The two figures, looking handsome together in a long, lean, statuesque way, stood at the doorway of the rambling adobe house on the heights overlooking old Santa Fe. They were standing close together, silhouetted shadows as seen from inside the house, where, in the great room beyond the foyer, small groups of people gathered in proximity--but not too near--a long trestle table, drinking wine and talking in subdued tones.

The woman, tall and thin, her skin tanned and weather-beaten without distracting in any way from her finely chiseled features, gave the impression of a Native American princess, accentuated by the long, plaited braid cascading down her back and the beaded band around her head. Her tawny-colored, long, form-fitting dress was of some sort of suede that matched the moccasins on her feet. The desert artist Margaret True, one of the centers of the Santa Fe art community in the early twentieth century, had gone native, but, in doing so, had set styles for the art community nationwide.

Standing with her, closer to her, and speaking in low, measured tones was the Western novelist, Carson Crane. Margaret was a tall woman, but Carson towered over her, and the bulk of him, distributed perfectly over a sinewy, but well-muscled body, made the spine-of steel artist of the desert look almost delicate and feminine. Eschewing the effects of the “gone native” artists’ community, which Crane only skirted the edges of, as he was a man’s man who valued his individuality and isolation, Crane was dressed in an elegant black suit. His salt-and-pepper hair was close cropped and his mustache well trimmed. He came by his muscular physique honestly, as he was a man of the mountains, although wealthy and well-educated enough to dominate in dignified parlors and who wrote novels of rugged men overcoming the brutal natural obstacles of the West.

Lying on the trestle table in the great room was a simple wooden casket encasing the remains of Margaret’s husband of twenty years, Jason Jain, sculptor of bronze statues of cowboys on bucking horses that were represented in nearly every major museum in the United States and Europe. Carson, the closet neighbor to Margaret and the artist community gathered about the Jains, albeit his ranch was five miles distant, was just leaving, having come to pay his last respects.

“It was so good of you to come, Carson. And I much appreciate what you have offered to do for Elan. If he agrees to it, so do I. It is very generous of you to offer.”

“Where is the lad? I haven’t seen him since we all went back to Chicago to see him graduate from that private lower school and then brought him back here. He’s grown into such a fine-looking boy, Margaret. How old is he now?”

“Fourteen,” Margaret answered.

“And a beautiful boy,” Carson said. “Has he decided which preparatory school he wishes to go to--or what he wants to do in life? An artist like you and Jason? He’s so good with his hands. His wood carvings already are first rate.”

“Who knows what Elan wants?” Margaret said, with a tone hovering between wistful and distracted--her mind was still on the composition she had been working on early in the morning before Jason’s friends had started to gather for the last viewing. “Elan was distant from Jason and me even before we sent him to school in Chicago. I have no idea what he wants, although he has mentioned writing novels, as you do. But he hasn’t come in from his room for the viewing. I think he took Jason’s suicide personally.”

How could he not, Carson wondered, as he raised Margaret’s hand to his lips. Neither Jason nor Margaret had had much room in their artistic lives for the son and only child, who had come to them almost as a surprise. A beautiful boy, always, who they had named Elan, Hopi for “friendly,” and who they had promptly turned over to servants and minor artists worshipping at Margaret’s and Jasons’s feet to raise. It had seemed that the name Margaret had chosen itself had steeled Jason to the boy. He had said that the name was too mundane for him to use, and it seemed he had dismissed the boy along with the name.

Only his mother called the handsome boy, Elan now. The rest of the family had picked up the father’s preferred use of El. The outside world had taken to mistakenly calling him Allen. The boy himself seemed to prefer the separation from his parents’ inattentive world, so when alone with him, and striving to be the attentive parent Margaret and Jason weren’t, Carson called him Allen too.

“Perhaps, Margaret,” Carson said gently, “We shouldn’t talk too much about Jason’s death being a suicide. It’s so distressing to the art world, and probably is doubly so to Allen, coming as it did right after our return from Chicago. Allen was all aglow from having finished at the lower school and having his summer here with the two of you stretching out before him. The death must have crushed him. That’s why I’ve offered to take him with me on my writing retreat for the summer. This probably isn’t a place he should be now.”

