Chapter 3

When we wrapped up the meeting there were a lot of the old hands who told me how much they'd enjoyed their time here. Of course they didn't mention it in the same breath they told me they'd be moving on. They did move on though. Nearly three fourths of them packed their things and took off the next morning. Most of them didn't even wait around until the end of the week to draw their last week's wages. Hell, I actually appreciated the thought of that even though it wasn't much money saved in the scheme of things.

Things were a little ragged the next day since we had to get organized to get things done with a lot fewer hands. There were only sixteen men left working so I divided them into two crews. I left one bunch herding and taking care of the stock we had left, as in the calves and the three biggest bulls I'd kept for getting more calves on the ground. The other crew I set out building fences and patching up other things on the place. I planned to swap the crew's jobs out every week so none of them would be getting more fencing than the others.

I ran into a bargain the next week. George Toleson, a rancher with a place close by got killed when his horse stepped into a hole and pitched him over into an arroyo. It broke his neck. He didn't have a wife since his last one had died in childbirth. He had his son left though and the son was disgusted with the cattle business and he wanted out of it. Thankfully he wanted to hang onto his property but he wanted rid of his cows. He sold them to me for six dollars a head except for the calves, which he let go for nothing. He even sold me his forty stock horses for the same price and I knew I was getting a deal since a half ass trained cattle horse was worth forty bucks anytime.

I had the money so I bought him out, or at least I bought his stock. It was a lot of money for him to come into and he spent some of it fixing up his place even though he didn't intend to get back into the cattle business. I was happy he had the remaining hands make a pass over the fences between his place and mine, and they did a damned good job.

Time rocked along and we had a mild winter and an early spring. Most of our stuff was still young so we didn't even make a gather in the spring we just let them keep eating and growing.

In the fall we had a gather and it was mostly yearlings which were now at their best time to sell. When the buyers came to town I invited several of them out to see my stock and the ones who came were impressed. They promised twelve dollars a head for them but asked for them not to be delivered until the last day before loading. It was no skin off my ass and so I held them, let them eat and watched them until time to send them on their way.

When I got the check we were Arab rich again. Our place was once again short on cattle assets but our bank balance was heavy in cash. It left me in an enviable position and I'll admit I was looking around for a ranch to buy out. I wanted one with distressed stock hoping I could buy it out, tend the cattle for a year and get them ready to sell.

Jack Paulson provided for me and in more ways than one. His place was next to ours and I'd recently met his daughter, Janet, at church. She was a shy little thing but she was as pretty as a picture. In fact she had some features, which didn't show up so well in a picture, and they were nicer than nice anyway.

One of them was her ass. It was outstanding from what I could tell. She wore her red hair brushed around her head like some kind of rosy cloud too and with her green eyes she was just something else. I could also usually see plenty of freckles across the tops of her big for on a short girl titties. They wiggled and jiggled in her low cut blouses and they gave a man evil thoughts unless he was planning on marrying her first.

It was just what I planned to do too. In fact I had taken her for a few buggy rides before Jack wound up dead under a fallen horse. Of course I supported her all I could while she was getting her daddy in the ground and then I asked her to marry me even before he was planted. She didn't have any brothers so I had an idea what was going to happen and sure enough it did.

We were married on a Sunday afternoon the week after her Daddy's funeral. We had already been doing a lot of kissing and hugging during the buggy rides and Janet was anxious to get on to the good parts as soon as we were hitched. She wanted us to live in her family home, with her younger sister, when we first got married and so I gathered a few of my clothes and moved them there.

She and her sister had cleaned up and taken all of her daddy's clothes out of his bedroom and she moved my stuff in there with hers before we even went to the church.

Janet was a thinker herself, and after we spent the first night in her Daddy's former bed she had me pussy whipped right into line. She let me have at her from the top the first time and then she bent her head down, sucked me back up hard, and then mounted me from the top and fucked down on me like a little red-haired green-eyed demon.