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  Huntley’s company numbered seventy-four, so he assumed this engagement would be easy sailing, since Indians were only armed with bows and arrows. On foot they followed the horse trail they had discovered yesterday, each man lost in his own thoughts, as they could not risk talking. Some of them, like the hotelkeeper, Boling, and Phil Din, the owner of the tenpin alley, had never engaged in combat before, and Huntley imagined they were sweating in their boots. Especially Boling, who, like him, had been a friend of the Indians and dreaded encountering a familiar face during the exchange.

  As Huntley marched, more and more details of last night’s events seeped into his brain. He started to question their accuracy, having been blissfully groggy in his sack for several hours. He had the most amazing and piercing eyesight known to man, able to see great distances on a moonless night. He thought it was due to some fisticuffs he’d participated in as a lad, when his father had walloped him upside the head for refusing to learn to play the violin. The blow had left one pupil permanently dilated, giving Huntley a sort of crazed, epileptic look, like some soothsayer who could predict the future.

  So it was entirely possible that during the night, Huntley had rolled over onto his side, alerted by a rasping sound, as though someone were rubbing their laundry against a rock. His eyes popped open, only to view the good doctor some ten feet away, lying on his back under his Navajo blanket, pumping his own cock assiduously.

  Huntley stopped breathing. After a few more passionate strokes the doctor flipped the coverlet aside, exposing his dark cock to the freezing mountain air. The ridges of his lean abdomen shimmered and steamed in the frigid air as he raised himself on one elbow. He was angled toward Huntley as though purposefully displaying that imposing, lengthy cock. Indeed, it was more impressive than any penis Huntley had ever viewed—not that he made it a habit to view men’s erect cocks, so perhaps he was no expert. He knew that penis size when flaccid was no judge of how monumental it would later be when erect.

  It was almost terrifying in its length and breadth, the shiny glans so tight it glimmered like a knob of quartz. Huntley was riveted to the spot, fascinated. Whit’s lower lip hung slack, lost in his own lascivious world of self-pleasuring. He freely stroked that monster of a cock, each caress coming quicker and firmer, from the steamy depths of his groin to the tantalizing crown of his cock.

  Downhill, men—soldiers, they were now—tramped back and forth in the frozen pine needles, stoking their campfires, relieving themselves, priming their firearms. A growing erection pressed insistently against Huntley’s leather broadfall, firmer and firmer as he watched Whit’s large, elegant hand pleasuring the hefty cock. Huntley held his breath. When he gasped for air, Whit’s salaciously lidded eyes lifted to meet his.

  Huntley didn’t bother pretending to sleep. Whit’s eyes seemed to acknowledge his presence with a slight curl of his upper lip, but he didn’t miss a stroke, caressing the bulbous cockhead that resembled a defiant fist. Huntley didn’t blink as the doctor brought himself off expertly. An arc of jism landed across Whit’s chest, open to the air with an unbuttoned shirtfront displaying the burnished brown pectorals. The seed pooled and steamed in a cinnamon mist. Whit tossed his head back with abandon, his abdomen quivering.

  It was a delectable sight. Huntley willed himself still on top of his buffalo robe, cock pulsating against leather. His mouth was so dry he couldn’t swallow, but he didn’t wish to reach for his water skin. All he could imagine was how buttery that jism would taste if he only had the grit to crawl over, wrap the doctor in his arms, and lap that nectar from the pit of his throat.

  Now, as Huntley marched, all of these details slowly came back to him in bits and pieces. His memory went blank after that—he hoped to hell they had proceeded to fall back asleep afterward. But as Huntley tramped toward his rendezvous with his former friends the Diggers, more disturbing feelings trickled into his brain. Foremost was the mortifying idea that he might be some sort of bumsucker, a Molly sort of fellow who entertained notions of congress with other men.

  That was absurd! He’d never entertained those notions before meeting up with the elegant Dr. Whitney. He had only become lecherous when the doctor’s fingers had grazed his erection because…well, because that was simply a physical reaction to having his prick touched! As for witnessing the doctor masturbating the night before, well…it was probably his own craving to screw a woman. Yes, that was it. Lately Huntley had become dissatisfied with the manner in which Indian women merely lay there as though tolerating his fumblings. He’d been wondering if perhaps he was fumbling and should return to San Francisco to hone his skills with the experienced hookers. He was becoming too accustomed to fucking in the Indian style. Just in and out, and it was over.

