In association with Bee-Line Books, Inc. by arrangement with THE Olympia Press, Paris Publisher and Editor: Maurice Girodias Paris, 1953: The Olympia Press was founded by Maurice Girodias. In those days, censorship made it impossible for writers and artists to express themselves freely in America. Many important works of literature would have been lost forever without that small publishing firm in Paris, which was first to publish such authors as Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Vladimir Nabokov and many expatriate writers-and such novels as Lolita, The Naked Lunch, The Ginger Man, The Story of O and Candy ...
New York, 1968: the battle for free expression has been won. The freedom to write, to read and to think is now accepted as one of the most authentic and valuable expressions of a true democracy. The Olympia Press is no longer a "publisher in exile": it's now famous series, the Traveller's Companion, is being published in America.
Chapter One
Whenever the ruts deepened Lud Stoner gunned the track and squeezed Abby's leg, shifting his hand upwards a testing, teasing bit each time, like a weather cock, or a straw in the wind.
"You must be looking for a high center!" she moaned fretfully.
"Never heard it called that before!"
"G-wan!" She squirmed and pushed at his arm. "You know I'm talking about this crummy road! Why come so far out into the sticks, anyway?"
"Because this is where I raped my last five women!" he said absently, ignoring her derisive laugh.
The road wasn't much more than a trail, a pair of grooves beat down into the raw prairie, first by wagons and buggies, and now by an occasional truck. There were faint tracks in the grass where some coward had straddled the ruts. Lud preferred to chance hidden rocks for the sake of smoother, faster going. Besides, he liked the idea of having tall sand grass scrape the greasy muck off the oil pan.
They were winding along a ridge, skirting rocks, small cut-banks and clumps of sagebrush. Looking down on either side he could see blighted bushes and streaks of green in the ravines that flanked the ridge. Once in a while a skinny jack rabbit would break cover and go zigzagging away from the road.
He pulled Abby's hand into his lap and stroked it with extreme gentleness. "OK, so you don't want to be number six! But how about being number one ... with my brother, Owen?"
"Say, wait a minute! I've heard about this brother of yours! I've heard he thinks there's hair on his palm!"
"Gossip!" Lud roared. He felt his face heating up. "You know how people talk? Especially country people! Sure, Owen's, sensitive-keeps to himself. What's wrong with that? He reads a lot!"
"Nope-Owen's serious-minded. He likes to read about the old West."
Abby sighed. "I'm sorry I took your fifty ... and spent most of it!"
Lud glanced at the young prosty's deadpan prettiness. She was a natural for what he had in mind. She never broke up. She could be depended upon not to laugh at Owen simply because she never laughed.
"You can do it!" he said firmly, wanting her to know that he expected his money's worth for Owen's sake. "You submit good!" he added. "Quick -but real good!"
"On a bed-yes! But these open spaces are giving me the creeps!" She nudged him nervously. "Know what I mean?"
Lud shrugged and his mouth hardened. "Just give me fifty dollars worth of acting, will you?"
"I'll try!"
She slid over on the seat. She had let her hand stay in his lap. Her fingers probed his crotch. A brassy look came into her eyes.
"Is Owen something like you?" she asked.
"Meaning?"
"Meaning-" She pressed his crotch, delineating her findings boldly.
"How the hell would I know? I don't make a study of his anatomy!"
"Well, you share a room or something, don't you?"
"Nope-one or the other of us is always out in the sheep-wagon!" Lud lied. The fact was that he and Owen were not always out with the sheep anymore. And they did share a room-had ever since their folks died and the old ranch house became so lonely-but Owen had acquired an abnormal modesty. Of course, they used to go swimming in one of the dams. Remembering back to that he was honestly able to say:
"I think Owen could outdo me some!"
"I don't believe it, but it's nice and brotherly of you to brag him up!" Abby said, dull-voiced.
"You look sick!" Lud said sharply, angered by her down-at-the-mouth attitude. If he hadn't been so familiar with her he would have sworn she was in a poor time of the month.
Abby shrugged. "No need to get sore-I'll be all right once I'm inside four walls again! All this-this openness gives me the willies!"
"Owen'll likely be in the mine. He has boarded off a short tunnel down there and furnished it up some! Doesn't that sound cozy?"
Abby groaned and raised the window on her side of the cab. She lifted her sober face to the great blue bowl of the sky. "A man as withdrawn as that-Lud, you're expecting a miracle!"
"Take your face out of the sky," he jeered lightly. "No one of your profession gets any help from up there-not while they're on the job."
"Damn you," she said icily, but nevertheless, lowered her eyes and stared straight ahead at the upcoming mountain foothills. "Brief me some more on your hermit," she demanded.
"Owen finished high school-I'm the drop out." Lud explained harshly, glaring when she threw him an odd look. "And like I said, he reads a lot about the old West-about the ghost towns and abandoned mines. He treasure hunts a little, too."
"Too many diversions and too much IQ. And if he plays with himself a little on the side-what chance has a girl like me got?" She shook her head wryly, "Tough for any woman to break up a handmade happiness like Owen's got."
"Knock it off!" Lud growled.
"You mean he don't and that you never did-not even once every other day ... as a kid?"
"Owen's no kid. Hell, he's only two years younger than I am. I'm twenty-four!"
"So you figure it's time for Owen to have a playmate!"
"Yeah!" Lud ducked his head lower than necessary to study out the trail. He felt like some kind of family pimp-propositioning a woman for his brother! And Abby wasn't making it any easier, sticking her face in the sky, communing like a religious nut.
He swung viciously on the wheel to pull the truck out of the ruts. "What whorehouse did you say you were in before you came to Rawlands?" he sneered, heading across the sagebrush towards their destination, which was out of sight just beyond a long, low ridge.
"I didn't and it doesn't matter. Besides, I don't feel like that out here!"
"Oh for crissakes, we'll have to change your mood!" he said arrogantly. He couldn't tell from her still eyes and face whether she was trying to romance him or welsh on the deal.
He stopped the truck in a grassy swale. Abby glared when he told her to get out and spread the tarp he had rolled up in the back of the truck.
"You wouldn't-not when you're taking me to your brother!"
"Think not?" He got out and spread the tarp himself, letting her imagination run wild as he weighted down the comers of the tarp with rocks to make it behave in the steady wind that swept moaningly around the truck.
"Well, where's the grub?" he growled, looking up.
Abby hadn't moved. He put a final rock on the tarp and went around to her side of the truck. She was staring at the blue rim of the distant horizon.
"Lord, it seems to go on and on forever!" she whimpered protestingly.
"Aw, you've just been cooped up in your room too much!"
He reached for the cardboard box on the shelf behind the seat. He knew what was in the box, having thrown the grub together himself before leaving the ranch earlier that morning. There were sardines, crackers, tomato juice, a jar of prunes and four cans of beer. He felt one of the beer cans. It wasn't too bad for cool.
"No" Abby was saying defensively, "it isn't because I've been in my room so much. It's this country-this flatness, this nothing sticking up or growing more'n a foot high! It shrinks me!"
"For crissakes, woman, if the pioneers had felt that way about the prairie no one would have rolled a wagon west of Saint Louis! But the wagons did roll! Ask Owen when you see him!"
"Let's go back! I don't want to see him!"
"Yeah! That's mostly it, I think!"
He placed the grub box on the hood and opened the cab on the girl's side of the truck. He didn't believe for a minute that she had spent any part of the fifty he'd given her ... unless she'd already used it to buy a bus ticket. She hated Rawlands. He'd known for some time that she'd been trying to get real moving money together.
"It's a stinking little service station town!" was the way she described Rawlands. "And all the gasoline cowboys come in wanting to get their boots pulled!"
He reached into the truck and took hold of her hand. "C'mon!" he urged.
"All right! All right!" She twisted her hand free. "Get away and let me out!"
"OK, then!" He turned and picked up the grub box. "There's nothing out here to bother you ... except maybe me!" He was about equally amused and impatient with her. "Bring the can-opener. It's in the dash!"
He had taken off his boots and his jacket and he sat cross-legged on the edge of the tarp, eating and watching Abby pick at her grub.
"You're a city girl, aren't you? Omaha, or some such?"
"Sure--right down by the stock yards where I could watch the stock trains roll in with the lambs!"
"I rode the caboose, and I was always on the lookout for girls like you!"
"That figures!"
She was trying to hold up her end of the small talk, but Lud could see that her heart wasn't in it. Her big grey eyes were jumping all over the place, cutting into the dry, windy slices of nothingness around them.
He tried to get her to eat more, but she was clearly nervous about her surroundings-or lack of them. She had her back up to the prairie. She was fighting it off.
He grinned sympathetically. Nowhere else, except possibly on the sea, was the sky blown up so big. Nowhere else was a smaller-than-life mood so apt to set in. He knew the dud-like gutless feeling. He used to get it when he was a kid-whenever his dad had ordered him away from the ranch to herd sheep. That had been like pulling two pieces of fly-paper apart. And all the stickum had always come off with the piece of paper he wasn't.
But kid and man, he'd had a job to do. And now Abby had one. People had to face up. Even whores, when they took a man's money.
He frowned, studying her. She had golden hair-lots of it. Long. Down to her shoulders. Nice white skin on smooth, nice arms. Nice legs, too, as he well knew. And other charms as well, all hidden now under the colorful print of the tent dress she was wearing.
Close as a man might look he couldn't see an L for loose or B for bad branded on her. She didn't look like a whore but she was. And maybe she needed reminding. He crawled around the edge of the tarp and began nuzzling her neck.
She took his kisses but kept pushing his hand away from her legs.
"Think about a room-a dingy little room-with the blinds drawn!" he intoned, distracting her enough to get a hand on her knees. "Think how much noise the boys made coming up the steps to get ... their boots pulled!"
He flipped up the bottom of her dress and got his fingers under the leg of her panties. He tweedled some soft hair that he knew was colored golden like the hair on her head. Abby played it straight-no wigs, no dyes.
"I ain't gonna let you undress me out here, Lud!" she protested, pushing down on her dress.
"For crissakes why not?"
She looked around blankly. "The wind-the wind is blowing!"
"So what-it's warm!" He got to his knees and stripped himself to the waist. He thrust out his chest, his muscles rippling under his skin. The wind twitched at the dark hair on his breastbone.
"How does it feel?" she asked indifferently.
"It tickles! So now how about it?"
"No-I've got to go to the toilet."
"That's no problem. Squat anywhere ... off the tarp!"
"It's too windy!"
He hooted derisively. She got up, her face suddenly gone prim and red, and disappeared into the bushes a short ways off.
When she came back she had regained her composure somewhat. "Your skin looks whiter out here," she said, laying cool white fingers along the side of his chest, tracing his ribs lightly with the splotches of red that were her nails.
"How's about seeing a little more of yours?" He pulled away and made a grab for her, but she twisted around and scrambled away on hands and knees, the bright print of her tent dress looking like a crushed sunflower against the drab prairie ground.
Dropping down he followed in like manner, his eyes glued to the lithe movement of her buttocks outlined by die thin stuff of her dress as she scampered away, his breath coming short, in anticipation. He caught up with her and slid his arms under her dress and around her hips just as she went under the truck.
She squealed and squirmed as he horsed up against her buttocks.
"Damn! Damn! Damn!" she panted, collapsing belly down on the grass.
He pulled her backwards until they were clear of the truck. Then standing astride her he worked her dress off over her head as she thrashed about, half playfully, half seriously protesting.
"I thought that fifty was to keep me in hold for your brother!" she cried, spitting grass. "Of course, if you want to take me back to town-"
She started to scramble away from between his legs again and he hooked his fingers into the waist of her panties, feeling her warm flesh, the soft down in the small of her back. He hung on and she struggled free, crawled out of them, her pink buttocks writhing, shoes flying off.
She ran across the tarp and stopped on a little mound, her legs knee-deep in wind-whipped sand grass. She still had on her bra, and her hands were covering her crotch. All he could see was about what a Bikini would show and it didn't seem enough for his efforts.
"Well, you're pretty!" he said grudgingly. "But pretty is as pretty does!"
She minced around, curling the toes of one foot. "I-I just picked up a sticker, Lud!" she cried shrilly.
"Oh, hoo-ee!" He stooped and gathered up her clothes.
"See!" she said when he straightened. She'd pulled the sticker and was holding it in the palm of one hand, but it was the other hand that he looked at. It was still covering her crotch.
He glowered. "You're putting me on!"
She shook her head. "Would you believe modesty?"
He gaffawed. "Nope-and the boys won't either ... if they ever find out I peeled you for nothing!"
"I'm sorry, Lud-but I feel so ... so NAKED!"
He hooted hoarsely. "You're blushing!" He feasted his eyes. The wind and sun were turning her white, round thighs pearly-pink. Golden ringlets of hair were caught between the fingers of the hand she was using for a fig leaf.
"Don't feel so bad-you're not naked yet!" He raked her bra loose.
She leaned aside, shaking her head. "Let me get dressed!" she demanded.
"Unh-unh! We're going to do it!" He made a teasing move to unbuckle his belt.
He caught her up. "Not as open as it's going to be!"
He grabbed a handful of her hair, and pulled her head back, forcing her lips open against his own. He could almost feel her flesh bruise. Her teeth were still clenched, and he ran his tongue around the inside of her lower lip for a while, till they relaxed and admitted his tongue completely. It thrust and darted around in her mouth, now sharp and hard as a rapier, now relaxed, spreading and sensuous.
Her nipples came erect, and brushed his bare chest, as she arched her back, still not coming in close to him. He relaxed his hold on her hair, and passed his hand over the curve of her back, from neck to buttocks, slowly and casually.
Her hand had dropped away from her crotch, and she brought both hands up and began to undo his belt, and unzip his pants. He let her, though he usually liked to undress himself, and his pants fell around his ankles, and he felt the wind hit his bare thighs. With a deft motion, she made the shorts follow them, and he stepped out of both at once, moving her with him onto a new patch of grass, guiding her with his hands on her back, his mouth never for an instant leaving hers.
He stood there with her, in his socks, nude under the all-seeing sky, in the openness of the prairie. For " a moment he felt as naked and blasphemous as he assumed that she did. He felt his member grow hard, and pulled her roughly to him, annoyed at being aroused to sentimentality, but she arched back and away, toppling them both onto the long grass.
He rolled over and she was on top of him. Pieces of straw were sticking in her hair, and she looked down at him with the eyes of a young wild animal, her ankles and feet curled around the outside of his legs.
He rolled her over again, lay on her, feeling the wind tickling his thighs and buttocks, thinking briefly of the tarp, but putting the thought aside. There was no time for that now.
He slid down in the grass and buried his face in her belly, drinking in the soft warm smell of her flesh, her slightly brassy perfume. He darted his tongue in her navel, while his fingers held onto her buttocks, kneading them and spreading them slightly apart. He slid down further, took one of her golden crotch hairs in his teeth, and pulled it out with a sharp, rearing motion of his head.
With her cry of protest, her legs fell open and her hands on his head pushed him into position. At first he turned his head aside of her slightly damp thighs, as he smelled the musky animal smell of her crotch and buttocks mingled with the smell of the crushed grass and dusty earth.
His tongue played with her clitoris for a moment, then slid between her warm moist lips tentatively at first, then fiercely straining, so that his teeth were crunched against her bone and he knew he was bruising her again. She moaned with pleasure and the taste in his mouth changed. But his member was bucking and jerking, and he could not wait.
He reared up and slid into her fully while she cried out, and drew her legs up around his chest to embrace him. He came in short, rapid jerks, the sound in his throat like an animal in rut, punctuating her high, drawn-out moans. Then he fell aside and lay still in the afternoon light, feeling the wind cold on his wet crotch and on the sweat of his chest ...
When she got up to put on her clothes, her light skin was marked by the crushed prairie grass, and there was a small blue bruise beginning to show itself beneath her shoulder blade, where she had hit a rock when they first went down.
She came back to the truck and began clearing the tarp, putting what was still good of their lunch into the box.
"Aren't we going on to see Owen?"
He grinned mockingly. "What's the use? If you're overawed out here in the sun, you would get very timid tits in an underground hole so big you can't see the top and so quiet it hurts."
"It's your fifty!" she said sullenly.
"Yep!" He threw the tarp and grub box into the truck. It sure was his fifty-his offering to family pride, and he'd give a lot more if he had to.
"Let's go!" He slapped her rump.
She stared at the mountains through the windshield as the truck roared up out of the swale.
"Then we are going to the mine?" She looked more down-at-the-mouth than ever.
Lud nodded curtly. Did she ever cry, he wondered. "Anything ever break you up, Abby-I mean to the point of laughing or to the point of bawling?"
When she didn't answer, he poked her cheek with his finger. "Were you ever raped?"
"Yes," she answered, in a low voice.
"What were your thoughts?" He reduced his speed in order to hear her better.
"I thought about my panties. I wasn't wearing any and it made it easier for him!"
"Bet he thought you were asking for it!"
"Oh no, he didn't!!" she came back sharply, curling her fingers into claws.
"Anyway you saved the real you. He couldn't break you up or reach you!"
She shrugged. "I saved myself, that's all I know, and-"
"Go on!" he prompted.
"That, I think, is what you'd better be doing! You've got company!" She nodded towards the mine.
Lud scanned the still distant terrain around the mine. There was movement near the tunnel. He stopped the truck and reached for his binoculars. With the glasses he picked up a car and travel trailer parked near the old mine headquarters.
"You're right, Abby!" he muttered. "Company!"
Probably treasure-hunters, he figured. It wasn't unusual to find them puttering around the old mine workings. Funny, Owen wasn't out chasing them off his happy hunting ground.
He adjusted the glasses carefully, and the scene on the little flat in front of the mine entrance jumped towards him. He whistled softly as he picked up the car and mobile home again. Both were luxury models. The sun glinted off glossy new paint. No jalopy-poor treasure-hunters, these!
Grunting suddenly he put the binoculars down and shoved the truck into gear. "That woman's got to be crazy-jumping in and out of the portal that way!"
"Don't flip! Imagine she's chasing Owen! That should make you happy!" Abby advised sarcastically.
Lud glowered. He was having visions of being sued for damages and didn't bother to mention the female doing a painting farther up the gulch. Also he was remembering his argument with Owen about barricading the tunnel entrance, not only as a safeguard against people, but to keep livestock from going in to get away from the heat and flies.
Owen always argued that he spent enough time around the mine to police it. And so far they had been pretty lucky with the property. The superintendent's old residence had escaped all hard-case vandalism, but Lud knew the fireplace had been used. And there was evidence that couples had cozied up to it for necking sessions. The old residence was ideal for seclusion if one wanted to brave the ten miles of primitive road from the mine to the highway.
"Nope-no Owen!" Abby had the binoculars. "Bet he ran and hid when he saw the women! Jumped into his hole like a rabbit!"
Lud's mouth straightened into a thin line at the sound of scorn in Abby's voice. He tooled the truck around cut-banks and thick sage brush for a moment in heavy silence. Then he said sardonically:
"I liked that about the guy catching you with no panties on. Try it with Owen. And have him follow you up a few raise ladders down there in the mine!"
Abby seemed to be preparing to answer when he reversed their course and a banner of dust swept in through her window. She choked and coughed. They were slowing down for the last gully before reaching the mine when he felt her hand on his arm again.
"I should get a bonus if I do it!" she threw out suddenly, flicking the corners of her mouth downward.
"If you do what?" he countered.
"Have relations with Owen!"
"Have relations with Owen!" Lud mimicked tauntingly. "For crissakes woman, you sound like a prude!"
"If I get him to lay me, then!"
Lud snorted at her muffled voice. "Careful," he cautioned scornfully. "You'll break the sound barrier and someone up there will hear you!"
He gave her a sidelong look, studying her angrily. She had turned out to be one surprise package here in the open. No lewd jokes. No loaded questions. Even the come-on look was gone. She looked cleansed, like she had been to confession or something. What would she have had to say there in the darkened booth as she leaned towards the priest and put in a long-distance call to God? Dear God, I call myself a waitress but I only put in time at Gurd's hamburger joint so I can meet the boys. My real workshop is over Brady's hardware store. Sometimes I have three or four fellows there at once, waiting in the bathroom while I'm busy in the bedroom. And I sin and sin and sin for money.
Lud leered disagreeably and pinched her leg, making her twist on the seat as they started a slow ascent out of the gully.
"That's for the blank dates I drew when you first hit town!"
"But you should have known Gurd wasn't paying me much more than cigarette money to sling hash! What could have been clearer?" Abby protested.
Lud grimaced. "Oh, I dunno! You hated the town from the start. I think you were putting us dumb Rawlands guys on! You could have come right out and said:
"Look, Lud Stoner, I'm a whore, here by mistake in this miserable burg, this wide place in the road, this thistle race! I was misinformed about its size and no one bothered to tell me that the mining boom died when the mines shut down in the mountains!"
"And you could have played with my breasts!" Abby joked shrilly. "For nothing!"
"Breasts are for babies!" he objected strenuously. But it was true. She had loosened her blouse and bra. He could still remember how he'd made a grab for her buttocks to avoid being mothered and smothered. He hated women who were showy with their tits. No topless waitresses for him!
He had been rough with her, trying each time to get what he'd gone up to her room for, but nothing happened, until one night, when, with a peculiar inflection of her voice, she had made "No, Honey!" sound like "No Money!" Or maybe he'd just been worked up to a point of readiness that caused him to hear it that way.
Yep-a curvy dame with financial troubles ... past, present and future.
He looked at her as they rolled up onto the flat in front of the mine. "I'll double the fifty, but you'll have to get to him-take his pants down. Get your pinkies on it. Do anything!"
"Shall I go this far?" She slithered to the floor, pout-mouthed and put her head on his lap. Her eyes rolled upwards. They were hazed with the look.
"Get back up here!" he ordered harshly. He knew damned well she would do it to him, to Owen ... to them both ... for a hundred dollars.
She regained the seat. Her expression had changed. She didn't look so clean. She had her back to the prairie and her face to the mean old mine buildings.
Chapter Two
The woman came out of the tunnel again. This time Owen was with her. So, too, was a small band of sheep.
Lud noticed first things first: the sheep carried the Big S Stoner brand. That made them strays-most likely from the herd nearest the mine.
He looked straight at Owen, faulting him for having argued against a barrier to keep people and animals out of the mine.
The sheep broke wildly around the truck and then bunched and started up the gulch. Owen moved out to follow.
"Let 'em alone!" Lud snapped, forestalling Owen's attempt to get away. "I'll call the ranch on the truck set and have Miller get in touch with Brown. I think they're from his herd!"
He turned and went back towards the truck, going wide around the woman, who was very tall and wanted to be noticed ... probably because she was about twenty and hot and didn't get much.
He upped the aerial on the front of the truck and then leaned in to switch on the set. While the tubes were warming he drummed his fingers on the hood, wishing, as he always did when he used the homemade short wave, that he'd gone to transistors.
"This thing is equipped like a patrol car!" Abby said, looking at the mike in his hand. "Makes you a kind of rangeland policeman, doesn't it?"
"Nope-just boss of the Big S!"
The set was warm, but before he put through his message to the ranch he looked at Abby.
