Chapter 7

They were dressed again. It was late, past midnight, and some things were resolved, while others were not. She could catch a later train, and stay a day or two more. During that time they would have to find a preacher to wed Madeline and Bob. Bob didn’t think that would be too hard because Salt Lake City had a lot of quick marriages. It didn’t matter what the preacher thought about Maddie’s swollen belly because the next day she’d be on the train headed east to Kansas. She would arrive in Dodge married and pregnant, with a husband who had been delayed back where she met, married, and been impregnated by him.

That was the part none of them could devise a story for. Her first thought was to tell people that she met him in California, where he owned a business of some kind. He had to dispose of that business before he could join his pregnant wife in Kansas, where he planned to be involved in another business venture.

The problem was that Bob was ... Bob. He was a cowboy and that’s all he knew how to be. People would believe she hired him to be her business manager, but he didn’t think anybody would believe she decided to marry him and have a child.

“And how would you meet a cowboy in California?” asked Rex. “Do they have lots of cowboys in California?”

“I never saw any, but they had beef to eat so somebody has to be providing them.”

“It’s too bad we don’t know anything about California,” sighed Rex.

Madeline blinked and her jaw dropped.

“That’s it! “ she squealed.

“What?” asked Bob.

“You two are going to take the train to Sacramento. I only have funds to send you third class, but I’m sure that won’t be a trial for men such as you. I will wire my sister and tell her you are coming. She knows all about you. She will find the contacts to connect you to cattlemen in California. You’ll get a job working cattle there and get a couple of months experience and then you will know how to act like California Cattlemen.”

“That sounds expensive,” said Bob. “It would be cheaper for us to get horses and ride there.”

“A ticket from here to Sacramento costs twenty dollars. Can you buy a horse for twenty dollars?”

“A nag,” said Rex. “A decent mount runs more to seventy dollars.”

“Then the train is cheaper. And time is a factor, here. What decent man would send his pregnant wife off to Kansas and then delay joining her until his child has been born? I need you to get there in February or March.”

“We’ll still need horses in California,” said Bob. “Some ranchers provide them, but some don’t.”

“If you have to have them then buy them there. When I get back home I can wire you funds. And if you get them there, they won’t be worn out after a long ride across mountains and hundreds of miles.”

“You’re making this sound easy,” said Bob, “but I know it’s not going to be easy.”

“Was making it out of that mine easy?” she asked.

“All right,” he groaned. “You don’t have to start nagging me before we’re even married!”

“I don’t nag,” she said, her voice frosty. “I tell my husband what I need and he provides it for me because he adores me. Then I reward him with good, hot meals and a willing woman in his bed.”

“We’ll do what you need,” said Rex. “I think it might be fun. I’ve never rode on a train before and I’d like to see what California is like.”

“What else?” asked Bob.

“I will wire Sarah tomorrow morning and ask her to help you. I know she will. She is going to be your sister-in-law when you get there, you know. You will be family. This will work out. You should be able to assimilate and learn enough to convince Kansans that you’ve at least been in California. Once that’s out of the way, the rest will be routine business.”

“When do we leave?” asked Bob.

“I’ll buy your tickets as soon as we are married. You can leave immediately, unless your mine is producing well.”

“Our mine is not producing well,” said Bob. “We’ve saved enough to buy one of those horses we’ve been talking about, but that’s it. I’ll be honest, living in that shack is going to get rough once the cold really sets in.”

“California is warm and sunny,” said Maddie. “You may not want to leave there to come back to Kansas.”

“Yes we will,” said Rex.

He reached for her hand.

“You’ll be there. That will make us impatient to get back to Kansas.”

The vast majority of religious leaders in Salt Lake City in 1871 were associated with the Mormon Church. Unless you joined the Mormon Church (which meant your existence was then planned out for you by others) they would not perform a marriage. It was the same with the Catholics and the Presbyterians. Maddie finally found the Methodist minister who, for a donation to his poor and struggling church, happily married a miner in rough and dirty clothes, to a beautiful, well-dressed woman who provided the “donation” for his acquiescence in the matter. Both said they believed in God and Maddie said she and her late husband had always attended the traveling tent revivals when they went through town, so he felt like he would not be stricken by lightning for joining the two. At least the miner was making her an honest woman.

