Sitting on a hay bale in the loft of the barn, Eli ran his fingers into the blond curls of Danny’s head and forced the boy’s mouth down on his hard cock. Danny was on all fours between the man’s spread legs. Eli moved one hand down to flare open his unbuttoned fly and gruffly demanded, “The balls too, son. They seek your love too.”

Danny dutifully licked and sucked on the man’s balls. The smaller boy was naked, except for his boots. His flannel shirt, jeans, and underdrawers had been hastily cast away to the side on a line of progress from the top of the ladder along the rough, hay-dusted wooden floorboards of the loft, showing that Eli had grabbed him at the top of the ladder and manhandled and undressed him down to the floor of the loft and to the hay bale, with the intent of bending the naked boy over the bale and fucking him good.

Sunlight streamed in from the large opening at the end of the wall for pitching bales, but the light didn’t quite reach where the two were crouching. Eli, tall, thin, gnarled, and hard-bodied, was still in his britches, but his white cotton shirt was beside him on the hay bale, and his suspenders were off his shoulders and drooping at his side.

Still, he was in readiness to pop up and get himself together at the first call of his name by his wife from the adjacent house. She was ever suspicious. She was constantly checking up on where he was in relationship to where the orphans they housed were. There were things left unspoken on the farm, but very little not known.

Eli ran his calloused hands down the smooth, pliant skin of the back and the flanks of the fourteen-year-old boy crouched between his thighs. Danny moaned in both ecstasy and anticipation. When Eli reached the nicely rounded buttocks, he slapped them, kneaded them, and spread them open. Holding one butt cheek open, he moved the other hand into the stretched crack and rubbed across the rim of Danny’s butthole. Danny moaned and moved his mouth back to the thick cock, taking it half way down into his throat in one slide. Then he grunted and groaned, as Eli dug a finger into the hole and gyrated it to help open the boy up.

Danny would have to be open wide for Eli. Eli was built big and proud. But he had proven in the past to open quickly. Eli extracted the finger and thumped it on the hole, being met by another moan from Danny. He thumped it again and then moved two fingers into the hole, which opened to accommodate them. Stretching the hole, he was rewarded by a muffled groan from Danny and a tightening of the lad’s mouth cavity on Eli’s cock. Eli joined in the groaning.

Rising from the hay bale and reversing their bodies, pushing Danny belly down on the hay, and crouching behind him and between his spread legs, Eli gave more attention to the hole, fingering it, spitting on it, thumping it with his index finger, pushing a thumb into it and revolving and jiggling the digit, loosening the hole more.

“Open to me. Give yourself fully to me,” he muttered. “Yes, relax. Let it open.”

He buried his face in the crack and began eating the hole out, encouraging it to open more, as a hand latched onto Danny’s cock and balls, no more than a handful for this farmer with the large, calloused hand. Eli milked the boy’s cock while he ate out his ass.

This was no first encounter. The man had been buggering the boy for a couple of months. They were into a pattern and a rhythm.

It wasn’t long before he was back up on his feet, between Danny’s thighs, working his thick cock into the stretching—but not really fast enough—hole, while Danny clutched at the straw of the bale and buried his face in Eli’s white shirt, inhaling the musky sweat order of the man who had been his master for the past seven years, and his secret lover—if what was happening here could be called love—for the past four months, since not long before Danny turned fourteen—if the people who had given Danny over to Eli’s farm orphanage care had calculated correctly.

Fully saddled, Eli grabbed Danny’s legs and pulled the boy’s ankles up to hook onto his shoulders. Then he reached down and wrapped his arms under Danny’s pits and pulled the lad’s torso off the hay bale, arching his lithe, willowy torso up toward his chest. He moved one of his hands to where it was buried in the curly blond hair of the boy’s head, and pulled the head back cruelly.

Holding the young, flexible body suspended over the hay bale in front of him, Eli began to stroke inside Danny’s passage, digging deep, stretching the channel walls wider as each stroke thickened and lengthened the cruel cock.

Panting hard, his hands pulled back to grip the back of Eli’s head in an attempt to hold himself steady in the extreme bowed, totally controlled position Eli had put him in, Danny was babbling quietly to himself, saying who knows what? Eli certainly didn’t care. He had his eyes closed and was thrusting in ecstasy, thinking that Danny was the best one yet.