"Owen'll go into the mine. There's a flashlight in the dash. Follow him!"
"Owen won't go anywhere with that woman watching! She's a head taller than he is!"
"I'll take care of her!" Lud promised.
"You will?" Abby stared curiously. She was looking beyond him. "Better watch out-that one can look down on you, too!"
"Keep your, mind on Owen!" Lud advised, and put through his message.
The matter of the stray sheep taken care of, Lud was ready for the trespassing people. He went straight to Owen.
"Did these people tell you their names and why they're here?"
"Yeah!"
Owen fidgeted. He had already edged back to the mine entrance.
Lud got around behind. He wasn't quite ready for Owen to make a getaway into the mine so Abby could comer him.
"Give me a knock down to them then!"
"Why? Their name's Randal. From the East somewhere. Saw the mine from the road and came over to do some painting! They won't stay long. They've got reservations at Brandt's Resort."
Lud heard footsteps and glanced around. The tall girl was coming towards them. She had a nice smile that spread some prettiness over her long face. Her arms were folded, and she walked with a shrugging motion that pushed and jiggled her breasts very noticeably.
"She keeps on twitching like that and she's going to cut her hair off with her shoulder blades!" Lud observed, looking around to wink at Owen. Owen was gone.
Lud braced himself. The girl didn't just stand- she loomed. Looking up at her from his average height, he had the uncomfortable feeling that the first thing she would say was, "Hello, little man!"
She was dressed in a light-weight knit outfit. One-piece blue, with silver threads on the cuffs and neck that went with the silver combs and gewgaws she had stuck in her thick coal-black hair. She had curves, too, but they were long and didn't assert themselves immediately, and a man tended to lose interest before he'd studied them out. This was probably the reason she'd picked up the habit of folding her arms and shrugging her breasts around. It was an exhibition-a vain glorious display of mammary magnificence.
She was doing it now ... and eyeing him boldly. He dropped his gaze and kicked at the dirt. Maybe she was the one he should send into the mine.
He looked up, catching her tallness again. He grinned. Naw-she'd never do for Owen. She'd scare him to death. Hell, she even had him, pulling back.
She was holding out her hand and saying, "I'm Grace Randal!"
"Hi, Grace! I'm Lud Stoner!" He took her hand and held it, glad for a way to keep her arms unfolded. He stole a quick glance at her breasts and choked. They were enough without nudging. Too bad he wasn't a breast baby.
She was smiling, apparently liking her hand in his, wanting to be very friendly, but there seemed to be something that had to be settled first. She twisted around until she was squared away at his side and could see the truck.
"Isn't your girl friend going to get out?"
"For Owen-maybe. Not for me!"
"Christine won't like that ... and I wouldn't have liked it the other way! Isn't that just like sisters?" She was openly possessive now in the way she linked her arm through his.
"How long have you girls been around the mine?" He understood her angle about Abby, but not Christine's.
"M-mm-long enough."
"You mean they got acquainted-that Owen made up to your sister?"
"Not exactly. But they communicated. Young people can, you know!"
"Young people? That makes me an old man at twenty-four!"
"And call me a twenty-two-old granny!" she laughed. "But truly-can we communicate without touching or speaking?"
"Who needs it? I like to touch and feel!"
"Oh, so do I!" Her eyelashes quivered. They were long, thick and curled-up on the ends. She had big, dark, dreamy, brown eyes, too. But her eyebrows were too thin. Massacred with tweezer and blade. Her nose was long and shiny, and her lips at least one kiss too wide, though they were firm and full.
"We really came over here to paint!" she said, and then her eyes began telling him that what she'd just said wasn't necessarily so. Not now, anyway. "I saw the sheep grazing near the mouth of the tunnel. They looked so picturesque!"
"And what did your sister see?"
"She saw your brother!"
"Did he pose?"
"N-no, not really. But she got his wave length; he gave her one long look before he hurried into the mine!"
"Got his wave length-how do you know?"
"Because she started painting!"
"Let's go look!"
"Oh, no-it would be obscene to look!"
"For crissakes, why?"
"Because she isn't painting Owen! She's painting how she feels about him!"
"Now listen-" Lud cuffed back his hat impatiently. "That sounds like crap!"
"Perhaps," she admitted, leaving his side and going to the mouth of the tunnel, walking with a hip-shot slouch that Lud felt certain she thought was very voluptuous.
"Anyway, I prefer poetry!" she said, edging into the mine. "It takes one to the heights and depths!"
"Wait!" He sprang around in front of her. "Let's leave the depths for another time!"
She swayed against him. Her heady perfume was running about neck and neck with the warm, natural smell of her body.
"I like the heights, too, but I'm not really dressed for climbing!" She linked her arm through his again.
"We'll stay on the level!" he promised, leading her out of the mine.
He winked at Abby as they went past the truck, noting that she had the flashlight out of the dash.
"Is there anything in that building?" Grace pointed at the old mine headquarters.
The rocky ground wasn't for high heels; nevertheless she was making enough headway to pull him along.
"I just love being guided around. Especially through old, empty buildings!" she purred enthusiastically.
"Owen should be doing the honors!" Lud groaned. "He's the authority on old mines!"
Grace looked back at the truck. "That girl is getting out of the truck with a flashlight. I wonder if she'll jam Christine's line of communication!"
Chapter Three
Lud went through the former mine headquarters, opening windows and giving heed to the sounds in the old building. The place-so long deserted and minus warmth and shifting life-was a sound-trap wherein the soft snapping and creaking of the boards in the floor and walls became sly whispering and footless movements to be cornered and throttled by the embrace of silence.
"There's a man-smell about this place!" Grace was admiring the huge fireplace.
Lud grunted. One of the windows was swollen and stuck. "You mean I smell musty?"
"I mean all this, the atmosphere!" She looked out a huge bay window that faced east, towards the mine tunnel and the prairie. Her cheekbones began to glow. "I love the way this place is built ... and that great pit of a mine hole-it-it's Herculean. So masculine!"
"If you're getting high on the idea that you've found a spot where there have been no women before you, you'd better cool it!" Lud warned, amused by the way she was carrying on.
"Oh, I suppose there were a few squaws around!" she said, using a tone that swept those creatures back into the corner with the cobwebs and legends.
"Oh, sure!" Hiding a grin, Lud walked across the room to another window. "I used to be able to see where they lived through this window, but the trees are getting too tall along the gulch road now. Anyway, your squaws came in colors-blondes, browns, in-betweens ... and one gorgeous red-head named Bricky!"
"A settlement?"
"Nope-a whorehouse. At least that's what Owen says. He did some research on this old mining community. The buildings are still there-no the gulch about a quarter-mile-the one the girls lived in ... and a saloon."
"How romantic-all those girls in a wild gulch! Is there anything left to show they were actually here?"
"Yeah-there's some old bedsteads, broken commodes, stale lust and the Professor's ghost!"
"Professor?"
"Yeah-the music-maker. Every old brothel of any standing had one! The sheep herders claim that if you walk through those rooms up there you'll hear the Professor playing a love song on his violin that'll drive a man crazy with lust for a woman!"
"Let's go!"
He jerked towards her. "Where?"
"Up there ... to that house. I want to see a man going crazy with lust for a woman!"
She meant it ... if he was willing, and he halfway was until she folded her arms and began pushing her breastwork to the fore.
He turned away from the window. "Well, have you seen enough?"
She followed slowly as he went back to the other window. "Maybe if I'd dye my hair red like Bricky's!" she said wistfully. "Who was she, anyway?"
"She was the madam, the gorgeous queen of the house-the one all the boys wanted!"
"Window's dirty!" Grace muttered, pressing her face to the glass. "If it wasn't I'd be able to see how strong Christine's feelings are for Owen!"
"You said we weren't supposed to look!" Lud reminded her.
"Did I?" She drew back, smiling drearily.
"Yeah-and now your nose is dirty, sticking it into other people's business!"
"What else is a long nose for? Besides, Chris isn't people-she's a sex-pot with a tremendous IQ and a liking for everything that's troublesome and avant-garde. Right now it's the sexual revolution. She worries me!" Grace sighed dismally. "Showing an interest in Owen is just about the first normal thing she has done since we started this trip!"
Lud grinned, feeling his face might be mirroring some of her dreariness. "I think we're even because Owen doesn't often show a normal interest in girls, either!"
Grace looked pensive. "This is a fascinating place. I hate to leave. Brandt's will be just a repetition of the resorts we've been seeing all across the country. But Chris might corrupt your brother. And that would be a shame! He's such an untouched type!"
Lud winced and drew a deep breath. He hated to admit it-but corrupting seemed to be what Owen needed to make him normal. He didn't care to have Grace but, he knew he couldn't get one sister without the other and ... well, Abby positively wasn't a corrupter. She belonged with the union squares- never would make it with any new movements.
"Why hell, why not stay here then?" he asked impetuously.
"You mean it?"
He absorbed a look that told him plainly he would have to prove it to her. And the look was accompanied by the disgusting showy move with her breasts. Nevertheless he said:
"Sure, I mean it. There's water and electricity. Even a brick outhouse. And you would be welcome to use this place if you wanted." He glanced around at the antique furniture-a roll top desk, a horse hide couch, a few ladder-back chairs-and then back to her. She was staring out the window.
"Well, here she comes, happening and all!" Grace sounded defensive.
"Happening? Oh, you mean the picture!"
"Nuh-she put the picture in the trailer. I mean the happening she thinks happened to us. A man and woman alone together means only one thing to her. Sex!"
"You've got to be kidding!" Lud crossed over to the door and jerked it open. "Come in!" he snapped, grabbing Christine's arm.
The girl swung against him boldly, giving him the firm feel of her backside and a sullen look. Then she slithered away like she knew he had just been had and couldn't possibly be of any use to her for some time to come.
Christine looked petite beside her big sister. And she was pretty-would have been even prettier without the sullenness and straining to put herself across as the limit.
Lud made a wide gesture that included the whole room. "I was trying to let this to your sister rent free, but as you can see it's dirty and unfurnished! No place for clean-living girls!"
He wanted to shame the girl. Shake her up. Maybe topple the towering IQ. He got a glimpse of her eyes and he would have called them brown and most likely very pretty when she wasn't ditching so much of her naturalness.
He shuffled his feet and looked down at the bare, dusty floor. For crissakes, if he'd had any ideas about laying Grace, he would have headed her upslope, towards a thick bed of leaves and pine-needles under the trees.
Lud raised his eyes. Christine was at the window, showing him her back. That was all-she had let him feel, too. She had a slim graceful figure, rigid with youthful dignity. Her hair was lighter than Grace's, and silkier. She wore it long, below her shoulders and unadorned. She didn't look like a corrupter. Even her buttocks appeared to be clenched against intrusion.
He sidled over to Grace for reassurance. "You sure she's a corrupter?" he whispered.
"Careful-she'll strip right here in front of us to prove it!" Grace whispered back warningly.
Christine stirred at the window. "That girl came out of the mine and got into your truck!"
Grace clutched his sleeve. "If you brought that woman out here to invade Owen's privacy, you should be ashamed!"
"And that'll make two of us if you're not careful with that nose!" Dizzy deductions were arranging themselves in her eyes like the mixed fruits and symbols in a slot machine. He grinned at her confusion.
"Owen's girl-shy!" Christine spoke suddenly. "And what boy wouldn't get that way out here in this wilderness area ... herding sheep?"
"Wilderness area! Herding sheep!" Lud bellowed. "You're condemning this country because it's open and uncrowded?"
He gestured towards the prairie outside, aware that both girls were watching him like they thought he'd flipped. But he didn't care. Everyone (he remembered how Abby had reacted) was finding fault with the country, being afraid of it or accusing it of denying Owen the wherewith to grow up properly. Hell! He'd grown up here, too! Maybe that made him a monster. He suddenly felt very aggressive.
"Cities are the most God-awful dumps!" he bellowed. "Full of filthy revolutions!"
Christine turned back to the window. She began humming and gyrating her hips.
"It would be nice if the city could meet the country and get acquainted, wouldn't it?" Grace was looking at him questioningly.
He gaped back at her uncomfortably. "Well, can't it? I thought everything was settled. Aren't you going to stay?"
"Nothing is ever settled for very long. We need to be reassured ... made to feel welcome. Don't we Chris?"
Christine didn't speak or turn, but the gyrations of her hips increased and the movements looked very affirmative.
"I'll do the best I can," Lud promised.
Grace smiled and made a showy move with her breasts.
Chapter Four
"Go on-go after her!" Lud elbowed Owen in the ribs.
Abby was halfway across the street, walking swiftly.
"What the hell did you say to her?" Lud gave his brother a sharp look. "She acted funny all the way in from the mine!"
"She tried something on me!" Owen muttered. "I called her a name!"
"But-oh, for crissakes!" Lud leaped from the truck and hit the street running. He caught up with Abby as she was starting up the back steps to her room.
"Abby ... the kid didn't mean anything!"
"All right, but that didn't keep me from getting hot and bothered!"
She flounced up the steps and went into her room. He followed.
"Abby, if he-"
"I told you-he didn't! And he wouldn't let me!"
She pulled the shades and began to undress. He dallied awkwardly by the door.
There was a long mirror beside her dresser. He could see both sides of her nakedness at once-the softly divided rounds of her buttocks, the large inviting fluff of hair on her groins. His crotch began to bulge and crawl.
She caught his eye in the mirror and moved closer to her reflection in the glass, until she was pressed taut against it, thigh to thigh, moist furry hair to hair, nipples pressed flat against reflected nipples. As if remembering herself suddenly, she whirled around and said "He was like a blind stud-rearing and pawing the air and running the wrong way! You going to run the wrong way, too?"
Lud felt the muscles stretch tautly across his stomach and groin. He locked the door. He wasn't going to run at all-he was going to strip and stand before her with his tight-sprung desire and upright, thrusting member.
"I'm hot!" She rolled her head, switching her hair about her shoulders like a golden cloud.
He took off his shirt and unbuckled his pants, loosening them so that they hung about his hips, leaving a small area of dark, tightly curled hair protruding. He sat down heavily on a chair and lifted his legs with a mock-weary grunt. "OK-I've had myself one hell of a hard day, but go ahead and pull my boots!"
She approached him slowly until she was standing alongside him and, with a cool mocking glance, took one boot in her arms, bending slightly so that the heavy tip rested against her belly and the heel and cruel shining spur almost touched her crotch. She pulled, and the boot came off, exposing his bare foot.
He lowered that leg and raised the other. With a sardonic look she turned her thighs. Her hands closed around the boot to pull it off, and he placed his other, bare foot against the buttocks spreading in front of him invitingly. He pressed his whole foot back and forth along the darkening crease, pushing it open. She gasped and whirled as the boot came off. She was trembling.
In one quick motion he had stood up and allowed his trousers and shorts to drop. She whistled appreciatively as his now free member thrust upward urgently and powerfully.
She sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled him close, his tool upright and pulsing. She leaned over him and closed her arm over it, imprisoning it gently between her armpit and breast. His stomach jumped with an exquisite excitement, and he clawed the bed, feeling an urgent hot need to thrust into her hard.
With a quick intake of breath she plunged her face into his stomach and for an endless second he felt the hot wetness of her tongue writhing inside his navel. Her tongue lashed a tickling streak across his gut. In one motion he flung her lengthwise across the bed. He knelt alongside her, his heavy rod aimed at that place that was made for it, hidden now from view by her tightly pressed legs.
"Want to keep the fifty anyway?" he asked generously, off the top of his head-not really having the money in mind at all.
"Not anyway!" she panted. "This way!"
Slowly he lowered himself onto her until his full weight was on her, head to head, toe to toe, her breasts crushed against his. She groaned throatily and writhed under him. Placing his hands under her buttocks, he began to knead and mash them deliberately and intently, while he forced her lips open with his and thrust his tongue into her mouth slowly and completely.
She closed her mouth on his tongue and sucked greedily, and his hands tightened convulsively on her buttocks. She arched under him and whimpered in her throat, turning her head from side to side, and grinding her pelvis. His member lay crushed against her belly, its urgent need forcing his tongue blindly in and out of her grasping mouth.
Giving a soft scream, she parted her legs and drew them up, encircling his stomach and pressing tighter and tighter. She groped for his member and finding it, guided it with trembling hot fingers until it stood poised, ready to enter, against her wet, pulsing crotch.
The room was hot. She'd drawn the shades and forgotten to raise a window and her skin was wet and slick. Lud trembled violently. Both their breaths were now coming in deep, harsh draughts, in the same rhythm as their undulating groins.
Now, Lud thought, and she whispered it, "Now!" She was holding her lips open with both hands, legs thrust upward. She lay there opening for him, arching her groin up invitingly, and with a ripping lunge he plunged his member into her, in and up. Her legs tightened around his waist convulsively, her fingers clawing his back.
They pumped, moving blindly back and forth in an ever increasing tempo. A heat spread through his body, which began a trembling arching, in its own convulsive rhythm, as the pumping began to explode something inside him. His spine was kinked with lightning.
She gathered him in more and more, holding him close like money in the bank. Wrapped him in lips and hair and a pulling warmth that was as sweet and sharp as the Blues.
Suddenly, she wriggled her buttocks aside and he was out of her. You lousy bitch, he thought, you've cheated me again. But he was powerless, he could not stop pumping, her hands were grinding his buttocks, her nails digging in, and with short, mouth-ripping groans of pleasure, he came.
Chapter Five
Owen got out to open a woven-wire fence gate. Lud looked beyond him, across the green knolls of the horse-pasture to the two-story ranch house on the big hill. Fence made a place look civilized. He liked that and he didn't. But given two more years he would have the whole damned ranch under sheep-tight woven wire! Then no more dependence on the bums who called themselves herders these days. No more taking their sass or spelling them off while they went on a toot.
With the place fenced he and Owen could lay back and let some good living catch up with them. Maybe they'd even socialize a little. Probably be good for Owen. He was getting so withdrawn and sensitive you couldn't talk to him anymore. And for sure he would blast that mine shut so the kid wouldn't have a hole to crawl into.
"You got a cigarette?" Owen was back in the truck but Lud felt like he was still alone. And he knew Owen was alone, too-alone with his very private affair with loneliness. Dad and Ma had left thousands of sheep, plenty of land and a worked-out gold mine, but they hadn't left any instructions on how to reach their sensitive, withdrawn youngest son.
Lud stopped the truck on the ranch yard and Owen made a break to get away.
"Wait-I want to tell you something!" Lud yelled.
Owen came back to the truck. Lud got out and put an arm around Owen's shoulders. They'd been close when they were younger. Lud never gave up hoping it would be that way again.
"Yeah?" Owen was meek. Too meek. And even standing still his eyes were walking away. You reached for him and he wasn't there and suddenly Lud felt like tearing down some fence instead of building it.
"Owen, you need your ashes hauled!" he blurted.
Owen looked stricken and now Lud felt his own eyes walk away. He hadn't meant to get stark with the kid, but it had been coming on-this angry thrust of his pride against the boil.
"Naw-" he retreated, dropping his arm from Owen's shoulder-"I just wanted to tell you that I stacked that last load of new posts in the tall weeds where Shulte's barn used to stand."
Owen swallowed. "I can do the posts but I don't know about the wire. Where you gonna be?"
"Out relieving Miller. He's got chores to do around the ranch. I'll try to pick up another herder after the Fourth. Just go ahead and set posts. Don't try to stretch any wire!"
Lud watched Owen got a horse out of the barn. "Take the truck if you want to!" he yelled.
"Tools are all out by the fence, aren't they?"
Lud nodded.
"Then I'm going to ride this new bronc. He's getting pretty frosty!"
Leather began to pop the moment Owen was in the saddle. "Yeeah!" Owen yelled as the thick barreled sorrel two-year-old went up and came down stiff-legged, bellowing like a mad boar hog.
Owen sat straight in the saddle no matter how the sorrel twisted and reared, straight and lithe and strong.
"He's a good-looking boy!"
Lud reached out and circled the waist of the speaker. He drew her in, squeezing. "He's too handsome!"
"Nice waist for a forty-year-old housekeeper, huh? And he's not too handsome!"
Lud laughed. He felt good again ... watching Owen prove that he still liked to compete. And Amy Miller did have a nice waist and hips, which had never been spread by childbirth. Maybe that was why she didn't mind being squeezed. Maybe she thought she'd missed out on something.
"Your pet's doing himself proud!" Lud nodded toward the noisy, dusty battle in the yard. "Much man there ... yet!"
Amy bridled. "You make it sound like he was on the skids!"
"Do I?" Lud waved at Owen, who had subdued the sorrel and was riding out of the yard. He turned and went through the back door into the kitchen. Amy followed and stood watching while he got a can of beer out of the refrigerator.
He eyed Amy over the can as he drank. Then: "So you haven't kept your promise to go to bed with Owen!"
Amy gasped. "I never promised!"
"Like hell. It's been in your big, baby-blue eyes for weeks! 'Sfunny Carl hasn't seen it. But then you've been guiding Carl between the shafts so often that his ears are pulled out like blinders!"
"Why damn you, Lud!" Amy crossed to the refrigerator and helped herself. "Just for that we'll both load up on beer and do it!"
They raised a can of beer to each other and laughed. It wasn't the first time the dare had been on. Lud wasn't sure it would ever happen. All he knew was that it could.
He put his beer down and went around the table. Her big, blue eyes went wide as he approached. She was a soft-faced, soft-bodied woman, but she was firm between the legs ... and virgin small. He'd had a hand on it once, right here in the kitchen. He knew she was remembering that hand and wanted it again ... wanted the surprise of his sudden grasp, fingers digging powerfully and with rough demand into her, pinching and squeezing.
She pressed close, legs spread, and her body closed around him like a poultice, hot and drawing. Even through their clothes he could feel that intense heat, sucking him into her.
"Think Owen would like this?" she whispered, tight-voiced and quivery, writhing against him.
"T'hell with Owen," he whispered hoarsely. "There's no one around but us chickens!" His strong, demanding hands moved down her back roughly. He cupped her buttocks, parted the cleavage, kneaded and rolled the rounded flesh, till he could feel the small hard opening throbbing through the material of her dress.
She pulled back, hands on his chest, face twisted with denial.
"You don't need me, Lud, and passion's no excuse!"
He released her and laughed harshly, unbelievingly, smuggling to control himself. "I'm not handsome enough-you're holding out for Owen!"
She collapsed into his arms and gently overwhelmed him with a whimpering kiss. "Yes-for Owen!" she said between kisses. "I won't sin for no reason!" She was stroking his face. "So, just you be good, my square-jawed, grey-eyed bully-boy!"
Lud backed away, chagrined. "Amy, you're just a damned softie do-gooder!"
He left the kitchen with a taut smile. It was still on his mouth as he packed the things he would need out in the sheep wagon. Every time he laid a garment out on the bed he saw things as they might have been between them.
It was fun to imagine how it would be with Amy on a bed. He had seen her naked once when he had come unexpectedly into the house and caught her going from the bath to her room.
She had been fixed with surprise and he'd ogled the squeezed, dimpled girth of quivery thighs that crowded the hairy hillock in the middle. He could still see her fleshy buttocks churning as she'd barefooted it down the hall.