If this was a veiled rebuke for Margaret, a suggestion that the wife had no need for the son or vice versa in this time of tragedy, Margaret didn’t seem to discern it. “Death is what it is, Carson. We have lived our life honestly. Jason would not have taken his life if he wanted to hide his pain. It was his health, you know.”

It was not his health, Carson thought. How little you knew of your husband, he mused, although all he did was look sympathetically into those beautiful milky-blue eyes of hers and cluck his regrets.

As he was standing out on the porch and Margaret was still in the doorway, Carson said, “If Allen would prefer not being here today, please tell him he’s welcome to come over to my place through dinner. He can come back tonight after the ... after Jason has been taken away to the mortuary.”

“Thank you, Carson, I’m sure that would relieve us all.”

Carson had spoken what he had just now because he was aware that Elan was at an open window farther down the porch line and could hear every word he said. As Carson moved down along the front of the porch in that direction to unhitch his horse from the porch rail, he looked up directly into the boy’s eyes, receiving, as he hoped, a look of relief and affection.

An hour later Elan rode up to a wooden ranch house far smaller and less pretentious than his parents’ rambling adobe mansion set in a compound with smaller artists’ matching adobe houses circling it. Carson was far richer than Elan’s parents were, even though they also were wealthy, but Carson carried his “frontier man” rough and simple persona through to his dwelling. The ranch house wasn’t small, but, beyond the great room with its soaring cathedral ceiling and varnished oak cross beams openly showing how the house was constructed, there were just two bedrooms; two baths; a large eat-in kitchen, where the housekeeper reigned and left shortly after noon every day for her own family ranch four miles away; and a large study, where Carson wrote his novels when he was in residence.

Elan walked into the house without knocking, turned right in the great room, and walked down a dark corridor, past the study on one side and the extra bedroom, bath, and storage room on the other side to the door at the end of the corridor leading into the large master bedroom.

Carson was lying on the large bed, his torso propped up by pillows covered in Native American textiles. He was dressed his black trousers and starched white dress shirt and had a book open on his lap. He looked up at Elan standing in the doorway, took his wire-rimmed spectacles off, laid them on the nightstand on top of the book he was reading, and beckoned to the boy.

“Come to me, Allen. Come as I like to have you.”

Elan lay sprawled on top of Carson, facing up, his right leg extended across the bed and his left leg bent over Carson’s left arm. Carson’s right arm was laced under Elan’s right armpit, with Carson’s hand cupping Elan’s chin and lifting the boy’s face up to his in a deep kiss.

The perfectly formed, naked body of the young blond Elan was writhing slowly on Carson’s lap as the fingers of Carson’s left hand dug into Elan’s channel, snaked up to the boy’s prostate, and worked him there until Elan’s cock had hardened. When it had, and still possessing the boy’s mouth with his, Carson grasped Elan’s cock and stroked the boy to an ejaculation.

“You are so beautiful,” Carson whispered when Elan had come for him. “On the cusp of manhood, so developing musculature, but still supple and flexible. I love the positions you will go in and hold when I fondle you, the innocence you exude when you come with my stroking. Never grow older.” The older man had released Elan’s mouth but not his cock, which he continued to stroke slowly.

“I want you to fully possess me. Fuck me now. Please,” Elan whispered.

“I’ve told you. I can’t now. Soon, though, if you come with me this summer.”

“Come with you? Where?”

“I’ve talked with your mother. I am going on retreat for the summer to a dude ranch, a special kind of ranch, in the Grand Tetons in Idaho. I wish to take you with me. Take you from here. Make you a man. Your body is beautiful as it is, but you can work with the cowboys and become even more hard-bodied without losing the flexibility of your young age.”

“Is that what you want--you want me to be more hard-bodied before you fuck me? Because I will do that. I’ll put on more muscle if that’s what you want, if that’s what it takes. Or don’t you think I am serious about wanting you? I’ve wanted you for years.”

“Yes, I think you are serious about it,” Carson said with a sigh. “And I want you too.”

“Is it because you are such good friends with my parents?”

“No, lad, it isn’t. It’s because I want my lovers to be young but experienced. I get no joy out of fucking virgins.”

