Arabella Denburg was different from her female contemporaries. She felt an especially strong need throbbing in her loins. She did not hesitate to satisfy that need. On the multiple rape and murder of her innocent cousin she decided to use her body as an instrument of revenge. But she had no idea that on the completion of her mission her body would be throbbing with the stripes of cruel sadism and her loins would ache from terrible sexual abuse. Arabella experienced more than she had bargained for-whipping, spanking, oral sex, anal sex, Lesbianism-but through her miraculous will she emerged triumphant and untainted.
CHAPTER ONE
Thrice the Lecompton Constitution had been rejected by voters of the Territory of Kansas, and accordingly statehood had been denied. Just before the days of the Civil War, this new land to which so many Missouri farmers had come in the hope of escaping the hateful burden of slavery, the ominous growing storms that would rend a nation in twain and pit brother against brother had already cast their signs and auguries for the mighty drama that would soon burst forth. President Buchanan had recommended to Congress that Kansas be admitted as a slave state; but to defy him, John Brown, called by many "God's angry man," who rode with his sons over the plains of Kansas, exhorted the abolition of slavery in every shape and form.
By 1859, hundreds of ex-Missourians who had settled in the new territory and pleasured in the fruit of their labors and the closely knit harmony which prevailed among them, openly expressed their sorrow when they learned of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry and his subsequent public hanging. Two short years later, the North and the South were at war, and Kansas had entered on the side of the Union.
By 1863, Kansas, newest and thirty-fourth state, had sent more men to the Union forces and had more of them die for the cause of freeing the slaves in proportion to its population than any other state. But by that same token of valorous enlistment in the Union rank:, Kansas was left without enough soldiers to fend off the bloody, destructive raids of bandits, bushwhackers and freebooters who saw a golden opportunity to plunder and to attack defenseless towns and farm communities. And of all these, the deadliest scourge was a man known to history as William Clarke Quantrill, a former Kansan who had fled to Missouri to escape arrest for robbery, there formed a guerrilla band and returned to wreak death and rapine on the land that had given him birth in 1837.
In August 1863, Quantrill and nearly three hundred of his raiders, who included the notorious Younger, Yeager and James brothers, had ravaged the town of Lawrence, which had been the headquarters of Free State men in the bitter territorial fight over slavery as well as a station along the "underground railway" for runaway slaves. When he and his men left Lawrence behind them, nearly a hundred and fifty citizens lay dead and the town had been burned and sacked before Union cavalry could be summoned.
It was October 9,1863, a crisp bright day which was the last vestige of Indian summer, in the little town of Korchman, a dozen miles northwest of Baxter Springs in the southeastern corner of Kansas. Here perhaps sixty settlers and their wives and children had founded a little town and named it after their leader, Matthias Korchman. He had led them from Missouri, in the angry days before the Civil War, for all of them had shared his belief that man was not born to be enslaved by his brother. They had tamed the wild, unbroken plain and the thin sere grass with the bags of seed they had brought from Missouri where the land was rich, dark and moist. They had found an almost incredible oasis in what seemed to be little more than barren plain, since a broad, deep creek stretched before them for almost a quarter of a mile, along whose banks stood sheltering elm trees and shorter sumac with their bright oval-shaped leaves, a creek with good sweet water which replenished itself from a hidden source under one of the rocky banks. They had made their homestead there and they had had no neighbors except the cicadas and the sardonic calls of the blue jay and the wails of lonely coyotes. The Indians had not come near their little town, but the war had touched them, for at least a dozen of the young lads were wearing the Union blue and seven had already died at Vicksburg.
It was late afternoon, but the sun was still high and the women were tending their children or spinning or preparing food for the evening meal. Some of the men had gone out to the distant hills to try to bring back a deer or a few wild rabbits for stew. And it was nearly five o'clock when the women in their cabins heard the distant thundering of hoof beats from the south.
They could not know that at noon, near Baxter Springs, General James Blount and about a hundred men had been met by Quantrill and several hundred Confederates masquerading as Union troops. As Blount's band was preparing a musical salute, Quantrill gave the order to fire, and before the surprise attack was over, nearly ninety soldiers were shot down in cold blood. Then Quantrill turned against Lieutenant James Pond and his contingent of ninety-five encamped at the springs, but this force resisted with heroic determination until at last Quantrill was driven off.
So he turned his band to the northwest, and his riders approached from a distant hill where Matthias Korchman and Milford Denburg were hunting. Matthias, white bearded, and sturdy despite his more than sixty years, swore under his breath: "It's Quantrill, Milford, I'm sure it is! Dear God, pray that they take the road on the other side of the creek and miss our people!"
"Amen to that," Milford Denburg gasped, spurring his horse back toward the little town. "My niece Genevieve is all alone in the cabin. The poor thing had her mother and father killed at Lawrence by that bastard, just shot down without any reason at all. My wife and I and my daughter off at Crestine Nursing School are all she's got left in the world!"
William Clarke Quantrill, twenty-six, bearded and handsome as the fallen angel himself, rode at the head of his men, saber in hand. "To this side of the creek, boys!" he called back. One of his lieutenants, cigar-smoking scar-faced Hank Morris, gave his leader a mock salute and, reining his horse, turned back to call to the others, "Go to the other side of the town, boys, we've gotta put nightfall between us and those damn Union troops!"
"Hell's fire, man, my ass is sore from the saddle all the riding we've been doing," complained Bucky Bolden, a fat, black-haired and sadistic young renegade who had killed his first man at the age of fifteen and now, only seven years later, boasted that he had at least thirty notches on his gun and twice as many "cherries popped by my horny pussy-cracker."
"Shet your mouth, Bucky! Better to have a sore ass than a stretched neck, and that's what you'll have if those boys in blue catch up with us," Hank Morris growled. "Once we've thrown them off the trail, there'll be little towns we can stop at and pick up some fresh pussy, if that's what you're hankering for."
"All right, hold your water, Morris," Bucky Bolden snarled. "All the same, I don't see many men around that little town over yonder by the creek and I'll bet they's some sweet untouched cherry just free for the fucking."
"Bill Quantrill gimme the word just after we left the springs," Hank Morris retorted as he drew his horse back to ride abreast with the angry Bucky. "No reprisals, no plundering till we've chased those Union bastards for fair."
"Man, will you look at that!" Bucky Bolden suddenly hissed, turning his roan stallion's head towards the edge of the road. There, just beyond the creek, a pretty girl was in the garden at the back of her cabin, squatting down to dig up some of the nasturtiums she had so carefully tended. They would grace the table for supper for Uncle Milford tonight, Genevieve Pitchard thought. She was twenty, full-breasted and chestnut-haired, and even in the rough gingham dress which had no frivolity to it and had not even come out of Godey's Lady Book, could not hide the ripening curves of hips and bosom. It was still too early for her to have awakened desire among the young men of this little village on the edge of the Kansas border, for all of them respected her grief over the cold-blooded murder of her parents back in Lawrence. But that didn't mean they hadn't noticed her, and many a lusty young stud was hoping that one of these days Miss Genevieve would sort of forget to wear that black band on her arm and allow herself to be sparked right proper. Maybe at the harvest festival, if someone could slip her a red ear of corn and get her out in the barn and tumble up her skirts and give it to her.
"Man, if that ain't sweet cherry, then my pussy-cracker ain't never poked one," Bucky Bolden muttered thickly. "Now just 'spos'n you and me could snatch that sweet l'il gal and take her along, you don't think Billy Quantrill would much mind, do ya, hey, Hank?"
Hank Morris shook his head: "Orders. Not unless the damn fools take a potshot at us and they ain't much likely-hey, what's that there? Cap'n Billy, some bastid over at that village yonder wants to play hero!"
For the shot of a rifle had suddenly come to the ears of the renegades, and they saw a spurt of white smoke from a window of a cabin to the left of the one where luscious chestnut-haired Genevieve Pritchard was tending her nasturtiums.
"I get your drift, Hank," Quantrill smirked. "All right, take the bitch along. We'll keep her as a hostage in case the soldier boys get too close on our tail. Hank, see if you can shoot down the son-of-a-bitch that dared to fire on William Clarke Quantrill. Don't let him draw another breath to fire on anybody else, boy, or you're not my second in command any longer!"
"Now that's the kind of an order I love to hear, Cap'n Gilly, sir," Hank Morris saluted smartly. Then, gesturing to Bucky Bolden to follow, the two men rode swiftly around the edge of the creek and towards the little village. Bucky Bolden got down on his belly, squinting along his rifle towards the open window of the cabin, where he had seen that puff of smoke. "Not a sound, Hank," he hissed. "Think I see the son-of-a-bitch getting about ready to take a peek-hold it there-now!"
He squeezed the trigger, and there was a shriek as the elderly man, crouching just at the sill of the open window, toppled back onto the floor, a bullet in his brain.
Genevieve Pritchard scrambled to her feet, dropping the little wicker basket, tumbling out the pink nasturtiums, as she saw the two bearded rogues in their Confederate gray uniforms hurrying towards her.
"Well, now, that's a real purty garden you got there, honey," Bucky Bolden snickered. "Come along, little lady, I'm gonna show you what you really ought to plant." With this, seizing her by her wrists with his left hand, as he flourished his rifle in his right, he dragged her towards his horse. Hank Morris saw a young boy peer out of the door of. the cabin to his left and promptly fired. Another scream, and the boy dropped dead. His mother inside began to wail, "Jeremy, Jeremy, he's only a little boy, who would shoot a boy?"
"Let's get to hell out of here," Bucky Bolden snarled. "Give me a hand with this bitch. Here, tear part of her skirt off and tie her wrists behind her, and you can even put her on the back of your horse. You can have a piece of her ass for the favor."
"You're on," Hank Morris chuckled thickly. He bent towards the screaming, struggling, chestnut-haired girl, ripped off a part of her skirt almost as high as her crotch, and then the two men forced her wrists behind her back while Hank Morris expertly tied the strip of gingham securely around them. It was Bucky who hoisted her up in the air onto Hank Morris's horse, riding ahead of him, and Quantrill's second in command leered as he put one hand on the young girl's left tittie and gripped the reins of his horse with his right hand, clucked to it and kicked his heels against the horse's flanks.
The men of Quantrill quickened their pace along the road and they raised a cloud of dust. Milford Denburg and Matthias Korchman reached the village just after the raiders had disappeared over the nearby hills, circling so as to throw the pursuing Union cavalry off their tracks.
Milford's wife Bessy was wringing her hands and weeping as she sobbed out what had happened to their young niece. "Two ugly men got her, Milford, after they shot down Mr. Scraggs and poor little Jeremy Forsden. Oh, I wish they'd shot her too, at least she'd be dead and saved in her purity. Heaven knows what those animals will do to her!"
"Don't cry so, Bessy, I know, I know, it's hard," Milford Denbury said heavily. "Give thanks unto high that our daughter Arabella is safe at Crestine. Oh, that poor child, to lose her folks to those fiends out of hell and then to be taken by them-there's no justice, she didn't deserve that! Come on, Bessy, might as well go comfort poor old Mrs. Forsden, Jeremy was all she had, what with her oldest son and husband off to the Union Army and, some say, both prisoners at Andersonville."
CHAPTER TWO
It was nightfall when the men of Quantrill halted their foaming, lathered horses in the thick woods of a spruce forest about twenty miles west of Hallowell. By means of constant doubling back on the trail they had taken past the little village of Korchman, they had outwitted their Union pursuers. They would make camp for the night and go back across the Missouri state line at dawn, avoiding any patrols that might have come from Baxter Springs.
Quantrill, tall, bearded, handsome, was in a rare good humor. "These bastards who called me a thief that ought to be put away for life near my home town," he was saying to Hank Morris, "they're thinking mighty different now, I'm figuring."
"That's for sure, Cap'n Bill. They ain't gonna forget Lawrence so easy."
"No, and there'll be more Lawrences before we're done. Tell the boys to rest easy. Break out the whiskey if you want, but you'd better handle the detail on the little bitch you and Bucky picked up. I don't want my men fighting among " aselves over one little piece of pussy, understant?"
Hank Morris grinned, showing crooked tobacco-stained teeth. "Gottcha, Cap'n," he drawled." Seeing as how Bucky and me took the bitch for hostage just in case there'd be trouble, I figure just the two of us ought to share her. Of course, you got first choice, 'count'a you're the big boss."
"No thanks. I can find my own poking stuff. Go have your fun, you've earned it."
"Thank you, Cap'n Bill. Any notion where we'll be heading after we get back to Missouri?"
"Maybe Pittsburg or maybe even Dodge. Hard to tell. One thing, we're going to change into Union uniform when we get back to our hangout in Dunnerstown. Too damn much Union cavalry hanging around these bigger towns. We'd have had better luck if we'd worn our Union rags down at the springs this noon."
"We did pretty good, at that, though, Cap'n. I'll tell the boys to ease off a little. Long as we're not doing any hard riding tomorrow, maybe we could even pick up a few more cute little bitches from some of those farm shacks near the border. Might be a good idea to have some real hostages if trouble comes."
"I'll give it some mind," Quantrill said briefly, as he took out a cigar and lit it.
Hank Morris grinned again and nodded. Then he moved back into a little grassy knoll where Bucky Bolden had pinned Genevieve Pritchard down on her back and, kneeling over her, his fingers digging into her wrists which he had drawn out in cross, was leering down into her contorted, tearstained face. He had gagged her with a piece of her own gingham skirt, and then ripped off another piece to wind over her mouth and knot it at the back of her neck. Some of his buddies had grumbled a little, complaining that after they'd been in a fight and ridden their tails off all day Ion, they ought to be counted in for the poking. But Bucky was too good with a knife and too long with a grudge to allow for any serious prolongation of this argument. He had simply snarled, "Find your own cunt, you scroungin' bastards, or I'll let daylights through your guts," and that had been an end of it. So they were forced to content themselves with watching. A lantern had been lit and set near the trunk of an old spruce tree, and it would serve to illumine the scene of poor Genevieve's degradation and martyrdom.
"Now lissen here, l'il gal," Bucky Bolden muttered, "you can take this a couple of ways, see? Nice and quiet so you don't raise a fuckus, and maybe you won't draw too many boys coming round to see the fun and maybe want their share, get me? Or you can start squallin' like a cougar and you'll have the whole camp down on you-and I do mean down!" he sniggered and jabbed Hank Morris in the ribs with his elbow at this lewd joke. "Well, make up your mind, honey, 'cause my cock's aching mighty hard and I need a little easing off!"
Genevieve Pritchard stared up at her captor, her eyes huge with terror and shame. Her chestnut hair was tumbled to her waist, and her gingham dress was already ripped in the bodice to show the shapeless cotton wrapper which served as chemise. There were few stores carrying ladies' fashions out here on the plains of Kansas, and Genevieve had had to leave most of her clothes behind in Lawrence after the raid which had burned down the hotel in which she and her parents had been staying.
But now, remembering this, as she lay on her back pinned down by one of the two men who had abducted her and realizing what they were going to do to her, a kind of reckless fury and hatred filled her. "You dirty murderers," she spat at Bucky. "Go ahead, you're cowards, all of you, and it's just about your speed to make war on women! The way you did back in Lawrence!"
"Now you watch your tongue, little lady," Bucky Bolden snarled, "or by the eternal I'll give you a lacing you won't forget in a hurry!"
Although her heart was thudding with terror, the chestnut-haired young woman still defied him: "I said cowards! You and some of these men with you-if you call them men-shot down my father and one knifed my mother. That was back in Lawrence. Maybe you wouldn't remember that, you've done so much murdering afterwards-Owww!"
Her tirade was suddenly broken off as Bucky, releasing one of her wrists, viciously backhanded her across the face. "Just keep it up, sister," he muttered in a thick voice, "here Hank and me was figurin' to poke you a little and give you a good time. But you're asking for it, and you're gonna get it! Hank, let's tie her up to this tree, peel her down, and then make her dance and beg for it, what d'ya say?"
"Sure beats sitting around and swapping lies," Hank Morris sniggered.
He came over to seize one of Genevieve's wrists while Bucky held the other. The two men dragged the panting, struggling young woman up to her feet. "Get the lantern, Miguel," Bucky called to a half-breed who rode with the gang. "Bring some rope, too, we're to have a little fun!"
"Seguro, Senor Bucky!" the Mexican chuckled assent.
"Kill me, you dirty cowards! Kill me!" Genevieve panted as she tried to twist herself free of the two men's grip. Bucky Bolden leaned towards her, his hairy cheek brushing her contorted face, and he muttered in a tone of gloating anticipation, "That'd be too easy, sister! Fact is, we're going to make you feel real alive, we are! Okay, Miguel, just keep the lantern up so we can see what we're doing here. All right, Hank, tie her up by the wrists to that branch right there, it'll make her stand just about on tiptoe-that's the way!"
"Help, of Heaven! Don't let them do it to me! Isn't there any man of honor her?" Genevieve
Pritchard shrieked as the two men corded her wrists with one end of a single heavy rope, and then Hank Morris knotted the other end around the sturdy branch. Thus Genevieve Pritchard was forced to stand on tiptoe, her arms dragged upwards, facing her ravishers.
The dark-skinned, mustachioed Miguel licked his lips as he held the lantern high. It had been a long time since he had tasted what a puta could give him to ease the ache in his cojones! Maybe for helping the Senors Hank and Bucky, they would let him have a little fun with the lovely Senorita!
"Now peel her down good, Hank, I want to see that cute little poke-hole she's got," Bucky grinned as he took a half-chewed cigar out of the pocket of his Army shirt and stuck it in the corner of his mouth, working it around to get the taste of tobacco.
Genevieve Pritchard tried to kick out at her tormentors, but it wasn't of much use. A couple of other men had roused themselves from the campfire beyond the grassy knoll and come over to watch the fun, drawn by Genevieve's cries and angry denunciations. They formed a circle around her, while the Mexican held up the lantern so they all could see what was being done. Panting, trembling, glancing this way and that, trying to twist and turn, Genevieve was helpless to fend off her attackers. Hank and Bucky were a little discomfited, because they hoped on having Genevieve just to themselves, but this would be nearly as much fun and there would be other women in the towns ahead. So, philosophically they decided to put up no argument. The men who rode with William Clarke Quantrill held life cheaply and there wasn't any sense getting yourself killed quarreling over some bitch you could always replace along the trail.
Her bravado soon fled when Hank Morris, using a clasp knife, cut off her tattered gingham dress while Bucky tugged at the flour sack-like chemise. When it fell, all Genevieve had on was her long cotton drawers and her shoes and stockings, and her soft pink skin gleamed by the lantern light.
"Lookit them tits," Bucky Bolden breathed as he began to unbutton his Army trousers down the crotch to liberate his bulging prick. "Wonder if she's cherry, Hank?"
"Thought you said you wuz gonna make her dance," Dan Weinbold called. He was a top-ranking lieutenant with QuantrilPs raiders, and he had once been a preacher back in Sedalia, Missouri, till he had been found fucking the handsome young wife of one of his parishioners. The enraged husband almost killed him, but Dan Weinbold had saved himself at the last minute when the husband's hands had clutched round his throat by jabbing his thumbs in the man's eyes and blinding him. Then, staggering to his feet, he had taken a butcher knife and expertly cut the throat of the shrieking husband while the naked young woman looked on from the bed in horror. Dan Weinbold had chuckled grimly: I'm just about done with my preachin' days, sister. Now either you come along with me or you get the same medicine. I'm not aiming to have nobody blab to the law about what I just had to do here, savvy?"
So the young woman had accompanied her husband's murderer, and she had become a camp follower when Dan Weinbold had cast her off, until one day, agonized over the depravity to which she was forced and the hopeless misery of her life, she had taken a knife and driven it into her heart.
"That's right," Bucky chuckled. "Preacher's got the right idea. We owe this little filly something for calling us all those names, huh? But let's not spoil her too much, because this here cherry-popper of mine can't wait to get into her little snatch!"
A shriek from Genevieve attested to the fact that Dan Weinbold had suddenly come forward and yanked down her drawers, making them festoon her long slim pink-sheened calves, exposing the enticing round cheeks of her voluptuous young bottom, and the thick dark chestnut fleece which marked her cunt. Genevieve Pritchard was a virgin, though she had been "spoken for" back in Lawrence. But the boy she had been affianced to had been shot down by one of the raiders in that terrible and bloody massacre.
"Let's switch her ass a little, boys," Hank Morris's voice was thick with rut. "Let's make her dance and beg for a fuck! The guy that lays on the smartest lick that makes her ask for it gets to cram her first, what d'ya say?"
"Suits me fine. Miguel, just keep that lantern as close as you can, we want to see all this little filly's got," Bucky Bolden hoarsely enjoined. Working his heavy belt out of the loops at the tops of his Army trousers, he swung it in the air with a fearsome crack, and Genevieve shrieked as she wriggled backwards.
Hank Morris chose a felexible whippy switch which he broke off from one of the spruce tree branches nearby and flourished it in the air near Genevieve's squirming naked tethered body.
"Preacher" Dan Weinbold emulated his cronies' example, and two other men, Joe Jasper and Rod Kenton, desperadoes with a price on their heads who had joined Quantrill for their own protection against the posse chasing them down for bank robbery and murder, used their belts as well. Now these five men began to circle the whimpering naked captive, who kept turning her head this way and that to watch all of her assailants. "Don't beat me, don't beat me," she groaned, tears running down her cheeks. "Kill me instead-you've killed my folks, I want to go to them in Heaven!"
"Now ain't that sweet," Bucky Bolden sarcastically jeered as he cracked out his belt and wrapped it round poor Genevieve's naked waist, drawing a cry from the naked beauty and a frantic squirming. "Sister, when we get done with you tonight, you'll be hot as hell, and they won't want no part of you up yonder!" This blasphemous joke made the man roar with ribald laughter. Now Hank Morris flicked out his switch and the end of it curled around the top of Genevieve's left thigh near her pussy. With a scream, the naked young woman jerked backwards, only to be met by two simultaneous horizontal cuts laid on by Joe Jasper and Rod Kenton. Shrieking again in pain, she lunged forward, and this time Bucky Bolden's leather belt viciously cracked against both her uptilting round firm titties. The pain was intolerable and Genevieve desperately screamed: "Not there, oh please don't hit me there, you're killing me, oh stop it!"
"I get the first poke," Bucky Bolden triumphantly roared as he strode forward, his prick bobbing in the air with every step. Gripping Genevieve by the hips, he thrust his cockhead against her thick chestnut love-fleece while calling to his cronies, "Go ahead, make the bitch wriggle, lay it on her hide good while I poke her!"
Instantly the switches in the hands of Joe Jasper and Kenton cracked wickedly against Genevieve's saucy bottom-rounds, sinuously cleft by a gradually broadening furrow. The upstanding round globes were velvety-smooth and at once were angrily marked by the stigmata of the switches. With a mad scream she jerked forward, only to try to lunge back again, for she had just felt Bucky Bolden's cockhead pry apart the lips of her virgin cunt and thrust forward into her sacrosanct love-canal.
"She's cherry all right, you guys, and I got here first!" Bucky hoarsely announced his joy. Gripping her by the hips, he lunged forward, and with a mad scream of pain Genevieve Pritchard felt her hymen shattered and tried to wriggle herself backwards. But now switches and belts cracked over her bottom and back, and she was forced to lunge forward, so that her ravisher's prick burrowed up to the hilt in a single dig.
"That's good, boys!" Bucky Bolden panted. "Keep it up, make her dance! Hell, that cunny'a hers is tight as a mouse hole, she's gonna crush my nuts off, she's that tight! But I'll open you up good for the other guys, sister, see if I don't! There-there-and there!" As he spoke, he drew himself back out of Genevieve's quaking love-chasm, only to cram viciously back inside her to the hilt, while the men behind the agonized naked young captive enthusiastically flogged her, gloating to see her wriggle and jerk under their blows, calling out obscene encouragements to Bucky Bolden.
At last, he gushed all his essence into her, and withdrew, while Hank Morris took his place between her writhing thighs, first mopping her blood-and-spunk-stained cunny fleece with a bandanna. Bucky in turn resumed the belt and went behind the unfortunate naked martyr. Grinning lewdly, he began to whip her naked bottom, while the other men used their switches on her thighs, shoulders, even her updrawn arms. Her cries and frantic gyrations excited them all. As soon as Hank had finished with her, Rod Kenton took his place and after him came Joe Jasper, and then even Miguel the half-breed had his turn . . . .
By dawn, as the men of Quantrill prepared to ride on, Genevieve Pritchard hung lifeless by her updrawn wrists tethered to the tree branch, her pink skin savagely welted. She had been sodomized as well as raped, and over twenty men had had their way with her. Finally, Miguel had put a merciful end to her suffering by plunging his clasp knife into her heart just before he saddled up his mare to follow the guerillas back to their Missouri hideout. And they rode on, soon forgetting the beautiful young martyr. There would be many more victims like Genevieve Pritchard before William Clarke Quantrill came to his own destined end . . . .
CHAPTER THREE
Arabella Denburg had the news of her cousin's shameful and needless death two days later, as soon as her father and mother had been able to get over to Hallowell for supplies and to send a telegraph wire to Crestine. A friendly Kiowa scout who often traded at the little village of Korchman, had been the one who discovered Genevieve's lifeless body, naked and sagging with her arms tied high above her head to the heavy branch of a giant Spruce tree in what was known as the Ghost Woods not far from Hallowell. The sturdy old Kiowa had covered that pitifully marked and abused body with a blanket and brought her back to Korchman, for he had recognized her. She had been buried at once, and Mr. Nathaniel Margrave, the minister of Korchman's only church, had read the service.
Arabella Denburg arrived two days later, the earliest she had been able to leave the nursing school where she was helping train women and girls for Army duty. Many of the graduates of this school were sent on to the base hospitals behind the Union lines which were constantly advancing into the heart of the South. But many others remained back in Kansas, and their knowledge would be of practical value that could save the lives of their own families, for with bushwhackers and guerillas like Quantrill ravaging the frontier towns where there was little Army protection, the casualty list was often staggering. In Lawrence alone, over seventy had been wounded besides those slain by the men who followed the Rebel flag of William Clarke Quantrill.