"Hey, fat-and-forty-I'm leaving!" he yelled.
She answered from her room at the end of the hall. The door was closed. He went back and tried it. It was locked.
"Lud!-I'm getting ready to bathe!"
Sure-just like that other day. He turned away, his face tensing up again as he walked. If he ever caught her in the dark where he couldn't see that softie do-gooder smile-whooee!
Chapter Six
Lud drove around the big bunch after he had sent Miller back to the ranch. Whenever he crossed a ridge he was conscious of his aloneness inside the vast circle of the horizon. It didn't wash over him in suffocating waves like it had when he was a kid, but it was still there ... the edge of the same awe Abby had felt yesterday.
Aloneness! There was a hell of a lot of that on the Stoner ranch. Always had been, but it was worse now, since the ranch boundaries had been pushed back. When he was a kid, his old man had just begun to buy out the small ranches. His thoughts swung about the vast acreage. There were still a few small outfits clinging to the Stoner borders. And as far as he was concerned they could stay, for when you lost the neighbors you lost potential help and herders and-what was really the dreary end-you lost the girl supply.
He often felt like selling out. What was the use of being an owner if one had to do all the work? Of course the answer to that was to grow richer and get the whole place fenced. And then, all be and Owen would have to do was let the sheep grow wool and have lambs.
Yep, all they had to do was hold-keep on doing battle with droughts and blizzards and sheep-tics and tape worms. The loneliness would take care of itself. He had a routine: hard work, a periodic trip to Rawlands for a night with Abby. Owen? He had a routine, too. Some few busy bodies claimed they'd ridden up on Owen and caught him indulging. Lud's face caught fire. He'd never caught Owen. He didn't want to. But he sure as bell wished Owen had ridden out to find a girl to break in on. If their old man's driving ways had sparked any rebellion in Owen, it had never come out. As for himself-the old man might have been able to send him out to herd sheep but he couldn't make him stay there. Not at night, after the sheep had bedded down. And not with the Shulte ranch only an hour's ride from his sheep wagon.
The Shulte's were gone now, sold out to his old man years ago. Where their ranch buildings had stood there was nothing but plain prairie, except the weedy spots where the barn and backhouse had stood. He had only to look at this latter spot to be reminded of Artice Shulte, a slight, brown-faced girl with hard, thin-fleshed legs.
He remembered throwing the sheep on the bed-ground and riding away from the wagon in the dusk. He hadn't minded the ride or the chances he took. (It was an unwritten law of the sheep country that a herder should stay with his bunch.) But the law of a tingling crotch had been written first and that was the one he'd followed ... straight to a girl who had squeezed his hand at a Fourth of July celebration in Rawlands. Straight, at least, to the place where she lived, for he'd made no date. And he couldn't go calling at the door of her house, not with her old man and his meeting often like they did. Shulte would've been sure to tell on him for leaving the sheep.
No-he'd had to slink around Shulte's dark yard, petting the dogs to keep them quiet until Artice came out to go to the backhouse.
Their first embraces had, out of necessity and inexperience, been quick panting bungling efforts to do it. Her, "Got to go in!" became a refrain with two meanings: he wasn't hitting the mark and there were only so many excuses a girl could think of for prolonged visits to a backhouse.
Often he returned to the sheep wagon with nothing but memories of a few sweet seconds of fuss and friction.
Artice had probably been about his own age-fourteen-that first night. He'd pressed her close and could remember the sharpness of her bones and the softness of her mouth. He had never found her breasts beneath the voluminous folds of her dress, pulled up around her chest. But then he had never tried. He'd been too busy lower down.
He couldn't remember her ever saying anything except those hurried panting words. "Got to go in!"
He'd gradually corrected his faults, going back over each meeting and recalling everything with bated breath and a joyful eye to the future. First of all, never having had any, he'd allowed the warm softness between her thighs to delude him. And then, at the very last, when she'd opened her legs and introduced him fully to his mistake, his hips had been bucking, and he'd been through and out in back of her, jabbing his sparkler in the air.
The night he made it with Artice, he had been stretched out on the ground with his pants off. He had lain there for some time, quietly, only half-aroused by the air on his body. The wind was cool, though it was late in the spring. It raised the gooseflesh on his arms and chest, and rippled lightly through the tightly coiled hairs of his groin, from which sprang his semi-limp member. It carried the smells of sagebrush and prairie flowers, dust and sheep, all mingled together, and he felt excitement, the tight pressure of anticipation in his chest.
When she came out and stood beside him, he pulled her down and removed her panties in silence. In the quiet dark his hand brushed across her skinny young body in silence and found her small, moist mound. His fingers closed over it gently. He was indulging a love affair with his hand for this hairy softness. Back and forth he stroked lightly, his fingers hypnotically rubbing the moist hot-plumpness of her young virgin parts.
As her emotions became stronger, she struggled to sit up. In doing so, her hand accidentally closed around his tool. Then, in a welter of embarrassment, she closed her eyes and looked away. She seemingly disowned the hand, refusing to acknowledge by the slightest slackening of her grip, what she was doing.
His tool in her hand was still only half erect. He too lay there with his eyes closed, but he began to breathe heavily. She tightened her grip, then loosened it, over and over again, moving her hand rhythmically up and down. Then with her fingers she began to trace light delicate lines along his member, up and down its sides.
A heat began in his groin and buttocks as her fingers worked, and his muscle now began to expand and enlarge, pulling out from him. Her fingers entwined themselves in his hair as his breath came in small gasps, and then suddenly they were compellingly plucking at the now swollen tip of his throbbing rod, and he was being pulled forward, his groin moving in short urgent stabs.
She fell back on the ground panting "Got to go in! Got to go in!" He agreed with her wildly, wordlessly, with a frenzied, rapturous pushing and pressing that made her moan and lift her knees to the sky.
Afterwards, of course, he had known that, embarrassed or not, she'd used her hand to guide him.
Chapter Seven
Christine was a-straddle him-had his pants bulging. He knew she could feel him along the crotch. He could feel her.
It had all come about because the sheep had headed into the south wind, which had taken them into the territory adjacent to the mine, territory Christine was claiming as a private hunting preserve. She hunted with a palette, canvas and easel. At least those were the items she was carrying when she'd come swinging down on him demanding that he lie for a painting.
"But I thought people usually sat or stood for a thing like that!" he'd protested, straightening up from tinkering the truck motor.
"My paintings aren't things like that!" she'd countered cutely. "Besides, I need something to sit on! I think you'll do!"
He had pulled the hood down, put his tools away, turned to her with a grin and said:
"It should be good-I understand all you're after is the feeling!"
That brought them up to now ... and he was stretched out having her feelings about him transferred to the canvas she'd propped up just beyond his shoulders.
Suddenly he was having some feelings of his own. "How're you coloring me, Chris?" he asked, squinting up at the sun. "Hot?"
"Well, your face and neck are a nice mahogany-" she opened his shirt-"Your chest is a lighter brown and beneath your pants I would expect to find the skin lighter still, or am I assuming too much?"
Lud grinned at the logical, and startling, course of her thoughts. Still, she wasn't the only one who could have startling thoughts.
"Nope, you're not!" he admitted. "But why assume anything?" He unbuckled his belt and shucked his pants and shorts down to his thighs.
"How's that?" he asked calmly.
"Th-that's perfect!"
He had the satisfaction of hearing her voice come out thin with constraint and he knew he'd shocked her. And he knew by the way she stood up to undress that she was out to shock back. It wasn't just the picture now-the revolution was going to sweep the countryside. Off came her blouse and bra and pants and panties.
Christine didn't have anything that he really wanted to see, except, of course, what was right between her legs. He'd sized her up and decided nothing went together. Her childish face didn't fit on her rather mature body. It was difficult for him to believe that her IQ was any higher than her navel when she sat back down and her hips began to twist and undulate.
"What the hell!" He swabbed at some drops of paint falling on his face. He bucked a little but that only made her clamp her legs the harder.
She was interested in her work. He could see that. The trouble was, he couldn't tell where artistic application left off and another kind of interest began. The pressure of her buttocks to his groins was firm, the movements of her brush from palette to canvas deft and sure ...
"Just what kind of picture you painting?" he asked curtly.
"It's an abstract!" she replied haughtily. "Your type doesn't come through to me as an individual!"
"Nothing personal, huh?" Lud jeered, sliding his hands up and down on her thighs. "What type does get through to you?"
"Your brother's!" she retorted unhesitatingly.
"Owen!" Lud started, bouncing her up on his belly. She came down wriggling. "Well, whatcha know about that?" he mumbled happily.
"Don't run a big fever!" she warned. "You're just an accident. Owen's going to be on purpose!"
He flexed.
"I'll have to stop painting." She laid aside her brush. "It'll never be finished."
"Because of me? Of what we're doing?"
She frowned and began to move back and forth teasingly, her bare buttocks oozing over his groin, pulling his skin up, his now fully erect member straining toward the dark warmth between her legs. "No," she said, "it won't be finished because this isn't going to mean that much to me."
"The hell you say," he swore softly, bucking beneath her so that she was forced against his groin, his swollen tool jammed against her now-moist lips.
She locked her legs and made him provide the rhythm to still the antagonism that built so easily between them.
He grunted. "How would you paint me now ... if you could still paint?"
"Red, like a hot poker!" she hissed, tightening her thighs.
She was reared forward, holding out on him, and he suddenly grew furious and lunged, so that she toppled, face down into the grass. She caught herself with her hands, and lay for a minute on her knees and shoulders, her soft white buttocks pointing at the sky. She started to get up and he fell on top of her, crushing her to the ground, the anger and antagonism between them turned into a sexual energy that made her cringe and whimper, clawing the grass.
He entered her from behind, biting her shoulders and neck, while she thrashed from side to side, trying to free herself of his savage weight. He swore softy between his teeth and ground her flesh into submission against the rough ground.
With a shuddering sob that wracked her from head to toe, she came suddenly and softly and lay limp and still beneath him. He withdrew his still erect member, huge and ruddy, and wet and slick with her moisture, and thrust it into her other taut, dark opening.
She stiffened-was it with pain or fear?-and lay under him rigid as a corpse for a moment. And then, as he worked his huge tool deeper into her bowels, she suddenly began bucking and emitting short broken cries, half scream, half bark.
He came, in a black mist that floated between them. He had even forgotten that it was Owen she'd wanted.
Lud stood beside the truck, waiting. The wind had changed and the sheep had turned back. There'd be no going to the mine today. But these things were only on the fringe of his mind at the moment. What held him rooted was the way Christine was looking at the picture. He got the idea that something fateful was being decided. The "To be or not to be." Owen or Lud?
She finally came along and got into the truck, holding the picture in her lap. He couldn't take her all the way to the mine. The sheep were moving away in the opposite direction. But he would take her far enough to find out about the decision. Owen or Lud? He hoped to God it was Owen.
She was looking straight ahead through the windshield. He spoke to her three times before she turned. Then he could see that her eyes were misty.
"Do you change your mind often ... after a tantrum like this?" he asked hesitantly.
"Not often!" Her voice was thick and uncertain.
"Have you ... today?"
"Some-I don't dislike you anymore!"
They were headed for a creek. He gunned the truck and got water through the open window. It felt good on his face. He stopped on the first ridge above the creek.
"It's only about a mile to the mine from here!" he reached across her and opened the door.
She got out and stood by the truck, her arms full of the painting and paraphernalia.
"Think you can make it?"
"I can make it." Her voice had firmed up.
"What are you doing to do with that?" He nodded at the painting.
"Burn it!"
Chapter Eight
"Well, the wind might as well have changed again today for all it has brought me!" Grace gazed forlornly out the window at the sheep filing past her trailer.
Lud stood up and buckled his belt. Undoing it had been only a gesture. He hadn't been ready, not with Grace mugging him and getting showy with her breasts. Maybe he'd never be ready ...
Grace swung around from the window. "You're sure a painting was all that happened between you and Chris yesterday?"
"That's what she called it!" He was honestly glad he could mishandle the truth because Grace was in great need of reassurance. He could see the threat to pack up and leave building in her dark eyes.
He crossed the room and stood beside her at the window, watching his sheep. He waved at Owen, who was guarding the tunnel entrance, but he didn't think Owen could see him. The light inside the mine building, where he and Grace were standing, was dim compared to the glare outside.
"There's Chris!" He caught Grace's arm and pulled her around to look. "She's got the picture!"
They watched Christine place the picture on a bare spot of ground near the trailer and kneel down.
"Oh, she's going to burn it!" Grace said breathlessly.
Lud squeezed Grace's arm, touched by the pathetic note of relief in her voice.
"Why not? She said I was only an accident!"
Christine managed to get one brief flame going, then the canvas smoldered.
"See-all smoke and no fire, that's me every time!" Lud joked, seeking to put out the lingering doubt and discontent in Grace's eyes.
But her doubts were obviously self-doubts and needed more than words. She looked moodily across the mine yard at Owen.
"You worry too much about your brother. You've become like him!"
Girl-shy like Owen. Was that what she was trying to make herself believe in order to salvage her pride?
"Owen's my brother!" She could put him down as much as she liked if it made her more content to stay. Christine had left the smoldering ashes of the "accident" and was going over to Owen. Lud saw Owen teeter. For an instant it looked as though he was going to bolt. Then Christine put a hand on his arm like she was taming a bronc. Owen smiled and they began to talk.
Lud grinned widely. Christine was the girl for Owen! By God, Grace just had to stay! He turned around. Grace was cleaning the room again. She'd been vigorously at it when he'd arrived, but now her efforts had fallen off. Her movements were vague and desultory. The swish was gone.
He watched her. She was kneeling on the old horse hide couch, bending to dust the back. The thin, blue thigh-length wrap-around she was wearing had hiked up. She wasn't wearing panties. He could see only the back part of her and his crotch crawled.
She straightened up and looked at the bare walls. "Wish we had some pictures."
"How about looking in the attic?"
"This place has an attic?"
"It sure do. This way."
He led the way to the second floor and into a closet. He climbed a short ladder, opened a trap door and went on up.
She followed, exclaiming at the low ceiling and the darkness.
"We'll never find anything-it's like night up here!"
"I've found something," he said, stroking the crease of her buttocks. Because of the low ceiling, she was bent almost double. He pulled her to him, spoon fashion, in the darkness, his hands just under her soft breasts, his member nesting itself in the ridge of her posterior.
"Lud!" Her voice invited tenderness, preliminaries.
He swiftly knelt down behind her, wrapped his arms around her thighs, his fingers grasping roughly along her crotch. In one wresting motion, he crudely forced her buttocks apart with his thumbs, and slid his tongue around on her briefly, from the moist hair and lips in front, to the hot crease in the rear. As his member stood up in urgent demand, straining against the cloth of his pants, he stood up again, resuming his original position, and pulling her skirt, with short impatient jerks, up around her navel.
"Please!" she whispered, and the plea was for time, and kindness.
He unbuckled his belt, raked down his pants and shorts, and filled his arms with her buttocks, thrusting and grunting. He knew she wanted gentleness, but he couldn't wait. Holding her writhing body tautly against him with the strength of his arms, he forced open her lips with his hand, and thrust his tool deep into her blindly, thrusting up, then out, cutting and twisting and going deliriously wrong.
It hurt every time he lunged, and she pleaded brokenly for more time, choking back a shuddering sob as she stood, supported by his arms, her knees buckling under her, ignominiously bent over under the dusty rafters.
Her short piteous cries drove him on, and they writhed and churned until his final frenzied lunge brought that hot mindless explosion, and she hung limp and spent in his arms.
Chapter Nine
The next several days were hot and the sheep stayed close to water. At noon they gathered in the creek bottoms, heads down in their own shadows.
Lud spent the long afternoons in the shade of the sheep-wagon, tinkering up an old battery radio. He had torn the set apart so often it had become a routine. And it didn't matter that he was getting the tuning condenser a little more out of alignment, or that the stations he could bring were becoming more localized, the tinkering helped pass the time.
Knowing the radio wiring diagram by heart, his thoughts were free as he worked. He had a habit of picketing his imagination, allowing it to graze out from the spot where he found himself. And when he thought about Lotte Kensler it was sort of like a preview of what could happen again, because the wagon was near the Kensler place, just as it had been last year at this same time. And it was the season for late afternoon thunderstorms of the type and fury that had blown his sheep against the Kensler pasture fence, which had leaked one or two head of his sheep through to swell the small Kensler herd.
And Lotte had seemed to know that he would forget the sheep that went through the fence if she would get into his truck out of the rain.
She would most likely know how to make him forget again! He began to raise his eyes from the radio. There were some thunder-heads building in the west!
Lud remembered his first meeting with Lotte. Her dad had been herding one of the Stoner bunches to add to the small income from his run down ranch, and had ordered some sheep salt. Lotte had been visiting her dad when Lud delivered it. He had offered to drive her home. He could still see her climbing into the truck, unmindful (or maybe she hadn't been) of the way her wide-bottomed skirt had flared up around her thighs.
That had been three years ago, when she was sixteen and still slender and lissome. He'd had her in the truck twice since, and each time her buttocks had spread a bit wider on the seat.
Still, she was youthful and solid, and it was fun to feel the difference in the heft of her thighs and rump from year to year. And a man could leave the wraps on her big, jiggly breasts. He'd better. She might smother him if he got his face in the deep cleft between them.
A long growl of thunder and a sudden wind that whined through the wagon spokes made Lud look up. A flying bank of dirty black clouds had ridged up in the western sky, blocking out the sun. Below him the sheep were leaving water, milling around, excited by the sudden change in the weather.
It looked like a thunder-buster-a bad one, judging from the black, menacing clouds ... bad enough to blow the sheep up against the weak Kensler fence. (Lotte always said she came out to save the fence when she heard the sheep bells and blatting).
Lud gathered up his tools and put them in a cardboard box along with the radio and radio parts. He took the box into the sheep wagon and shoved it away under the bunk. He had something to tinker with in each of his three wagons-a set of walkie-talkies, an old phonograph. He closed the window over the bunk and then went out, closing and latching the door.
There was an ax leaning against the wagon and he used it to pound down the guy wire stakes. A sheep wagon caught the wind like a sail, and something was needed to keep it from tipping over.
He wet his lips as he worked. The wind was dry now, but at any moment it would turn cold and damp from the fringe of hail that usually formed the front teeth of these storms.
After giving each stake one last whack, he dropped the ax and ran to the truck. He always followed the storm-driven sheep with it as far as he could. Sometimes if the visibility became too bad he would lose the truck in a mud-hole or hang it up on a high center. Then it was slicker-up and follow the herd, the idea being to stay close to the sheep and not let them split up, whether he did it in the truck or on foot. And it wasn't easy because, as a rule, he couldn't get his damned dog out of the truck to help when it was storming.
Wind-driven hail was bouncing off the truck when he reached it. The whining dog jumped in ahead of. him and curled up on the seat, nose under its tail.
The sheep were difficult to see, their wool being about the same dirty-gray color as the storm-light. Lud headed the truck down to the creek where the bunch had watered. Tumbleweeds and sagebrush roots were floating by on the developing flash-flood. A few minutes more and there would be a small river between him and the herd. He gunned the truck across and caught up with the drag on the long valley slope.
He honked the horn to hurry the laggards, wanting to keep a tight herd, from the rear, at least. It was no good going to the lead of the bunch-the sheep would only split around him and keep going. Anyway, they were taking him where he wanted to go-to Lotte.
He leaned forward, peering eagerly through the windshield. Sheets of water filled in behind the flying wipers. Lightning slit the windy bleakness, leaving stagey, unreal conglomerations of sagebrush and waving sand grass and woolly butts piled up on the retina of his eyes.
The thunder rolled and boomed. Lud laughed aloud and turned on the radio. A mixture of static and music added to the confusion.
He began honking the horn continuously, as much to let Lotte know where he was as to hurry the laggard sheep. Gripping the wheel, he could already feel the fat, firm curves of Lotte's warm body. Then suddenly he saw her. The windshield was a mess, and she moved away from the fence quickly, but he knew she had been enlarging a hole to let one of his sheep through.
He swerved to miss her and stopped, throwing open the door. He pushed the dog out, ignoring its whines as it ran under the truck.
Lotte's moonface beamed at him as she stood in the lee of the door to take off her dripping hat and slicker. It was raining buckets and her-light dress pressed damply around her thighs when she got in on the seat.
He turned on the heater and she leaned down, fluffing her long blond hair into the warm blow of air. Hair fragrance filled the truck cab.
"Testing our fence again, huh?" she teased, looking about as adroit as a hippopotamus.
She seemed to him much fatter and bolder than ever before. "How many got through?"
"Three head!" she admitted breathlessly.
He could see the glint of her pale blue eyes. She was looking up at him side wise through her hair. There was a cheap bead necklace around her neck. Her dress, where it hadn't gotten wet, was freshly ironed. He leaned closer. She smelled of soap. So-he wasn't the only one who had been watching the thunderclouds build!
"Three head would bring at least thirty dollars in Omaha!" He filled one arm with part of what she had to trade. She would do-on a cold, rainy afternoon. Besides, the light wasn't good in the cab.
She giggled. "Brown's always quoting the Omaha price, too!"
Lud started. Brown was one of his herders. Suspicion threatened to take the edge off the afternoon. "Brown's been over here?"
"Yes-" her breath caught and she seemed to sense his suspicions-"but on his free time! And not to test the fence!"
"Oh-a cash deal!" Lud laughed thoughtfully. He'd dropped as much as thirty for a good lay in Omaha. He patted Lotte's cheek forgivingly. After all, he saw her only once a year. He couldn't blame her for branching out. As for Brown-Brown was a bastard!
The storm still flashed and boomed in the east. The hail had left the air cool. Lud rolled up his window all the way and Lotte did the same, shutting out the dampness and the blatting of the sheep. The herd was spreading out, nipping busily at the rain-softened grass, filling their guts before dark. They were working back towards the bed ground. They wouldn't need any attention for some time.
Lotte shifted around. She patted the seat measuringly. "This the same truck?" She sounded doubtful.
Lud grinned. "Same truck!" He put a hand on either side of her buttocks. "You're just bigger ... and better!"
She hitched forward on the seat and put her knees against the dash. The hem of her dress slithered.
"No panties!" he observed, tightening at the sight of the big blossom of hair on her crotch.
"You like?" She rolled her eyes.
Lud hawked at a rising cud of excitement. She was beginning to act like she knew the time for counting sheep had passed. He pulled at her dress and she raised her buttocks to let it slip up. She unbuttoned the top and her nipples hooked it open.
"No bra either." Lud drew back to eye her big breasts. They rolled and rubbered around like they had a life of their own.
"You no like?"
Lud shrugged. He could take them or leave them as long as she didn't point the nipples at his mouth. He slapped them together playfully, mounding them and fashioning the crease to look like a buttocks.
She opened his pants and stroked his crotch. "I know you like that!"
"Every woman's got to know something!" He took his pants and shorts off.
She squeezed past him and lay down on the seat. "Take off your shirt!" she pleaded.
He's forgotten how she'd tongued the hair on his chest the last time. Her wanting to do it again made him think of how the wind had felt the day he was with Abby. That had tickled, too, but not the way Lotte's tongue could. He removed his shirt and hunkered down.