“You will give me these hand jobs and you will suck me off--but you haven’t let me do that for you yet--and yet I’m not experienced enough for you?”

“Have you let any other man fuck you? Has another man had his cock inside you?”

“No,” Elan answered in a small voice, hesitating a bit as if he was weighing what the effect would be to lie and say he’d already been fucked. “It is you I want.”

“Well, I will have no man who isn’t well-fucked and experienced in the positions. Don’t ask me to explain. Do you want me enough to let other men break you in first?”

Elan hesitated, but then, in a determined voice, he said, “Yes. If that’s what it takes, I will do it. But how?”

“Go with me this summer to the Antinous Ranch in the shadow of the Tetons. It’s a ranch solely for young teenage boys to be trained. Men there will prepare you for me. If you want me, that is what you will have to do. We can be lovers in the fullest sense by July. Will you come with me?”

“Yes,” Elan whispered.

“And I feel you hard again,” Carson said. “Will you come for me again now.”

“Yes,” Elan whispered as he moaned and lifted his face to Carson’s for another deep, lingering kiss as Carson’s stroking of his cock increased in intensity.

The train ride from Santa Fe to the end of the rails was a grueling one as far as Carson and Elan were concerned, entailing boarding the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe line, headed north to Chicago; getting off in Omaha; and picking up the Union Pacific line, aboard the Overland Limited, headed west. The journey by rail took five days in 1915, and the closest rail stop to the Idaho side of the Grand Tetons was Green River, Wyoming, in the south of that new state. Green River had burgeoned in size--but was still not large--with the passage of the railroad through there having been completed in 1868. From Green River it was another five-day ride by stagecoach over rough dirt tracks north to Driggs, Idaho. The Antinous Ranch, tucked into a finger of the Teton Valley, projecting into the Grand Tetons on their western slope, was another five-hour ride on horseback.

Fully private compartments and carriages were a rarity on the run north and existed on the Union Pacific run west primarily to serve industrial and railroad magnates. So, semiprivate compartments were the best that Carson could obtain.

When he and Elan were the only ones in such a compartment during segments of travel between station stops, though, Carson would lower the curtains to the corridor; turn the lock in the door; pull Elan onto his lap, with the boy’s trousers on the floor at his feet; and finger fuck and stroke Elan to an ejaculation. In this way he kept the boy keyed up for him and continuing to beg for a fuck that Carson would not yet provide.

Carson fully expected to make Elan his. He just felt he had good reason to fully prepare for it. For years he had intended to make Elan his when the lad reached his preteens, with the span of time when a boy was developing into a man’s boy but still with the boy’s emotions being what aroused Carson the most. With Carson, though, it wasn’t a matter of destroying the innocence, deflowering the virgin. He wanted the boy he lay with to be experienced. Everything he had done in relating to Elan as the boy grew up was to prepare for this relationship without scaring the boy away. In this situation, so near to his goal, though, he needed to exercise supreme restraint, no matter how hard that was for him to do. He needed to do it right so as not to ruin it altogether.

On the stagecoach ride north from Green River, there was a driver and relief driver in the driver’s box and a Mexican teenaged boy to do the hauling chores, who sometimes sat on top of the stage coach, amongst the luggage, and sometimes in the stagecoach, when it was raining. There were two other paying passengers, in addition to Carson and Elan, composed of an elderly missionary couple en route to working on and spreading the gospel to an Indian reservation.

It rained during the first day of travel, and the Mexican, Pedro, rode inside the carriage, sitting beside the missionary couple, with the massively large Carson sitting across from Pedro and Elan sitting beside Carson. During the trip Carson and Pedro exchanged several glances that Elan didn’t particularly appreciate, but he wanted Carson so badly that he wouldn’t say anything.

That night they camped on the north bank of the Muddy River, which honestly earned its name. They camped near the home compound of a ranch by arrangement. The ranch family provided meals, although the passengers and drivers slept in tents by a campfire.

The second day of the journey took them to the small town of Kemmerer, where, once again, they camped in a small grove of trees at a ranch that provided meals. Carson had been moody the whole day, even though the weather was good. Pedro was riding on top of the stagecoach.