Arabella Denburg was twenty-three, about five feet six inches in height, and her pretty auburn hair was neatly coiffed in a prim bun at the back of her head. She was an only child who had survived life in this little frontier town so far from any large city, exposed on the plain to Indians, bushwhackers and the raging elements. The village of Korchman had prospered until the outbreak of the war, but there had been hard years in the founding of it, and this war might drag on endlessly.
Arabella's mother had given birth to two sons, but one of them had died of swamp fever when he was only three, back in Missouri; the other had been bitten by a rattlesnake and died at the age of six. Milford and Bessy Denburg had longed for a boy who could take over their farm and carry on their name, but it just wasn't to be, for after Arabella's birth, Bessy Denburg was told by Doc Murton that she would have no more children.
So lovely red-haired Arabella had grown up knowing secretly that she had to substitute for her dead brothers, that her parents really wanted a boy in the worst way and couldn't ever have one, and she'd wanted to be worthy of them and make them proud of her. She'd been engaged to Ben Tolson, a sturdy brown-haired twenty-five-year-old farmer whose stern father was one of the elders of the Korchman village council. But somehow Arabella hadn't felt that this was what she really wanted, to settle down and marry a farmer's son and bear a flock of kids out there in a little village on the Kansas plain. Then when the war had broken out, she'd persuaded her parents to let her go to Crestine, where an Army colonel was founding a nursing school to train women to help the surgeons with battlefield cases as well as to give them the practical training they needed to take care of a wound made by an Indian arrow or a guerilla's bullet. And so she'd broken her engagement with
Ben, just told him that it was her patriotic duty to do all she could for the soldiers at the front, and gone off to Crestine all by herself, much to her parents' consternation. Ben had been unhappy, but got over it; a month later, he'd sparked Laura Mundt, a simpering, big-bosomed eighteen-year-old blonde, to marry him, and now he was wearing a blue uniform and fighting somewhere in Tennessee. And Laura had a set of twins to look after and to carry on his name in case anything happened to him.
Arabella was frankly quite relieved, because she hadn't felt drawn to her suitor in the least. If most of the occupants of the village of Korchman where she had been born actually knew her feelings about love and marriage, they might have not only been scandalized, they might have ridden her out of town on a rail after tarring and feathering her. The simple fact of the matter was that Arabella Denburg was thoroughly disgusted with the servile role a woman had to play. After all, it was the nineteenth century, and here brothers were killing brothers and destroying the nation, so why shouldn't a woman have her sayso about whom she wanted to go to bed with for the rest of her life?
But she told herself that when the time came, she'd know who Mr. Right was. Then there wouldn't be any problem about climbing into bed with him, not by a darn sight.
Her parents took her out to the freshly dug grave of Genevieve Pritchard in the little cemetery to the southeast edge of the little village. Arabella Denburg stood looking at the headstone, trying to blink away the tears. Her parents didn't have to tell her what happened; she had a pretty good idea of what a renegade or a bushwhacker would do to a pretty girl like her cousin if left to his own devices.
That evening, just after the simple meal of fried chicken and biscuits and turnips and strong coffee and freshly baked apple pie, Arabella politely excused herself from the table and walked down the lane till she came to the blacksmith shop. The old Kiowa who had brought the news of Genevieve's whereabouts into Korchman was still there, having his horse re-shod. Arabella had learned a few phrases in Shoshone and Kiowa as well as Sioux, and so the scout was startled to hear this beautiful red-haired paleface speak to him in his own tongue and ask him to be honest with her and tell her how he had found her cousin on the trail. The scout hadn't wanted to tell Arabella, but she had persisted. Finally he had shrugged, and bluntly came out with it. And he had identified the raiders of Quantrill as those responsible for Genevieve Pritchard's degradation and death.
"Wait here," Arabella Denburg instructed him. Then she went back to the house of her parents and she confronted Milford and Bessy Denburg in the parlor of their cabin and she said, "Ma and Pa, I hope you aren't going to be too mad at me, but I'm going back to Crestine. I might just as well put my learning to some use. I'm just about done at the school, and I'm going to ask to be assigned to one of the base hospitals."
"Child, why don't you stay here and try to find yourself a nice young man?" her mother anxiously inquired.
Arabella stood her ground: "No, Ma, that's not for me. I'd get too restless. Besides, I'm still young enough to want a little fun before I tie myself down. And since there's a war on, I'm not likely to have much fun until it's over. But I'll be in touch with you, so don't you worry any."
They said their farewells, hardly suspecting that Arabella Denburg had taken an incredible vow after listening to the story of the Kiowa scout. It was simply this: somehow she was going to get herself accepted as a camp follower to the men of Quantrill, find out who had been responsible for her cousin's death, and kill them with her own hands, if need be. But kill them or get them killed she would, or her name wasn't Arabella Denburg.
Arabella knew it wasn't going to be easy, and she also knew that her life would be in terrible danger. If just one of those bushwhackers ever found out she wasn't really a whore or a girl of easy virtue who liked to follow desperadoes like them because there was plenty to drink and lots of gold and good times and plenty of fucking, she wouldn't even wind up with a headstone to her name like her poor cousin Genevieve. They'd probably dismember her and bury her all over the county. Still and all, she was going to try it. She and Jenny had been such good friends, and she'd loved her uncle and aunt, who had been murdered by that skulking criminal William Clarke Quantrill.
But since Crestine was a border town, Arabella Denburg figured that she was bound to find a few renegades who, for the price of a few drinks, might tell her where she's be likely to find the Quantrill gang. They might even arrange to take her to the gang's hangout.
Yes, Milford and Bessy Denburg would have been horrified if they had known what their daughter was planning. But then they probably would have fainted dead away if they had learned first of all that she wasn't even a virgin. Because the fact was, luscious red-haired Arabella, with that naive curiosity and pertinacious stubbornness of purpose which probably went along with her red hair, had already learned what it was like to have a strong young hard prick thrusting back and forth inside her pussy grove. She'd found out, to be exact, the night after her sixteenth birthday, because that's when she'd been engaged to Ben Tolson, and she wanted to find out what it was going to be like to lie in bed next to a man and not be able to tell him he didn't have the right to fuck her whenever he wanted to. She wanted to see what it would feel like when she got fucked. Of course she didn't dare try Ben out, because then the word would go out that she was just a slut and nobody would want to marry her and it would disgrace her folks. So instead, she'd picked a young Negro stripling who worked for the blacksmith, and she knew that Dan Toby couldn't talk, for the very good reason that his former master down in Mississippi had had his tongue torn out by the roots. Dan had run away and been passed along the famous underground railway as far as Sedalia, and then the Korchman party had taken him along in their travel to find freedom and new land in the territory of Kansas.
No, Arabella hadn't been a virgin now for about seven years, and Dan Toby was an experiment she hadn't regretted. He'd been aghast when she'd intimated to him by sign language what she wanted of him, and she'd let him into the barn late at night when no one was watching, taken off everything except her pantalettes and lowered those just enough so that he could see her pussy, spraddled herself on a pile of hay and gestured to him to get on her and give it to her.
CHAPTER FOUR
The death of Arabella's uncle during the Quantrill raid on Lawrence had brought the red-haired beauty a small legacy of about four hundred dollars. This money was in the bank at Lawrence, and Arabella intended to claim it as soon as she had finished her business at Crestine. It would come in handy in helping her keep alive while she went through with her plan of setting herself up as a decoy and sexual bait to some of the lustful rogues who rode with the scourge of Kansas. Clearly and with as much levelheaded judgment as if she were planning a hunting expedition-and in a sense she was doing precisely that!-Arabella weighed the risks and dangers she was going to encounter in playing this dangerous game all by herself.
First of all, she was going to have to go to some border town through which Quantrill's men were likely to ride on their way from their secret headquarters in Missouri. She would have to pose as a saloon girl of easy virtue, and try to attract some customer whose bearing and talk might suggest that he was one of the men in that despicable group of renegade outlaws who cared nothing for Union or Confederacy, but only for what booty they could plunder, including tasty and helpless female flesh. She would have to live the life of a whore, a camp follower, and if she made just one slip, the least she could hope for was having her throat cut after having been thoroughly gang-fucked.
And if she could only kill one or two of those swine who had put Genevieve through such hell, it would be worth it.. . .
When she left the Kiowa scout at the town of Crestine, she went at once to a nursing school, whose headquarters were in an old farm house which the Army had taken over and which was run by one-armed Colonel John B. Neade. He was a kindly man but brusk, and he had no sympathy at all with malingerers or women who professed to be Florence Nightingales and then proceeded to faint dead away at the first cut of a scalpel or a saw. Arabella had been Colonel Neade's star pupil. She asked for a private audience with him and he gruffly agreed to see her. Five minutes later, he was pounding on the table with his one good fist: "Of all the consarned notions, that's the craziest yet! Now look here, Arabella-and maybe I'd better pull rank on you, seeing as how you're about to be commissioned a second lieutenant in the Union Army, Medical Division. Here you are at the top of your class, you've helped me with these other fidgety females and turned out a few real good nurses, and now you want to go traipsing off looking for that dirty, no-good rapist and murderer Quantrill! Do you realize, young woman, what you're letting yourself in for? Even a man with guts would have better sense than to try to get into a nest of vipers like that one, even if he were armed to the teeth and ready for bear. And you, a frail female, think you're man enough to bring those sons of hell to justice, do you?"
"Will you let me talk to you just like any ordinary person, Colonel, and not as my superior officer?" Arabella Denburg demurely asked, approaching the desk and most provocatively leaning against the edge of it, so that the one-armed grizzled officer had not only a full view of her delectable young charms but also could catch a whiff of her verbena scent.
"Fire away, Miss Denburg. But I'm warning you, I can stop you here and now with just one little order, and send you off to Pennsylvania and McClellan's Fifth Division. That'll put an end to your nonsense."
"Let me talk first, please. Isn't there a bounty on Quantrill and his lieutenants?"
"Of course there is. All you'd have to do is catch them in the act and they'd be hanged out of hand without even a trial," the one-armed officer testily declared, pounding the desk again with his fist to emphasize the point. "But this is a job that calls for a detachment of smart, well armed cavalry, not a singly girl. Look at yourself-red-haired and saucy and flighty, a girl who ought to be bedded down with some fine strapping Union buck who'd give her a big belly in no time at all, not thinking of a crazy stunt like this!"
"Why, Colonel," Arabella cooed, fluttering her long thick lashes at him. "That sounds like a very indecent proposition. I'm not even married, much less engaged. Besides, a girl might trap some of those devils where a soldier couldn't. They wouldn't be expecting a girl to work on them."
"That's true," he said grudgingly. "What have you got in mind, Miss Denburg?"
"I was thinking of going to Coffeyville, Colonel Neade, because that Kiowa scout who brought me here told me there were quite a lot of bushwhackers flitting in and out of that town on the border. It's right next to Missouri, you know--. "
"Damn it, girl, are you giving me a lesson in geography? I know where Coffeyville is. Quantrill recruited a couple of his dirtiest fighters from that town. There was Indian Joe, and Matt Haskins, who's been called the Butcher of Lawrence. Some of the citizens who made that report after that cursed raid in which your cousin's parents were killed identified him as having shot down at least three women and two old men just for a lark. They're murderers and they love the smell of blood, Miss Denburg. So what do you think you're going to do in Coffeyville?"
"Get me a job at the Red Dog Saloon, Colonel Neade. I'm going to take the money my aunt and uncle left me, fit myself out like a real chippy, and go to work there. You mark my words, there'll be some of Quantrill's men coming in there for booze and fast women, and I aim to be on the spot so I can make myself known to them as a sympathizer."
"You ought to be locked up in your room and given a switching every night till you get rid of this notion, Miss Denburg," Colonel Neade thundered, hammering the desk again.
"That wouldn't change my mind one little bit, Colonel Neade. But if you were to assign some soldier who knows the territory pretty well and can identify some of Quantrill's lieutenants, the two of us could work undercover and bring these murderers to justice. And you wouldn't need a detachment of soldiers, and you can't spare them anyhow, not with the war going the way it is."
"I see. But it's still crazy. How can a decent girl like you expect to carry off the role of a chippy?"
Arabella Denburg giggled. She moved closer to the one-armed officer, and her slim hand caressed the back of his neck. "I do declare, Colonel Neade, you're ever so dashingly attractive when you get angry," she purred. "I've got a hankering to be poked by a strapping buck like you with lots of experience. Why don't you take me to bed right now and see if I can't be all the chippy any of those Quantrill raiders can handle?"
Colonel John Neade's mouth opened and his face turned red as his eyes goggled. When he recovered his breath, he gasped, "That sounds just great, Miss Denburg, but suppose one of those raiders takes you up on your offer and drags you off to a private room in that saloon? I know what it's like and you've got some nasty characters hanging around there all the time. Your life wouldn't be worth a plugged nickel, not even a Confederate greenback."
"Pretend you're one of the raiders and take me to bed right now, and I'll show you, Colonel Neade," was Arabella Denburg's astounding riposte. Her hand crept across his grizzled cheek, and moved down to the buttons of his uniform and began to undo them one by one.
"Here now, stop that, girl! You've gone plumb loco! I've a mind to haul you over my lap and lambaste your pantalettes!" he spluttered.
"Why don't you try it? Besides, I'm not wearing pantalettes, I'm wearing drawers. They're made of batiste, and they've got lace ribbons along the legs, Colonel Neade. You can take them all the way down and lambaste me good and hard," Arabella provocatively murmured.
Colonel John Neade gulped, then rose shakily to his feet, his eyes mercilessly fixed on Arabella's lovely, pert face. He hadn't had a piece of pussy in over two years, and he'd been a widower the past five. He hadn't even tried the officers' brothel in Crestine, because he didn't want to take his chances with the pox. But the notion that this delectable red-haired young woman could so calmly and yet wantonly offer herself to him to prove her qualifications for the fearfully dangerous role of spy in a border town where Quantrill's men were known to gather made him suddenly conscious of his long-enforced continence. "I'm going to call your bluff, Miss Denburg," he said in a thickened voice as he grasped her by the wrist. "Let's go to my quarters, and if nothing else happens, you're going to get that lambasting I promised."
* * *
Colonel John Neade locked the door, hurried over and drew the dirtied, frayed curtains over the room's only window. Then he turned to Arabella Denburg, his face mottled with the flush of mingled astonishment and lust. "I'm calling your bluff, Miss Denburg," he repeated. "Let's see just how far a decently bred young woman like you is going to go. I'm going to be a raider now, and I found you in the Red Dog Saloon and I'm taking you up to my private bedroom. The door is locked, and there's the bed, and let's see what you do next!"
Arabella Denburg smiled sweetly. Then, erect and cool, she began to remove her dress, pulling it over her head and neatly draping it over the back of the straight-backed chair near the mahogany chest of drawers at the other end of the room. Next she undid her stays, and then she tugged her lisle chemise over her head and draped it as carefully over the dress. Colonel John Neade uttered a choking gasp as he saw the delicious redhead in a deshabille of drawers and chastely cut camisole. Through the thin stuff of that latter garment, her magnificent widely spaced pear-shaped titties thrust with virginal boldness, and the slim grace of her supple waist flared temptingly into sleek, elegantly curved hips. The drawers hugged two magnificent resilient oval-shaped globes, divided by a gradually broadening crease. Her long shapely thighs and high-set calves were sheathed in coarse gray lisle hose and held up high on her thighs with elastic garters. Now, meeting his eyes without the slightest hesitation, she tugged off her camisole and let it flutter to the floor, standing half-naked, and put her hands on her hips with the bold gesture of a tavern slut. "Well, Colonel? Hadn't you better get undressed too?" she calmly queried.
Colonel John Neade let out a blustering oath. Then, compressing his lips, he began to undo the buttons of his uniform with his single hand, while Arabella moved over to him and purred, "Let me help you, Colonel. That's what I'm here for."
He stared at her, his eyes feasting on the glorious up-tilting goblets of her naked titties, exquisitely circled by rosy halos in whose centers there grew pert pink buds. His hand trembled as he cupped one of those luscious naked love globes, and Arabella shivered as she unbuckled his belt and shoved down his Army trousers.
In a few moments, he was down to his own drawers and boots, his sinewy chest thickly covered by a mat of gray hair. And through his drawers, the evidence of his pent-up manhood thrust violently, roused by the vision of voluptuous half-naked femininity which Arabella Denburg proffered so casually.
"Shall I take off my drawers now or do you want to do it yourself, Colonel?" she whispered.
Again the one-armed officer swore an unprintable oath. "First, I'll try to act like a father, and pound some sense into your backside, girl," he snarled. Sweeping her stays to the floor, he seated himself in the straight backed chair, seized her by a wrist and dragged her down across his lap. Then his hand rose and fell resoundingly on the right cheek of her bottom. Arabella winced, closed her eyes and seized the lower rung of the chair with both hands as she submitted herself. Her drawers were tight, shaping out the contours of her voluptuous young bottom like a second skin, delineating the lascivious furrow which led to her two temples of pleasure. His hand fell on the other cheek now, attacking the ripest curve of the globe, with the sharp report of a pistol shot. Arabella bit her lips and shifted herself a little over his lap, her bottom throbbing not unpleasantly. "So you're still determined to go down to Coffeyville, are you?" he asked in a hoarse shaking voice.
"More than ever, this is fun," she giggled.
"Is it now? We'll see about that, girl," he snapped. His hand rose and fell a dozen times now, violently and swiftly, alternating on the cheeks of her behind. Arabella gasped and squirmed uneasily, as she felt the tender flesh of her firm young buttocks chastened by the burning smacks. But against her belly she could feel the protuberance of his prick, and slyly she began to wriggle herself over him, knowing how best to defeat his vindictiveness and turn it to her own account.
He paused, panting for breath, his face almost purple with excitement, his eyes glittering. "Had enough?"
"I thought you were going to take down my drawers, Colonel," she exclaimed, her voice slightly high-pitched as the flames in her behind began to make her loins churn with longing. What he couldn't guess was that she was as passionate as he and had been even longer denied since that initiation by the Negro deaf-mute.
"You asked for it, Arabella!" he groaned. "Arch that bottom of yours off my lap so I can get at your drawers, then. I'll make you wish you'd gone back home and married some hardworking farmer boy, see if I don't!"
Arabella Denburg obediently arched up her bottom, and his fingers fumbled with the buttons of her drawers. "You'd better let me," she interposed, as she grasped the legs of her final veil with both hands and vigorously tugged.
Colonel John Neade's eyes widened with carnal anticipation as the garment was husked down past the promontories of her behind, just to the tops of her thighs. On the pale nacreous skin of her bare bottom, the flaming marks of his energetic palm stood out in lascivious release, contrasting with the silky-smooth whiteness of her sculptured bare back. Her buttocks were twitching now and the muscles flexing as she shifted herself again to endure the rest of her spanking.
He raised his hand and brought it down with all his might on the right summit of that magnificent bare posterior, and then hardly with a pause delivered an equally emphatic smack on the left cheek. Arabella's hips involuntarily jerked, and a stifled little gasp was wrested from her. She bowed her head and closed her eyes as tightly as she could, but the tears of anguish were beginning to well in them. Yet the chalorous heat he had inflicted in her tender naked woman-flesh made her loins seethe with a yearning that must have culmination. "Give it to me good, Colonel," she panted, "make me want to fuck you!"
And with that salacious and unexpected interjection, she completely destroyed the last restraint of the one-armed Army officer. With a cry of mingled rage and desire, Colonel John Neade began to spank her resoundingly, his arm rising and falling like a piston, his hand calloused palm biting stingingly into the firm hillocks, first right and then left, till Arabella could no longer control her gasps and little stifled cries of discomfort nor keep her long delightfully sculptured legs from kicking about, disclosing the thick dark red bush of her cunt.
Finally he stopped, breathless, his chest heaving, his prick about to burst. "There!" he panted, "maybe that'll change your mind for you, Miss Denburg!"
"Oooh! Oh my! Quite-quite the con-contrary, C-Colonel," Arabella Denburg stammered in a voice choked with tears. "May I get up now?"
"By all means," he said ironically.
Slowly and painfully she hoisted herself to a standing position, her drawers festooning her thighs, and he could see her now from neck to crotch, her titties rising and falling with a violent rhythm, the thick triangle of her cunt a tempting regalia and making her pale white flesh whiter still by its lascivious contrast.
Forcing herself to stoop, though the maneuver made her gasp aloud with pain, she tugged down her drawers to her ankles, then stepped out of them. Then slowly she walked over towards the bed and lay down on her side, turning towards him and holding out her arms: "You've made me so hot behind that I'm just as hot in front now, Colonel Neade," she seductively murmured, "please hurry and take care of me! You owe me that much after that dreadful spanking!"
Colonel John Neade rose from the chair, tugged off his own drawers, and in his boots, strode over to the bed. Clambering upon it, he seized the beautiful red-haired nurse, who, as he came towards her, quickly put his hands to the back of her head and loosened her shimmering tresses till they tumbled down nearly to her waist.
"My," she whispered, "you really are excited, aren't you? Don't you think those raiders will be too?"
"Suppose you just shut up, Arabella, and take your fucking as bravely as you took your spanking," Colonel John Neade countered.
His moist quivering lips fixed on one of her nipples now, as he thrust his rampant prick against the thick bush of her love-temple. Arabella groaned as her arms clung round him, arching to him, yielding unhesitatingly to his demands. He felt his cockhead slip between the soft quivering lips of her pussy, and he thrust himself into her as in a tumult of excitement he realized that there wasn't any cherry to say him nay.
"I know what you're thinking, Colonel," Arabella gasped as she ground herself to him, taking all of his prick up to the very hilt. "You're thinking I'm not a virgin, and you're right. That's exactly why I'm going to work at the Red Dog Saloon. I can't wait to find a farmer's boy who's man enough to bed me the way I need. That's why I'm going to Coffeyville-oh Colonel, oh my goodness-yes, oh give it to me, oh, how you hurt my poor bottom-mmm, that's awfully good!"
She was hardly aware of the fact that he had twisted her over onto her back and that her blazing bottom was ground down against the sheets of the bed as now, riding her as he would a restive mare, Colonel John Neade began to fuck her with long deep digs, his beard tickling her titties, the fingers of his one hand gripping her by the back of the neck.
Closing her eyes, Arabella Denburg surrendered to passion. Panting and whimpering, she arched to him, meeting each thrust with the full verve of her nakedness.
Her sobs and groans were delirious music to his ears, and suddenly with a cry he felt himself explode within her.
She rolled back and forth, her fingernails digging into his sinewy back, until the torrential flow of her girl-cream met his bubbling spunk.
"Now, Colonel Neade," she whispered, "do you think I can hold a job at the Red Dog Saloon?"
"By Heaven, Arabella, you can do anything you've a mind to," he panted. "I'll put you in touch with a soldier who's to be trusted and who can help you bring those bastards to justice and a swift rope over the branch of a tree."
"Thank you, Colonel darling, I knew you would."
"But before I do that," he chuckled as he settled himself in her saddle, "let's take care of some unfinished business. It's been a long time since I've had a piece at all, and I'm not going to let you go until I'm thoroughly fucked out."
CHAPTER FIVE
The town of Coffeyville, four miles north of Oklahoma's territorial boundary (by treaty of 1834, Oklahoma had been set aside as Indian Territory and did not become a state until 1889) and eighty miles west of Joplin, Missouri, was a thriving frontier town of about three thousand residents. It had rich farm land to the northwest and a small copper mine which had brought prosperity to some of the earlier families. Its main street contained an emporium which offered dry goods as well as groceries, a farm equipment and supply store, a barber shop, a blacksmith, a livery stable, a hotel for commercial travelers which housed thirty and, at the time of a cattle drive or the meeting of some of the border gangs such as Quantrill's, it could of necessity give shelter to three or four times that number. Also, there were three saloons, of which the Red Dog was the largest, noisiest and most patronized.
The old Kiowa scout who had told Arabella Pritchard of having discovered her cousin's abused and lifeless body had vouchsafed his belief that if she meant to track down any of Quantrill's raiders, Coffeyville would surely be one of the most likely places. It was known to have a dissolute sheriff, Bud Horkins. who had been brought up as a boy in Missouri and whose father had once owed two slaves. Bud Horkins was embittered over the war because his father had been killed by an abolitionist following a night-long poker game in which the senior Horkins, who had been drinking heavily, lost all his money and then had staked his house and finally his two slaves. When he had been stripped bare, he had accused the abolitionist of cheating, and he had been shot down in the saloon. That had been twenty years earlier, when Bud Horkins was only fourteen, but since that fateful day, Horkins had hated the cause of the North. His mother had to sell her few heirlooms and go to work as a laundress, and had died two years later.
At the age of sixteen, Bud Horkins was working at a livery stable in Joplin, and one stormy night the man who killed his father-though it had been in a fair fight-came in to buy a horse and to ride for Kansas, having had a threat made on his life by a band of pro-slavers whom he had impoverished over a similar poker game. Bud Horkins stabbed him with a Bowie knife, took one of the horses, and after having robbed his victim of a sizable amount of cash, the proceeds of the winnings from that last poker game, had ridden for the Kansas border. He had come to Parsons, gone to work as a hired hand for a well-to-do farmer, and stayed in that hiding place for the next three years, managing to hide the stolen money. Things had gone well for him, for he had learned that the man he had murdered had many enemies and that the slaying was eventually attributed to a gambler who had been shot down in a Joplin saloon about six months after he had avenged his father. But he had stayed on at the Parsons farm because there was a pretty fifteen-year-old girl named Susan working there as an orphaned bonds-maid.