  Soon, he could tell they were upon the Indian camp. His nose twitched at the smell of their cooking fires. He needed to be on alert and couldn’t entertain visions of that physician’s superb penis spouting streams of delicious semen. Huntley motioned the column behind him to slow, as there was now enough light to sight their rifles. They were nearly up to the snow line, the Indian camp on the other side of a pine-fringed ridge. The only sound was several soldiers’ rifle hammers clicking. Huntley heard a short burst of movement between several pines to his right. Holding his arm steady in the “halt” position, he narrowed his eyes at those pines.

  The Indian sentinel let loose with a mad coyote yell before disappearing, bounding down the ridge to alarm the encampment. Immediately an infernal howling and whooping rose from the bowl opposite Huntley’s company, and he hardly had to bellow the order to “Charge, boys! Charge!” His men raced through the icy chaparral. Huntley was glad he had worn his moccasins and had securely lashed the wide legs of the sailor’s trousers about his ankles as he raced with the other Californians up the slippery route.

  Gaining the ridge, the extent of the Digger camp spread below him. Their conical winter huts, covered with the bark of the incense cedar, were placed for half a mile on either side of the creek that bisected the valley, blanketed almost entirely in new snow. Warriors dashed barefoot from huts’ doors, fitting their arrows into their bowstrings. The appalling scent of horseflesh cooking imbued the frigid air, and for the first time in his life Huntley was nauseated by the general pall that emanated from a Digger camp, an effluvium of the acorns that were their main diet staple.

  Fifty rifles cracked instantaneously on Huntley’s ridge. The puffs of smoke gave away their positions, and although forty Indians lay groaning before their huts, a William Little standing nearby was felled with an arrow through the lungs. Huntley ordered one detachment down the ridge to their right, another to their left, and he took the remaining thirty men directly into the fray. They raced downhill, discharging another volley. The fellow to Huntley’s left was stuck in the arm with an arrow but yanked it out and continued running.

  “Fire those wigwams!” Huntley ordered, just as King Joseph of the Chowchillas stepped into clear view from between two huts.

  Huntley had never hesitated to fire upon an enemy before, but his hesitation now might have cost him his life. His rifle was loaded. He had only to fire into the chest of this Indian standing not twenty feet away, his eyes—and his pistol—leveled directly at Huntley. His hesitation was that he knew this man, and he had never fired upon anyone who was not a faceless, nameless enemy.

  Someone shoved him aside and squeezed off a ball first, dropping King Joseph soundlessly to the snow.

  “Ashbury!” growled Bud Pennington, rattling him by the sleeve, for it was he who had shot the Chowchilla chief. “That goddamned savage has a pistol!”

  As Bud scampered to wrest it from King Joseph’s clutching fingers, Huntley ordered, “Bud, go get those Diggers escaping up that slope!”

  Bud energetically charged to follow several Diggers who were all imitating the American cry “Charge! Charge!” Huntley grabbed a pine branch to use as a brand, sticking it into a flaming campfire. A young Texan doing the same suddenly collapsed, a ball from
a different pistol lodged in his face, rendering it a jellied mass. This time, the puff of smoke gave away his enemy’s position, and Huntley dashed up a hill, darting behind huts and trees, hiding himself beneath fingers of smoke that crawled up the hillsides from the flaming huts.

  When the enemy, clutching a rifle, emerged from behind a tree, Huntley had no compunction about letting a ball fly at him. This good-for-nothing toad had shot that Texan in the face while retreating like a yellow worm, and Huntley would feel sympathy for them no more. His aim was true, although the Digger had already commenced hiding behind another pine, so the ball only lodged in his arm. He went flying onto his back, a spray of red decorating the snowbank behind him, and Huntley dashed up to finish him off with a knife.

  Falling to his knees, Huntley tossed the Digger’s rifle aside and yanked his bowie knife from his belt. But again he hesitated, for something in the pleading, shivering Digger eyes gave him pause.

