingly at the rolling blue contours of forest rising ridge after ridge towards the brassy sky on the far side of the lake. The mewing was coming from just around the corner of the mill. Townsend hastened across the yard, his feet scuffing up clouds of sawdust from the sun baked ground.
Turning the angle of the building, he stopped short with an exclamation of astonishment. He was facing the traveling carriage that hurled the logs against the whirling blade of the giant circular saw when the mill was opening and the cry was coming from some place up on the steel platform of that carriage!
Goddamnit, how could a kitten have gotten itself up there! The little devils were up to the damnedest tricks if you left 'em alone for a second...
Shaking his head, Townsend strode past a red-lettered notice warning Danger! Personnel are strictly forbidden to approach within ten feet of carriage or saw, and hauled himself up onto the platform. The kitten was trapped somewhere behind the log already clamped in position on the moving carriage for the saw operator to deal with when they started work again. Although it was on the far side of the huge balk of wood, Townsend couldn't reach it from there because of the position of the clamps. He had to drape himself over the breast-high log and reach down from above. As he saw the pitifully mewling creature, he caught his breath with horror and rage. The kitten couldn't have been more than four or five weeks old a tiny ball of soft white fur in which a double triangle of pink opened and closed as it voiced its distress. And it was tethered cruelly to one of the clamps by a length of cord that was wound about the iron work and tied tightly around its frail leg!
Townsend swore. What kind of bastard could dream up a deal like that...and in God's name what for?
He never found out the answer. A shaft of sunlight slanting through the operator's window beside the slit in the mill wall through which the saw blade emerged picked out a lean brown hand. The hand moved slowly forward, grasped a lever and then jerked suddenly backwards.
There was an abrupt whine of gears engaging, a clatter of machinery, and a shrill scream from, the murderous saw as it spun into motion and the carriage slammed the captive log towards it with devastating force.
For a hundredth of a second, Townsend sensed the terrible acceleration as the log over which he was doubled shoved him violently in the chest and bore him remorselessly back towards the whirling teeth of the deadly blade. For an instant of time he was confusedly aware of imminent peril. And then the world dissolved into an inferno of searing pain that was as immediately replaced by total darkness.
The man sprawled over the log had time only to make the smallest instinctive effort to escape before the carriage was forcing it against the saw. The high-pitched whine of the blade dropped an octave as the revolving teeth bit into the obstruction and the helpless burden it carried and then it rose to a scream again as the saw sliced through and the carriage jolted back to return the log for the next cut.
A great fountain of blood spurted high into the air as the saw blade tore through Townsend's diabolically positioned body with the precision of a giant surgeon's knife. Split neatly in two from crotch to scalp as efficiently as a carcass, in a butcher's shop, the sundered body dropped into the sawdust on either side of the traveling carriage, the sheared bones showing ghastly white in the raw red flesh, dying muscles and nerve ganglions causing each grisly half of the body to jerk and flail in a macabre dance of death.
The carriage slammed the log a third time against the circular saw...and then the whine of the blade died away in a diminuendo, the machinery rumbled into silence, the carriage ground to a halt. Inside the mill a door slammed. Footsteps padded across the sawdust covering the yard. An automobile motor choked into life, was revved up, and then died away down the road leading into town.
In the yard, the cloying, sick-sweet stench of gore overlaid the thin stink of oil on hot metal as the sun congealed the blood spattering the carriage and its rails. Beneath, flies were already buzzing over the gray blancmange of brain tissue and the blue-white coils of intestine heaving slowly like a heedless smoke onto the sawdust from the two halves of the foreman's sliced open body. , And then the kitten, stunned into silence by the sudden uproar with which it had been unexpectedly surrounded, began to mew again as it tore vainly with its small teeth at the cord tethering it to the clamp.
CHAPTER ONE
The girl standing on the flat roof of the porch in front of the big log house was tall and slender. The whipcord riding breeches belted tightly around her small waist could disguise neither the richly contoured swell of her hips nor the soft curves of tapered thigh and calf below. Her tan shirt, open at the throat, was thrust our provocatively by the twin mounds of her full, wide-set breasts, and there was a mass of red-gold hair tumbling about her shoulders.
Standing in the driveway below, the wiry little man in the gray gabardine suit stared up at the lush lines of her high-breasted body and licked his lips. Somehow, with him, his flickering tongue looked obscene. "Miss Devlin?" he called. "I'd be obliged if you could spare me a few minutes. I have a proposition I'd rather like to discuss with you."
Belle Devlin smothered a sigh of exasperation. The little man's name was Damon Snell, and he was a lawyer. It wasn't the first time he had called unannounced and although the details varied it was always the same unwanted proposition he had to make. "I'm kind of busy right now, Mr. Snell," she replied. "There's a lot of logs in this wall that have rotted and will need replacing before the bad weather begins. I was just making a note... "
"It won't take long," Snell interrupted. "Only a few minutes."
The voluptuous redhead sighed again. "I don't see much point in our talking anymore," she began. "If it's the same proposition as the last...."
"You owe it to yourself," the lawyer urged. "If you're the business woman you claim to be."
Belle Devlin tutted with annoyance. Really, it was too bad, being pestered by these small-town hustlers when she had so much to do! But she supposed she'd have to listen to the wretched man once more: it was the only way to get rid of him now! "Oh, very well then," she said crossly. "I'll be right down but only a few minutes, mind." She turned and went into the house through an open french window.
Snell looked around him as he waited for her. Years ago, when the girl's uncle, old man Devlin, had started his lumbering business in Bartlett's Creek, the house had been one of the showplaces of the neighborhood. It stood on a rise half a dozen miles out of town, looking over the lake from a clearing among the cedars. But, as Devlin had poured more and more of his money into the ailing mill, the place had become neglected until now, six months after his death, the two story wooden facade was peeling and shabby, the once-imposing gables with their widespread chalet eaves were sagging, and the formal gardens at one side of the terrace were waist-high with ragweed and grasses. Behind the main building, the servants' annex was shuttered and silent; one of the barns had a hole in its roof. Fairly recently, a bulldozer had plowed a rough track uphill through the cedars, but the only thing on the whole property that looked new was a jeep with Connecticut license plates parked in front of Snell's ancient Buick beside the weed-grown track twisting back between the trees to the mile-away turnpike leading south. If appearances were anything to go by, the lawyer thought to himself, Miss high-and-mighty Devlin should welcome his visit with open arms!
The girl appeared at the top of the flight of steps leading up to the porch. "I suppose you'd better come inside," she said, a trifle ungraciously.
Snell hitched his briefcase under his arm, settled his steel-rimmed spectacles on his long thin nose, and followed her into the house.
The interior wore the same dispirited air of genteel decay as the outside. The paneling was lack-luster and stained, there were broken boards marring the treads of the wide stairway curving up from the hall, and even the fine wood of the Colonial furniture had become dulled and lifeless with neglect. Belle led the way into a back room looking out over an overgrown vegetable garden and turned to confront him. Her face, hardened slightly by impatience and irritability, was still beautiful. The nose was short and straight; the eyebrows curved impeccably over luminous wide green eyes; and above the determined chin a generous mouth turning upwards at the corners testified to the warmth and humor underlying the girl's impetuous nature.
"Well, what is it this time?" she asked shortly, eyeing the lawyer's spare figure with disfavor. She had never liked Snell; the way the little man's long head pecked back and forth on his scrawny neck, the way his ill-fitting black clothes always flapped like raven's wings around his wiry body, the mean inward slant of his tight-lipped mouth and the predatory gleam in his small eyes reminded her too uncomfortably of a bird of prey one of the less courageous ones, hopping around on the fringe of the activity, waiting for his own pickings until the big boys had had their share. The man was almost a caricature of a small-town shyster!
Snell laid his brief case carefully on the table, hitched up his creaseless pants, and lowered himself into a sheeted armchair. "First of all," he said mendaciously, "I should like to express my sympathy over the tragic accident that ah robbed you of such a valued employee last weekend."
"Accident?" Belle repeated. "You mean Townsend?"
"Certainly, certainly. A bad business. A very bad business, Miss Devlin. And very bad for business, if I may say so."
Belle stared at him without replying. When she had come north a month ago to take over the property left to her by the uncle she hadn't seen since she was a child, heiress to nearly a hundred thousand acres of forest and not much else, she had found that animal-loving mill foreman almost the only man she could really trust. To be sure, there was Gil Roussel, the burly French-Canadian in charge of the lumberjacks and logging gangs on the river beyond the ridge. But although Roussel was honest, he was also inarticulate and anyway he was miles away in the forest. Townsend had been the only man she could talk to and confide in. She was still shocked and grieved by his loss.
"Yes, indeed," Snell was saying unctuously, "a sad affair. And especially so when it seems to imply both carelessness and deceit on the part of a key worker. That can have a bad effect on -ah confidence in the case of an ailing business."
"My uncle's business may not be as ailing as you think," the girl replied tartly. "There's around a hundred and fifty square miles of good timber back there. Just because the mill here isn't working to capacity, it doesn't mean there isn't a lot of work going on beyond the ridge. The mill's not all that important to me, if you want to know."
"Ah, but it is to us, Miss Devlin," Snell cut in quickly. "It is to us. The mill Is Bartlett's Creek.
With the falling off in business, the townsfolk are naturally anxious. Add to that the inevitable loss of confidence over this unfortunate affair...." He spread his bony hands and shrugged.
"I don't know what you mean," Belle said. "You mentioned carelessness and...deceit? I don't see what that has to do with it."
"The man Townsend posed as a lover of animals," the lawyer explained primly. "Yet when his body was found there was a dead kitten nearby. Apparently he'd tied it to some part of the saw mechanism a most cruel and brutal thing to do and the poor creature had died of starvation after the ah accident. That certainly seems to me a smack of deceit in a man representing himself as an animal lover!"
"I don't believe it for a moment!" Belle flashed hotly. "More likely he was trying to rescue a kitten that someone else had put there!"
"As to the carelessness," Snell continued smoothly, "the manner of the accident itself furnishes the clearest proof of that. How a so-called experienced man could make so elementary a mistake... " He shrugged once more and left the sentence unfinished.
The toe of one of Belle's polished riding boots was tapping impatiently on the wood floor. "I think you said you had something you wished to discuss with me, Mr. Snell," she said coldly.
"Ah, yes." The lawyer reached for his briefcase, unzipped the flap, and drew out a buff folder from which he took a sheet of paper covered with typing. "The clients instructing me have requested that I approach you one final time," he said, scanning the closely spaced lines. "I am directed to make you a formal offer of one hundred and eighty thousand dollars, the sale... " He glanced down at the sheet for confirmation. ". . . to include all the lands left to you under the terms of your late uncle's will, plus the sawmill and the goodwill such as it is entailed therewith."
Belle's green eyes were flashing. "A hundred and eighty thousand dollars?" she repeated incredulously. "Do you realize that's less than two dollars an acre? For land that's covered with first grade timber? You must be joking!"
"It's a lot of money just the same," Snell said. He smiled thinly. "I doubt if you could produce figures showing a profit that would normally be expected from such an investment."
"I don't have to produce any figures," the angry redhead stormed. "I've told you a dozen times already: the land...is...not...for sale! How many more times do I have to say it before you stop pestering me with these ridiculous offers?"
"I think it fair to advise you that my clients are not prepared to raise this offer any further," the lawyer said imperturbably. "This is positively their last and final offer. My clients feel...."
"Your clients!" Belle interrupted furiously. "I'd like to know who these mysterious clients are! Even if I wanted to sell which I don't I wouldn't dream of doing business with anonymous people I hadn't met."
"It is perfectly normal procedure...perfectly proper...for an attorney to advance an offer on behalf of clients, who may wish to remain anonymous," Snell said stiffly.
"Well it isn't normal for me! And surely it can't be normal for the attorney to keep on coming back, again and again, even after he's been told the property's not on the market? Who are these people anyway?"
"It would be most improper a grave breach of legal etiquette for me to disclose that, Miss Devlin. You must know that," Snell said. "You would be well advised to consider the offer nonetheless."
Belle breathed hard. Snell had appeared at the house a few days after she had arrived in Canada, bearing an unsolicited offer to buy her out for a hundred thousand dollars. She had sent him away but he had come back the following week with the offer raised by twenty five thousand. When she had again refused he had left her in peace for ten days...only to return with an offer for a hundred and fifty thousand. This was now his fourth visit and she was angry-angry at the impertinence of the unknown buyer or buyers who seemed to think that everything must inevitably have its price; angry at the repeated intrusion of her privacy; angry because she disliked Snell himself; and angriest of all because the optimism she displayed about the business was far from justified...and she knew Snell knew it!
In fact any accountant would have advised her to accept the offer. But Belle was an idealist, a tempestuous, hard-riding country girl who preferred the challenge of making a success out of her unexpected inheritance to any promises of easy money, wherever they came from. Her determination was now stiffened by the fact that she despised Snell as much as the shadowy figures who were using him to transmit their unwanted propositions.
"I have considered the offer," she said curtly. "You can tell your clients, whoever they are, that it's unconditionally rejected. I will never sell this property to them, or through you, at any time, at any price. Is that clear? Furthermore I forbid you to come here again, on any pretext. . . and now will you please be good enough to leave? You have already taken up far too much of my rime."
She stood before him, her lushly ripened breasts heaving, her lip curling scornfully as she jerked her tawny head imperiously at the door. Snell flushed darkly as he stuffed the paper and its folder back into his briefcase and rose to his feet. His eyes lingered for a moment on the sensually swelling contours thrusting out her shirt as he stood up. He'd bet ten dollars to a nickel the bitch wasn't wearing a brassiere under that shirt! He could see her tits move softly under the stretched material as she breathed and the nipples were clearly outlined at the tip of each tautly up-thrust mound! His fingers whitened momentarily on the leather of the briefcase and then he said:
"You refuse the offer? And that is your last word?"
"I believe I made my meaning quite clear," Belle said evenly.
Snell's eyes too were glittering angrily now. "I imagine that is ah a decision that you will have cause to regret, Miss Devlin," he grated. "Yes indeed, a most unwise attitude to take. Most unwise."
Raking her voluptuous young body once more with his insolent eyes, he swung on his heel and left the room. She heard his feet clattering through the hallway and down the steps. A moment later the motor of the old Buick wheezed into life and then ground away down the track leading to the highway.
Within the week, things had really begun to go wrong at the mill. And ten days later Belle herself was attacked and raped in her own home.
CHAPTER TWO
For several days after Snell's last visit, Belle Devlin was worried. The fact that the obnoxious little lawyer or whoever it was behind him had three times upped the original low offer for her property made her suspicious. Why would they go to all that trouble to acquire a concern that they must know perfectly well was only just keeping its head above water? What was so desirable about the lumber business anyway? Reinforced concrete, stressed steel, glass and plastics had long ago killed the boom in timber, both for the building and automobile industries. Even as fuel, with the increase of oil firing, hydrocarbons, electricity and nuclear power, the demand for wood was less than a tenth of what it had been before the war. So what was the great attraction of her land? Was it in fact the land itself rather than its product that they were after? Belle thought not: it wasn't after all as though it was in some area ripe for development. It was remote country, unlikely to attract building speculators for many years to come, even as a holiday center the hills were not high enough for winter skiing, and it was too heavily wooded to offer the panoramic vistas beloved of summer visitors. Why was it so important to get hold of it, then? And above all why should the prospective buyers keep their identity secret?
Finally she stopped thinking about it. There were too many things to do! But however hard the struggle might be, her resolution to make a success of the venture in the face of universal skepticism was strengthened rather than weakened by the mystery. Her Irish blood was up!
Then, three days after Snell's visit, Harry Topman, the local man she had appointed to take over Townsend's job at the mill, gave in his notice and left. He had been offered a better position by one of the lumber companies on the St. Lawrence, he said. Four other men walked out the following day without any explanation.
Back in the lulls, a bark-peeler was killed by a falling tree. All the men at one logging camp were inexplicably taken ill with ptomaine poisoning and had to stop work for three days. And further down the river, one of the great log booms being towed by steamer towards Lake Superior mysteriously broke up in the middle of the night and did five thousand dollars worth of damage to a yacht marina at a riverside town.
People in Bartlett's Creek began to talk. As Belle walked along Main Street to the stores or drove her jeep towards the mill, where she spent most days in the manager's office trying to work things out, the suspicion and resentment on the faces of the townsfolk were undisguised. She knew perfectly well what they were thinking it was the fact that she was a stranger, a foreigner, that was responsible for the swelling tide of misfortune...not only that but a young one too! And, to top it all, a woman! No wonder old man Devlin's business was going to the dogs if it was being handled by an inexperienced upstart girl from across the border! What could you expect? The atmosphere of bigotry and prejudice in the town was almost tangible.
Belle lifted her determined chin and shrugged it off. It would take more than the small-mindedness of upcountry hicks to break her spirit!
The marauders broke into her house soon after midnight on the sixth day. She had gone to bed early after an exhausting session at the mill. The boat had called and loaded up all the cut from the yard; now they must work on the great stacks of logs in readiness for the next shipment in ten days time. But the saw operator told her that the fault in the machinery temporarily fixed by Townsend was likely to reoccur: to continue using the saw might endanger the workers. And it would be a week before a competent mechanic could arrive from Cochrane...
It was with a sigh of frustration that the glamorous redhead put down the notebook in which she had been wrestling with her accounts and reached for the switch of the bedside lamp. Being the boss, as she was finding out the hard way, brought its headaches!
Just before her slender red-nailed fingers touched the cord of the lamp, the light went out. Frowning, she groped for the plastic pear and clicked the switch several times. The room remained in darkness. Belle threw back the covers and padded barefoot towards the door. The wretched bulb must have gone: she would have to use the ceiling light if she wanted to check her diary for tomorrow before she went to sleep. But the wall switch beside the door brought no response from the old crystal chandelier hanging in the darkness above her head.
Belle tutted with annoyance. Another power failure! It seemed they had them every other day in this part of Canada! Why on earth couldn't they devise a system that brought in emergency generators when some damned overloading or other imposed a cut? Now she would have to feel her way downstairs and open the door of the icebox if she didn't want her supplies to be covered with green fungus by morning! Sometimes the cuts lasted all night...and it wasn't as though they didn't charge enough for the damned electricity!
She groped her way down the shallow, creaking stair?, flicking experimentally at each switch she passed on the way. But it was no use: the old house was entirely without power.
The angry redhead shivered as she passed through the only two downstairs rooms she used and her bare feet struck the cold flagstones of the big, old-fashioned kitchen. The nights sure were chilly up here in the northeast!
She came to a halt as her outstretched hands brushed up against the bulk of the refrigerator. Had she heard a noise somewhere behind her in the living room? She listened, her head on one side in the dark. A faucet was dripping monotonously into the sink over on her left. Outside the window, leaves tapped lightly on the glass as a puff of wind stirred the branches of an elm. But otherwise there was nothing. It must have been one of the ancient timbers settling: there always were unexplained creaks and bumps in the night in these old places. Log cabins especially were full of them!
Belle was neither nervous nor superstitious, but she shivered again and held her short nylon nightdress more closely about her body as she jerked open the ice-box and the chill air from the interior swirled about her naked calves.
A moment later she caught her breath. Her legs were cold; the rest of her was cool but the air playing on the smooth flesh of her shoulders where they emerged from the flimsy, sleeveless garment was warm! It...it was almost as if...as if...as if someone was standing silently there in the blackness breathing on her!
Before the horrifying thought had crystallized in her mind, a human hand closed in a vise-like grip around her forearm. Belle screamed.
Another hand clamped itself cruelly over the curve of her shoulder as she made an instinctive dash to get away, holding her powerless between the two sets of steely fingers. She screamed again, a high, wild cry of terror sawing into the dark as she struggled frantically to wrestle free of the unknown intruder's brutal grasp. A coarse voice chuckled just behind her ear and the hot breath jetted revoltingly over her neck and cheek, a smell of chewing gum and alcohol.
Heavy boots scuffed the stone floor as she kicked out wildly with her bare legs, and the voice chuckled again and then said hoarsely: "Jeez! This looks like a hot one, Harry! You better c'mon in and lend a hand, man!"
Footsteps rang across the flagstones from the corner by the sink. The next moment, hard hands were at her knees...and then a pair of arms locked around her legs and she was swept off her feet, a helpless, writhing prisoner held between the two intruders like a trapped animal.
For the third time, Belle Devlin screamed. The man behind her laughed aloud. "Yell your fuckin' head off, sweetie," he panted. "There ain't nobody else in this house, and we know it and judgin' by the length of that goddamn drive, I figure the nearest neighbor must be more'n a mile away!"
The captive redhead twisted her head and sank her teeth into the thumb of the hand grasping her shoulder.
"Shit!" the man shouted, snatching his fingers away so that the girl sagged almost to the floor, supported only by the hand around her forearm and the second man's grip around her knees. "The cocksuckin' little whore up and bit me!" The night exploded into a sudden clanger of pain as the injured hand slashed viciously against the side of Belle's face.