When he was nineteen and Susan was eighteen, he paid her employer a thousand dollars to release her from the indenture, married her and moved to Coffeyville. There, with the rest of the money he had stolen from the corpse of the man he killed in the livery stable three years before, he bought a livery stable and settled down with his young wife. For the next three or four years, he prospered and his wife bore him a son, but then fate seemed to turn against him as if to punish him for his murder and theft. His little son died of the croup and, three months later, Susan fell ill of a malingering fever and went to her grave within a week. Bud Horkins became a morose and angry man, drinking heavily and assuaging his grief in the arms of the chippies who worked at the Golden Eagle, then Coffeyville's only saloon. (The State of Kansas did not go dry till the Murray Liquor Law of 1881.)
In 1859, Bud Horkins, then thirty, was well on his way to a drunkard's early grave, when once again fate stepped in to alter his checkered life.
From his backgound, Bud Horkins had been on the side of slavery, and he was bitter: most of the citizens were on the side of abolition. He thought of returning to Missouri, perhaps to Sedalia or Jefferson City and then one April evening destiny decided that he was to spend the rest of his days in Coffeyville. A desperado who had just robbed the Coffeyville bank entered his livery stable and, at gunpoint, forced Bud Horkins to give him his fastest horse for a getaway. As Horkins reached for a saddle for the animal, he suddenly flung it at the robber, knocking the gun out of his hand, and then, seizing a pitchfork leaning against one of the stalls, killed him.
When the citizens of Coffeyville learned of Bud Horkins heroism, they urged him to run for sheriff the following month, as the incumbent sheriff had been told by the town's doctor that he had not more than six months to live. The president of the bank made Horkins a present of $250, and this recognition decided him against moving back to Missouri.
He became sheriff of the border town and because he was lightning-fast on the draw and a brutal bully, maintained sufficient order and respect to hold his job through a reelection. When the Civil War began, he discovered that Missouri had remained in the Union, so he resigned himself to make the best of his opportunity. There were few Union troops in Coffeyville, and so Quantrill's raiders and the desperados of other guerrilla bands often passed through Coffeyville on their way to forays to the northwest towns. Bud Horkins had skillfully hidden the bulk of the money he had taken from his father's murder and used it to build the Red Dog Saloon, and letting the venture be purchased by one of the pretty young chippies at the Golden Eagle with whom he was on the most intimate of terms, so that the townspeople would not think it odd that their sheriff owned an establishment where gambling, women and liquor were dispensed and whose customers were often of shady reputation.
The chippy was a black-haired girl of twenty-four, Lorna Boles, and one of her professional customers had been Ted Porter, a red bearded, tall twenty-five-year-old gunslinger who had very nearly been hanged in Dodge City on the charge of being a horse thief and who, as enraged as William Clarke Quantrill for the way his native state had treated him, had made his way to Quantrill's headquarters in Missouri and joined the ruthless guerrilla. Ted Porter often visited Lorna Boles, who faithfully reported these visits to Sheriff Horkins. The latter, with his keenly opportunistic mind, foresaw a way to make more profit from his saloon by harboring the men of Quantrill, and so he had Lorna intimate to her bearded young lover that, so long as needless gunplay in the saloon and hoorawing the town itself did not occur, he would look the other way when any of the Quantrill band wished to take their pleasure at the Red Dog Saloon.
Bud Horkins was burly, nearly six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds. His black hair was sparse and his face was that of a smirking bully, and he was soft-spoken and viciously sarcastic. And that was how the raiders of William Clarke Quantrill learned that they might seek diversion in Coffeyville without danger from the law, And it was to this saloon, this hideout for wanted criminals, that beautiful red-haired Arabella Denburg came, just three short weeks after her cousin Genevieve had been given Christian burial . . .
It was a busy night at the Red Dog Saloon, and Lorna Boles, an ostrich feather in her hair which had been fluffed up into a thick pompadour, and wearing a spangled, rhinestone beaded gown which was cut enticingly low to display the wide valley between her jutting melon-like titties, was behind the bar herself seeing to it that her customers got a fair shake.
Lorna had little luxury in her childhood. Lorna's mother had had to take in boarders, and one of them, a mealy-mouthed bespectacled deacon of the Presbyterian Church, had found Lorna at home one afternoon when nobody else was at the house. She was then just two weeks past thirteen and already budding, and the deacon had noticed this for a long time. Before Lorna could protect herself or had even divined what he was about to do, the deacon had locked the door of her room, flung her down on the bed and, one hand clamped over her mouth, had foraged under her dress and petticoats to tear down her drawers. While she struggled and kicked, he had swiftly liberated his bulging cock and, mounting her, brutally fucked her and taken her maidenhead. Then, coercing her with the threat of telling her mother that she had seduced him and also telling the story around town that both she and her mother were trollops, he had forced the weeping, trembling adolescent girl to suck his cock so that he could fuck her again.
When he had finally left, smugly satisfied at his triumph, and warning her that he might just lay her out again sometime soon, Lorna knew what she had to do. She gathered her few pitiful possessions, stole ten dollars in gold from her mother's hiding place in the pantry under the sugar bowl, wrote her mother a hasty note explaining what had happened, and hitched a ride on a buckboard with a farmer who was going to Pittsburgh to find out what price he could get for his wheat.
She managed to work as a slavey to a widower and his three daughters, but after about four months, the widower got the same idea as the deacon had about Lorna's blooming young bottom and titties. And one night, under the pretense that she had been lazy in her chores, he took a strap to her bare bottom to the amusement of his giggling daughters, and then led her into her room, purportedly to sermonize her on the virtue of hard work. Once inside her room, he promptly fucked her, and so again Lorna Boles ran away.
This time she went to Dodge City, and since she was aware that her good looks were all she had to offer, she went boldly to one of the red light houses and demanded to see the madame. Once the interview was granted, she brazenly offered to work in the house. The madame was suspicious, but Dodge City was booming and there was plenty of demand for fresh young pussy. So, taking a chance on Lorna, she let the girl work that very night, and Lorna's introduction into prostitution was five vigorous cowboys who had just ridden the trail on a herd of cattle and hadn't had a piece of tail in three months.
It tuckered her out by the time her last client left her rumpled bed, but after the split she had to make with the madame of her earnings, she found that she had earned the princely sum of fifteen dollars, more money than she had ever had at any one time in her life.
She slept most of the next day, treated herself to a good man-sized steak at the combination saloon-restaurant across the street, and that night took on six customers.
From then on, Lorna Bole's destiny was clearly marked. Three years later, when the madame of the house in which she was working was knifed by a drunken customer, Lorna took over. She was shrewd and practical and she knew men. She ran the whorehouse for two years, and then decided to seek greener pastures. She came to Coffeyville and found that already there was a going business at the Golden Eagle Saloon and that the madame there was thirty, a holy terror and jealous as a fiend out of hell.
Besides, she didn't want to go back to Dodge because the last week there she'd bamboozled a drunken customer out of bag of gold dust worth about eight thousand dollars. He'd been pretty drunk, but the chances were that when he sobered up, he'd remember whom he'd fucked at the house because it was Lorna herself. So she resigned herself to playing second fiddle at the Golden Eagle Saloon and her initiation that first night was pretty rough.
Lily Bentley, the madame there, had sized Lorna up pretty well and had decided to give her the treatment. Accordingly, after Lorna had taken her first customer and got rid of him in about ten minutes, Lily sweetly asked her to her private parlor for some instructions on how to take care of the customer, who was none other than the owner of the town's bank. Unsuspectingly, Lorna went, only to be seized by four of the girls, stripped naked and flung down on the bed, her wrists and ankles held by the quartet while Lily thrashed her naked bottom with a rawhide quirt almost to the blood. Then, lifting her skirt, and dropping her petticoats, she forced the hysterical victim to gamahuch her. When this was done, she mockingly commented, "That's just to teach you that I'm boss here, you black-haired little bitch. I know you've got hankerings to run the place yourself, I can tell all the signs of an ambitious chippy like you. But as long as you're working for me, my dear, you're going to toe the mark. Now old John Widdemer is going to be in here in about half an hour, and I've told him that I've got a nice new piece of ass for him. That means you, bitch. You're going to go back to room, the girls will help you fix yourself up a little, and you're going to give old John the best poke he's ever had in this house, or when work shuts down for the night, you're going to get twenty-five more cuts with this quirt here, understand me?"
So Lorna Boles had conquered her pride and crowded back her ferocious hatred of Lily, and had humbly nodded and agreed to do as bidden. The four whores dragged her to her room, stumbling and half-fainting from the pain in her mercilessly flogged bottom. There, they sponged her with a towel dipped in cold water, gave her a drink of whiskey, made her put on a flouncy negligee and told her to get ready for old John.
John Widdemer was then sixty-four and just about the wealthiest man in Coffeyville, a widower the past ten years. He was a regular customer of Lily's house, which was really on the second floor of the Golden Eagle Saloon, but his trouble was that age was catching up with him and he was generally impotent. Every girl working for Lily knew that it was her duty to give him a hard-on and make him come at least once or she could expect a sound quirting after he made his complaint in a whiny voice. There had been several occasions where he hadn't been able to manage the necessary vigor to cover one of Lily's girls, and in each instance his money had been cheerfully refunded and the unlucky girl had the same dose of medicine which had been Lorna Boles's initiation to the ways and mores of Coffeyville.
But Lorna's luck changed once again for the better when Sheriff Bud Horkins happened to visit the Golden Eagle one evening earlier than was his wont because it was springtime and he had the itch for a piece of tail which couldn't wait until Saturday night. Two of the girls were down sick, so Lily grudgingly let him take Lorna to the best parlor with the muttered warning, "If you don't give Sheriff Horkins all the hoorawing he needs, you'll have some red stripes on that big ass of yours, you uppity bitch!"
Lorna Boles saw her opportunity and made the most of it. She cajoled Bud Horkins from the moment he entered the parlor. She herself undressed him, fussed over him, praised his erection as the biggest she had ever seen, pretended to be a terrified little girl in assuring him that she just knew she could never take on such a great big man as he was. She knelt down and kissed his cock, caressing his wiry, hairy legs, and Bud Horkins was enthralled. By the time they had spent an hour on the big wide four-poster bed, Bud Horkins had a yen for Lorna Boles and the glimmering of an idea.
The idea was, of course, the building of the Red Dog Saloon and installing her as owner of it so that nobody in town would know that he was really the big boss.
Lorna went to Dodge City as well as to St. Louis to recruit pretty girls for her lover, so that the Red
Dog Saloon might draw away the customers from the Golden Eagle. She had her revenge, too. Just a year after Bud Horkin's place opened with her in charge, a very crestfallen Lily Bentley came over to visit her one afternoon and humbly begged for a chance to work. It seemed that the owner of the Golden Eagle hadn't liked the way business was falling off and had just fired her as madame and was importing an octoroon bitch from New Orleans, who had actually been second in command in a house on Rampart Street.
Lorna Boles thought it over. Then she told Lily, "All right, bitch, I'll give you a job. But you know, I've got a new rule here for all recruits. A good ass-whipping. And I'm going to set you a quota every Saturday night, and if you don't live up to it, you can expect a fantailing from my nigger bouncer. How does that suit you, Madame Lily?"
It was Lily's turn to conquer her pride then, and she humbly nodded. A few minutes later, she blushingly undressed as if she were a timid young virgin instead of a practiced whore. But to her shame, instead of letting her lie down on the bed and take her medicine bravely, Lorna insisted that she lie across her lap, and humiliated her with a good sound hand spanking first before taking a strap, doubling it, clamping her right leg over Lily's calves, and giving the shrieking ex-madame about thirty good swats. Then she made Lily get down on the floor, kiss the strap, thank her for the thrashing, and finally wind up by gamahuching her. That night, Lily was forced to take on seven customers, in spite of her burning and swollen bottom. One of them complained about her lack of energy, and so when the house closed down for the night, poor Lily was dragged in by two of the girls, bent across the bed, her skirt raised and her still swollen bottom pitifully exposed to twenty more lashes of the strap which Lorna Boles laid on with gusto.
This, then was the conniving young woman for whom Arabella Denburg was going to go to work. Arabella didn't know it, but her first night would find her with a sore bottom as well as a somewhat vigorously chafed pussy!
CHAPTER SIX
What auburn-haired, spirited and independent Arabella Denburg had no way of knowing when she so boldly accosted Colonel John Neade with the courageous proposition of becoming a trollop and inveigling herself into the Quantrill camp was that for some months, following the brutal massacre of innocent citizens in Lawrence, the perspicacious Army officer had been himself attempting to find some way to curb the murderous activities of this guerilla band.
Realizing that he could expect little help from a beleaguered war cabinet, Colonel Neade had therefore taken his own steps to do what he could to suppress the ever-present menace of another Lawrence. One of these had been to commandeer the services of Benjamin Colby, a sergeant who had been badly wounded in the Second Battle of Bull Run. Sergeant Colby had been offered an honorable discharge, having received a serious chest wound and another from the fragment of a cannon ball which had nearly broken his shinbone. Though he was no longer fit for the rigors of combat duty, he volunteered to be assigned some small part of the conflict which was raging between the North and the South.
Two months before the spirited red-haired cousin of Genevieve Pritchard had confronted Colonel Neade and finally convinced him that she could ably play the role of a camp follower and whore, Benjamin Colby had been summoned into Colonel Neade's office for a secret interview. Greatly disturbed by the news from Lawrence, Colonel Neade explained to his handsome soldier that he feared there would be more such raids upon the defenseless farmers and the unprotected little towns, where there was rich booty not only of money but of women. Sergeant Colby enthusiastically offered to do whatever he could towards bringing these renegades to a speedy justice. But the role he would have to play, Colonel Neade pointed out, was one of paramount danger, and moreover it entailed a blackening of the Sergeant's reputation.
In essence, the plan was that Benjamin Colby was to pose as a Union deserter, with apparent means which he was to explain that he had got by dint of force-which would at once identify him as a man without principle or scruple-and to travel to the several towns just across from the hidden Missouri headquarters of William Clarke Quantrill. As soon as he could learn from his spying where the guerilla band was hiding out on the Kansas border or planning to strike anew, he was to telegraph Colonel Neade in prearranged code.
And only a week before beautiful Arabella Denburg confronted the one-armed Colonel and convinced him with her luscious body and her boldly insistent ways that she could play the role of female spy, Sergeant Benjamin Colby had gone to Coffeyville, taken a room in the city's only hotel, and was making the rounds of the saloons, playing poker, buying whiskey for his new cronies, and letting it be known that he was looking for action.
As soon as Colonel Neade had consented to Arabella's going to Coffeyville to find work as a harlot and entertainer at the Red Dog Saloon, he sent a coded wire to Sergeant Benjamin Colby, instructing him to be on the lookout for Arabella and, from the contacts he had already made at that notorious hangout for gamblers, renegades and gunslingers, to ingratiate himself with Lorna Boles, the madame at that saloon. Benjamin Colby had already let Colonel Neade know that he had met the black-haired Lorna and seen her several times in the company of suspicious men who appeared to have unexplained large sums of money to spend on their pleasures.
And chance had it that the personable young Sergeant was to be at the bar of the Red Dog Saloon being served by none other than Lorna Boles herself when Arabella Denburg entered through the swinging doors to begin her hazardous career as a girl of easy virtue . . . .
It was a cold blustery November night and the Red Dog Saloon was crammed with noisy customers. At a table near the door, two burly men in their late forties were casually ogling Lily Bentley, the ex-madame for whom Lorna Boles had once worked on the other side of the street at the Golden Eagle. Now, at thirty-two, Lily's good looks were fading, one reason being that Lorna cruelly and vindictively made her solicit as many customers as she could take, and on a Saturday night like this one, had set a rigorous quota. Failure to meet it meant a thrashing from Lorna's own expert hand, as Lily Bentley knew only too well from several previous Saturday nights.
The two men seemed to be more interested in their bottle of whiskey than in Lily, despite the feverish gaiety and enthusiasm she showed towards them. She was of medium height, and her straw-colored hair had been styled in a wealth of tiny spit curls all along the top of her forehead, while her rather opulent figure was daringly exposed in the bare-shouldered pink muslin dress she was wearing. Her breasts were widely spaced and round, but beginning to sag. She wore a feather boa around her neck as a coy camouflage of the abundant flesh she was putting on display.
As she leaned towards the two men, both of them glanced at her and then stared lecherously down the valley of her titties, seeing the pale pink nipples in their narrow brownish-coral aureolae. "Come on, boys, I'll give you a Saturday-night special," she was pleading in an affectatiously honeyed voice. She put her left hand on the knee of one of the men, her right hand on the inner thigh of the other as she glanced at each in turn. "You can fooferaw me, the both of you, and it'll only cost you fifteen bucks and free for the room. Now isn't that a bargain?"
The man at her left knocked her hand off his knee with an oath: "Lay off me, you crummy old bag! Hell, I can probably get your boss Lorna for a poke for twenty-five, and she's got more looks than you do, Lily. So why the hell should I get an itch for your twat, you tell me that?"
Lily Bentley glanced towards the bar where Lorna was busy waiting on a good-looking, sturdy brown-haired man with a limp to his right leg. It happened to be Sergeant Benjamin Colby, but Lorna Boles knew him only as Benjy Colburn, a deserter from the Pennsylvania Fifth who had robbed a bank in Galena and come out here to Kansas to get away from the law and the Union provost marshal, both of whom had put a price on his head.
"Aw, c'mon, Dick honey," Lily Bentley wheedled as she turned to the man on her right, and her fingers slyly moved against the crotch of his buckskin trousers. "I'll give you the best poke you ever had in your life, and that's a fact. Tell you what, Dick, 'cause I like you lots, I'll make it ten bucks and the room. Now ain't that fair?"
The man she was thus accosting, heavily set and with a short spade beard which hid his double chin, sniggered: "You're old trade, Lily, face it. Hell, I wouldn't shell out more than five bucks for you and the room and all."
Again Lily Bentley bit her lips, full and sensual and smeared with gaudy rouge. She glanced again at her nemesis at the bar, and then decided: "You got a deal, Dick honey. Five bucks and the room it is."
"Oh no, don't go putting words into my mouth, you low bitch," her prospective client jeered. "I said five bucks for you and the room and all, didn't I, Harry?"
His companion at her left vigorously nodded. "Heard you right the first time, Dick. Anyhow, if you ask me, that's even too high, that is."
"Aw, shut your big mouth," Lily Bentley furiously hissed at him. Then, moving her chair closer to the man on her right, she rubbed her thigh against his and whispered, "I'll take it. Let's go upstairs to my place. Take the bottle along, honey."
"For all night," the man replied with a lewd wink at his companion. "You gotta lemme hear you say you will in front of Dick, or it's no go."
"But for heaven's sake, Harry," Lily Bentley gasped, "I can't afford that. Why, it's only eight o'clock, and I gotta do some business for the house, or Lorna'll take it out of my hide. And you're only my first customer tonight."
"That's right, Harry," the man at her left jibed, "I heard tell this bitch has got to run five guys up to her room every Saturday night or Lorna takes her drawers down and fantails her."
"Oh, you dirty low bastid you!" Lily Bentley vituperatively exclaimed in a choking voice, turning red with fury.
"You watch yourself, bitch, don't you go 'round calling me names like that, or I'll take you upstairs and lay my belt on your ass and fooferaw you for free, you hear?" her interlocutor savagely rejoined.
His crony, grinning to expose jagged, yellowed teeth, listened to this venomous discussion with amusement. "Aw, cheer up, Lily," he finally drawled, "I'll give you a break. Three bucks and the room and we'll go up right now. Is it a deal?"
At this moment Lorna Boles turned away from Benjamin Colby to stare menacingly at her raging employee, and made a gesture with her thumb that made Lily Bentley quail. Hastily, the latter nodded: "that's fine, Harry, I'll take good care of you, you'll see. Let's go up right now."
With a guffaw, the burly gunslinger put his arm around Lily's buxom hips, and pushed her forward through the milling throng around the bar towards the rickety, though red-velvet-carpeted stairway leading to the private rooms where the girls under Lorna Boles's surveillance plied the oldest profession in the world.
Lorna Boles turned back to stare admiringly at the supposed Army deserter. "Benjy, you want to go upstairs with me when things slow down a mite?" she huskily murmured. "For you I'll make it a special price. Ten bucks, only you're to keep your mouth shut. I'm the head gal of this establishment, and I generally charge a lot more, you can depend on that."
"I'm flattered, Miss Lorna," Benjamin Colby inclined his head and courteously retorted. "But first I've got some drinking to catch up on. We'll see, though. Now don't get me wrong, Miss Lorna, that's a mighty fair offer, only I ain't got the itch right now I want to have for a special number like you."
At this flattery, Lorna Boles beamed, showing her buck teeth in a thin-lipped smile, and with a curt nod to him, went down to the end of the bar to which a bearded cattle driver had just summoned her. He wanted to know if girls were to be had and at what price, and Lorna, wearing her best professional smile, seeing that he was well-heeled with a bulging wallet containing crisp Union banknotes from the sale of a herd to the Army quartermaster at Pittsburgh, where he had sold his beef for the soldiers, expatiated in her most honeyed terms on the merits of the five fillies who comprised her stable, one of whom, of course, was the unfortunate ex-madame.
It was at this moment that Arabella Denburg made her way uncertainly towards the bar, glancing nervously about and mustering her courage for the approaching interview with the madame of the establishment. Benjamin Colby at once spotted her and recognized her from Colonel Neade's telegraphed and coded description. He had already chatted with Lorna Boles a few days earlier on having met a sassy red-headed baggage back in Dodge City who would be a real addition to the Red Dog Saloon in case she ever got this far south. Colonel Neade, in giving Arabella Denburg her instructions, had urged her to give as a reference the falsehood that she had worked one of the houses on Front Street, Dodge City's most lurid thoroughfare.
Glancing quickly at the other end of the bar and seeing that Lorna Boles was in absorbed conversation with the bearded cattle driver, Benjamin Colby pulled his slouch hat down over one corner of his head and sauntered towards the hesitant suburn-haired Arabella.
Arabella Denburg had prepared herself to look the part she meant to play at the Red Dog Saloon. She had taken the curling iron to her hair in back and designed fanciful curls which tumbled about her dimpled shoulders. Along the front of her high forehead was a thick row of exaggeratedly large spit curls, and a blue ribbon bow was tied to her hair at about the nape of her lovely white neck. She had invested some of the inheritance left her by Genevieve's parents in a low-cut velvet dress with flounces at the hems and puffed sleeves, and her camisole and pantalettes and two petticoats were made from the finest cotton she could find in the shop of Mrs. Eustace Dovey, Crestine's leading dressmaker and milliner. She wore black lisle stockings, and to hold them high on her long shapely thighs, had purchased a pair of gaudy purple rosette garters with tiny imitation silver bells. Rice powder on her cheeks, her soft mouth garishly daubed with rouge to emphasize the sensuality of the lower lip, she indeed resembled at first glance a young and desirable chippy who had not yet lost her bloom but already knew enough of the ways of men to entice them to the bed of lust.
She had put on only a light cape, and she was shivering from the raw November air. Benjamin Colby stooped and pretended to pick up a cambric handkerchief which he had stuffed in his trousers pocket and gallantly presented it to her: "Excuse me, Miss, seems to me you dropped this."
Arabella's lovely dark brown widely spaced eyes widened with surprise to hear so courteous a tone and words in this dissolute place. But before she could speak, Benjamin Colby had whispered as he pretended to move close to her and to put his arm around her waist, "Don't get scared, I'm Neade's man. You're expected. Tell Lorna Boles-she's that black-haired slut down at the end of the bar talking to that bearded man there-you've worked at the Brass Rail on Front Street in Dodge. It'll get you the job. Good luck."
Several of the men seated at nearby tables had blushed enviously as the limping brown-haired Army deserter had accosted the luscious newcomer and apparently was already scoring a signal victory. As one of them rose, snarling to his cronies, "If that don't beat all! Here's the cutest little piece of poke meat ever seen at the Red Dog, and that gimpy has to go and hogtie her! It's time a citizen of Coffeyville stood up to his rights and got first crack at that new little piece of quim!"
Benjamin Colby out of the corner of his eye saw the angry, glowering man rise from the table and hastily whispered to Arabella, "Hurry up! Slap my face and tell me that you're peddling it, it's not for free. Do it quick and be loud about it-now!"
Arabella Denburg nodded imperceptibly. Then, twisting out of Benjamin Colby's grasp, she called out in a voice quivering with admirably feigned and insolent indignation, "You farmer's clod, you! Get your hands off me, unless you've got fifty dollars in gold and then I'll let you do all the feeling you want upstairs!" Then, drawing back her right hand, she struck Benjamin Colby across the cheek. He pretended to be hurt, cried out and stumbled back against the bar. The glowering man who had risen to intervene burst into a bellow of admiring laughter: "Haw haw, that's the ticket, beauty! What you want is a man, not a gimpy deserter who probably couldn't even get a hard-on with one of those Army whores at a dollar a throw! Now my name's George Wilton, and if you've a mind for a quick profit, I'll give you that fifty in gold."
The hubbub of conversation had suddenly hushed and all eyes had turned to fix Arabella Denburg with surprise and then desire. Lorna Boles looked up, noticing the sudden silence, and then, with a muttered apology to her prospective client, hurried down to the auburn-haired Arabella and angrily demanded, "Who the hell do you think you are, bitch, coming in here, and trying to peddle yourself? I run the girls upstairs, and you're not one of them. Get your tail out of here before I raise some welts on it with my quirt!"
"Now wait just a minute, Lorna," George Wilton growled, "I've taken a imagine to this cute spitfire, and I'll pay her price!"
"You do, George Wilton, and the Red Dog will be off bounds to you from tonight on, you hear me?" the black-haired young madame snapped. Then, hands on hips, her eyes narrowing sadistically, she demanded, "Well, sister, what are you waiting for, a hand-painted invitation to get the hell out of my place? I own this saloon, in case you didn't know it."
"I'm sorry if I've offended you," Arabella Denburg stammered, taken somewhat aback by Lorna Boles's spiteful fury. "The fact is, I'm in the trade and I was told that you could use a good girl."