He didn’t notice when Danny jerked and spilled his seed on the dusty floorboards. He only cared that his own explosion was building—and then firing off in four strong bursts of cum up into Danny’s intestines. And then Eli reveled in the afterglow of the pleasure of the mellow coming back to the world as he continued to languidly stroke inside the small boy’s passage, until he slowly let loose of Danny’s body and let it sink into a trembling pile at his feet.

Eli reached down and clutched and raised Danny’s head by his hair and turned Danny’s face to his dripping cock, demanding in action that it be cleaned. Danny opened his mouth to the cock.

A far-off voice, a woman’s voice, called, “Eli, Eli. Where have you gotten too? I see out in the field that the reins are slipping off the plow horse out in the field and Joey ain’t able to get them back on.”

Eli let loose of Danny’s hair and reached over him for his cotton shirt.

“Time you got out in the potato field, Danny, and earned your keep like the other boys are doin’. Best I go sort Joey out. God help me, it’s a chore keepin’ all you orphan boys sorted out and contributing your keep. What do you say, boy?”

Danny looked up at the farmer who also ran the makeshift Iowa orphanage he’d been at for the past seven years. Eli had stuffed the tail of the shirt into his britches waist and was buttoning up his fly. He was a tall, rugged, gaunt man, with a stern expression. Danny’s image of him was always one of carrying around a Bible and thumping it as he harangued the boys on the whereabouts of the edges of the straight and narrow.

“Thank you, Brother Eli,” he said, by rote. “Thank you for taking us lost boys in and giving us food and shelter and work. And thank you for loving me and giving me the special attention that you do.”

“And you best remember that. Now get on out into the potato field. And you know not to talk of this. This love between us is our own secret.”

Danny wasn’t naïve enough to think this was, indeed, love. He did receive pleasure from Eli’s attentions. When he’d first been taken four months earlier, it had given him release from doubts and frustration. He, in fact, would be happy receiving more of this attention from Eli. If only the man weren’t so stern about it all of the time. If Eli took and looked like he took more enjoyment from it beyond those moments when he was past control and doing what animals naturally did, Danny would take more enjoyment from it as well. It couldn’t be much of a sin if Eli was doing it.

Eli was still pulling his suspenders up when he came out of the barn, a gesture that wasn’t lost on Sarah, his wife, looking out the kitchen window. She had thought that Eli was probably in the barn with Danny, the oldest of their orphans—older than she’d thought she had just yesterday discovered by going through the birth certificate records. She’d have something to say and do about that, yes she would, and soon. At fourteen the boys were supposed to be moving on to a work house and learning a trade. They had no right holding a foster child on the farm past fourteen.

But Sarah then wasn’t the least bit surprised seeing Danny, small bodied, which made his age deceiving, and more beautiful, with his blond curls, dark-blue eyes, ready smile, full, sensuous lips, and slim, but well-muscled, body, than handsome as he came out of the barn, tucking the tail of his flannel shirt into the waist of his tight jeans. There were things that happened on the farm that were known but best not talked about until or unless necessary.

Sarah expelled a puff of air and put extra elbow grease into washing out a pot. She’d do something about this—right soon.

Danny walked out into the potato field. Four others working out there raised arms in welcome. The oldest of the orphans at the farm, actually, at fourteen and some five months, well past the time he should be here, Danny was well liked. He had a sunny disposition and was always quick to lend a hand. There was no resentment that he had not been out in the field with them earlier. A few of the boys had a strong notion why he hadn’t been, and, although they felt sorry for Danny, they were just glad it was someone other than them—and that it meant that Eli wasn’t out here in the field ordering them around. Despite having taken them in when no one else claimed or wanted them and clothing and feeding them—and not making more work demands on them than any father would do in the hardscrabble recently-minted State of Iowa in the late 1870s—Eli was a hard, humorless man.

As the orphans worked, they talked.

“You must be gettin’ on old enough to leave and move on to a new life learning a trade,” John said. He was taller and bigger boned than Danny was, as several of the orphans were, but he wasn’t as old. His voice sounded a bit wistful. “I will be sorry to see you go, but I envy you,” he continued.

