Chapter 6

And one thing I had come to want out of life was making love to my sweet Moxie. It was amazing how much life had changed — how much I had changed — since I had found her. Never in my wildest dreams had I thought about finding a woman to love — and who would love me — like Moxie and I did. Oh, sure, I'd dreamed about finding a woman to fuck often but I didn't know what love was until we came together. Now she and my growing family put new meaning into making life worthwhile.

One night a couple of weeks after I had eaten Moxie's pussy for the first time, I was laying in bed after massaging her feet and legs, sort of planning the next day's work while about to doze off, when things changed again. Moxie quietly turned around and began fondling my flaccid cock. It didn't stay that way long, coming to life quickly. It surprised and amazed me when Moxie's warm mouth closed over my spear, since no woman had ever done that to me before. I wasn't sure what to think but, after a moment to puzzle about it, I knew that I liked it and if she didn't mind, I was not about to stop it.

At first she sucked on me like I was a piece of hard candy. Then I felt her tongue snake out and stroke along the big vein at the bottom of my penis. That sent little shockwaves through my system but no less than the ones that coursed through my body a few minutes later when her tongue began running around the underside of my mushroom-shaped helmet.

She spent the next several minutes alternating between sucking me, licking my head, and licking my big vein, while her fingers gingerly maneuvered my balls. I felt myself getting close to climaxing and tried to tell her but she ignored me. When the first shot of sperm hit her mouth, she coughed and gagged slightly but went back to sucking my cock until the last dribbles oozed out. She coughed once more but swallowed it all, licking my cock until it was clean again. Then, looking pleased with herself, she turned around, snuggled back into my form, pulled my arms around her and went to sleep.

After that night, Moxie and I traded oral sex with the other on many nights. Both of us liked the pleasure of savoring what the other was doing without the distraction of doing it to the other, so we seldom both did it the same night but that worked out well for us. I think we were both well pleased with what we had.

By the early spring, Moxie's tummy was again rounding out with the growing life she was carrying. I sometimes mused at the wonder of her still wanting to have sex with me after I had caused her to grow like that. But she did. We were still doing the foot and leg massage thing every night and especially those nights when we fucked. She loved the attention to her feet and legs and I think it even added to her horniness. Some nights she climaxed only once or twice but a few nights she had so many orgasms that she was totally exhausted when we finally curled up and slept.

I had finished the work on the new house addition. I'd had to board up the window openings with some old lumber until we made the next trip to Fort Worth where I could buy some glass. I had spent several days splitting down an old dead hickory trunk and working it with my adze and plane to get it down to boards roughly two inches thick. Just two of them were wide enough for the door but I also carved out a couple of cross members used to hold the two boards together. As a final touch to the outside, I brought dirt up from the fields to bank against the outer walls to add insulation. Moxie found seeds from wildflowers that she sowed in that area and added a little color to our house once they grew up and bloomed.

With the coming of spring and warm weather, the typical tasks rolled around: plowing up the fallow ground, harrowing it into loose soil, plowing again into plantable rows, dropping the seeds and covering it. This was probably my favorite time of year because it always renewed my faith in the ability of the earth to come back from a season of hibernation and turn green again.

Back in the fall when we were in Fort Worth, we had picked up some seeds for fruit trees and decided to try our luck at growing fruit to add to our diet. Everyone we had talked to told us that fruit seeds like to germinate over the winter months so that they are ready to grow when the weather begins to turn warm. So we had laid out a plot of ground to the east of the house, a place where the soil was a little more sandy than in other areas, and planted the seeds far enough apart to give the trees room to spread. Now I took pride in seeing the little sprouts in the fruit tree plot, hoping that we might be able to harvest apples and pears and peaches in a couple of years.

In May of the year 1858, a small wagon train stopped overnight just out from the house. The members of the party were all from one extended family, moving west from Tennessee. We invited the folks to spend the evening with us and we shared coffee and a big pot of venison stew for dinner.

They obviously thought Moxie was something unusual but they were very friendly with her. The people had an eastern European accent themselves, so talking was interesting all around. It was not unusual for one of them to revert to words of a foreign language, possibly German, which puzzled both Moxie and me but we got through the evening just fine.