Next she arranged for their travel to Sacramento and sent a wire to Sarah, explaining in clipped sentences that her “new husband” was coming to visit and “needed introductions” It ended with “he will explain all stop love Maddie.” She did not expect a response.

Checking her dwindling supply of on-hand funds, she took them to the general store and bought them new shirts and pants. Their boots and hats would do, for now. She could wire funds to Sarah to improve their wardrobes until they could earn some money for themselves.

When all was done, and they had talked about everything they could think of, they returned to her room at the hotel.

“I’m leaving on the train tomorrow,” she said.

“We know that,” said bob.

“You look good in your new shirt and blue jeans,” she said.

“Thank you, Dear,” he said, with a bow.

“You would look much better without them on,” she said. “We have not consummated our marriage yet, either.”

“Then I will do what is necessary to remedy that,” he said.

“You’re already speaking better,” she said, turning her back to Rex so he could undo the buttons on the back of her dress. She stepped out of the dress and draped it over the back of the hard-backed chair in the room, by the small desk. She shrugged out of her chemise and stood, naked. She had stopped wearing underpants after the mine. All they seemed to do was get in the way when she had to relieve herself. She turned to Rex.

“I’m going to make love with my husband,” she said, unbuttoning his shirt. “I would like it very much if you’d get me ready for him.”

“I’d like that very much, too,” he said.

She took his shirt and laid it on the desk. Looking at her dress she got an idea.

After his new jeans joined his shirt she lifted her dress off the back of the chair and laid it gently on top of his clothes. Then she pointed at the chair.

“Sit down on that,” she said. “I want to try something.”

He didn’t question her. He just did as he was told and sat. He felt like he looked ridiculous, naked, with his already stiff pecker pointing up out of his lap.

He understood when she straddled his knees and lowered herself until he felt her scorching walls slide down his shaft. When she settled, she scooted toward him and he scooted toward her.

“Oh, yes, this is going to work just fine,” she breathed.

Rex looked down at her bump, which was pressed against his flat stomach. Above that were her breasts, with their fat, dark nipples. He leaned forward to suckle them and she sighed as her head went back and her mouth opened.

“I love it so much when you do that,” she said, as her head came back down. “Can you spurt in me this way?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Maybe not. It feels really good, like I could keep doing it for hours.”

“I could too, but we don’t have hours right now. My husband is waiting. Keep sucking like that and I will be ready for him. Then you and I can mate fully later.”

“All right,” he said.

Three or four minutes later Maddie started humping her lover.

“Oh, yes!” she yipped. “Oh there it is!”

She slowed and leaned forward to kiss Rex long and hard, dueling with her tongue as his came out to play. The kiss finally broke.

“Thank you for loving me,” panted Rex.

“Thank you for being a man I can love,” she said. Then she got up. His spend started dripping out of her immediately so she used one hand to pinch her nether lips closed as she went to the bed. She had just sat on the edge when Bob spoke.

“Wait. Stop right there. I just thought of something.”

He went to her and had her lie back. As she did so he stooped to lift her legs and placed her calves on his shoulders. The height of the bed lined her up perfectly for his penis and as he leaned forward, to put his hands beside her shoulders, he slid into her all the way.

“Mmmm, this will work, too,” she said.

“We’re going to do this a lot, wife,” he said as he started sawing in and out of her.

“You have no idea,” she panted. “I have three bedrooms and we’re going to do this in all of them.”

Madeline was on the train again, which was headed for Kansas City, with stops along the way. She would get off at one of them and hire a buggy to take her home. Once there she would open up the house and go get provisions at the general store. Within an hour everyone in town would know the widow woman who always wore black was no longer wearing black, was married again and was already pregnant!

It was the holiday season and people would invite her to celebrations and parties. In the past she would have politely declined, or only made a brief appearance, but that would change this year. She would accept every invitation she got and begin to repair the scars her withdrawal from society had created. She needed friends. And she needed information about her competitors.