Lotte worked him over with her tongue like a bitch would her pup, starting with his chest and urging him upwards until she had her face in his gut. She licked and kissed and her mouth felt like a flash-fire. She was down to his groins when he pulled back.
"Oh, Lud!" she gasped. Her face was rosy red. She kept lifting her legs, parting her thighs, showing him where.
Lud haunched up to her on the seat, thrusting as he clasped her firm, chunky thighs to his sides. She formed her plump buttocks into sensual cushions, taking the first of it stolidly. But there was excitement inside-welcoming spasms. She wanted the trip.
Maybe it was the elemental feeling in the air from the storm or the bulky pulchritude and overflowing curves of her body that made him bigger than life. Anyway he was suddenly making her work to take as good as he gave. At first she met him with grit and a little misery. Then she wanted to talk:
"How long have you been out with the monkey-faced sheep, Lud? How long since you've had a woman?"
He thought back. "Five or six days, I guess!" He understood her game. If the trip was long, rest at the halfway-it made the last half feel better!
She groaned, mock-tearful. "Don't ever go a week, Lud-not ever!"
He pushed and she began again, too, undulating, clasping him between her fleshy thighs.
"You're a honey!" he said, and kissed her heavy red lips.
She gasped and held herself so that there wasn't any way but in.
Her heat pulled at his body. She wriggled and clawed, touching off his own drive. He lunged forward, clutching the rounds of her buttocks, sinking his fingers and wrists into her ample softness.
He felt her face taming beneath his chest, grinding against hair. Their breathing sharpened again. He raised himself, caught her legs under the knees and bent them forward until he could hug and hustle the quivery weight of her thighs in his arms.
He pressed her flesh against his chest, and again she was quiet, making of her stillness and compliance yet another invitation. Her moonface had a damp, shiny look that became even glossier as she sensed his intentions.
He slid his arms under the extravagant fullness of her buttocks.
"Oh-o!" She put her feet to the roof of the cab and soon she was groaning and complaining as he overwhelmed her.
Chapter Ten
After taking Lotte home Lud rounded up his sheep. The herd was reluctant to bunch, each sheep seemingly determined to keep some air space around its bulk of wet wool.
Lud sat in the truck, smoking moodily as he watched the sheep mill about. He couldn't help feeling a bit contemptuous of Lotte. Her put-on about the sheep that got through the fence was hypocritical. Hell, why couldn't she be at least as honest with him as she was with Brown. Besides, things hadn't gone too well in the truck cab. The seat was better used with a medium sized girl like Doper-Joe's daughter, Myra.
Myra! He would be seeing her soon, for it was getting on in the spring and time for Doper-Joe's annual inspection of the herds. If the sheep were scouring it meant they needed to be doped. Lud v knew they needed it this year just as surely as he needed the tonic of Myra's presence to lift him out of the winter dumps. He always felt good when he was with Doper-Joe's daughter.
Hoo-ee! He began to whistle as he put the truck in gear and headed the sheep towards the wagon. His mind filled with pictures of Myra. She was sure to be along with her dad when he came to inspect and doctor the sheep because she, if no one else, was absolutely certain that the dosage would not be measured correctly, or the corrals hold unless she personally saw to it.
He could hear her saying, "A double dose of vitriol will kill a sheep, so it's best to keep the doped ones good and separated from the ones to be doped!" in sweet, serious tones.
The help laughed at her concern, but he liked it ... and what went with it.
Myra had a pretty, heart-shaped face, olive skin, large curly-lashed brown flirters and voluptuous thighs and buttocks that put crimps in a man's nervous system.
Myra left her smell on a man, even from one year to the next. She was twenty. He knew that from having asked her last year, when she'd told him she was nineteen. And she had a way of keeping her firm forked breasts to herself that he admired. He liked the texture of her shoulder-length hair, too. It was fine-spun and flossy in the sun.
Myra worked the corrals like a man but she never wore pants. Whenever she made for a fence everyone reached for a cigarette and watched to see how brief her panties were. Just thinking about it made Lud reach for a cigarette now. He was hungry for the sight of Myra moving about the corrals of the home ranch, or standing in the barn door, her supple figure easy and graceful to look at. And he was sure her flashing, knowing smile would make it easy to ask her to go for a ride this year, just as it had last.
One thing troubled him about Myra. She hinted at marriage too often for a girl who came across without it Last year he'd worried for a while after she'd left, wondering what he would do if she should come back claiming she'd gotten 'caught.'
Lud looked around at the sheep. They were grazing towards the bed ground. He mashed out his cigarette, taking curious note of the fact that Myra was the first person he'd thought of for days who'd been able to keep his mind off Owen.
He lit another cigarette and dreamed on uninterruptedly about Myra, remembering that he'd taken her out on the same lonely road Abby had complained about-the two parallel ruts ground so deeply into the prairie sod they would be an almost-forever mark on the land, like the old Santa Fe Trail.
He had let the truck idle along, no lights on, nearly stalling on the up-grades.
"How about it Myra-want to make love or shove?" he'd joked, amused by the way she'd leaned forward whenever the engine had threatened to die and then sat forward again when it had made the hill.
"Why do you always make fun of love? Is it to-to bring the price down," she'd countered.
She'd had a way of making him feel the reproach in her soft sloe-eyes, even though it was dusk in the cab. Stolen glances at her face, dim and oval in the shadows, would remain with him for life.
"That you don't need to tell me!" she'd murmured, dispiritedly, going slump-shouldered. "You've had too many girls to be serious with one!"
"Oh, I wouldn't say that!" He'd stopped the truck and given her a squeeze. "You're just seeing me in the wrong light!" he'd said, argumentatively, when she hadn't responded.
She'd drawn away. "Oh, there's nothing wrong with the light-what there is of it!" She'd nodded towards the front, where the gray prairie and a spangling of stars were visible through the windshield.
"OK! OK! I'll take you back if that's what you want!" he'd blurted impatiently.
"Oh, sure! And never really look at me or speak to me again!"
Her voice had been curiously muffled and he'd reached out contritely towards her and found her all mummied-up with the dress she was pulling off over her head.
"You're good to me, Myra!" He'd turned too and skinned out of his own clothes.
"I could be better ... if I felt easy in mind!"
He'd laughed roughly. "You're leading me on. You couldn't be better than last time!"
She'd hugged him, encircling his neck with her arms and pulling him down with her as she flattened out on the seat.
"Oh, you don't know! You don't know how I'd be. If you were a real man you'd find out!"
Her words cut him curiously, though he fancied himself invulnerable. He'd been sitting on the edge of the seat with her curled up against him. The soft in and out of her tummy as she breathed had been like a pleading touch. He'd felt a twinge of pity and reached around to put a hand on her curvaceous backside. His throat had thickened and whatever he might have said hadn't been.
"You really on the seat?" She'd put a hand down in front of him, striking his crotch and making him start.
She'd giggled and that had been it. The tension and pity had left him. He'd turned and caught her roughly into his arms.
She'd come to him, too taut in the thighs and buttocks. But later she'd begun to twist and jerk. She'd gripped his forearm and pushed herself against his knuckles, lisping and crooning and lusting for him.
"Kiss me!" she'd demanded.
Her kisses had been loose and hot, her mouth open, a seeking, sucking, most intimate-like thing closing around his tongue.
She'd put her round firm arms about his neck and pulled herself up, squirming, rubbing her groins to his then going limp in his arms, to sigh and quiver voluptuously. She'd been fragrant and languorous and at the point where it could begin.
He'd kissed her and gotten to his knees to take her legs in his arms and squeeze her thighs into his hip bones. Slowly he'd moved his hands over the lovely curves of her thighs to place them on her waist. Then he'd pulled her down into his crotch until her legs slipped over his and he was started.
He'd kissed her and felt the firmed up repression of her lips.
"You're holding back!" he'd chided, and let her know what he wanted by gyrating her lax, loose torso.
"We'll make out!" he'd said a minute later, as she began to undulate.
"But it could be so much better!" she'd wailed, her body hungering up under him.
He hadn't wanted to listen, and he'd pushed roughly upward to the sharp, steep peak of ecstasy-land, where all talk was a moaned and mumbled jumble of wet-mouthed love-talk.
Afterwards, in the all-done lull, when she'd told him he ought to get married because he had the responsibility of the ranch and Owen, he'd let himself be led into a line of thought that ran counter to his former thinking. When she'd advanced to supposing that a married man was a more responsible person he hadn't denied it. He'd even let her get away with the implication that it was his fault that Owen was anti-social.
"And it's a pity-he's so handsome and smart!" Those had been her words.
"Why don't you set your hat for Owen?" he'd asked truculently.
"Because you're my type-rugged and virile!"
"And Owen isn't virile?" He'd been defensive. "Does he repel you?"
"No-not repel exactly-but around Owen I feel like he's in reverse, that he's thinking of himself first and that he can't see me because of it! He needs to meet a girl with a special gimmick-something that will overwhelm him!"
Lud remembered grimacing. But he hadn't opened his mouth. Myra's reasoning had been too well supported by his own thinking. Owen needed something special all right. A whirlwind, a miracle, a sexual revolution!
Lud mashed out the last of his cigarette and stopped reminiscing as he drove around the sheep. He turned on his lights to push the sheep up to the bed ground. Then he headed for the ranch, nagged by an irritating set of questions: how many people were analyzing the situation on the Stoner ranch and coming up with answers like Myra's and Amy , Miller's? How many blamed him for Owen's retreat into himself?
How many thought his vaunted family pride an empty brag? Did anyone credit him with real affection for Owen. Lud admitted that besides family pride and affection for Owen there was another motive. Some of his preoccupation with their problem was rooted in a kind of fatalistic viewpoint that existed only in his mind. He felt that his destiny was hooked to Owen's, that all must go well for one or the other would suffer. This feeling was something he brooded on, a kind of superstitious fuel into which he had set the wick of his hopes for the future.
He rammed the truck towards the end of the tunnel bored into the darkness by the lights. He drove like he expected to find some answers there. And all the time he knew there weren't any answers, only possibilities. Possibilities that depended on his keeping a certain tall, hungry-eyed girl around long enough for Christine to initiate Owen into the sexual revolution.
Chapter Eleven
There was a letter from Doper-Joe waiting for him at the ranch. The Doper wanted to set up a date to inspect the Stoner herds, and worm them if they needed it. Lud did some figuring the following day and then wrote his answer and took it to Rawlands to mail. He hadn't set as early a date as he would have liked-it hurt him to put off seeing Myra-but there were many things that needed doing about the ranch corrals and chutes before the sheep could be brought in off the range.
As always when in town, he did some shopping and then headed for Abby's room. It was in his mind to tell her good-bye and leave (he'd heard she was going away) but she sat him down and gave him a drink and let him stare at her marvelous shape and deadpan prettiness. When she offered to pull his boots he let her.
At first the yen for her was all in his head. It wasn't as if Abby needed climbing because she'd never been climbed before. Abby wasn't a mountain. But she was a challenge, a taut, anti-climactic baffle against which she let a man dispense himself. He didn't believe any man had seen ecstasy on her face. A woman should leave his town looking different than when she came. He wanted to be the one.
Abby had lovely arms. Creamy, rounded, patting and fondling soft. And when she lifted them as she was doing now to push back her hair, they honed his desire almost as much as looking at her thighs.
He went to her and put his hands on her legs, going up until he was at the large, breath-tightening part.
She seldom sighed or smiled. She never laughed. But she would go through all the motions of play. Like now-she tried to pull away, writhing, twisting lithely and, finally in a pretended frenzy, turning to the attack and throwing her dress over his head and clutching his shoulders as she pushed her panties against his face. He felt the nylon slipping past his mouth as she worked the panties down. She began to buck but before she could raise herself and make him kiss it he flung his arms about her buttocks and stung the soft skin in the middle of her belly with a hickey.
When she broke free there were buttons rolling on the floor and he had his hands full of nothing but dress.
She ran behind a screen and when he went over to look he saw that she was taking off what he hadn't. The afternoon sun, slanting in under the indifferently lowered shade, caught her across the groins, glossing the fluff of blonde hair on her crotch with warm yellow lights.
She freed her firm, close-set breasts and went around the screen and stretched out on the bed, belly down, face buried in a pillow.
He started to undress then stopped, deciding to mock her for showing how she wanted to do it instead of giving him a choice. He lit a cigarette and drew up a chair. He smoked slowly, entranced by the soft whorls of hair on the nape of her neck. Curls and creamy skin and the perfume of her hair were melded there in an intoxicating measure. He often hung up the act several times to kiss and tongue that spot. And she would reward him with a voluptuous tensing of her buttocks. She liked to do it belly down. And he liked it that way too ... sometimes.
But not today. Today he wanted closeness. He wanted heaven with the hump down. He wanted parted lips and a catch-breath "Oh!" coming straight up at him like a thank you.
"I haven't got all day!" she prompted. "Not even for Mr. Stoner!"
"The bus leaves tomorrow!" He mashed out his cigarette.
"Lud!"
She raised herself on one elbow, scissoring her legs, parting and pressing her thighs. Her impatient look caught him as he was approaching the bed, naked.
He flexed deliberately and she lidded her eyes.
"Show-off!" she said flippantly.
He made a grab for her but she jumped up and ran to the bathroom. When she returned she put a small jar on the night stand.
"What kind of grease is that?" he jeered, leaping toward her. She evaded him but followed when he went to the bathroom.
He stood in the shower stall and put his hand on the cold water tap. "If it's too much I'll cool it!" he offered sarcastically, trying to get under her facelessness.
She came into the bathroom, lithe yet listless, pumping her crotch.
"Stand aside!" she ordered. "I might as well wash off the last two drunks while I'm in here!"
He moved, jostling her rudely. "Sorry," he mumbled-"nothing personal!"
He looked down at himself-at his body. How asinine could a man get-saying he meant nothing personal? He blamed her damned professionalism. It kept warding him off.
"With a whore it's like doing it through a fence!" he blurted angrily.
She had the shower running and he couldn't hear what she said, or if she answered at all. He took one look into the dim shower, at her body, and carried the longing for it with him when he went out into the other room and stretched out on the bed.
He rubbed the hair on his chest and groin, flexed, passed his hand over the taut muscles of his abdomen trying to bide his time while he waited.
When she came to him she assumed the belly-down position she'd bad before. He patted and shook the voluptuous halves of her buttocks. Her skin, cool and slightly damp, had a sweet-soap odor.
"Two drunks, huh?" he mused. His old acquaintance, Dan Smiley, ran the only bar in town. Smiley was always bitching about the total lack of business during the week. This was during the week. Who did Abby think she was kidding?
He slapped her rump. "You haven't had a man for days!"
She managed a slow contemptuous twitch of her buttocks. It was like a weary shrug of the shoulders.
"OK! If you're that near done in, I'm leaving!" He got up and reached for his pants.
"No!" She came off the bed, trailing the clean sweetness of her soap and a big bath towel. Her blonde hair rolled loose and billowy about her shoulders as she came slowly across the room to him, dragging the blue and yellow towel up between her legs and knotting it around her waist.
"Gotta keep warm somehow!" she said sulkily, pushing him into a chair, still minus his pants.
Her breathing was sharp enough to move her breasts perceptibly. He knew that any man would consider her curvaceous body beautiful. Most men would have been nuzzling her superb breasts. But he wasn't most men. Maybe that was why she had lambent lights in her eyes that turned them into twin orbs of soft, blue fire.
"Titty me!" She thrust the coral tips of her breasts at his face.
"Naw!" Lud averted his face and felt her breast fork around his neck.
She twisted and got a nipple against his mouth. He felt it budding and made a face. He never sucked a woman's tits. It made him feel foolish. He guessed that was why Grace's business with her breasts repelled him so much.
"Do it!" Abby pleaded, her voice suddenly honeyed. "Do it, and I promise you won't be sorry!"
"For crissakes!" he mumbled, taking the bud in his mouth for a second.
She peeled off the towel.
He drew back. "Having fun?" he taunted.
"M-hmm!" she murmured, pulling his face up to her breast again. This time he kept his mouth closed.
With the towel gone she wanted his hand, opening her thighs to push it up to the soft hair and flesh.
She began to buck and undulate.
He got to his feet. She swayed and he had to catch her. He carried her to the bed.
He nested her buttocks on a pillow and pulled her legs up about his shoulders.
Her hand began to grope towards the night stand.
"Coward!" He gripped her wrist.
She gasped and struggled.
His eyes fell on her rolling breasts. One nipple was pinker than the other. He made a face.
"I did what you wanted!" he reminded her.
"Not really!" She writhed one last time. "All right," she moaned, "be like that bastard I told you about!"
"You mean the guy who raped you?"
"Yes!" she hissed.
He patted her thighs. She sounded excited, but she was fighting not to show it. Her skin was warm now. Smooth and warm ... hot between her thighs.
He took her slowly, steeling himself against all her whorehouse tricks-her false blandishments and urgent exhortations. He was pressing hard upon the springy hillock of fulfillment when she grasped her legs and pulled herself wide, bucking up for the limit with a screech of rapture.
She threw back her head-the skin tightening over her cheeks and jaw, letting the ecstasy glow through from the bones.
His guts knotted as her tightening spasms jerked at him. She was raking hot sparks off the end of his spine. Each powerful lunge of his groin dug him more deeply into her. As she groaned, she kneaded his buttocks with abandon, digging her nails in, grinding her fists into the hollows his muscles made as he pumped. He wrapped himself around her, every muscle taut as a whip, and welded their twisting bodies into a two-backed beast.
Lud fought desperately for control over his emotions. He knew he'd already had more than he'd paid for. He knew why Abby had wanted to keep it faceless, and why he did it to Myra in the dark: these were ways of holding down on the price ... the emotional aftermath.
He came twice before he pulled himself roughly out of Abby, pushing her away violently. She lay back, still groaning and writhing uncontrollably, grinding her reddened thighs together. He spread her buttocks and slid his pressing member into the long crevice. Gasping and writhing, she swiveled her pincer-like buttocks around his imprisoned member wildly.
A scream that started in the back of his head as his whole body shook, ended in blackness as he arched and bucked endlessly.
Chapter Twelve
Lud had the corrals and chutes up in good shape for working the herds and was heading into one last chore before Doper-Joe and Myra arrived. The fly season had come on early and the insects were driving the stock back into the darkest, coolest places they could find during the heat of the day. Thickets and undercut creek banks were natural retreats for the animals, but he didn't want anything wandering into the mine tunnel and falling into a sump. A stock guard had to be built across the mouth of the tunnel.
He'd dropped Miller off at one of the wagons to break in a green herder, then went on into Raw-lands for a load of used iron railings. He was getting ready to leave town when he realized it was noon and that he was hungry. Not wanting to haul the rails roundabout in order to stop at the ranch for grub, he wound up at Jim Gurd's little hole-in-the-wall restaurant eating a hamburger steak and staring at Gurd's battered face before starting out for the mine.
Gurd was a broken-down bronc fighter who had been hoof-marked for life. "Business ain't so good!" he confided, slapping a fly-swatter at a big bluebottle buzzing the sink. "The boys don't come to town so often since Abby pulled her stakes!"
He stared sadly at Lud's busy jaws. "Even Owen hasn't been showing up for his reading sessions!" He nodded towards the end of the counter.
Lud looked at the pile of western magazines Gurd had stacked near the cash register. One had a lead story titled: THE COWBOY AND THE CAT-HOUSE.
Gurd grinned. "I know that Abby's being out of town isn't what's keeping Owen away, so you must be finding plenty for him to do out at the ranch!"
"Yeah." Lud took a vicious bite out of one of Gurd's tasteless baking powder biscuits. Why was everyone so damned sure Owen had never touched Abby? This, after all the trouble he'd gone to trying to make it look otherwise!
He watched another fly come in for a try at the sink. It had an angry buzz, like it was insisting on doing what came naturally.
Gurd wielded his swatter again. Then he held it up and winked.
The fly was a mangled mess, but somehow Lud could still hear it asserting its rights to do what came naturally.
"It's not only the ranch work that's keeping him away from town!" he said.
Gurd squinted shrewdly. "Fooling around the mine again, huh?" Gurd shook his head. "I don't remember being young like Owen's young. I remember hellin' around after girls-that's what I remember. Not hungerin' after the past ... readin' about the old West and such. What's he going to do-write a history about it?"
Lud shook his head, suddenly eager to open up and tell for true that which he only hoped would happen.
"Owen's got himself a girl-a real swingy little twist from the East. She's teaching him about the sexual revolution."
"The hell!" Gurd was leaning across the counter. "Where'd he meet her?"
Lud grinned, giving Gurd time to get hooked.
"Gimme a piece of lemon pie and maybe I'll tell you!"
Lud handed out the first part-how the Randal sisters came to be staying at the mine-about as it had happened. The rest he made up. The way he had it, Christine and Owen were really that way about each other.
Gurd seemed to be taking everything in; then suddenly he laughed. He jabbed a thumb into Lud's shoulder.
"By God, you're a good brother just the same! Making all this up to give Owen a name with the girls!"
Lud frowned. "I'm not making it up!"
"You're not?" Gurd gaped uncertainly. "But hell, man, it's hard to believe that either one of these women, providin' they exist at all, would give Owen a second look with you around!"
Lud belched. Lemon pie and panic juice! But he couldn't belch away his lady-killer reputation. Gurd's look had him under pressure.
He took a quick drink of coffee. "Maybe I didn't make it clear what a looker the older sister is!"
Gurd's eyebrows shot up. "No-you didn't! You've had your talk set on the young one-the swinger! Wait 'till I tell the boys about her! They'll be forming in columns to march on the diggings like the old miners used to double time up-gulch to that stone whorehouse. Yippee! A sexual revolution!"
Lud looked up sharply from lighting a cigarette. Gurd was panting with eagerness to spread the news ... with a spicy topping. Lud could see that the story he had just told was in for a wild run. He didn't mind that ... as long as it stayed in town.
"I've promised those girls privacy as long as they're on Stoner property!" he said bleakly, getting up from the counter and flipping the price of the meal down beside his plate.
"Sure, Lud-I understand!" Gurd agreed meekly. "This revolution's been a long time coming and you want Owen to have a chance to make the most of it! Living out there all alone-I mean, having those girls around must be quite a change from his reading and such. Say, I've got a batch of his magazines here that he loaned me!"
Gurd lifted a bundle of magazines out from under the counter. "Give these to him for me, will you?" He winked as he relinquished the bundle. "If he's as busy as you say, it may be some time before he comes in!"
Lud hefted the magazines, turned them over, looking at the covers. The issue on top had a lead story titled, GIRLS IN THE GULCH ... He was at the door when Gurd called him back.
"I truly meant what I said about Owen needing private time with his girlfriend, but why can't you bring the other one to the Fourth-of-July hop? It'll be an old-time outdoor pavilion type dance, like always. There'll be square dancing mixed in with the other. Your eastern belle might get a kick out of it! Whadya say, Lud-do I tell it around that you'll show up with this beauty? It'll give the civic event a real lift. A real Fourth-of-July bang!"