"You do that once more, you little bitch," the voice threatened, "and I'll beat the shit outa you!"
The second man laughed. His voice was deeper and in some way stronger than the first. "You always did like 'em spunky, Mac," he chuckled. "C'mon let's get her into the front room. It's colder'n a morgue in here!"
Mac shifted his grip, shoving his hands under the struggling girl's arms so that her head and shoulders were crammed against his hard chest and his cruel fingers dug into the tender mounds of her breasts through the thin nylon of the nightdress. "Okay, Harry on your way," he said. "You'll get your chance to warm up in there. Jesus, there's a pair of tits to make your goddamn mouth water here!"
Between them, they bundled the terrified girl through the door and into the living room, blundering against walls and furniture as they strove to control the frenziedly squirming and jackknifing body they were carrying.
"Let me go!" Belle sobbed. "Put me down...Who are you?...What do you want?...Please... "
Her mind was a chaos of fear and shock and horror. What were her brutal captors doing here? Were they burglars? Passing bums who had broken into the house on the lookout for what they could get? Escaped convicts? Homicidal maniacs? What were they going to do with her...and were there any more of them around? Even if there weren't, she could never escape these two.
The penultimate question was to be answered only too soon. Once in the sitting room, Harry let go of Belle's legs and Mac flung her violently face downwards across an oak table that stood between the shuttered windows. An instant later, a ham-like hand caught her two wrists and twisted them sadistically up into the small of her back; another descended heavily on to the nape of her neck, screwing her face sideways and forcing her head down hard against the cold wood of the table. She was pinned there as helplessly as an insect on a board, the table edge grinding cruelly into her pelvic bone through the creases of her hips, her legs flailing wildly in the air behind.
"Let me go!" she wailed again. "I don't have any jewels if that's what you want...and all I have in the house is about eighty dollars: it's in m-m-my purse up in the b-b-b-bedroom."
Mac's grating laugh knifed through the dark. "Thanks, sweetie," he chuckled. "We'll help ourselves on the way out. Right now, we have other fish to fry! Get goin', Harry boy. She's all yours!"
As the frantically squirming redhead rolled her body vainly from side to side on the table under the remorseless pressure of Mac's hands on her neck and wrists, her anguished mind took in the meaning of her captor's words...and a cold chill ran the length of her spine. Surely they couldn't be going to... ? Surely men even as brutal as these appeared to be wouldn't sink to such bestial depths of depravity as to... ? She had read often enough of women and girls being assaulted and violated by intruders in lonely houses but surely it couldn't be happening to her? Oh God. it couldn't!
The second man's deep laugh sounded from somewhere behind her flailing legs. And half a second afterwards she knew with a tingle of horror that her worst fears were about to be realized.
Calloused fingers dug into the backs of her thighs, forcing her legs down; powerful knees covered in harsh denim slotted into the hollows behind her own knees, splaying her legs apart as they hung over the end of the table; and then the hands had hauled the hem of her nightdress roughly up over her naked young hips and the cold air of the room was playing over her shamefully exposed genitals.
"Aaaaaaaagggggghhhhhhhh!" Belle screeched. "No!...No!...No!...Not that!...Please don't do it to me!...Nooooooo!"
She began to thresh even more frantically on the table, trying to free her legs from the imprisoning pressure behind the knees, trying to break the iron grip on her wrists and escape the hold on her neck that was thrusting her cheek down and squashing her painfully straining breasts against the wood.
Her struggles were cut short by Harry's hand slashing brutally down across the tender flesh of her buttocks; once, twice, three times, four times, in savage, stinging blows that reduced her sobbed entreaties to gasps and whimpers of pain. "Shuddup!" he snarled. "Or I'll fuck you in the ass!"
Belle's heart quailed at his words. Abruptly she froze.
She lay mewling softly between them, her mind reeling. There was nothing she could do now. She had fought as hard as she could but they were too strong for her. She was completely at the mercy of the two anonymous marauders in the dark, pinioned helplessly between them as defenseless as a rag-doll, a toy they would use to satisfy their brutal animal lust.
There was the unmistakable metallic rip of a zipper being opened behind her, and then Harry's voice:
"That's better," he growled. "Just relax and go with it, baby. For Jeez' sake I'm doin' you a favor if you only knew it!"
Above the terrified girl's head, Mac was breathing heavily. "Attaboy, Harry!" he gloated. "Lay it to her, man! Stuff it in to her! Screw the shit outa the bitch!"
"Just try me!" Harry croaked.
Belle groaned as she felt his calloused hands seize the softly rounded globes of her trembling buttocks, hauling the quaking moons apart...and then suddenly she gasped and jerked convulsively as he let go with one hand, spat on the fingers, and crammed the saliva-wet digits straight into the hair-covered vaginal furrow up between her fearfully quivering thighs.
The next moment she felt a hard, hot, rubbery pressure nosing against the tender folds of flesh at the quaking entrance to her cunt.
Harry had taken his long hard penis in one hand and rammed the throbbing head straight at the saliva-dampened orifice of her pussy! Writhing her hips vainly in a futile attempt to escape the lewd assault on her exposed genitals, she began to cry a storm of rasping sobs that racked her painfully stretched body and sent the hot salt tears spurting from her eyes.
Prying apart the naked ass-cheeks below him with the forefinger and thumb of one hand, Harry stirred the iron-hard shaft of his pulsating cock into the warm moist folds of cuntal flesh flowering amidst the silken curls of pussy hair mantling the girl's obscenely splayed loins. She felt the muscles and tendons of his legs tense against the backs of her knees. His denim-clad hips leaned hard against her naked buttocks...and then she gave a strangled moan as the bulging head of his cock crushed through the fleshy, hair-covered lips of her cunt and slid half-an-inch into the wetly heated tunnel of her vagina.
He stirred the rigidly pulsing end of his huge cock into her a few more times, dilating and moistening the tightly contracted passage, stretching the walls of her tight little cunt in preparation for the brutal impalement to come.
Belle moaned again and then, as he flexed his hips once more and thrust viciously forward up into her belly with his raping pole of male hardness, she opened her mouth and gave a shrill squeal.
"Aaaaahhhhhhhhh!...It's too big! Stop!...Stop!...You're hurting meeeeeeee! Aaaaaaaiiiiiiieeeeeeee!"
Harry chuckled lasciviously. Releasing his penis, he grabbed her buttocks with both hands and hauled them apart as he thrust the rock-hard length of his heatedly throbbing cock far up into the tight clasping tunnel of the sobbing redhead's cunt. His hips smacked heavily against her nakedly squirming ass-cheeks and his sperm-bloated balls swung against the edge of the table as he plunged his shaft of hardened flesh in right up to the hilt with a grunt of animal satisfaction. Belle squealed with pain at the hotly pulsating cock-head bludgeoned against her cervix: Harry's long thick penis was enormous, her belly felt as if it was on fire and she was sure the lips of her painfully stretched cunt must be splitting from the girth of the plank-stiff instrument wedged into her loins.
"How's it goin', Harry boy?" Mac Breathed from the darkness above her contorted, tear-wet face.
"Okay," Harry gasped. "Man, but it's tight in there! You wouldn't believe!...Mac, I gotta take a look at that tight little cunt!"
There was the sound of clothes being fumbled aside, a soft click, and the pencil beam of a small flashlight stabbed the blackness of the room.
"Hey, cut that out!" Mac warned. "You know what the boss said...like no lights while we're here."
"Aw, hell, this can't do no harm," Harry protested. "She can't see nothin' of us not if I keep it trained right on that pretty little pussy!"
He caught his breath with a gasp. "Jesus!" he said softly. "Jesus, would you look at that!"
Keeping his grip on her wrists and neck, Mac leaned heavily across the girl's helplessly prone body. As his weight pressed her even more forcefully down against the table top, Belle almost screamed from the pressure of his body flattening her breasts below her. "Let's have a look, then," he whispered. And then, in his turn: "Jesus!"
He was staring over the twin moons of the girl's naked buttocks at the circle of light cast by the torch. In the pool of illumination, every hair in the obscenely exposed cleft between her ass-cheeks stood out sharp and clear. Below the tiny puckering ring of her anus, the thick white stump of Harry's wetly glistening cock protruded from the gleaming pink flanges of her pussy. "Move it around a little, Harry," Mac said hoarsely. "Let's see you move it, man!"
He watched, fascinated, as his partner began slowly undulating his hips, thrusting and withdrawing his plundering cudgel so that the ravished girl's brutally stretched cuntal lips were pulled out lasciviously clasping the hard, thick-veined shaft of his cock on the out-stroke, and then stuffed back into her vaginal cavity again each time he fucked the full length of his maledom home in her quaking belly. "Ain't that somethin'! " he muttered over and over again. "Now ain't that really somethin'!... "
And then suddenly the light clicked off. With a lecherous gasp, Harry grasped the half-naked girl's trembling hips and began ramming it into her with long, hard strokes. "Jeez, Mac," he panted, "I just can't...I just gotta... "
Face downwards on the table, Belle was still adrift on a sea of shame and horror. The searing pain of Harry's entry had subsided, to be replaced by a dull ache in the belly that was almost although she dared not admit it to herself that was almost pleasurable by comparison in its hypnotic regularity as he sawed in and out in gradually accelerating tempo. The skewering cock plowing into the obscenely milking depths of her vagina was drubbing the tender bud of her clitoris against the edge of the table as it slid lewdly up and down the thin wall of flesh separating her cuntal passage from the wood...and already tiny flames of erotic sensation were licking unwantedly through her loins and trembling the nerves of her belly.
The speed of Harry's lunges now suddenly increased...the rhythmic smack of his hips against her nakedly up-thrust buttocks grew more frantic...hesitated...became sporadic. . . accelerated again and then abruptly, far up in the hotly throbbing depths of her cunt, she felt his cock bulge and heave. The next moment he gave a choked cry and his raping pole of flesh spewed its white-hot load against the neck of her womb, squirt after squirt of creamy, scalding cum in gradually diminishing spurts.
Belle opened her mouth and cried in horror. The cruel hands were suddenly removed from her neck and wrists, and she heard Mac frenziedly panting: "Let me in there, man! Christ! Move over and let me in, Harry!"
But before, she could make any attempt to raise herself from the table a heavy weight flattened her down once more against the wood. Harry had leaped astride her back, pinning her tingling arms to her sides with his knees and leaning forward to rest his sperm-wet hands on the naked cheeks of her ass.
She heard the harsh rip of Mac's pants opening. The flashlight clicked on again but although she twisted her head around as far as she could, she could see nothing but the silhouette of the man straddling her back and a confusion of dim shadows cast by the faint light on the far wall.
She kicked out experimentally with her now-free legs but at once her ankles were grasped in a steely grip and the legs were forced relentlessly down to the floor again. "Okay," Mac's voice said from his crouching position below the table edge, "open 'em up, Harry, and let's see what the good Lord has in store for us!"
The man whose weight was pinning her to the table grasped her buttocks and slowly, torturingly, drew them apart. Mac whistled softly. "Jesus!" he murmured for the second time.
In the torchlight, the violated redhead's plundered little cunt gaped wetly open in its nest of damp hair, the glistening pink folds of flesh gleaming stickily with her vaginal secretions and droplets of Harry's cum. There was a trail of sperm shining on the inside of her left thigh and between her quivering ass-cheeks the pouting, wrinkled hole of her anus distended and contracted in time with the ravished girl's labored breath.
As the two men chuckled salaciously together, Belle felt more open and exposed than she ever had in her life. Held brutally down, bent double in a position of abject humiliation while they gloatingly examined each hair and crevice of her shamefully revealed secret parts, she was stripped of every vestige of self respect, robbed of every last shred of decency and pride. More quietly this time, she began to cry again, the bitter tears welling up from her eyes and splashing on to the wood of the table.
Mac rose slowly to his feet, splaying her thighs apart with his knees as he grasped the hair and cum-covered lips of her fleshy little cunt in fingers and thumbs and drew them slowly apart. The next moment, Belle was squealing with terror as he lunged forward savagely with his hips and slid the great length of his massively throbbing cock into the heated sheath of her hungrily clasping vagina.
There was no finesse about Mac, no slow-burn build-up to the climax, no pianissimo overture subtly orchestrated through to the forte crescendo of the last movement. When Mac fucked, he fucked...like a bull!
As soon as he felt the scalding elastic grasp of Belle's moistly throbbing cunt close around the hard, veined shaft of his cock, he began slamming it into her with long powerful strokes, panting in a fury of lustful abandon as he jerked his muscular hips convulsively against her naked buttocks.
Crushed as she was beneath the weight of his brutal companion, the violated redhead nevertheless felt to her horror the automatic response of her sensually awakening body to the repeated plundering of her loins. As Mac's lustfully expanding instrument jack-hammered in and out of her hotly tingling vaginal passage, the friction of that iron-hard pole of male flesh sawing against the sensitive rubbery shaft of her clitoris, teasing it down through her hair-lined cuntal lips against the edge of the table, triggered off spasms of unwanted erotic delight that flamed along her nerves and sent her mind reeling.
And in some strange way, some bizarre masochistic fashion, the very fact that she was being raped that she was held in this humiliating position being fucked half to death by one stranger while another, who had already raped her himself, gleefully watched seemed to heighten the intensity of the unbidden thrills trembling out from her ravished loins. Belle Devlin, the fiery, tempestuous redhead who had never yet found the man strong enough to tame her, was getting turned on by the crude assault of two hoodlum rapists she had never seen!
As Mac's powerful hips splatted against her splayed-open buttocks with demonic fury and the obscene suck and squelch of his massively thickened cock tunneling up into her pussy drowned the panting breath of the two men, she began mewling and groaning in ecstatic time with his pistoning thrusts.
"Oooooooohh...Aahhhhhhhhhh...
Ohhhhhhhhh!...Yessssssss!...Oooooooooooohh...Aaaaagggghhhh!" she chanted on and on as the drubbing staff plowed faster and faster into her wetly throbbing pussy.
Her orgasm took her by surprise. It was the sheer monotony of the pile-driving lunges searing machine-like up into the heated depths of her belly that started it off. She felt a delirious sensation building deep in the center of her. She fought with every shred of concentration to suppress it. But the hypnotic rhythm of the muscled cock fucking in and out of her love-starved cunt was too much for her. The fleshy orbs of her buttocks trembled convulsively under Harry's hands; spasmodic shudders quivered the muscles of her belly and thighs; her hips threshed frenziedly from side to side on the table. And then, like a tidal wave roaring outwards in all directions from her punished loins, it was on her...
Even then she tried desperately to hide it. She couldn't let these two brutal and despicable bums witness the betrayal of her body! She couldn't! Biting her lips until the blood came, she strove to conceal the cries of anguished ecstasy bursting from her contorted mouth. But it was no use. Her head and shoulders reared galvanically up behind Harry's imprisoning ass and her lips flew open.
"Mmmmmmmmm!...Ooooooggggggh!...Ah-ah-ah-aaaagggghhhhh!" she screamed.
"I...I...Oh God! Oh God!. . . No! Please!...I'm...Yes, I'm going to...I'm cumming! I'm c u m m i n g !...Aaaaaaagggghhhhh!"
And as the big man fucking remorselessly into her hotly trembling cunt sensed his complete conquest and subjugation of the lustfully writhing girl, his own climax seethed outwards from his balls and exploded devastatingly within him. Throwing back his head with a strangled cry of triumph, he seized her nakedly flaring hips and slammed his pelvis savagely against her ass-cheeks as his burgeoning penis began a wild staccato jerking that spewed gust after gust of heated sperm far up into the walls of her lewdly sucking pussy.
For awhile there was no sound in the darkened room but the labored panting of three pairs of lungs. Harry clambered slowly off Belle's back and zipped up the fly of his pants. Mac withdrew his now deflating penis from the wet hairy lips of the ravished girl's vagina and slowly straightened up. "Christ!" he mumbled thickly. "Jesus Christ!" Belle lay motionless on the table, her legs trailing limply over the edge, her mind a maelstrom of shame and revulsion and self-disgust and...yes! of carnal delight!
She was brought back to reality when rough hands seized her wrists and strapped them tightly together behind her back with a belt. Another was buckled around her biceps, shackling her arms to her sides. Then, lifting her off the table, they pushed her down on to the floor and Harry laughed. "Thanks, lady!" he said. "We'll just collect those eighty dollars from upstairs...and then we'll be on our way!"
CHAPTER THREE
"One was called Mac and the other was called Harry," Belle Devlin said. "They got into the house by forcing a first floor window with a broken frame and then they switched off the electricity at the mains I found out this morning. After that they...well, I guess I've already told you the rest."
She was sitting in the Bartlett's Creek police captain's office on a ladder-back chair, her knees primly together, her hands folded over the purse in her lap. Her glossy red-gold hair was freshly brushed and she was wearing a lime-green linen dress and suede brogues. The makeup on her face was subtly applied but it could not hide the lines of tiredness around her eyes, for it had been daylight before she was able at last to struggle free of the straps pinioning her wrists and arms. They were still red and raw under the long sleeves of the dress.
Darrell Bosquet's meaty body was sprawled in the swivel chair beside the green filing cabinets, a wide-brimmed hat tilted forward over his eyes and his crossed ankles resting on the ancient roll top desk against the wall. His collar was open and his tie loosened. One of his thumbs was hooked into the armhole of his unbuttoned vest; between the other and one fleshy forefinger he held the butt of a chewed cigar at arm's length over the back of the chair.
"Apart from that, Miss Devlin," he drawled, "you're missin' eighty dollars, is that all?"
"All?" Belle's eyebrows climbed her smooth forehead. "I should have thought physical assault, rape, burglary and tampering with the property of the electricity company was quite enough to begin with! Maybe you could add robbery with menaces, or whatever it's called, if you wanted to vary the charge."
"Now just a minute," Bosquet said. "I frame the charges around here. If I read you right, they just switched off the mains, didn't they? They didn't cut any wires, anything like that?"
"No, but "
"So they've committed no felony on electricity company property for a start. As to the window they came in by you said it was already broken, didn't you?"
"Kind of broken, yes. The frame was split and
"Okay. The window was broken so they couldn't have forced it. For a charge of burglary they have to break in. If they just kinda helped themselves to an open window... "
"It wasn't open; it was shut," Belle interrupted.
". . . then the only charge left out of all that list is plain and simple theft. They took eighty dollars of your money. That ain't much more than a misdemeanor."
Belle compressed her lips. "And what about the assault and rape?" she demanded.
"Well now you claim you was assaulted and raped," Bosquet said. "A lotta women claim that, if you don't mind my sayin' so. And half the time it turns out they was only too willin' at the start and then they changed their minds when it was all over."
"Are you suggesting," Belle began stormily, "that I would willingly...go to bed...with a couple of brutal hoodlums who had broken into my house and terrorized "
"Lady, I ain't suggestin' nothin', " the police chief cut in wearily. "I'm just tryin' to put you straight with the law as it stands. For a rape charge to stick you have to have evidence. The same goes for assault. Do you have any evidence? Any bruises, injuries, wounds? If you do, you gotta show 'em." He looked up under the brim of his hat at the girl's flawless face.
Belle flushed. She was damned if she was going to show this small-town Ceasar the purplish bruises mottling the soft flesh of her buttocks, the inflamed and swollen lips of her ravished vagina! "There are the marks of the straps they used to tie me up," she said uncertainly, pushing up the loose sleeves of her dress; "and the bruises on my arm and shoulder where they carried me from the kitchen to the living room."
"Oh, come on. Miss Devlin," Bosquet said after a cursory glance, "that ain't evidence not the way I mean! You could of got those if some guy reached out to stop you fallin' over, a fair skin like yours. And those red marks there's a dozen other explanations. Tight clothes, windin' a rope around your arm to haul a log, anythin'. You're doin' a lotta work around your place, ain't you? Cleanin' up and so on?"
"Yes, I am, but "
"There you are then." Bosquet twisted his leathery neck and spat into a cuspidor beside his chair. "No assault charge. As to the alleged rape, you went to a doctor, of course, first thing after you uh freed yourself, and got him to sign an affidavit after examination?"
Belle was suddenly silent.
"Welt, did you or didn't you?"
She cleared her throat. "Er no. I didn't. It didn't occur to me. I thought...." Her voice tailed away into silence again.
The police captain shrugged his heavy shoulders and shook his head. "Not a chance without that affidavit," he said, trying to make his voice sound regretful. "And it ain't no use goin' now. If they did find anythin', it could have happened any time since: you couldn't tie it down to last night, could you?"
"But I'm telling you they raped me last night!" Belle burst out angrily. "D'you think I enjoy coming here and giving you all these intimate details, for God's sakes? You think I get some kind of kick out of it?"
"I've heard of stranger things," Bosquet said calmly. And then, holding up his hand to stem another outburst from the furious girl: "I ain't disbelievin' you. But what I believe and what a judge will believe ain't necessarily the same. I'm just tryin' to sift out from your story the facts that's stand up in a court of law. So far I ain't found any, so we're back with the theft of eighty dollars. You have the numbers of the bills?"
"No, of course not. It was just a bundle of fives and tens and ones in my purse."
