Wolf Creek Ch. 08

Ada had grown into a strong, independent woman, spurred by having lost nearly everything, including her husband and two of her children, at a relatively young age. But she also had a weakness for men, a weakness that she fought, but never nearly enough if she didn't want to lose the fight. She was willing to admit to herself, though, that part of being strong and independent and not controlled by social mores on what a woman's place was considered to be in the early twentieth century was to have her pleasure just as a man would be permitted to have his pleasure.

She had declared her intent to give Pete up as she settled in to her new life in Colorado's Wolf Creek valley and settle for a life with the reliable, staid William Hagen. But when she was honest with herself, she knew she couldn't give up the young, hard body of the man who had driven her across the country in the Shaffer Golden Eagle and who drove her to distraction and ecstasy with his masterful cock.

Nor did Ada give Pete Fair up even after William Hagen had artfully attempted to remove him from the equation. Hagen had done this by giving him a full-time, live-in position at the saw mill a hard ride up the mountainside above the cottage Hagen had built for Ada and that she had named the Brook House in recognition of the brook that ran through the structures basement.

Ada had kept the Golden Eagle that had not lost an axle, and Thaddeus, the other driver, had stayed around—and married Aunt Martha—and therefore could keep the touring sedan in working order for Ada. But she only was able to use it to go back and forth from her cottage to Slater, where she had taken up the duties of post mistress and emporium manager. For transportation within the valley and up to the saw mill, Ada had soon bought her own horse and quickly learned to ride it as well as any range ranch hand. Martha and Thaddeus worked with Ada in the post office and the emporium and were always willing to watch Hugh, so Ada had considerable free time on her hands. Settled once more, she took up landscape painting and had soon rehoned a talent for painting that she had enjoyed in her earlier life.

Ada particularly loved to paint the stream that cascaded down the mountainside from the saw mill camp, and so she frequently rode up to a little glen beside the water in a grove hidden from the road about half way up to the saw mill. The stream gave a little twist here and went over a stone outcropping, and the little meadow area was rampant with color in the spring, when the wildflowers were in bloom. It was a restful place for contemplation, and it was a perfect place to paint. It also was the perfect place to make love. And frequently when Ada went up to the hidden glen to paint, Pete sneaked out of the saw mill encampment and went down to the glen to fuck.

William Hagen was no dummy, however. He soon caught on to Pete's disappearances from the camp and followed him down the mountainside unobserved one beautiful spring day in 1919. He quickly regretted that he had done so. From a hidden spot at the verge of the grove of trees, he saw Ada open her dress to Pete and Pete devour her breasts and belly and her secret triangle with his lips and tongue. Hagen watched, helpless and transfixed, as Pete placed Ada's saddle on a blanket on the ground, and they both became naked.

Laughing and chattering away, Ada sat on the saddle and then reclined back onto the blanket and spread her legs wide, her mound pointed to the sky. Pete laid on his belly with his face in Ada's lap and his arms woven between her legs and the saddle and his hands squeezing her ample breasts. Her moans and little cries of pleasure carried across the glen and assaulted the ears of the observing Hagen. Ada had her fists buried in Pete's hair and she was giving little gasps and groans and, at length, she began rhythmically pumping her pelvis up into Pete's face and then she lurched and her arms stretched out and her fists dug into the multicolored carpet of the Colorado meadow as she orgasmed. Then Pete turned her on the saddle so that her belly was in curve of the saddle and he crouched over her and entered her strongly and stroked down into her until she'd had her second orgasm. Only then did the young buck fill her to his own ultimate pleasure.

Hagen could take no more. He quietly withdrew from his observation point and then fled up the mountainside to the safety of his saw mill.

After that Ada returned to the glen often, but Pete was never there. By midsummer she managed to unobtrusively mention to several of the men from the saw mill who came down to the emporium in Slater that she hadn't seen the man who had driven her family to Colorado around for some time. None of the men could pinpoint when Pete had disappeared, but they all said that one day in spring he was there and the next day he'd gone, without explanation, and no one had seen him since.

William Hagen still came down from the mountain to visit Ada occasionally and to Slater to check on his emporium enterprise there. But just as suddenly as Pete had disappeared, William had stopped what passed for his courting of Ada in the slow move toward his apparent intent to ask her to marry him. For her part, Ada, also cooled toward William. She didn't do so intentionally, really, but there was a nagging worry at the back of her mind about why—and under what circumstance—Pete had disappeared so abruptly.