Lud felt Gurd's eyes. Gurd was Rawlands-gossip-hungry-bored up to the ears with stale lust and stud-horse jokes. Gurd wanted the makings of a girl-story, something to hold the boys on his counter stools by the hour, eating hamburgers and swilling coffee.
"Oh, I think a shindig like that would be a bit too rough for her!" he lied, quailing mentally at a vision of himself parading Grace in front of a leering, nudging bunch as they gave her a long, long up and down and compared her height with his.
They were the crude kind. They'd let go with their derision. At him. At Grace! At the uppity Stoner name. Like as not one of them would ask why he hadn't brought the eastern beauty he'd been bragging about and he'd have to flatten him.
"Easterners go for anything western, you know that, Lud!" Gurd argued. "She'll come if you ask her. Hell, you've probably got her eating out of your hand!"
Lud stood at the door, afraid to go, afraid to refuse too emphatically to share his ravishing eastern woman with the woman-hungry Rawland's crowd. They were a nosey bunch of sheep herders. He wouldn't put it by them to come snooping around the mine.
"Hell, I'd like to be accommodating, but most likely I'll be busy doping sheep over the Fourth!"
Gurd shook his head. "Not if you're depending on Doper-Joe you won't. Half the ranchers around here got a letter from him yesterday and today. He's been delayed!"
Lud turned, his eyes slitted. "You ain't just sayin' that?"
"Me? Not on a serious thing that's important to you sheep men. No sir!"
Gurd meant it. He was a born caterer. And he knew to whom to cater. Lud frowned. "Strange I didn't get a letter!"
"Several of the ranchers have boxes here in town. You know that, Lud! They'd get theirs first!"
Lud nodded. "What the hell's gone wrong? Doper never went back on his word before!"
"His daughter never got married before!"
"What?"
"Myra's gettin' married. I saw one of the letters!"
"Well, I've got to see one of those for myself!" Lud groped for the door.
He strode out onto the sidewalk, tossing the bundle of magazines into the truck as he went by. He didn't keep a box at the Post-office as many of the ranchers did, but when some emergency was on he often called for his mail at the window. This was one of those emergencies. Myra getting married! Doper delayed!
Doper-Joe's letter verified Gurd's story. But that alone wasn't what made the little post office suddenly seem too small for comfort. The question of what he would have done if he'd been the cause of Myra's getting 'caught' was answered: he would have married her just as the guy in the town three hundred miles away was doing. And Doper-Joe would probably have been letting business slide while he waited around to give the bride away, just as he was doing now.
His thoughts rebounded quickly. He was no less concerned about the prospective delay in having his herds treated than the other ranchers. Doper-Joe had neglected to even mention another date. Well, the sheep couldn't wait. There were too many gaunt ones showing up through the bunches-a sure sign of worms.
Grim-faced, Lud left the post office. He'd have to dope his own sheep, and with a short crew, too, because he'd been counting on the wranglers and syringe-men Doper-Joe always brought along.
On the way back to the truck, he wrestled with the help-shortage problem. There was a choice: he could switch the treatment from liquid blue vitriol to pills. One man could pill a sheep whereas it took two to administer vitriol. Besides, the pills were available in Rawlands.
Chapter Thirteen
Lud could feel Grace pressing against him as they went down the mile-long inclined tunnel into the mine. He shifted Owen's magazines into his left hand and steadied her with his right.
"The light looks pretty dim-what if the batteries fail?" she murmured.
"Then we'll feel our way along the ore-track. We're almost doing that anyway!" Lud knew she was lonesome. Very. She had to be to go into a place she was afraid of just to stay with him.
She'd come over from her trailer as he drove up to the mine tunnel. Then she'd stood around, trying to talk to him over the noise he'd made unloading the rails.
"Afraid?" He put the beam from his flashlight on her face.
She giggled nervously and cast a quick look over her shoulder at the dot of daylight marking the tunnel entrance. Somehow she looked different down here. She seemed smaller. More defenseless. Lud caught himself feeling protective.
"A mine spooks some people ... and this one's old enough and dangerous enough to spook most anyone. Want to go back? I could leave these magazines in sight near the tunnel entrance instead of taking them all the way down to Owen's nest!"
She jerked gratefully and put her free hand on his arm. It felt strangely trusting and dependent.
"Well," he said gruffly-"what do you say?"
"I-I don't understand it," she faltered. "I've explored caves without getting this feeling!"
"Caves are natural holes-this one's man-made ... maybe a trap! Deep down-and that's where we are-we humans distrust our own handiwork!"
"Oh, stop trying to get to me! Next thing you'll be pulling ghosts out of the walls!"
She giggled again and moved away a little, head bent forward, peering into the darkness.
"It's a soft, pulling darkness," she murmured, edging forward. "It has weight ... and perhaps strength! How does it make you feel?"
Lud crossed over one rail and caught her about the waist without breaking stride. "Like doing what I came down here to do and getting back out!" He urged her on down the tunnel at a faster pace.
Their shoes cracked against loose rocks. The sound echoed. He guided her footsteps so she wouldn't bark her ankles on the car tracks.
"Owen says this mine makes him feel like he was going back into the womb!" he said harshly.
"That's a strange reaction ... but I understand it a little. The earth is mother and coming in here is a return to her innards! I wonder-"
"You wonder what?"
"How it would make Christine feel-she rebels at being protected!"
"Protected by you?"
"Well, I'm the biggest!" she laughed deprecatingly. "It's like she's a lovely little island and I'm the mainland!"
Lud grinned crookedly. Too bad Grace's shoreline was so long. No wonder she relied so much on disgusting wiles and tricks-giving herself the rough end of the stick whenever she looked at her more favored sister.
The tunnel widened suddenly. They had reached the spot where a vertical shaft dropped down through the rock to other mine levels below.
The hoisting machinery reared up gauntly before them. Lud threw the beam from his light to the left of the machinery to illuminate a wooden door, seemingly set into the wall of the tunnel.
He headed for the door, which was actually built into the opening of a small drift, blasted back into the wall of the main tunnel and probably intended for storage. Owen had rigged it up as a hideaway.
"This is where Owen hangs out-putters around, reads, writes, wastes time!" he explained, speaking back into the darkness where Grace had stopped. He opened the door and tossed the magazines inside.
"But how can he do all those things without lights?"
"Oh, there's juice down here!" Lud flipped a switch near the door and some lights came on, bright within Owen's hideaway but too few and far between in the cavernous excavation outside.
Lud dowsed the lights and used his flashlight to get back to Grace.
"Got to get those rails up into some kind of a barricade!" he mumbled, half apologetic for trying to hustle Grace off the platform, that had been laid down around the hoist.
Grace hung back. "But now that I'm down here, I'd like to see more. The machinery looked so clean when you had the lights on!"
"Owen-he works on it!" Lud swung about impatiently and went back and threw the light on again. He stood aside as she entered Owen's hideaway.
The cave-like room had a board floor, a miscellany of boxes and a broken-down chair. The place was strewn with books and magazines.
"I've tried to get Owen to build some bookshelves!" Lud growled impatiently. "As long as he's going to stay down here so much-"
Grace turned towards the door reluctantly. "Well, if we must go-"
Lud nodded. "I do have those rails to put up before I leave!"
"Busy days at the ranch, huh?" Grace was properly sympathetic.
Lud stared. She not only looked and sounded sympathetic, she was cuddling her breasts again like she wanted to nurse him.
He doused the lights and stood for a moment, hiding his embarrassment in the darkness as he told her about his troubles. It was at least a minute before he regained his composure, switched on his flashlight and guided her across the platform to the opposite wall, where the main tunnel began.
"Christine and I will come over and help with the pilling!" she vowed fervently. "We can do something!"
He started, making a wide gesture that threw her off balance against the wall.
He heard a dull thud as her soft flesh hit the wall of rock. His arms went out, catching and holding her and keeping her warm softness close. Maybe it was the cold iron of the rock that made her feel so soft and warm and desirable.
He saw her mouth, only inches from his, open in surprise, and impulsively he drove and twisted his tongue between her full, moist lips. He unzipped his fly, and his rigid part sprang out, to press deep into her belly.
He switched off the flashlight, and she slipped to the platform, her dress sliding up and bunching under her armpits. He lowered himself on top of her, and wrapped his steely legs around hers, grinding her remorselessly into the rough planking. As in the attic, she wore no panties at all.
She'd said that the mine's darkness had a kind of strength, and maybe that was what held her, he wasn't asking. All he knew was that he had to lose the taste of bitterness and frustration over Myra. He buried his swollen manhood deep within her, twisting his groin mercilessly, heedless of her writhing and groaning.
Her body began an uncontrollable shaking and her eyes rolled back in her head. She clawed mercilessly at his shoulders, her hot moist sheath sucking him ever deeper, demanding the quick searing jerks that were building up an almost unendurable heat in his loins.
His plunges into her came faster and harder, but just as he felt himself about to explode, he pulled almost all the way out of her. Then, as she arched almost beyond endurance, gasping and shuddering uncontrollably, he made one last brutal plunge into her, and burst.
Minutes later, as they were going up the tunnel incline, it was easy to figure that it had been an aside, an incident, a happening-something outside the mainstream of his life, something composed of ingredients that wouldn't be around to form up twice in a lifetime. Ingredients like his worry about the sheep, Owen, and his disappointment over Myra. Yep! It was definitely a freak thing, something to be kept in the dark. He didn't have to be uneasy just because the protective feeling he'd had towards Grace on the way down persisted on the way back up. Why hell, nothing would have happened if he hadn't turned off all the lights!
Chapter Fourteen
The mingled herds made a huge grey fan on the prairie. The lead was headed for the long wing of, fencing built from panel sections. The wing would shunt them into the main corral gate.
The din of bells and the bleating was terrific. A great cloud of dust, lifted into the air by thousands of sharp hooves, rose upwards and turned gold-colored in the setting sun.
It was pretty, and it should have been a heartening sight, as well-the undulant rolling motion of so many woolly backs, thousands of them, each representing several dollars.
Up-wind from the herd, where Lud leaned against the truck, the air was clean and smelled of sage. He was on a slight elevation and could see down into the ranch yard. He had spotted Grace's car parked there more than an hour earlier-at about the time he and his three herders had started bunching the sheep for the final push.
Lud breathed deeply ... and discontentedly ... of the sage as he made another sweeping survey of the seventy or eighty thousand dollars worth of sheep, the golden haze, the deep blue of sky where it met the southern horizon, the neat ranch yard and Grace's expensive car. He had been hoping the latter item would go away-that someone, maybe Amy Miller-would persuade Grace that pilling sheep was back-breaking labor; that the sheep were unappreciative-locking their jaws against the pill, or spitting it out if it wasn't deposited so far back in their throats they couldn't.
He had wished Grace away, wished she would get the idea that a greenhorn eastern female would be more of a hindrance than a help. But the car was still there and by this time Amy Miller had no doubt set the table for two extra hands. For Owen's sake he earnestly hoped Grace had brought Christine along.
* * *
Amy Miller had also had the foresight to put two extra leaves in the table. Grace, seated at the opposite end from Lud, looked a comforting mile away.
The seating arrangement made him happy in another way, too-Christine was right next to Owen and the way they tossed their heads together and laughed it looked like some progress was being made there.
Lud started the meat platter around to the herders and smiled pleasantly at Grace. He persuaded himself that he could put up with her for a few days during the pilling. He might even station her out on the hills back of the corrals to watch the sheep as they came out of the pilling chute. That way he could keep all the herders in the corrals, where the work was to be done. As for Christine-he was looking at her when Amy served dessert-apple pie with whipped cream.
"Could you get me a permanent meal ticket here, Owen?" Christine asked.
Her eyes skittered past the three herders and met Lud's for an interesting second.
Hopefully, Lud read a lot into the earnest look.
"He's half-owner of this outfit-why couldn't he get you a permanent meal ticket?" he countered pleasantly, just as Amy served him his pie along with an approving shoulder squeeze.
Christine laughed and swayed against Owen, her shoulder-length hair brushing his neck.
"That girls going to push herself right into Owen's arms and there ain't going to be anything he can do but take!" Amy whispered gleefully in Lud's ear. Her face was beaming as she gathered up his main course dishes.
There was a little tussle between Christine and Owen and Christine came up with a magazine she had probably pulled out of Owen's hip pocket.
Christine held the magazine high, laughing gaily into Owen's embarrassed face. "Look everybody!" she cried. "Look what Owen reads!"
Lud recognized the cover. It was the fact magazine with the story about the GIRLS IN THE GULCH.
"Owen says this story is about a place just up the gulch from where our trailer is parked!" Christine was looking at the lurid magazine cover. "He's promised to give me a personally guided tour ... and explain everything that happened away back there in the past!"
"If he does I bet she brings the happenings up to date!" Amy whispered again in Lud's ear. This time she was bringing him more coffee. "Did you see how much thigh she was showing on the sofa before we came to the table?"
Lud put his hand on Amy's plump neck and pulled her down. "What do you think of the one named Grace?"
Amy clucked thoughtfully. "I think she has pretty eyes and that she should be wearing a bra!"
Lud pushed her away affectionately. She was right. Grace was wearing them disgustingly free. They swung whenever she moved, like they did now as she turned to look at Christine and Owen.
"I'll have to read the article!" she said, speaking to Owen. "Your brother has promised me a guided tour, too-with special sidelights on the brothel's madam. A red-head named Bricky, wasn't she?"
Before Owen could answer someone on Lud's left gave a nervous chuckle. This sound drew Lud's attention to one of the herders. Stub Brown was a heavily built man. He had shoulders that started at the top of his neck and sloped like a bull's.
Brown chuckled nervously. "My granddad worked up there in that old mine. He used to tell yarns about Bricky and her girls!"
Brown shifted nervously in his chair. Now that he had everyone's attention he didn't seem to know what to do with it. He was also having trouble keeping his eyes off Grace's bosom. He began to sweat. He pushed his plate away and reached for the makings.
Lud had finished eating and was smoking. He regarded Brown carefully, seeing him in a different light now that he knew about his herder's affair with Lotte. Brown didn't look like a Romeo but Lud could see that his squared-off, pugnacious features could get him female attention. Even Amy had stopped on her way to the kitchen to watch.
Lud handed his cigarettes across, feeling a twinge of pity for his sweating herder. Brown took one and calmed down. He looked around the table, his eyes coming to rest on Grace.
"If you want, I can tell you something that isn't in Owen's magazine!"
Owen leaned out over the table to look at Brown. "Is it something that was censored?"
"They better not censor anything!" Christine said darkly.
"The rebel has spoken!" Grace's voice rebuked, but Lud noticed that her eyes were lighting up with interest.
"Censored?" Brown shrugged. "I dunno-I read the magazine article and as far as it goes it's accurate. It describes the red sandstone whorehouse, with its fancy parlor and eight bedrooms, Phonograph House, the old timers called it. And the article tells about the water hole upstream, where Bricky had her sign ordering the miners to take a bath before coming in to see her girls. Everyone and everything is there just as granddad had it ... except the Professor and the phonograph!"
Lud nodded. "Hell, I've heard of the Professor, too, from some old timer or other! Bricky used to have him walk the path above the saloon on paydays, playing his violin to remind the boys not to spend all their money for drinks!"
"The Professor was likely a dirty no-good! That's why he isn't mentioned in the article!" Amy averred sharply.
Brown shook his head. "Nope-I think he was simply overlooked ... along with the phonograph. He wasn't a bad guy at all. Everyone liked him except Bricky. She hated him because he wouldn't take his pay out in trade with her girls!"
"My guess is that he wouldn't go to bed with anyone but Bricky!" Christine's lips curled ready for kissing as she leaned sinuously against Owen.
Brown nodded. "You're right. And not only that -he wouldn't play his violin when Bricky was busy. The whole gulch knew when Bricky had a customer ... by the silence. It began to embarrass her. She fired the Professor and tried to get another musician, but they were hard to come by!"
"I bet other interesting details were left out of the article, too, such as how many lovers the girls had on payday night!" Christine was avid now, almost licking her lips, looking for some way to shake everybody up. She already had one victim. Owen was red-faced.
Lud studied his brother, who was obviously caught up in the story to the degree of being painfully embarrassed by it. Lud could feel his self-consciousness emanating across the table like a physical thing. He thought that Owen must feel like a hot burr to Christine, though she didn't seem to mind. She was sitting as close to Owen as she could get without being on his lap. She was smiling up at him, squirming a little from time to time, like she enjoyed the prickly feel of a hot burr.
Grace had pushed her dessert dish aside and folded her arms, elbows on the table. Lud saw that she had taken the position out of habit rather than design. He couldn't honestly tab her as a coarse, crude girl. He was fairly sure she didn't know Brown was staring at her because she was pointing out a lovely set of accessories. She thought Brown was seeing her for what she imagined she was by spells-a beautiful charmer.
She stretched her big mouth into a slow smile.
Brown smiled back.
Lud frowned and swore to ask Grace to go for a walk in the dark.
Chapter Fifteen
Grace left the table and went out the front door soon after Brown stopped talking. Lud got up and gave Brown a look calculated to squelch any fired-up ideas the herder might be entertaining about following Grace. Then he strode out the front door.
Grace was walking away from the flood-lighted area of the yard in front of the house and going to the rear, in the direction of the barn. Lud joined her and they were at the barn door before either broke a silence that was easy and pliant between them. Then Lud said:
"Want me to turn on the lights in the barn? We have a pretty bunch of saddle horses-chestnuts, bays, sorrels ... two paints!"
"Oh, I guess not-I'll see them tomorrow!" She folded her arms and shrugged shiveringly. "The nights are cold out here in the West!" Her breasts jiggled visibly, even in the poor light.
"Yep-the nights get cool." He swung open the door. "Here-" he took hold of her wrist and made her unfold her arms as he guided her into the barn -"it's warm inside!"
She stood rigidly by the door, staring back into the darkness, reminding him of the way she had looked in the mine. His crotch began crawling and he took his hand from her arm, trying not to remember the stall at the rear of the barn-the one with the pile of sweet-smelling creek-bottom hay piled in it.
"It-it feels friendly in here! And I like the sounds the horses make. They eat like they were enjoying it!"
She reached out and her hand found his in a trusting clasp.
Moving quickly to ward off a sudden clot of emotion, he led her through an aisle of dimly outlined horse-rumps. When they reached the rear of the barn he opened the top half of the back door and looked out at the sky.
"We've got some really juiced-up stars out here in the West!" he said unsteadily, looking at her as she came and leaned over the door with him.
He thought that if he could make out the longness of her face the fresh hay in the stall beside him would remain unladen. And he could forget about the resolve that had begun to form when he saw Brown ogling her at the table. Let some other guy tell her it wasn't nice to knead her breasts in front of company. Let someone else tell her that shaking her jugs didn't really make her look pretty-just available.
He sidled up to her, wanting to take note of her size, her tallness-wanting to kill off her warmth and perfume ... and willingness ... with contempt.
But she didn't come through to him the way he wanted. All he felt was her stillness, her waiting ... and awareness. He was almost glad to see her fold her arms and start knocking her jugs together again. Maybe it was just as well she didn't know that without her imagined allure she was most alluring to him. And the crazy things she did with her eyebrows-
She was staring out towards the sheep corrals. "They look so soft and grey ... and their eyes gleam like jewels!" she murmured.
He knew this was true-he had thought the same thing many times, but he wondered if her seeing wasn't part of her trance, her make-believe, her spell. Suddenly it was important that she see it as just plain Grace-not as some barnyard Cinderella with a set of magic pumpkins.
He struck down her hands with a violence that made her gasp.
"What do you see now, Dreamer?" he hissed savagely. "Do the sheeps' eyes still look like jewels?"
Her body slumped like he had cut the cord to paradise.
"Why are you so mean? You were like an animal in the mine and now you've scraped my hands on the door!" she cried, holding out her hands towards him momentarily and then taking them back and putting them to her breasts.
He grabbed her wrists and held her hands behind her back. She twisted and struggled.
"What are you doing to me?" she wailed, and he almost let her go, she sounded so wretched.
"Please-no!" she moaned, as he forced her down onto the hay.
She flinched from his touch as he stripped off her panties.
"You don't want me!" she cried, pathetically clumsy and self-conscious with her long legs.
He stared down at her with mingled feelings of contempt and a curious affection. She lay spread out, long and awkward, on the hay which was dry and prickly. Sharp pieces of hay stuck out from between her thighs, and into the moist dark matting covering her swelling mound.
Almost absentmindedly, he snapped free a long, firm straw and, kneeling down alongside her head, stretched his arm down her body and began running the straw along her leg. It made a soft, whirring sound as it raked the soft inside of her thigh. Pricking her gently but insistently with the straw, he forced her thighs wider and wider apart, until her full reddened lips spread and quivered nakedly in the wind.
Slowly he brought the straw up along her thigh as she drew her breath in sharply. Bypassing the hungry lips of her sex, resisting the urge to force them wider open with his fingers, he twisted the strew in and out of her curled, wet hair.
In spite of himself he was becoming excited. As his tool leaped he cursed Grace for the power that he was beginning to sense that she had over him. Her spell. He looked down at her. Her head was flung back and her eyes were closed. She was writhing expectantly, her mouth open and slack, directly underneath his now massive sex.
Deliberately, he moved the straw further down the hair on her crotch until it was touching the tip of the swollen bud pushing out from between her lips. He tapped the straw against the exposed shiny mound and was rewarded by a screaming intake of breath and the violent shudder that went through her. She was moaning and rolling her head.
Holding the straw in one hand, he twaddled her harder, forcing her into a rhythmic jerking whose pace he controlled at will with the merciless tapping of his straw on her glistening purplish protrusion. With his other hand he raised her head until her lips touched the swollen knob bulging at the end of his rigid member. With a groan she became aware of its fleshy coolness against her mouth. She groaned again deep in her throat, and her head fell back as he eased his sex a short way into her parted lips.
She closed her lips about it, and sucked the tip noisily with her tongue, working her lips urgently. A stabbing desire burned at his loins and up his spine, jerking his stomach. She supported herself on her elbow and, leaning forward, sucked the whole of his member into her mouth. He stretched himself prone across her as she fell back on the hay, his member tightly caught in her sucking lips. Waves of ecstasy surged through him.
Her tongue was rubbing wildly against the rod which filled her and she made choking animal sounds as it pressed the back of her throat. As he pulsed furiously inside her he dropped the straw and gripped her whole sex in his hand, his fingers rubbing and grinding the yielding, wet fleshiness. He twisted and turned them, feeling her mouth tighten spasmodically with each digging pinch. Her hips thrashed and he flung a heavy leg across her thighs to still them.
She lay there immobilized, her hand pinned to the ground by his voracious maleness, and her powerful thighs held in place by his legs, stretched wide. The hand that had been rubbing and exquisitely torturing her lips and purple mound moved down and found the small pulsing opening, wet and widened by desire.
Slowly and gently, he forced his rough, coarse forefinger in, then the middle finger, and worked them around, just at the tip inside the opening. Her attempts to arch her body up became more intense, and her mouthing of his straining member more desperate.
Again he was ready to jam himself roughly into her, not wanting to wait, not wanting to acknowledge that it was she, Grace. As he realized this, he grew tired. His fingers stopped their probing, and he raised himself, gently removing his member from her clinging mouth.