Bosquet sighed. Tossing his cigar butt into the cuspidor, he swung his feet off the desk, leaned forward, and drew a grubby notebook towards him. "Can you give me a description of these men?" he asked, picking up a stub of pencil.
"No, I can't," Belle said shortly. "It all happened in the dark. I never saw them at all. I told you."
"I thought you said there was a torchlight?"
"There was. But...but they were using it only to...to look at me." She was struggling to master her embarrassment. "One of them was. . . sitting on my back. I was face downwards across a table. I only caught a glimpse of the man on my back silhouetted against the light and a shadow on the wall."
"You didn't get no impression of size?...Dark or fair?...The kind of men they were?...Anything you would recognize again?"
"I should have thought it was obvious what kind of men they were. They were hoodlums, bums. You don't get college boys breaking into people's houses in the middle of the night and raping them!"
The police chief permitted himself a wintry smile. "You'd be surprised what we get college boys doin', " he said.
"All I could say," Belle went on, "was that they were both powerful men. And they both seemed to be er big. Their voices were kind of. . . well, kind of coarse. Oh, and one was much deeper than the other. More assured too, if you know what I mean." She leaned back in her chair and looked at him expectantly.
Bosquet pushed his hat to the back of his head and passed his hand over his forehead. "Just so," he said, throwing the pencil down on the blank page of the notebook. "Two guys that may have been big...and one had a deeper voice than the other! That's a hell of a description to circulate, Miss Devlin. Would you recognize these men if you saw them?"
"I...might. If I heard their voices. Under similar circumstances."
"I said if you saw them."
"Well. . . No, I guess not."
"Two unidentified men, then. They walk into your house, take eighty unidentifiable dollars and so you say rape you and tie you up. Apart from your say-so, there ain't no evidence for any of it. And I suppose you expect me to have them in jail within twenty-four hours?"
"Isn't it your job to have them in jail?" Belle asked coldly. "And there is evidence too. I brought you the belts they used to bind me."
"Ah, yes. The belts." Bosquet picked up the pencil again and flicked at the two coiled straps that Belle had laid on his desk. "Dime store pants belts. They could have been bought at any five-and-ten from coast to coast. There's probably a hundred like 'em in this town alone."
"Fingerprints then?" Belle was beginning to feel desperate. She almost doubted her own story now! "They must have left dozens of prints all over."
"Ah, now, look," the big man protested, "this ain't some smart movie we're in: this is real life! We don't keep citizens prints on file in this town. You want me to haul in some forensic expert from Cochrane and fingerprint every white male over fourteen in the county or something like that? For eighty dollars?"
"Eighty dollars plus breaking and entering plus robbery with violence plus rape," the girl said tightly.
Bosquet swung his chair around to face her and planted his big feet in their cowboy boots solidly on the floor. He slapped the palms of his hands down on his knees and stared at her. "Miss Devlin," he said, "I got plenty to do right now. There's the inquest on your foreman. Another on the guy in your logging camp got killed over the ridge last week. There's game-law enforcement, auto patrols, traffic handling, local crime, school supervision, and I don't know what. Now you ask me to do something about two guys you never saw, committing a crime with po witnesses on evidence you can't support. Okay, okay I'll ask the boys to keep their eyes open."
He swung the chair back to his desk, scribbled a single word on the pad, and then, turning his head briefly towards her, he nodded curtly and said: "Good day, Miss Devlin. Thanks for calling by."
Belle's green eyes were still glittering with anger as she trod down the rickety stairway to the sunny Main Street boardwalk. She hadn't expected much from the local police: she'd made her complaint as a matter of form, for the record. She didn't really expect them to lay hands on her violators; they could have been passing vagrants, across the state border by now. But she hadn't bargained either for quite such obstructive tactics on the part of the police chief. Not only had Bosquet openly doubted her story: he'd implied that she was some kind of nut, a hysterical female making the whole thing up for obscure reasons of her own. He hadn't taken a note; he hadn't even made the formal gesture of entering the complaint on the note pad Devlin. The complaint would simply be filed away and forgotten...except that there was nothing on paper to file!
She walked along the row of two-story frame buildings making her daily purchases at the general store, the grocery and the hardware emporium, ignoring the nudges of passing housewives and the covert grins of the men sitting in tipped back chairs outside Murphy's saloon. They'd have something to talk about when Bosquet called by for his pre-lunch beer! By two o'clock the story would be all over town: the smart-ass American girl who thought she could run old man Devlin's business was so man-crazy that she'd invented some harebrained tale of intruders in the night who'd laid her against her will. She could almost hear the malicious whispers now!
She parked a paper sack of groceries on the back seat of her jeep and drove to the mill. When she left an hour later, a dusty sedan that had been waiting across the street with the motor running pulled out behind her and kept station right through town. On the highway beyond, she accelerated. The sedan gained speed too. But when she slowed, instead of passing her, the larger car did the same, remaining a couple of hundred yards behind her whatever speed she went.
The driver he was alone, she saw with a sigh of relief after a glance in her mirror followed her all the way out to the dirt road leading through the trees to her property.
As she made the turn-off, he braked to a halt in a patch of shadow on the far side of the highway. She drove the jeep around a couple of bends in the winding track, cut the motor, and stole back between the thickly massed cedars towards the entrance. A hundred yards from the road she could see the sedan she thought it was an old Plymouth still parked in the shade. The driver was leaning against the front fender reading a newspaper.
When she went out in the afternoon, the Plymouth was still there. It made a quick U-turn and followed her to the gas station, where she refueled the jeep, and then back again to the dirt road, where it parked as before. The following day a Dodge station wagon was waiting for her when she turned out of her driveway to go to the mill. The driver was different but the routine was the same. Evidently she was being placed under continuous surveillance by somebody who didn't care if she knew or not! Who could be doing that...and why?
The answer to the first question was obviously Bosquet. But why? Surely not because of the story she had told him? And especially after he had made such a show of being too short-handed to deal with her complaint! Belle's anger at being spied upon began to be tinged with alarm.
And then, early the next morning, there was a rustle of tires on gravel and she came to her bedroom window to see a black Buick limousine followed by a Chevrolet sedan pull up in front of the porch. Darrell Bosquet climbed out of the Buick and strutted to the steps followed by four uniformed cops from the Chevy. She belted a housecoat tightly around her body and hurried down the stairs.
"Miss Devlin," the police chief said stiffly when she opened the door, "I'm afraid I have to ask you to allow my men to search the house."
"S-s-s-search the house?" Belle was stupefied with astonishment. "What on earth for? Have you decided to try and dig up some evidence after all?"
"We sure have," Bosquet said grimly. "But it ain't nothin' to do with that complaint of yours."
"Why then? I don't understand."
"Information received," the captain said vaguely. "It seems like there's some kids in town been caught smokin' joints. . . marijuana. Hopped up on the hard stuff too, for all I know. That kind of thing may be okay in the United States or over on the West Coast, but we don't go for it here."
"And just what has that got to do with me?" Belle asked in a dangerously quiet voice.
"According to my information...well, let's just say I have to search the house, shall we?"
"Some kid smokes pot and so you automatically suspect a foreigner! And you think that I. . . ? Why, I never heard of anything so ridiculous in all my life!" the girl exploded, almost speechless with indignation. "There's such a thing as the law of libel, you know. Even in Canada. Even in this backward county."
"My orders are to search the house," Bosquet said.
"You have a warrant, of course?" Belle demanded icily.
"Sure I have a warrant. They don't come any better than this one: it's signed by Judge Warren himself!" Fishing a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket, the police chief turned towards his men and repeated: "A warrant from Judge Warren," to make sure they got the joke. The four uniformed cops smiled dutifully.
Snatching the document, Belle stalked into
SO the sitting room seething with rage. Defiantly, she poured herself a half tumbler of neat rye whiskey and sat furiously pulling on a cigarette while Bosquet and his men blundered about the house overhead. Two hours later, Bosquet walked into the room and stood staring down at her. "Well, we didn't find anything," he announced.
"Of course you didn't find anything," the angry redhead said without looking at him. "There's nothing to find."
"All I have to do now," Bosquet said, "is to ask you to submit to a personal search."
"A personal....? " Belle bounced to her feet with her eyes blazing. "Dear God, is there no limit to the amount of persecution I have to suffer in this one-horse town?"
"It's in the warrant."
"Well, I certainly have no intention of allowing myself to be pawed over by you or your men," the girl snapped.
"Of course," Bosquet said smoothly, "you can exercise your right to be searched by a police matron if you wish."
"I certainly do wish, then. I never heard of such a thing!"'
"In which case," the police captain continued, "we shall have to take you into custody and keep you in jail until it's convenient for a police wagon to ship you to Cochrane...just in case you junked something before we could get you to the station there. We don't have no policewomen in Bartlett's Creek."
"You don't seem to have much in the way of policemen either."
Bosquet grinned. "It's a three and a half hour drive to Cochrane," he said. "We couldn't get a wagon here before three-thirty. I guess you shouldn't figure on being home much before midnight."
Belle bit her lip. This was sheer moral blackmail. As the biggest employer in Bartlett's Creek, she couldn't possibly afford to be seen in custody. There would be plenty of eyes to see her taken from the police car into jail...and out again into the Cochrane wagon. Plenty of tongues to wag and plenty of voices to say there was no smoke without fire and Bosquet knew it. The fact that she was entirely and completely innocent of any connection with drugs would in no way serve to restore her tarnished reputation.
Breathing hard, she turned to look out of the window at the sunlight slanting through the trees and glinting on the chrome work of the police cars in the driveway. "Very well," she said distantly. "You can do it here. Let's get it over with but not in front of your men."
Grunting with satisfaction, the police captain walked to the door, closed it firmly and came back to Belle. As she stared woodenly at the wall above his head, he ran his fingers perfunctorily up her thighs, patted her under the arms, felt the pockets of her housecoat, and then placed the flat of his hand in the cleft between her tautly bulging breasts. She sucked in her breath with a hiss, but the touch was brief and impersonal. "Don't you want to look between my legs?" she couldn't resist saying sarcastically.
"Certainly," Bosquet replied calmly. "But first I have to ask you to remove your brassiere and panties."
"What!"
"A search is a search," Bosquet said.
"But that's outrageous! I've never been so...I've never... "
"Look, lady," the police chief cut in with his first show of anger and irritation, "I have a job to do. This is part of it sometimes. You gotta forget I'm wearin' pants and you're in a skirt or whatever you call it. Now quit squallin' and get outa them clothes or do I have to take you down to the station house and call that wagon from Cochrane?"
Striving to hold back the tears of rage and humiliation, Belle turned her back on him and stripped off her panties without removing the housecoat and then unsnapped the fastener of her brassiere and shrugged the lace and nylon garment up above her breasts. Bosquet placed a hand on her arm and spun her around to face him. Staring over her shoulder, he felt again the wide valley between her breasts without disturbing the tightly belted housecoat, passing his fingers afterwards along the crease underneath each softly swelling mound of flesh. "H'mph," he grunted surlily. "Ain't nothin' there."
Belle said nothing.
"Okay," Bosquet said. "Now bend down and pull them skirts up over your hips."
Scarlet with mortification, the speechless redhead spread her legs and leaned forward, sliding the housecoat up to her waist so that, for the second time in less than a week, her genitals were shamefully exposed to a stranger.
Bosquet left her in that undignified position while he produced a small cardboard box from his pocket, placed it on the table, extracted a single-finger rubber medical examination glove, smoothed the fingerstall on to the middle finger of his right hand, and then smeared vaseline over it from a tube he dug out of another pocket. Approaching her with the greased finger held upright and the skirts of the glove falling over the rest of his clenched hand, he proved among the silky hairs covering the cleft between her lustily rounded buttocks until he found the entrance to her vagina, and then shoved the finger in.
"By rights, I oughta have somebody else present," he said conversationally as he rummaged around in the ridged and trembling passage, "to witness that I'm not interferin' with you. So remember it was you asked I should do it alone. I don't want no complaints floatin' around about you bein' raped by a police captain."
He removed the invading finger with a slight squelch and peeled off the glove. "Nothin' there," he remarked as he selected another from the box, drew it on and greased it as before. "But you'd be surprised how many folks try to get away with hidin' things inside themselves packets of gems, sachets of dope, ammunition even, I heard tell once!" Leaning over her, he thrust the rubber-gloved finger swiftly and accurately into the tightly puckered hole of her anus.
Belle rocked on her heels. She caught her breath and bit her lips to stop from crying aloud as the intruding digit sank to its full length through the clenched nether ring and began worming about in the soft buttery depths of her rectum. She was almost fainting from the abject shame of this degrading examination. She had never felt so humiliated in her whole life, not even under the brutal manipulations of Harry and Mac.
Bosquet withdrew the finger gently and her belly muscles contracted involuntarily as it slid past the constricting ring of her asshole. He straightened up, stripped off the glove and said genially "Just one thing more. Will you please stand up and open your mouth?"
Wondering dully what further indignity could be heaped upon her, the trembling redhead closed her eyes and did as she was told. Bosquet pressed two fingers on her lower lip, forcing her jaw open wider still and shone a small flashlight into her mouth, turning his head this way and that to peer up at her palate and between her teeth. Finally he snapped off the beam and stood back. "Okay, Miss Devlin," he said, "you're clean. Sorry we had to bother you an' all that. All in the course of duty, you know."
He went to the door, jerked it open and poked his head into the hallway. "Okay, boys," he called. "We're on our way."
Belle turned on her heel, stalked past him. climbed the stairs and slammed her bedroom door. A few minutes later, she heard the two cars grinding away down the drive in low gear.
Still white with rage, she flung herself on her bed and broke into a storm of weeping. It was over an hour before she could master her feelings sufficiently to get up, take a shower, fix her face and tidy up the mess the searchers had left.
In fact, she discovered when she got down to it, they couldn't have searched very hard. There were a hundred places where a packet of drugs could have been hidden if they were really looking for such a thing which they hadn't touched. Drawers were undisturbed, valises unopened, piles of papers on her desk as she had left them. She poured herself another rye and sat down to think. This could only mean one thing with a search that perfunctory, they could never have expected to find any drugs. "I should hope not!" She exclaimed aloud as she swallowed a mouthful of the fiery liquor.
Why, then if they knew perfectly well there were no drugs in the house, had they come? Again the answer was obvious; the whole thing was a put-up job. There never had been any
"information received". . . there probably weren't even any drugs in town at all. It was just an excuse to get a warrant and come to the house and pester her!
And if again she asked why, the answer was once more clear. Whoever was trying and failing to persuade her to sell was switching the attack. She could see it all now; everything was falling into place. Somebody, and it must be somebody powerful, was mounting a deliberate campaign to try and force her out, to make her life so unbearable that she would have to sell.
Looking at it this way, everything fitted as soon as she had refused Snell's final offer, things had begun to go wrong. The break-up of the log boom could have been sabotage. So could the attack of ptomaine that had decimated the logging camp. The men who had walked out could have been bribed. Townsend's death and that of the bark-peeler could have been "arranged." And yes, of course! Harry and Mac had been ordered to break into the house and rape her! Hadn't she heard one of them say something about "the boss" not wanting them to be recognized when the flashlight was first switched on?
If that was true, it was small wonder she had received no cooperation from the police when she complained! If Snell's "clients" were big enough to contemplate murder, bribery and rape in their attempts to get hold of her property, they would scarcely balk at the corruption of a small-town police chief! The inexplicable posting of men to watch her, the pointless search of the house and the degrading personal examination of herself were all moves in the game to humiliate and embarrass her to the point where she would rather leave than carry on. And if she left, presumably she would be prepared to sell....
But to whom? Now she could understand why the men behind Snell wished to remain anonymous!
All right, Belle said to herself grimly. We shall see! If they think they can get rid of me this way, they've another think coming!
Suddenly, she felt more confident than she had for days. It was the fear and uncertainty and aura of mystery that had sapped her courage at the root; now she knew or thought she knew what she had to face; the obstacles she had to overcome at once reduced themselves to their proper perspective. But if she was going to fight, the first thing she had to know was who was she fighting against?
Snell she could discard as a hired intermediary. Bosquet was probably simply doing what he was told because his job depended on it. The thing was to find out who was doing the hiring and the telling.
Attack, she had always been told, was the best method of defense. Very well, instead of weakly defending herself against the attacks of others, she would go out and attack herself! She remembered reading the advice of some fictional hero was it James Bond? who said that when you were stalled for a lead, the best thing to do was to take some overt action yourself to stir things up...and then sit back and see what happened and hope you could make some useful deductions from it!
She didn't know whether it was the stimulating effect of the liquor she had drunk or merely the relief from tension that knowledge brings, but she felt so confident that she decided to put her plan into action right away. She would defy convention and brave the local gossips by going to have a drink alone at the saloon!
As soon as it was dark, she put on a tan trouser suit and a light camel topcoat and drove into town in the jeep. That would give them something to talk about a woman drinking alone in pants!
The car waiting at the bottom of the driveway was an Oldsmobile convertible at least five years old. The driver was a man she hadn't seen before, young and fair and good-looking. He followed her into Bartlett's Creek and parked half a block behind her on Main.
The saloon was crowded, a long, low-ceilinged room with a bar along one side, booths at the far end and tables grouped around the door. It was heavy with the smell of cigarette and cigar smoke and loud with the chatter of a score of animated conversations. With an assurance she was far from feeling, Belle pushed through the door, walked up to the bar and hitched herself on to one of the stools. For a heart-stopping instant, all conversation ceased. Heads turned towards her, elbows nudged, eyebrows were raised. And then there was a low murmur, a sudden bark of laughter from one of the tables, and the talk crashed out as before only this time she was sure most of it would be about her!
The bartender was standing on the far side of the counter, swabbing the polished top with a cloth. "Good evening, Miss. What'll it be?"
"Make mine rye-and-dry," the girl said.. "A large one."
There was another buzz of conversation around her. The ladies of Bartlett's Creek on
Saturday nights or the other rare occasions on which they were allowed to drink with their men folk, usually ordered sherry or vermouth or port. Dressed like a man, acting like a man by coming in unescorted and drinking a man's drink, Belle knew they'd be talking about her already as the scarlet woman. Well, that was okay that was what she had come for, wasn't it, to be talked about?
Sipping the liquor, she swiveled on the stool and looked around her. She was the only woman in the place. There were professional men, barflies, card players and laborers in groups. She wondered how many of them were called Harry or Mac. In one noisy booth she saw several mill-hands she knew by sight. As she watched, the door opened and the blond young man who had been tailing her came in and slid into a seat at a vacant table. He was better looking than she had thought tall and muscular with a wide mouth, large gray eyes and a tanned, clean-lined face.
Turning her back on him, she picked up a day-old copy of the Toronto Star lying on the counter and idly scanned the headlines. There had been another earthquake in Chile. Nixon was once again asking for the confidence of the American people in a television broadcast
French-Canadian separatists had picketed Government House in Ottawa. A millionaire playboy was missing from his usual haunts in New York and thought to be wandering with amnesia. A psychopath had slain a family of six in British Columbia. Tossing the paper aside, she drained her glass, pushed it to the far side of the bar and called out, "the same again, please."
After her third rye-and-dry, she began to feel impatient. People came and went. The crowd had thinned a little. She had started a desultory conversation with the barman, but it led nowhere. She dare not engage the men on either side in conversation in case they thought she was trying to make a strike. Yet nothing was happening. How did you make things happen? What was the formula for stirring things up?
Raymond Chandler once said, on the art of mystery writing, "when in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun." She was embroiled in a mystery all right, but she could hardly do that. She would have to hope that her appearance in this way would not pass unnoticed and might start some reaction she would learn about later. Feeling slightly tipsy, she paid for her drink and made for the door.
Before she got there, her eyes met those of the young man following her. He was sitting over a tankard three-quarters full of beer. "You'll have to down that pretty quickly. I'm leaving right away," she said.
"Ma'am?" his voice was deep and pleasantly modulated.
She leaned her hands on the table and stared at him. "Why are you following me?" She demanded.
"Following you? I don't know what you're talking about," he said.
"Sure you know. You were waiting at the bottom of my driveway. When I left, you tailed me into town. You followed me when I came in here."
"I may have followed you into town. It's open to all; isn't it, the highway? I came in here because I was thirsty; I'm a stranger and it's the only saloon I know," the young man said reasonably.
"Don't give me that!" Belle cried angrily. "You were posted outside my house to spy on me and tail me if I left. I want to know why."
"Ma'am, I think maybe you should go home," the young man said, gazing pointedly at the girl's flushed cheeks. "I tell you I don't know what you're talking about." He turned his head to shrug at his neighbors. Conversation around them had stopped and people were listening curiously. She could read their thoughts on their faces...an hysterical broad with a persecution mania...thinks every man she sees is trying to lay her! She turned on her heel and walked out of the bar in an atmosphere heavy with animosity.