“I reckon I will leave soon, yes,” Danny answered.

John and Danny exchanged meaningful looks. They both knew that, if and when Danny left, John would be the next one to be worrying about special attention from Eli.

“Any idea where you want to go, what you want to do?” Steven asked.

“West,” Danny said. “I’ve always thought of going West. All the way to California.”

“Panning for gold? Making your fortune?” John sounded hopeful.

“I think the gold has panned out in California,” Danny answered. “But the thought of California sounds like gold to me anyways.”

“And it’s far away from Brother Eli,” Sylvester chimed in in a quiet voice. Sylvester was a shy boy, not much larger than Danny, although near his age, a month past fourteen, and, like Danny, more beautiful than handsome.

Danny looked at Sylvester. He knew that Sylvester was like him in wants. They had met in the blueberry patch behind the outhouse in recent weeks, lain side by side, and given each other release with their hands. Sylvester had already been coaxed to roll over on top of Danny once and put it inside him. Danny wondered if, when he left, Eli would be after Sylvester rather than John as he now was after him.

“Yes, it is—far away from Brother Eli,” Danny answered, adding, “but Brother Eli, he’s teaching me a trade whether he knows it or not. There’s always a way gettin’ to and livin’ in California from what I’m learning from Brother Eli.”

“And what would that be?” Sylvester asked.

“Men been sniffing around me for some time,” Danny said. “The first time one got me, I learned I liked it all right. Now I know I can make money off it.”

“Come on,” John said. “Brother Eli don’t give money out like that. He’s tight with it. We all know that. He wants you, he just takes you.”

“Yeah, but he’s not the only man sniffing around for it. He’s not the only man laying on top of me. I get paid for it by Brother Mort from over that field over there. I figure I have myself a trade that will get me to California and keep me there. And speaking of Brother Eli, we’d best be back at digging up these spuds. He’s sure to count them when we’re done and expect a certain number of them to be there. Although he’s never likely to tell us how many he expects on the chance that we’ll bring in more than that.”

“Brother Mort from the neighboring farm, you say?” Sylvester asked, as they started back toward the barn.

“Yes, and Elder James from the church too.”

“They got big ones, do they?”

“Not as big as Brother Eli. When he’s inside me, I feel like I’ve gone to heaven—or hell—I never can decide which. It takes me somewhere else than here, though, and that’s good ‘nuff for me.”

“Shit, Danny. You gonna become a whore?”

“I’ll do what I have to to get to California.”

Inside the house Sarah was accosting her husband.

“You know, husband, that we are licensed only to keep the boys until they are fourteen.”

“Of course I know that, woman. You don’t have to preach my business to me.” He uttered it with such finality that he probably had an inkling where Sarah was going with this.

“You know your weakness, Eli,” Sarah said, poking a finger into his chest, which looked rather amusing, as he was nearly six and a half feet tall, and she wasn’t much more than five feet. “You know the laws—the law of orphans and the law of men.”

“I don’t know what you mean, woman.”

“I mean Danny. I’ve been lookin’ at the birth certificates, and, thank God he’s fourteen, not younger, as you have allowed. But there’s the orphan laws. We can’t still be havin’ him as an orphan. I’ll bet he’s not the only one either. How old will Sylvester be if I look for his papers?”

“I don’t know if I can give him up,” Eli said in a despairing voice. “You know my passions.”

“Your passions are displaced, Eli Phillips,” Sarah said with a good deal of force behind the statement.

“Not displaced. Just broad,” Eli answered, grabbing at Sarah’s bodice and pulling her to him, taking her mouth in a brutal kiss, as his hands ripped at the buttons of her bodice, freeing her breasts, and squeezing them, as he pushed her down on the floor, pulled up her skirting, working at the buttons of his fly, entering her strongly, and beginning to pump.

Sighing and moaning under him, Sarah clutched as Eli’s shoulder blades. This was the Eli she wanted. Not the other Eli. This was the Eli she’d fight for.