"Haw haw, you mean use a bad one, don't you, honey?" George Wilton chortled, and slapped his thigh with his wide-brimmed hat.
"You keep out of this, George Wilton! I know how to handle hussies like this one here," Lorna Boles angrily remarked. "So, Missy, you're in the trade, you say? How old are you?"
"Twenty-three."
"I'll give you this, you've got a figure and you've got the clothes for it. Where'd you work before?"
"At the Brass Rail on Front Street in Dodge," Arabella Denburg coolly retorted, her aplomb and self-assurance returning.
"Well, you just might do. I've got five bitches here, but business has been booming lately, and on a night like tonight we could use another girl all right. Now what's all this crap about fifty dollars a throw? Hell, nobody here gets that much. Not unless your poke place is silver-lined, maybe."
A roar of laughter from the listeners greeted this obscene sally. Arabella couldn't help flushing a little, but realizing that she had to play her part convincingly, shrugged her lovely shoulders and countered, "I didn't say it was made of silver. But I can take down all those boastful cocks around here and make you all the silver you can handle."
"Well, now, sort of conceited, aren't you, bitch? What's your name?" Lorna sneered.
"Arabella Denham," the auburn-haired beauty promptly responded, having already agreed with Colonel Neade on what name she would assume when she went to Coffeyville.
"All right, Arabella, I'll give you a week's trial. I'll tell you our rules right now so's there won't be any mistake. All of you girls do what I tell you to, or you get your asses fantailed but good, you savvy?"
"Yes."
"Now then, it's ten dollars a poke and I don't need to tell you, if you've worked in Dodge, or anywhere else for that matter, that you get the mazuma before you start peeling for your John. And half of it is mine, get me? You try holding out and you'll have the sorest ass this side of the Mississippi and that's a promise, Arabella. Oh yes, one thing more. You're to charge your customer three dollars for the room, understand?"
"Yes, Miss Lorna. But don't you think ten dollars is a little low, considering what I've got to offer? I told you I came here to make money for both of us."
"Let's see your legs, bitch. Up with that skirt and the petticoats, high as you can," Lorna Boles peremptorily commanded.
Arabella obeyed, and her pale white cheeks adorably flushed as she stood revealed in her fetching, skintight pantalettes, with dainty ruffles at the hems, the waistband and all down the legs.
Long approving whistles and shouts burst from the avid male spectators. Lily Bentley, who was on her way upstairs with her customer, turned back to look, and ground her teeth with frustrated spite. Arabella had already made one deadly enemy, for the ex-madame was remembering the days when she was queen of the roost and could dish out orders the way Lorna Boles was doing now.
"Not bad, I'll give you that. All right, we'll make it fifteen a poke. Who wants to try out this little bitch from Dodge and see if she's as good as she thinks she is?" Lorna called out.
"Me! I'll fooferaw her good, you can bet on that! Lemme try her out for size, Lorna honey! No, I'll give five dollars more to be the first to poke her and welcome her to Coffeyville!" Thus came the eager shouts from the men at the bar and around the tables.
"All right, bitch, pick one of these fellows, get your eighteen bucks right now before you go upstairs, and then take the last room down the hall to the right. And I better hear no complaints about you, or you and I are gonna have a little midnight session and you won't be able to sit down so good when I get done, you get me?"
The men began to jostle forward, each eager to be selected by the luscious young auburn-haired newcomer to Lorna Boles's stable of prostitutes. Arabella stared at the handsome brown-haired man at the bar, the one who had picked up her handkerchief and identified himself as Colonel Neade's agent. She saw a flicker in his eyes, and she instantly made her choice. "I'll take this one," she called out in a clear, decisive tone, as she walked forward to the bar, took Benjamin Colby by the elbow and throatily demanded, rolling her eyes at him as she did so, "How'd you like to take me upstairs and show me what you're made of, CHAPTER SEVEN
Benjamin Colby blinked for a moment and then quickly recovered. "Sure, Red," he chuckled, slipping his arm around Arabella's waist and lifting his hand towards one of those luscious titties which was almost half-bared in the bold d'colletage of her gown. "I think you might be worth that much. Give us a kiss to seal the bargain, and I'll get you your money so that everybody can see that Benjy Colburn pays his way around these parts."
Whoever they sent, he thought to himself, is sure a cool one. But trust Colonel Neade to find a brainy bitch on a job like this. She has guts, all right, she has.
As Arabella quickly pressed her mouth to his, he lowered his hand from her luscious breast, reached behind her and gave her bottom a resounding smack which made her squeal, to the amusement of the avid spectators. Then, taking out his purse, he counted out eighteen dollars in gold, the sight of which made Lorna Boles stare greedily at the tall, limping, alleged Army deserter. She would have to get word to Joe Horkins that there was a fellow here in Coffeyville with money to burn and plenty more where that came from, from the looks of it, who might be counted on to do some of the dirty jobs that needed doing. Maybe Ted Porter would want to know about Benjy Colburn too. Trouble was, with a limp like his, he wouldn't be much good in the saddle, and maybe that went both ways as far as both the horse and bed were concerned. Still and all, he could be useful to carry messages back and forth to the fellows Ted rode with.
Arabella Denburg blushed, and then cleared her throat. She was aware that all eyes were on her, and that the men who stared at her were mentally stripping her naked and going upstairs with her in this handsome fellow's place. But she knew that she was walking on thin ice and that the least mistake, the slightest slip, could get her throat cut for her. Drawing herself up, she marched over to Lorna, counted out nine dollars and said, "I think you said half the fee, Miss Lorna?"
"So I did, bitch," Lorna Boles sneered. "But you only get half the fee for tumbling you. You don't keep anything of the room rent, because I own this place, get me? So let's have another buck and four bits and you're even on your first trick, all accounts squared off and that's the way I want it."
"I see. Well, at the Brass Rail-" Arabella began.
Lorna Boles viciously slapped her face. "You're working for me at the Red Dog, bitch, and if you don't like it, go back to the Brass Rail. Now let's have the rest of the money you owe me."
Arabella bit her lips, then handed over a two-dollar piece and Lorna mockingly thrust the change of a silver four-bit piece down the valley of Arabella's titties, again to the amusement of the onlookers. "Take your trick upstairs and give him a fair shake. And I don't want to hear any complaints from him either, you red-haired hussy," she warned.
As Arabella and Benjamin Colby ascended the stairway, they were followed by catcalls and lewd advice which again brought color to Arabella's lovely pale white cheeks. Benjamin Colby took her by the hand and led her down the carpeted hall, to the door Lorna Boles had indicated, opened it and politely waited for her to enter the room, then closed and swiftly bolted the door.
"Whew!" he breathed. "You gave me quite a turn there when you picked me out."
"I couldn't think of anything else to do," Arabella confessed. And then she really did blush and looked down at the floor. "Are you--? "
He nodded. "I'm Neade's man here. He'd let me know you were coming and told me to get in touch with you. Maybe I can be of some help. You'd better watch out for that Lorna, though. She's mean as dirt, and somebody else you'd better watch out for is that blonde you saw coming down the stairway. She used to be the madame from the Golden Eagle across the street and Lorna used to work for her. Now the tables are turned and Lily would just as soon knife Lorna as look at her if she thought she could get away with it. But from the scouting around I've done here, I think that the sheriff is the big man behind the Red Dog Saloon and that Lorna is probably his girlfriend and has the place in her name as a kind of a front. Folks don't take too kindly to having a sheriff own a saloon, not especially this kind where every renegade from Missouri and Illinois comes looking for trouble."
"I'll be careful. But I've got a reason for doing this."
"Most folks generally have a reason for everything. You look like a darned nice girl under all that get-up and folderol, Arabella. What made you think up this stunt? It's a job for a man."
"That's what Colonel Neade said until I convinced him otherwise," Arabella giggled.
Suddenly there was a loud rap at the door and Lorna's voice drawled: "I don't hear any poking noises going on in there, you two. Open up, Red, let's see how comfy you're making Benjy!"
Arabella clapped a hand to her cheek and her eyes went very wide. Swiftly she tugged off her gown and then her camisole, unhooked her petticoats, and stood in her pantalettes, naked to the waist. Then she nodded to Benjamin Colby, who made a silent whistle with his lips and then slowly unbolted the door.
When Lorna entered, Arabella was posed on the bed, her hands behind her neck, her titties arching insolently up, and her knees provocatively upraised and swinging back and forth like a gate. Lorna Boles sniggered: "Why aren't you peeled down, Benjy?"
"Oh, me, I like to talk to a new piece and find out what she's like before I start the frolic," he casually retorted as he began to unbutton his jacket, tossing his slouch hat towards a chair at the other end of the room and neatly landing it on the seat.
"That's a cute trick, Benjy! Well, I'll be leaving you two to your fun. When Benjy's gone, Arabella, fix yourself up and come back downstairs. I'll want you to be on tap for other customers. And if Benjy says you're good, I might see about raising your rate a little bit. But just don't get too greedy, not your first night, for damn sure!" She gave Benjamin Colby a broad wink, and closed the door which he promptly bolted again.
"You're quite a girl, Arabella," he said as he turned to admire her. "But you'd better put your clothes back on."
"What's the matter, Mr. Colby, don't you like my looks? You paid eighteen dollars to poke me, remember?"
Now it was Benjamin Colby's turn to blush, to look down at his feet and to shift them nervously. "Oh, sure, I know, but this was just to get us upstairs so we could talk about how we're going to work together," he said rather awkwardly.
"Look, Mr.-I heard her call you Benjy."
"I'm Benjy Colburn in Coffeyville, and that's the only name you'd better remember. It'd be best for both of us."
"All right, Benjy. As I started to say, I told Colonel Neade that I was going to be a chippy at the Red Dog, so I could maybe meet some of Quantrill's men when they come to Coffeyville, because I'm sure they'll head for a place like this."
"You're right about that. But how could a nice decent girl like you know all that, and how could you-well, I mean-" He embarrassedly took out a pouch of smoking tobacco and began to roll himself a cigarette.
"For tarnation's sake, put your clothes back on."
"But that wouldn't be fair, Benjy. Not after taking your eighteen dollars."
"Damn it, do what I said!"
"Unless, of course, you're not man enough to foo-fooraw me-I think that's what Lorna called it, or was it that man who got up from the table and wanted to take me first?"
Handsome young Benjamin Colby ground his teeth. This little vixen was making him damned uncomfortable, and she was playing a game. He was going to call her bluff. "All right then," he said grimly as he turned to face her. "That's right, I did pay for the privilege, didn't I? And since I've got to tell you a few things about what to do and what not to do while you're working at this place, we might just as well be comfortable in bed."
"I hoped you'd say that, Benjy. Oh my, you're really a very handsome fellow." He had peeled off his trousers after first tugging off his boots, and now he stood in a pair of long johns, and even though he limped a little, he was still a strapping, fine figure of a man, she thought.
"Why don't you roll one for me too, Benjy, please?" she murmured, giving him a cajoling smile.
Again Benjamin Colby got red in the face. Picking his trousers up, he pulled out the pouch of loose, coarse tobacco, and the sheaf of cigarette papers, and rolled her a cigarette and then struck a lucifer and held it to the tip. As he did so, she sat up and leaned towards him, and the tempting jut of her firm naked titties made him gulp and flush and he tried hard not to look.
"Now why don't you be real comfy and take off those funny long johns?" was her next question. Benjamin Colby almost dropped the burning stub of his cigarette onto the carpeted floor, for all the rooms were fancily decorated and furnished. Much of the time, indeed, when they weren't in use by Lorna's five chippies, they served as living quarters for the women.
Benjamin Colby swore under his breath. The little hellcat was going a mite too far in playing games with him. But there was no two ways about it, she was really a gorgeous piece, with those lovely long legs and that saucy bottom of hers so tightly snugged by the white cotton pantalettes and their frills and flounces. And what wonderful boobies she had, big and jutting and impudent, with such dazzling white skin! Suddenly he felt himself throb with meaningful turgidity.
"Why, Benjy, I do declare, you're getting interested in poor little me. But then, eighteen dollars is an awful lot of money, and I expect you to take it out in trade real good. Oh my-I really think you can, too. I'm sure that you'd be much more comfy if you took the long johns off, really I would," she crooned.
Benjamin Colby crushed out the stub of his cigarette, angrily unbuttoned the long underwear, tugged it off, sat down at the edge of the straight-backed chair to get the legs off, and then stood up naked. Arabella's eyes widened with respectful admiration; his prick was even bigger than the Colonel's, and she could see the scars left by his wounds, but he was still an awfully good-looking hunk of man.
She put out her cigarette too, tossing it into the spittoon near the bed. Then, suddenly blushing again. She began to undo the drawstrings of the pantalettes, and began to squirm them down from her luscious bottom and upper thighs. They were awfully tight, and suddenly she looked up at him and stammered, "Help me pull them off, please, Benjy."
He did so, and her eyes fixed on his turgid weapon. It had a broad plum-shaped head, and the shaft seemed very long and almost bony. The dark blue veins were throbbing under the tight skin. "I-I guess you don't mind taking your eighteen dollars out in trade now, do you?" she couldn't help whispering.
"All right, Arabella, let's see how much a decent girl like you knows about poking," he said with brutal candor, wanting to shock her. But Arabella only giggled again: "It'll be my pleasure, Benjy."
She held out her arms to him, and Benjamin Colby, without any foreplay, sank down into her warm naked satiny skin against his own, felt the angry ache of his prickhead as it rubbed against the thick dark red bush of her cunny. Her arms folded round his shoulders. "At least you can kiss me," she whispered. "We're going to work together, so let's be friends. And I don't think there's a better way for a girl to prove her friendship than this, do you, Benjy?"
He didn't answer. He felt all of a sudden an overpowering desire to fuck her, and yet, inexplicably, he felt a certain protectiveness towards her, a tenderness he wasn't used to. To hide his feelings, he crushed his mouth on hers, and he thrust himself between the lips of her quim.
Arabella sighed raptly as she wriggled into a more comfortable position, feeling him probe along her channel. It was hot and hard and it felt oh so good! She closed her eyes and gave herself up to physical pleasure. , Arabella Denburg moaned and squirmed, clawing at him with her fingernails, finally locking her stockinged legs over his thighs and holding on for dear life as he began to fuck her with a furious rapidity that betrayed his excitement. J
And then suddenly he uttered a hoarse cry and, putting his mouth to one of her nipples, gave it a passionate kiss as he exploded deep within her.
Arabella felt her own tides released as the jut lashed her vaginal chasm. She clung to him with all her body, wanting to get in under his skin and become a part of him. And then the earthquake shook her body and released her, and she lay panting, almost terrified by the frenzied ecstasy that had come over her. It was even more shattering than with Dan Tobey seven years ago back in the barn, even more than with Colonel Neade.
"Light me another cigarette, will you, Benjy darling?" she said in a weak trembling voice. "I think I need it before we get back to what we were doing so nicely."
He stared at her incredulously. Then he began to laugh and slapped his thigh. "You're the damnedest girl, Arabella!" he said at last. "All right, but try to be serious for a minute. While I give you that cigarette, listen to what I've got to tell you and what I think you ought to look for."
She listened attentively. She nodded, asked a few intelligent questions, but listened most of the time. And when she had finally finished her cigarette and Benjamin Colby had explained to her how they were going to work together, Arabella held out her arms to him and murmured, "You've got lots more poking coming for that eighteen dollars, Benjy. After all, I don't want my first customer at the Red Dog Saloon to complain to the madame he didn't get his money's worth."
CHAPTER EIGHT
After Benjamin Colby had left the room which was to be her home for as long as it took her to track down the men who had murdered her cousin Genevieve, Arabella Denburg languidly donned her discarded garments, after first sponging herself from his copious priapic tribute to her temple of Venus. This done, she doused water from a pan on the dresser onto her face, inspected herself in the flyspecked mirror topping the dresser, and then went slowly downstairs to Lorna Boles. Half an hour had passed since she and the supposed Army deserter had entered that room for their bout of love for hire. And Arabella had been surprised at the intensity of her own feelings, even though she had some weeks back fiercely resolved that the surrender of her body meant nothing if it could only be instrumental in punishing Genevieve's murderers. For Benjamin Colby, despite his wounds and his limp, had been astonishingly virile and, with that, strangely tender as his hands had caressed her shivering flanks, her panting titties, till finally, grasping the cheeks of her voluptuous milky sheened bottom, he had fiercely ridden her to draw her inexorably towards the abyss of total surrender to his maleness.
It was going to complicate things, she told herself, if her body responded to the embrace of every man she would have to take as a saloon girl who sold herself to the highest bidder. Well, it couldn't be helped.
Lorna Boles saw her coming down the stairs and went to meet her, a crooked smile on her thin lips. "Benjy said you were pretty good under the sheets, bitch," she greeted Arabella. "All right, you've got yourself a job here. Now after tonight, you get your things and move into that room-it's going to be yours from now on till I kick you out. Just don't give me a chance to do it, or you'll wish you'd never been born. I suppose you stopped at the hotel?"
"Yes, Miss Lorna."
"All right, move your stuff over in the morning. Now let's see, there's Davy Talmadge, the fellow I was talking to over at that end of the bar when you came in. He's a cattle-driver and he's got money to burn. He's taken a kind of hankering to you, bitch. I'm going to send the two of you upstairs. And just to show you that Lorna Boles gives her girls a break, I told him it would be twenty bucks and the room. So you get to keep ten. Make sure he pays you before you start peeling off your duds." With this, she turned abruptly away and called out, "Davy, she's all ready for you now."
The bearded cattle driver, in dusty boots and a buckskin jacket, chomping a cigar between badly stained and decaying teeth, rose from the table where he had seated himself and came eagerly towards the red-haired beauty. Lorna took Arabella by the elbow and shoved her forward. "Here she is, all prettied up and ready for you, Davy boy!"
"Well now,-little lady, I took a imagine to you and I liked your style picking that cripple. Shows a nice warm heart. Now let's see if you've got a nice warm poke hole between those nice long legs of yours. What's your name, anyhow?"
"It's-Arabella D-Denham."
"That's a nice name, that is mighty pretty. All right, l'il gal, let's get ourselves some privacy where we can shuck down and fuck." He turned to give Lorna Boles a lewd wink and then, taking Arabella by the elbow, commandeered her and drew her along up the stairs with him.
This time, however, Arabella Denburg found the other extreme in her newly adopted profession. The bearded cattle driver had no sooner shoved home the bolt than he flung his hat into a corner of the room, grabbed the auburn-haired beauty and bruised her mouth with a harsh rapacious kiss. His beard scratched her dainty chin, and she felt as if she were being smothered in a bear hug.
"Get your things off, girl, and let's have a go at it," he growled hoarsely. Arabella backed away, color high in her lovely cheeks. "Please don't tear my dress, I'll get naked for you," she promised, her voice quavering just a little. "Why don't you get comfortable too, Mr. Davy?"
"That's a good one, that Mister," he guffawed. "All I need is to get my dong out for a poke, little lady, no need to peel down. 'Sides I been out on the range for a month now and I'd feel plumb helpless without my duds. You just go right ahead and do the necessary."
Arabella hastened to remove her gown and then her camisole, but when she was about to untie the ribbons which secured the waistband of her pantalettes, her "trick" stopped her by grabbing her hands and pulling her against him. "Ain't you got a slit in them pants or maybe buttons you can open up so's I can shove my dong into your cute little snatch, honey?" he thickly demanded.
"I-I'm afraid not. They-they have to be taken all the way off-"
Laughingly, he pushed her back until she sat down heavily on the straight-backed chair, then squatted down, pulled off her shoes, seized the hems of the pantalettes' legs and tugged while Arabella, gasping at his directness, arched her lovely bottom off the chair to facilitate the removal of her final veil except for her stockings and gaudy rosettes.
"Criminy, if you ain't got the prettiest little snatch I ever poked," he breathed, his eyes feasting on the dark auburn fleece between her pale white thighs. Arabella rose, the little bells tinkling as she moved. The bearded cattle driver guffawed again, stooped down, inserted a forefinger between the stocking and the rosette and made it snap against her thigh, drawing a little squeal and wriggle from the young redhead. Then he gave her a resounding whack on the bare bottom with his calloused, ham-like hand, which set her stumbling towards the bed. To prevent herself from falling, she bore down with her palms on the edge, and the bearded cattle driver at once commanded, "Jist like that, you sweet little filly! I'm going to jackrabbit you good and give you the best fooferawing your snatch ever had, you watch if I don't!"
With this, seizing her by the hips, and having opened the fly of his trousers and unbuttoned his long johns, he bared a respectably vigorous organ which he at once thrust forward between her shaking, straddled thighs. Bending forward thus, her naked titties dangling and heaving with the tumultuous excitement of this rude wooing, Arabella Denburg closed her eyes and shivered as she felt his cockhead probe between the still moist and twitching lips of her voluptuous cunt.
With a groan, he crammed himself up to the hilt, his hairy belly smacking against her shuddering naked behind, and Arabella shivered again because, despite her revulsion for this whiskey-and-tobacco-smelling client, she unexpectedly felt her insides churn at the rough, scraping and digging way he had taken her. Now he began to fuck her exactly like the jackrabbit he had mentioned, jostling her rudely as his heavy weight smacked up against her bottom, and it was all she could do to keep her balance, bent over thus and with her palms bearing down on the edge of the bed. It didn't take him long to vent his lust in a bursting jet of semen which lashed the walls of her quaking vagina, and just as he withdrew, Arabella uttered a stifled little cry as she felt herself responding again despite the animal, selfish vigor he had used.
"That was a good one, that was," he exhaled a gusty sigh, and again cracked her on the bottom with the flat of his hand which this time drew a cry of pain as she rushed a hand back to her stinging bottom and ruefully rubbed it, looking back at him with widened eyes, just a little afraid of his coarse vehemence.
"Now you fix yourself up right smart, Bella," he sniggered, "and then you're gonna git me all riled up for another real good poke. At them prices, I figger Miss Lorna is gonna let me have at least two pokes, if she wants a steady customer. Be quick about it, girl."
Straightening, the naked auburn-haired beauty moved to the pan of water on the dresser and hastily performed her ablutions, her "customer" stroking his beard and chuckling at her obvious discomfiture. As she returned, he put out a hand: "Get down on your knees, gal! Suck my dong real nice and make it all ready for your hot little snatch!"
This was something Arabella Denburg hadn't counted on; she had known only the elementary act of carnal passion, and because her body had long ago been wakened, she had been more than eager for it, righteously inspired by her zealous desire to avenge her murdered cousin. But this cold-blooded order seemed horribly obscene, and her cheeks turned scarlet as she stared uncomprehendingly for a moment, then realized what it was he wanted of her.
"Hey now," his voice took on a suspicious edge, "mebbe you ain't no imagine whore from Dodge, not if you don't know how to French a man proper! Mebbe I better tell Miss Lorna I want my money back."
"Oh no! Pl-please don't do that, Mr. Davy!" Arabella gasped. "I-I'll do what you want. It's only that-well, I haven't done it for a-for a very long time." he seemed mollified by this lie, and chuckled "Then you better git in some practice, gal, 'cause lots of fellows like me want to have themselves peckered up with a sweet little mouth and tongue like you got. Git to it!"
Standing straddle-legged, the bearded cattle driver stared greedily down at her. Arabella bit her lips, not quite certain how to proceed, and then improvised. She put out a trembling hand and cupped his hairy balls, and then slowly bowed her head towards his limp and sperm-covered organ. It was all she could do to force herself to open her mouth and accept it, but his threat of telling Lorna Boles that he didn't think she was a real whore had terrified her. Conquering the waves of nausea which rose in her, she began to suck at the object in her mouth, and was rewarded by feeling it harden and throb with renewed vigor.
"Attagirl!" her customer panted, reaching down and digging his fingers into her auburn hair. "Nice and easy now, mind! I want to shoot my juice into that tight little box you got between those long squirmy white legs, you mind!"
Arabella bobbed her head in acquiescence, her mouth filled now almost to suffocation with the obdurate turgidity of his prick. Her fingers tickled his balls and his hairy thighs, and this he found a welcome diversion, grudgingly exclaiming, "I guess you're purty good at your business at that, little lady! That's real good, only make sure I don't lose it till I get inside your box!"
Again Arabella bobbed her head. Her throat was congested, and she couldn't swallow, and her temples were pounding. He hadn't taken a bath in a good month or more, she was sure, and she wanted to throw up, but she knew she didn't dare. At last, to her great relief, he pulled himself out of her mouth and hoarsely commanded, "Now git onto that bed and git ready for a real hard fooferawing!"
She did so, and he flung himself down on the bed without even bothering to take off his boots, his stiff ramrod finding the way at once to her tender quim. With a brutal dig, he hilted himself, till their hairs merged, and Arabella's sensitive milky-skinned titties were flattened by his heavy chest. As he began to fuck her energetically, his hands grabbing at her hips to steady her, she closed her eyes and turned her face to one side, but her arms accepted him lest he complain of her lack of enthusiasm. With plunging digs that chafed her, she winced and gasped as they grew more and more violent. It seemed they would never end. Having initially vented his lust in her love-sheath, the bearded cattle driver was apparently invigorated to continue at a much longer tempo, and it became an ordeal for Arabella Denburg. Finally, when with a groan he did ejaculate, she felt herself again incredibly responding, though he had not quite brought her to orgasm this time. Nonetheless, the walls of her love-chasm quaked and clenched against his dwindling organ, and her breath was quickened and her cheeks were flushed.
Slowly he pulled himself out of her and got off the bed. "You're a hot piece all right, Bella," he complimented her. "I guess that does me in for now. But I'll be back. Mebbe tomorrow night."
But Arabella Denburg's first night wasn't over by a long shot. Under Lorna Boles's watchful eye, she had to take up three more customers to the rooms she was now to inhabit, and each of them was inordinately demanding. One, a swaggering young bully in his early twenties who boasted of having a dozen notches on his six shooter, had her get on all fours on the bed while he fucked her dog-fashion. "I seen some Kiowas doing that out in the prairie when I was riding herd for Old Man Durwald," he snickered as, grabbing her titties and pinching them till she cried out in pain, he jammed himself deeply into her wet quaking sheath.
