On The High Plains Ch. 06

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.

Moxie hauled my tools up after the last bucket of mud and then I used the rope to haul myself up to the top. I still had the wall lining to handle in the next few days but that seemed like an easy chore compared to the digging. A few days later, we both went back to more typical chores but with a well in the field available for providing water as needed. Every few days, I'd take a ride out to the well and draw buckets of water to fill a trough I had built; it wasn't great but the cattle used it enough that I knew they were grateful for it.

July turned out to be hot and dry that year. Sure it wasn't all that unusual for west Texas but this was worse than normal. I spent a lot of time drawing buckets of water for the cattle reservoir as well as filling a couple of barrels on the wagon which we hauled out to the crops. The ground drank it like sponges. But it kept the plants alive for a while longer. The harvest wasn't too bad.

As if that wasn't bad enough, I was coming back from a run with water one day when I heard a gunshot. Dropping the reins of the slow team, I grabbed my rifle and raced back to the house.

The only thing I could think of was an attack by the Indians. However since I'd taken Moxie into my house, the Comanche had seemed to be friendly or at least tolerant of us. I wondered if something had set them off.

When I came around running through the barn and skidded to a halt just inside the front door, I could see a band of six or eight Indians racing around the house in a big circle, firing at or into the house. I could only hope that Moxie and the kids were protected behind those new stone walls.

The next thing I noticed was that these were not the Comanche that occasionally came by on their migration moves. These men were not dressed like Comanche warriors. I noticed that several of them had vests like I'd seen some Mexican men wear and I remembered hearing in Fort Worth that the Apache had adopted some habits of the Mexican people. The Apache were enemies of the Comanche so we had no "credits" with them. In fact this was the first time I had seen them.

They were running their horses around the house in a wide counterclockwise circle. As fast as they were moving, they weren't good targets but then that had to impact their ability to hit anything in the house as well. Using the two foot thick center pole to steady my rifle and provide support, I took aim on the next brave who turned down the nine o'clock leg because that meant that for a few seconds he was coming directly toward me.

My shot was lost amid the sounds of their shots and an infrequent shot from out one of the windows of the house, letting me know that Moxie was still okay. However the Indian I had fired at was not; he was on the ground not moving, while his horse was rearing and shying away from his body. The next brave in the circle came to a sudden stop, looking around nervously to see what was happening. That was his downfall. My next shot caught him square between the eyes.

Suddenly the circle broke as the whole party realized that things weren't going their way. I shifted a little more inside the barn, turned my rifle to the three o'clock position and took out another milling brave. Just as quickly as they came, they began a retreat to the north, away from the barn. I put a bullet in one more brave but just wounded him; he bent over his horse's neck with blood blossoming from his left shoulder as they raced away.

Wasting no time, I raced into the house and checked. Moxie was just fine, coolly ejecting and reloading one of my revolvers while the two babies cooed and played as if nothing unusual had happened. There had been no real damage done, although it certainly could have been serious.

There was nothing to do but to return to our chores of daily life. As hard as it was, any settler in such a land had to take such things in stride and go on. If you failed to defend yourself and yours, you were dead and worrying didn't help. However you took your gun or whatever you needed every day, wherever you went, just as a precaution. Sometimes I used my rifle to kill rattlesnakes; that day I used it to defend my family. Just another fact of life.

That night after a shower and dinner, Moxie nursed both children and put them to bed. We cuddled tightly for a long time that night; it felt unusually special to have Moxie hold me and to be able to hold her. Even knowing the way life was, I thought about not having her for the rest of my life – or not being there to watch my children grow up.

Eventually we made love that night, perhaps the most poignant sex we'd ever had. We took our time, hugged and kissed often, and the whole night was filled with tenderness. My cock slid slowly in and out of her wet velvet channel while our tongues searched the other's mouth and soft lips met soft lips. We didn't say much that night but we didn't need to either; we both knew what the other was feeling.

It wasn't until late that fall that we heard more news about the Apaches. The Comanche band came by on one of their meandering migrations and stopped overnight. Moxie sat beside me and translated for me.

It seems that the Apache and Comanche had always disputed parts of south Texas, with both tribes claiming that land. At times, they have clashed violently, although sometimes they went for several years between major battles. This year they had a significant battle in the hill country of Texas and out of that both tribes had sent raiding parties against the other tribe. Any whites in the way were subject to attack too. We were fortunate to come out so well.

Eventually the country did become engaged in a bloody civil war, over a lot of issues although slavery was one of the major ones. I managed to avoid participating, mostly because I didn't believe in slavery but if I had joined the northern army, there would have been nobody to take care of my family and it would have made it impossible to return there to live, no matter what the outcome of the war.

Moxie and I continued to work at building our farm/ranch, getting to the point that we had some excess produce that we sold or traded to merchants for other things we needed. Our cattle herd continued to grow and multiply until we were able to sell some cows every so often which also helped with other areas.

I purchased the pump I needed to get my windmill working. Using the team and a home-fashioned blade for dirt moving, we dug out a small reservoir that the windmill fed constantly. It still provides a consistent source of water for the cattle – and the wild creatures that visit from time to time. In subsequent years, I wound up putting in three other wells around the property, the last two with more modern machinery that I purchased rather than made.

Besides Sam and Dawn, Moxie and I had another daughter, Skye, and a second son, Daniel, in the next five years. During the birth of Daniel, something seemed to happen differently, causing Moxie a lot of pain and requiring many days of recuperation before she was back to her normal self. However there were no more babies after that.

That hasn't impacted our love for each other however, nor has it significantly slowed our desire for each other. Oh, I guess the frequency of our lovemaking has slowed a bit but we are still usually at each other passionately a couple of times a week. As we have aged, it has lengthened our sexual activities and made them even more pleasurable.

The high plains have become more settled as the years have passed. We had a neighbor move in as close as four miles a few years ago, which made it seemed like the land was closing in. A number of small towns have sprung up between our place and Fort Worth, so that we can make a trip to town and back overnight now, instead of taking nearly two weeks. Still it isn't the same because Fort Worth had grown to almost 10,000 people the last time we were there. It was crowded!

In another way, it is nice to have people closer. Now that Sam has turned eighteen, he has been courting young Amy Thompson over to the southeast of us; he just has a ride of seven miles to go see her and I think they are already getting pretty serious. I can't begrudge him the love of a young woman. After all, if I hadn't found Moxie and her love, Sam wouldn't have ever been born; then what would I have had to be so proud of? Just as I am of all my children.

Having neighbors has been a boon another way too. Several times different families have gotten together at one place or another to work jointly on a project. One project a couple of summers ago involved about six families getting together at the Johanson's, about nine or ten miles to the west of us, to erect a new barn for them. Jergen Johanson had hauled in a steam engine and the works for a saw mill. By the time we arrived, he and his son had enough rough-cut lumber to raise the barn. We had enough teams and men to build the barn in less than two days.