Later, not long before twilight, Danny was wandering down near the stream, where the bushes were thick, when he heard them, when he heard the moaning sounds like he sometimes made himself of late. Creeping up to a clump of bushes, he spread the foliage enough to see that the cook was on her back on the ground, and Benjamin, one of the hired hands, was between her legs, holding her pinned to the ground with strong hands holding her upper arms to the moss. His hips were in high gear, fucking her.

Danny had barely started to watch, one of his hands unbuttoning his fly and pulling his hardening cock out, when he was jerked up from behind by a hand on the collar of his shirt, shaken hard, turned, and thrown off toward the stream bank, away from the bushes where the hired help were fucking. Eli strode over and jerked Danny up again, and tossed him further down the stream bank. And then again and again, until the two of them were in a clump of bushes themselves, a stand of bushes with the trunk of a huge tree laying on the ground between the bushes.

Danny got tossed across the log, the wind forced out of his sails, the small of his back on the log, and his torso arched over it and down, so that his shoulder blades pressed into the moist moss on the other side and his pelvis was elevated toward the sky.

Eli was standing over him, breathing hard, an angry look on his face, holding a short riding whip. “You are not to look at such as that,” he barked. “I will provide all that you need to know of such as that.” He leaned over and struck, three times, with the whip, twice on Danny’s chest and once on his thighs. Danny winced, more in shock and surprise than pain, the flannel shirt and jeans being of heavy material. The touch of the whip thongs tips then focused on the boy’s groin, not striking but playing, flicking and brushing across the boy’s crotch. Danny moaned, taking it for a moment before he started to roll away from where, vulnerable, he lay.

Eli reached down, grabbed the front of Danny’s shirt, and put him back in place. He ripped the shirt open, popping buttons left and right, and then grabbed the waistband of Danny’s jeans—the boy had unbuttoned those and flared them aside himself when he was watching the hired help coupling—and jerked the jeans off Danny’s legs.

The man struck again and again with the whip, this time on exposed flesh, as Danny writhed under him. The whip had stung him on the belly, on the upper thighs, and on the exposed cock and balls. Danny was embarrassed that he had gone hard under the lash.

Realizing, perhaps, what he was doing—and the effect it was having on Danny—Eli stood up over Danny, whip at his side, panting hard. He paused there for the longest minute, looking down at the small, more beautiful than handsome, boy. His eyes went to the manifestation of Danny’s involuntary arousal, erect, twitching, and throbbing. Danny’s hand went to his cock.

“My God, I’ve got to have you,” Eli muttered, as he pushed the suspenders off his shoulders, and unbuttoned the fly of his trousers. He sank down on his knees in front of the log and between Danny’s spread leg. His hands glided up Danny’s red-welted chest, as the boy winced and groaned. Pressing his hands into the hollow of Danny’s shoulders where his arms connected to his trunk, Eli held the boy’s torso stretched out over the tree trunk and descending to the other side.

Making little grunting sounds, Eli licked and kissed up Danny’s torso as if that was going to make the welts go away, while, resigned, Danny let his arms go, stretched out from his body and parallel to the tree log, putting him symbolically into a cruciform position, prepared for the sacrifice—in heat and wanting it now. He groaned and jerked as Eli’s cock entered him. Eli’s mouth found Danny’s, and he went into a deep kiss as Danny lifted his ankles to Eli’s shoulders and the deep pumping began.

Wild with arousal himself, surprising himself that the whipping had made him hard, Danny focused his attention on the possessing cock and set his pelvis in motion, meeting Eli’s thrusts forward with thrusting his hips forward as well, to take Eli deep as he relaxed his passage walls and set his interior muscles to undulating over the thick, plunging cock.

For the first time, it was more than Eli’s taking Danny for his own need—it was two lovers, both with red hot need and lust, going at each other for their own separate want of the use of the other’s body. They moved their pelvises against each other in concert, thrusting and withdrawing, thrusting, thrusting, thrusting, Danny holding on for dear life, taking as much as he was giving. Fully into the fuck.

For the first time Danny could feel—could connect with—the muscles of his passage walls, which gripped and undulated over the invading shaft, caressing it as it moved inside him, causing Danny to groan as his channel muscles pulled the cock in deeper—and prompting Eli to groan in pleasure as well, surely aware that, for the first time, Danny wasn’t just a dormant receptacle for Eli’s need, but had a need for this himself. Going molten soft inside and opening as never before, Danny took the older man’s cock deeper, thicker than ever before, and the two tensed together, jerked together, came together, sighed and relaxed together, tensed again together, came a second time together in a weaker afterglow, and felt their tension melt away into a soft final sigh together.