The next customer was a man in his early forties, short and squat and hairy as an ape. But he took off all his clothes except his heavy woolen stockings, and crushed her with his weight and made her wince with his loud bellows of lust as he plowed her. And finally, her first night as a whore of the Red Dog Saloon was concluded in the arms of the lanky, nearly bald owner of Coffeyville's Emporium, with a waxed moustache and a sadistic habit of pinching her titties and her bottom while he nuzzled at one of her breasts before finally thrusting himself deeply into her.
When she finally came out onto the landing of the second floor and made her way down the stairs, she felt her legs tottering beneath her. In between the last three customers, she had been obliged to wait on tables, serving drinks, and many a hand had slipped up her skirt and petticoat and pinched her bottom or upper thigh through the clinging pantalettes.
It was now well past midnight, and business was beginning to slacken. Many of the customers were drunk and some of them had been flung out into the street by the Negro bouncer Jumbo, rightly named because of his gargantuan size. Over six feet tall and yet at least three hundred pounds, his black head bald and his nose flattened from having been broken in some stake fist fights held in the barn of the livery stable next to the saloon, Jumbo could lift a full-grown man and hold him high above his head with hardly any visible effort. Arabella Denburg shuddered at the sight of him, not because he was black, but because of his obvious cruel delight in bumping heads and flinging bodies out of the swinging doors with hardly any provocation.
He looked her up and down as he approached Lorna Boles behind the bar and then he smacked his lips aloud and said, "Now I'd say Miz' Lorna has got real good taste to take in a l'il white heifer like you, Bella!"
"That'll do, Jumbo, go sweep up the broken glass at that table over there," the black-haired chippy who ran the saloon sharply ordered. Then, smirking as she stared at Arabella, "Well, bitch, you passed the test. You did a good night's work, I'll give you that. And every one of your Johns liked what he got. Now, as soon as I get this place quieted down a little and I can let the bartenders handle the rest of the business, you and me and the girls is gonna have a little welcoming party."
"Th-thank you very much, Miss Lorna, but if it's all the same to you, I-I'd just as soon get some sleep," Arabella confessed in a shaking voice.
"Why, honey, we wouldn't think of letting you go to bed alone your first night till we've welcomed you to the Red Dog in the proper style," the young madame maliciously retorted. "You go upstairs to your room and I'll have Lily call you when the time is ripe."
Arabella wearily climbed the stairs again and flung herself down on the bed, exhaling a long sigh and wincing at the throbbing discomfort in her thigh muscles and her chafed love chasm. Well, she'd asked for it, and she'd certainly got it. She wondered what Colonel Neade would say il he could see her now.
She must have dozed, for she heard the heavy blows of a fist hammering on her door, and sat up with a gasp. "Just a minute, please!" she called, then drew back the bolt. Blonde Lily Bentley, hands on hips, glared at her: "Are you deaf, you red-haired tramp?" she angrily demanded. "Come along now, Lorna wants you."
"I-I was just lying down and I guess I fell asleep, I'm sorry," Arabella awkwardly apologized. But the trollop who had once been a madame and had subjugational command of Lorna Boles, wasn't listening. Her still attractive face was warped in a cruel smile of anticipation. She'd had her licks aplenty since she'd gone to work for that black-haired bitch, and when she saw another girl getting it instead of her, it was some small satisfaction for her.
She opened the door and gave Arabella a push inside, and then quickly stepped in and bolted the door behind her. The auburn-haired beauty uttered a gasp, but before she could say or do anything, two of the four other prostitutes who worked for Lorna Boles seized her by the wrists and dragged her towards the large four-postered bed beside which Lorna Boles stood. The black-haired young madame had put on a pair of buckskin gloves, and between them was a doubled black leather strap, about two inches wide, a full quarter of an inch thick, gleaming from its frequent polishing on naked female flesh.
"What took you so long, Arabella?" Lorna Boles demanded.
"I-I guess I dozed off, Miss Lorna. I'm sorry." , "Well, I can't hold that too much against you, I guess. How do you like the tricks you take here in Coffeyville? Guess, though, if you've worked in Dodge, you know how rough these boys can be when they come back from the trail after a spell. All right now, every girl who starts working here gets her welcome, you might say, and you're no different from anybody else. Just bend her over the end of the bed, May and Flossie."
"But what are you going to do to me?" Arabella gasped, reluctantly tugging at her captured wrists as the two young prostitutes dragged her towards the bed.
"Just dust your ass off a little, that's all, honey. And then you've got to go down on me and say you're gonna be a good little bitch long as you got a job here with Lorna Boles. All right, girls, you know what to do! Let's see that bare ass of Arabella's all nice and ready for the strap!"
The girl on Arabella's left, May Worringer, was about nineteen, copper-haired, tall and slim with spectacularly big round titties set closely together and nearly bared to the nipples in her spangled gown. The prostitute holding Arabella's right wrist, Florrie Moore, was perhaps twenty, with mousy brown hair, a plump face, and a ripely opulent figure. Heedless of Arabella's protests and her attempts to plant her feet and hold back, they dragged her across the heavy wooden rail at the foot of the bed and then, adroitly sitting on the edge on each side, used both hands to hold one of her wrists so that her arms were dragged out to the maximum.
The other two chippies, Winnie Tillotson, twenty-eight, with dark brown hair, small but perky titties and a spacious bottom, and Eulalia Dermott, twenty-six, tall, black-haired and olive-skinned, at once began to furl up Arabella's gown and pin it above her waist out of harm's way. Next her petticoats were unfastened and tugged off, and then they attacked the ribboned ties of her pantalettes.
"No, please! Don't beat me! I did my work, I don't deserve it," Arabella cried.
Lily Bentley uttered a nasty laugh. "Don't rile Miss Lorna, bitch," she advised, standing with folded arms and a grin of cruel satisfaction on her handsome face, "you'll only eat more strap leather, that's all you will. All of us have got to take it, so just make your mind up to grin and bear it!"
"Now there's an ass I can really work on," Lorna Boles commented as she moved behind the struggling half-naked captive. Arabella's pantalettes had just been tugged down to her ankles, and her beautiful pale-white skinned spacious oval buttocks gleamed from the flickering light of two big kerosene lamps on each side of the room. Against the wall to Arabella's left, there was a huge couch stuffed with horsehair, and on that couch lay Lorna Bole's ominous rawhide quirt with a heavy stock handle, symbol of her dominant authority over all six females now in her own private room.
She glanced spitefully at Lily Bentley, who quailed before that malevolent look: "Just watch your tongue, Lily," she said in a silky voice that was more frightening than one of rage, "or maybe I'll have May and Flossie stretch you straddled over the bedrail and give you some rawhide to eat." Her glance over at the couch spoke volumes of meaning, and Lily Bentley humbly lowered her eyes and flushed vividly with mortification.
In a silk wrapper and boots, black-haired Lorna Boles, her buck-skinned gloved hand brandishing the double strap, took her stance to Arabella's left, so that the pale white spacious oval bottom cheeks of her victim were completely within range.
Drawing back her arm, she swept the gleaming leather band with a wicked crack across the upper right cheek of Arabella's defenseless posterior.
There was a strangled little cry as the auburn-haired victim wrenched at her wrists, twisted back her contorted face and protested, "Now wait a minute! I didn't bargain for this when I came here looking for a job! They don't treat people like this anywhere else I know of, not if you want a girl to peddle herself and work hard making money-Owww! That hurts! Stop it, I tell you! Aaahhhrrr!! Owoooh!! "
Disregarding Arabella's indignant protests, her eyes shining with eager sadism, Lorna Boles applied half a dozen sonorous whacks all over Arabella's jerking naked posterior. In desperation, Arabella kicked out, and Lorna snapped, "Winnie, Lalia, grab her ankles and hold them tight, 'cause if she kicks at me one more time, you girls are gonna get a dose of strap too!" She was unable to do more than twist her hips about, as May and Flossie, shifting themselves farther along the edge of the bed on each side, dragged her arms out as far as they would go, making her muscles ache from the strain.
"Kick, will you, you onery bitch?" Lorna Boles hissed, licking her thin lips with salacious anticipation, "I'll teach you to kick back at your madame! How do you like that, Arabella?" Thwack! The doubled strap danced viciously across the upper curves of both contracting satiny bottom globes, leaving an angry red swathe against the pale white skin. Arabella wailed in despair, not so much from the pain alone but mainly from the atrocious humiliation of being thus chastised in the presence of her mocking tormentresses. Lorna Boles now pitilessly began to wield the doubled leather band with vigorous cracking blows all over the auburn-haired victim's defenseless posterior. The leather smacked wickedly against the base of the right buttock, then swept imperiously across the slopes of both squirming hips, then vertically cut down the tender parting incurving edges which led to the secretive cleft between those voluptuous, firm nether ovals.
By the time she had received twenty-five strokes, her bottom was blazing in the most haphazard and salacious pattern imaginable, and tears were running down her cheeks. Her titties rose and fell violently in their tumultuous emotion as she fought for breath and to try to phrase words of humility and supplication that would end this unexpected and by now intolerable martyrdom: "Aahhh-ohh, please, do stop it, please, Miss Lorna-I'll work hard, I'll be a good girl, please stop beating me! Ohh, you're killing me!"
"Well, seeing as how you did pretty good your first night, I'll let you off easy this time. But this is just a little remembrance of what you might get if you don't toe the mark the way I want you to, you hear?" Lowering the double strap, Lorna expertly swept it up right between Arabella's partly opened thighs, attacking not only the perineum but also the tender chafed mound of her cunthole.
A piercing scream was torn from the naked victim at that insidious lash, and the four young women holding her had all they could do to maintain a grip as she frantically lunged and tried to break their hold.
"All right, girls let her go!" Lorna commanded. "Get down on your knees and hold them with your hands, savvy? Now you're going to take the oath of loyalty to your new madame, bitch!"
With this, opening her wrapper, she exposed the thick black bush of her cunt and, as Arabella was shoved unceremoniously down to her knees, hastening to obey and giving up the feverish impulse to rub her blazing, swollen naked seat from the thrashing, Lorna plunged her left hand into Arabella's tangled curls, twisting them as she hissed; "Go ahead and gam me, bitch! Suck me off, or you'll go back over the foot of the bed for another dose!"
To punctuate that order, she raised the double strap in her right hand and slashed it down across the lovely deeply hollowed naked back of her victim.
Arabella abandoned her momentary revolt at the nauseating thought of what was demanded of her. With a sobbing groan, she leaned forward, closing her eyes, and put her tremulous mouth to Lorna's pussy. "That's the way," the black-haired young madame enthused. "Now let me feel that tongue of yours on my clit, too, work me up till I juice if you know what's good for you!"
And so Arabella Denburg completed her first night as a whore at the Red Dog Saloon by performing the most obscene of the lesbian rituals on the perverse young chippy who was Sheriff Bud Horkins's sweetheart and at the same time a vital link in the chain that was to lead the intrepid young auburn-haired beauty to the men who had ravaged and murdered her beautiful young cousin.
CHAPTER NINE
Dunnerstown, the tiny farm village which was actually the headquarters for William Clarke Quantrill and his ruthless horde of murderers, thieves, traitors and deserters, was only a few miles from the line which divided Missouri from Kansas. Its population numbered about thirty-seven, and the men of the village had made their compromise between murder and survival in accepting Quantrill and his men. They were left alone as were their womenfolk, and they received a modest share of the spoils from looting and plundering and rapine.
The bearded young renegade who commanded this group of ruffians was at his ease now in the kitchen of the Spandrell farmhouse. George Spandrell, fifty and slowly dying of consumption had founded the village about twenty years before and had been a successful farmer. He knew himself to be dying, and he reasoned that when Quantrill nearly three years before had come to him as a fugitive and demanded at gunpoint that he give him sanctuary, he had realized he had no fight in him and that to play the role of hero would be to endanger the lives of his aging, frail wife Alma and his two attractive daughters Cissie and Molly.
William Clarke Quantrill had assured the mortally ill farmer that his men would not touch any one of the women in the village, unless, to be sure, she wished it. And that pledge had been kept perhaps better than any of Quantrill's other pledges, though Cissie and Molly had by now become the bearded young ruffian's mistresses.
William Clarke Quantrill lay at his ease, naked except for his shining black boots with spurs, on the quilted cover of the wide bed in Molly
Spandrell's bedroom. His curly brown hair and his thickly luxurious beard, his Roman nose and twinkling blue eyes, his rangy and well made body, at first glance suggested a man of humor and keen intellect. These qualities he undoubtedly had, but those twinkling blue eyes could grow mercilessly cold and his smiling red lips-unusually sensual for a man-could whiten and compress with vindictive rage as he gave the order for the pillaging of Lawrence and for the coldblooded firing upon unsuspecting Union troops at Baxter Springs.
Cissie and Molly lay on either side of him, and each of his hands rested upon a magnificent naked tittie. Cissie was golden-haired and petite and vivacious, full of merriment and a frank, healthy sensuality that had led her to steal into the renegade's bedroom the very first night he was quartered at her father's farmhouse and invite him to initiate her into the tender joys of Venus and Priapus. She was twenty-one, while Molly, lying at Quantrill's left, was three years older, oval-faced, black-haired, tall, with a wonderfully soft tawny and freckled skin and bold narrowly spaced pear-shaped bubbies.
Molly, discovering that her younger sister had lost her maidenhead, at first had snubbed the renegade leader, but her jealousy and instinctive feminine curiosity had led her inevitably and only two weeks later to offer him the same sacrifice which Cissie had made on the altar of lust.
George and Alma Spandrell had resignedly accepted this immoral relationship, because they could do little else. Protest would have meant not only perhaps their deaths but those of the other villagers and Cissie and Molly would still have become the playthings of William Clarke Quantrill. So when at times Quantrill had a bottle in his room or visited one of the sisters with a bottle of whiskey, and the noise of roistering and lust came to the ears of the aging and mortally ill parents, they closed their eyes and ears to what was going on and said a prayer that the implacable and savage cruelty of the scourge of Kansas might not be visited upon them and their friends and neighbors.
But this November night, William Clarke Quantrill was in rare good humor. The bottle of whiskey was nearly half consumed, and even Cissie and Molly had imbibed more than they were accustomed to. Both were giggling and fondling him, Molly sliding her long slim fingers down between his sturdy hairy thighs and tickling his prick, while Cissie flicked her tongue at one of his nipples and caressed his armpit with one of her soft little fingertips.
Both girls were naked except for their stockings and garters, and Molly, looking across her lover's naked body, fixed her younger sister with a proprietary look that as much as said, "I'm the older and he likes me better and I can give him more pleasure than you, so don't get any notions that he's your man."
"What are you thinking about, Bill?" she huskily murmured, as she pressed her sinuous naked body to his.
"This and that, Molly girl. It's time for me to get back to Kansas, I've been thinking."
"Why not stay? It's almost winter now, and there'll be snow and wind and hard riding."
"You think I'm a weak-kneed, weak-livered store clerk?" he angrily snapped. "I'm thinking that the Union troops will find winter rough going for them and they won't be so likely to patrol where we ride. They've got problems enough of their own. No, Molly, weather like this is perfect for the men of Quantrill. Now don't concern your pretty head with what I'm doing. I'd hate to think you were prying. There's a price on my head, girl, and if anyone was to know where I'll be riding next, there'd be good Union gold put out to the informer." Lazily, he turned his head to stare at her, and though there was a smile on his lips, Molly shuddered at the cold, almost inhuman and unwavering look he gave her.
"Oh, my goodness, Bill darling," she breathed, "what a thing to say to me! I don't want you hurt, not a hair on that handsome head of yours, I'll be bound! Come now, give me a kiss and tell me you still love me. Don't I make you comfy in bed?"
"So does any bitch who wants to save her soft neck," he sardonically retorted. But lust rose in him to see her cringe, her eyes widening, with fear, at his brutal words. With a mocking laugh, he pulled her to him and made her ride atop him, his hands gripping her tawny buttocks as he hissed, "Don't fill your pretty head with nonsense now, Molly. Give me a good poke, that's all I want from you. And you, Cissie, get up now and give Molly a good spanking to make her lively on me, and shell do the same for you when I'm hankering for that tight little twat you've got between those nice pink plump legs of yours!"
Molly giggled and kissed him hard and fast, grinding her loins over his, as she felt his stiffening prick slip between the moist quivering petals of her quim. With a gasp, her left arm around his neck, she reached down with her other hand and guided his organ well into her channel, and then, closing her eyes began to move up and down, taking care to retain his turgid weapon inside her churning sheath.
Cissie, kneeling behind her older sister, her left palm on the small of Molly's back, began to slap the tawny compactly set, boyishly rounded bottom-cheeks with her palm, which quickened Mollys ardors and gymnastics. Soon she began to pant and to whimper, glancing back at her sister, and mumbling lustful endearments to her ruthless lover, words he had taught her on many a dark night of lust: "Oh Bill, cram into me good, put it all in, I need it so bad! Oooh, that stings, Cissie! Oh Bill, she's hurting my poor bummy, do my spot some good, please do me hard! Aahhhhohhoooo!! ! Oh darling, oh Bill honey, I can feel you digging all the way up my little pussy, you're stretching me to pieces, ahhhh!"
Her face was flushed and her eyes were sparkling, as her panting titties flattened against his hairy chest, her maneuvers becoming more jerky and sporadic as they foretold her approach to orgasm. But with a roar of Homeric laughter, Quantrill rolled her off him, and beckoned to the eager, giggling golden-haired Cissie, who at once took her sister's place, parting the pink plump lips of her moist quim with thumb and forefinger of her left hand and fitting his cock, which she gripped with her other hand, into her gaping slit. Sinking down, she impaled herself with a low moan of ecstacy, while the discomfitted black-haired older girl, grinding her teeth with frustrated rage and shame, scrambled to her knees and began to spank Cissie with flailing smacks of her open palm that made Cissie's plump pink-skinned bottom-cheeks bound and spring up in all their succulent young resilience.
And it was in Cissie's tighter quim that the leader of the guerilla band finally gushed forth his final offertory of the night.
"Pour me a good cup full of this likker, Molly, that's a good bitch," he drawled lazily. "Cissie, go look in my lapel pocket for one of those long black seegars and light it for me with a lucifer." Both girls scrambled to do his bidding, their earlier animosity forgotten, their eyes adoring as they served their heartless master and lover. When he had downed the whisky with a gulp, and taken a few puffs of the strongly pungent cigar, he growled, "Put a wrapper on, Cissie, and go fetch me Bucky Bolden, Hank Morris and Ted Porter. Make it fast or I'll lambaste you and it won't be with my hand, you sweet yellow-haired piece of pokemeat!"
Cissie hastened to put on her muslin wrapper and to thrust her dainty stockinged feet into her slippers, then opened her closet and took out Molly's heavy greatcoat to ward off the biting cold wind of this November night.
"I better get dressed too, Bill," Molly urged.
"Nope. You stay just like this, baby. Get going, Cissie!"
"But-but, Bill, I-I'm naked, you don't want them to see me?"
"Sure I do honey," William Clarke Quantrill laughingly countered. "I want the boys to see what good taste their boss has." Then his eyes narrowed menacingly: "Come on now, lie down right beside me and take hold of my cock and feel me up and show me how much you love me. Do what I tell you to, or I'll have the boys trice you up in the barn and lay a carriage whip on your sweet ass!"
Knowing him fully capable of carrying out such a threat, Molly Spandrell shudderingly did as she had been bidden. In a few minutes, Cissie swung open the door of her sister's bedroom, and the three ruffians entered. "Hey, now, Cap'n Bill," Bucky Bolden leered. "You tryin' to make us randy on a cold night like this? Jeez, that's a goddamn dirty trick, that is, and us without a piece of pussy for the last couple of nights."
"Don't cry poor mouth to me, Bucky," Quantrill laughed, "you've got Ella and Maggie and Sarah. Leastways they were in our camp when we got back from that raid on Baxter Springs."
"Hell, those old bags?" Bucky Bolden sneered disparagingly. "Tell you the truth, Cap'n, I ain't had me a real poke since we took along that cute lil' chestnut-haired gal tending her flowers-you know what I mean."
"That's easily remedied. You can take Molly along to keep you warm tonight."
"Oh no, Bill, for goodness sake, no!" The tall brunette shrank back, her eyes wide and glazed with terror as she saw the three ruffians smirking at her, devouring her nakedness with glittering eyes.
"Go on and do what I tell you to, Molly or they'll take you out to the barn and whale some sense into your backside. And mind you give them a good romp, all of them, or it's Cissie I'll be poking from now on and no one else," Quantrill warned.
With a triumphant guffaw, Bucky Bolden reached out, grabbed sobbing Molly Spandrell by the wrist and dragged her out of the bed as she burst into hysterical sobs and pleas. Roaring with laughter at her shame and fright, the fat black-haired young ruffian picked her up and flung her over his shoulder as he might a sack of potatoes and headed for the door.
"Wait a minute, Bucky," Quantrill called, puffing at his cigar, then laying it down on the little night table beside the bed, heedless of the fact that the hot ash began to burn the mahogany veneer. "I want you three boys to ride tomorrow into Coffeyville. Ted here knows the Sheriff, don't you, boy?"
"That's right, Cap'n Bill," the redbearded lover of Loma Boles chuckled and nodded.
"I've got an idea. There's a couple of farm towns about twenty or thirty miles due west of where our good Sheriff hangs out," Quantrill thoughtfully mused. "Sound him out about what kind of patrolling the Union cavalry does in those parts, Ted. Tell him if he keeps his mouth shut, there might be a few dollars in it for him. Get the lay of the land there anyhow. Hell, I might have me a little shindig at the Red Dog. From what you tell me, Ted, they've got some good looking chippies there."
"Sure, boss. Lorna always changes the merchandise to make things interesting. I'll be back to you in about a week and tell you what I find out."
"That's all, though," the leader warned with another puff of the cigar which he took off the table. "Matter of fact, while you're there, take a look at the bank and see how well it's guarded."
"I don't know if Sheriff Horkins would stand still for that," Ted Porter doubtfully ventured.
"Look, Ted, I don't give a good goddamn whether he stands for it or not. If I want that bank, I'll take it, like I took Lawrence. Hell get his cut if I do, he needn't worry. You and I know he's the real owner of the Red Dog, and he looks the other way on lots of things he ought to take care of with that badge of his. He's not going to ruin his cushy job by standing up to Bill Quantrill. Now have your fun tonight, then saddle up early and ride the hell out of here."
Thus dismissing them and crushing out his cigar on the table, Quantrill rolled over towards Cissie, whom he had beckoned to lie beside him, and instantly mounted her. Molly's despairing shriek was drowned out by the boisterous laughter of the three renegades who trooped out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind them.
Alma and George Spandrell were wakened by Molly's cries and clung to each other, tearfully praying that their daughter's life would be spared. But out in the barn, the horses snorted as Bucky Bolden flung the sobbing brunette down on a pile of straw, unbuckled his breeches, and flung himself down over her, while Hank Morris, crouching beyond her head, hastily liberated his prick and, twisting her earlobes, snarled, "Use your mouth on me, you little bitch, or I'll yank your ears off and wear them in my belt like an Injun scalp!"
Molly Spandrell submitted. Her ordeal was long and cruel. After Bucky Bolden had had his fill of her, Hank Morris took his place, and then Ted Porter. And then, on the pretext that she had protested and cried too much and deafened their ears with her plaints, they tied her to one of the hitching posts, so that her arms hugged it as they might a lover, and, taking their cowhide belts, began to flog her mercilessly until she at last fainted. Then Bucky Bolden, gripping her welted and swollen naked buttocks with his stubby, dirty fingers, pried them open and pressed himself against her anus, sodomizing her as she slumped in her bonds.
CHAPTER TEN
The three desperados set out the next morning for Coffeyville, in high spirits after their sadistic enjoyment of unfortunate Molly Spandrell. The weather was raw and blustery, but fat black-haired Bucky Bolden didn't mind at all. "Shucks," he called to Ted Porter and Hank Morris, "I feel right warm inside me after the hoorawing we give that purty lil'l black-haired bitch last night. Anyhow, when we get to Coffeyville, I'm gonna spend some of my gold for one of the gals that Ted says a man can buy at the Red Dog Saloon."
"Ain't you never got nothing on your mind but fuckin'? " Hank Morris crookedly grinned as he hawed and spat, shifting the wad of chewing tobacco to the other side of his mouth. An angry, triangular purple scar glowered on his left cheek, the mark left by a fat war profiteer who had attacked him with a clasp knife a year ago in his home in Parsons. Hank Morris had run a feed and supply store in that town, married a pretty seventeen-year-old blonde girl named Lucy Prentice, and there had been nothing in his background to suggest that he would be riding with the men of Quantrill. But he had had to go to Dodge for a week to get more supplies, had come home unexpectedly to find Lucy in bed with this fat gunrunner. The man had leaped out of bed, gone to his braces and pulled out a knife and slashed Hank Morris before the latter had managed to take the knife away and plunge it into his assailant's belly. Then he had killed Lucy too and fled the town, riding into Missouri where, a month later, he met William Clarke Quantrill. In that short year he had proved himself so valorous and efficient as a leader of raids that Quantrill had made him his second in command.
"Nope," Bucky cheerfully answered, "not less'n they stop making bitches, and then I'll have to content me down with a bottle and a bag of gold. And they ain't too much comfort on a cold night like we're gonna be having till Spring."
"Just don't forget to do your job, Bucky," Hank Morris growled. "Cap'n Bui don't like malingerers."
"You know, it's a funny thing about the Cap'n," Bucky Bolden reigned in his horse alongside Hank's and began to reminisce in a confidential tone. "Now who'd ever take him for bein' a schoolteacher? But that's what he was, all right. Stoop-shouldered from all that booklarnin', he was. Looked down on the ground 'cause he didn't wanna look people in the eye and come right out he was teaching kids their three R's."