An immensely tall man with the build of a wrestler was standing on the boardwalk smoking a cigar beside her jeep. He was dressed in an off-white alpaca suit with an open-neck shirt. Belle had seen him at a couple of cocktail parties soon after she arrived, but she had never spoken to him. "You're Louis Burger, aren't you?" she demanded. "The mayor of this town?"
He nodded, squinting down at her in the lamplight. "That's me."
"Mr. Burger, I want you to help me. I'm Belle Devlin. I live up at my uncle's old place, off the highway. Somebody's trying to frighten me into leaving town so that III sell my property. And I'm being persecuted by the police that man Bosquet had a permanent watch on my house, and I'm followed wherever I go."
Burger flicked the ash from his cigar. "Look lady; I'm the mayor," he said curtly. "If the police are watching you, I guess they must have their reasons. They're only doing their duty. If you have any complaints, take them up with
Bosquet; it's his business, not mine. As to your property, if you have any specific charges to lay against named persons, it's up to you to pass the evidence to the police department. Then the matter can be dealt with in the proper way in the courthouse. Good night, Miss Devlin." Nodding briefly, he turned and walked away.
"Well, you can tell Bosquet from me," Belle shouted furiously after him, "that I refuse to be intimidated! I'm here and I intend to stay here! And that goes for Damon Snell and his wretched clients, too!"
Burger, his massive back receding down the boardwalk, gave no sign that he had heard.
Trembling with rage, Belle climbed into her jeep and turned the starter key. The motor of the little utility burst into life, and she wrenched it around in a tight U-turn and drove rapidly towards her home. She was about a mile out of town when the headlights came up fast behind her. She glanced in the mirror. As she had expected, it was the convertible driven by the young man from the saloon...but this time, instead of keeping station behind her, he pulled out and roared past. In a few minutes, his twin taillights had disappeared around a curve in the highway.
Belle shrugged and forgot about him. The cool night air was sending the liquor she had taken to. her head, and she was feeling decidedly muzzy. She would have to use all her concentration to keep the jeep on a straight path and get herself home safely. The last thing she could afford right now was to be pulled in on a drunken driving charge by some prowling patrol car!
She was winding the jeep along the tortuous track leading through the trees towards the house when she rounded a bend, and the lights from her headlamps picked up a large car slewed across the driveway, barring her passage. It was the convertible which had passed her on the highway.
The driver was leaning against the fender. As she jammed on the brakes and brought the jeep to a squealing halt, he levered himself upright and walked towards her. Belle jumped to the ground and gestured angrily towards the Oldsmobile. "What the hell's the idea? What are you doing on my property? It's bad enough being followed when I leave it," she began, "without finding some police jalopy blocking my -"
"Okay, okay," the young man cut in. He was smiling. "I accept the rebuke, and I know I shouldn't be here...Miss Devlin, I guess I owe you an apology. But I couldn't play it any other way in the saloon. Too many ears and eyes around."
The enraged redhead was taken aback. "Apology?" she repeated blankly. "It's a little late for the police department to repent, isn't it?"
"This is nothing to do with the department. It's personal."
"But...but I don't understand. Why?"
"Because I think you're getting a raw deal," the young man said.
CHAPTER FOUR
His name was Alan Dennis. He told her, standing in the tunnel of light carved from the darkness by the jeep's brights, that he was an American bumming around the lakes after six unprofitable months as an insurance salesman. Bosquet had hired him along with two other strangers and enrolled them as special deputies with instructions to keep a day and night watch on her.
"It sounds like a job that could go on indefinitely," Belle said bitterly. "So why tell this to me?"
"I already said. I think you're getting a raw deal."
"How raw? The police have their duty to do. The mayor told me so himself. Why shouldn't you get paid to help them?" She was still suspicious.
"No reason at all if it was their legal duty. I don't think it is."
"Why not?"
"Oh...gossip around the station house," Alan said vaguely. "You know. Nobody there believes you have anything to do with drugs. It's some kind of a setup. If it's a frame, I don't want any part of it."
Belle found herself smiling. "Now tell me the real reason, Mr. Dennis," she said. Her voice, she realized with dismay, was thick and blurred from the effects of the rye...and somehow it seemed terribly important that she should speak clearly and articulately at this moment.
Dennis was staring at her, wide gray eyes under the curly blond hair shining with admiration as he took in the proud thrust of her breasts under the camel coat, the subtly sculptured contours of waist and hip, the perfect planes of her face hollowed with shadow by the harsh light. "Do you really have to ask?" Alan said softly. "Must I spell it out for you?"
The next moment Belle never quite knew how it happened his arms were around her and her hands were clasped to the back of his head, pulling his face down towards her. It might have been the after-effect of the liquor; it could have been because she had moved for so long in a world where every man's hand seemed against her that the discovery of an unexpected friend was overwhelming; maybe it was simply a natural woman's reaction to male approval that had been denied to her for too long, but all of her generous and passionate nature welled up inside of her and overflowed the artificial dam she had built and sheltered behind for so many weeks. She opened her mouth and kissed him ardently, lasciviously, invitingly, their hotly muscled tongues lacing together in the wet winy caverns of their mouths as Dennis's arms tightened convulsively about her, and Belle's fingers scrabbled at the stuff of his jacket.
Then she was crying helplessly, her head on his broad shoulder and the hot salt tears spilling out of her eyes and running down her cheeks. He crushed her to him, squashing her full breasts against his chest, his knee firm between her trembling thighs. With one hand, he stroked the cascade of fiery hair burnished by the bright light. "Baby," he murmured. "It's all right. . . Relax...it's all right."
And as she heard the quiet, reassuring tones above her head, Belle felt suddenly as though an enormous weight had been lifted from her shoulders. The fears and problems and rages of a few minutes ago dwindled to insignificance beside the surge of gratitude and tenderness and sudden desire she experienced for the man in whose arms she stood. She wasn't alone anymore; she had a friend and he said it would be all right!
She could feel the hard bulge of his penis through the stuff of his pants against her thigh. She could feel the warmth of his breath playing on her hair. She shivered with awareness at the touch of his big hand on her back. And all at once she knew that she wanted this Alan Dennis...she wanted his warmly pulsating penis inside her, she wanted to feel its clean male hardness boring up into her belly...more than she had ever wanted anything in her life!
Raising her tear-stained face, she stared up into his eyes. "Kiss me!" she cried fiercely. "Kiss me and hold me tight!"
Dennis caught his breath. He thought the pale features in their frame of tawny hair, the luminous green eyes bright with pleading and the voluptuously parted lips the most beautiful he had ever seen. Their mouths clasped hungrily together. For a delirious moment they stood there kissing while his hands roved the supple curve of her back, sculpted the hollows of her waist and then insinuated themselves under the camel coat to cup the swelling weight of her breasts in their palms. And then Alan's arm tightened around her shoulders, his other arm dived behind her knees, and he had swept her off her feet and was carrying her through the trees.
There was a grassy glade among the cedars ten yards off the track. He lowered her gently to the turf and cast himself down beside her. He was panting hoarsely. "Belle?" he croaked, almost as if he were asking her if she were sure.
She gazed mistily up at him in the faint light percolating through the foliage from the jeep's headlamps, the storm of erotic desire shaking her stifling the power of speech. Her mouth opened and her head moved hypnotically from side to side on the short dry grass.
With an inarticulate cry. Dennis tore open the buttons of her jacket and forced the white nylon brassiere beneath it up and over the tautly up-thrust mounds of her breasts. His fingers lightly traced the swelling outlines of naked flesh, rolling and tweaking her rubbery nipples until they spiked out into lustful hardness. Then with a groan of delight he dropped his head between them and hungrily kissed the soft slopes of satiny flesh under which the excited redhead's heart was fluttering wildly. His tongue trailed wetly along the warm valley separating her breasts, flickered up the incline nearest to him, and then circled lasciviously around the areola centered on one erect nipple.
Belle mewled softly with pleasure, arching her hips off the ground as his fingers tightened on her tender flesh, forcing the nipple up into his mouth while he sucked and nibbled teasingly at the rubbery little bud. Her hand crawled down the length of his body, groping for the rigid bulge of his lustfully throbbing cock where it thrust out the material of his pants, already moist and sticky with seminal fluid seeping from the glans. He jerked convulsively and moaned deep in his throat as her fingers tightened around the stiffly outlined shaft, thrusting his pelvis towards the tantalizing grasp as his lips and tongue alternated frantically between the squirming girl's nipples.
In a state of mindless passion, Belle reached for the zipper at the top of his fly and yanked it down. Worming her hand into the opening, she hauled aside his shirt and jockey shorts and hauled out his hotly throbbing shaft of male flesh.
As her cool fingers closed around the muscled staff, the young man groaned again. His aching cock jerked and trembled at her feather-light touch sending unbearable ripples of erotic delight coursing through his loins.
Alan's penis was long and thick and webbed with veins on the underside, the lust-bloated head already bursting through the distended foreskin to nose wetly into the girl's excited palm. Her naked breasts rising and falling agitatedly with the violence of her emotion, Belle shifted her position so that she could reach him with her other hand. Gently, she pulled his testicles free of the garments sheathing his hips, kneading and caressing the sperm-swollen balls in their hairy sac as she milked the rigidly quivering cock and watched his plum-colored cock head appear, then disappear, then reappear.
And then suddenly, drawing his foreskin hard back with her forefinger and thumb so that the blood-engorged instrument throbbed and expanded to even greater hardness, she snatched her other hand away and tore open the side-zipper of her own pants, arching her pelvis off the ground as she dragged the garment, and the nylon panties under them, down over her hips and kicked them off to lie naked in the grass.
"Oh God," she groaned, flailing her coppery head from side to side on the velvet turf in wild abandon, "I want you so much! Give it to me...give it to me now!"
Gasping with excitement, Alan scrambled to his knees, his eagerly pulsing penis still firmly grasped in the aroused young redhead's hand. For a moment in the dimly lit glade he saw her beneath him she was lying shamelessly on the grass, her topcoat and jacket wide open, her brassiere pushed up under her arms, the tautly erect nipples tipping her full sensuous breasts pointing proudly up at the dark sky. Down the long pale blur of her naked body he saw from a fugitive gleam of moisture among the damp scythe of hairs between her trembling thighs that her quivering cuntal furrow was already wet with excitement. And then her legs had snaked wide on either side of him and he was sinking down between them, her urgent fingers lustfully guiding his pulsating hardness towards her cock-hungry vagina.
He gasped and shivered as the hard rubbery tip nosed damply against the hair-fringed, feverishly swollen lips of her cunt, moaning with desire as she stirred the sensitive throbbing glans into her warm wet folds of pussy flesh. Then he could stand it no longer: supporting himself on the palms of his hands on either side of her softly trembling body, he flexed his hips and thrust.
The huge throbbing cudgel slid through Belle's wetly gaping vaginal lips and up into the liquid heat of her belly. The scalding elastic sheath swallowed the whole length of his rock-hard shaft as easily as a vaseline-filled rubber glove. Never before had he felt a vagina so warm, so buttery, so clasping. Her deeper cuntal muscles milked and massaged his pulsating hardness until he wanted to yell his delight. Dennis clenched his teeth and groaned deep in his throat with sensual delight.
Belle had crowed with ecstasy as the muscled rod of flesh tunneled up into her belly. Now she released her grasp on Dennis's hotly throbbing cock and tore open the buttons of his shirt, writhing her naked breasts lasciviously against the pale hairs matting his chest. Her legs twined themselves around his thighs, her heels locked themselves behind his knees, and she raked her fingers passionately down his back as she thrust her cock-stuffed pussy convulsively up and down to meet the downward plunges of his powerful hips.
"Ooooooooooh!" she gurgled deliriously. "That's so gooooooood! Give it to me, darling! Fuck me! Fuck harder...Oh...Yes! Yes! Like that!"
"Damned right I will!" Dennis panted, punctuating his words with thrusts and withdrawals of his long hard penis. "I'm going to...screw that beautiful ass...off you...you gorgeous...sexy bitch!...I'm going to...fuck you...until you scream!"
"Yesssss! Yesssss!...Give it to me, honey!...Say it again!"
"Aaaaaaaaah!" Belle chanted in a delirium of abandoned desire. "Oh, darling! Ooooooggggghh!
Together, they started a slow undulating rhythm, their naked hips smacking lewdly together in the stillness of the forest as the wildly aroused young man's rigidly throbbing penis pistoned relentlessly in and out of her hungrily clasping, cock-milking cunt.
Belle's arms clamped fiercely around his shoulders, drawing him down to her so that the taut buds of her lust-hardened nipples continued to grind furiously against the bared flesh of his chest. Dennis's face was drowned in the red tide of her hair, his tongue slavering at the smooth skin of her neck as her wetly open mouth crooned obscenities into his ear. His hands forced themselves under her undulating ass-cheeks, cupping the cool weight of her buttocks against his palms, pulling her up tighter still against the jack-hammering trunks of his penis.
For minutes they fucked in a silence broken only by the slap and squelch of naked flesh on flesh and the rasping of excited breath punctuated by murmured endearments and small cries of delight. The roar and crackle of a powerful motorcycle approaching on the highway swelled to a crescendo and then died away into the distance. Further up in the forest a night bird gave a single discordant cry, and somewhere on the far side of the glade a nocturnal animal scurried suddenly in the undergrowth.
Arching her strong young hips ferociously upwards to meet the plunging thrusts of the man whose rock-hard penis was pistoning in and out of her belly, Belle was in a transport of erotic rapture. Nothing existed in her alcohol-dimmed, passion-crazed mind but the reality of the hands clenched into the sensitive flesh of her buttocks, the warm mouth at her neck, the hard male weight pressing down on her aching nipples, and the thrilling assault of the wonderfully hardened cock skewering her loins. The soft forest turf slid away under her. In the gaps between the branches overhead, the stars swung crazily across the sky.
For some time now they had been gradually accelerating the tempo of their pounding hips. Their nakedly entwined bodies were working together like a perfectly designed machine ....and the graph of the machine's progress was mounting inexorably towards a climax! Over the hammering of his heart and the thunder of blood in his ears, Dennis realized in the sweet anguish of approaching orgasm that the moment was almost there. The graph had begun to climb unbearably upward; already he could feel the familiar tension building deep in his cum-filled balls...building, building, clamoring for release.
XS
"Oh God!" he groaned, "Oh, Belle, baby...I can't...I'm almost. . . Are you... ? "
Drawing up her knees in answer, she wound her legs around the humping Dennis's waist, her heels drumming frantically on the pumping cheeks of his naked ass. He moaned in ecstasy, easing one hand out from under her buttocks to squeeze the fleshy hair-covered lips of her cunt more tightly around the iron-hard stump of his cock as it sawed savagely in and out of her hotly seething pussy.
Alan's forefinger wormed its way among her sensitive folds of vaginal flesh to find the erect little bud of her clitoris and pushed forward causing her sensitive, passion-swollen nerve ending to scrape against his thickened male hardness.
Belle's breath exploded shrilly from her lungs in a convulsion of delight. "Oh God!" she exclaimed in a whispered scream, her whole naked body shuddering in uncontrollable spasms. "Oh God!...Oh no!...I'm going to...Yes, I'm going to...I'm going to cum!... "
"Go on, baby!" Dennis groaned, ramming his wildly jerking cock furiously up into her heated cuntal passage for the final shattering strokes. "Go on...cum!...Cum, cum, cum!... "
Belle's hips writhed and threshed galvanically beneath him as he felt the irresistible surge of his own orgasm steam the spasming length of his cock and erupt into the hotly sucking depths of her womb in scalding, pulsating spurts. Their bodies slammed together in mutual ecstasy. Their arms tightened convulsively around one another. And then as Belle, open mouthed, rolled her head in speechless delight, Dennis arched his back and leaned up off her to utter a strangled cry of triumph and fulfillment.
At that moment, blinding white light burst momentarily over the glade as a flashbulb exploded and a shutter clicked among the trees.
"What the hell. . . ? "
Pushing himself savagely away from her so that his half-deflated penis pulled free of her cunt with a loud sucking squelch, Dennis scrambled furiously to his feet and sprinted into the undergrowth, stuffing his cock back into his trousers as he ran.
The almost naked girl sat up aghast, her eyes wide with dismay, listening to the receding crackle of brushwood as the spy and his pursuer blundered off among the bushes.
Five minutes later, Dennis was back, his lips compressed and his brow dark with anger. "He got away," he announced grimly. "I couldn't catch him in the dark but I'm sure it was that little bastard Snell."
Belle was fully dressed again, standing in the center of the glade with her hands clenched at her sides. "Naturally he got away," she said tightly. "Congratulations, Mr. Dennis. You earned your money well."
He stared at her uncomprehendingly, his mouth falling open.
"Belle?" he said haltingly. "Darling...Surely you don't....? "
Her face was as cold and as distant as the stars shining through the branches overhead. "A beautifully arranged job," she said. "Deputy Dennis delivers the goods!"
"Belle!"
"The only thing is, in the case of a very special Deputy like you, do you pay Snell or does Snell pay you?"
"Good Christ!" Dennis exclaimed despairingly. "Surely you don't think that I....? Surely you can't believe that I knew anything about. . . ? You can't!"
"Oh, Christ! Get out of my sight!" the distressed redhead shouted, striving to master the tears that threatened to overcome her. "You make me sick to my stomach!" Leaving the dumbfounded young man standing in the middle of the clearing, she swung around and walked blindly back to the driveway.
A moment later the motor of the jeep burst into life and the beams of its headlamps swept across the glade as she wrenched it off the track and bumped through the trees to avoid Dennis's convertible. Then she was on the dirt road again and accelerating furiously away towards the house.
CHAPTER FIVE
The next morning Belle was again drawn to the window of her bedroom this time by the crunch of heavier tires on the gravel of the drive. Peering down over the porch, she saw a white Cadillac Eldorado rocking to a standstill in front of the steps. The wide door opened and Louis Burger, still in the off-white alpaca suit, extricated his huge frame and marched heavily up to the entrance.
Belle gave a final glance at herself in the mirror she was wearing mushroom corduroy pants and a violet shirt and went downstairs to meet him. She was tired and she was depressed. The sleepless night she had spent raging to herself about Alan Dennis's perfidy had left dark smudges under her eyes. But worse than the shaming realization that she had once again been caught in a trap laid by those who were trying to force her to quit, worse even than the thought that it was the clamorous demands of her own nature that had led her into that trap, was the stupefying sense of loss and betrayal she felt; she had thought she had found a friend; she had trusted him with her own body. But he had turned out to be just one more pawn in the disagreeable chess-game in which she was involved. She was in no mood now to make conciliatory moves towards a man who, for all she knew, could prove to be one of the major pieces on the board. What did the uncooperative mayor want with her anyway? Why had he come to see her?
She did not have to wait long to find out. "Miss Devlin," Burger said as soon as she had shown him reluctantly into the front room, "I have an unpleasant task to perform."
"Really?" Belle was giving nothing away. She hadn't expected any representative of Bartlett's Creek officialdom to arrive with good news anyway. What was it this time? Some trumped up complaint about the mill? She stared coldly at the craggy face above Burger's navy blue button-down shirt, waiting for him to continue. One of the white pearl buttons, she noticed, had cracked and fallen in half.
The mayor cleared his throat. "Certain right-minded citizens of this town," he said, "have brought a matter...have brought certain facts.. .have brought this to my attention. Here, perhaps you'd better see it." He drew an eight-by-five manila envelope from the capacious pocket of his loose jacket and held it out to her.
Even before her eyes registered the details of the glossy print inside. Belle knew what she was going to see. With mounting horror, she recalled the flashbulb and the scene it had recorded. Of course they hadn't been spying on her just to embarrass her! They were much too clever for that; the spy had taken the picture for a purpose. Now, she realized with an inward chill of despair, she was going to find out what that purpose was.
Damon Snell if indeed it was he holding the camera had done his job well. It was all there in harsh black and white...her pale body with its nakedly jutting breasts writhing in lustful abandon on the turf; the shamelessly widespread legs gripping Alan Dennis's convulsed hips; her contorted face, instantly recognizable, even in open-mouthed ecstasy. And rearing up above her half-clothed, obscenely spread-eagled form, the Deputy himself, fully dressed except for the wetly glistening white stump of his cock disappearing into the triangle of hair at her loins, his head thrown back just enough to hide his own features and reveal hers to the lens. Even the crumpled ball of her discarded pants was visible in the lower left-hand corner of the picture. To anyone who didn't know the facts, the story looked clear a drunken nymphomaniac (and one who had been seen by numerous witnesses to spend the evening drinking alone in a saloon), unable to control her sexual urges, wantonly seducing some man to assuage her burning lust! She had evidently thrown off her clothes in a desperate attempt to entice him to pander to her animal desire!
Belle flushed scarlet as she slammed the incriminating print back into the envelope and dropped it onto the table.
"Well?" she asked faintly. There seemed to be nothing else to say.
Burger coughed. "You realize of course that such behavior is an offense against public morals," he said. "I don't know whether it's permitted where you come from. I imagine not. In any case it's certainly forbidden here...and that's quite apart from another equally serious matter suborning an officer in the execution of his duty."