But she rolled over and straddled him, and, taking his hands guided them to her sex. She writhed invitingly and his member jutted forward again. All right, he thought to himself with a smile, it was your idea after all, wasn't it, honey?
Seizing the gift in his hands, he pried it open as wide as he could with a thumb on either side, and closed his eyes expectantly. Slowly, she lowered herself onto his now throbbing member while rotating her body, causing deep shuddering breaths to course through him. She raised up and came down again, more deeply, grinding in. She moaned and clutched her belly as her opening slammed against his groin, burying him within her. Blinded by lust, he groped for her thighs, found them, and pulled them down violently, giving a thrusting twist deep inside of her that caused her to fall back against his raised knees and claw at his buttocks.
As he pulled at her he arched up into her harder and harder, faster and faster, feeling his powerful twisting stabs force the breath out of her. A deep small groan started in her throat and spread as she grew rigid in his grasp. His member thrashed and jerked, caught tightly within her, and suddenly, with aching relief, he saw and knew nothing.
Yet afterwards, just as she was going to her room, she could still say:
"I wonder what would have happened if it hadn't been dark-if we had been able to see each other?"
Lud almost said, Nothing! Nothing would have happened! But he didn't. The question was too childish. Besides, he didn't want to hurt her so much she would leave ... and take Christine with her. Not when things were looking so promising for Owen.
Chapter Sixteen
Lud went to his room. He wanted to get a good rest-tomorrow would be a long, dusty, aggravating day. Pilling sheep was no fun!
But sleep wouldn't come. There were too many things he could have done better there in the hay with Grace. There had been no need for such God-Almighty haste. He was sure he hadn't given her any pleasure. Poking blindly like an adolescent.
He finally fell into a restless dream-filled sleep wherein it was lambing time and the rainy, cold weather was giving him hell. Grace and Christine were helping with the sheep. Grace wanted to keep the herd in the corrals where there would be some protection from the weather but he kept shaking his head.
"There isn't a hell of a lot we can do except carry the fresh lambs down into the ravines where they can stay with their mother, out of the wind! The herd has to be let out to graze!"
"But so many lambs are dying!"
"Maybe the rain will let up. And if it doesn't, you better stay with Christine and help her with the yearling bunch!"
"But I want to stay where the lambs are being born!" She jostled Lud's arm. "Look! See that ewe straining? She's been trying an awfully long time! There must be something wrong!"
"There is!" Lud said wearily, sloshing forward, clumsy in rubber boots and slicker. "The lamb's stuck!"
He went towards the edge of the herd, carefully bringing his ten-foot sheep hook into position to snag the ewe's leg. He made a quick lunge and missed. The herd bunched. He'd had time to see the lamb's head sticking out. It was swollen. The ewe had already been in labor too long.
Lud circled the herd, cursing the unconcern of the sheep in general. All they could think of was to mill and run and give him hell.
Suddenly Grace was motioning. "She's over here, Lud. She has stopped trying. She can't get the lamb out."
The ewe was down and Lud dropped his sheep hook and leaped, catching his fingers in her soggy wool, but the weary animal managed to scramble up and run, with the lamb's head bobbing crazily.
"Oh, God, Lud-it's neck will break!" Grace cried.
Lud got up and ran back to where he had dropped his sheep hook. "Go around and turn the herd!" he yelled.
Soon he had the ewe spotted again. This time he didn't lunge. He pressed forward steadily until the ewe was slowed by the surge of sheep running before her. Then he snagged her leg with his hook.
"Get away!" he warned, but he was too late. Grace had swooped down beside him.
She put a hand on the ewe's flank. "She's in agony!" she cried solicitously.
Her hand went from the ewe's flank to the lamb's head. The lamb's head moved slightly. "It's alive-it's actually alive!" she marveled joyfully.
"Yeah, but not for long!" Lud pressed gently on the ewe's flank and the animal responded by straining weakly. "She's about done for-strained herself out!"
"But why hasn't the lamb come?" Grace asked, with a quick sad catch in her voice.
Lud looked at the ewe's messy rump. There was blood and a straggle of gut that he recognized as being the remains of the water sac that always came out first. A raw, wet mingling of smells came up to his nose. He glanced at Grace. The moisture on her lashes wasn't all rain, he could see that, even though her rain hat was pushed askew and a curling lock of hair was plastered to her forehead.
"The birth isn't normal-the front legs should be out with the head. If they were, I could give her a hand."
He looked at the ewe again, at the meekly outstretched neck, the twitching upper lip. Then he bent over the ewe's rump again and ran his forefinger around between the lamb's neck and its mother's taut flesh.
Grace put her hand beside his, pulling the wool aside.
"I can touch something-it might be the lamb's foot," he mused.
"Let me try!" Grace begged.
Lud drew back and Grace took his place beside the ewe's rump. He watched her insert two fingers to the knuckle.
"It's feet are there-just caught back!" she muttered, working and wrinkling her brow with concentration. Her upper lip pulled back on her teeth like the ewe's.
"I think they're coming!" she panted. "Now if my arm doesn't give out!"
Lud could see the tiny yellow points of the lamb's hooves coming out between Grace's fingers.
"Pull down-away from its neck!" he coached encouragingly.
The ewe was straining again, giving what help she could. The legs came out past the knees. Lud pushed Grace away.
"I can get my fingers around them now!" he explained.
He applied a steady pull, with the ewe helping a little, and the lamb's shoulders finally came through with a grisly sound that mingled with the ewe's gritting teeth.
The lamb slid out and lay free of its mother except for the umbilical cord. The ewe heaved weakly to her feet and turned towards the lamb, stretching and breaking that. She began to lick at the shiny birthing membrane clinging to the lamb. The lamb shook its head and made sloppy sounds on the wet ground.
Lud whipped off his slicker and draped it over a giant sagebrush. Then he took the lamb by the forelegs and moved it slowly to the lee side of the makeshift shelter, keeping it close to the ground and in plain sight and smell of the ewe, who followed, grunting with soft, motherly affection.
"You can't stay out in this rain without a slicker!" Grace warned.
Lud bent and washed his hands in a pool of water. Grace followed suit.
"It's time Brown and the other herder took over!" Lud said, starting to dry his hands on his shirt tail and then sharing it with Grace. "We'll go to the wagon and rout them out!"
* * *
Lud began stuffing the firebox of the tiny sheep wagon stove as soon as Brown and his companion were gone. As he bent to the task he felt Grace tugging at his damp sweater. He shrugged helpfully, straightening as she was hanging the garment in back of the stove. He took off his shirt and gave her that, too.
"You haven't done a thing for yourself!" he observed, getting a towel out of a drawer under the bunk. "Take off your rain duds and dry your hair!"
"Thanks!" She took the towel and shuffled past him through the narrow aisle between the food bunkers to lean over the stove. She fluffed out her hair, losing its fragrance.
Lud sat down. The heat was pleasantly relaxing. He rubbed his bare chest.
She straightened and looked at him curiously. "Where's your undershirt?"
"Used it to flag a ewe and her lamb last night," he replied laconically.
"You used it for what?"
"For a flag ... scarecrow-whatever you want to call it. Something to scare the coyotes!"
"Oh!" She smiled. "Didn't we have a time with our lamb?"
"You did great! My fingers were too big."
"I've never had an experience like that before! Imagine! Mid-wife to a sheep! Big deal, huh?"
"Cut it out!" Lud laughed. "You're busting with pride and you know it!"
"Sure I am!"
She let her face light up and the sight made Lud stare. She wasn't plain-she was lovely. Her dark hair was dry now and wild, moving along her cheeks, half hiding her eyes. Her eyebrows didn't bug him either, he noticed. Nor her mouth. Her lips were bowed, intent with the sympathy and pride running in her thoughts.
"Lud"-her eyes were fixed on the shelf over the bunk-"what's that big square box?"
Lud glanced up at the shelf and at the box she'd mentioned. He grinned. "That is a phonograph box. An honest-to-God real old-timey phonograph box. I've worked it over and it'll play ... I think!"
He got the box down and placed it on the bunker beside him. He spun the crank, grinning widely.
"Oh, the spring's broken!" Grace said sadly.
"It'll play," he averred, and raised the lid. There was a record on the turntable. He snapped a shiny gizmo and the thing took off.
"See!" he chortled gleefully.
A clear, sweet tone issued from the old box. He opened the louvers in front and the volume increased to fill the sheep wagon with violin music.
Grace was suddenly leaning over the phonograph, her head only inches from his. She was staring, seemingly fascinated by the spinning turntable and the sounds emanating from the ancient box.
"Whatcha seeing?" he teased. "Bricky and the Professor?"
"Lud, I'll do anything for you if you'll bring this along when we go up to that place above the mine!"
"Anything?" he mocked.
"Anything!" she reiterated, settling onto his lap but jumping up quickly.
"Your pants are wet, too! Stand up!" She felt of him, running her hands along his legs concernedly. "You're wet through-shorts and all, I think! You'll have to take them off!"
Lud demurred. "Shorts, too?"
"Of course-there must be another towel!"
Lud opened the towel drawer. "Yep-there is!" he admitted.
She turned her back and Lud looked at it sadly as he stripped. "Aren't you the least bit damp anywhere ... I mean excepting your head?"
She laughed uncertainly. "Would you like that, really? It's daylight, you know!"
Lud laughed uproariously. "It's daylight, you know!" he mimicked. "What a hell of a funny thing to say!"
She smiled over her shoulder as he shut off the phonograph and draped the towel around his middle. Then he sat down and watched her turn towards him. He had a terrible feeling that something wrong was about to happen. He studied her and suddenly he saw her arms go up and he knew he was waiting for her to rub her breasts and spoil everything.
He wanted to yell-his mouth was open-and then he saw that she was unbuttoning the top of her dress. In no time at all she stood before him white and lovely and voluptuous.
"Bare as babes!" he gasped, rising to stand close to her.
"Not quite!" She reached out and took the towel off his waist. "And now if you were on your honor about the daylight not mattering-"
The tips of her breasts were tickling his chest.
He could feel the heat of her body on his belly.
His crotch swarmed.
He made a move to get on the bunk then paused and let her get up first and go to the back.
Then he crawled up beside her, stretched full length, and began nuzzling her neck and cheeks and mouth. Her lips were soft and full. They were closed, but not against him. Gently he probed with his tongue. Their coolness sent a shiver through him. He licked at her mouth, darting his tongue to this side and that, until her lips parted slightly. He continued the delicate probe with just the tip of his tongue, until her tongue, no longer able to resist, reached out hungrily, weaving from side to side. He took it between his lips and slowly sucked it until its full length lay trembling in his mouth. She quivered and laced her arms around his neck, her body straining against his.
With a gentle motion he separated their mouths and brought his head down to her breast. Taking one breast in both his hands, he squeezed and kneaded it firmly. The nipple, taut and upright, looked inviting. He enveloped it in his mouth with a sudden downward swoop and began working and sucking it. He found that he liked this, for there was no abatement, no lessening of his passion.
He went smoothly to the position between her legs. But here there was some maddening difficulty.
He strove mightily, his breath rasping with the effort to exhort and plead and suddenly Grace became a pillow and his eyes were open to the grey dawn coming in his bedroom window.
He groaned and rolled over. He was still in a great state of readiness. He grinned and got to the edge of the bed to have a smoke.
He shook his head. Talk about your wet dreams! How real could they get. Why hell, just a little bit more and-
And the part about the phonograph-that was funny because there actually was one in the wagon Brown was herding from.
Chapter Seventeen
Lud used up a good ten minutes of the noon hour making two sweeps around the sheen Grace had been assigned to watch. He stopped the truck on a high knoll and got out to look around.
He scanned the surrounding area impatiently. She waited long enough, but he had to get back to the would probably show from behind a cut-bank if he ranch and see that the pilling got under way again.
He decided that Grace would have to herd hungry unless she had the good sense to go to one of the wagons and open a can of beans and a box of crackers. The wagons were parked a mile or so apart and about the same distance from the ranch corrals. They were standing ready to be pulled back out onto the range after the pilling was over.
He glanced around at them again as he went back to his truck. That was when he noticed Brown's pick-up nosed into the short noonday shadow of the far wagon. It was Brown's own herding wagon and he had likely driven out to it to get something-maybe a pair of gloves. The sheep were loaded with burrs. The hands caught hell goosing them through the chutes.
Lud had the truck headed back towards the ranch when he saw the brief flutter of Grace's colorful dress in the doorway of Brown's wagon. He knew he couldn't be mistaken. He remembered how bright the dress had looked against the drab prairie as Grace had walked away from the ranch that morning.
Well-so that was that-Grace had already been in the wagon getting something to eat when Brown arrived ... or he had picked her up and taken her there.
Lud slowed and glanced back at the sheep. They were beginning to file off the slope towards water and would be all right long enough for Grace to eat. He pumped the foot-feed to get up speed again. The truck wasn't accelerating right. There was something in the fuel line or the carburetor was dirty. He fixed it in his mind to tear the carburetor down and soak it overnight.
He swung out once more, slowed and looked back at the wagon thoughtfully. Nothing was stirring--there was no bright dress in the doorway. He jerked the truck completely about and headed for the wagon, pumping the foot-feed like an organ pedal. It wouldn't hurt to hurry Brown along ... and warn Grace about the breaks east of the wagon. They were God-awful easy to get lost in, with their bare look-alike mud buttes and deep washes.
He leaped out of the truck, which had died the moment he let up on the gas, and peered into the wagon through a cloud of dust of his own making. He could hear the phonograph music before he could clearly see Grace and Brown. They had their heads together-and their legs, too, under the tiny sheep wagon table, whereon they had placed the battered old phonograph.
Grace wasn't exactly bent over the music box- her arms were folded and she had her breasts squeezed out. Brown wasn't looking at the phonograph. Nor was he tapping out time with the music. The bastard was playing footsie. The top of Grace's dress was open and she was showing a hell of a lot of skin.
Lud banged the door against the side of the wagon, but the phonograph was filling the air with music. Neither Grace nor Brown looked tip.
"Brown!" Lud yelled testily.
Brown stood up and shuffled through the wagon. Lud backed away to let him out. Brown came reluctantly-like he was hating to because things had been going his way. When he hit the ground his face hardened and he squinted up at the sun.
"What're you so ornery-eyed about?" he asked truculently. "The noon hour ain't up yet!"
"Lud, come see the old phonograph!" Grace pleaded, showing herself in the doorway.
"I've seen it!" Lud's anger fell away a little. Grace seemed enthused about the old music box and not Brown. That helped. And she hadn't exactly followed Brown to the door, either. That helped some more. Maybe in about an hour he'd be able to look at Brown without hitting him.
He turned and stepped to the truck. He opened the door, unaware that Brown had followed until he felt a tap on the shoulder.
"Better get into your own heap!" Lud growled, turning and eyeing the heavy man.
Brown grinned wickedly and folded his arms. He shrugged, trying to move like Grace did when she was showing off her breasts.
"Talk about asking for it!" he sneered.
"Yeah-" Lud drawled ominously-"talk about asking for it!"
He hit Brown flush on his blunt jaw and Brown sagged. But he didn't go down, quite, and when he came in, head low, arms flailing, Lud knew he was in for a rough house go unless he could end it quickly.
He stood like a target, letting Brown come bulling in, then he stepped aside and hit the man on the back of the head with both fists as he went by. It was an old ruse and a kind of dirty one, but he was in a hurry. There were sheep to pill.
Brown groaned as he got up. His eyes were slitted and still full of fight. He'd been down but he wasn't beaten.
Lud raised his fists. He was ready and eager to continue the fight, but he was more ready and a great deal more eager to get back to the corrals.
"Keep up this ruckus and you won't be able to see your way around Rawlands on the Fourth!" he warned, knowing that Brown and all the men were looking forward to the celebration, which was only two days away.
Brown stopped a few feet from Lud, sneering. "I still say she was asking for it, and if she starts throwing those things under my nose again, she's going to get it!"
Lud tensed, but his fists stayed home this time.
Brown laughed heavily as he went towards his pickup truck. Lud watched him back up and head for the corrals.
"Lud, I'm sorry!"
Grace's voice stopped Lud as he was getting into the truck. He turned. She was still standing in the wagon door. He went back, trying to level out his anger before he spoke.
"I asked him to play the phonograph," she said.
"You do one hell of a lot of asking ... one way and another!" Lud raised his eyes stonily to the top of her dress.
Her hand went up to her bosom. She seemed to be counting the buttons, trying to gauge the exposure by the expression on his face. Then she flushed.
"It was unbuttoned long before Mr. Brown came along!" she said defiantly. "It's hot out here on the prairie watching your damned sheep!"
"Yeah-well-" he could see the lacy insignificant halter she called a bra-"with all that creamy-white skin showing, watch the sunburn, too!"
He could see her in the rear vision mirror as he drove away. The heat waves curdled the reflection. The bright print on her dress looked like it was running together as she left the wagon and walked out of sight in the direction of the herd. And then he remembered he hadn't warned her about the breaks. He vowed, as a kind of penance, to be especially nice to her the coming evening.
Chapter Eighteen
Lud was awakened the next morning at dawn by a noise at the bedroom window. He raised up cautiously to look and saw Owen crawl through the window and walk quietly to his bed. He was soon snoring.
Well I'll be damned, Lud thought, settling back with a pleased grin. Little brother Owen out tomcatting. He knew that route over the flat verandah roof. He'd used it himself many times, years ago, when the folks had had a hired girl sleeping in the next room who was willing to unhook the screen from the inside.
And now it was Christine's room. Grace's was opposite, across the hall. His grin deepened. Owen! The boy was learning.
Lud turned over and closed his eyes. It was easy to recall some of his trips out over the verandah roof, especially the ones when he'd been going to visit Lara.
Lara! His first affair with her had been in the truck, though. Slipping into her room by prearrangement had come later.
Lara had been the one who broke all the knobs off the truck's dash with her feet. She had been the one to fill the cab with vexatious moans.
His youthful ardor had wilted a little when she'd berated him for his clumsiness, for being hobbled by his pants, which he'd only slipped down, not taken off.
There had been a moment when he'd felt silly and ineffectual with his trying and had almost pulled back, but then suddenly it had started and the warmth of her hand had drawn him out to man-size. He could still remember that hand, kneading him with a firm, delicious pressure. She had crooned softly as she rubbed and stroked, maddening him beyond belief in the confines of the small seat.
He had spread her legs as far as they would go, forcing them back against her shoulders, and aimed himself at her opening sex. With his young manhood fully aroused, he had surged into her once, twice, a third time. Her powerful legs had tightened convulsively about his neck, as she urged him on, pleading for more and deeper, her moans changing at last from vexation to pleasure.
Lud sucked in a hard breath and threw off the covers. Dawn had brightened. There was about another half day of pilling. But before that he had to replace the truck's carburetor.
He got up quietly, dressed, and left the house. The garage was still dark so he rigged a light over the motor with an extension cord and went to work. He was half finished when Amy called him in to breakfast.
He hurried through the meal, only absently listening to Amy's talk until she said:
"The herders are figuring on taking off today, as soon as they get their pay. Can't wait to get their snoots into some of that Rawland's Fourth-of-July booze, I guess!"
Lud gulped hurriedly at his coffee. "Brown won't be going in. We talked it over last week and he agreed to herd over the Fourth."
Amy's brows went up. "Hasn't he told you?"
Lud got up from the table and lit a cigarette on the way to the door. "Told me what?" he asked carelessly, his mind on finishing the carburetor and the puling beyond that.
"Brown's quitting! Said so last night at the table after you left."
"That figures!" Lud growled. He'd forgotten the set-to out at the wagon.
He was scowling as he crossed the yard and entered the garage. But he kept his mind on putting the carburetor together. Only after he had the truck running again did he start mulling the question of who would herd over the Fourth. Miller would, of course, if he asked him, but one man wasn't enough, not with the herds thrown together into one colossal bunch by the pilling operation.
So-here was a ready-made excuse for not taking Grace to Rawlands. Subconsciously he had known all along that he would find some way to avoid that embarrassment. It wouldn't have been quite so bad if he hadn't played her up as a real looker that day in Gurd's hamburger shop. No one as tall as that was a beauty by Rawland's standards, and the gang would have landed on him with all fours for the way she towered above him.
He wasn't proud of himself but there was one argument for not taking Grace to the celebration that didn't have anything to do with his being ashamed of her height. There would be a great deal of drinking and some of those Rawland's toughs could get pretty rank. In going the whole way to humiliate him they could have hurt Grace.
He turned off the engine and heard someone cough near the garage door. It was Owen.
"It's too thick in here for me!" he choked, stepping backwards until he was outside.
Lud walked towards him. The air in the garage was blue with exhaust smoke, but he hadn't noticed it so much at the front where he'd been working on the engine.
"Hoo-ee!" he scoffed, giving Owen a playful shove. "Don't go blaming your morning miseries on a little exhaust gas! Blame it on that long crawl over the verandah roof!"
Owen recovered and grabbed Lud's arm and twisted it into a hammer lock. "You spying bastard!" he hissed.
Lud tensed. He could break the hammer lock but for the moment he didn't. He liked the physical contact with Owen. There hadn't been any horseplay between them for years.
"You ever see me coming through that window, bub?"
Owen laughed. "Yeah-many times!"
Lud suddenly undid the hammer lock. Owen's laugh had given him a perfect opening.
"Take this then!" he grinned into Owen's surprised face as he pulled him over his thigh for a pratfall.
Owen bounded up like a wolf, his teeth bared.
Lud gave ground, his hackles a-tingle with pride. By God here was the kind of brother he'd wanted. And he gave credit for the change in Owen to Christine. He felt like giving her a great big Fourth-of-July hurrah.
Lud relaxed first, grinning as he leaned on the front of the garage. Owen came up and stood beside him.
"Had breakfast?" Lud asked.
"Yeah-with Chris and Grace, just a few minutes ago! Amy told us about how all the help intends to take off for Rawlands. Now Chris and I don't want to go to the celebration half as bad as Grace. We'll be glad to help Miller while you take Grace to the celebration."
Lud looked away from the well-meaning warmth in Owen's eyes. "Christine say that?"
"No. But-"
"And what did Grace say?" he muttered. "Nothing-but Chris says Grace has a new western wear outfit that she wants to show off so damned bad she can taste it!"
"Fine-so she can go with you and Christine and show it off!" Lud had visions of Grace's western wear outfit. For crissakes, in high-heeled boots and a cowboy hat Grace would loom up taller than ever. He could hear the hoots and jeers of the small and not so small fry as he walked Grace down the street.
"You know, Grace is real pretty even if she is tall," Owen said, seeming to read Lud's thoughts from his squint-eyed, evasive expression, "and I'm not just saying it because she's Chris' sister!"
Lud frowned and shook his head, negating Owen's plea before it took root. "Take the girls to the celebration-I've got to help Miller hold herd!"
It was Owen's turn to frown. "OK then! But stop making a shambles of Grace's pride. If you can't stand her in the daylight, let her alone after dark!"
"Just what the hell do you mean?" Lud tried hard to look like he didn't know.
"Ah, bull!" Owen snorted derisively.