That evening, as the passengers and drivers gathered from walks they had taken after their evening meal to stretch their aching limbs from a full day’s ride in a lurching coach with inadequate springs, Elan noticed that Carson and Pedro had not yet returned. First Pedro returned, stumbling and looking distressed, and lurched into the tent he was to share with the drivers. Carson entered the camp soon thereafter, whistling and almost strutting.

Carson and Elan shared a tent. The previous night Carson had managed to embrace Elan and quietly stroke him to ejaculation. This second night, though, he merely turned over, with his back to Elan, after a furtive kiss on the lips, and drifted off into snoring.

The next morning, as they were loading the stagecoach, Elan noticed there was no Pedro. So did the missionary couple. The husband of the couple asked the driver about this, and the driver gave a scowl and said that Pedro had taken ill in the night and would be left at the hosting ranch to recover. When the missionaries turned away, though, Elan saw the driver’s scowl turn toward Carson, who was in good spirits and not paying much attention to the loading at all.

Elan felt tense the entire day of the ride northwest, across the Idaho state line, and to an encampment on the banks of Bear Lake. The tail end of the Tetons now clearly were in sight to the north. Carson continued humming to himself and engaging in discussions with the missionary couple who, Elan knew, didn’t really interest the novelist at all--and weren’t providing anything he could use in his writing, which was normally the only topics that could loosen Carson’s tongue.

It also seemed to Elan that Carson didn’t want to be engaging in discussions with him.

But that evening, after the meal and while the drivers were setting the tents up, Carson asked Elan to take a walk with him along the banks of Bear Lake.

In a hidden little forested ravine leading down to the shore of the lake, Elan disrobed at Carson’s request and took a dip in the water. Carson remained dressed, watching Elan from the bank. When Elan came out of the water and had dried off with his shirt, Carson pulled the boy into his lap and finger fucked and stroked him to an ejaculation, while covering his face with kisses. In this much of sex, at least, the boy had become quite experienced. Carson knew Elan would let him go further, but Carson wanted others to be there first to show Elan the ropes so that Carson wouldn’t have to train him in the positions of the anal fuck.

Elan had tried to be standoffish in this coupling, though, and certainly was showing Carson he was ticked about something, but Carson ignored this until after he had made the boy come for him--an activity that Elan was lost to as soon as Carson initiated it.

“Tell me what’s wrong, Allen,” Carson said.

“Pedro. You--”

“Yes, I fucked him. And we might as well establish right now that I will fuck other boys during our relationship. But if you wind up living with me, as I hope you will, I will always be coming home to you. That doesn’t mean I will tolerate you fucking other men after this summer. That is just the way it will be. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Elan answered, trying to keep the whine out of his voice. “But, why would you fuck Pedro and not me?”

“I established that Pedro let men fuck him. He was experienced. I needed the relief. You can’t imagine how frustrating it is to be near you like I have been on this journey and not to find sexual relief.”

“But ... anytime you wanted me, you could ... and Pedro, when he returned ... Oh, Carson. Oh!”

Carson had moved down Elan’s body and taken the boy’s cock in his mouth and was sucking it. Elan was lost to him. Carson had only rarely done this for him before, and Elan was transported to the clouds overhead, completely lost to any more questions he might have about Pedro.

A man introducing himself as Henry--but saying most called him Hal--met Carson and Elan at the stagecoach stop in the town of Driggs, Idaho. The stop was in front of a saloon, and the man came out of that wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. He was a big, strapping redhead, who Elan thought was maybe six years older than he was. Elan wished that he could go into the saloon too, but civilization had reached this little town in the shadows of the towering Grand Tetons. He wasn’t old enough. It didn’t matter that his parents had let him drink from the moment he’d said he wanted to try it. Of course, that had worked as they probably wanted it to. Since it wasn’t forbidden and he wasn’t at all impressed with his first drunken state, he had only drunk in moderation since then.

He started to tell Carson that he might like to have a drop to assuage the dust of the long journey, but he stopped when he saw the assessing look Carson was giving Hal. In any event, in a short time they were on horseback and on their way east, toward the plain at the base of the foothills into the Tetons. Carson, Elan, and Hal were each astride a horse, and two other pack horses carried their luggage. Carson didn’t travel light.