  Oh, God’s holy trousers. It was no ordinary Digger. It’s a Digger woman.

  The maiden looked to be in her twenties, judging from the unlined voluptuousness of her bared breasts that jiggled with the beating of her heart. In her lingo, Huntley said, “I won’t kill a woman, even though you’ve just killed one of my men. I’ve shattered your arm, so I’ll leave you here to fend for yourself.”

  It occurred to Huntley that he could take her as his prisoner, for she would be rather comely when washed, with a waist narrower than most Diggers he’d known, hips flaring alluringly beneath her deerskin skirt. But he’d had quite enough of Indian squaws for the moment, and he would have to turn her over to the Indian Commission anyway. So he forced himself to say angrily, “Chum-haw.” Die.

  Huntley stalked back toward the burning village, where already he could see his men plundering. There not being many valuables to an Indian camp, they were carrying away white man’s gewgaws that had been plundered from them to begin with, a strange assortment of portmanteaus, framed landscape paintings, tall parlor lamps, and women’s corsets. But even in the rabble of this activity, Huntley heard a rustling behind him, and he spun about in time to see the squaw let an arrow loose in his direction.

  He crouched, hearing the arrow whir as it sailed over his head. He rushed at her in a rage, mostly a rage against himself. Twice in the past hour he’d failed to plug an Indian when he should have. Yet he still couldn’t bring himself to kill a female, so he’d bring this one in to the authorities. With a warning that she was saltier than the Great Salt Lake and pissier than a ten-foot anthill.

  She was fitting another arrow into her bow from her sprawled position but swiftly tossed them aside when she saw she wouldn’t make it in time—she couldn’t turn Huntley into a porcupine like they’d done to his partner Greeley. Instead, cradling her injured arm to her chest, she struggled up the rise, her moccasined feet serving as snowshoes in her mighty effort.

  Huntley’s rage was greater than her fear. He tackled her from behind, spearing her to the snow. She squeaked with her face pressed into the crusted ice, but Huntley had no sympathy for her injured arm or whether she would choke on frozen ice. He flattened her to the ground with his powerful hips, an oddly satisfying feeling to grind his flaccid cock into the cushiony cleft of her naked ass, thinly covered with the deerskin. Indeed, it would have been easy to take her by force, as most other men would have done. No one was looking, the Diggers were routed, and the common opinion was that a female cunt was one of the natural spoils of war.

  But it was not his way. He pinned her to the snow with a palm against her shoulder, snarling in her lingo, “You damned women. Always creating trouble. If you didn’t try to shoot me, I would’ve let you go.”

  Yes, this maiden had a fine, athletic form not usually seen in the square, sturdy frames of Digger squaws. She was obviously much taller than most squaws, probably the product of some amorous mountain man lying with her tribe for a few months.

  He straddled her as though she were a mare while trussing her wrists in the small of her back with a leather strip. He fairly whistled a happy song as he bucked his hips into her to display domination. His cock was damned near popping the buttons at the broadfall of his sailor pants, he had such a desire to spend. Yes, he would have to make another trip to San Francisco. Soon. Perhaps the doctor would like to accompany him, if he weren’t so dead set on delving into the mysterious Ahwahnee Valley.

  He yanked her mercilessly by her uninjured arm and rattled her for good measure. As expected, she glared at him from under a curtain of filthy, matted hair. Such a shame he couldn’t keep her, as she actually had the most pleasing features of any Digger squaw he’d ever seen. Her eyes were more rounded than the Far East slant of the Indians, her lips more charmingly formed than the typical scowl, as though this one couldn’t stop smiling, even when being taken captive. Yes, she was definitely the product of some far-flung mountaineer taking a brief siesta in the Sierra.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’m not taking you to my bed. But this time, I’m not letting you go, either.”

  “Good!” she snapped back. “I wouldn’t let your vile, vomit-smelling penis between my legs anyway.”

  Or something that approximated that in Digger lingo.

  Huntley shoved her downhill toward her burning village.

  Chapter Five

  Agua Fria

  “Hey, Doc.”

