At fourteen, an indentured servant on a farm between Falmouth and Portland, Maine, Danny already had been initiated into sex with a man. The unmarried farmer he was indentured to preferred boys in transition to manhood to women, and an indentured servant at the end of the eighteenth century in New England in the new country of America was no more free than a slave on a southern plantation was. Danny had grown to like the attention, which gave him some hold over the farmer, who was besotted with the boy. Danny had drifted into the role of submissive to the lusts of a man naturally, but it was a shock to him to learn that he liked it rough. That happened on the road between Falmouth and Portland when he was walking to one of the farmer’s fields one day.

He was walking aimlessly along the road south toward the farmer’s most distant field, not feeling the need to rush to his job of weeding in that field as he increasingly was able to demand leniency from the farmer he was being laid by. As he walked, a wagon pulled up beside him. A burley Irishman with flaming red hair hailed him.

“Would this be the road to Portland?”

“Yes, you’re on the right road, mister.”

“And I guess you would be knowing why boys like yourself dally around on this section to the track, would you not? You are not moving at a pace that would suggest you have more to do than what a man, like me, driving a wagon here might want.”

No Danny didn’t know. But he found the question so strange that he passed over it and didn’t answer. He also made no move to walk away from the wagon.

“You’re a right handsome boy. Not too old for schooling, you don’t appear. You look more than a bit too young to be standing in this stretch. Maybe it’s the smallness.”

“Old enough,” Danny responded indignantly, pulling himself up to stand straighter. His lack of height was one of the biggest of life’s irritations for him. He was always being taken for the age he was or younger rather than the older age he wanted to be. Some boys his age were shooting up in height already and could pass as older.

“So, where you off to?” the man in the wagon asked.

“Nowhere in particular.”

“No one down the road expecting you or anything?”

“No, just out for the exercise.”

The man gave a guttural laugh at that response, which he took for saucy teasing. “I could give a handsome boy like you all the exercise he could want. I got to admit I’m really right randy now, and you have that look about you that makes a man go hard and that wants to be poking a boy. Fancy a fuck? I’ve got chickens in the back. Fair exchange it would be.”

“What?” Danny managed in a strangled voice, confused and scared but also inexplicably aroused. Until now, he hadn’t had the hint of an idea what the man was saying about what boys might be about who loitered in this section of the road.

The man had set the brake on the wagon and was coming down off it. He was huge, maybe twice Danny’s weight. Danny felt frightened, but all a tingle at the same time. He turned and ran into the woods at the side of the road.

That was a mistake. “Ah, a playful one we have here. You best not make me work too hard for it,” the man called out at Danny’s retreating back. “You would regret that soundly, I can tell you.”

The man caught Danny easily and dragged him farther into the trees to a small glade where a few large trees had been chopped down, leaving stumps at near chair height. He grabbed Danny’s arm and spun him around. “No!” Danny cried out. But then all of the air was knocked out of him as the man punched him in the stomach with a doubled-up fist and, as Danny bent over from that blow, gave him an upper cut to the jaw for good measure.

The ruffian was already fumbling at Danny’s clothes as Danny was sinking to the ground. He had Danny’s shirt opened down the front and the front of his trousers opened and hanging low on his hips.

“No!” Danny managed to stumble out in slurred words, but the man pulled him up by his shirt collar and backhanded his face twice. Danny hit the ground hard, and the man stooped down, grabbed the waistband of Danny’s trousers, and pulled them and his underdrawers off his legs. His hands then immediately went to unbuttoning his own fly.

The man laughed, looking down at Danny. “Well, look there. You already want me.”

Danny was embarrassed as well as dazed. He indeed felt that he’d gone half hard. He looked up at the man’s crotch, at the already erect cock the man was holding in his hand. The shaft was both thicker and longer than the farmer’s was. More mesmerizing to Danny was the bush of red, kinky hair that surrounded the root of it. Danny moaned and tried to move away. A heavy boot plopped down in the center of his chest.

“You ain’t gonna give me trouble now, are you? You want the fuck. We both know that. That’s what boys want who hang around this section of road.”

Pinned to the ground, Danny just whimpered incoherently. He couldn’t hide that he was going hard, though. Being assaulted and controlled like this—not being able to do anything about it—had aroused him in ways he’d never achieved by himself in bed at night or with the farmer. The danger of it. It was exhilarating. Yes, he wanted it. He’d been thinking of wanting it as soon as he started getting the idea of what the man was talking about while he still was sitting on his wagon. He’d wanted it from the farmer and had gotten it. He couldn’t help himself; he wanted it from this man too—and the roughness of it had him more aroused then he’d ever been before.

“Yes,” he whimpered.

“Yes, you want it?” the man growled.

“Yes, I want it,” Danny admitted.