1919 turned into 1920, and autumn on Wolf Creek turned into winter. For the first time, Ada decided to winter at Brook House, because she wanted to paint a series of winter scenes in the valley. Martha and Thaddeus were more than willing to watch after the store and run the post office through the winter and also to keep the five-year-old, hyperactive Hugh where it was warmer and safer.

Aunt Martha indulged Ada in everything involving Brook House. Martha's money was still on William for Ada's future, and she saw the house that Hagen had been for Ada as a link between the two. She saw the effort Ada put into decorating the house and keeping it spotless as a projection onto what could be between Ada and William, and almost said as much once when she found Ada scrubbing the floor of the living area for the second time in a week.

"I declare, Aunt Martha," Ada had said, "that this house is going to be the death of me."

"If so, one would wonder why you smile so much and hum such happy songs while you are working on it," Martha had given in reply. "And I don't think the house will be the death of you, Ada. I think it will be your release."

William came down from the saw mill encampment one late November day after it had snowed a couple of feet over the previous two days. Although they no longer were as close and comfortable with each other as they once had been, Hagen continued to watch over Ada and ensure that she had everything she needed.

"Everything in working order in the house, Ada?" William asked after she had invited him in and they were drinking coffee she always kept brewing on the stove. "Are you warm enough here? I worry about you wintering here."

"Everything's fine, William, thanks," Ada said. "The chimney has a leak somewhere, I think, and smokes up the big bedroom upstairs a bit. But I'm sleeping in one of the rooms down here, so it doesn't bother me. Everything's fine with the house."

"We'll have to see about that come spring," William said. "You don't want smoke in the house. And everything that's fine about this house, Ada is that you are in it and caring for it."

"What a nice thing to say," Ada said and she was blushing. But she quickly returned to the discussion of the leaking fireplace. "It's just wood smoke. As long as it doesn't get to the paintings, it's sort of nice to have the smell of wood smoke around."

"Those are might fine paintings," William said, as she surveyed what Ada had been working on. "You've got a real professional touch. I bet those would sell well in Denver. When the worst of the snows pass, I have to go down to Denver to check on my company's office there. The guy I have running the office is going gangbusters with timber sales. Let me take some of your paintings down when I go. I'm sure they'd sell."

The two discussed this for a while and then William circled back to what was really worrying him. "I still think it isn't good for a single woman to be trying to winter here in the valley, Ada. I wish you'd go back into Slater until it thawed."

"There won't be snow scenes out here to paint then, William. And it's really peaceful here. Besides, I'm not really alone. I can see the smoke from the Wolf Creek Ranch from here. If I need anything, I'll just go up there." What Ada didn't want to admit to William was that she had grown discontented with her life. The setting here was idyllic, but ever since Pete had disappeared, there was something very important missing in Ada's life. And it had made her one frustrated and discontented woman.

"No, don't do that. I keep telling you to stay away from that lot, Ada." William was really concerned now. "That Frank Wolf is mean as rot, and his two sons are much worse. I'm more concerned about them coming down here and messing with you than I am with the snow, if truth be known."

Ada didn't focus on the catch in William's voice when he said this. He was cutting awfully close to the bedrock of what had been clawing at him about Ada for years. He loved her; he'd loved her from the first day he'd caught sight of her. But he just couldn't ignore this streak in her that needed a man. And he was so unsure of himself. He couldn't believe he was man enough for her.

The winter deepened and so did the snow. Ada was out by the road, all bundled up and trying to manage a couple of strokes of paint on a scene that included Brook House with Hahn's Peak in the background to catch the light just right. After only a few minutes outside, she preparing to hustle back into the relative warmth of the cottage, when three men came by on the road from up the valley at the fastest trot their horses could manage in the drifts.

As they passed they hauled up long enough to call out to Ada. "You might want to head for Slater, Mam. There's a fever just like that Spanish flu of the other year taking hold up at Frank Wolf's spread. One of the hands died from it yesterday and now Wolf himself is abed. The men are leavin' as fast as they can."

"Who's left to take care of the sick?" Ada asked out of instinct. She hadn't forgotten her training in Native American cures nor the horror of the Spanish flu.

"Ain't gonna be anyone alive up there in a couple of days," one of the riders answered. "And there's no telling whether it will spread down here to. As Tex here said, you'd best try to get into Slater yourself."

"Mrs. Wolf?" Ada asked with persistence.

The one called Tex let out a guffaw. "Old lady Wolf was the first one to take off. She headed up toward Hayden with one of the hands she's been sweet on. The only ones left alive up there besides Wolf now are Fess and Jess, Frank's sons. They're too mean to die, but they'll pull out soon too, I reckon."