There would be questions, but they would be polite, mere hints of all the questions people would want to ask but which exceeded the bounds of propriety. She would give them dribs and drabs of information, slowly painting the picture of the revival of the cattle company her dead husband had operated. She would have many things to do to “get ready for her new husband’s arrival.” There were competitors who had filled the void left when Richard died. Then she had ample land to work with, while most of the others only had pens that could hold no more than 500 head of stock at the most. And those would have to be fed before they could be driven to Abilene. They would have lost weight on the drive from Texas, and it needed to be put back on before they continued east.

She got started, in fact, by offering to rent her section of pasture land for the holding of cattle being put together for a drive. It was early in the season and there wasn’t much grass to put cows on when they arrived. Her land had not been grazed, though, so last year’s grass was still standing. It was dry and not worth much, but it was feed. She had a small herd on her land by Late January. That produced some income and left her free to travel east, herself, all the way to Topeka, where she met with officials of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. Everyone knew they were trying to finish the line to Dodge City, but no one had tried to secure any contracts for shipping beef, yet. The officials she met were more than happy to have her there. She was beautiful, pregnant, and wanted to do business. She eventually met the man who was slated to write those contracts some day. His information was that the track would be laid by November of ‘72 at the latest and possibly sooner if the weather was good and the workers were unmolested. With his assurances that they would be able to do business, she left with her foot in the door, so to speak, and the knowledge that she needed to have a thousand head of cattle to ship in the fall, where they could graze on her land and fatten up until the train arrived.

When she got back home it was February and she was gravid to the point that she wanted to start taking it easy. She’d gotten one letter from Bob, written in his own hand, describing what he and Rex had been doing. She got two letters from Sarah, who gave much more information, describing Bob and Rex as big hits because they were from the Wild West, where they had fought Indians and bandits. They were seen as hard-bitten, dangerous men, which made Sarah laugh because she knew they were both cream puffs.

Bob, with more experience, was accepted by the Vaqueros who still had significant influence in cattle handling and ranching in California. Cattle drives there went south into Mexico, rather than east. There was also a thriving business in hides and tallow, which provided needed and otherwise expensive raw materials.

Rex became friends with an old Vaquero and his son, who was in the business of taming wild horses. Rex had seen and ridden some mustangs and had noted that some of them were more trustworthy than others. It was from watching how Vaqueros tamed horses in the Californio tradition that he determined that bronco busting, as practiced in the Midwest, and which was sometimes brutal, was a significantly poorer way to tame a horse. He would bring Californio taming skills to Kansas when he and Bob wrapped up their “training” and got on the train to ride to a future with the woman they both loved.

It was the first of April when Bob and Rex unloaded their horses from the stock car that had brought them all the way from the west coast to Colby, Kansas. From there it was a four day ride to Dodge City. When they rode into Dodge they asked the first person they saw on the street where “Mrs. Grisham’s” house was, and were told no such person existed. It was Rex who thought of something and asked, “What about Widow Fitzwater?” That person did exist, and directions were obtained. When they rode up to the front of the house and tied their horses to the hitching rail Madeline was, at that point, eleven days from giving birth. Of course none of them knew that.

Bob walked up onto the big, covered porch and, without knocking, went on in. It just so happened that the midwife was there, checking on Maddie. Everyone knew she was about ready to pop so a close eye was being kept on her. The woman, whose name was Caroline Huntington, came out of Maddie’s bedroom as Bob and Rex walked in. Bob was wearing black cloth pants and a white shirt, covered by a black vest and coat. His hat was flat-topped with a wide brim and was also black. A black leather gun belt was strapped around his hips and the white pearl handle of a pistol protruded. His boots were black as well. With his bushy black beard and moustache, he looked dangerous. The only thing that relieved the black were the silver spurs on his boots, some silverwork on his gun belt, and a band of silver Conchos on his hat.

“Who are you and what do you want?” asked Caroline loudly and with authority. Women who lived in Dodge were tough. If they weren’t, they either went back east or died.

“I am Robert Grisham and am married to the owner of this fine house,” said Bob. “Where is Madeline?” He stood and waited.