He turned away with a hurt reproving look that Lud carried with him all through the busy morning. It was still there as he paid the men and watched them take off for town.
And it was still pushing as he hurriedly got into the truck and circled the yard on his way out to help Miller.
He braked up beside the big red sports car with the New York license plates.
Owen was behind the wheel, waiting for Grace and Christine to come out of the house.
"You sit that thing like you owned it!" Lud scoffed.
"Why not? Grace is giving it to Chris and me for a wedding present!"
"Wedding!" Lud whistled. Then: "Hell boy, I'm sure glad!" He let his gladness show, but, eyeball to eyeball, Owen's look stayed unfriendly.
Lud let his eyes slide away and all of a sudden the heat from the one-thirty sun was turning the truck cab into an oven.
"Whew!" He cuffed his hat back. "It's a real burner!"
"Yeah-hot enough to take all the run out of the sheep! Bet they won't leave water until almost bed-ground time!"
Lud straightened angrily. Owen was trying to belittle the necessity for his going out to help Miller, for not taking Grace to the celebration. He was trying to make him feel guilty and rotten. Wonder how he would feel if he was taken up on his offer to stay? Wonder how slicked up and cool-looking he'd be explaining to Christine over a hot bed of cactus that there'd been a change in plans and that they'd have to spend the afternoon going around the woolies instead of lolling in the Rawlands municipal park eating sandwiches and drinking cold beer?"
The sound of the girls coming out snapped his pleasant run of theoretical revenge.
Motioning a quick goodbye to Owen, Lud hot-rodded out of the yard, trailed by what sounded like a wail of disappointment. It might have been Grace calling after him. He wasn't sure. He didn't want to be. It was going to be a long hot afternoon without any more recriminations.
It was going to be a real roaster!
Chapter Nineteen
Lud checked through the wagon Brown had been herding from, making sure that Brown had removed all his gear. Then he hooked the truck onto the front of the wagon and pulled it carefully out over the sagebrush until he hit a trail that led to the hill he'd decided on for a bed ground.
From the hill he could look across a mile or more of sheep, spread out grazing. Miller was on horseback, working the edge of the herd off the Rawlings' road to let a sleek red car get by.
He thought he saw someone-maybe Grace- wave from the car just as it was picking up speed. Then the car shot up over a ridge and out of sight, leaving him with a sudden feeling of being disconnected, cut off.
He panned the loneliness with his eyes, gradually pulling Miller into the breach. He knew from experience that loneliness would grow and feed on an emotion like feeling sorry for himself. This had been one of his kid habits-indulging himself in long bouts of feeling sorry for himself. In those days, when he'd been out in the sheep wagon, he'd really been alone-no one, nothing, except his dog, the damned sheep, and his everlasting thoughts.
And the loneliest bugaboo of all had been the rim of the prairie horizon because it marked out the overwhelming vastness of his isolation.
He leaned against the shady side of the wagon and lit a cigarette. Grown up or not the feeling still came out of the sound and the no-sound. The sibilant whisper of the wind in the grass hadn't changed; nor the gut-hollowing no-sound that followed the wind's dying.
While the wind blew it still carried the to-be-continued dreams he'd dreamt as a kid. They were dreams that had come out of nameless longings and moodiness and too much time to think.
Now the dreams were bigger and stronger and more incomplete. That's what came of growing up-your dreams were blunted by shrugs and laughs and all the who-the-hell-gives-a-damns.
And the laughs got louder and more unkind. Especially the ones that were on him. Like the kind he'd have had to stand up to if he'd taken Grace to Rawlands.
His eyes went out across the vacant distances of the land. Big! Overhead and underfoot! They said man was an island. He was that all right! Isolated with all those incomplete dreams! Trying for an ending, a growing-up magic that would finally put him over. Some tried whiskey or marijuana or LSD. But that was crazy. He wouldn't settle for anything foggy. He wanted something-maybe a good fight-maybe love-maybe both. Anyway it had to be something that would help him complete the dreams and fill the skin he'd been born with.
It had occurred to him that there might be too many old rules in too many old books getting in the way. For he had long ago concluded that the trouble with completing dreams was that the rules were laid down beforehand and they tended to make everyone conform. If a tall man went with a short girl everyone stared. Reverse it, they made fun of you. Had he taken Grace to Rawlands-whooeee! And no rearrangement of their heels could have made it otherwise. Not with Grace being as tall as she was.
He felt a rush of anger at the old mores and habits-the old route with signs along the way proclaiming that all had been ground down to fit-this when everyone knew there wasn't any real control over the important things. No real real control over living and dying. No real control over mating-the belly-to-belly kind of mating. Did the girl just lie there like a cow chewing a cud or did she hump and come alive? If they were right for each other that way why should anyone give a damn who was shorter and who was taller?
His eyes roved the distant mountains and he thought about the mine and Owen and the visitors from the East. The mountains were high beautiful. They looked friendly. They always had. Except for the mine. And Owen's hiding. But it seemed that might be finished because of Christine. High beautiful! There for the climbing. Like Grace? Well, he didn't know. She was long-waisted and there, that much was for sure!
He stretched, laughing at himself. Whooee! That damned pilling chore had really been something. He would likely be forcing jaws and throwing pills in his sheep for a week. And the blatting and the dust! He didn't blame the herders for taking off for town to tank up on beer and whiskey!
Lud hawked and spit and wished he had a beer. Maybe he would drive back to the ranch and pick up some as soon as he had the wheels dug in so the damned wagon wouldn't blow off the hill if a storm came up.
As he went to the truck for a spade he looked at Miller across the tremendous spread of the sheep. God, how the heat waves were jumping down on the flat. Miller's tongue must be hanging out.!
The sweat started running off his face as he dug holes in front of the wagon wheels. What a hell of a way to spend the Fourth! Bet Owen and the girls were in the shade drinking beer right now!
With that thought on his mind, it was sure hard to concentrate on work. In his imagination he could see Owen sitting with his back to a tree, Christine by his side. His hand was under her dress, pulling aside her panties, while Grace dozed in the heat. She held it there by rolling over on her stomach, and the undulation of her buttocks indicated that Owen was hard at work.
In his mind's eye he saw Grace, aroused by her sister's moans but still asleep, instinctively begin to rub her thighs together. Drowsily, her hand readied out to Owen's unbusy hand, guiding it under her dress.
"Stop it," said Lud violently to himself, and stomped off stiffly, his crotch bursting.
Chapter Twenty
Lud stood in the doorway looking out over the dark yard. Behind him in the kitchen he heard Amy close the refrigerator. Next thing she was poking him in the back with a vacuum bottle.
"Take this iced tea to Carl on your way to Raw-lands," she said. "And don't ask me why I'm not sending beer after you took the last of it."
Lud threw away his cigarette. It hit the bare, hard ground and loosed a spray of red sparks. He stepped off the stoop and squashed the butt.
"Have I said anything about going to Rawlands?" he asked harshly. The spiked beer, the bath, the shave and change of clothes hadn't relaxed him the way he'd thought they would when he'd been hightailing it to the ranch right after the sheep were bedded down.
"No you haven't told me"-Amy squeezed around him in the doorway-"but I'll put this in the truck just in case you do decide to go!"
Lud flipped on the yard lights and watched her cross to the truck. She walked with a jounce, rolling her buttocks together like she knew he was looking. She never stopped jiggling from one step to another.
He was frowning and made a grab for her when she returned.
"Why Lud, you act ornery enough to rape a woman!" she cried, jumping away and taking stock of his eyes with pretended dismay. "Trouble is, Lud, I don't think I'm the woman!"
"No-why not?"
"Oh, Lud!" She rebuked him by flinging up her arms in mock despair as she went into the kitchen.
He followed and trapped her against the wall. "Why aren't you the right woman? You've thrown me enough hints!"
She rocked him back with a shove and a disgusted glare:
"I'll be damned!" he muttered, gaping. "And here I thought-" She was waggling her arms again and nodding like a stout puppet.
"It could have happened again." She gave him a bewildered look and suddenly dropped her arms and began to laugh. "But not now!" she chortled hysterically. "I-I guess it's because I want to see a double wedding so much it makes you seem like a son!"
"Oh for crissakes, let me out of here!" Lud bellowed, bolting.
"You can't miss her-she's tall, stunning and wearing a lot of silver doodads in her hair!"
Amy's voice, sounding like a thousand horselaughs, caught him at the door. With that ringing in his ears, just to get out of the house wasn't enough. He made for the truck. Then almost stacked it up against a shed as he whirled out of the yard.
He was entering the outskirts of Rawlands before he realized the hard object pressing into his back was the bottle of iced tea he was supposed to have dropped off at the wagon. Hell, he'd pick up something better than iced tea to drop off. He would just gawk around a little, spy out Owen and the girls and see what they were doing, then pick up a six-pack of beer for Miller and head back.
It didn't take many carnival sideshows and rides to fill up half of Rawlands' short main street. The bowery dance floor more than filled the other half. Lud walked on virgin prairie sod to get around into the shadows at the end of it.
The lighting was dim, colored down with blue, green and yellow shades. The effect was like a quick dusk and a cloudy sunset all at once. The best light was right over the five-piece orchestra, but there was a barricade built up along the dance floor at that point. He went around there anyway, but the barricade was too high to see over. He decided the best way to see anything was to dance.
He bought one of the five-dollar all-night benefit ticket-ribbons, which was all the rodeo committee ever sold, and made his way to the wallflower bench. He knew from former dances that any male walking towards this bench would be met head on by one or more females. But the one that sallied out to meet him now he tried to dodge, taking her for a kid. She was that short!
He turned towards her when he saw his mistake and a girl about eighteen floated into his arms and tucked her head under his ribs.
"They're playing nothing but struggle music!" she complained gleefully.
"Struggle music?"
"Sure, Lud, you know-the old-fashioned contact kind!" She snuggled closer.
"Oh!" He drew back, trying unsuccessfully to see her face. "If you know me, for crissakes stop playing hide-and-seek with my belly button!"
She giggled loudly and drew the attention of the near-by dancers. They began to stare, and after that it seemed everyone was looking and pointing. He heard them start saying, "Well, I guess that's the long and short of it!"
His partner finally stopped giggling. "You don't know me but you should! I'm Gladys Stark!"
"No!" The Stark's he'd heard of-a family of ranchers. Gladys he'd overlooked, understandably. He began scanning the crowd as best he could, lifting embarrassed eyes over the close-in couples.
Gladys began talking to get his attention and when she mentioned Owen's name, she had it.
"I haven't seen him," he said. "Is he here?"
Gladys nodded.
"Did he dance?"
"Not with me, darn it!" Gladys pouted. "He acted like he didn't know the local stock. That's why we gang-laughed when he danced by with the tall one!"
Lud winced. "What did she do?"
"She towered! What else?"
Lud began turning and twisting, staring around at the shifting couples.
Gladys giggled. "Stub Brown danced with her, too, and did that look funny!"
Lud missed a step, stumbled and swore at his clumsiness and the sudden impulse to laugh. Sure Grace and Brown had looked funny. Anything off the norm looked funny to the other nuts.
"Brown must be drunk!" he suggested tentatively. "I mean he must have been out of his mind- passing up western pretties for this-this eastern long-legs!"
Gladys reared back suspiciously. "She's staying at your place. You know she's not a bad looking girl- just outsize one way like I am the other. Brown wanted to dance with her enough to brave the laughs!"
"Brave, huh?" Lud grunted. "Then why aren't they dancing?"
"Oh, they left. Brown was steering her towards Smiley's Bar!"
"See what I mean-he's drunk!" Lud grinned, but he was squirming inside, refusing to match up his performance with Brown's.
"He looked brave!" Gladys reiterated. "And he didn't redden up as much as you are-dancing with me!"
When the dance ended, Lud found they were standing very close to the spot where the dance had begun. He thanked her for the dance and strode to the edge of the bowery floor and jumped to the ground.
Smiley's Bar was at the opposite end of main street, close to the park and opposite Gurd's. It was the only place in Rawlands that sold hard liquor and six-packs.
He threaded through the celebrants crowded in along the midway, nodding at acquaintances and out stepping several who tried to head him off for a bull session.
He was in a dead heat with one persistent neighbor and went off the end of the walk into the park before he realized he'd passed Smiley's.
Circling back he almost ran into Grace's sleek red car. He shied away. Christine and Owen were clearly up to a little pre-marital experimentation in the back seat.
Chapter Twenty-One
Smiley's Bar was full of bleary eyes, smoke and loud voices. Lud had elbowed his way to the bar and ordered a whiskey and six-pack before he noticed that one of the voices was louder and more openly quarrelsome than anyone else's. This character was being drunkenly belligerent about having to take seconds or thirds with a certain girl. He kept swearing that he'd get between her shafts before the night was over.
"I know where they took her, and I'm going up there!" he vowed. His legs buckled and he almost sagged, to the floor.
Smiley approached, grinning wearily as he put the drink and six-pack down in front of Lud.
"I think our friend there has got delusions of grandeur, don't you?"
Lud shrugged and snagged Smiley's arm to detain him. "You had a real tall girl in here tonight?"
"What the hell-you too?"
"What's that supposed to mean?" Lud tensed. He didn't like the smirk on the saloon-man's mouth ... or the dirty-story expression coming up in his eyes. Still, it was his mouth, his eyes ... and his place of business. He wasn't responsible for what came in ... or went out.
Smiley nodded affably towards the packed house. "Where'd you think I got such a crowd? Half the guys at the dance must have followed her over here! And then they stayed to see if Brown could get her drunk enough to perform!"
Lud frowned. "Perform? Perform what?"
Smiley shrugged, trying to free his arm of Lud's grip. "Some kind of come-on with her boobies, I guess. Brown kept snapping his fingers at her and telling her to do it, but she put him off, saying she was through with that trick!"
Lud tightened his grip. "Was she drunk?"
Smiley nodded emphatically. "She was glassy-eyed when they took her out of here!"
"They?"
"Yeah-Brown and his sidekick. Wouldn't be surprised if they gang up on her-Ouch!"
Lud eased up on Smiley's arm. "Know where they went?"
"I can guess-Brown rented Abby's old room over the hardware!"
Lud's heels ground against the walk-his legs churned, taking him swiftly across the street to the alley and then down that to the flight of steps leading up to Abbey's old room.
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! As fast as he moved, his thoughts were still out ahead of him, beating him over the head with fierce self-disgust.
And Brown looked so brave! Setting a girl up for a gang-run. Just about as brave as he had, grabbing the same girl in a dark mine or a barn ... or any place where she would be a soft crotch and nothing more!
They hadn't even bothered to lock the door. Lud went in hump-backed and wrathy, the hot oil of his anger lubing his joints.
Brown's sidekick was sitting on a chair facing the door. He had one boot off, ready to drop it. When he saw Lud he froze.
Brown was naked. Grace was on the bed. Brown had his back to the door as he stood looking down at Grace.
They hadn't undressed her yet, but they'd been working at it.
Fiercely Lud zeroed in on the details as he glided forward, his fury building towards slaughter. Grace's hair was a wild black mane covering her face. Bright, metallic hair ornaments were strewn from hell to breakfast over the rumpled bedding. Her fancy white western style pants were balled around the top of her shiny brown cowboy boots. The band of her panties was slantwise across her navel. Her bra was a twisted string, cutting into her breasts.
Lud was halfway into the room when Brown straightened. Lud thought he was going to turn but instead his hands went to his crotch.
"Look Baby-" he implored hoarsely-"ain't this what you want?"
Grace made a sound. It wasn't an answer. It wasn't meant for anyone. It was an uncaring groan. She rolled over on her side and pulled her knees up under her chin. This brought her panties down and there it was. All Brown had to do was lie down and cozy up.
The toe of Lud's boot smacked into the crease of the naked man's big bare butt.
Brown bounded forward, weaving and yelling with pain. Lud sprang at Brown's sidekick and toppled him off the chair with a good fist in the face. Then Brown came at him from the rear, looping his arms around his neck and trying to weight him to the floor.
Lud ducked and twisted around, coming up face to face with Brown and with Brown's arms still looped around his neck.
Brown was husky and his skin was getting slick with sweat. He was hard to handle. They fell, heaving and grunting across the bed. Lud thought he heard Grace whimpering, but he wasn't sure. He didn't have time to make sure, either.
Brown had slick-skinned his way to the top. Lud suddenly found himself in a position to take a face-beating. He lifted his legs, put boot heels into Brown's gut and flung him back.
Lud came off the bed warily. Brown's slender sidekick had armed himself with a chair. He and Brown were advancing together. It was a new battle and the odds were bad. So bad that to have Grace come around the end of the bed and begin jostling his arm was a prelude to disaster. At least that's what it seemed like until he glimpsed the shiny slender object she was trying to hand him.
"Get him!" Brown snarled, and his sidekick jumped forward.
Lud caught him in the face with the discharge from Grace's tear-gas gun just as he threw the chair. The chair went high and broke the overhead light, bringing sudden darkness to the battlefield.
Lud circled Brown's coughing, wheezing sidekick. He could see Brown's nude white bulk and was able to slip in close. Lud figured he could do without any more infighting with the greasy bastard and aimed for the belly. When he saw Brown buckle he brought a knee up under his jaw. Brown's body rattled the floor with a good down-and-out sound.
"Lud!"
Grace was outlined in the doorway, silhouetted by the garish glare from the carnival and bowery dance floor lights.
"Grace!" He made for her outlined figure. "Are you all right?" She had fixed her clothes-that much he saw.
"Oh, yes!"
Her voice was pitched with an eagerness to reassure. Nevertheless he saw that she had her hands up to her head.
"Are you sure?" She might have gashed her head or something. "Not woozy or sick?" He put his hand up to feel of her head, and as he did so his eyes caught the glint of silver. She was putting the goddamned silver gauds and baubles back into her hair.
"You made one hell of a quick recovery!" he snapped, dropping his pity. She didn't seem to be hurt, and she certainly wasn't drunk.
He choked suddenly and his eyes watered. He grabbed her arm and turned her away from the tear gas being vented through the open door.
"And why didn't you use the gas gun yourself before those bastards started getting you ready?" he demanded angrily as he herded her down the steps to the alley.
"Because I just didn't care until you came!" she admitted softly, confirming and numbing his suspicions with one backhanded declaration of her preference for him.
The alley ended and they were walking on the soft grass of the municipal picnic area. Lud could make out the forms of benches and took Grace's arm to guide her past them. She stopped instantly at his touch and wrapped her arms around his neck.
"Oh, Lud, this seems like a good place to thank you for saving me!"
There was the feel of utter willingness in the kiss she gave him. A sureness that he would want his reward now. And it whirled through his mind that this must seem fitting to her. Weren't they in a dark place?
He drew back. "That's over!" he said surlily, not knowing whether he meant more or less than the words implied.
"Oh no, Lud!" she moaned softly, reaching out to him.
He caught her hand and pulled her along towards his truck at the end of main street.
"But my car is back there!" She pointed back at the park.
He forced her along until they reached the truck. Then he opened the cab and she got in willingly enough.
He left her in the truck and crossed the street to Smiley's Bar. It wouldn't do to let Smiley re-sell the six-pack earmarked for Miller.
As he came out of the bar and started for the truck he glanced backwards at the saloon, not seeing the bat-wing doors or hearing the raucous noises anymore than the bunch in there could see Grace in the truck. That's why he realized suddenly that he couldn't take Grace back to the ranch right away, not with several dirty minds convinced that she was over the hardware store with Brown. Hell, all Brown would have to do in an hour or so was stroll back into the bar and everyone in Rawlands would think he'd been with Grace all the while.
When he got to the truck he threw open the door and motioned Grace out. She came, but with a question in her eyes.
He fingered the five-dollar ticket ribbon pinned on his shirt. "I forgot about this all-night dance token. Let's use up a little of it!"
He gritted his teeth as they danced past the wallflowers. If they laughed he was braced for it-braced so hard he stumbled and then there was a laugh, but he found that he didn't care too much as long as they were laughing only at him.
For the remainder of the dance he concentrated on having as many people as possible take notice. He deliberately bumped into the other dancers. When he led Grace off the floor there was much applause, most of it for the orchestra as usual, but some, he was sure, was an expression of relief at his going. He acknowledged sardonically by bowing left and right.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lud rummaged in the dash compartment for cigarettes and left the door hanging open as he lit up. The little bulb in the compartment filled the cab with a soft glow.
Grace leaned towards him, staring at his face. Her fingers found a touchy spot on his cheek and caressed it.
"This is the first chance I've had to really look at you since the fight!" she murmured. "How does your cheek feel?"
"Sore!" He brought his fist up under the compartment door. It closed with a snap, extinguishing the light. Brown had bruised him with a heavy ring he always wore.
Grace moved over to the window on her side, opened it and stared up. "You can't shut those off!"
Stars! Everyone gaped at the Western stars, that were so bright only because the air was thin.
He stepped on the gas and the tuned-up carburetor gave him a quick, easy seventy-five.
Grace closed the window against the whistling wind. "Owen says you're a good mechanic," she mused.
Lud hooted. "He played me down! He should have mentioned the electronics course I took by mail!"
"He did tell me that you were the one who should have gone on to school!"
Lud snorted his derision for the idea.
Grace sighed softly. "Give me a cigarette-please!"
* * *
Lud approached the wagon by way of the slope opposite the bed ground. When the lights hit the wagon Grace touched his arm questioningly.
"Isn't this the wagon with the old phonograph?"
"Yep, this sure is the wagon with the old phonograph!"
He stopped the truck and got out, taking the six-pack and vacuum bottle. He paused beside the truck. "So what? We sure as hell aren't going to play it now!"
Grace slid over on the seat to look up at him. The starlight fixed her face in the dark frame of her hair. "Of course not!" she agreed. "There's no romance to revive here! But I'd like to play it in the gulch above the mine!"
"You mean play it near the old whorehouse!"
"Oh yes! I think that would be very apropos. What's Phonograph House without its namesake?"
"H-m-m!" Lud demurred absent-mindedly. She had leaned forward in her earnestness. He closed his hand around the dusky mass of hair rolling across her near cheek. It was soft and springy with life ... sensual ... in the palm of his hand.
"Lud-when you said we were through-did you mean just through ... in the dark?"
His grip tightened on her hair. Her plaintive tone had grated against his ears. "I hope you're not thinking of timing me tomorrow-one record, one trick!" he answered obliquely, half sneering.
"But you won't have to worry about that, will you ... in the daytime?"
"Grace-" From her tone he knew she had his moment of truth planned for the morrow. Was a little hasty bundling in the dark the limit of his feelings for her? That, it seemed, was what she meant to find out.
"There's Miller!" She pulled her hair free.
Lud turned. Miller had come part way out of the wagon in his long Johns.
"Did I hear someone say I wouldn't have to worry about tomorrow?" he demanded.
"Brought you some beer and iced tea," Lud announced. "Thought maybe a drink would comfort you some!"
"Beer-at this time of night?" Miller growled, getting back into the wagon.
Lud followed him in. "Save it for tomorrow then. Maybe you'll need it-herding the big bunch by yourself!" He lit a match to locate the phonograph.
"The hell you say!" Miller flopped down on the bunk. "Where you gonna be?"