A rising tide of anger began to submerge the girl's embarrassment. "Spare me the hypocrisy," she snapped. "You must know as well as I do that the picture's a frame-up."
"How can it be a frame-up? Are you denying that the woman in that photograph that depraved and immoral woman is yourself? Are you suggesting that the picture is in some way a fake?"
"I didn't say that. The circumstances leading up to the. . . the way I got into that position...I was tricked into it," Belle stammered finally.
"As the representative of the clean-living decent folk of this town, I am not concerned with how or why you behaved the way you did. It's enough that you did behave that way...in that disgraceful way," Burger corrected himself, an actor who had muffed a line.
"Oh, come off it!" Belle exclaimed wearily. "We both know that's not the real story, don't we? Somebody wants me out of here so that they can get hold of this property for some reason or other. . . and the plan is to inconvenience and embarrass me, if necessary to frame me so that I can be pressured legally, to the point where I'd rather throw in my hand than stay. After which local prejudice will do the rest. And you're in on the deal, you and Bosquet. You must be. So forget all the mealy-mouth humbug and... "
"Miss Devlin," Burger interrupted, raising a ham-like hand, "I ain't that is to say, I haven't an idea what you're talking about. Such wild talk only confirms in my mind certain suggestions about you that have been made. I am only concerned with the moral effect of your behavior in this town."
"All right, I made a mistake. Maybe I was tricked into it, but I made a mistake. I admit it. And now you have that picture to hold over me. Okay so what's the pitch?"
Burger walked to the window and stood looking out of it, his huge silhouette cutting off half the light in the room. "As I was saying," he remarked with his back to her. "That photo is proof of an offense against public morals. So far, though, I'm the only one who has seen it. Bosquet ain't.. .hasn't...seen it. Nor, luckily for you, has the pastor or any member of the Watch Committee."
"Well?"
"It lies within my power therefore...that is to say, I could use my influence...to suppress the picture. In which case," the mayor said slowly, "you would avoid either being charged or run out of town. In addition to that I could, arrange, in certain circumstances, to have the police watch on you called off."
"I thought you told me last night that the police were only doing their duty?" Belle snapped sarcastically.
Burger swung around to face her, the small-town Caesar showing suddenly through the careful veneer of civic respectability he had adopted. "I run the police in this town," he said curtly.
"All right, so you run the town. So what are these 'certain circumstances' that would! persuade you to take off the pressure, Mr. Mayor?"
"I'd be glad to do what I could to help a stranger in our midst," Burger said. "If yon! were...nice to me... "
"Nice to... ? " Belle's voice trailed away into silence. After a moment she said faintly: "If I understand you, you'll call off the hunt if I...if I go to bed with you. Is that it?"
"We could make music together," the big man urged, "you and me! You're a swell-looking dame; I'm unmarried, I got money, I got influence. With this little place of yours here... "
"Ah!" Belle cut in triumphantly. "Now it begins to make sense! With this little place of mine, eh? Well, you can tell the people who sent you that whatever kind of blackmail they try to pull, I'm still not selling!"
"Nobody said anything about selling. This is a straight deal between you and me. You asked for it straight, and here's how it stacks up. You make yourself nice to me; I'll squash the photo and call off the cops. It's that simple." Burger had completely dropped the phony pomposity with which he had originally spoken, allowing the tough country bully to show through the town-hall facade.
Belle was breathing hard, her lips compressed into a thin red line and her green eyes flashing. "One straight answer deserves another." she said tightly. "The answer is no. And however many holds over me you fake up, the answer will still be no, no, and no!"
"You refuse?" Burger seemed unable to believe his ears.
"I wouldn't go to bed with you if you were the last man on earth, you big gorilla!" the angry redhead cried.
"You opened your legs quick enough for home lousy two-bit ass enrolled as a Deputy," Burger growled, advancing slowly towards her. "What's wrong with me, for Chrissake."
"Almost everything I can think of. . . keep away from me, you ape!" Belle panted, backing away before the big man's approach. "If you know what's good for you," Burger snarled, "you'll quit that kind of talk and listen to reason." Moving astonishingly quickly for a man of his huge size, he shot out his arms and grabbed her by the shoulders.
"Take your hands off me...let me go!" the frightened girl screamed, beating at his barrel chest with her fists and wrestling her shoulders in a vain attempt to break his grasp. But the incensed mayor crushed her to him in a bear hug, pinioning her arms to her sides as his cruel, loose-lipped mouth smashed wetly down on hers. Belle's protests were smothered in his slobbering kiss as his thick tongue crushed through her lips and invaded the tender cavern of her mouth. She twisted her head violently from side to side, desperately endeavoring to escape the odious embrace as hot breath from his nostrils jetted over her face. Finally she clamped her jaws and bit fiercely into the shaft of flesh skewering into her ravished mouth.
Burger sprang back with a cry of pain, slashing her backhanded across the face with a blow that sent her reeling across the room. There was a wolfish smile on his big face and his teeth were flecked with blood. "Little bitch!" he exclaimed. "But I like a kid with spirit you get more kick out of it that way!" Advancing again to where the terrified redhead was backed up against a sideboard, he added softly: "Now I'm goin' to show you what it's like to be fucked by a real man!"
Belle screamed. "Don't touch me!" she cried hysterically. "Leave me alone...please!"
Dodging under his outstretched arms, she made frantically for the door. He caught her in two strides, seizing her by the shirt collar and ripping the garment from her back in a single savage jerk. Then he spun her around to face him and hooked his fingers into the elastic joining the two tautly filled cups of her brassiere. Another brutal tug, and the flimsy foundation tore in two and hung uselessly from her shoulders as her full, pink-nippled breasts sprang nakedly free. "You're so pretty," he panted, "I gotta make you see...I wanna show you... "
Screaming again, the fear-crazed girl ran for the other door but Burger shot out his foot and tripped her so that she fell heavily onto a davenport beneath the window. In an instant he was towering over her, his bloodied mouth grinning and his lust-hardened penis thrusting immensely at the tight-stretched material of his pants. With a sadistic laugh, he threw himself onto her furiously squirming body, rammed the fingers of one hand into the waistband of her pants, and hauled. The thick corduroy split from waistband to crotch, revealing her softly trembling belly and a triangle of silkily curling pubic hair framed in the tatters of her nylon panties.
Sobbing with despair, Belle beat frantically at his vast body with fists and feet, kicking and gouging and scratching in a desperate attempt to keep him off. Burger paid no more attention than if the blows had been drops of sea-mist falling on his leathery skin. Dragging the torn garments down to her ankles in one powerful thrust so that the whole length of her writhing body was revealed to his lecherous gaze, he seized her ankles and bent her legs back over her head. Then, leaning brutally on the backs of Belle's thighs, doubling her up in a humiliating jack-knife posture of the cushions, he stared gloatingly at her nakedly exposed vaginal furrow before reaching forward to caress the red-gold pubic hairs mantling her cunt. The terrified young girl shrieked anew and jerked convulsively at the rough touch of his fingers on her sensitive pussy flesh.
"All right. Burger. . . on your feet with your hands above your head or I shoot...."
The voice came from the entrance door a voice dry as a whiplash, tight with suppressed rage and nervous tension.
Sprawling around with an oath, the sadistic mayor let go of Belle's legs and stared up open-mouthed from his crouched position by the davenport. The naked girl struggled up onto her elbows and gave a cry of astonishment.
Alan Dennis was standing just inside the room, a Smith & Wesson Police Special in his lean brown hand.
"I said get them up, you big bastard!" he rapped. "Come on move! If you're not on your feet in three seconds, I'll plug you in the kneecap. My finger's itching for the opportunity...one...two... "
Highlighted by a gleam of sunlight filtering through the window, the cylinder of the revolver shifted slightly as the young man's tensed finger took up the first pressure on the trigger. Burger scrambled hastily to his feet, scowling, his huge hands raised shoulder high.
"You're a little out of line, Dennis, aren't you?" he said menacingly. "Seems to me I recall you being sworn in as a Deputy a few days ago. I don't recollect gettin' the drop on the mayor as being part of your duties."
"I took the job because I needed work and I thought I'd be helping to establish law and order," Dennis said. "Instead, I find myself mixed up in some lousy conspiracy to pervert the law and persecute an innocent girl."
Burger was breathing heavily, his fingers clenching and unclenching. A dark stain of seminal fluid marked the pale alpaca of his pants at one side of his fly. "I don't recall...." he began again.
"Shut up!" Dennis cut in fiercely. "I don't recall it being pointed out to me when I was sworn in that I was required to connive at blackmail and fraud and intimidation, and act as an accessory to rape!" He scrabbled behind his lapel, unpinned a shield and flung it tinkling to the floor at the mayor's feet. "Here, I'm turning in my badge. You can take your stinking job and stuff it up your crooked ass!"
"You're gonna be sorry you said that," Burger grated through set teeth. "I don't aim to be told where I get off by minor employees of the police department. As the representative of the people of this town... "
"If you represent the people of this town, the goddamn town should be wiped off the map," Dennis shouted. "Now get out of here before I pistol whip your ugly face!"
The big man's eyes were glittering malevolently. "A half-ass punk bumming around the country to avoid going on relief, and a cheap little two-bit whore can't even control her own cunt that's a hell of a combination to preach morality," he sneered. "Well, I'm gonna see that you get yours, both of you. I'll have you run outa town so quick you won't know what hit you. By the time that photo's been shown around, you'll be lucky if you get away without bein' tarred and feathered, mill or no fuckin' mill!"
"Get out!"
Dennis raised the barrel of the gun threateningly and Burger moved reluctantly towards the door. "Just you wait, that's all," he muttered as he went through into the hallway. "Just you fuckin' well wait and see, the lousy goddamn pair of you!" His voice died away and the front door slammed. A moment later they heard the Cadillac crunch away down the track.
Sitting up on the davenport naked except for the two halves of the brassiere hanging over her shoulders and the fucked-up pants shackling her ankles, Belle was laughing hysterically.
"What's so funny?" Dennis demanded, thrusting the gun into the waistband of his Levis. "I should have thought
"I'm s-s-s-s-sorry!" Belle gasped. "It's just...it's just that...I just remembered what someone wrote once about mysteries. 'When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun'. . . well, I was certainly in doubt in a big way, my darling and...and you came through the door with a gun!"
The young man smiled. "Thank God I was around and able to."
"Yes...oh, God, I should be thanking you...but how did you happen to arrive in the nick of time like that?"
"I was hanging around near the end of your driveway, hoping you might come out so I could explain that I knew nothing about last night. You stormed off in such a temper... "
"I'm sorry," Belle said contritely. "But you can see how it must have looked to me...at the time."
"Sure. That's all right. You do believe me now, though?"
The green eyes melted. The wide mouth curved into a smile. "After what you just did? Are you kidding?"
"That's all right then. Anyway, I was hanging around, as I say, and I saw Burger's daddy turn up the drive. So I thought I'd just come to the party too, in case he started to play rough, and...well, I guess you know the rest."
"Mister American Marine!" Belie said mockingly. But the look she gave him was tender.
Dennis grinned. "Sorry I was so long coming to the rescue. I walked up through the trees: I figured the noise of an auto would tip him off if he was up to no good. This way, catching him as Snell would say in flagrante delicto, it means we have something on him. Which could be useful."
"But he's got something on us. He has the negatives of that photo."
"Oh, that was the pitch, was it? Is the picture all that bad?"
"Terrible. There's a print on the table."
Dennis glanced at the photograph and whistled. "I see what you mean!" He walked across the room and sat down beside her on the davenport. "But you don't want to worry about that too much. It's infuriating and it's embarrassing and one day I'm going to beat hell out of the bastard that took it. But don't worry about it: they'd never dare use it!"
"I'm not so sure," Belle said dubiously. "Why wouldn't they use it? Why would they take it if they weren't going to use it?"
"To use as a lever on you! If you fell for the bluff and were scared enough to do what they wanted, then the picture would have served its purpose. But once you'd called the bluff and refused to be intimidated...well, the thing's lost its point, hasn't it? I mean, they aren't going to show it around town just out of revenge are they? They've got too much to do."
"They can still use it to whip up the public opinion against me, can't they? You know how stuffy they are in these small towns. Do you believe for a moment that there won't be copies of that print passed around tomorrow and sniggered over in every saloon and barbershop in town?"
"Maybe you have a point there," Alan said slowly. Absently, he picked up the girl's hand and began to stroke it. "But there's no use stirring up public opinion if there's nobody on hand to... "
"Besides," she interrupted, "they can still use it to...they can still use it as evidence if Burger does bring a public morality charge against me. He's vindictive enough to do that. I know these big, tough dictator types." He shook his head. "Not a chance," he said decisively. "They don't dare do anything of the kind. Not publicly...whatever they may do in private."
"Why not?"
"Because as soon as they brought a charge, we could counter it. Don't forget you have my evidence as well as your own, now that I've turned in my badge. Our story about Burger's behavior today alone's enough to stop him."
Belle sighed, her fingers automatically returning the pressure of his hand. "I guess so. But they could still have a damned good try to force me out of town through public opinion by showing that photo around."
'That's what I was getting at just now. I was going to say there's no point in stirring up public opinion against someone if they're not there for the disapproval to be vented on."
"How do you mean...not there?"
"I mean," the young man said earnestly, "that the only way they could hurt you through that picture is by showing you they disapprove. If you're not there, they can't show you."
"You're saying I should quit after all? You think I should... "
"No, no, no. Just that you shouldn't go into town for awhile. Stick around in the house. There's plenty to do. You have God knows how many thousand acres of backyard to play in. I think you should use them."
"But the mill...there's food to get... "
"The shopping can be done for you. As for the mill well, if you had a manager, he could bring the problems to you right here, and you could deal with them at home."
Suddenly, Belle was smiling. She raised her eyebrows quizzically. "Mr. Dennis," she said, "are you trying to talk yourself into a job?"
He grinned "Yeah, I guess I am at that."
She squeezed his hand. "As it was through me that you lost your last one," she said, "I suppose it's the least I can do! Okay, you're hired...my God! Here I am talking business and look at me!" She was staring horrified at her naked body and the tangle of pants around her feet.
"Yes, ma'am. With the greatest of pleasure,"
Dennis said with mock servility. He gazed pointedly at the lushly ripened curves of her belly and hips, at the tautly swelling breasts with their pink buds of nipples, at the smooth slopes of her shoulders and the ivory column of her neck above. "If it's not an impertinence for a new employee," he said craftily, "I'd suggest that it was a terrible waste of working time not to make use of what's already been done in that direction!"
The naked redhead looked into his eyes...and blushed. Abruptly she reached out her arms and pulled him down so that his head was cradled on her belly. "Oh, Alan you're an impossible man!" she cried delightedly.
As the young man's mouth touched the cool surface of her softly quivering flesh, he tensed and sucked in his breath and then, almost of their own volition, his lips began gently nibbling at the satiny skin, his tongue trailing wetly along the scarcely visible arrow of tiny gold hairs linking her navel with the tawny "vee" shadowing the top of her thighs. Belle held her breath. This was ridiculous! She mustn't let him...not again... !
Dennis's breath was quickening. As his mouth lingered among the silkily curling pussy hairs, his hands stole down to her sculptured thighs and tenderly pressed them apart. "No!" the trembling redhead whispered. "Alan, no...you mustn't! Stop!" But the muscles involuntarily relaxed, her knees fell outwards and she found herself surreptitious freeing one foot from the constricting tangle of trousers and panties so that her legs could spread even further.
The lustfully aroused young man stroked his hands upwards until his fingers touched the moistly heated coral flanges of her cuntal slit nestling up between her widespread thighs. And then, as she jerked and caught her breath at the sudden thrilling contact, he gently pried apart the fleshy, hair-covered lips and eased himself along her body so that his mouth could close over the gaping, wet entrance to her vagina.
"Darling, don't"! Belle breathed ecstatically. "Please don't. You really mustn't--Oooooogggghhhhh!" Her shoulders slipped further down among the cushions and her hips squirmed lasciviously as his tongue suddenly laced snake-like into the hotly throbbing tunnel of her cunt.
Delicious flickers of unbelievable lewd excitement flamed through her loins as Dennis's lips sucked teasingly at her quivering pussy and the tip of his hot probing tongue found, and then swirled around, the sensually tautened bud of her clitoris. The naked young redhead felt her own vaginal secretions begin to flood warmly around his lapping mouth as he drew the sensitive, tautly throbbing shaft of flesh between his teeth, rolling it from side to side to send insane tremors of desire shuddering through her veins.
"Aaaaahhhhh!" she moaned. "Oh, darling!
Ooooohhhhh! Oh, what you're doing to meeeeeee!"
Her hips writhing in slow hypnotic motion. Belle reached her hands out blindly for his loins and, for the second time in twenty-four hours, tore open the zipper of his pants and dragged out his stiffly upstanding cock.
For a moment she gazed in fascination at the bloated, purplish head protruding from the distended foreskin at the top of the rigidly muscled shaft. A pearl of seminal fluid glistened like dew on a rosebud at the slit of its tip. Then, twisting the top half of her body towards him, she pulled the lust-thickened pole of flesh towards her face and poised her wetly ovaled lips above the blood-engorged glans.
Feeling the warmth of her breath playing over the passion-bloated cock-head, Dennis groaned deep in his chest. A moment later, as the desire-inflamed redhead's hot mouth closed wetly over the aching tip off his penis, he was levering Belle's quivering thighs even further apart as his tongue slavered wildly into the scalding depths of her writhing young cunt.
The excitement, the sensations of a moistly heated mouth against their genitals, was too much for them both. Almost before Belle knew what was happening she felt Alan's warmly throbbing cock growing larger and larger in her mouth. Knowing he was about to cum, she began sucking hungrily and mewled with an obscene delight as she felt the First heated splash of his cum spurt like liquid fire down her throat.
And that triggered her own orgasm, causing her to spread her legs even wider to get more and more of his wonderfully fucking tongue up inside her convulsing cunt....
CHAPTER SIX
For several days after the mayor's visit, Belle Devlin was undisturbed by any signs of Bartlett's Creek authority or the hostility towards her brewing in the town. Alan Dennis, who seemed to be something of an engineer, drove to Cochrane and obtained the necessary spare parts to repair the saw at the mill, bringing back with him enough supplies to last a week. He appointed a new foreman, who appeared to be competent enough to handle the preparation of lumber for the shipment due the following week. And each morning he drove to the mill to supervise the schedule for the day and collect the paperwork which he brought back for Belle to work over at the huge scarred desk in what had been old man Devlin's study.
During this time they saw nothing of Burger or Darrell Bosquet. Snell made no further appearances with offers to buy the property. And if there were any repercussions in town from the clandestine photo he had taken of them, nothing reached Dennis's ears at the mill.
On the Saturday, they drove the jeep northwards through the forest towards the further boundaries of Belle's land, where an arm of the lake curved in and made a natural harbor among the woods. For the first mile and a half, there was a freshly bulldozed track winding through the trees, but it ended in a clearing heaped with freshly turned soil, and after that the going was more difficult. The jeep lurched and bumped along weed-grown forest trails, grinding through valleys choked with second-growth timber, thrusting aside the undergrowth, tunneling its way beneath leafy branches overhanging the half-hidden track. "I aim to have the new road cut right through to the lake," Belle explained. "There's an old boathouse there and it would be an ideal place for a summer cabin. But the bulldozer was contracted to work some place else and I have to wait until the spring before the operator can finish the job...at least he said he was contracted: it's probably just one more annoyance fixed by Snell's friends!"
When they had driven almost ten miles, the jeep ran out suddenly into an open space and Dennis exclaimed with delight. In the early fall sunlight, the land dropped away towards the lake, blue and glittering in front of a line of tree-covered hills that rose up ridge after ridge into the clear sky. There was fireweed and brush in the clearing and the derelict cabins of an old logging camp. They were very old and some of the roofs had fallen in. Beyond them, huge gray logs lay scattered among the brilliant weeds it the brush. Through the screen of partridge-berries and wintergreen at the edge of the forest, Dennis could see at the foot of the slope the pale green of birches and willows growing along a stream. And below the stream the darker green of a cedar swamp led to a spur of land jutting out into the lake. The boathouse leaned drunkenly towards a rotting jetty running out over the water with the ribs of a ruined skiff laid to rest on its weathered planks.
Belle braked the jeep in the shade of the trees and unpacked the picnic lunch she had brought. "We can sit on one of those logs," she said. 'This used to be a hemlock forest here. My uncle told me...they only cut it for the bark and never used the logs. You can still see the rings left by the park-peelers and the marks of the sealer's hammer on the end of the logs."
"But those are cedars on the far side of the clearing, aren't they?"
"Yes, that's virgin forest. There are no trails, no blazes, no direction sticks. The trunks go up sixty feet before the branches start and the sun hardly ever gets down to the forest floor. You can get lost in there in half an hour: it's kind of creepy."
"Are they cutting cedars on the far side of the ridge then?" Dennis asked, shading his eyes against the sun and staring across the darkly massed foliage rising to the high ground behind them.