The family had decided to move to New Mexico Territory to try to find a new place to settle that would not be impacted by the coming civil war. They were neither pro- nor anti-slavery but just wished not to be caught up in a war. It seemed that was the main reason they had moved to America in the first place.

When the men found out that I had a forge in the barn, they asked permission to stay over a day and use the forge. They had had the misfortune of taking one of the rougher trails out of Fort Worth and in the process had damaged three wagon wheels beyond use. They had fashioned new spokes for those damaged but needed the forge to work the tires back on the wooden rims.

That night the family pitched camp just out of our yard. They had two young girls that were enamored with Sam, who was just beginning to toddle around on rather unsteady legs. They pretty much adopted him while the family stayed over the next day. Although Moxie kept an eye on them, it took a bit of a burden away from her and let her visit with the women of the party. On the other hand the party's three young boys went off exploring on their own, wandering back every so often to check in with their parents.

That day the men worked on the new wheels, returning them when finished to be tied under each wagon as a spare, a very important part of cross-country wagon travel. While the forge was hot, the men checked the shoes of their horses, deciding to replace several. Since they had their own materials and provided the labor, I didn't mind letting them use my forge and even helping here and there.

The following morning we bid the family goodbye before dawn and watched them drive off to the west. Then it was back to the usual chores.

Three weeks later and just two days before Sam's first birthday, Moxie gave birth to another child, a healthy beautiful little girl. We discussed naming her at length and eventually settled on both a Comanche and English name. I have never been able to pronounce the Comanche name, which means Dawn Light because she was born with the first light of the morning. We both call her Dawn most of the time, although I sometimes heard Moxie crooning to her in Comanche when she lovingly used Dawn's Indian name.

The longhorn herd was doing well. Over the last two years, we had 21 new calves dropped, of which only five were young bulls. Since my herd bull was still in his prime, I castrated the youngsters and would fatten them up for slaughtering whenever we needed meat. We did have two old cows that I would be culling out for slaughtering that fall; both were beyond reproducing and if we waited any longer we might not get the benefit of their meat.

It was always a dreaded possibility of finding a dead cow out on the range past the point of being able to salvage the meat. Given Moxie's abilities for letting nothing go to waste, we've used almost every part of the animals, including the hooves and horns for making glue. And there was always a use for leather so the hides would be treated with care.

One thing that had begun to bother me was water. There were times when the two rivers were little more than a trickle and the several creeks within what I claimed as my range actually did dry up at times. Although there were places where cacti was plentiful and spines could be burned off to let the cows eat the watery pulp, it was not as plentiful in our area as further south. We had a good source of water at the house but it could be a problem on the range.

I figured I had a reasonable chance of putting in a well somewhere on the range — ultimately maybe several but for now just one — if I could arrange a method to get the water up to an open reservoir of some kind, that would be ideal. Of course I had heard about and seen several windmills that used the natural power of the wind to power a pump to raise water to a tank. That sounded like the solution I needed to pursue, although to accomplish the whole project, I would need to make parts of the machine and purchase other parts.

I could make the wind vein and paddles for the wheel out of wood. I'd need to buy the pipe and probably most if not all of the pump parts. Of course all of that was dependent on being able to find water below ground. I started looking for what I thought were likely spots. I finally settled on a spot that seemed to be about equidistant from the two rivers on the north and south and roughly the middle of my range from east to west. If I got lucky and hit water, at the least I'd have a place I could draw water by hand to pour into a water trough or something to hold water until I came up with a long-term solution.

When we had a little break in the vegetable harvest, I took a few days to start digging a well. Like with my original well, it would be roughly 36 inches in diameter, with a stone wall inside to help keep the dirt from falling into the water — assuming I hit water. I set up a tripod over the dig site with a pulley so I could use buckets to pull dirt out of the hole as well as a way to get myself down and back up after I had dug so far down. Moxie had volunteered to come down and operate the pulley to remove bucketfuls of dirt once I got down too far to crawl out. That was an enormous time saver.

It turned out that I hit water at 23 feet. I kept digging until I was down about 26 or 27 feet, leaving a fairly good sized pool of water to draw from. It was difficult to work in waist deep water so the last part of the digging to try to shape the walls had to be done with a posthole digger, since I couldn't bend over and haul shovelfuls of dirt out of the water. But I had tasted it before I stirred a lot of dirt into it and it was cool sweet water and there seemed to be a reasonably strong stream.