Chapter 20 The Night Riders
Jack Slocum had bound Honey well. As the blazing late afternoon sun slowly
descended toward the horizon in the west, the young blonde still hung on the
corral like a full-breasted, golden-haired scarecrow. Her shoulders hurt from
being pulled backward over the top rail of the corral, her legs ached from being
forced to stand in such an unnatural position, and the south-facing front of her
body was rosy from the broiling rays of the sun.
Honey had fought all afternoon to lift her breasts clear of the strands of
barbed wire that Ernie Gibbs had strung just beneath them, but the weighted
nipple harness he had fashioned ensured that her ripe love-melons paid a
lacerating price each and every time she tried to relax.
Honey had never looked forward to a sunset so much in her life, for if
nothing else dusk would provide a reprieve from the skin-scorching rays from
above. The brightly-shining globe in the sky had been her only companion on
that long afternoon, and a most unpleasant one, but one that seemed to celebrate
its mastery over her. As twilight approached it was as if the brilliant orb had
looked down upon the splendid body of Honey Wilson with its bright lusty eye,
and had become so aroused by the sight of her glorious nudity that it erupted in
a cosmic climax, shooting brilliant sprays of golds and pink and reds through
the porous, puffy clouds that dotted the azure sky.
Twilight came, and with it the first stirrings of of nocturnal life.
Occasional froggy croaks from the direction of the swimming hole punctuated the
soft drone of chirping crickets that interrupted the stillness of the summer
evening. Dusk had almost turned into nightfall when Honey heard the first faint
sound of horses' hooves, coming down the road along which she had raced the
night before. Her heart leapt up; surely these riders must be her daddy's ranch
hands, returning from Abilene. Soon she would be freed from her painful and
humiliating bondage, and a posse would be formed to track down the brutes who
had raped and tortured her. But this time, Jack Slocum and his verminous
sidekick wouldn't get off with a prison sentence. There wouldn't even need to
be a trial or testimony this time. Her daddy would see to that! He'd see that
the two desperados were lynched from the highest tree between the Brazos and the
Rio Grande. And if it was up to Honey Wilson, her daddy's posse could cut off
the gunmen's balls and feed them to the coyotes before they started the necktie
party.
As the rhythmic pounding of the horses drew nearer, Honey called out weakly
once or twice and was rewarded by hearing the horses turn off the road into the
dirt drive that led up to the ranch house. Unfortunately she could not see
them, because she was positioned with her back to both the road and the drive
that led from the road to the house. From the sound, there seemed to be a number
of horses, perhaps as many as eight or ten, she thought. But once the horses
had pulled up, the riders paused briefly. Despite the fact that night had not
quite fallen, and that anyone looking in her direction should have had no
difficulty in seeing her nude body lashed to the corral rail, the riders did not
approach.
Honey strained to hear what the horsemen were doing, puzzled by the fact
that she did not hear the door to the bunkhouse opening. Even if they hadn't
seen her, why wouldn't the ranch hands have gone into their cabin to rest after
their long, dusty ride back from Abilene?
"Help! Help me!", she cried, as loudly as her waning strength would permit.
"Red! Michael!" she called out the names of two of the bunkhouse crew. But even
the slight exertion of speaking proved painful, as the necessary intake and
outflow of breath brought the smooth, soft undercurves of her breasts into
contact with the jagged barbs of the wire.
Honey was mortified by her nakedness and her bondage; but there was
nothing to be done for it. Better surely to be seen naked by a few of the boys
than to spend the night struggling to keep her bloodied breasts off of the
cursed wire prongs. But still the seemingly oblivious riders made no reply to
her muted calls for help. Then a sudden swift twinge of alarm shot through
Honey's body. She remembered something else that she had forgotten in her pain
and fatigue and her joy at hearing the approaching horses.
The ranch hands weren't due back from Abilene until the following day....
Honey wrestled with the question of whether she should continue calling
attention to herself. Was it possible that Jack and Ernie had changed their
mind and returned, bringing a band of brutish marauders with them? Ernie had
been convinced that he had been cheated out of money. Had he brought back a
pack of free-spending thugs willing to pay to use and abuse her body?
As twilight melted into darkness, Honey strained to listen to any sounds
from the mysterious riders, but, aside from the stirring of tired horses, and
the occasional indistinct mutter of male voices conferring in a low voice, she
heard nothing.