"No, that's pine again. They roll them down to the river on that side it's steeper than it is here on the west...Come on: you go on down the stream and get some water while I fix our lunch."
"I'll bring you back a couple of trout," the young man said. "I learned to tickle for them in Scotland when I was a kid."
Pushing his way through the gray brush choking the slashing, he went down the slope to the stream. It was hot in the midday sun and he was glad to get in among the shady trees. The river was shallow and pebbly, glittering with reflected light as it sped over gravel and water-smoothed rocks. Ahead, the water became dark and deep as it narrowed and swung into the cedar swamp, the trunks of the trees packed together and the branches too close to the ground to walk. Upstream, there was a jam of logs where an elm had been uprooted in a storm, and behind this natural dam the stream had formed a pool, deep and still with green fronds of waterweed swinging in the current above the marly bed. There would be trout in the shade where the branches of the old tree dipped into the water, steady in the moving stream, resting in the shallows above the gravelly bottom. Moving cautiously, he stole out onto a log and lowered himself to the warm surface of the rotting wood, taking care that no reflection appeared in the water to frighten the fish.
Twenty minutes later, he was toiling back up the slope with two fine trout. Belle had made a fire of brushwood and laid out the rest of the food for their lunch on a blanket. As she piled more deadwood onto the blaze, an unexpected gust of wind spilled the flames over into a patch of dry grass. In a moment, the fire was streaking through the tinder-dry undergrowth, sizzling amongst the ragweed and leaning before the breeze as it licked hungrily towards a clump of balsam. Blue smoke rolled across the slashings.
Dennis dropped the fish and sprinted up the hill in the sun. Seizing a four-foot sapling at the base of its trunk, he wrestled its roots from the ground and leaped in among the burning grasses, beating frantically at the flames, slashing the leaves and branches viciously down on the blazing brush.
It took him ten minutes to beat out the fire. When he was satisfied that the last tongue of flame had been extinguished, he tramped back across the powdery black ash, his feet scuffing acrid fumes of burning into the air, and dropped the scorched sapling by the rug. "Baby," he said to the astonished redhead, "you don't ever want to do that! If I'd been five minutes more getting those fish, you could have had a forest fire on your hands!"
"But. . . but I never thought...I mean even if I couldn't have put it out myself, surely it wouldn't have spread beyond the clearing?" the discomfited girl stammered. "Those forest trees are green and growing. I can't believe-"
"Nobody can believe the facts about fire until they've actually been in one," Dennis interrupted. "Believe me, though it could happen!"
"I was just trying to get it ready so we could cook the trout. People do light fires in the forest, just the same. The loggers do."
"Sure. In a circle of firestones, after they've cleared a space around. Making sure they don't pile it too high...Here, I'll show you how it's done and then I'll go back for the trout and we'll eat... "
Later, as they were enjoying the deliciously broiled fish with a glass of white wine, he turned to her and said solemnly: "Nobody realizes how easy it is to start a fire in country like this. I worked with firefighters in California once, and I know what I'm talking about."
"You seem to have been a lot of places and done a lot of things," Belle said curiously. "How come?"
"Oh," Dennis replied vaguely, "I've knocked around some in my time. But it's crazy how quickly a fire can spread, especially on hilly ground like this. You just saw how it can start. All you need is a change in the wind direction for a minute, and it'll fan out another way and start another front that grows as quick as the first. Blazing twigs'll get carried away by the hot air rising and start other fires where they fall; flames will get blown against a steep hillside by the wind and lean against it like water flowing upwards so that the whole slope goes up at once. You've no idea!"
"But if there is no wind... ? "
"You don't need a wind not once she gets going; not once there are trees ablaze. A big fire creates its own updraught as the hot air rises, and that brings winds howling in speeding the fire advance. A fire can go as fast as sixty miles an hour!"
"Sixty... ? Alan, you're kidding! You must be putting me on!"
"No kidding," the young man said soberly. "A couple of years ago I saw a canyon fire near Monterey eat up a mile and a half of pine forest in less than two minutes!"
"But that's...that's incredible!"
"True just the same especially with pines."
"What about the fire breaks though?" Belle asked. "We have them all over, on the other side of the ridge. It looks like a checkerboard from a distance."
"It would be uneconomic to make them wide enough to be really effective. A pine'll go up long before the flames reach it. Pine resin vaporizes in extreme heat and becomes explosive: trees as far away as three hundred yards from the fire front will suddenly blaze up whoosh! just like that! It's terrifying!"
"That must be some heat that can do that!" the girl exclaimed.
"Pines ignite spontaneously when the temperature rises to four-fifty degrees Fahrenheit," Dennis said. "When they're alight, it rises to around nine hundred degrees but the superheated air pushed ahead of the fire front can go as high as thirteen hundred! So you can see what I mean about your firebreaks: you wouldn't get much lumber if each one had to be four hundred yards wide!"
"My God!" the shaken redhead exclaimed. "We'd better be damned sure we kick out these embers before we leave!"
When they had packed up and extinguished the fire, they walked up a little way into the virgin forest on the far side of the clearing. The slashings ran up over a rise in the ground and then the big cedars began. Less than a hundred yards from the edge of the woods, the underbrush disappeared and they were treading the bare brown forest floor between the soaring trunks. It was pleasantly cool in the cathedral shade of the big trees and the ground was springy under their feet. No sunlight filtered through the lofty screen of branches and the green gloom was utterly silent except for the distant rustle of leaves far overhead.
They had scrambled down a declivity where an outcrop of rock broke the smoothness of the forest floor when they came across the ashes of the other fire. They were enclosed in a neat circle of stones and there were opened sardine cans and empty beer bottles scattered nearby.
"That's queer," Belle said slowly. "These look kind of fresh to me. Who the hell could be picnicking way out here?"
"Resorters from the lake, perhaps?" Dennis suggested. "Some of your loggers?"
She shook her head. "The loggers in these parts are all on the far side of the ridge; the nearest are more than five miles away. And the timber we cut for the mill's all down by the lakeside among the pines. As for resorters, it's too far away from the water for fishermen and who's going to sail ten miles up the lake for a picnic when there are much better places nearer town?"
"I guess you're right. Kind of a mystery then, isn't it? And look this is odd, don't you think?" Dennis gestured towards a shoulder of rock behind the firestones. The surface was freshly scarred and chipped, the minerals and crystals sparkling darkly against the lichened smoothness of the outcrop. On the mossy ground below, splinters and fragments of rock littered an area of several square yards.
"I give Up," Belle said. "Maybe they were knocking off chunks to put around their fire?"
"Uh-uh." The young man shook his head in his turn. "Those are all weathered stones. They must have found them lying around...or perhaps there was an old Indian fire-ring nearby. What's so curious is that this is the second of these camp fires that I've seen today."
"The second?"
"Yeah, we passed another in the jeep. About half-way between the house and the lake. You were driving, so I guess you didn't notice. It was by a patch of rock too and the rock was marked just like this. I didn't say anything because I thought you knew; I thought it must be something to do with the men."
Belle sighed. "It's all new to me. It seems I have trespassers to deal with as well as everything else!"
The following day, Sunday, Dennis took the jeep and went into town in the morning. After lunch, as Belle had chores to do in the house, he drove into the forest by himself. Beyond the slashings where they had picnicked, he found an overgrown trail leading tortuously down to the lakeside. Not far from the water's edge, he passed a low rocky bluff and here for the third time he found the remains of a fire and evidence of chipping among the rocks. The ashes were so fresh that they still carried the bitter stench of burning. He was whistling softly between his teeth as he climbed back into the driving seat and steered back onto the track.
A mile further on, he saw a flat-bottomed fowler's boat half-hidden amoung the reeds where the trail ran around the head of a small creek. He cut the motor and coasted the jeep in behind an ash thicket where it was out of sight of the creek. Had he stumbled upon the mysterious visitors who were lighting fires all over Belle's property?
Treading warily, he began circling through the second growth beech and elm and cordwood growing around the inlet, his ears cocked for any sign of the intruders. But it was not until he had climbed up into the pine forest beyond that he heard the voices. A moment later, his nostrils caught the heady scent of woodsmoke through the trees.
There were four of them grouped around the fire: Burger, Snell, Bis Bosquet, and a lanky, gum-chewing man whom Dennis knew as a surveyor's clerk from the mayor's office. They were sitting on a stretch of bare granular rock protruding in rough steps through the brown carpet of pine needles under the trees. There were rock fragments piled at the clerk's feet and he was holding a pair of tongues clamped around a small test tube which he was waving to and fro in the flames. Tiny splinters of the rock jumped in the colorless fluid bubbling in the test tube.
"Yeah," the clerk said, "I guess that's it. This is your dolomite again, see. She won't effervesce when the acid's cold, but she will when it's heated up. Calcium Magnesium Carbonate. And just for a double check... " He picked up a geological hammer and chipped a fragment from a rock splinter at his feet, holding it up for the others to see. ". . . you get your perfect cleavage in three planes at oblique angles to each other, see? Your crystals are rhombohedra again!"
"Er yeah." Burger cleared his throat. "So we get the limestone again, eh? But the rock we mapped yesterday, above the creek back there... "
"Sandstone," the clerk said. "Like the bluff on the far side of the ridge. Remember we found crystals of Orthoclase Felspar in amongst the quartz just like we did in that cliff on the other side of the lake."
"Put it down then," Bosquet ordered. He watched the clerk make some marks on a large rectangle of paper clipped to a board and then added: "But if we get shale above sandstone above limestone at the bluff... ? "
"Yeah?"
". . . And then we find the same rocks in different outcrops coming down towards the lake on this side first the shale, then the sandstone, now the limestone again, all tilting down towards the east... "
The clerk nodded. "Yeah?"
". . . but on the far side of the lake they're in the reverse order limestone first, then sandstone, then shale tilting towards the west this time...what the hell does that mean?" the police chief finished, pushing his broad-brimmed hat to the back of his head and mopping his brow.
"It means that Mr. Burger was right. Where the lake is now there was an anticline, followed by a syncline running under the forest between here and the bluff."
Burger gave an exclamation of satisfaction and Snell, who had not so far spoken, clapped his bony hands together and said: "Excellent, excellent! Our worthy mayor has a good brain inside that imposing head a good brain indeed!"
Hidden behind the bole of a huge pine a few yards up the slope from the hollow in which they were sitting, Dennis caught his breath. The scientific jargon had made sense to him, and all at once he knew just why it was so important for these men to force Belle Devlin to sell her property without revealing the real reason, why there had been trespassers in the forest, and what the scarred rocks and camp fires signified. They had been conducting a secret geological survey of the largely uncharted area north of Bartlett's Creek and now they had confirmed what Burger must have suspected: the presence of a geosynclines beneath the forest floor!
Millions of years ago, the layers of rock forming the land had been crumpled up by some vast subterranean upheaval into a series of crests and troughs and in the intervening millennia the crests had been worn away by erosion but the bottom of the troughs, the synclines, still lay far below the present surface. There were thousands of examples of such structural contortion all over the world, Dennis knew. But few of them repeated the ideal conditions outlined here by the clerk...conditions that spelled out only one word.
Oil!
Oil formed by the decomposition eons ago of carbonaceous matter in the rocks, oil which would then be soaked up by the porous sandstone like a sponge and trapped in this arched underground reservoir by the impervious, non-porous layer of shale above. Oil which could only be released when man bored a hole through the shale to set it free...
If the clerk's deductions were right, and the geosynclines he postulated did in fact contain an oil pool, Belle's land would be worth a fortune. No wonder Burger and his cronies who were evidently themselves the mysterious "clients" using Snell as a front would stop at nothing short of actual murder to persuade the girl from the United States to sell before she discovered the real worth of the land! But were the clerk's deductions right? Dennis determined to get a closer view of the map and see for himself.
The four men in the hollow had their backs to him. They were watching the lanky clerk make the latest series of notations on the chart. Dennis thrust a finger into the neckband of his shirt to ease his collar the day had been sultry and heavy, and there was a hint of thunder in the air and flitted silently from behind the sheltering pine to another nearer the slope at the foot of which they were grouped.
None of them seemed to have noticed. There was one more tree overhanging the low limestone outcrop above the hollow. He stole soft-footed across the carpet of pine needles and peered cautiously out from behind it.
He was looking down diagonally at the map, conveniently lit by a shaft of late afternoon sun slanting through the branches. The outlines were drawn on a large scale: he could see Bartlett's Creek, the Devlin house, the lake and the forest trail, represented by a dotted line winding through an area tinted green. On top of the printed details, the clerk had meticulously crosshatched a number of areas in colored inks red for sandstone, blue for limestone, green for shale to represent the various rock outcrops they had identified and pinpoint then-position and size.
And yes! the evidence was unmistakable. To an eye trained in the reading of geological maps, the patches of blue, red and green banded thinly together on the far side of the ridge above the river, reappearing more widely spaced here in inverse order, and then marked for the third time across the lake in their original sequence, testified clearly to a series of strata dipping underground at the ridge, re-emerging here, and then plunging beneath the surface again on the far side of the water!
Dennis was excited by his discovery. He leaned a fraction further out from behind the tree...and the displacement of his weight caused his foot to slip on the shiny needle carpet, shooting his legs from under him so that he hurtled down the slope and crashed heavily on his back beside the fire.
The four men leaped to their feet, swearing. Dennis rolled with the fall, back-somersaulting to the far side of the fire and reaching for his shoulder holster as he struggled upright.
But Bosquet's revolver was already in his hand. "Don't try it, Dennis," he warned. "I got Alpha Plus Tor marksmanship in police school!"
Panting, the young man raised his arms. He was furious with himself for the carelessness that had given him away.
"So the Deputy who was too yellow for the job turned into a spy, huh?" Burger sneered. "Ain't you got nothing better to do than louse up other folks's plans?"
Dennis said nothing. With any luck they might not realize that he had been able to interpret the map. Even if they knew he had overheard the clerk's geological explanation, the man had said nothing about oil. He'd let them think he was wise to only half the story. In any case, the less he said the better.
"I asked you a question, punk!" Burger shouted, slapping Dennis backhanded across the face. "What the fuck are you doin' here, snoopin' around like some half-assed creep?"
The force of the vicious blow sent the young man staggering back a pace. There were stars in front of his eyes and his head was ringing. He licked the blood from his split lip and said evenly: "I work here. I work for Miss Devlin. I got tipped off there were trespassers on the property so I came to check." He saw no harm in revealing that he had been hired by Belle: if they thought she knew he was here, at least they would hardly shoot him and bury his body in the woods.
"Work for Miss Devlin?" the mayor repeated with a coarse laugh. "I'll bet you work for her! It'd take more man than you are to keep that farmyard bitch's cunt from itching! What happened today? She let you outa bed to go eavesdroppin' for a Sunday fuckin' treat?"
Dennis flushed and clenched his hands. "I don't call it eavesdropping to listen to someone who's already illegally on private property not when you're hired to protect that property," he said thickly.
"Don't give me any of that shit, you cocksuckin' bastard!" Burger yelled. Striding forward, beside himself with rage, he raised his huge arm and smashed a devastating blow to Dennis's solar plexus.
Dennis went over backwards as if he had been poleaxed, landing six feet away on the rock with the blood thundering in his ears and breath groaning from his tortured lungs. Snell and the clerk hauled him to his feet, retching and wheezing. The lawyer's crafty eyes were glistening and his mean little mouth was wet with saliva.
As they held the young man's arms. Burger drew back his ham-like fist again and slammed another savage punch into the pit of his stomach.
Dennis rocketed back with the force of the blow, his arms torn out of the men's grasp, and cannoned sickeningly against the bank beneath the tree. He slid limply to the ground, rolled over onto his hands and knees, and vomited onto the brown forest floor, his chest heaving in convulsive spasms as animal noises whined from his gaping mouth.
Bosquet was looking uneasy. The barrel of his gun, which had been covering Dennis, had begun to waver. "Hold it, Louis," he said as Burger was about to approach the fallen man. "If the guy works here, as he says, you can't-"
"Shuddup, Dal," the mayor interrupted. "Like Mister Dennis says, this is private property. You ain't got no jurisdiction here. What goes on between him and me's no concern of yours."
"All the same," the police captain protested, "I wouldn't want to get mixed up in no-"
"Then beat it!" Burger cut in. "Quit bellyachin' and take a walk. Me and Dennis has a little argument to settle. Somethin' personal, if you know what I mean. Why don't you go on down the lakeside and we'll join you at the boat in a while?"
Bosquet hesitated, glanced again at Dennis, and finally shrugged his shoulders. "Just as you say, Louis," he mumbled. Slamming the revolver back into its holster, he walked quickly away through the trees.
Burger was standing over Dennis, his fingers clenching and unclenching at his sides. The young man's breath was beginning at last to whistle in agonized shudders back into his lungs. The mayor jerked his head at the surveyor's clerk, who had said nothing since Dennis's unexpected arrival. "You, Andy," he said, "Get the gun outa his holster in case I bruise my knuckles next time I hit the bastard."
"Right away, sir." The lanky clerk reached in the open front of the kneeling man's lumber jacket and twitched the Police Special out. "You want me to cover him, Mr. Mayor?"
"Naw. It ain't worth the trouble. Give me the gun...then you go get a length of cord from that pack and help Snell tie his hands behind his back."
By the time Dennis was breathing fairly normally again, he had been dragged to his feet and his wrists bound tightly together. He stood swaying slightly, his head spinning and his diaphragm and chest on fire, staring up at Burger through pain-dimmed eyes. "A good, clean fight," he said blearily. "An unarmed man with his hands tied behind him against a gorilla with a gun!"
The giant stretched out his gun arm and pistol-whipped him savagely twice across the face. Dennis cried out in pain as the steel barrel laid open his cheek to the bone and then smashed sickeningly against the end of his nose. A curtain of blood flowed from the split cheek and mingled with the twin stream pouring from his nostrils and spattering his jacket. He sank down on one knee and dazedly shook his head.
"You can forget that fair-play college boy shit." Burger said menacingly. "You got the drop on me once and made me look small. Okay, I warned you now I got the drop on you, you bastard, and I'm goin' to beat the shit outa you!" He nodded to Snell and Andy, who pulled the half-stunned young man to his feet for the third time and propped him upright.
Burger balanced on the balls of his feet, judging his distance. Then he drew back his right arm and piled in a murderous blow to Dennis's heart, following it with a vicious left hook to the chin that sent his helpless victim reeling sideways. Dennis felt as though the world had exploded in his face. From an infinite distance, he heard the thud and crack of the terrible punches landing over the anguished grunts of his own breath. The big man's strength was phenomenal.
He would have fallen again if Snell and Andy had not caught his arms and held him. Burger was grinning sadistically. Stepping closer, he looped in a swinging roundhouse right that started down near the ground and landed on Dennis's temple. It was followed by a tattoo of hammering blows to the body and another left to the jaw. Dennis's knees buckled. At a sign from the mayor, Snell and Andy released his arms and he stood teetering on rubber legs while the brutal giant measured his distance again and then jerked up a tremendous uppercut that snapped his head back and burst inside his brain with a crimson roar.
This time Dennis went down and stayed down.
They dragged him up the bank and untied his hands. Then Burger went back to the fucksack by the fire and fetched two lengths of cord which he flung over the lowest branch of the pine. They lashed one end of each cord around one of the unconscious man's wrists, and then they hauled on the other ends until his limp body rose into the air and hung with the feet about eighteen inches from the ground. The mayor hitched the loose ends around the trunk of another tree and stood back to admire his handiwork.
Dennis was suspended by the wrists from the branch, his arms spread wide so that neither hand could reach the rope around the other, his head sunk on his bloodied chest and his battered face hidden.
"Okay, you guys," the mayor said. "You can begin humping the gear back to the boat. Then we'll go back down the lake and pay a visit on Miss High-an'-Mighty Devlin. Me and her have some unfinished business to discuss. Maybe if you're lucky I'll have you join in! Right now, I'm gonna have me a little workout just to get my eye in, as you might say!" He went back to the fucksack and returned swinging a whip made of a bull's penis.
Andy and the lawyer gathered up surveying instruments, map, inks and pens, the chemical apparatus, the hammer and a second fucksack, and began the trek down to the lakeside. As they left, Burger was pinching his forefinger and thumb on Dennis's chin, raising the lolling head so that he could slap the cheeks with his other hand. "Wake up, you bastard," he said genially. "I don't want you to miss any of this!... "
The clerk looked back over his shoulder. Burger had stripped off his jacket and was swishing the short, thick bullwhip experimentally. He drew back his arm and brought the hide and sinew quirt whistling down across Dennis's back with a crack like a pistol shot.
The body suspended from the branch leaped and twisted as Dennis's breath hissed out through his teeth. Burger struck again, the vicious lash laying open the wool lumber jacket as though it had been slit with a knife. The victim's head snapped back between his splayed arms and a deep groan burst from his throat.
Andy turned back towards the lake, his face pale. "Jesus!" he said.
Returning for the rest of the equipment, they could hear Dennis screaming, and the repeated cracks of the bullwhip, long before they reached the beginning of the pine forest above the creek.