The three moved off toward Slater, and Ada went into the house to get what she needed, saddled her horse, and started up through the snow to the Wolf Creek Ranch homestead on the hillock below Hahn's Peak.

The two sons, handsome devils, but quite obviously mean devils, were saddling up as Ada struggled into the ranch compound.

"Well, what do we have here?" one said with a leer. "That fancy lady from down at the fork in the river. Pete Fair's piece of ass."

"And soon to be our piece of ass," the other one answered with a sneer of his own. The two left off saddling their horses and moved away from them, putting Ada between them. One wasn't as sure as the other, though.

"I don't know, Jess. We need to get on out of here. This fever crap isn't anything to play with."

"Aw, I think we can hold up for a half hour, Fess. I think we can do her in a half hour if we work her together."

The two were circling Ada now, coming in closer. She was wondering if she could get to the pistol in her boot in time, and her horse was getting skittish, probably sensing the danger in the air.

The one called Fess was close enough to reach out for Ada when the two sons, Ada, and the three horses all lurched from the echoing of a shotgun blast into the air from the adjacent porch.

A massive mountain of a man, not fat, but heavy muscled, although now nearly doubled over in fever, was on the porch leaning heavily against a post and gasping for breath. But he had a determined look about him that his two sons obviously were deeply familiar with and recognized was not a bluff. They both stepped back as he lowered the barrel of the smoking shotgun in their direction.

"I think you both were going, weren't you? Deserting me, like that cow of a mother you have did." His voice was hoarse and his eyes were unfocused. His face was deeply flushed. "Go, then. But if you touch this woman in passing, I'll blow your heads off."

The two sullenly patted their saddles to ensure everything was in order for their ride, mounted, and slowly rode out of the compound, their eyes darting from their father to Ada, who was sitting as quietly as she could on her horse, not wanting to do anything that might make them change their minds. She was sure that they could see as well as she could that their father couldn't stay on his feet for more than a minute more.

And, indeed, when the two strapping sons had disappeared through the log arch leading out toward the road down into Slater, Frank Wolf lowered the barrel of the shotgun and slowly sank to the floor of the porch. Ada barely had the strength to drag the massive man back into the ranch house and onto his bed.

She nursed him for two weeks before he was clear of whatever fever had attacked him. She had seen right off that it wasn't anything like the Spanish flu that had taken most of her family, and she reasoned that the ranch's well must have gone bad. She melted snow for drinking water and stripped him and sponged him off several times a day and then wrapped him well in blankets and applied all of the herbs she had learned to employ that might help make him well.

Then on Christmas day, marked that year by Ada only as a date on the calendar, Frank Wolf showed that he was strong enough to rejoin the world by pulling Ada down on his bed, rolling on top of her and kissing and stroking away her defenses with his lips and hands and his murmurings of endearments that were a shock coming from someone who was supposed to be so mean and gruff. And then he was getting his thighs between her and splitting her and pumping her with the biggest cock she had ever had inside her.

No one had made love to Ada for a year, and she had melted to the magnificence of his man's body as she had sponged him off during the worst days of his fever. By the time Frank Wolf had trapped her underneath him and driven himself deep inside her, Ada had built up such a desire for the most powerful rancher of the valley that no one could have told who had seduced who. Indeed, although she had struggled a bit—at least symbolically—as he trapped her under him and entered her with that long, thick dick of his and pushed up and up and up, pinning her to the bed, as she moaned and groaned at the fullness of his possession of her, Ada grabbed his buttocks in her hands and held him as closely to her pelvis as she could. She arched her back and began bucking wildly against him, flooding away the discontent of her months and months of forced abstinence. They were well matched in lust and mastered technique and rode each other in turn, hard and to great mutual satisfaction, into the next day.

When the spring thaw settled in and Ada came into Slater to retrieve her son, she left the post office and emporium permanently in the care of Martha and Thaddeus. And it was to the Wolf Creek Ranch on the hillock below Hahn's Peak that she returned, not to Brook House. That same spring, when William Hagen left for Denver, he didn't return. He did, however, make good on his promise to take Ada's paintings with him and they, indeed, did sell very well in Denver—and art dealers throughout the region started to take notice of this new talent hidden away in a remote Rocky Mountain valley. It wasn't long before George Vaughn had taken notice of Ada's success and had both established her with an art broker in Chicago and featured her paintings in the upscale furniture department of Vaughn's department store. The arrangement was quite lucrative for both of them.