Chapter 43

After another wonderful night with all my women I was out early and to the jail about the time Ben had the coffee ready. I took a cup and had barely got my ass in a chair when the boy came with our breakfast. Of course Ben had to get up to feed the prisoners when he came back in a few minutes with the plates for them.

We had a little fuckup when it was time to collect the plates, cups, and eating utensils after they were through. We were one fork and one plate short. Ben called me back into the cellblock and gave me the sad news.

"That ain't bad news Ben. It just gives us an excuse to light the branding fire again. After I put that hot iron on their balls like I did mister tough guy they're gonna be glad to tell us who is holding out."

They weren't all in separate cells and apparently the one who admired his plate and fork so much was in with two other men. They had hold of him and were choking the piss out of him before he could even give them up. He did it though, and in the end I guess he was glad to. I know for sure he was glad to get to breathe again.

The town looked more or less normal today, but when I got down to the store it was doing a land office business. I asked Nancy what had them stirred up and she said it was probably because they wanted to make sure they had everything they needed before the out-of-towners started coming around before the big hanging.

Luckily I only had to help one girl with a fitting this morning and I was ashamed of myself for playing with her budding titties because I'll swear she wasn't over eleven. At least I doubted anyone in this time knew what pedophile meant.

Apparently my little talk to the carpenters had some effect. They had already finished the larger gallows, but they were out testing hell out of it today. They were taking the trap doors apart and doing a lot of trimming on them and they were spreading lard for lubrication every place there was a place. They must have dropped fully loaded feed sacks through each door a hundred times or more.

I didn't mind if I'd scared them into doing a proper job. Hell, we didn't want a fuckup with so many people watching. If we kept up things like that people would be attending just to see what we could let go wrong, and that wasn't the kind of reputation the town needed.

After all it would reflect on me and I had enough odd about me as it was. I didn't need anyone poking around to see what made me tick.

We passed an uneventful day at the store and then we retired to Olivia's house where we had a night full of the kinds of events that I really appreciated. I settled down to take care of my numerous mates and then dropped off to sleep. It wasn't a dreamless night though. In fact the dreams were a little disturbing since they had us moving back to where we'd come from and leaving a lot of our things here. It was a little unsettling and it came with me when I woke.

I cornered Jerrilyn the next morning and asked her if she'd had any dreams the night before and I could tell she had before she opened her mouth to admit it. Whatever had put us here was going to put us back where we'd come from, or at least I was convinced it was going to happen. I started making plans to get everything back into the storage area, soon.

After breakfast with Ben, I walked down to John Johnston's stable to check on my stock. It was all present and accounted for and so I quit worrying about it. Mainly I wanted to be sure the Arabians were in place since they would be the most precious.

The mules were irreplaceable too, but at least they hadn't come from a foreign country and while I'd spent a lot on them they weren't worth nearly what the Arabians were. Besides, I'd have a lot easier time explaining to the old man I'd lost them than I would explaining to Kahlila's father where I'd lost the Arabians.

I felt much better when I had it all in my mind, but I held the girls late at the store packing everything back up into the trailer we still had backed up to the back of the warehouse. I noticed none of them asked any questions about why we were doing it. Not even Carolyn and Lindsay. They helped pack up everything that had come out of the trailer.

I eased them off to the side later and told them they should go home and pack up everything they had if they wanted to keep it. They didn't even ask me why, but they did ask some of the other girls to come over and help them. Jacky, Christine, and Selene went with them and they asked me where to bring the stuff.