Afterward, still crouched over Danny’s body and flaccid inside Danny’s channel, Eli pressed his lips into the hollow of Danny’s throat. Pulling a bit away, he whispered. “Don’t leave. I have to go for supplies for a few days, but don’t let Sarah make you leave while I’m gone.”

Danny didn’t have the foggiest notion what Eli meant by that, however his thoughts soon went to the present. He could feel the man thickening again inside him, and he emitted a low moan, whispered, “Yes, yes, yes,” under his breath despite himself, scared a bit that the lashes of the whip had only enhanced his own arousal, and clutched at Eli’s shoulder blades, as the man’s hips went into languid motion once more.

“Yes, yes, yes, fuck me, Master,” Danny murmured under his breath.

Eli did so, hard, thick, and deep. The second fucking was as totally open in giving and taking as the first one had been. The two now were fully lovers.

The next time they had sex, all Eli had to do was show Danny the hand whip and flick it and Danny was hard, on his back, with his legs open, and panting for the cock. Danny’s Achilles heel in sexual terms had been uncovered.

“Is Colorado near California?”

Meachem winked at Grant and replied, “Almost spitting distance.”

Danny was inside a coach traveling west from the Iowa orphan farm. They’d barely started on the journey before Meachem, the man in a black suit sitting across from Danny, started telling Danny where they were going and what the deal was.

Nothing had been said about this back at the farmhouse when the men had arrived and Sarah had called Danny in to tell him that he was going with them. Eli was off on his supplies buying spree. Danny had spied Eli fucking Sylvester in the hayloft the afternoon before Eli left on his trip, so Danny didn’t really care where Eli was. And once he’d heard one of the men in the black suits tell Sarah that they were headed West, Danny didn’t have to hear any more to be good about going with them.

“We’re going to a mining town in the Colorado Rockies called Clark’s Station,” Meachem told Danny. He was leaning in toward Danny in the compartment of the couch, which meant that he almost was in Danny’s lap. The distance between the two facing seats was so narrow that the man’s knees were nearly in Danny’s crotch. Danny’s legs were spread around the man’s. The other man, Grant, who was pretty silent and who was shorter, beefier, and somewhat younger than Meachem in appearance—but also wearing a black suit—was sitting beside Danny in the forward-facing seat.

A black man was up top, driving the team of horses. Danny hadn’t seen many black men in Iowa, but he knew that there were some who had drifted there away from the Civil War fought some ten years earlier. If this black man had been in the Civil War, he would have had to be very young when he did it, Danny thought. He appeared to be a strapping, large-framed, very muscular young man.

“You’ll be working in a saloon,” Meachem continued. “They need fresh boys coming in to work the saloons in those mining towns. You’ll do quite well from the look of you.”

“Thank you.” Danny couldn’t think of much else to say. As long as it was getting him close to California, he didn’t particularly care what his job would be. It would be his first job as a man—leaving the orphanage.

“Mrs. Phillips says you have no relatives.”

“Not that I know of—none that have shown up for the last seven years,” Danny said.

“It’s hard to believe you are fourteen,” Meachem said. “Or even thirteen for that matter. But I have a birth certificate here that Mrs. Phillips gave me that says you are fourteen. That’s an age they like in the Western saloons.”

He looked at Danny as if he expected Danny to explain the difference between what was in print and what the man observed, but Danny had nothing to offer.

“We lose track of the passing years in the orphanage,” was the best he could offer.

Meachem put his hands on Danny’s knees and pushed the boy’s legs apart a bit more. At the same time Grant put an arm around Danny’s neck and palmed Danny’s bicep.

“Mrs. Phillips assured me that you lay under men. Was she telling the truth?” He was giving Danny an intense look.

“Under men?” Danny answered with a gulp.

“Yes. She said you would let a man put his pecker inside you. I must know if she lied. If so, we will take you back and recover what we paid for you. The job in Colorado requires you to let men fuck you. Will you lay under men?”