The young man's clothes were in tatters, his gory face contorted and his mouth open as he bucked and jerked and twisted at the end of the cords suspending him cruelly from the branch. Through the rents in his jacket, shirt, and pants, ridged blue-red weals flecked with blood scarred his flesh. His wrists were raw and bleeding from the chafing of the cords.
Damon Snell was licking his lips. "Lay it to him, Louis!" he called excitedly. "Teach the dirty sonofabitch not to bring his filthy immoral habits into our town!"
Burger paused in his unmerciful lashing, wiping a beefy forearm across his sweating brow. "I guess this is a lesson the little creep won't forget," he panted. And then, punctuating each word with another furious stroke across back, belly or buttocks, he cried: "He can take this...and this...and this...and this...and that...as a reminder...to behave himself...in the future!" Each time the wicked lash bit into his lacerated flesh, Dennis screamed again, his dangling body leaping at the end of the ropes.
Andy swallowed, "Mister Mayor," he said huskily, "I think...that is I guess...maybe we ought to be gettin' back if we want to make the Devlin place before nightfall. He...he's damned near passed out anyway."
Burger stopped again and glanced up at the blood-spattered scarecrow hanging from the branch. "Maybe you're right, Andy," he said. "Okay we're on our way. Just one more for Miss Devlin, with my compliments!" He slashed a savage backhanded blow of the deadly whip across Dennis's groin.
As the quirt's leather and gristle tip seared shockingly into his unprotected penis and testicles, sending waves of unbearable agony crashing through his loins, the helpless man threw his head back and uttered an animal howl. His body threshed frenziedly below the swaying branch; his legs jack-knifed slowly up towards his brutalized belly and then dropped limply down as he hung unconscious from the cruel cords.
He awoke to an inferno of pain that lanced agonizingly through every nerve in his body. Hanging there in the dusk, he listened dully to the putt-putt-putt of an outboard motor gradually receding along the dark surface of the lake.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Further up the lake, a dory with muffled oars nosed silently in to a narrow creek running up under the trees. The pines came right down to the water's edge here, and the darkness beneath their motionless branches was heavy with the aromatic odor of resin. When the wide boat nosed around, two men climbed on to the low bank and manhandled three forty gallon drums of gasoline ashore. There was brushwood and dead branches piled in three great heaps among the closely growing conifers a hundred yards away from the water. The two men laboriously rolled the drums along the soft forest carpet and left one by each deadwood stack.
When the last one was in place they unscrewed the bung and tilted the drum on its side so that the inflammable fluid gurgled out and flowed down a slight slope to saturate the brush and soak into the ground around the neighboring trees. They repeated the process with the remaining two drums, and then they carried all three back to the dory and stowed them between the thwarts. They were much quicker with the empty drums than they had been when the drums were full.
The two men were trappers who worked out of a log cabin on an island over on the far side of the lake. Their faces wouldn't have been recognized in Bartlett's Creek even if they went there, which they rarely did. When they had finished, they retraced their steps carrying two ordinary two-gallon gasoline cans from which they splashed a trail of liquid leading from the three gas-soaked stacks of brushwood back to the boat. The air under the trees was now pungent with the stink of the fuel.
Pushing the dory away from the bank, they unshipped the oars. The taller and older of the trappers produced a box of matches from his pocket.
"Harry," the younger man said anxiously, "are you sure... ? "
"Sure I'm sure," the older man whispered. "Button your lip, Mac." He took a match from the box and struck it, shielding the small flame with his hand until the sliver of wood was well alight.
"But Harry, I thought we was supposed."
"Will you shuddup!" the older man said furiously. "Louis Burger give me a hundred dollars to do this job, and I'm goin' to make goddamn sure she's done right!" Leaning over the gunwale, he tossed the lighted match across two feet of water to the bank.
The tiny flame guttered and almost died. And then, as the gas-drenched grass at the water's edge flared suddenly alight, the flame snaked away from the creek, streaming along the inflammable trail under the trees like a powder train. Half way to the first stack it dwindled and they thought how incredible it was that it had gone out. Then a clump of dried grass blazed up in the dark and the trail was rejoined, zigzagging inexorably towards the stack.
They lost sight of it again before it reached the brushwood, but before they had time to wonder there was a hissing .oar and the impregnated stack caught fire all at once and blazed up among the branches.
The vapor rising from the second stack exploded in the heat before the fire trail reached it and the third went up seconds later with a thudding bloomp! that sent a billow of black smoke marbled with flame bellying among the pines. "Okay, she's away," the older trapper hissed. "Let's get goin' and pull like hell!"
When they were a hundred yards offshore, they rested on their oars and stared across the black water at their handiwork. Crimson and scarlet tongues of fire were shooting up through the trees to cast a ruddy glow on the underside of the smoke cloud rolling above the blaze.
Fragments of incandescent wood floated away to extinguish themselves among the bright reflections wavering in the dark surface of the lake. As they watched, a pine went up like a torch in a shower of sparks, followed by another and then another. The sinister smell of burning drifted across the water together with the angry crackling roar of the fire.
"Gee," the younger man sighed, "it seems kind of a shame to do that on a Sunday even for a hundred dollars."
"What d'you mean, Sunday?" the older man growled.
'Today is Sunday, Harry."
"You're outa your mind, boy. It's Monday. Thursday was the fifteenth and-"
"Thursday was the fourteenth," the younger man cut in quietly.
In the flickering orange light from the blaze, the older man's stubbled face was a study in dismay. "Jesus Christ!" he exclaimed blankly. "I've gone and fired her a day too early!... "
* * *
Behind a lighted window high up in a government building in Ottawa, a lean gray man picked up a sheet of paper and leaned forward across his desk. "A little chore for you, Captain," he said. "Or maybe you'd go for a day in the fresh air among the pines?"
The officer sitting across the desk was in the khaki uniform jacket and navy, red-striped pants of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. "Anything you say, Frank," he drawled.
"Remember old man Devlin, the lumber tycoon?" the gray man asked.
The captain nodded. "Sure. Lived somewhere north of the lakes, didn't he? A buddy of yours, if I remember right."
"Check. We were in the war together. Well, it seems his niece inherited the property and there's some local conspiracy going on, trying to scare her out of taking it up. The girl's an American citizen. I just got a call from her and she's pretty frightened. Because I was fond of the old man, I promised her we'd look into it."
"Okay, Nelson," the captain said. "You want me to go take a look?"
"Do that," the gray man said. "Take a chopper and a couple of men and find out the score. It's a place called Bartlett's Creek, about a hundred miles southwest of Cochrane."
The captain and the two mounties in the helicopter caught the smell of smoke in their blister cabin while they were still twenty miles from Bartlett's Creek. Then they could see it dragging like a heliotrope veil across the tree-clad ridge separating the lake from the river in the next valley. Under and through the smoke the fire flashed like artillery too far away to be heard. "Christ!" the pilot shouted above the clatter of the rotors, "they sure got one going down there! She looks like big-time stuff to me!"
The captain was consulting his map. "Seems to be in the uninhabited tract just north of where we're going. Call up base, Jess, and check that she's been reported, will you?"
The second man clapped a pair of earphones over his head and fiddled with the dials of his radio. After a moment he spoke into the curved mouthpiece sprouting from the harness on his chest. Turning his head up to the captain, who was standing gazing through the Perspex blister at the cloud of violet smoke, he reported: "Apparently not. No word's come through on the telex yet."
The captain swore. "Seven fifty on a Monday morning, and nobody's reported a fire of that size! Somebody must have seen her by now. You better call the Forest Service, Jess, just in case. Then report back to HQ and alert the anti-fire boys. Take the map and give them coordinates...You, Frank, bring her down lower and circle around. We better take a closer look."
"Willco," the pilot said. The chopper banked steeply and dropped like an elevator towards the flame-shot pall of smoke.
As they sank towards the rolling cloud, they could see the upper edges teased out by the wind into long streamers of reddish brown through which the rising sun glared angrily like a daytime moon. The flames that had looked from higher up like distant gun flashes were crashing through the massed pines like cavalry charging. The smell of burning grew stronger. It was already uncomfortably hot in the tiny cabin.
The captain eased the collar of his uniform jacket away from his neck with a worried forefinger. "If that wind freshens, it could be murder down there," he said. "You better put her down, Frank. There's a flat stretch by the lakeside there, just north of that little creek. Jess tell 'em we're going in to investigate."
The helicopter planed in over the leaden water and hovered above the inlet before it settled gently to the ground. The sliding door was already open. The captain jumped to the springy turf and stared up the black hillside where the fire had browsed. The hot air was bitter with the stench of burning and a gray snow of ash drifted on the sultry breeze.
"Looks like she started here, right here by this creek," the captain said. "Now how in hell... ? "
"Resorters," the pilot said contemptuously, stretching his arms as he came up to join him. "Firebugs. Some people!"
"She's just beyond that second ridge," the captain said. "If she goes left, she could ass clean up to Hudson's Bay. If she goes right, she'll head for town." An anxious frown was creasing his brow.
As they watched, the wall of smoke that hung above the fire leaned out from the hillside and the fire front appeared suddenly over the ridge a long wavering orange glare that silhouetted the serrated tops of the pines on the nearer slope. A cool wind bent down upon them from the north and a moment later the fire changed direction, burning more brightly as it sent outriders of flame leaping down the slant of trees towards the distant town. They could see it spilling downhill like a lava flow run wild, spouting smoke and sparks above the swaying treetops.
"Captain!" the radio operator called from the cabin. "They want you to take charge until the firefighters arrive. They're sending smoke tops and planes, and heavy equipment to the town, but they want you to direct the planes until the big men arrive."
"Okay," the captain said. "Better get the equipment out and set it up here by the creek. I guess this place is as good as any. She's been here and gone already!"
Ten minutes later, the pilot ran out of the trees reaching almost to the water's edge on the unburned side of the creek. "Captain I can hear some guy hollerin' a couple of hundred yards away in the pines."
The officer turned away from the microphone he was holding. "Okay, Frank. Run up and see what goes."
As the first plane, a converted two-engine bomber, soared over the burning ridge to lay its red spoor of fire-retardant, they were forcing brandy between Alan Dennis's shivering lips while he writhed in agony at the pain of the returning circulation in his lacerated wrists. He had hung semi-conscious throughout the night, feeling the hot breath of the fire as it passed on the far side of the creek and raced uphill, only just managing to summon enough energy to call for help when the sound of the chopper told him that rescuers might be nearby.
Dennis was in a terrible state, weak from exhaustion and exposure, his face and body a mass of bruises and cuts and welts from the savage beating he had received, his clothes in rags and every nerve raw with pain. When he had gasped out his story, the captain nodded grimly. "We know something of this," he said. "Matter of fact we were on our way here to investigate when we saw the fire. Your employer called up Ottawa to ask for help. But for the moment, I'm afraid Miss Devlin will have to wait: we've got a man-sized disaster on our hands here if we're not careful."
But remembering with a chill the sadistic Burger's final words, Dennis had a shrewd suspicion that Belle might not be in a position to wait. When the mounties were occupied with their radio, he slipped away among the trees. Five minutes later, he was at the wheel of the jeep, racing through the forest in a desperate attempt to beat the fire to the Devlin house.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Belle Devlin screamed. Lying naked on the davenport with her hands bound behind her and her full breasts mottled purple and blue by the clawing touch of brutal fingers, she watched with terror-struck eyes as the huge shadow of Louis Burger fell across the floor. The night was over but the nightmare was beginning again.
They had arrived an hour after dark the previous evening. She had been expecting Dennis and so she had unsuspectingly opened the door. There had been three of them Burger, Snell and a lanky youth she'd never seen before. Apparently Darrell Bosquet had been with them earlier but he had gone on home. She could smell the liquor on their breath as she tried to slam the door in their faces, but they had forced their way in and held her a prisoner in her own house while they drank more and more and made obscene suggestions about what they would do to her later.
Belle had tried not to show her fear, crossing her fingers and praying for Dennis's return. What could have kept him so late? It was already after eight! She could only hope that the sight of a car outside would tip him off so that he would come in with a gun in his hand and rescue her as he had done before. Then Burger had revealed that they had not come by car; they had walked up from the lake. And when in a fit of drunken boasting later he had told her what had happened to the ex-Deputy, she had lost all hope.
Burger had raped her first, his monstrous penis battering up into the tender depths of her vagina as Snell and the boy Andy held her down spread-eagled on the floor, their eyes bright with lust and their lips wet, as they leered gloatingly at the pounding body of their evil boss. The lawyer and the clerk had her after that, and by the time the crooked mayor was ready to fuck her again, she was too exhausted to resist anymore; she lay limp and stunned under his brutal assault, feeling more used and spent and humiliated than she ever had in her life. Finally they had raided her kitchen and made themselves a meal which they washed down with more liquor and at last they had fallen into a drunken sleep, leaving her bound and helpless on the divan.
Now it was morning and Burger was coming to her again! The sunlight casting his shadow through the doorway leading from the hall was curiously tawny and the day was uncomfortably close. She was aware for a moment of the smell of woodsmoke in the air, and then he was in the room.
He was naked, his belly and ape-like chest matted with black hair, his huge thick penis hanging obscenely in front of the bull-sized sac of his testicles. Even as Belle recoiled involuntarily on the davenport with a shudder of revulsion the grotesque rod of limp flesh stiffened and expanded in lewdly accelerating jerks, stretching the wrinkled skin until the shaft was gleaming with tautness and the bulbous mauve head burst out of the foreskin to point rigidly at the ceiling.
The terrified captive girl bit her lip to choke back the cry of fear that sprang to her lips. She cringed back among the cushions, her green eyes wide with foreboding. What further horrors lay in store for her at the hands of Burger and his repulsive toadies?
The ruthless mayor of Bartlett's Creek was leering down at her as he seized his long thick cock in one meaty hand and began skimming the loose foreskin up and down the lustfully expanding shaft. A large drop of seminal fluid welled from the slit in the blood-engorged cock-head and splashed wetly to the floor. "Ve-ery nice," he said approvingly, his bloodshot eyes feasting lasciviously on the trembling curves of the girl's naked body. "I guess it's time we all had ourselves a little more fun, huh?"
"I suppose you don't think you're going to get away with this?" Belle's voice was high with indignation . . ', and fear. "D'you think for a moment that you'll be able to stop me from complaining, from laying a charge... "
Burger chuckled. "Don't give me that, baby. Who the hell's going to believe you? You're already established as a neurotic, hysterical dame who drinks on her own. We got witnesses to prove it. And don't forget there's a certain picture to prove somethin' else too."
"You wouldn't dare! Not with Alan...with Mr. Dennis's evidence to prove my point. Besides, as the owner of the town's biggest business, as the owner of the lumber... "
"Lady, as of tomorrow you won't have no lumber!" Burger interrupted with a sneering laugh.
"W-w-w-what do you mean?"
"Never you mind. There's a little deal I have planned for tomorrow. Just wait and see: it's kind of a surprise!" The giant chuckled again, scratching his armpit with his free hand. "As for Mister Dennis I don't somehow think hell have the guts to testify against me not after what I done to him last night!"
"You're horrible!" Belle sobbed. "I hate and detest you!"
Burger swung around towards the door, the sperm-bloated pouch of his testicles swinging heavily beneath the pumping hand on his cock as he turned. "Come on, you two," he shouted. "For Chrissake sink that coffee and move! I got work for you to do."
Snell and Andy appeared in the room. They were both naked too. The clerk's long thin penis speared lewdly out from his mouse-colored pubic hair and one of his hands plucked nervously at his wetly drooping lower lip. The lawyer's bird-like stance was even more exaggerated without clothes, his round head thrust forward between his bony shoulders, his arms flapping as he massaged the stubby tube of his thick cock into hardness below his hairless belly. Belle thought with a shudder of horror that she found the two henchmen even more repulsive than the brutal Burger. At least he was a man!
Before she had time to take the thought further, the mayor's two cohorts, at a signal from their boss, threw themselves on her nakedly defenseless body, seized her ankles, and hauled her legs savagely apart. The screaming redhead lay obscenely spread-eagled in abject humiliation before her sadistic captors, the whole red-curled length of her vaginal furrow, with its pinkly glistening pussy lips, still swollen and inflamed from the previous night's excesses, spread open to their lewd gaze.
Trembling with terror, she stared wild-eyed from face to pitiless face as Burger and his cronies leered salaciously at the quivering white mounds of her breasts, the softly trembling bulge of her young belly, and the russet triangle of curling pussy hair nestled between her obscenely splayed legs. Dear God, there was nothing she could do against three of them! She had no idea whether her uncle's friend in Ottawa would keep his word and send in the mounties...or when they would arrive if he did. For the moment, imprisoned in her own house, she was utterly alone and at the mercy of Burger and his friends. The only victory she could hope for was a mental one; they could conquer her body again as she knew they must; but it would be an empty triumph if her spirit remained unbeaten.
But the fact that troubled her most a fact that she strove unsuccessfully to put from her conscious mind was the realization that even in the orgiastic nightmare of the previous evening, her body had responded with climax after climax to the cruel manipulations of her ravishers...
* * *
For the hundredth time, Alan Dennis shifted into low, wincing with pain as the lever of the bucking jeep shook his damaged wrist, and the seatbelt intensified the pain in his whip-lacerated shoulders. Beyond the rampart of red-tinged smoke to his left, the sky was overcast with a sulphuric haze. The heat and stench of the fire was all around him, and occasionally burning embers trailing spirals of smoke floated down through the branches overhead and drifted to the forest floor.
The jeep's wheels were scrabbling on the rutted trail, the motor laboring as he pressed the tough little vehicle to its limit in his desperate efforts to regain the house before the fire cut him off. He had passed the old boathouse and crossed the slashings; now he was negotiating a dense patch of second-growth forest where the track was almost lost in the underbrush.
A Canadair flying boat zoomed over the treetops, discharging its load of lake water somewhere ahead of him...and still to the left. It was followed by a twin-engined converted bomber dropping borax powder on the blaze.
The jeep ran suddenly into an open space where an arm of the fire had already reached into the woods, burning an erratic swathe through the trees. Dennis drove past blackened and maimed stumps, the spinning wheels raising clouds of choking dust from the still-smoking ash mantling the charred ground.
The land dipped on the far side of the space and then swelled up to a wooded rise. As he bumped towards the dip, the fire appeared on the crest beyond like a brilliant, evil fungus which continued to grow until it bloomed very large against the sky. Dennis braked and stared ahead through the flat windshield. The trail ran through the dip and up over the crest. It looked as though the fire had overtaken him and he would have to make a detour.
He could feel the blast of hot air on his sweating face. The trees in the dip had begun to sway, and a pine beside the track some way ahead was smoking. Dare he try to drive through or should he swing away through the trees, making his own path between the closely packed trunks, hoping to find his way back to the forest trail ahead of the flames?
The fire was making a noise like a storm. Enormous and fierce and red, it leaped savagely like a raging animal into the woods ahead. The pine tree that had been smoking burst into flames. Then four more on the other side of the track blazed up like giant torches in a row.
Swearing, Dennis wrenched the wheel of the jeep to the right and trod on the pedal. The little utility rocketed off among the trees. Behind it, sparks and embers floated down from the crest, plunging through the branches like bright exotic birds to replace the real birds that had flown in panic earlier.
* * *
Belle gasped aloud as Burger leaned over her, pawing at the soft flesh of her belly with his hard hands. "It's up to you now, kid," he said. "You can cooperate, and we'll all have a ball or you can try and fight it, and it's just the three of us gets the kicks. Like I say, it's up to you." His hands moved lewdly upwards, caressing the fullness of her firmly swelling breasts, rolling the tight rubbery nipples between his fingers.
The captive redhead felt her skin crawl with horror as she strove desperately to find words that might appeal to whatever sense of honor or decency one or the other of her captors might possess. She found none: the three faces gloating above her were alike in their brutish concentration on the satisfaction of their animal lust. She froze in terror as Burger's fingers raked teasingly down the trembling contours of her body to linger with dreadful familiarity among the silky hairs sparsely mantling her pubic mound. "Okay, boys you can get her ready!" he rasped.
The two men released her legs and leaped into action. Snell clambered onto the davenport and straddled the helpless girl's naked chest, his bony thighs gripping her bound arms, her heaving breasts squashed beneath his buttocks and the sperm-packed pouch of his balls resting in the deep cleft between her straining mounds. Andy sat astride her belly, forcing her knees cruelly apart with his hands as he leaned acrobatically downwards to lace his slobbering tongue snake-like into the moistly quivering slit of her vagina.
Belle jerked convulsively under their constricting weight, a whimpering moan escaping from deep in her throat. Her buttocks ground down hard among the cushions, seeking to escape the maddening oral assault of the weedy clerk. She shivered uncontrollably as Andy drew the tiny bud of her clitoris wetly up into his hot mouth with a liquid suck and began gently nibbling at the sensitive little shaft.