Within a few minutes darkness had fallen, and the rising moon seemed to
have become lost behind the billowing, fleecy clouds which had so embellished
the sunset, leaving the night inky black. A lonely coyote howled out on the
prairie, its voice touched by sadness, as if it missed the crescent-shaped
companion that had kept him company on recent nights.
Then, suddenly, from behind her, Honey heard a pair of nearly silent feet
running in her direction. As the runner drew closer Honey detected the
unmistakable odor of stale alcohol a moment or two before she cried out in alarm
as a dark, heavy cloth was draped over her head. The rough cloth, which felt
like part of a horse blanket, was quickly secured in place by a snugly-fitting
rope around her throat. The man with the rope spent a long time silently
fashioning an intricate cocoon of knots spaced at odd intervals around her
throat and neck, a cocoon that she quickly sensed would not be easily undone.
When the foul-smelling man was done securing her over-sized blindfold,
Honey felt him tearing or cutting a small opening in the stifling fabric, near
her nose and mouth, so that she could breathe.
While the man was tying the blanket, Honey had heard more footsteps
approaching - many more. There was a hint of smoke in the air. Some of the
newcomers had apparently lit torches so that they could see in the stygian
blackness of the night, a blackness made doubly dark for her by the cloth that
had been pulled over her head. She could smell torches burning on either side
of her, but could see nothing more than the pale irregular outline of light
through the all-enveloping blanket.
Suddenly Honey heard a commanding voice call out, "Mondala-te!"
Exhausted from her ordeal, and not sure if perhaps the blanket might have
muffled her hearing, Honey essayed, "Red?" again, in a troubled, trembling
voice. But surely Red and the boys would not be behaving so strangely....
As if in response to that single spoken word, Honey could feel hands
lifting the switch Ernie had whittled and which he had suspended from her
sensitive nipples, so that its weight pulled her poor breasts down toward the
painful barbs. Even though she could not see, she sensed that the newcomers
were undoing the switch from the twine, thereby releasing the strain on her
tortured nipples. Moments later she could feel masculine hands carefully
disengaging the barbed wire the desperados had strung beneath her blood-streaked
pleasure-globes.
"Oh, thank you, thank you. But can't you please take this thing off my
head?"
But the deep voice only answered, "Mondala-te! Ka-i-ne!"
The voice was not all that loud; but it was possessed of a measured
forcefulness that made Honey tremble with fear. There was a strange,
half-familiar inflection to his voice, a familiarity that she guessed stemmed
from the fact that the voice was that of a man secure in his purpose. A man who
would not easily be dissuaded from his course, least of all by a woman's tears.
Strong hands attacked the ropes which bound the blonde teenager's ankles to
the lowest corral rail, while other hands worked to liberate her wrists. Other,
more eager fingers wrestled with the tiny loops of twine which had been pulled
so painfully tight around the tender love-buds which had endured so much in the
last thirty-odd hours.
"Ka-i-ne!!" The voice was impatient.
When the evil circlets of twine were removed from her nipples, Honey was
greeted by twin bursts of pain resulting from the renewal of circulation to the
inflamed tips of her out-thrust breasts.
As two pairs of eager, groping hands ran freely over her tender breasts,
made hyper-sensitive by their long hours of exposure to the hot Texas sun, Honey
sought for clues to the identity of her "rescuers". Surely the strange words of
the leader were not English. But she had heard enough Spanish in her young
life to be fairly certain that her "rescuers" were not Mexican either. Who else
could they be? In her fatigue and confusion she tried desperately to come up
with a plausible answer other than the one that hovered in a dark corner of her
consciousness like an evil cloud...
Had a roving band of Indians somehow found its way to the lonely Wilson
Ranch? Even in her predicament the thought that she been calling out "Red" to a
party of Indians struck her as savagely ironic. There were numerous tribes of
Indians still residing between Austin and Albuquerque, but she felt her blood
run cold as she realized that there was only one tribe so audacious as to let a
band of its men stray so far from their ever-shrinking lands.
Comanche! In west Texas, the Comanche were perhaps the last remaining
tribe not to be fully subjugated by the westward-encroaching whites. She
remembered listening once outside the bunkhouse window as Michael Casey, the
bookish Irish-immigrant wrangler, responded to a series of questions by old
Lester, the Negro harmonica player, about the Comanches.