"At the old whorehouse above the mine!"
Miller struck his own match. "With that for company?" He stared at the phonograph under Lud's arm.
Lud nodded in the direction of the truck. "Grace's going. She wants to reconstruct the past- have things authentic about Bricky and the Professor and the phonograph!"
"Authentic!" Miller chuckled. "And to the tune of old-time music, huh?"
"Yep."
Miller's match went out as Lud stepped down out of the wagon. The phonograph bumped against the door and he almost dropped it.
"But that thing ain't authentic!" Miller protested amusedly. "Not since you worked it over into a camouflaged record player!"
"We'll make-believe!" Lud snapped, getting the old music box under his arm again and walking towards the back of the truck. The damned box had some weight with all the batteries he'd installed. He put it down on the truck bed.
"Make-believe what?" Grace asked as he got in behind the wheel.
"Make-believe the Professor is playing on and on," he said sarcastically. "That's what you want, isn't it?"
She squeezed his arm. "And what do you want, Lud?"
He didn't answer. He wasn't sure of anything anymore except that he tightened up when he thought ahead to the next day.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lud was deliberately slow about going down to breakfast. He smoked several cigarettes to take the edge off his appetite. He shaved, glad that his face was still sore; it gave him an excuse to dally. Twice he stuck his head out into the hallway, sniffing the coffee and bacon, and listening. He could pick out the voices in the dining room-Owen's, Amy's, Christine's. But he didn't hear Grace's voice and that puzzled him because Grace's door was open, as it always was when she was downstairs.
He heard someone come halfway up the stairs.
"Lud! You coming down to breakfast?"
It was Amy.
He left his room and went to the head of the stairs, where he stood looking down into the dining room. Christine and Owen were the only ones at the table.
"Well come down here and get something to eat so you can go look for her!" Amy urged.
Lud knew that all three of them were eying him as he came down the steps. They seemed obnoxiously curious about the state of his face.
"Shame on you, Killer-you've powdered the bruises!" Christine's eyes roved over him as he sat down.
Lud shrugged. He guessed Grace had told them about his set-to with Brown. But she didn't seem to have told them about a date with the old whorehouse.
He dunked a piece of toast in the soft yolks of the two eggs Amy had ladled out onto his plate. He was waiting for someone to explain Grace's absence.
He looked at Amy. "What did you mean about going to look for 'her'? Did you mean Grace?"
Amy nodded.
"I saddled a horse for her over an hour ago!" Owen spoke up quickly.
"Can she ride?" Lud directed his question at Christine, who was frowning concernedly.
"Oh sure! She's good!"
"Then what's the worry?"
"Well, we thought it might interest you to know that she headed straight for Rawlands!" Amy piped in. "And I mean straight! I watched her through the kitchen window!"
Lud put down his fork and stared out the open front door onto the yard. The mid-morning sun had heat waves jumping off the barn door. They would be jumping off the hardpan in the breaks, too- jumping right up at Grace ... if she'd taken a straight-line fix on Rawlands like Amy said she had. It was damned easy to get lost out there. What the devil was she going to Rawlands for anyhow?"
He got up from the table. "I'll ride out and have a look. Should be able to see tracks if she went into the breaks!"
He glanced back from the door, singling out Amy. "Isn't there a chance she was angling? It might have only looked like she was heading for Rawlands. Maybe she was going to the mine to check on her trailer."
"She wasn't going towards the mountains-she was going that way!" Amy pointed emphatically in the direction of Rawlands.
Owen pushed his chair back from the table and squared around towards Lud. "She told Chris and me to move the trailer over here, today! Considering that, I can't see any reason for her to be going over to make a check on it, can you?"
"Nope-guess not!" Lud admitted. He went out, absently slapping his gloves against his thigh. He stopped by the truck on his way to the barn to throw a tarp over the phonograph. He'd taken the rechargeable batteries out and plugged them in for two hours before going to bed last night. The music box was ready to revive the Professor, but the audience was gone.
* * *
The breaks were a no-man's land of cactus, hard-pan, mud buttes and treacherous washouts. The latter changed course and depth after a heavy rain and confused every path ever made through them.
There were some mesa-like benches of ground striking across the bottom of the breaks. These were grassed and sharply defined by cut-banks. Several were connected by narrow necks of ground and stood like barriers in the way of the traveler, their raw sides rising high enough from the main floor of the breaks to give a horse much trouble.
This rough, sunken scab on the land was absolutely impassable for anything on wheels, including a horse-drawn wagon.
With patience and a full canteen of water, it was possible to ride across on a horse. This Lud had done several times because it was a short-cut to Rawlands. The breaks could also be walked, but it was a foolhardy way to win a bet. He had come out on the Rawlands' side with his boots full of cactus thorns, a couple of snake rattles in pocket for souvenirs and one hell of a thirst.
Lud smiled grimly. One thing the ten-mile gash of hell did well, though-it made everything else around look good by comparison, even the drab sagebrush flat that led right up to its edge. He urged his horse over the rim and slithered down a thirty foot shale slope, re-marking the same ground that had been chewed up by Grace's mount.
He would have ignored the beguiling channels that seemed to offer an easy way, for he knew they invariably ended in a gouged-out impasse, but he was trailing Grace, and she either couldn't resist temptation or was just plain dumb. And as the sun climbed higher and got hotter Lud cursed because she didn't learn. Finally he began hoping that she would push on into some cut-bank narrows and wedge herself fast. But this didn't happen. She found ways out. He was hard put to follow.
He began venting his feelings in long cursing yells that he hoped would reach out into the maze ahead and bring her to a trembling halt. These hopes, like the ones that she would trap herself, did not come to pass, either, though he did find where she'd stopped and made-do with a temporary comfort station beside an upended slab rock. He also found a cigarette butt. It had burnt down to the filter, leaving an inch of ash since hitting the ground. There was nary a sign of a boot print near to show that the smoker had even thought of stomping it out.
Lud hacked nervously at a dry spot in his throat and reached for his canteen. Grace better not throw a live one away while she was crossing a grassy bench. Buffalo grass cured early. It was tinder-dry right now. Not that there was any danger. The fire couldn't get off the grassy benches. But the smoke could. It could turn the low-lying breaks into a smudge pot.
There were many colorful formations in the breaks, and now, about three-quarters of the way across, Lud began finding evidence that Grace had paused to admire them all. At least her tracks showed that she had dismounted several times, and these richly-hued, layer-cake cut-banks were the only interesting things in sight. She had also been down on her knees picking up shiny bits of rock. Like a damned eight-year-old! Lud thought disgustedly. Only this kid chain smoked. There were two burnt matches where she had lit up again ... and when he straightened to go on he got smoke in the face, and it wasn't from a cigarette.
The smoke was staying in the washouts, not rising at all. It was like riding through a dry, blue fog. He rigged his handkerchief over his nose, but there was no way to protect his eyes. They began to smart and water.
He skirted the blackened, still smoldering mesa when he came to it, increasing his pace to get out of the smoke area. Fortunately, it was only a short distance to the Rawlands' side of the breaks and he was soon up on the rim and only a quarter of a mile from town.
He stopped in the park long enough to refresh himself and his horse at a hydrant, then rode down main street, past the appetizing smell of frying hamburgers coming from Gurd's.
It was afternoon. He was hungry. But he had Grace in sight. He kept his smoke-burnt eyes on her lest she ride away behind the confusion of trucks and workmen tearing down the bowery dance floor at the end of the street.
There was a hell of a screeching of uprooted nails and a loud clattering of boards at the ring-side positions where Grace was sitting her horse. Lud reined his horse up against hers before she noticed him. Then she didn't say anything-just went on eating a hamburger as she offered him one from a sackful she had propped up between her stomach and the saddle horn. The hamburgers were warm and tasty with onions and relish. Lud kept reaching for them until the sack was empty.
"Let's go to Gurd's and get some pie!" he suggested. He was also thinking about some coffee ... and any other diversion that might snap Grace out of her trance. She hadn't taken her eyes off the wreckers since his arrival. If it wasn't so damned silly he would have been inclined to believe that this was why she'd come to Rawlands ... to see the bowery torn up.
"Why'd you come back here today?" he asked, deciding to put the silliness to the test. After all, a girl who made-and broke-whorehousing dates, picked up shiny rocks and set fires-
"What the hell came over you-running away ... breaking our date?" he growled.
She'd started shaking her head before he had the question out. "I didn't break the date-only postponed it until tomorrow. I-I did it because I had to come back here first!"
"Why? Why did you have to come back here?"
Grace looked at him reprovingly. "Don't you see it? Don't you really see it?"
"What the hell are you talking about? All I see are some guys tearing up a bowery dance floor!"
Grace's dream-happy eyes went back to the wrecking scene. "But this is where it happened!" she mused, her words muted behind a hamburger bun. "This is where we danced, where you were so haughty-so-so angry-proud and possessive!"
"Oh, whooee!" Lud grinned self-consciously. Maybe it had looked that way to her ... and others, but it was utter mush.
"You'll be writing poetry next!" he blurted.
"But I do-I have!" She showed him a notebook. "It's a habit. I do it all the time. I've written one for tomorrow ... about the forest! Do you mind?"
Lud reined sharply, forcing his horse against hers to get it headed up the street. "Write all the forest poetry you want Miss Shiny-Rocks-just don't burn the trees down!"
"Whatever do you mean?"
"I'll show you on the way back! But first we'll stop at Gurd's and coffee up!" He wanted to share his confusion with someone. Why hell, when Grace started talking about the beauties of the breaks, the intrinsic loveliness of shiny stones and a phantom dance, Gurd wouldn't know whether she was a tall pine on the lonesome prairie or a long-stemmed beauty from the East.
Lud had coffee and apple pie. Grace had a glass of water ... and talked. Actually she bubbled. Her eyes were glossy with happiness. Maybe it was from looking back ... or from looking ahead to tomorrow. Anyway, Gurd liked it. He liked her. He was soon swabbing the counter in front of her continuously and doing nothing but listening and gaping and nodding his head.
Lud had finished and was smoking when she stood up to recite her poem:
As we walked over the pine needle
padded floor of the forest,
Noting naught with eyes but the tree
trunks before us-
Our thoughts were caught in the web of
the wind being threaded
Among the unfallen needles that roofed
the aisles where we wandered.
These thoughts, the product of shade
and the wind's weaving ...
Kept coming and coming and as often
kept leaving.
They carried a story of beauty
in song,
And though pausing repeatedly,
never stay long.
"That's pretty!" Gurd said emphatically.
Lud mashed out his cigarette and stood up. He couldn't vouch for the quality of the poem, but the author had recited it with poise. And her voice had been smooth as cream.
It was crowded back by the door of Gurd's little hamburger joint when they left. All eyes were on Grace. Hats were tipped and respectful 'Howdy Maams' were muttered as ranchers shuffled aside to make way. Lud figured his neighbors hadn't been so shook since their wives last entertained the minister.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It didn't take two looks to see that Grace was in that time of month when nature sets a woman up for a man. She was so sensual it showed on her skin, in her glances, in her sugary tones. Half a lover's work was done before the first kiss.
Lud felt embarrassed and depressed. Her readiness accentuated his unreadiness. Shriveled his crotch. He began to think shallow, act shallow ... and bluff.
He stopped the truck at the same spot where he had picnicked with Abby. It was too early to eat but not too early to brag. He told how he had taken Abby's clothes off ... and his, too. How they had stood in the sun. Abby's shyness came back clearly but he couldn't find the words to explain how it had been ... not with Grace hanging on his every word. When he got to the part where Abby had stood nude on the little sandy hillock, defying him, Grace laughed protestingly.
"Don't lie, Lud! She came back to you! You were together on the tarp!"
Lud shook his head. "She took a strange grip on all this open country and sky! It was a little like getting religion. Some of what she had got to me, too, I guess!"
Grace sighed anxiously. "Either she came over to you or you went and got her!" she persisted.
Lud frowned. It was suddenly an important order of business to jar her loose from the idea that a man never, never failed when he saw bare skin. If he didn't the slopes of whorehouse gulch would probably echo with sounds never before heard there-the outraged cries of a woman scorned!
Grace was staring at the ground. "Did you make love to her good-there on the tarp?"
"Dammit, I tell you it didn't happen!" Lud growled. He held up his hand, thumb crooked loosely down. "It was like that-I swear!"
Grace giggled constrainedly. "Should I start looking for bananas in the picnic basket-is that what you're hinting?"
Lud shrugged callously. "If your need grows that great-why not?" How much would he hurt her before nightfall? And would he ultimately insult her again after dark?
He looked at the bloom on her cheeks, the fullness of her lips, the long, graceful line of her waist.
She smiled and winked, eager to please, to offer everything-even to doing herself over. (He hadn't seen her make one move to bundle her breasts in the old obnoxious way.)
He was regarding her with lessened harshness when something happened. She changed. One minute she was like a picture, plain but wholesome. The next all the colors were running together like she'd lost her fix.
"Lud, you aren't feeling sorry for me? I'd hate that!"
Lud started. All inadvertently she'd given him the key, the emotional combination, to lock the door between them. A liberal application of pity and tenderness would do it! And it wouldn't be as if he was scorning her!
He lit a cigarette and put the truck in gear. He was smiling, much more at ease.
"I want you to enjoy the day!" he said, gently patting her back.
"Thank you, Lud."
Her voice was suddenly subdued, rounded off with reserve and politeness, and he noticed that she had become self-conscious about the way her bright loose dress slid up around her thighs on the bouncing seat. She kept pushing it down.
Things were beginning to work out. It might not be a bad day after all. He knew Amy's picnic lunch would be good-they could hike around, play the phonograph for a while. Hell, he might even catch a nap. He hadn't slept too well last night. And after dark-no before dark-he would take her back to the ranch.
He carried the phonograph a few yards beyond Phonograph House and put it down on a flat rock. Grace was bringing the picnic basket and he sat down to wait for her to come into the small, glade-like clearing. He watched her as she turned and twisted through the brush, holding the basket with both hands, the weight pulling at her shoulders, rounding them and making her look stooped and dejected.
She paused in the center of the glade and her face went soft as she listened to a series of whispering sounds in the boughs of the pines surrounding the clearing. For a second her expression mirrored two lines of her poem:
These thoughts, the product of shade
and the wind's weaving ...
Kept coming and coming and as often
kept leaving.
Lud leaped up to relieve her of the basket, but she turned swiftly, evading his politeness by taking the basket to the rock and placing it beside the phonograph.
She opened the basket then closed it. "I'm not hungry yet, are you?"
"Not very."
They were facing each other across the rock. The soft look was gone. Her eyes were guarded.
"Where do you want this?" He tapped the phonograph box. "I suppose if you want to whoop it up with romantic sound effects it should be inside the old whorehouse.
She dug into a pocket and got out her cigarettes. She lit one, glanced nervously at the phonograph and then away.
"Why not leave it there for now?" she suggested, and sauntered to the edge of the clearing.
He followed her upslope, staying close and protesting the whiplash of the branches she released in his face.
Finally she turned and mashed out her cigarette at his feet. "If you're concerned that I might get lost or set another fire, forget it!"
Lud stared. Her eyes said scat. She had her guard up a mile too high. He backed away with exaggerated concern. "Why for pity's sake, why didn't you tell me you were looking for a comfort station!"
Her eyebrows arched mockingly. "For pity's sake, huh? Well, let me tell you, Mr. Stoner-if I wanted to squat, I would squat! I wouldn't dill-dally around like your friend Abby!"
Lud grinned. There was spunk in this tall girl. Spunk and shininess and sudden fires!
"I had a dream about you once!" he blurted admiringly.
The impulsive remark shook them both about equally. Or so it seemed to Lud. Her eyes fastened intently on his face as did his on hers.
"Wh-what kind of a dream?" she stammered.
"A wet one-or almost!" he said curtly, disgusted with himself for having mentioned the dream.
"I don't understand!"
He shrugged. "Man talk for a horny happening!"
"But I entered into it?"
"You entered into it!" He cuffed back his hat. "It's hotter'n hell here on the slope! Be cool down in the mine!"
"And dark!"
She was startled. So was he, but one blundering remark had seemed to lead to another. So now suddenly there was a dare on and the last one down into the gulch was a 'fraidy cat.
* * *
He took down the barrier from across the mouth of the tunnel and then as they stepped in towards the darkness he noticed her expression. It was forlorn and resigned ... the look of one who had dreamed beautiful but was now ready to settle for life as she found it. Ready to get what she could from a hasty bundling in the dark, though wondering still perhaps what he had meant by 'being through with that.'
He pressed forward more quickly away from the light.
They descended arm in arm, much as they had before, except that now they made no small talk about the large works of man and nature. At least they were being honest in a way; they weren't denying that it might not happen; they weren't denying that he wouldn't be bruising her buttocks on the rough planking again, pushing wildly, frustrated and unconvincing because she was hobbled and veiled by clothing.
He tightened his hold on her arm, guiding her so that she wouldn't stumble over the tracks. The sound of their footsteps had a hollow ring.
Owen's little nest had been dismantled. The makeshift shelves were empty of his books. The magazines were neatly stacked and tied near the door.
Lud looked at the dejected chair, scrawled a long, twisty mark in the dust on the table. There was nothing in here for him, and Grace hadn't moved from the door.
"It looks abandoned!" she ventured.
"Yeah-and I'm glad!"
They moved out into the main tunnel, staring around at its cavernous dimensions.
Lud walked over to the machinery. The polished sheen Owen had worked up on the housings was gone. Lud banged a fist on the tremendous cable drum. The chances were against the hoist ever turning again, ever lowering another cage full of miners or lifting a load of ore.
He went back and stood by the switch panel. "Lights out!" he yelled.
"Lud-wait!"
She was far out on the platform ... waiting at about the exact spot where it had happened the last time.
"Leave the lights on!" she pleaded.
He flipped the switch as though he hadn't heard. But he had. And the unhooked and ready quaver in her voice-he'd heard that, too.
And the unbelieving gasp when he took her arm.
And her hesitance! That he could feel!
But he walked her. Walked her right back up to daylight.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Amy hadn't packed any diversions like beer or whiskey in the picnic basket-just coffee, beef sandwiches and a chocolate cake with the word LOVE written on top.
Amy still wanted that double wedding!
Grace lifted the beautiful cake out and set it to one side without making a remark of any kind. Lud was stirred and hurt by the Eastern woman's slighting of a Western woman's cooking. Against his own best interests he decided not to let the slight go unchallenged.
"Amy's put LOVE on top!" he pointed out.
"Yes-I'm sure she meant well, but her premise is wrong. Love's usually on the bottom!"
Lud looked away. The goddamned creature was going to make another pass before the day was out. He could read her like a book-an up-to-date love book in which the heroine is smart enough to know that if she can get the hero to go far enough she might have him hooked.
Lud watched Grace put and take out of the basket. He noticed her long waist when she bent down ...
* * *
"I'm going to fetch the tarp from the trunk," he announced as soon as he'd finished eating.
"Oh-the tarp!" Her eyes widened.
"Yeah-I'm going to spread it over there in the shade and take a nap," he explained carefully, pointing at a shady spot back away from the clearing and the picnic rock and her sphere of influence. Also he had noticed that in that particular spot the pine needles were cushiony-thick-his idea of solid comfort.
"I'll start the phonograph when I get back ... if you want!"
"I want!" She sounded hungry ... and she'd just eaten.
On the way back up the gulch from the truck he stepped behind a bush. Standing unzipped he was aware of his physical excitement and quickly blamed it on Myra's defection, Abby's departure, Amy's sudden motherliness and, more immediately, on the tarp and Grace.
"It must have been good ... on the tarp!" Grace had said, looking like she was able to see him and Abby going to it.
He daydreamed all the way back to the clearing, where he spread the tarp on the ground and lay down, determined to take a nap and forget.
"Lud! Lud!" Grace's voice reached for him through drowsy corridors ...
She touched him. Not with her hands-with her body. Low. About at the hips.
"Did the woman-did I come to you like this in the dream?"
He stirred, reached out and gathered the loose cloth of her dress in his hand. "Nope-not like this!"
"Then how?" Her whisper was part sound, part feeling against his cheek.
He got to his knees and began undressing her, smiling, trying to make out it was all in sleepy fun. But she wasn't helping and he could go only so far ... in sleepy fun.
"You said you wanted to know," he chided halfheartedly, still able, he believed, to fall back on the tarp and finish his nap.
"Yes ... I do!" Her tone was emphatic, fervent. "But it won't be like a dream. Your eyes are open!"
"Oops!" He pretended to close his eyes. She wanted to play-he would try.
Her co-operation came quickly and his own movements turned truly dream-like, following hers during the removal of dress ... bra ... and panties.
His arms dangled. She put his hands to the bare curve of her waist questioning.
"It was like this?" Her breath was bated.
"Yeah!"
"And you?"
"I was undressed, too!"
"Well then-"
She unbuttoned his shirt and he did the rest.
He stretched out and she came to him, first as a light, tingling contact. Then the feeling spread, marking out a soft, warm area on his side, wondrously like in his dream.
Her hair brushed down on his face in a fragrant smother. He felt her lips on his closed eyelids.
"I'm glad you put on a long recording," she whispered. "And it's so beautiful! I love violin music."
She had the nerves in his skin standing on end-feathering her hair around the way she was. She leaned forward to kiss his temples, and he felt her full breast nestle in the hollow of his neck. His hands reached up and drew her on top of him, drawing her nipple into his mouth. He liked it, liked its roundness like a ripe fruit, and one hand pinched and fondled the other breast before moving out to trace the whole line of her torso, from the nape of her neck to her buttocks.
Her skin was delicious-so many different textures, and each one a separate surprise. What is happening to me! he thought wildly. He wanted the whole woman, not just one part, one act. And he, Lud, wanted Grace to know and love him, too. Love him! A thousand conflicting emotions churned around inside him. In a attempt to still them, he lay her gently on the tarp and opened his eyes.
He was confounded by her beauty. There was a flush in her usually sallow cheeks, and her long torso echoed the gentle curve of the horizon. She lay there content, no longer looking hungry or anxious. Wind lifted her dark hair like a small cloud and she smiled.
"Follow your dream." Her eyes, when she opened them were like stars in the Western skies. But he could not move, bewitched by this new vision of her, and a soft sadness swept over her face.
"The dream ended?" It was scarcely more than a whisper.
"No." His voice was emphatic. Spellbound he reached down for her ankle, with his hand, and then bent over it, licking and kissing her instep over and over, working his way slowly up her long slender legs, striving to know every inch of her with his lips, while she lay content, playing lightly with him with her hands, tracing the hollows in the tautened muscles of his rump, the sharp dip and spout of his pelvis.
When they came together, overtones of his dream still spilled over, still pulled at his spine with incipient little spasms, shooting sparks and then lightning into his belly and heart, his throat and his brain, till he thought the top of his head would come off, spin away like an afternoon sun.
His hands pressed down on her shoulders, and she gathered him in closer, murmuring endearments. He had just enough sense left to wonder if he might be hurting her, and slipped his hands under her buttocks to cushion them, seeking to ease his weight a little.
But: "Don't stop!" she cried, nibbling his lower lip, sucking at his collar bone.