"He don't like to be reminded of them days, Bucky," Hank Morris gave his crony a black look. "He ain't stoop-shouldered now, for sure he ain't, and he ain't afraid to look no man in the eye. He can hold his head high after what he done in Lawrence."
"Sure, Hank, sure," Bucky placated nervously, "I was just saying ain't it a change from what the Cap'n was, though? Hell, there ain't a man in Kansas can stand up to him, not even you."
"It ain't ever gonna come to standing up to the Cap'n, so shut your fat mouth and ride. It's gonna be a long haul to Coffeyville. Might make it tonight if you get the lead out of your big fat ass, Bucky. Well, Ted," the scarfaced Quantrill lieutenant turned to regard the red-bearded young renegade at his left, "you're sure we can count on the Sheriff keepin' his nose outta our business?"
"Sure, Hank. No two ways about it, Bud
Horkins likes the jingling of gold coins in his breeches better'n any man I know outsid'a us."
"Then there'll be no trouble. Well mosey over to the bank first chance we git and look it over. Might be we three could pull it off ourselves," Hank Morris decided.
Arabella Denburg, after her initiation by Lorna Boles, had been put to the crucial test of proving her worth as one of the "regular" girls in Loma's stable. The very next night, she had had to take on six cowboys, all of them young and vigorous, and by the time the saloon thinned out and the bartenders began polishing glasses and getting ready to close, she was bruised and aching in every limb. But her clients enthusiastically commended her to Lorna, so that the black-haired madame had no occasion to rebuke or punish her. Nevertheless in Lorna's shrewd and malicious mind, there was something about the auburn-haired young beauty that just didn't click. She couldn't put her finger on it, and one of these days she intended to ask one of her steady customers who might be going on to Dodge on business to go to the Brass Rail on Front Street and find out if Arabella had actually done a stint in that famous whorehouse.
But the owner of the Coffeyville Bank, old John Widdemer, who found it increasingly difficult to find satisfaction even in the arms of these young and practiced harlots, had noticed Arabella's lustrous auburn hair and voluptuous figure, and on her third night the elderly banker engaged her services. For the past few weeks, he had utilized the services of Lily Bentley, the ex-madame who had once ruled the roost at the Golden Eagle, and blonde Lily was furious at losing a customer who invariably gave her a handsome tip which, needless to say, Loma Boles never saw. And when she saw Arabella on the arm of the banker on their way to Arabella's room, she swore she would get even. Being in disrepute herself with Lorna, it meant that she would have to connive so that Arabella would be blamed for something and would get the latter a good thrashing from the quirt or the doubled leather strap whose kisses Arabella had already experienced to her discomfiture on her first night.
By ill luck, the banker had drunk more whiskey than was good for him that night, and as he lurched along the carpeted landing towards the room where Arabella waited to beguile him, he dropped his wallet. Lily Bently, observing that Lorna was busy at the bar, had crept up the stairway to watch the couple, swearing vengeance, and so chanced to see the wallet drop onto the floor. She swiftly appropriated it once the door had closed behind the couple, and waited her chance. A few minutes later, she was loudly greeted by a former patron of the Golden Eagle whose favorite she had been, and made her way upstairs with him to her own room where, hiding the banker's wallet under the mattress, she quickly undressed and began to earn her keep, as Lorna might put it. John Widdemer did not miss his wallet, for he had already paid Lorna Boles in advance for Arabella's services. The auburn-haired beauty was compelled to French him in order to get his dwindled cock adequately turgescent, and she playfully got astride him and, sinking down with her satiny naked flesh warming his sere, juiceless body, began gently to rise up and down, nuzzling his stiffened tool in her warm housing.
"You're just wonderful, Bella, you're the best here," he gasped in pathetic gratitude as his hands squeezed her bottom and his lips pressed effusive kisses on her throat and cheeks and chin.
"That's nice of you to say, Mr. Widdemer, but I just try to make you feel happy, that's all," she murmured. She felt sorry for the elderly banker, because he was disliked throughout the town, had few friends, and as a widower his money seemed to have done him little good.
Meanwhile, Lily Bentley was lustily fucking with the client she had known for some years, certain of a good tip and in more gracious humor than usual because of the trick she was going to play on her hated young rival. When she was finally finished, she put her arm around his shoulder and brought him out into the hall and kissed him, reminding him to come back soon and ask for her. Then she waited, but without going downstairs, knowing that the elderly banker wouldn't last too long and would come out soon enough. In a few moments, the door opened and he made his way down the hall, Arabella following demurely behind him, her hair fluffed up and her dress back on and a little rice powder applied to her cheeks.
Swiftly Lily Bentley hurried into Arabella's room and thrust the banker's wallet under the rumpled pillow, then walked slowly down the stairs to mingle with customers and to solicit another "John."
Just as John Widdemer reached the bar, he put his hand into his greatcoat and then his frock coat and uttered a cry: "My wallet's gone!"
"What's all this noise, John?" Lorna Boles came forward, an anxious look on her face, for the elderly banker, though he was disliked by all the girls who had to work hard to draw him to pitch, was a generous tipper and spent a good deal on whiskey as well.
"I was going," he complained, "and just now felt for my wallet, and it's gone!"
"We can't have that. Bella, I sure hope for the sake of your ass you didn't try to sneak it off old John here," the young black-haired madame glared as Arabella flared. "He paid you downstairs here, before he took me up to the room, you know that."
"Sure, I know that, but that wouldn't have stopped you from filching his wallet if you thought you had the chance. I'm going to look through your room and tear it apart, bitch, and if I find it, kiss your ass good bye and yourself out of a job, you can depend on that!" Lorna Boles fumed.
Angrily shouldering Arabella aside, the black-haired madame hastened up the stairway, and Lily Bentley followed her, looking back to direct a gloating look full of malice and hatred on the astonished young auburn-haired beauty.
"All right, Lily," Lorna turned and beckoned to the blonde ex-madame. "You can help me too. You used to know where a bitch who worked for you would be likely to hide something she's stolen. Get your ass in here and let's turn everything upside down till we find it."
"Yes, Miss Lorna, I'll help," Lily Bentley replied, trying to keep the satisfaction out of her voice and to act humble towards the young woman whom she hated most in all the world. She told herself that it wouldn't do to find the wallet too quickly, that might look suspicious. So, with a great show of eagerness and concern, she opened the drawers of the dressers while Loma Boles searched the closet and rummaged through Arabella's few belongings.
"Not here. But I'll be bound that red-haired doxy took it, nobody else could have. How about under the bed, Lily?"
"Yes'm, I'll look." Lily Bentley lowered herself to the floor and peered under the heavy bed. "No, not a sign. But maybe it's hidden in the bed. Could be under the mattress or such likely place, Miss Lorna."
"Well soon see!" Angrily, Lorna Boles began to pull the sheets down and then, lifting the mattress to one side, peered under it.
"It may be under the pillow, Miss Lorna. Want me to look?" Lily Bentley could now hardly keep the triumph out of her voice.
"Of course, you dumb blonde bitch, no need to ask such a stupid question!" was the sarcastic rejoinder.
Lily flushed and bit her lips but conquered the rebellious remnant of pride which made her want to claw Lorna's eyes out. Lifting the pillow, she gasped out, "Here it is, Miss Lorna!"
"Give it here, you thieving tramp! I wouldn't put it past you to filch a couple of greenbacks before you give it back to me-so that's where the sly little whore hid it. She can't have had much training in the trade, I'm thinking, or she wouldn't have put it in so likely a place. More I think about it, I think she was lying when she came in here and said she'd worked in Dodge. Now let's get downstairs and then well really give Miss Arabella Denburg what for!
The two women went down the stairs, Lily behind her employer, just as Arabella felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to confront the man who had accosted her. He was one of the most repulsive men she had ever seen: fat, black-haired, young but with centuries of evil in his glittering dark eyes, his mouth petulant and much too ripe, his dirty buckskin jacket and breeches damp with body sweat and stinking to high heaven. "Say now," he drawled, "how's about you'n me havin' ourselves a time upstairs? I got money to pay for ya."
"Well, I suppose so," Arabella hedged.
She got no farther. Just as the stranger had taken her wrist and was about to lead her off, Lorna Boles came up to her and, drawing back her hand, slapped Arabella across the cheek so brutally that the auburn-haired beauty's head was rocked back and she uttered a cry of pain.
"Hey now, that ain't no way to treat this here purty lil'l bitch," the fat young stranger complained.
"You keep outta this, Mister," Lorna Boles' voice was shrill with fury. "All right, bitch, upstairs with you to my room. I'm going to quirt you and then me'n the gals are gonna run you outta town naked as a jaybird. You never worked in Dodge, not and pull a stupid stunt like you just did with old John's wallet! Leastways, you'd a known better'n to stash his money under the pillow, fer Gawd's sake!"
"Now wait just a jiffy, M'am," the black-haired fat young man interposed, "me'n my friends come in here lookin' fer a little fun and booze, and I been hankering for this little filly. I'll pay good for her, I will."
"Mister, I don't know who you are and I care less," Lorna Boles had her hands on her hips and was glaring at him now, "but I'm the madame here and what's more I own the Red Dog, and I'm telling you this little bitchin' thief ain't gonna service none of my customers, 'cause she's gonna git her ass whaled raw 'n then we're gonna send her out of town so fast it'd make your head swim. I got five other gals here, Mister, so just you mosey over and pick out someone else!"
But the black-haired young fat man shook his head. "Sorry to be rude, M'am, but I got my mind set on this one. Now me'n my friend would take it right unkindly if you was to turn me down."
"And who the hell sire you?" Lorna sneered.
"Well now, M'am, names don't matter, not really. But if I was to tell you something straight off just between the two of us, mebbe you'd be a mind more respectful." With this he leaned forward and whispered something into Lorna Boles' ear. The black-haired young madame suddenly gasped, her eyes widening. She glanced quickly at the terrified Arabella, and then finally shrugged: "That's different. But anyhow, I was gonna fire her outta her job here, so why don't you'n your friends take her off my hands for free?"
"Sounds like a right fine idea, M'am. I'm mighty obliged. Come on, Ted, Hank, let's go across the street to the other saloon where we can wet our whistles. You, Red, come along."
"With me, Bucky," a scar faced man with tobacco-stained teeth sardonically chuckled as he took Arabella by the wrist and glared at his fat young companion.
"Well, there's room for all of us, ain't there, Hank?" the fat youth sniggered.
"You find your own piece of poke meat, Bucky. I rank you and don't you forget it none. Come on, Red, I'll stand you drinks and maybe some chow if you've a mind."
Arabella hesitated, glancing uneasily at the now suddenly glum black-haired fat man who had first accosted her. "I-I don't want to cause any trouble between you two," she faltered.
But Lorna Boles was suddenly behind her, whispering in her ear: "You stupid little bitch, now I really know you ain't been to Dodge or you'd know better'n to play a teasin' game with Hank Morris. He's second in command to Billy Quantrill. Now you just go right with him and be as sweet as you can, and thank your lucky stars he took a imagine to you, because otherwise you wouldn't have an inch of untouched skin o your thievin' ass!"
Arabella stiffened, her eyes widening as they stared into the cruel, grinning face of Hank Morris. So this was one of Quantrill's raiders! Little did Arabella Denburg know that Hank Morris had been one of the two men who had abducted her murdered cousin.
"Why, I-I'd be honored to drink with you, Mister Hank," she quavered.
"There, you see, Bucky. You ain't the only ladies' man around here. Come along then, Red."
His left arm hugging around her waist, Hank Morris led Arabella Denburg out of the Red Dog Saloon.
Lounging at a table near the door, a good-looking brown-haired man watched with apparent indifference. But when Hank Morris and Arabella had left the saloon, followed by Bucky Bolton and the red-bearded Ted Porter, he yawned, stretched his legs and slowly got up, limping over to the bar and demanding whiskey.
A few minutes later, as he mounted his horse and headed it in the direction of the railroad station, he was talking to the telegrapher in a low earnest voice.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was nearly the end of November, and for two weeks Arabella Denburg had been the mistress of Hank Morris.
Hank Morris had taken the lovely auburn-haired woman out of the Red Dog Saloon just in time to save her from a ignominious thrashing by vengeful Loma Boles, installed her in the best room in the town's only hotel, while Bucky Bolton and Ted Porter settled down in an adjoining room, the former glumly bemoaning Hank's intervention in robbing him of "a piece of poke meat that could have made me sizzle-nf it wasn't that Hank ranked me in the outfit, I'd gut his gizzard out for that!"
But Ted Porter laughingly reassured him, "Tomorrow we're gonna case the bank and maybe take it for all it's got, and when we get back to Cap'n Bill, you'll have gold enough in your breeches to buy yourself a saloon and run a stable and sample all the merchandise every night." That prospect had cheered the sadistic young fat black-haired bully.
Arabella hadn't been exactly overeager at the prospect of being summarily led away by these three vicious-looking desperados, but after Loma Boles had told her with whom they rode, her heart had leaped inside her bosom and she had vowed to seduce the scar faced man who had commandeered her over Bucky Bolton's desire.
So, once inside the hotel room, she calmly began to undress while Hank Morris, grinning crookedly, slouched in a horse-hair-stuffed chair near the bed, one leg flung casually over the arm, while he rolled a cigarette and smoked it, his eyes glinting with lust as Arabella's pale-white skinned body shed its garments. When she was naked in her hose and gaudy rosette garters with the bells, he swore a violent oath and seized her, crushing her to his chest, mashing his lips on hers in a possessive and brutal kiss, as his hands gripped the cheeks of her velvety bottom and squeezed so mercilessly that she moaned and squirmed. He mistook this for passion, and thickly chuckled, "That's the sort of bitch I like on a cold night, Red! Do me up good, and I'll take you along with me. How'd you like to be Hank Morris's woman?"
"I-I'd like that fine, real fine, Hank," she panted, wincing at the dig of his sinewy fingers and then suddenly feeling his turgid prick rub against the furry cleft of her cunthole.
Without bothering to do more than opening his fly, the brutal scarfaced lieutenant of William Clarke Quantrill flung her down on the bed, mounted astride her and, rubbing his whiskered face against the valley of her swelling white titties, ruthlessly fucked her.
Strangely, even as she averted her face and closed her eyes and submitted, her arms around his shoulders in token of acquiescence, Arabella Denburg began to feel rhythmic tides churning in her vigorously rasped love sheath. I've really become a whore after all, just as I was that day in the hay-loft with that poor tongueless black man, she thought to herself.
When at last she felt the hot lash of his seed deep in her vagina, she groaned and arched herself, as he drew out and, going back over to the armchair, slumped down and lit another cigarette, staring at her with a lewd grin: "Go fix yourself. I'm not done yet. Fact is, I haven't even started poking that hot tight twat of yours, Red."
"I'm glad you like me Hank. You're a real man." Arabella unsteadily got off the bed and moved over to the commode, taking a towel and sponging herself from his vigorous drench.
"Come on over here, "he invited, sinking lower down in the overstuffed chair, one leg flung across the arm, his limp greased organ obscenely proffered. "Go down on me, Red. Give me a real French job. Then I'll show you what a real poke is."
Again conquering her revulsion, Arabella Denburg moved towards him, and the twinkle of silver bells as she moved made him chuckle again: "Goddamn it if you ain't the purtiest whore I ever poked! Only when you ride with Cap'n Bill, you'd better take those Goddamn garters off, you'll wake up half the farmers and have them shootin' at us!
"Cap'n Bill?" she echoed.
"Sure. Bill Quantrill. Hell, thought everybody around the territory knew Hank Morris. I'm Cap'n Bill's second in command. Then there's the Preacher and Matt Haskins. Them other two, they're what you might call second lieutenants, but I'm the first in Cap'n Bill's army. You're gonna hafta wear men's duds, Red, if you ride with me. Otherwise there'd be fightin everybody in the band off your snatch, and I aim to save my fightin for those bastids we raid. But that's enough palaver now! Git down on your knees and suck my whang real good, get it up so's I can hooraw you good and hard!"
She was on her knees, her head bowed towards his organ, and gingerly she took it just inside her lips. Hank Morris extended his right hand, twisting his fingers into the thick curls at the back of her head. "Go on like that, baby, you're good," he panted.
And so Arabella Denburg Frenched one of the men who had been responsible for her cousin's degrading death, wondering if perhaps by entering this nest of human vipers, she might not meet the same atrocious fate as lovely innocent Genevieve.
So well, indeed, did she please Hank Morris after performing that rekindling act of lust which led inevitably to his longer and even more possessive pillaging of her cunt, that he told Bucky and Ted the next morning, as they sauntered out to look over the bank, "Bella's goona be my bitch, so you guys keep your hands off. You can look, but that's all, and not too much of that, savvy? She's going to ride with us. She ain't got much use for these lily-livered Kansans anyhow, and if she can saddle a horse and holster a gun, we might even take her along on a raid."
"Man, you're crazy, plumb loco," Ted Porter gasped, "Cap'n Bill won't stand for that none, a woman on a raid-you been drinking rotgut whiskey and it's turned your brain plumb around!"
"No cause to use language like that on me, Ted Porter," Hank Morris said between thinned, crookedly grinning lips, "I don't take kindly to it. Look, you dumb head, ain't you never figgered what a hostage is fer? S'pose we take Bella with us and something goes wrong on a raid, we leave her behind and the folks in the town will forgit all about us and give it to her good. They'll be so busy strippin' and lambasting her cute white ass they won't think to get up a posse to chase after us, get me?"
The young red-bearded desperado thoughtfully stroked his beard, then chuckled. "I gotta hand it to you, Hank that's right smart thinking. I guess Cap'n Bill will go along with that argument."
"You better be goddamn sure he will, Ted Porter. Now let's quit arguing and go have ourselves a looksee at this here bank."
Just before sundown that day, the three Quantrill raiders entered the Coffeyville Bank, and while Ted Porter went through the motions of opening an account with gold coins, Bucky Bolton and Hank Morris moved into old John Widdemer's office and held him at gunpoint. When he started to rise from his chair in terror, Hank Morris brutally struck him across the temple with his gun butt, and the elderly banker slumped down, unconscious, blood flowing from the wound.
The haul was a good one, sixteen thousand dollars in notes and gold. While Ted and Bucky trained their guns on the frightened tellers and clerks, Hank Morris sauntered boldly across the street to the hotel and brought Arabell Denburg down. He had made her put on a pair of buckskin britches and a jacket, after having learned that she knew how to ride horseback. At noon, he had gone over to the livery stable and bought a sturdy black mare, bargaining over the price and making sure the mare had speed.
Arabella mounted, Hank helping her up into the saddle, and he gave her his inimitable crooked grin: "You sure mount a horse real purty, Bella," he complimented her. " 'Bout as good as you ride me. By tomorrow morning, well be back across the border and damn if I don't think Cap'n Bill is gonna be real happy with this day's work I done."
CHAPTER TWELVE
Milford and Bessy Denburg wouldn't have recognized their red-haired daughter in the brash hoyden who, this tenth day of December in the year 1863, had been riding for two months with Quantrill. Indeed, Arabella hardly recognized herself. Hank Morris griningly and proudly introduced her to the band in the little farm village of Dunnerstown, while at the same time giving notice that she wasn't to be trifled with unless they wanted a showdown with him. Now wearing a slouch hat, heavy woolen longies against her fine white skin, one of Hank's thick and foul-smelling buckskin jackets and leather britches, booted to the knee, one took her in the saddle at first glance for a young ruffian making his apprenticeship with the terrible band whose leader was known as the scrouge of Kansas.
Perhaps her most terrifying moment had come when she had been ushered by Hank Morris into Molly Spandrells's bedroom, which had now been taken over by Quantrill himself, with golden-haired Cissie brazenly sharing bed and room and exhibiting herself to all and sundry who had matters to discuss with the terrible guerrilla chieftain.
On the day they had returned to the Missouri village hideout, Ted Porter, Bucky Bolton and Hank Morris had knocked at the bedroom door and been admitted, Arabella bringing up the rear, to find Cissie naked except for her gartered stockings and a ribbon in her hair, fondling Quantrill's deflated cock while the guerrilla leader lolled at his ease with his head pillowed on his arms, wearing only his boots.
Hank Morris had flung down a bank sack filled with the loot they had taken from the Coffeyville haul, and Quantrill had sat upright with a sparkle in his cold eyes and demanded the details of that adventurous foray which had been brought off with so few men and so little cost to his group.
When Hank Morris had finished telling the story, Quantrill chuckled humorlessly: "Good work, Hank. Well, we'll cut Sheriff Horkins in for a thousand dollars so he won't be too worried about sending posses off in every direction. I want you to take the money back to him and tell him that's just an installment on what he will get if he looks the other way when our boys come to his town."
"Here's someone, Cap'n Bill, who can do that triflin' job," Hank Morris spoke up, turning and pulling Arabella forward by a wrist. "This cute little red-haired bitch was about to get herself quirted by Lorna Boles at the Red Dog when we came in the night before we pulled this bank job. She's got spunk, she's a good poke, she rides a horse real smart, Cap'n Bill. And she hates the damn Kansans as much as you and I do. Got the same treatment in Dodge from the town's most illustrious citizens, she did, and more likely than not, she'd have had the same dose in Coffeyville."
Arabella quailed under the scrutiny of William Clarke Quantrill. There was a strange light in his e j, while Cissie went on fondling his stiffened prick which was not fully ready to service her. After a long moment of silence, he gave her a curt nod: "Can you use a gun, bitch?"
"Y-Yes, s-sir. A revolver and a rifle both."
"Take her out to the barn, give her a target to shoot at with both," Quantrill bruskly commanded. "If she's off the mark, trice her up and whale her backside good and hard. If she can shoot, give her a rifle and a revolver and let her take this money into Horkins and get back here fast. I want to hear what that conniving lawman's got to say about cooperating with us."
"Sure, Cap'n Billy," Bucky Bolton piped up, eager to ingratiate himself with the leader.
"Now you men beat it. Leave the rest of the loot here, it'll be divided up, equal shares to all, with you three coming in for the biggest because you did the job." As if they had already gone, Quantrill turned back to the giggling Cissie, cupped her scarlet face in his wiry hands, whispered something to her, at which she at once wriggled atop him and inserting his organ in her slit, hugging him with her arms locked under his back, began slowly and teasingly to ride him up and down . . . .
Out in the barn, Bucky Bolton, Ted Porter and the half-breed Miguel-the man who had actually killed Arabella's cousin-watched with leering amusement as Hank Morris loaded the stolen Army six shooter and handed it to the auburn-h aired beauty. "I've made the mark sort of easy, Red," he said banteringly, "only you'd better not be off too far or well have to take your britches down and whale you-you heard the Cap'n.
"Listen, Hank," Bucky Bolton eagerly spoke, "if we whale her, can we fuck her too?"
Hank Morris stared with an evil grin at the wide-eyed auburn-haired girl who now looked as dissolute and almost as masculine as any of them. Hating women as he did and using them only for their physical convenience, he had taken Arabella Denburg from the Red Dog Saloon on a capricious impulse. Fortunately for her, she had pleased him sexually, but this in no way guaranteed her a lasting bond of his affection. To her horror, she heard him say with a brutal laugh, "Sure. If she ain't up to the mark, she's no woman of mine. All right, Bella. See that old hat hanging on a peg at the back of the barn on that white post?"
Arabella nodded.
"You've got six shots there. Hit that hat with three, and you're my bitch. Less than that, the boys here get to fuck you after they've lambasted your bare ass good. Go ahead."
He stepped back and watched, striking a lucifer and lighting a handmade cigarette, his eyes narrowed and cruel. Either way, he'd be sure of enjoyment.
Arabella fought the nauseating fear at the pit of her stomach, as she slowly lifted the heavy six shooter and trained its gleaming dark bluish barrel on the dirty slouch hat fixed about fifty feet away to a wooden peg on the heavy barn post. Squinting, she took a deep breath, praying that her aim would be steady and sure, and then squeezed the trigger. There was a loud report.
"That's the way, Red! Hank Morris chuckled. "A nice clean hole right through the brim. Put two more there, and you'll do fine, just fine."
But Arabella's next two shots, perhaps because of her mounting excitement, narrowly missed the hat, and the other men began to anticipate their pleasure with her: "Now she's gotta hit it twice out of three, boys, or down come her britches!" It was Bucky Bolton who exulted.
Arabella closed her eyes and said a prayer and she raised the heavy revolver and took careful aim. Breathless, she squeezed the trigger and was rewarded by a shout from Hank Morris: "Right next to the first hole. Just one more, baby!"
Coolly, feeling a little more reassured, the auburn-haired beauty held her wrist as steady as she could and again squeezed the trigger.
"Goddamn it anyhow," Bucky Bolton swore, "I guess she saved her ass that one time."
"Wait a minute," Hank Morris held up his hand to intervene. She's got to do the same thing with the rifle. Only this time, well put up a lantern and see what she can do." The half-breed Miguel hurried to the back of the barn and set up a kerosene lantern on the narrow wooden rail. Then he moved away, hands on hips, licking his lips as he stared greedily at Arabella's voluptuous figure so boldly outlined by her tight leather britches and the buckskin jacket.
Hank Morris handed her a rifle. "I hope you know how to load, gal," he growled.
Fortunately for Arabella, part of her instruction as a nurse at the school in Crestine under Colonel John Neade had been in the handling of firearms. And by irony, that training had been imperative on every nurse just because of the ever-present danger of Quantrill's raiders.
She nodded, knelt down, cradled the heavy stock against her shoulder, squinted along the barrel and pulled the trigger. The recoil was greater than she had expected, and it bruised her shoulder, but she had the satisfaction of hearing the metallic ping of the bullet and the tinkling of the shattered glass of the lamp, while a shout of approval rose from the man whose mistress she was.