While they rode, Elan asked, out of curiosity, “I don’t understand why the ranch is named Antinous. Is that an Indian word?”

“No, it’s because of what happens at the ranch,” Hal answered. But then, looking like maybe he wasn’t supposed to say anything, he clamped his ruggedly square jaw shut.

Carson looked over to the cowboy and said, “Antinous? You?”

The man laughed. “I’m twenty, and, no, that was never me. I have always topped.”

Carson sighed and looked away from the man. He turned to Elan and said, “It’s not an Indian word. It’s a Roman name, taken from the Greek. As this young man has said, it signals, although doesn’t dwell on the actual import of the word, the business of the ranch to those of us who are interested.”

“How so?” Elan asked.

“Antinous is Greek for a boy, a boy who died at nineteen, but after he’d made the historical mark that made him a god. An Antinous is a boy who accommodates a Hadrian, like me. An older man.”

“An older man?” Elan asked, still not getting it.

“Older men who fuck boys, young boys, sometimes as young as nine years old, during the ancient Greek and Roman period,” Carson said, with an amused look on his face. “To keep it almost legal in these United States--even in Idaho now--it’s older boys. It’s like Alexander the Great and his young lover, Hephaestion. It was quite common and acceptable in Greek times. The gods did it--Zeus fucked the young Ganymede. And the Thebans were said to have three regiments made of seasoned warriors and their young male lovers. The Greeks married, of course, but they also were permitted to have boys to fuck. I guess ‘Hephaestion’ wouldn’t be readily pronounceable for a ranch name, though. ‘Antinous’ is pretentious enough. But I’m sure it does the job for advertising what you can get at the ranch--or near enough if you take into account how young the Antinous can be. Antinous was the accommodating boy lover to the second-century Roman emperor Hadrian. The boy was drown in the Nile under mysterious circumstances at the age of nineteen, and Hadrian made him a god.”

“So, a ranch named Antinous is a place offering boys for older men to fuck?”

“Yes, of course. They have older boys--for guests like me. But they also have their Hadrians--for boys like you.” He turned to Hal then, who Elan was somewhat embarrassed to realize was listening to the conversation. “And you, Hal. You indicate you aren’t Antinous, and indeed you look too old to be that, although you do look magnificent. But a Hadrian? I think not--not yet.”

“I am just a hired cowboy, sir,” Hal answered. “There are different jobs at the ranch. I train the horses and handle them--like coming into Driggs to pick up guests like you.”

“But you look too sexy to be only that,” Carson said. Elan looked sharply at him again, disturbed by Carson’s open interest in the young man. “I’ll bet there are guests who want you to handle them too.”

“So you aren’t teasing me,” Elan interjected. “You really have brought me here to prepare me for you to want to fuck?”

“Yes, little one. I want you to work with several Hadrians here, men who can train you in the positions and techniques, before being handed back to me. But yes, before we leave here, I am going to be fucking you silly.”

Hal cleared his throat. They had reached a rise. “There it is,” he said. “Antinous Ranch.”

They looked down in a bowl nearly surrounded by higher ground--much higher ground, the foothills of the Tetons, to the east. The ranch complex was a large one, with several buildings radiating out from a central long, low-slung log cabin structure that was the heart of the operation.

“If you need me while you’re here, you can usually find me by that corral over there,” Hal said, standing up in his saddle and pointing to the edge of the spread. “I train all of the horses here.”

“I indeed may need you,” Carson said, laying his hand on the rump of Hal’s horse, giving Elan the sense in the look Carson gave the cowboy that he’d lay his hand on the cowboy’s rump at the first sign of acceptance.

Elan couldn’t see the expression on Hal’s face, but he was disturbed enough by the expression he saw in Carson’s face.

They were met by the ranch manager in the great room of the central building.

“We are honored that you are staying with us for the summer, Mr. Crane,” the manager said. “I understand you will be writing a book and that ... ah ... you have special needs. We have a boy for you, Tom, who I’m sure will meet your specifications. And this,” he said, turning to Elan, “is the boy you have other needs for?”