Casey had explained how the Comanche had originally been a peaceful
Shoshone people, but how circumstance and history had turned them into the
prototypical "wild Indians". How they had been the first tribe to adapt to the
horses that Spanish adventurers had brought up to the American southwest from
their settlements and outposts in Mexico. They had embraced the horse with
enthusiasm and skill and had, over a century and a half, made themselves into
one of the most feared cavalries in history.
It had been the Comanche and their horses who had made large scale buffalo
hunts possible in the years before the white man's advent. And it had been the
Comanches, not constrained by the white man's notions of personal property, who
had rustled just about every horse and mule in New Mexico, and a great many in
west Texas as well, a half century earlier. The Texas Rangers themselves had
been formed, Casey noted in his Irish brogue, in large part due the depredations
of the warlike Comanche.
The white man's slow, steady, acquisitive western migration had decimated
the Comanches, as it had so many other tribes, but every now and then reports
surfaced of small bands of marauders raiding isolated villages and outposts.
Great and fearless horsemen, the Comanche were capable of covering remarkable
distances in a short time. Honey Wilson had not heard of any Comanche raids in
recent years within fifty miles of the Wilson ranch. But it seemed apparent
that some primitive magic or magnetism had drawn a party of them across the
great llano estacado, the staked plains of western Texas, to the lonely corral
and the bare-breasted beauty who adorned its weathered wood like the figurehead
of an old-time whaling ship.
Comanche! Since she had been a little girl Honey Wilson had listened
spellbound to dreadful tales of massacres and torture perpetrated by bands of
the red marauders. Of outposts attacked and villages burned, of men slaughtered
and scalped, and the women, particularly the young, pretty women, subjected to
ordeals of depravity and pain which had surely made them wish that they, too,
had died in the first hour of the attack.
There was no way of telling how much exaggeration and one-sidedness there
had been in these blood-curdling stories, but they had caused her many a
sleepless hour as a child. As Honey had blossomed into nubile young womanood,
those chilling accounts had caused her to fantasize a few times of being taken
captive by a war party of virile young Comanche. When she had had such
thoughts, a strange combination of fear and girlish sensuality had caused her
pink nipples to stiffen and her soft inner thighs to tremble with apprehension.
She never knew to what extent it was an apprehension of pleasure or pain -- or
both.
In her daydreams sometimes the cavalry would arrive at the eleventh hour to
preserve her virtue. On other, more sensuous occasions, a handsome young brave
would somehow contrive to rescue her from the series of dreadful ordeals
conceived by his malevolent comrades. The young warrior would proceed to lead
his golden-haired prisoner off to a secluded bower and ravish her in a dark
forest to the accompaniment of sweet bird calls and the rushing sound of a
waterfall.
Unbeknownst to Honey, Ernie the Peeper had watched from his covert perch
one night while Honey had pleasured herself during one such dreamy, rosy-hued
fantasy. Fresh from a swim at the lake, she had stretched her tawny body out on
the crisp whiteness of freshly laundered sheets, lying on her left hip, facing
the foliage through which the Weasel's unseen eyes devoured her delicious
nudity. She had caressed herself lovingly, as she imagined a gentle lover
might, touching her silky thighs with long feathery strokes, lingering at the
portals of her seat of pleasure for a brief, teasing moment before sliding up
her body. She had run her graceful fingers over her smooth flanks, and felt the
gentle pressure of her lower ribs pressing against the golden flesh of her flat
tummy.
When her hands reached her breasts, her sensitive love-mounds seemed to
tingle with pleasure-passion. Her pink breast tips responded to the gentle
strumming of Honey's self-taught fingers, by swelling with shameless desire, as
if the handsome brave's lips and tongue were ready to close upon them.
As her left hand slid down her creamy body to the juncture of her
golden-fringed thighs, Honey had no idea that an unseen watcher was liberating
his rock-hard cock from his dungarees, or that he was stroking himself even as
her index finger toyed with her glistening clitoris. Several more minutes of
pleasurable exploration ensued, during which Honey envisioned her muscular young
warrior positioning himself above her luscious body, before lunging his
stallion-like maleness into her moist and yearning love-nook. His first
imagined thrust caused the blue-eyed nymph on the bed to climax in a shuddering
cataract of pleasure, even as her rapt-eyed voyeur splattered gushers of semen
into the concealing foliage....
But tonight the cavalry might as well have been on the other side of the
Pecos. And the handsome young brave seemed no more real than a character in a
fairy tale....