"I think she's proved her point, boys. Now let's get her on a horse and send her off to Sheriff Horkins," he said.
The others disappointedly grumbled, but the orders of their leader had been followed and they were not of a mind to argue them over a wench, not with so many tempting morsels of pulchritude awaiting them on their future raids.
"Here, Bella," Hank Morris said as he stuffed the sack of money into her saddle bags, "git back as fast as you can. You did me proud just now, and I've got an itch to poke you, but it can wait till you get back." Lifting his right hand, he smacked her horse's withers, and Arabella Denburg rode out of the barn on her way back to
Coffeyville . . . .
The meeting with Sheriff Bud Horkins was fortunately brief. The burly corrupt lawman who owned the Red Dog Saloon where she had worked as an apprentice whore under Lorna Boles was greedier for the money she bought than for her, though his beady eyes appraised her admiringly as she stood before him, her slouch hat gripped in her hands to show the lustrous gleam of her auburn hair, which she had pinned up into a neat bun. Her cheeks were red from the howling December wind, and there was soon to be a snowstorm. This was the weather in which Quantrill's raiders could do their most heinous work, for an unsuspecting little farmer's community or even a larger town would be caught off guard.
"You're new to the band, aren't you, Red?" Sheriff Horkins chuckled as he counted out the money Quantrill had sent him.
"That's fine with me. You tell the Cap'n there'll be no trouble from me and my deputies. I'll give him a tip, too, and all I want is another down payment like this. About twenty miles northwest of here, there's a little town by the name of Brandon. I'd say about seventy people there. Nice little farming land, and some of those folks are mighty rich. A couple of them has got big accounts at Old John Widdemer's bank. Say, you should have heard him complaining the other day about not getting any action. I told him I'd had posses out searching for the lowdown varmints that took his gold." He winked broadly at Arabella. "Now, there's a big red farm house just on the edge of Brandon. Belongs to Old Man Davies, he founded the town and he's the richest critter in it. He don't trust no bank, keeps all his gold stashed in a sugar bowl in the kitchen, that's what I've been told. I want my share."
"I'll tell the Cap'n," Arabella coolly replied. "You'll get what's coming to you, don't you worry, Sheriff Horkins."
"Nice to have met you, Red. You sure pulled a piece of luck when you met up with Hank Morris and Ted Porter and the boys." Again he winked. "My little gal Lorna wanted to peel you down and stripe your cute backside .Guess she's taking it out on poor Lily Bentley about now. Well, lemme hear from the Cap'n what you did over at Brandon"
"Sure, Sheriff. I'll get back to the hideout right away."
Arabella Denburg left the sheriff's office and made her way down to the swinging doors of the Red Dog Saloon. It was a Thursday night, but the noise which wafted to her ears told her that business was thriving as usual. She entered, trying to be as nonchalant as she could. Her heart gave a bound when she saw Benjamin Colby standing at the bar, and she moved up to stand beside him, as the bartender came forward to peer at her curiously. "Whisky," she demanded.
"Yeah, stranger, right away."
"Without turning her head, Arabella Denburg whispered, "I'm Hank Morris's girl now, Benjy. Their hideout is in Dunnerstown. I've just been to Sheriff Horkings with some money from the bank robbery. He told me to tell Quantrill that there's pickings over at Brandon, especially at the farm house of Mr. Davies."
"Good work, Bella! I'll get word over to Colonel Neade. I'll leave right now. Well be waiting for them if they get there."
"I'm pretty sure they will. I heard some of the men grumbling that they haven't had any gold for a couple of weeks now, and from what Sheriff Horkins said, there's plenty over there and no Army protection."
"There will be. Take care of yourself, Bella. You're playing a damn dangerous game and I wish to God I could be with you."
"I think the man whose girl I am had something to do with my cousin's death. And maybe that awful Mexican half-breed they call Miguel," she murmured. "I'd better go now." After I've had my whiskey." She picked up the shot glass and downed it, then choked and coughed, and Benjamin Colby, supressing his mirth, had to slap her on the back before she recovered herself.
But as she prepared to leave, Lorna Boles, who had watched from the stairway this meeting between the man she knew as Benjy Colburn and the young stranger in the slouch hat and buckskins, came down the stairs and hurried over to the bar. "Benjy, aren't you gonna introduce me to your friend? I thought I knew all my customers-hey now, if it ain't Bella! Why, you thieving bitch, you dare to show your face in here after what you pulled on old John Widdemer?" Lorna snarled, as she seized Arabella's wrist.
"Let her go, Lorna. She's with Quantrill now," Benjamin Colby propitiated.
"You keep out of this, Benjy boy!" Lorna whirled to face him, her eyes sparkling with hate. "I owe this bitch a score, and it's just between us. I'll have Jumbo break you in half if you interfere, savvy? Come on, bitch, I'm taking you to old John's house right now. There's a Citizen's Committee meeting there, and unless I miss my guess, they'll want to talk to you about the scabby trick you pulled. Yeah, we got decent citizens in this town don't stand for a tricky bitch like you!"
"But-" Benjamin Colby uneasily began.
Then he subsided. He had just seen the hulking, menacing figure of Jumbo, shuffling forward at Lorna's sign. "All right. It's none of my business anyhow, I guess. But give her a fair shake, she's only a girl."
"Yeah, and a thieving, lying, sneaking bitch at that," Lorna spat. "Remember, you told me you worked at a famous restaurant, bitch? Well, Hunk Blanders, who works on the Bar TD Ranch, just got back from Dodge a couple days ago and he did some checking up on you. Seems the madame there never heard of you. You've been lying all along, and I wanna know what your little game is. Come along. Jumbo, come on, we're gonna put this bitch on a horse and take her over to John Widdemer's house!"
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
His heart heavy with foreboding, Benjamin Colby saddled his horse in the livery stable, mounted it and rode down the main street of Coffeyville. At the end of the street, he turned his horse's head to the right down toward the blacksmith's shop. It was closed but there was a light in the front room of the little frame house just behind the shack. Tying his horse's reins to the hitching post, he limped up the stairs and hammered on the door. A moment later, a white -haired, spry, tall man in his sixties peered cautiously out, in his nightshirt, a shotgun ready in his hands. "Who are you, Mister? Oh, it's you there, Benjy, didn't recognize you at first. Come in!"
"Got no time, Jesse. Look, I've got to ride to Crestine. Arabella Denburg just got back here-she's been living with the raiders."
"She's got guts, that girl has, Benjy. You better get her out of there fast before they find out who she really is and what she is doing, or she'll get worse than her poor cousin got!" the old black-smith exclaimed.
"I know that. But the only danger she's in now, is from the Citizens' Committee. Seems Lorna Boles and her bouncer Jumbo just took her over to old John Widdemer's house where they're meeting. Lorna has got it in for her and just found out she didn't work a whorehouse in Dodge like she said she did. I don't know what they're going to do to her, but you better get Ed Green and Tom French and Harry Selmers and ride over there and stop them before they really hurt that sweet girl."
"So you're stuck on her, Benjy," the old blacksmith cackled, lowering his shotgun and giving Benjamin Colby a knowing wink. "Why, I'll get to the boys right now. Good luck. It's a cold hard ride to Crestine'"
"I'll be there tomorrow afternoon. I'll get Colonel Neade and the Union troops over to protect Branden. I think that's where Quantrill will strike next."
"So this is the girl who stole my money!" the elderly banker angrily exclaimed as Lorna Boles finished her story. Arabella, her wrists held behind her back in the crushing grip of the huge bouncer Jumbo, tried to protest, but he cuffed her across the mouth, snarling, "You keep your mouth shut, you little whore, or I'll do worse!"
"So you see, Mr. Widdemer," Lorna hypocritically declared, turning to smile at the eight black-coated, bearded men who were seated in the banker's living room, "I know that you gentlemen don't want lawlessness and thieving whores like this one to take over your town, so I thought I would bring her here for a good lesson."
"She shall have one," a stiff-necked gray-bearded man in his mid-fifties righteously exclaimed. "A slut like this one ought to be whipped and tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail!"
"That's exactly what I had in mind, Mr. Pinkham," Lorna sweetly smiled. "I'll turn her over to you, then, and get back to my business. You know, I need all the protection I can get, running a saloon and trying to keep out characters like this one. Let her go, Jumbo. These fine gentlemen will see to Miss Arabella Denham!"
With a coquettish glance at several of the men who, though they were the town's leading citizens, she recognized as customers not only of her saloon, but of the rooms upstairs where her five girls serviced their crudest carnal desires, Loma Boles, accompanied by her huge ambling bouncer Jumbo, left the house and rode back to the Red Dog Saloon . . . .
"Please-please, you've got to listen to me-" Arabella hysterically sobbed. A jarring blow from one of her captors silenced her as the eight black-coated middle-aged and elderly men who formed Coffeyville's Decent Citizens' Committee dragged her out into the snow covered yard towards the bam, the elderly banker hurrying along in his sensual delight to see the fun.
In vain Arabella Denburg had tried to explain that she was actually a spy acting under authorization from a Union colonel in Crestine and that her purpose had been to be accepted as a camp follower and whore in the Quantrill band.
"Go to, girl," Jeb Mordaunt, who had presided as her judge, had guffawed. "Lies won't help you none and nobody here is going to believe such a crazy yam! Why, tarnation, the Union cavalry had been chasing that bastard Quantrill all over Kansas and here a puny girl like you says she's the one who is going to bring that filthy murdering guerilla to justice! Well give you justice, girl! It's the judgment of this private court as citizens of Coffeyville that you be taken out to the bam, peeled down raw and switched, then tarred and feathered and made to ride a fence rail until dawn. Naked as a jay bird, girl, and if you freeze up and die, nobody is going to shed a tear, not for a thieving little bitch that couldn't give a honest poke without swiping Mr. Widdemer's money! Take her out to the bam, Burt and Lemuel!"
Arabella had tried to run but the man called Lemuel, a prosperous fifty-year-old farmer to the south of Coffeyville, who had two teen-aged girls as indentured servants to him and who fucked and whipped them for his pleasure, seized her by her hair and dragged her back. Then, even as she protested, he had struck her face with his fist, and he and Burt Monahan, the owner of the granary to which all the farmers brought their wheat, had seized her by the wrists and dragged her out for execution of the sentence passed upon her by the good citizens of Coffeyville . . . .
The light from several flickering lanterns shined on the scene, as Arabella Denburg, pale with terror and half-fainting, more dead than alive in her desperate and abandoned state, was summarily dragged over to a wooden hitching post at the back of the barn, her wrists tied together on the other side. Then the two men who had taken her there began to rip off her clothes, using their clasp knives to cut through the buckskin laces of her jacket when they would not hold to their fingers. Her belt was unbuckled and her leather britches dragged down and salacious comments droned upon her ears as they saw her woolen longjohns; "Maybe it's a man we've got tied up to the post, boys! Well, only one way to find out! Burt, boy, jist slip your hand inside the flap of them longies and feel if she's a boy or a girl, that's what!"
Twisting and writhing, the auburn-haired beauty sought to evade Burt's degrading quest, as squatting down, he put a gnarled hand to the buttons of her long underwear and began to open them. She uttered a cry of shame when she felt his horny forefinger prod against the lips of her twitching pussy.
"No doubt about it, this here's a bitch," he triumphantly announced to the men who clustered around the hitching post to which Arabella Denburg had been tethered for her switching.
"Keep that tar, boys, and get those feathers ready!"
Two of the men who had sat in judgment on her were busy stirring a cauldron in which smoking tar was bubbling, while a third had taken a feather-stuffed quilt from John Widdemer's guest room and was ripping it apart and neatly piling the feathers into a trash basket.
"It'll be hot enough soon," one of them called out.
"Good!" Lemuel chuckled thickly as he put both hands to the neck of Arabella's long johns and viciously ripped them down, exposing the pale milky skin of her sculptured back. "You won't, catch cold, you sweet redheaded bitch. We'll be sure to warm you good first with a switching and then the tar. Why, you'll be piping hot as toast even when you sit out on the rail outside the barn!"
Now taking his clasp knife, he began to cut away at the heavy woolen undergarment until finally it fell away, disclosing the magnificent panting breasts, as, mad with shame, her head flung back, her eyes uplifted towards the ceiling of the barn, Arabella Denburg jerked uselessly at her tightly bound wrists which had been give no play by the rawhide thongs lashed round them and the thick unyielding post.
"Now slip them off her legs and she'll be bare-nekkid!" he declared, pinching her calves and thighs under pretext of tugging down the ripped and cut garment which alone had veiled her nakedness.
Then it was done. By the flickering light of the lanterns, Arabella's statuesque naked body was exposed in all its helpless nudity, the cheeks of her behind cringing as the cold gusts of December air came through the chinks of the door and the windows of the barn. The men grouped round her shuddered with mounting desire at the sight of that pale milky flesh, their eyes glistening and glazed with lubricity.
It was Lemuel who had been chosen to apply the switch, and he had peeled a flexible long hickory rod with a murderously tapering tip. He made it whistle in the air now, and Arabella thrust her body tightly against the post not only to protect her most intimate parts from all those obscenely gloating eyes but also in a futile and pitiful attempt to diminish the tender regions of her voluptuous young body now given over the burning kisses of the whip.
"How many do you think I ought to give her, boys?" Lemuel croaked as he took his stance to her left, while, in his frantic and lustful eagerness to watch more closely, the elderly banker hurried over with a lantern in his hand to cast even more light upon Arabella's nakedness.
"To the blood," was the brutal answer by Burt Monahan.
"Right! Too bad to mark up such nice fine white skin, bitch, but you ought to have had more sense than to steal Mr. Widdemer's money when all you was paid for was for him to poke you!" the ruthless answer came.
"Lay it on her hide good, Lem!" one of the men called out, his voice throbbing with ill-concealed lechery. "Make her dance and shake that big white ass of hers! Paint the Union Stars and Bars on her tail so she'll remember who we are fighting for when she rides the rail!"
"Oh Heavens, have mercy on me! I swear to you I come from Korchnon, and my father is Milford Denburg! Don't do this to me, you've got to listen, please! Send someone to Colonel Neade at Crestine, the Army hospital there, he'll tell you who I am and what I am doing!"
"Hell, that would take two-three days, bitch," one of the men sneered. "You sure have some consarned imagine ideas for a saloon trollop! Well, you're not going to spread your legs any more in Coffeyville, well tell you that. When we let you go, well ride you out of town and Heavens help you if you ever come back! Go ahead, Lem! Make her feel it good and hard, maybe she'll confess she's been lyin' all along!"
Arabella twisted her face back over her left shoulder, her eyes mad with terror as she saw the grinning black-coated executioner draw back the long flexible switch. "Oh no! I beg of you-Geey arrhh!'
Smirking at her agony, holding the switch high to keep the naked auburn-haired victim in suspense, Lemuel had suddenly brought it down with a wicked crack across the tops of Arabella's bare dainty hips. Convulsively, her body had jerked forward, as she ground her loins against the heavy wooden hitching post, chafing her pussy in the frenzied contortion as liquid fire seemed to burn the place when the switch had traced its hellish course. A blazing red weal sprang up at once as Lemuel stepped back and contemplated his handiwork with a chuckle: "There now, she's had a real taste! Why, a couple dozen of those, and we can open the door and all the windows here and still her backside would be hot enough to fry eggs on!"
Lecherous laughter applauded this cruel sally, as Arabella, jerking her wrists uselessly, tried to free herself from this improvised whipping post. Even as she struggled, a second blow of the switch leaped across her upper bottom globes laying a neatly efficient, bright, fiery welt exactly an inch below the first, and again her shrill shriek of agony reverberated through the barn.
Lemuel showed his proficiency at flogging, acquired by his lustful practice on the two helpless bound girls enslaved on his farm, one fourteen, the other seventeen. Methodically he set the switch hissing and cracking over Arabella's bottom, each time a little lower down, till he had applied fifteen parallel welts from the tops of her hips to the tops of her thighs.
The pain was intolerable, heedless of the obscene gyrations to which the switch compelled her, Arabella jerked her bottom this way and that, lunging and twisting, contracting all her muscles in a useless defense, grinding her pussy against the wooden post, her eyes upturned to the ceiling, then turning her face back over her shoulder as, her cheeks wet with tears and her eyes enormously dilated with agony, she hysterically besought mercy.
Another dozen cuts, and blood pearled from some of the intercrossing welts, and Arabella was sagging in her bounds. A bucket of cold water slashed over her body, making her jerk upright with another shriek of pain.
"Just a couple of good licks more, then we can put the tar on," Lemuel hoarsely declared. He lowered the switch to the floor of the barn, then suddenly whisked its flexible tip right up into her cunt. Arabella nearly tore herself free, her head flinging back and her mouth gaping in a prolonged wordless scream of unutterable agony.
Five times more the wicked hickory whip bit home over her naked bottom, and now blood oozed down her thighs, and her head slumped forward.
Another bucket of cold water was doused over her to revive her, as two of the men moved forward to cut the rawhide thongs bindings her wrists and to drag her over to where the tar was waiting. In the process, they fondled her breasts and cunt, making lewd appraising remarks on her beauty. "Say, before we put this tar on," one of them growled, "lets have a little fooferawing with her huh?"
"Not on you life," Lemuel declared, "most likely she's got the pox, as any whore does. Drag her over there, and two of you hold her wrists and stand her up and stretch her out and Burt and me'll put on the tar."
The other men excitedly crowded around to watch as the swooning naked auburn-haired victim, her head drooping, was dragged to the side of the barn where the cauldron waited with its bubbling, black viscous liquid, a man holding each wrist and pulling so that she was forced to stand, her head drooping and her body sagging, while the others avidly raped her with their glittering eyes, their crotches swollen with lust. If it had not been for the warning of pox, assuredly Arabella Denburg would have been fucked by each and every one of them, the banker included.
"Hey, what's that? I hear horses!" Burt suddenly shouted just as the banker himself, invited by his cronies, was about to lift the wooden ladle and tilt its horrid, hot contents onto one of Arabella's breasts.
"They're coming here!" Jeb shouted.
And then the door of the barn was flung open and three young men, each carrying a shotgun, stepped inside. "Let her go and give her some clothes," one of them called. Behind them, the elderly white-haired entered now, his own shotgun at the ready.
"Don't you interfere, Jesse!" Lemuel angrily exclaimed. "These citizens are just teaching this thieving whore a lesson!"
"Just let her go, Lem," the blacksmith drawled, "or I'll blast you! Stick to Matty and Prissie, you can switch and poke the two of them all you like, you got them on indenture. But you're not hurting this girl, not if you want Quantrill and his men brought to justice. Now let go of her!"
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The three young men were grandsons of the old blacksmith and members of the town militia, stationed there for defense against marauders like Quantrill. They bundled her in a horse blanket and rode her back to the blacksmith's house, where she told them her story and what Sheriff Horkins had said to her. First, however the blacksmith had had her stretch out on the couch in the parlor, sending his boys away while he rubbed good grease on the bloody weals which crisscrossed her bottom, and gave her what comfort he could.
"You've got to get back to the hangout, girl. Even if it hurts your pretty tail to ride-those dirty cowards! Because if Bill Quantrill takes the bait of Brandon, your Colonel Neade will be already for him. Think you can ride back, girl?"
"Sure, just let me rest a little, and give me some coffee if you can, please. I-I guess they would have tarred and feathered me and made me ride that rail."
"You know they would. You'll get a medal for this, girl, and you deserve one already. Even my boys don't have as much nerve as you've got."
And so, a few hours later, gritting her teeth and wincing at the pain that the jogging horse gave her, wearing a pair of woolen long johns with cotton padding covering her swollen hurts, Arabella Denburg spurred her mount back to the little Missouri border village where William Clarke Quantrill and his men waited till their next raid.
Hank Morris welcomed her with a boisterous shout and pulled her down from her horse and hugged her and bussed her, then smacked her on the behind. "Oww!" Arabella wailed.
"What's the trouble, Bella, you saddle sore!" he guffawed.
"Not hardly!" she replied. "But if you'd been set on by some of the upright citizens and taken to a barn and switched with a hickory switch until you bled, Hank Morris, you wouldn't feel so happy if you had to ride a horse."
"Why, the goddamn bastards!" he swore. "So it was the banker, I bet!"
"It was mostly Lorna Boles, she had it in for me and she turned me over to him and his fine upstanding citizens," Arabella sneered.
"Come on, we'd better see Quantrill," he urged. And a few moments later, Arabella, her heart pounding wildly, faced the cold merciless eyes of the scourge of Kansas and told her story of how she had given the money to Sheriff Horkins and how he had mentioned the unprotected little village to the northwest as fine pickings for the raiders.
"You've done a good job, girl," Quantrill rewarded her with a cold smile. "All right Hank, take about thirty men, and Miguel and Bucky and Matt Haskins among them, and get all the gold you can muster!"
"What about the girls, Cap'n?"
"As to that, that's your business," Quantrill shrugged. "Since you've just about used up Molly, I imagine a few more new fillies won't do any harm. Keep the boys from grumbling too much. Now get going. From what I hear, there is going to be a snowstorm in a couple of days, and I want you all back here so we can plan a big raid this time."
Benjamin Colby had ridden his horse to the ground and taken another from an alert farmer to whom he had told the reason for his mission. Weary and bearded, his body shivering in the cold, he had arrived in Crestine the next afternoon and gone at once to the office of Colonel John Neade. The one-armed Union officer listened, then snapped an order to his aide, young Lieutenant Clarence Young. "Mount up a detail of fifty troops, provisions enough for four days, double loads of ammunition. Circle Brandon to the other side and take what cover you can in any woods. It will be cold as the North Pole, but it will be hot news if we can string up some of those dirty murderers."
The lieutenant saluted and left the office on the run. Colonel Neade turned to Benjamin Colby, "Well, I didn't think it was possible for a girl, but I've got to hand it to that Arabella, she's got fire and spirit, Benjy. I'm thinking that when the war is over, you had better marry her."
"I plan to do it before that, Colonel, before some other scalawag gets the same idea and takes her away for good," the handsome crippled Army sergeant smilingly replied.
It was the afternoon of the second day after Arabella Denburg had returned to the camp of William Clark Quantrill. She had insisted in riding along with her lover Hank Morris on this foray against Brandon, saying that she had a vendetta of her own to settle with the decent citizens of Kansas, the same type of people who had whipped and stripped her and threatened to tar and feather her and ride her on a rail. And Hank Morris, his last suspicions fled, enthusiastically agreed and gave her a new six shooter and plenty of ammunition for it.
It was sundown when the twenty raiders dismounted and tied their horses to the barren trees on a little hill overlooking the village and moved slowly and carefully down towards the frame houses, out on what seemed an endless prairie covered by a mantle of snow.
The half-breed Miguel, always used as a scout, crept cautiously forward ahead of the others, a Bowie knife clutched in his left hand, moving towards the first house on the edge of that protective circle of little farm homes which stood alone against the elements and the human dangers of the prairie. He recognized the red frame house as that belonging to the wealthiest man of the village from what Sheriff Horkins had told Hank Morris's girl.
The door of the farmhouse opened and a tall bearded man came slowly down the steps, his gloved hand holding onto the rail as he strove for footing. Miguel sprang at him and plunged the knife into his chest, and his victim uttered a gurgling cry, stumbled onto the ground and lay sprawled on his face, his blood staining the snow. Miguel raced up the steps and burst into the house. A handsome flaxen-haired young girl of about seventeen, a book in her hands, rose in her chair with a cry of horror, the book falling to the floor. Miguel leered at her and approached. "Just yell once, puta, and you're dead!" he hissed, making a gesture with his bloodies knife. "Anybody else home."
"N-no-my-my mother has gone to Parsons, my father just went out-"
"To bad, Senorita, he won't be coming back," Miguel leered. "Now you get into the bedroom and fast, comprende?"
Sobbing, wringing her hands, the young daughter of the murdered farmer stumbled towards the bedroom while Miguel followed her, pressing the point of a sharp knife against her supple back. Once inside the bedroom, he commanded, "Get all those duds off now, and get naked!"
"Oh please, don't do that, oh please don't hurt me that way-" she wept.
With a lewd chuckle, the half-breed transferred his knife to his left hand, slapped her face and then, putting his fingers to her shirtwaist, ripped it down to her waist, then tore the camisole till her round small but beautifully proportioned and spaced carnation-tinted breasts sprang forth in all their virginal loveliness.
"Madre de Dios!" he breathed, licking his lips, "Such a tender little pigeon!" He shoved the door shut with his booted foot, then turned and began to undress, laying the bloodied knife on the top of the dresser as he snarled, "No tricks, bitch! I'll use this knife on you if I have to, so make it fast!"
Hysterically, trembling, whimpering, "Oh don't hurt me, I'll do what you want." the young girl, her eyes filled with tears, began to remove her clothes.
The other raiders had encircled the little unsuspecting village. Hank Morris came upon a young boy who had come out to go to his father's barn, and ruthlessly knifed him. Arabella closed her eyes in her horror.
And then suddenly, from the opposite side of the village there came the sound of horses' hooves. Hank Morris, who was about to open the door of the house from which the murdered boy had come, whirled and plucked his six shooter from his belt. "It's Union Troops!" he shouted, "Take cover! How did those bastards know that we were coming here?"
Then came the sound of gunfire, and two of the raiders stiffened and fell lifeless in the snow. Hank Morris, crouching behind a fence rail, fired his six shooter at the horsemen in their blue uniforms and greatcoats, saw two of them fall. A tall brown-haired man in a sergeant's uniform now rode swiftly from the left flank towards the house, and Arabella recognized him. It was Benjamin Colby.
"Look out!" she cried, "there's one of them there behind the fence with a gun!"
Hank Morris swore, "Why, you're the spy, you goddamn little redheaded whore. I ought to have let Lorna flay the skin off your cunt-but you won't be playing any more of your tricks"-and he raised his six shooter. But Arabella Denburg, in desperation born of both terror for herself and the man she loved, had fired first, and Hank Morris half-rose, clutched his belly, stared down at the blood that welled from his buckskin shirt, then stared at her disbelieving as his six shooter dropped from his hand.