  Whit was glad to see Huntley again. He had not glimpsed him often after the skirmish at the Indian camp. They had built litters for their few wounded men, so Whit had accompanied those patients back to town, while Huntley traveled with Burney and the other heroes of what they were terming the “Mariposa Battalion,” probably discussing future strategies and their glories on the battlefield.

  “Hey, Huntley. It’s the talk of the brigade, your rubbing out of that long-winded King Joseph.” Whit gestured to the famous trader to take a seat next to his new desk. For Huntley had ordered a hospital tent to be erected for Whit, placed close by his own house. Three wounded, including poor William Little, who had been pierced through the lung, recovered here on cots. Whit sat behind a desk where he could once again do the paperwork and research he loved so much. He poured Huntley a tumbler of brandy that he’d been giving the patients, but Huntley only slumped in his chair, staring morosely at the amber liquid.

  “Yeah. Regarding that. I don’t know why Bud Pennington has been running around telling everyone it was me who wiped out that obnoxious King Joseph. It was him.”

  “Bud? Then why would he be telling—”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

  Whit wished the trader would get some sleep. It was impossible for a man, even one as hale and hearty as Huntley Ashbury, to go four days without sleep. He would walk him back to his house and tuck him into bed if needs be—as Whit had been ordered to do the night before last. Under those orders, Whit had lain awake sleepless to ensure the trader didn’t sneak out of his sack and wander the hills in some sort of backwoodsman’s restless quest. When it became evident Huntley was finally sleeping, Whit had become bored. Watching the handsome, placid face, the luscious lips curled up at the corners as though he enjoyed a good dream, Whit’s mind meandered into some good dreams of his own.

  It seemed as though his prick had just sprung into his hand, for suddenly there he was, frigging his massive appendage, imagining what it would be like to ejaculate on that serene, well-sculpted face. The power of his own sexual urges sometimes terrified Whit. In Glasgow, Paris, and more recently in New York, he’d gotten off at the houses of the nan-boys, but there was no such thing in the Far West. In the Far West, a fellow was more likely to get a healthy walloping if his fingers dared stray toward another man’s half-erect cock. Although Whit had seen a few masculine couples going at it, it was always in back rooms with shaded faces, faces that in daylight spat upon the ground in disgust to discuss two men groping. And it went without saying that any respectable American woman would rather have a dozen scorpions crawl up her
torso before she’d let a man of color touch her.

  So yes, Whit had freely frigged his own penis, even though Huntley lay ten feet away. The man was deservedly sound asleep. It was so dark, the trader would never have noticed when he erupted so explosively upon his own chest and throat, much less have known that Whit was imagining fucking his luscious mouth. Maybe he and Huntley could take a trip to the closest town—did Mariposa have a whorehouse?—and recall what it was like to have congress with American women.

  Huntley finally took an apathetic sip of the brandy. “People kept coming up to me, congratulating me on murdering that warmongering Chowchilla chief. I told Sheriff Burney straight out that it was Bud Pennington who put a ball into that louse’s skull. All day yesterday people kept congratulating me on such a worthy coup. I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that it was Bud Pennington who should be lauded, but the story seems to keep persisting.”

  Whit thought. “Maybe because it’s a much more romantic story. The famous trader of Agua Fria murders the biggest—well, the second biggest—Indian chief in the Sierra.”

  Huntley snorted into his glass. “I was standing a foot away from Pennington at the time, that much is true. And it should have been my coup, but to be honest, Doc, I sort of froze up when I took note that the face was familiar to me. If Pennington hadn’t shoved me aside and taken the shot himself, why, I’d be a dead duck right now.”

  “It occurs to me,” Whit said thoughtfully, “what’s in it for Bud to be spreading that story. I must know him better than anyone in California. And he doesn’t take a single action without there’s something in it for himself, something he’s gaining. He’s not just a chowderheaded Pike County rustic, although I do believe his family was from Pike County, Missouri, where those clownish miners hail from.”

  Huntley smiled. “Yes, those gaunt, sallow-faced fellows who express astonishment at the slightest civilized thing. But they can sure use an axe, build a cabin in one day, and draw a bead on a squirrel. Or,” he said as an afterthought, “the whites of an Indian’s eyes with complete cool.”