This can t be happening to me! It cant! the cruelly pinioned young captive groaned to herself as the youth's face rocked in greedy feast between her legs and his swollen tongue fucked in and out of her involuntarily dilating cunt. Yet in spite of her terror and revulsion at the depraved attack on her loins, tiny wisps of forbidden pleasure were already beginning to purl deep in the violated redhead's belly...and on her firm young breasts, crushed as they were beneath Snell's ass-cheeks, the nipples had already spiked out taut and erect!
She gasped aloud as the flames of sensation tearing out of control through her loins blazed higher and higher...dear God, she must fight this enemy from within with all her strength! She must not succumb to the betrayal of her own body!
But suddenly the slavering clerk's experienced tongue arrowed forward, burrowing far up into her now wetly straining cunt to send waves of carnal fire spiraling crazily up her spine to the base of her skull. Like Fourth of July rockets, they burst there into showers of stars, scattering pinpoints of desire all over her cruelly stretched body. Fire was replacing fear as the practiced lips and tongue of her ravisher plundered her erotically quivering pussy. Her mind reeled with shock. What was happening to her? Oh God! She had never felt so wantonly abandoned in her life!
Spontaneously, under the teasing ministrations of the expertly lapping tongue in her cunt, she had come erotically alive! Her nakedly rounded ass-cheeks arched convulsively up off the davenport, frantically trying to quench the searing lashes of lustful flame destroying all her reservations and all her inhibitions!
She opened her mouth to groan aloud...and choked back a gasp of alarm. Snell, who had been watching her contorted features with a grimace of lustful glee, had nosed the huge rubbery tip of his thick, hotly throbbing cock in between her wetly parted lips!
Almost without realizing it, without wanting to but not being able to help herself Belle began automatically to suck and nibble on the iron-hard shaft whose moistly seeping tip was invading the scalding cavern of her mouth. God Almighty her desire-crazed mind moaned instead of recoiling in disgust at the debased and unnatural intrusion off the attorney's thick-veined rod of flesh between her trembling lips, she was actually welcoming it! The flickers of lust were dancing with ever-increasing fury about the shuddering pink edges of her seething cunt! A tongue in her vagina and a penis in her mouth were no longer enough: she wanted something more; she had to have it!
The wish was granted almost as soon as it had formed in her mind.
Andy withdrew his tongue from her cunt and sprang aside. Grasping her flailing legs, he bent them savagely back towards her head so that the man whose penis was filling her gagging mouth could clamp them under his arms. She was bent double on the divan, jack-knifed in abject humiliation, her arms bound and her legs pinioned by the odious little lawyer whose hotly throbbing cock was sawing in and out of her distended lips, the whole stretched plane of her genitals defenselessly upturned beneath the leering gaze of Andy and the mayor.
"All right, boy; get in there and pitch!" Burger chuckled. "It's time we fucked the shit outa the bitch!"
The lewdly excited clerk jumped astride the helpless redhead's bent-back thighs. Then, guiding the plank-stiff shaft of his long thin cock downwards with his forefinger and thumb, he plunged the lust-swollen head straight in between the inflamed and desire-moistened lips of Belle's cunt.
"Ummmmm". . . " Belle muttered through her cock-stuffed mouth.
The nakedly doubled girl bucked and squirmed in unwanted ecstasy as the raping rod of flesh speared up into the tight hot passage of her hungrily clasping pussy. Her ovaled lips opened around the thick shaft of Snell's penis plowing rigidly into her mouth as she mewled again and again in wanton delight.
And then she felt herself being manhandled sideways so that her naked buttocks faced outward from the couch.
Suddenly she screeched...half in agony half in lustful passion, for the giant Burger had kneeled up on the davenport facing the youth on the other side of her loins. Now, with the steely shaft of his massively pulsating cock clutched in one huge hand, he was ramming the hard acorned head brutally up against the tight hairless opening of Belle's puckering little anus....
* * *
Dennis wrenched at the wheel of the jeep to avoid running down the crowd of forest creatures fleeing across the trail before the fire. Deer, badgers, martens, polecats, mink and even squirrels were dashing frenziedly through the woods to escape the devouring red monster sweeping across the land.
The fire was terrible in its intensity a wall of orange and crimson clawing at the sky and growling like an express train as it raced insatiably through trees. Dennis could see its pulsating red glow through the trunks of the pines, and every now and then, as the jeep lurched across a clearing, the black-streaked flames soared into view high above the treetops outlining a rise to his left. The heat was insupportable a lung-choking assault that tightened an iron band around his laboring chest and drew the sweat streaming from every pore in his body. The metal bodywork of the jeep seared his lacerated skin and the wheel scorched his hands. He drove grimly on, hoping the flat hood provided enough protection to stop the gasoline vaporizing in the carburetor and bringing him to a standstill.
He had regained the trail after a hectic detour among cedars and hemlock and cordwood growing on the slopes above the lake, then-trunks widely enough spaced for him to send the miniature auto rocketing between them through the underbrush. But now he was back among the closely packed pines and the conflagration was outpacing him along the ridge to his left. If the wind veered a couple of points to the north, the fire could spill down towards the track and consume him as instantly as a moth in a candle flame.
A sudden blast of hot air on his neck caused him to twist his head and glance over his shoulder. He gasped with dismay. An arm of fire had crossed the trail behind him and flames were roaring and crackling through the trees along the lakeside! As he watched, the blaze gathered speed and size, streaming past him along the half-mile-distant water's edge, rolling towering columns of brown smoke towards the town. Unless he could get back to the bulldozed track leading to the house before the twin outriders of flame coalesced, he would be finished caught like a rat in a trap by the converging pincers of the fire!
Despite the suffocating heat that was blistering his throat and lungs, a cold chill ran the length of Dennis's spine.
Gritting his teeth, he sent the jeep bouncing and careering along the rutted trail. As the fire closed relentlessly in on either side, the trembling smoke-filled air darkened. Trees lining the track ahead swayed and threshed in the hot gale. Flocks of birds flew up into the sky, fighting for altitude above the billowing smoke.
He was driving through a black rain of falling embers that clattered and spun off the bucking jeep. The awful roar of the flames drowned the scream of the motor and the thunder of invisible planes above. Once as he swerved wildly to avoid a flaming pine teetering over the trail, the vehicle lurched and staggered under the impact of borax powder thudding through the branches on to its square tail.
Now he was blinded by the furnace glare on either side of the track. The heat hammered him into the scorching seat, stopping his heart in his chest...and then, as a giant tree crashed down behind him in a shower of sparks, he was through, accelerating madly along the mile and a half of bulldozed road towards the house.
* * *
With the whole exposed area of her loins shamelessly distended and pulled back towards her chest, Belle's tightly clenched anus could not for long withstand the flesh-splitting pressure of Burger's rock-hard penis. The clasping rubbery folds suddenly gave way, and she screamed again as the sperm-bloated head of the mayor's sodomizing cock speared far up into the scalding buttery depths of her vise-like rectum.
Grunting with lustful fury, the giant men began fucking viciously in and out of her painfully stretched anus while Snell undulated his hips so that the rigidly glistening shaft stuffing her mouth sawed in and out between the violated redhead's widely ovaled lips. Saliva and pre-ejaculate ran in a cloudy rivulet from both comers of her hungrily sucking mouth. At the same time Andy, rising and falling in invisible stirrups, plowed the long hard length of his penis ferociously up and down into the greedily clasping passage of her cunt.
The helplessly pinioned girl was being mercilessly skewered from three different directions at once! Every opening in her wantonly squirming body was filled with cock! There was cock in her mouth, cock in her anus and cock in her seething cunt! The whole world was stuffed with hotly throbbing, rigidly expanding, wetly seeping, beautiful, beautiful cock! And she loved it. . . hated the monsters doing this to her and making her respond against her will. . . but loving their cocks. She moaned and mewled in lewd delight as her wantonly squirming body was buffeted between them.
As the three men bucked and plunged and sawed and thrust, gasping hoarsely with animal lust as they bounced her nakedly contorted body between them like a rag doll. Belle sensed the quivering muscles of Burger and his two brutal companions tense and shudder. Thrashing wildly under the weight of their laboring, sweating bodies, she groaned her wanton ecstasy past the gagging bulk of the raping penis invading her mouth as her orgasm suddenly and overwhelmingly seized her sweeping her up off the davenport in a storm of quaking, shuddering erotic fury that sent her spinning among the stars. She was cumming...cumming...CCUUUMMMMIINNNGGG! Oh God! Never let it stop!
At the same time, the expanding cock in her lewdly sucking mouth bulged and heaved, squirting a hot and acrid stream of semen far back into her gasping throat...and the two penises pistoning into her plundered loins shuddered, jerked, and then spewed their white-hot loads of heated jism in powerful jetting spurts against the obscenely milking walls of her rectum and vagina.
For a long time as the three men lay collapsed and satiated over her. Belle drifted in a sensual, erotic daze, wondering dimly why, despite her horror and revulsion at the unspeakable and degrading ravishments she had suffered, despite the shame and humiliation and distress, her body had nevertheless responded in a way that both astounded and dismayed her. Why should she so wantonly react to the brutal assaults of Louis Burger whom she loathed and detested?
Why should she have welcomed even his repulsive cronies once the fires of her carnal lust had been kindled? Could it be simply that her own tempestuous, autocratic nature demanded a partner strong enough to subjugate that nature utterly to his own demands? And was that why even at the extremity of her humiliation, it was Alan Dennis's face she had longed to see above her violated body?
It was only when Burger hauled her roughly to her feet and untied her aching wrists that she realized the room was unnaturally dark, and the stench of burning wood had become uncomfortably strong.
* * *
Dennis slid the scorched and blackened jeep to a halt behind the house in a shower of gravel. The radiator was steaming noisily and the paintwork was pockmarked with blisters. He ran towards the back door, staring anxiously to the east. The main body of the fire had swept past half a mile away, heading for the highway, leaving a mountain range of brown smoke bulked menacingly against the sky. But there were still ominous smudges of dark vapor over the trees fringing the lake on the other side. If the wind veered again, the house could be encircled in a matter of minutes, trapping him once more. Surely Burger and the others would have got out by now. Surely even they would not have dared to leave the girl there alone? He would have to check, just in case...but every second counted.
As he raced up the steps, the door opened and four people piled out onto the stoop. They were only half dressed, and their faces were pale. Andy was sweating with fear and Snell was visibly trembling.
"For Christ's sake!" Dennis shouted. "You must be out of your minds! Quick climb into the jeep and I'll try to get you out!"
At first, Belle had not recognized the battered, soot-smeared, ragged figure, but at the sound of his voice, she ran down the steps and hurled herself sobbing into the young man's arms. He glanced fearfully over her coppery hair. The angry murmur of the fire had suddenly increased to a terrifying, crackling roar. The mountain of smoke stretching from far back in the forest towards the highway had doubled its height, leaning out into the sulphurous sky above their heads. And now its lower slopes were limned in a hellish crimson glow.
A hot wind bitter with the stink of ash blew around the side of the house and plastered their clothes to their bodies. "My God!" Burger yelled, quick to appreciate the danger. "She's changed direction and headin' this way!"
They scrambled frenziedly into the jeep and Dennis twisted the key. As the weary, overheated motor spun, caught, hesitated, choked and then caught again, he looked towards the west. The lake had vanished behind a curtain of smoke and flame...
He knew there would be firefighters and heavy tankers and bulldozers along the highway, struggling to keep the fire away from the town. But there was a mile of heavily wooded dirt road between the house and the highway and the blaze was approaching from the east with terrible speed. If the lakeside outrider spread uphill and joined the main body of the fire between the house and the highway, the wouldn't have a chance.
There was only one thing to do. It was a slim chance, but he had to take it it was better than no chance at all. Wrenching the wheel around, he turned the jeep in a tight half-circle and headed back up the bulldozed track into the forest.
"What the hell are you doing? You'll kill us all! Well be burned to death!" Snell was thumping him frenziedly on the shoulder, his reedy voice wailing with fear.
"Stop, stop, stop!" Andy screamed at the same time. "Let me off! I want to get back to the road!"
"Shut up!" Dennis snapped over his shoulder. "I know what I'm doing!" He shifted into top and sent the jeep howling up the wide track. But the two terrified men had launched themselves into space, rolling over and over in the dust as they hit the graveled surface. A moment later, they were sprinting back towards the house and the dirt road beyond.
"What's the pitch, Dennis?" Burger yelled, leaning forward between the girl and the young man in the front seats.
"There's a dirt pile up the road, left by the dozer," Dennis yelled, watching the speedometer needle quiver towards the 50 mark on the dial. The trees on their right were outlined in a raucous glare, and the fire bellowed angrily as it swept towards them. They had perhaps four minutes...five at the most!
Burger nodded and sank back against the bouncing seat, wiping the sleeve of his shirt across his streaming forehead. He knew, as
Dennis knew, that heat rises but doesn't penetrate downwards; even after the fiercest fire had passed, the earth only a few inches beneath the surface is still cold. But above the surface it rises ten degrees every inch, so that a man lying on his back on the ground in a forest fire would find the tip of his nose fifty or sixty degrees hotter than the back of his head! If they could get to the pile of loose earth left by the bulldozer at the end of the track, therefore, they might be able to burrow into it sufficiently to escape the worst ravages of the holocaust. It was a desperate chance but it was better than being roasted alive on the dirt road almost within sight of the highway! The mile and a half to the clearing was a better bet than the mile to the road.
They made the distance in four minutes. Dennis leaped to the ground and snatched the shovel from the tailgate of the jeep, scraping three shallow troughs in the slant of earth and stones. Burger and the girl scrabbled frantically in the spoil, deepening them with clawing fingers.
The wall of flame through the trees was terrifyingly close. The heat was unbelievable a searing, mind-deadening assault on the senses that thundered behind the eyes and made the movement of every limb an effort against the pull of untold weights. So it must be, Dennis thought, if a runner tried to sprint a hundred yards wearing the lead-footed boots of a moon explorer!
"Lie down on your face with your chin on your hands," he yelled to Belle over the fury of the blaze. "Breathe shallowly you should have just enough air and don't move until I tell you to get out!"
As the frightened girl, her green eyes wide with alarm, hurried to obey, he shoveled earth hastily over her prone body until it was entirely covered. Burger was already face down in his trench, pawing the loose soil over the backs of his legs. Dennis spread a layer over his shoulders and head and then threw himself into the third depression.
As he arched his back to scrape a cover for his own legs, he could see the distant house through the tornado of smoke and embers billowing across the track. The fire was already there, bending around it like the fingers of a hand to squeeze black smoke out of the windows and then flame. The roof collapsed inwards and the flame raised triumphant arms to the sky.
Dennis shuffled himself as far down into the earth as he could, bending the arm he had left free to scoop rubble over his shoulders and head. As the arm wriggled crab-like into the soil, a pine needle beside the trail began to smoke furiously. Flames were already licking up from the burning paint along the jeep's hood. A moment later, the tree exploded with a hollow roar and ten seconds later the gas tank blew with a "whoomp" that was heard even above the express train roar of the fire as it closed down like evil red fog around them!
The fire swept like a cloud of white-hot locusts across the clearing, and the trees, like weary soldiers on a battlefield began to fall. . .
* * *
It was with a sense of total disbelief that Belle felt the hand shaking her shoulder. There had been in immense and distant thunder at the far corners of the universe; a mind deadening sense of constriction in the claustrophobic confines of her earthy prison; a suffocation that was more of the spirit than of the lungs. There had of course been the heat. Heat so intense that she was sure her hair was on fire, and she was forced to fight panic fight the suicidal desire to jump up screaming and run. But Alan had put her here...she was putting her life in his hands. And the brassy glare she thought she had seen illuminating the gravel between her laced fingers could have been an effect of the blood pounding behind her eyeballs. After a while, the trembling of the earth like the beat of a far-off gong had proved itself to be the hammering of her own heart. And then there had just been the stillness and the silence and the faint sound of embers cracking as the devastated land began to cool.
She sat up shakily, and the hot soil showered from her shoulders and back as Dennis helped her to her feet.
"Where's Burger?" she asked.
"I guess he ran," Alan answered. "If so, he's a dead man."
Stunned, Belle glanced around her. A scene of almost cosmic desolation met her eye. Where there had been living green forest pressing around the clearing, now there was a blackened wilderness of jagged smoking stumps and spars hoisted like the masts of wrecked ships over a surf of redly glowing charcoal and silver ash. Above the sea of smoldering debris, wisps of acrid smoke carried the death stench of incinerated wood.
The burned out body of the jeep, sole testimony to man'singenuity on this lunar landscape, sat forlornly under the high, angry sky, its tireless rims sunk in the ashes. Beyond it, down the slope of burned land where the cedars had grown, smoke was still rising from the funeral pyre of the house. There was smoke and flame too, down by the lake. But it was already a menace one degree removed a ghost seen through glass or an ogre on a television screen.
And in the middle of the road, there was a blackened lump from which an acrid smell rose with the smoke. It resembled nothing human, although once it had been a man.
"Don't look," Alan said. "Burger didn't get far... "
With infinite weariness, their arms around each other's shoulders, Dennis and the girl began the long trek back to the highway. The house was nothing but a pile of smoldering embers; there was virtually nothing left but a few sets of bedsprings, a tangle of pipes, a blackened stove. Beyond it, they found the roasted bodies of Snell and the clerk. Crazed with fear, the two men had run straight into the fire, swallowed superheated air at thirteen hundred degrees and died instantly, just as Burger had.
Averting their eyes, they staggered on towards the highway, the firefighting team, the waiting helpers.
EPILOGUE
"We arrested Bosquet this morning," the Mounted Police captain told Dennis and Belle. "I guess hell stand trial in Ottawa. He's already filled us in on the major details. He warbled like a songbird! He directed us to Mac and Henry -they thought we had come about the fire! Burger hired them to set it. Jesus! What a gang! You'll both be required for depositions and evidence, of course. Well let you know when." He escorted them to the door of the requisitioned police station in Bartlett's Creek and shook hands. His lined face was drawn with fatigue. With the aid of state and national fire services, the Forest Service and the RCAF, they had finally got the fire under control but although the town was saved, the mill and all its lumber plus more than half the timber on Belle's property had gone up in flames. It was therefore with a somewhat desolate air that she walked up Main Street in the setting sun with her hand in the young man's.
"You look kind of sad," Dennis said. His face was still battered and bruised, but a good night's sleep had worked wonders with his morale. "Don't worry, Belle; it's all over."
The disconsolate redhead burst into tears. "That's just it," she sobbed. "It is all over. I've lost everything the mill, the house, the timber, everything. I've nothing left."
"But the oil....? I told you... "
"I don't want to know about the damned oil!" Belle burst out. "Don't you understand I love this land! I've loved it since I was a little girl. I love the forest and the solitude and the lake and the fact that there's nobody around. I wouldn't dream of covering this place with filthy oil derricks and pumping stations, even if I had the money to develop it...and don't tell me I should sell! The land's mind and I'm keeping it. I told Snell the truth; I wouldn't sell at any price."
"There's replanting...reforestation... " Dennis said hesitantly.
"I couldn't afford it. I told you I have nothing left."
The young man cleared his throat. "There's something I have to tell you," he said nervously. "My name isn't Alan Dennis. The real name is Dennis Alan."
"Dennis... ? " Belle started. Where had she heard that name before? A door in her memory clicked open and she saw the saloon...the bartender sliding her rye across the counter...a copy of the Toronto Star and its front-page headlines... "Dennis Alan!" she repeated. "Not the... ? "
"Yeh...the missing playboy from New York," he supplied with a wry smile.
"The millionaire with amnesia?"
"That's just a polite newspaper fiction," Dennis said. "A nervous breakdown would be nearer the truth after too much high living and not enough to do. I checked out and decided to ass around incognito, trying to get back in touch with reality." He squeezed her hand. "I think I found it."
"But... ? "
"With my money," he said persuasively, "we could get this place back on its feet in no time, rebuilding the house, restocking, modernizing what's left of the mill, the lot."
"Oh, but I couldn't possibly "
"Look darling." Dennis said, "I think you need someone to manage your life as well as your business and I'm the guy to do it. I don't want any arguments or protests. I've decided and that's it; we're in this together from now on."
Belle's eyes were shining. And then suddenly they clouded over. "Alan...Dennis...I'd almost forgotten...that dreadful photo! I couldn't go on living here if that's been shown around. I couldn't!" She was nearly in tears again.
"It hasn't," he said shortly. "W-w-what do you mean? How do you know?"
"Because last Sunday morning was it only the day before yesterday? before I went out into the forest, I burgled the mayor's office while they were all in the saloon after church. I broke open the drawer of his desk and found the negative and a set of prints. I burned the lot."
"Y-y-y-you what? You didn't! Oh, darling!" Belle rested her red head on his shoulder for a moment and sighed happily.
"So that's settled," Dennis said firmly. "Now, if I'm going to look after you, you're going to have to do what I say." He lowered his head and added, "And the first thing I've decided is that I'm going right on back to that hotel room and screw the ass off you!"
Belle blushed. Her fingers tightened on his arm as her pace quickened. "Yes, darling," she said demurely.
The sunset was kind of smoky, but they walked off into it together anyway!