"You-you-" he gurgled, but could not finish. He pitched forward and lay still.
A dozen of the twenty raiders who had come to ravage the little village lay dead in the snow, the others having surrendered, including the murderer Matt Hoskins and "Preacher" Dan Weinbold. Though they begged for mercy, they were given speedy justice. To the woods where they themselves had hidden, they were brought, their wrists bound behind their backs, nooses fitted around their necks and the ropes looped over the sturdiest branches. The soldiers whipped their mounts out from under them, leaving them to dangle and jerk under the leaden sky. Benjamin Colby took Arabella by the shoulders, staring intently at her.
"You gosh darned filly, you," he breathed admiringly. "I'm in your debt, you saved my life, you know. And here's some other news-that old Kiowa scout who told you about your cousin, he ran into a trapper. It seems the trapper was camping just a little ways beyond where the Quantrill band had taken your cousin. He saw who killed her, all right. It was the half-breed who knifed her, and the Preacher and Bucky Bolden and Hank Morris die the worst to her. So you did what you set out to do. Braver than any man I ever knew! Darned if I'm not in love with you!"
Arabella stared uncomprehendingly at him for a moment, as he added, with a frown, "You could have got yourself treated a lot worse than your cousin too. I've a good notion to turn you over my knee and lambaste some sense into you!"
Arabella giggled. "Well," she whispered softly, "since the soldiers are busy with all the details of the burying, you might just have time for that. You might just take me inside one of the houses where we can be in private. I still think I have the marks from my switching, so please don't use anything worse than your hand."
A few minutes later, in a bedroom of a farmhouse whose grateful owner knowingly and smilingly abandoned it to Sergeant Benjamin Colby and a young woman who was dressed in the costume of a Quantrill raider, Arabella lay across Benjamin Colby's lap, her britches tugged down to her ankles and the flaps of her long johns open to expose the jutting oval gloves of her love bare behind.
"You poor kid, the marks still show pretty plain," Benjamin Colby sympathized. "But I've got to spank you just the same until you say yes to a very important question." His left arm pinned her waist as he raised his right hand after first rubbing it gently over the twitching naked globes, and then his hand descended with a noisy "Smack!"
"Ouch!" Arabella squealed, glancing back at him and kicking her lovely legs. "What is the question, hurry and ask me! It hurts more than I thought it would!"
"All right! Will you marry me, Arabella Denburg?" Smack, Smack, Smack!
"Owww, ohhh, you big idiot, of course I will, you don't have to spank my poor bottom just to ask me that! Help me up so that I can kiss you!"
EPILOGUE
Arrabelle and Ben did not wait for the end of the war to get married.
They got married three days later. Ben was given a furlough and Arrabelle had her hospital assignment delayed to give them time for a honeymoon.
They wanted to get as far as possible from the shooting and from the memories of Quantrill as they could. The colonel got them a ride north on a Mississippi steamboat.
They were fortunate in their timing, there was a boat going up virtually empty. Most of the time the steamboats carried arms and fresh cannon fodder on their trips south. On their way north they carried the wounded and the maimed. The colonel delayed it's departure for a day so that they could be on it.
Arrabelle went to the colonel to thank him for the favor on the night before the ceremony. She was dressed in a more chaste and tasteful version of her whorehouse costume. That is to say, while her dress was not garish it was low cut. It swayed to reveal her ankles and a fine portion of her calf. It revealed the creamy skin of her shoulders and dipped low enough so that if it were cut straight across at the low point her beautiful nipples would have been revealed.
Colonel Neade stood, as a gentleman should, when she entered the office. His eyes could not help but travel the length of her body. The firm swelling bosoms that welled out of her cleavage and the tightly drawn in waist and her round, generous hips all reminded him of what a woman she was in bed.
He coughed to cover his embarrassment but his excitement clearly bulged from the center of his crotch.
Arrabelle smiled her sweetest smile at him.
"Colonel Neade, or may I call you John now?"
"Please do my dear, please do. I feel like a father-in-law."
"Why that's terribly nice, John. I just came to thank you for arranging the honeymoon boat ride for us. The captain says he has a bridal suite," she giggled prettily, "where we'll have plenty of room and no one, absolutely no one will disturb us. It's really two rooms, a big bedroom with a big, big bed and a little dining room. The captain says he only thinks we need one room and that just big enough for the bed. After all, the trip only takes three days," she giggled again. "I think I agree with him."
"You are," Colonel Neade said pleasantly, "the wickedest proper girl I have ever met. Don't you know that young ladies aren't supposed to talk that way? Well brought up young ladies, at any rate."
"Oh, I don't see why not," she said saucily. "You know what I'm going to be doing, and you even know how well I do it. You know Ben and you know what he thinks about me. So if it's all true and we all know it I don't see why I can't talk about it." And deciding to tease and shock him she said, "We're going to have the greatest fooferaw you ever did see. It'll probably rock the boat and make waves all the way to Grant at Vicksburg."
"You have lost all sense of propriety, young lady. I think you could use a good thrashing to lick some sense into you."
"Remember what it knocked into me the last time."
He looked shocked at what she said. He put on a stern and proper face.
"Oh gome, come. We did it. Why shouldn't we say anything about it? Don't be such a hypocrite, John, not with me. You've been in me. You've spanked me. You know all about me. Don't put on that face with me!"
She was talking improper rings around him and he was furious. Also his cock was standing completely erect almost tearing through his trousers at the thought of the pussy of a woman who was about to marry one of his friends. It made him feel guilty. He spoke to her angrily.
"Young lady, I really do think you need a good thrashing. I have a mind to throw you over my knee and give you one right now. If your father were here and heard you, that's what he would do."
"But he's not. You better do it."
"What's that?"
"But please, just your hand, not the strap. I'm still a bit tender, John, from what the good townsfolk did to me." Then to make sure she prodded him far enough, she added: "They really whipped my ass."
"Come here. Over my knee. Right here. Right now," he said in a rage.
She walked over to him and bent herself over his lap. She threw up her dress as she got on him. His one heavy hand slapped down on her firm round cheek ringing loudly in the quiet evening. It was followed quickly by another and another as his hand beat a rapid tattoo on her ass.
The stinging slaps brought the blood tingling to the whole area, front as well as back and she felt her pussy lips begin to swell and warm. She wiggled on his lap, feeling his hard cock pressing against her. She kept shifting her position until her thickly flooded plump pussy rested directly on the colonel's throbbing cock.
"Don't you think you should take my drawers down, Colonel John?" she said. And without waiting for him, she reached back and started rolling them down her pretty hips. It slowly revealed her beet red and scarred ass. It was, despite the fading scars, as lovely as it had ever been . . . two, full, round, firm cheeks with a deep cleft between them, with the end of her thick red bush just visible at the bottom.
"Oh my girl! They really hurt you. I'll kill the bastards who did that to you. Pull up your pants and go home to Ben."
She did, indeed, get off his lap. She stood in front of him still holding her dress up and calmly dropped her drawers to the floor. She raised her dress as high as she could so that he could see the way the fine white flesh of her hips rounded out from her narrow waist. Her thick red bush was directly on a level with the colonel's eyes. She waved it, like a flag at him. "Colonel John, you know how hot a good spanking gets me. It makes me need to fuck. I'm all hot and red and ready for you. And unless my eyes are lying you're more than ready, you're bursting."
"Young lady, you are about to get married. Tomorrow morning. I could no more touch you than I could my own mother."
"But Colonel John, I want you. That's what I came here for. After tomorrow, I am sworn to one man. I'm sworn to be faithful. But before that I want to enjoy this last of my freedom. I loved it with you that time and I want the last fuck of my single life, the last fuck I have with someone besides Ben to be with you. Please, John, give me that good hard prick of yours."
"I mustn't. Heaven knows, I want to. I'm burning, child, but I have some honor."
"If I forced you would it be all right? I mean if I made it so you couldn't help it?"
"I suppose. I suppose so," he said gulping. "But I don't know how you could do that."
"Oh, it's the easiest thing in the world," she said falling on her knees in front of him. Her delicate hands quickly unbuttoned his regulation pants and the long Johns underneath. She pulled out his rampant prick. It was swollen a luscious red. Her sweet, red lips kissed it.
While her mouth worked on the hot, hard cock, her hands were busy with herself. She let down her hair and unhooked her dress. Shaking her shoulders she dropped the dress away and uncovered the fine white skin of her bosom. The large uptilting globes swung against the colonel's legs. Then she made a move that surprised him.
She rose up and wrapped those fine white breasts around his hard, wet cock. Placing her hands on the outsides of her breasts she rubbed them so that his cock felt the pressure in between. Then she started rising up and down. The stiff prick, well-greased with her saliva, slid up and down as easily as if it were in her love canal.
You sinful, lascivious hussy," he yelled, grabbing her by her thick red tresses. "You win! You wanted it, now you're going to get it. The pounding you got on your ass is nothing to the pounding you're going to get in your hot twat." With that, he threw her down on the floor by her thick red hair. Then he fell on top of her. Her anxious legs parted eagerly to accept him.
He plunged all the way in on the first thrust, his hard hips slamming against the cushion of her pelvis. She liked it and she told him so. "Give me a good pounding, Colonel John. Beat me with your big cock. Give it to me hard. I love it. I love it. Give me all of it."
He bent his head to her thrusting breast. He sucked in the hard nipple and bit roughly on it. She loved it almost as much as she loved the hard cock sliding in and out of her juicy pussy. Her hands roved up and down his back, finally, coming to rest on his surging hips where they worked to make him pound even harder into her.
Closing her eyes she surrendered herself to passion. She whimpered and gasped as she arched up to meet him, meeting each thrust with equal force and even greater eagerness.
Her sobbing sounds were delicious and lascivious music in his ears, and suddenly, urged on by them, he exploded within her. She rolled back and forth as the come of her cunt slopped down to meet his spurting hose.
Her twitching hips subsided only slowly. Rather than stopping after her orgasm, she faded slowly away from it.
She looked up and putting her tender lips to his ear, said, "Colonel, now that we've gotten past your problem why don't you take your pants off and we can do it right?"
By this time, his attitude had changed. "You really are an extraordinary girl, you know that? I hope Ben knows what he's getting. I hope he appreciates it. I can assure you, I do. You are quite the best I have ever had, my dear. Quite the best!"
His shrinking cock freed him from the grasp of her clutching pussy and, using his one arm with a practiced gesture, he stood up. "Yes, I think we shall follow your advice. I will remove these encumbrances and we shall do it properly. As a goodbye, as it were. To be strictly forgotten tomorrow."
"Is that an order."
"Why, yes it is."
"I wanted to treasure the memory."
"Well, I suppose you may. But for all other purposes, it shall be strictly forgotten."
"Yes, sir," she said and she saluted him, making her big titties jiggle and bounce. He laughed. It was the first time in his regular army life that he had ever laughed at a salute. "Sir, let me help you with your clothes. Sit down, if you please, sir," she continued, giggling again.
He sat. She backed up to him and, bending over with her sore red ass staring him in the face took one of his legs between hers. She grasped his big boot by the heel. Pushing her ass out even further, she said, "Give me a push."
"Actually," he replied, "they come off rather easily. You don't need me to push you."
"I know," she said sweetly. "I want you to." At that, he placed the sole of his boot against the soft flesh of her ass and pushed. As he had predicted, the boot came off easily. She enjoyed the feel of the boot on her ass, however. She then got in position to take off the other boot. His bare foot didn't feel as good as a boot on her ass but it was good, too.
She sat on his lap to unbutton his army tunic, going slowly, stroking his hairy, muscular chest at the same time. His pants were already undone. All she had to do was pull them off. Even though he found it all very exciting he told her, "My dear child, you will have to wait a few moments. Actually, I would guess about fifteen minutes. I'm not so young as I once was."
"I don't mind at all and if there's anything I can do to help I'll be more than happy to do it. You know that, Colonel."
"All I need at the moment my dear is some time."
"All right, suppose we have a drink while we wait."
"I have some French wine in my trunk that I had been saving for a special occasion. This seems like as good a time as any. A better one."
"Allow me," she said and walked across the room consciously swaying her full, handsome hips. The Colonel watched admiringly and licked his lips. On the trip back, as she carried a bottle and a glass in each hand, he got to watch her swaying breasts. When she bent over to hand him the bottle and the corkscrew, they swung in his face and his mouth automatically opened and took a nip, to her immense delight.
She sat in his lap in the big chair as he poured the wine. Her soft fingers stroked his grizzled cheeks.
"We must," he said, "have a toast. What shall we drink to? What would you like to drink to?"
"To good fucking?" she asked saucily. "To the ghost of Quantrell, to Ben, to all the things I learned in my disguise? I don't know, what would you like?"
"Ummm, well, umm, usually I drink to a Union victory but I don't know how appropriate that is on this occasion. Not that it's inappropriate just not precisely applicable. I think we should drink to Ben and your marriage. May it be a long lasting, satisfying, successful union," he said, raising his glass. They drank to it, arms linked, the swollen nipples of her up-thrusting tits pressing against his bare chest. They both finished their glass in one gulp. He immediately refilled them.
This time she proposed the toast: "To your cock. May it have a very good night."
In the name of his honorable prick, he drank to that. Then, when his turn came again, he said, "To your sweet and excellent quim. May it always be satisfied."
She drank to that and finishing her glass at one gulp again giggled, "It always will be. I promised it at least that much." Unable to think of anything specific, she proposed the next toast to, "Fucking and sex, generally." He drank to that enthusiastically. They had one more glass without a toast and that finished the first bottle.
They opened the second one. He started to pour it in their glasses but she took the bottle from him. She got on her knees between his legs. She held the bottle against his chest and pouring it slowly she lapped it up when the wine flow reached his crotch. The combination of cool wine and a hot tongue brought his cock right up. She gave it a loving kiss. He roared with pleasure.
Looking up with her sweetest expression, her eyes wide open with innocence, she asked if he would do her a favor. He, of course, said, "Yes." Following her instructions, they changed places. Arrabelle sat in the chair and the colonel knelt between her legs. He put his mouth to her pussy and bottle between her breasts. Then he slowly poured, just as she had done.
The wine came quickly down her belly, flowing in a straight line, then fell into the wet swamp of her pubic hair. His tongue was waiting there for it. The thick pink flesh lapped at the wine like a dog drinking. It stroked her lips and rubbed with gentle roughness against her clit. She sighed happily.
"That's one thing I never had done John, I never had a tongue on my cunt. It feels good. I should have gotten to it sooner. Keep pouring. You can drink as much as you can hold, don't worry about saving any for me."
He seemed to be enjoying this novel way of drinking wine. He enjoyed it so much that even when the bottle was empty he continued his drunken lapping. By then Arrabelle was very much in heat. She threw her legs around his head, his rough cheeks scraping the tender insides of her thighs. It didn't matter to her. Her bosom was heaving, sending her huge white mounds in slow bounds. Her hips were twitching and her clit was throbbing. Moaning she pulled his face tight against her cunt and then with a high pitched yell, shot pussy juice into his mouth and down his chin. Just as she did that he bit barefully against her clit and it pushed her even higher. She tried to scream but her constricted throat prevented her. She promised herself that she would teach Ben to do that.
Now she was eager for his cock. Pushing him away she threw herself on the floor and her mouth searched eagerly for his organ. Finding it she began to suck and to stroke it with her tongue. It quickly grew to its full size. He gave her a hard whack on her quivering ass and tossed her on her back. She welcomed him with eagerness.
Colonel John Neade waved good-bye to them from the pier as the boat slowly churned its way up river. They stood on the deck waving until his form disappeared around the bend. Then they went into their cabin where they stayed until the steamboat docked in Chicago. Meals were sent up and left in the little dining room. The cabin boy got a very thorough education as he kept his ear to the bedroom door. Each time he delivered a meal there seemed to be something different going on.
He noticed that this strange woman was spanked often. It struck him as strange. Was she naughty he wondered? Spankings, he had though were reserved for young children. And he had never realized that mouths played such an important part in sex. He was just twelve and he had had his first couple of fucks but all they involved was sticking his little cock up a woman's hairy hole and then shoving it in and out until it spurted. He stood in awe of the exotic things he heard through the door. He resolved to try them at the first opportunity. Unfortunately he tried to spank an experienced whore ten years older and fifteen pounds heavier than himself. He got his ears soundly boxed. He did get the next whore to take his little cock in her mouth but it cost him a whole week's pay. She let him eat her for free but she had the pox and the poor cabin boy got it. He died three years later.
One thing positive, from anyone's point of view, that she had picked up from her experiences was a high appreciation of cleanliness. She required Ben to wash before he came to bed with her. A daily bath was almost unheard of in those days. But thinking back on the filthy bodies of, and even filthier cocks of Quantrell's men, she insisted that Ben be completely clean. He put up with this odd quirk of his wife's partly because he loved her and was willing to accept her eccentricity and partly because she showed such fast appreciation. He had never had a woman kiss, lick and nipple him over his entire body.
Since it was their honeymoon, and they had nothing but time and themselves, they put great effort and elaborate technique into their sex. She could spend an hour washing his body with her tongue before he rolled her over and rode her or she played the part of the rider instead of him.
But they both had duty to return to. Ben, to the fighting, and Arrabelle to the hospital. They saw each other when they could and when they couldn't, Arrabelle remained remarkably faithful to him.
One day in 1865, the war finally ended. Peace came to the war-wracked land. Hostilities did not end but the armies no longer clashed, blue uniform against gray uniform.
Benjamin Colby had been a good soldier. When he was mustered out he received a small pension for his wounds.
But, Benjamin Colby was a lousy business man. He wanted to cover his wife in jewels and buy her a big house and let her travel in a imagine buggy with a matched team. But all he brought home was a series of bankruptcies and law suits. The only money he managed to make was with his gun and that was more harm than help.
After the war the James boys and the Youngers rode the Missouri/ Kansas border, robbing and stealing just the way they had when they rode with Quantrell. But they did it without the semi-legitimacy of confederate uniforms. One day they rode into town to get the bank. Ben was walking down the street and when all the other good citizens ran for cover, he stayed in the street, blazing his Colt back at the outlaws. He hit one. He was worth a flat one-thousand dollars to the railroads.
The only problem was that the rest of the gang knew who Ben was and would undoubtedly come to get him. When they did they would take Arrabelle and they would treat her the way Quantrell's men, many of whom were with the outlaw gangs, had treated the women they found. Ben couldn't stand the thought of that.
The threat, though Ben wasn't afraid for himself, combined with his business failures, made Ben think of leaving. After discussing it with Arrabelle who agreed enthusiastically they took the thousand dollars and went to England.
They settled in London. But Ben couldn't find work. They found friends enough who wanted Arrabelle and what was left of the thousand dollars. Many investments were offered. One day, when Arrabelle wasn't home to protect him, Ben fell victim to a very attractive offer for stock in South African gold mines. It took every penny they had.
Arrabelle was in despair. And she was very angry with Ben. Perhaps, that's why she accepted the offer of one British Lord who had been unusually attentive to her. He was very wealthy and was willing to share that wealth with Arrabelle's long red tresses, her swelling bosom and full, generous ass.
The Lord was victim to what is called the English vice. Raised in boarding schools, and earlier by governesses and tutors, the English gentry were used to being beaten. The primary discipline for the young. Usually on the bare buttocks with a switch or a cane. Many a schoolboys' underground ballad featured epic whippings.
Coming of age, they found that their childhood bare ass experience was closely tied with their adult bare ass experiences. As they aged and their youthful vigor, which virtually forces cocks to rise regardless of circumstance, disappeared and they found themselves searching for the rod of childhood to arouse their jaded affairs.
Lord Arthur Ribley Snowbottom was one such lord. An extremely handsome, well-dressed and well-groomed man of great wealth; he was a devil with the ladies. All over London there were women panting for his bed. He had style; he had wit; he had manners; and he had charm. The only thing he didn't have was a cock that worked without a rod. No matter what the circumstances, no matter how beautiful and lascivious his partner-male or female-he could not perform without being beaten until his buttocks were raw.
Arrabelle was a vigorous, energetic woman. She was strong enough to ride a horse with soldiers or outlaws and it showed in her actions. Possibly that was why he found her so attractive and continued to pursue her. She looked like she had a strong arm with which to wield the rod.
"My dear and beautiful immigrant, wonderful American, I worship you. In my love I will obey you implicitly. I throw myself at your feet. I have gold. I have silver. I have my ancestral manor house in Sussex. I have my apartments in London and I have a Villa in Italy. I have horses and fine carriages. All.. . all of these are yours if you come with me. Your husband is unworthy of you. No, I shall not speak harshly of him. He is yours. But yet.. . . "
She received these flatteries with a gracious smile and refused the offer with as gracious a smile. Yet, when Ben lost their money and they seemed to be destitute, she contemplated the trade she had once practiced in the service of the Union and private revenge, she contemplated, as a ploy.
Lord Arthur Ribley Snowbottom's apartments were gorgeous. He had three floors in the most fashionable part of London. In the days when labor was cheap the rich had servants. Lord Snowbottom had a butler, a cook, four maids, a laundress, two menservants, a valet, a coachman, a wine steward and a housekeeper. The house, of course, with a staff of that size, was well kept.
"Ask anything," he whispered hoarsely, "anything at all and I shall do it for you. All your pleasures are mine."
Arrabelle was not sure exactly how precise this statement was. She decided to test him. She slid one foot forward so that it was exactly beneath the outstretched hand he was kissing. He noticed it. He fell to his knees and taking her shoe in his hands, bowed to it and kissed it. "Take the shoe off, Lord Snowbottom."
"Yes, my lady," and so saying, he gently slipped the shoe off her pretty foot. Then, holding it gently with his hand underneath her sole, he bent down and kissed each toe. His tongue slipped between them the way it had between her fingers and after that he sucked each toe in turn.
A small shiver ran up and down her spine as she felt her pussy begin to cream. "Yes, you may," she told him and his lips began to kiss her ankle. Then her calf. It took a few minutes for him to get above her knee and place his warm wet tongue on her inner thigh. There she stopped him. She sat down on the bed and offered him her other foot. He removed the shoe and began again there.
This time she let him get all the way to the top. His practiced tongue played around her thick, red bush, teasing and teasing until she had to say in desperation, "Eat it. Eat it." Once given instructions, he went directly to it. His tongue found her clit immediately and began flicking it at great speed. He was much more skillful than either Ben or the Colonel, the only men who had had their tongues on her clit before. She came in what was, for her, record time. The elaborate teasing ritual had brought her to a very high pitch before his tongue, his beautiful tongue hit the magic button.
But she didn't let him go as soon as her come juice rained down on his chin. She pulled his head in tight and locked her legs around him until she got seconds. And then thirds.
Realizing that she was here for business as well, now, as pleasure, she spoke to him after her third orgasm. "What," she asked sweetly, "do you like?"
"A moment, my lady," he said and went to the washbowl and cleaned the come from his drenched face.
"If my lady pleases, I like, I need the birch." Unfamiliar with the import of the phrase, she looked at him questioningly. "Arrabelle, my dear, it is necessary, if I am to have a cockstand that my buttocks be thoroughly switched. These," he said pulling a pair of switches from under the bed, "are the most efficacious."
Arrabelle smiled. She had never beaten a man's ass. One of her great pleasures was being spanked. She loved the way it heated her loins by bringing the blood to her bottom. She loved it because in that way a man showed his mastery. Here, she would be master and the idea pleased her very much. She took the two birches from him and stroked their narrow length lovingly. "With pleasure, Lord Snowbottom. With pleasure. Why don't you remove your trousers?"
He undressed with alacrity. His ass matched his name. It was white and soft, not like the asses of the rough outlaws and hard soldiers she had known. It was more like a babies bottom. The blood would redden it quickly and the welts rise easily.
"Lord Snowbottom, why don't you lean against the bedpost here? That way I can stand to the side and watch the rising effect of my efforts." He assumed the position she requested. She flexed the long rod in her hand, testing it in the air. She swished it and listened to its cruel hissing. She rather liked the sound. She whirred it around a few more times, loosening her wrist.
Then she brought it down on his soft white buttocks with a smart snap. A red streak showed where the blood flowed to the surface in response. She hit again, making another line. Soon there was a pattern as she laid it on one stroke at a time. As his buttocks reddened she watched his cock closely as the limp affair began to stir. As soon as she saw that, she began to paste into him hard and regularly without regard for individual strokes. It came slowly with the intensity of the red in back matching exactly the growth in front.
She felt herself grow warm also. New juices added to the wetness already soaking her warm twat. She changed her motion so that she felt the tug of her body pull at her crotch when she swung the birch. It was arousing her.
She had discovered a new pleasure.
"Thank you," he said a little while later. "Thank you. You are, by far, the most marvelous woman I have ever known. Far exceeding even my expectations. You are very strong. I like that. You have a powerful arm. The sensations you provided were exquisite."
"I'm glad I pleased you."
"You did, indeed. I'll give you anything you like. Money. Love. Even my noble name. Anything!"
"Lord Snowbottom, would you set me up in business?"
"Anything you like. What did you have in mind?"
"A whore house," she said with charming frankness.
"You're too good for that. I will never permit it."
"You said 'anything'. Isn't your word good?"
"I will stand by my word. Tell me, what exactly did you have in mind?"
"I used to know a saloon and whorehouse in America. It was rather a wild and colorful place. There's absolutely nothing like it in England. I think, with American girls and such a set up way over here it would be a great hit, for the novelty alone."
"What a charming idea. You shall have it. You will do it. How much do you need?"
"I'll have to figure it out. I'll go to America and bring back some girls and a picture of the place. And then I could build it exactly the same way here."
Delightful. Do it. Marvelous. Get the sketches and send them on ahead of you. While you collect the girls I shall start building your establishment and when you return it will be ready and waiting for you.
She had done it now, she knew.
Arrabelle was in business again and she knew, now, that all would go well from now on.