“Yes. I believe I set forth the program for him in my letters to you.”

“Yes, of course. There won’t be a problem. In fact, seeing him, I can say that there will be no problem at all--not for anything or anyone on the staff who he might fancy.”

“That’s all of the luggage,” Hal interjected. He’d just arrived in the great room with the last of the baggage. He turned and gave Elan a big smile. Elan was somewhat comforted that the smile had been given to him and not Carson, but he was mostly preoccupied with the conversation going on between Carson and the manager.

“Your rooms are down here,” the manager said, as he guided them down a corridor off to the left the great room.

“Rooms?” Elan involuntarily spurted out.

“Yes,” the manager said. “Mr. Crane will be in this suite here, with the bedroom and a study. You will be in a single room down the hall.”

Elan turned his face, showing concern, to his companion. “Carson?”

“I will be in here with ... I believe the boy’s name is Tom,” Carson said. “Until you are prepared to come to my bed in full acceptance and experience,” he continued. “I’ve asked for an isolated single room to be provided for you. One with its own door to the outside. They have such here, they advertised ... for complete privacy of the guests. As I told you, Allen, until I am assured that you are ready to come to me, I want you to accept anyone who takes your fancy here into your bed. And I do want you to select men to fuck you. I have a routine settled for you, but I want you well-seasoned. The sooner you take care of this the better.”

Elan was bumped a bit before he could respond and the manager and Carson already had entered the suite, leaving Elan in the corridor.

“Excuse me. If you could tell me which of these cases is yours and which is Mr. Crane’s...” the man who had bumped Al, the cowboy Hal, said.

Elan couldn’t explain why a jolt of electricity went through him when Hal’s shoulder touched his, but it did. Turning away from the door to Carson’s suite and shivering with second thoughts of having agreed to come here, the boy busied himself with the separation of the luggage.

While Carson holed up in his suite with his writing by day, and with the young prostitute, Tom, at night, Elan spent the first three days settling into the ranch and building up to what he knew was coming. In a few days he was scheduled to accompany a hunting trip up into the Tetons. There would be just him and five of the older cowboys on the ranch--ones Carson made clear to him when they took their dinner together were of the Hadrian category.

“You are going to come back from that two-night hunting trip well fucked,” Carson said, with a cheery note in his voice.

Elan wasn’t left entirely to his own devices. At Carson’s instructions he was given odd jobs around the ranch, mostly muscle-building work, as they had agreed. One of the jobs was to carry bags of feed out to the corral where Hal trained the horses.

The two inevitably struck up conversations while Elan filled the feed boxes, and Hal volunteered to show Elan around the ranch buildings. They ate lunch together the first two days.

On the third day, Elan arrived at the corral to find Hal holding a rope and having a horse trot around him in the center of the ring. Hal was shirtless and Elan felt tinglings in his crotch at watching the rippling of the young hunk’s muscles as he exercised the horse. Hal correctly gauged the “tongue-hanging-out” look Elan was giving him and walked over to the wooden-slat fence.

“I will be direct with you, Allen,” he said. “I know what you are here for. I know what will happen the day after tomorrow when you are taken up into the mountains. What will be will be there, but is it true you’ve never been fucked--that you a virgin to a man’s cock?”

“Yes,” Elan answered in a small voice.

“And are you here willingly for this preparation Mr. Crane speaks of?”

“Yes. I want him to fuck me. I want to be with him. But he says he won’t take me without experience.”

“But he doesn’t tell you why?”

“No, he hasn’t. Do you know why?”

Hal didn’t answer this. What he said instead was, “I find you arousing. You make me hard. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” Elan said shyly.

“I can be gentle and patient with you for your first time. The men who take you up on the mountain won’t be. Mr. Crane has made it clear to them that he just wants it done. It’s not up to me to tell you why he wants it done by five men. Do you find me at all arousing?”

“Yes,” Elan answered in a small voice.

“When those men take you into the hills, they are going to fuck you hard. Mr. Crane has certain needs. They will make sure they meet those with you. I can make your first time easier and more pleasurable. Will you let me be the first to fuck you?”