Chapter 9

Mrs. Livingston had assumed her duties as the manager of our provision stores shop, and she had two of the Mormon girls working for her part-time to earn some folding money the old fashioned way and not flat on their backs in some dirty back room.

The Chinese girls were learning English real fast and were literally working their ass off washing all the dirty clothes and rubbing down those cowboys with their magic hands. Caleb decided it was best that he stay out of their business because they were all contributing to a safe and friendly atmosphere in our little settlement. A couple of the Chinese girls also knew the benefits of acupuncture and used their little pins to fix a whole bunch of aching backs and stiff necks.

Unfortunately, the Indian girl was not fitting into our happy little camp very well because she had a basic dislike of all white people thinking that they were the ones that had killed the sacred buffalo and pushed the Indian men into drinking the firewater that made them mean and nasty to their wives and children. She told Caleb that she had been raped by a pair of gunslingers when she was just a young girl getting water down at the stream to help with the cooking. She tearfully described the scene where one of the perverts had held her left leg and left arm in his firm grip as his partner ravished her defenseless body already stripped of her clothes and open for his laughing penetration. The girl told him that she was not a stranger to copulation because she had already mated with her proposed future husband under the stars on a summer night when her feminine urges were too demanding for her to ignore any longer. The brave was killed by a buffalo hunter that was so drunk he mistook him for a buffalo instead of another human being.

Caleb was certain he knew the pair of perverted gunslingers because they were a constant nuisance to the working girls at Miss Molly’s bordello down by the river. One of the girls claimed he had sodomized her, but the local Sheriff decided she was just upset because he didn’t pay the proper fee and decided to fine him instead of hanging him for a major offense.

Eventually, Caleb decided that his new little town would have wooden sidewalks to eliminate the problem of mud in the streets because of the heavy wagons and numerous horses stopping at the store and the new hotel next to the original bunkhouses that had housed the range riders hired for the ranch operations.

It was amazing how the sidewalks changed the entire atmosphere of the ranch. The females were able to walk outside now without getting their dresses all muddy on the bottoms and even the children ran up and down them playing and not getting filthy dirty from the nasty mud.

The latest addition to the booming shops around the main house was the undertakers emporium which sported a display of wooden coffins right up on the sidewalk like an article in a newspaper.

The newspaper example brought his attempts to set up a small printing press in the converted barn that doubled now as a sort of workshop for budding businesses with no rent fees for persons interested in furnishing a service for the community. The youngest of the Mormon wives had started a Gazette that published local news on a weekly basis, and she had most of the literate residents subscribing to her service just to have something to read when they had to go to the outhouse.

Caleb was sitting on the front porch of the main house working on his Colt Peacemakers and store of ammunition to get them all in perfect working order for any emergency. He had gotten the handguns from a gravedigger on a Boot Hill located on his back trail taken in payment for services rendered for a deceased gunslinger after his unexpected demise. The gunman was suffering from an age-related slow draw problem that made his occupation a fatal liability.

Caleb wondered about the history of the matched pair of pistols noting that the left hand gun had a total of seventeen notches on the handle and only three on the right hand sidearm. That left him to think the gunman was probably a left handed shootist and he carried the other gun to balance his defense against the opponents he confronted in his travels in the Old West.

He liked the balance of the guns and had used them extensively on his travel to Texas and in defending his life and possessions after moving to the ranch. The Henry rifle sat nearby because he didn’t want to be without a ready weapon as he worked on his sidearms right out in the open.

One of the unattached former Mormon wives approached him and informed him, “Mister Caleb, my younger sister Hattie is traveling down here from Utah with her brood of young ones and I am going to move her into the daughter’s room with your permission.”

Caleb knew that the house had several empty rooms not that the younger girls had hitched up with the family-minded cowboys and he agreed readily knowing that a fresh stock of females would be just what the doctor ordered to brighten up his day as the days grew shorter and the nights got colder with the approach of Winter.

The Conestoga wagon showed up about six weeks later with the young looking widow with six children ranging in ages from twenty to thirteen. She only had one boy and five girls. The girls all looked the same with blonde hair and blue eyes. The boy looked darker, and he thought he might be adopted but the sister put his straight right away and told him the boy was hers and hers alone and that she had the twenty year old a few months before she married the Mormon farmer with two older wives and no children of his own. The two previous wives were not happy campers with the constantly pregnant new wife, and they called her a whore behind her back because of her bastard child called Jonas.