How did she know? Danny wondered, feeling panicked. He was shamed and embarrassed all at once. But why should he be? He hadn’t chosen that. It wasn’t his fault that it seemed natural enough to him. He even liked it—and he found it gave him power over men. He could never go back now. And he didn’t want to go back. He wanted to go to California. He’d do anything to get there.

“I might will lay under men,” he answered, hedging as far as he was concerned, but that wasn’t exactly the way the two men heard it, “if it helps get me where I want to go.”

It was like both men had been holding their breath to that point. Smiling, Meachem moved his hands to between Danny’s legs, running his fingers up and down Danny’s crotch. Danny felt himself becoming aroused.

“Does scare you, son?”

“No sir.”

“Do you like the feel of that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Grant moved a hand to the back of Danny’s neck and ran his fingers up into the blond curls on the back of Danny’s head.

“We’ll need to have proof of that—that you lay under men.”

“Proof?”

“You’ll have to lie under both of us. And of course we can’t go too much further on our journey without testing out the quality of what you will do with a man.”

“The quality?” Danny asked, somewhat confused.

“The quality, yes, how well you do lying under a men—how much pleasure he gets from penetrating you and releasing his seed. How well you make him hard and pleasure him. Am I embarrassing you?”

“No, sir,” Danny answered not wanting to appear naïve. But scaring me more than a little, he thought. Had he been giving men quality?

“Have you sucked a man’s pecker?”

“Yes, sir,” Danny answered. It was, after all, the truth.

“And you have had a man’s pecker inside you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Deep?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And he has moved it inside you for a while? And released his seed inside you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you just lay there while he moved inside you or did you move with him?”

“I don’t understand.”

“What did you do while he was fucking you.”

“I guess I was fucking him too.”

“You were moving with him—your hips and your ass? You weren’t just laying there, doing nothing, not being any part of—”

“I was moving against him too.” Now that he thought about, he did do that with the men. He was trying to meet their rhythm and go with it. Maybe that’s what the man meant about quality.

“Good. And we must test for endurance. I can tell that you will be popular, in high demand. Do you think you can have one man pull out of you and another man enter you almost immediately? And even more men than two?”

“I don’t know,” Danny answered with a shaky voice. “There have only been a few men, mostly one man.”

“Was the man thick and long?”

“I don’t know,” Danny answered honestly. “Only the one man has had me see it close—has had me take it in my mouth. How does one compare when there is only one man ... oh.”

Both men had unbuttoned themselves and had their cocks out in their hands. Danny reddened a bit.

“Yes, the man is thick and long,” he answered. He didn’t want to say more to make the men angry, but there was nothing special about the size of Meachem’s cock, although it was growing in his hand as they spoke. Grant was quite thick, but nothing as long as Eli was.

“I am going to undress and fondle you now,” Meachem said. He didn’t ask for permission, but he gave Danny a quizzical look.

Danny knew that it was now or never to object to this—to object to everything that these men would do to him. And, if they were laying out the job fairly, everything other men would do to him, probably many men. He set his sights on California and steeled his will. He had no skills or talents. He was coming out of an orphanage. No past or family or attachments. It was up to him to make his own way, using whatever he had to work with. He had a body that inflamed a man—Eli. Maybe it would inflame other men as well. That’s what he had to work with. That’s what he’d told the other boys he was willing to do to get to California and then to stay there. He’d heard that panning for gold was going stale. He hadn’t heard that men wanted to stop dipping their wicks, and there weren’t many women in California yet. Boys were the thing, he’d heard. Still, this was getting a bit too much for him. Going too fast, being too much in the open on what they wanted to do.

“I don’t know about any of this. Maybe I shouldn’t go with you. You could just pull over to the side here and I’d—”

The stinging slap came as a surprise. Danny’s head snapped to the side, and Meachem’s hand connected with another slap when he turned it back. It more than stung him. It both told him they were serious, this had gone beyond the turning back point, and it had aroused him. He felt himself harden. He lay back in the seat and gave Meachem a glazed look.

“You gonna fight us on this, boy?” Meachem growled.

“No, sir, I’m not,” Danny answered meekly.

“Look, Meachem,” Grant said. “The boy got hard when you slapped him.”