2 comments/  39798 views/  10 favorites

Wolf Creek Ch. 01

By: sr71plt



The pain was almost unbearable, but Ada was doing what she could to smile through the suffering, to give him that dreamy look of trust and love and encouragement that she had practiced so many times. This was what she wanted, what she had hoped and schemed for. A bit of pain and a few months until she showed, a scene with the Reverend Albin, her father—a scene she had rehearsed in her mind endlessly—and then this man would take her away from here forever. Take her away from this dreary treeless Natoma, Kansas, smack dab between nowhere and nothing.

Brother Hiram Leffler pushed her arms higher on the splintery, white paint-flecked side of the shed with one strong hand wrapped around both of her slender wrists. His heaving chest was pushing her breasts flat against the boards so that she could hardly breathe, and he was grunted hard at his barely controlled exertion. He was babbling between his ragged pants, telling her how beautiful and nice and sweet-smelling she was and how much he'd dreamed being with her like this.

Well, Ada had dreamed of this as well. She had dreamed of escaping from this ugly patch of ground with its lopsided weather-beaten church, where her father tended an ever-dwindling flock of pitiful souls and terrorized his family as compensation for his own disappointments from a harsh life on the cruel, unforgiving Midwest plains. 

She had dreamed of release from Natoma's catch-as-catch-can meager parsonage, stuffed with all of the broken and cast-off furnishings of a tightfisted, poverty-stricken congregation. And she dreamed of freedom from the one-room schoolhouse, where Ada had spent her youth. A schoolhouse to which she had now, in her eighteenth year, returned to lay waste to the youth of another generation of ill-dressed and barely literate children—one day a student and the next day the new schoolmarm, simply by right—and responsibility—of seniority and of being the parson's daughter. Doing what was expected of her with no thought that she could have dreams of her own for anything else.

Although Hiram undoubtedly thought that he had seduced Ada, Ada knew better. But she'd never tell Hiram that. She knew enough of men to know that they needed to feel dominant. But from the moment she had decided that Hiram was to be her deliverer, she had, subtly she hoped, displayed her considerable charms to him and led him to where they now were, making fumbling love behind the hen house. 

She had flattered him and cooked for him and given him the praise and admiring glances that had worked so well on her father when she wanted something from him. She had found out which colors Hiram liked best and had endeavored to wear those when he was around. She wore her luxuriant dark hair several ways when he was around at first, and she watched to see which style pleased him the most. And when she saw that special look of favor for a particular style, she henceforth wore her hair down, flowing free to beneath her shoulders—ignoring her father's looks of disapproval. And then the other special looks from Hiram began, and she returned them, demurely she hoped. Hiram was an outspoken man of the Book, and she didn't want to scare him off.

But Hiram was also a man. And she was a young, beautiful, ripe woman. It didn't take much. A few warm apple pies, a dress in cornflower blue, a special smile and fluttering eyelashes. Then moments alone on the porch swing after a good dinner, while her father was inside finishing off a sermon or counseling a distressed parishioner. A few kisses, increasingly ardent, and a well-placed, practiced sigh when, at last, he was bold enough to place a trembling hand on one of her nubile breasts. Slowly, every slowly, but steadily responding to his arousal. Ever modest but always compliant, and then, after having "accidentally" let her hand brush across his crotch, letting him take control—or, rather, letting him think he was taking control—and whimpering that she, indeed, wanted him as much as he said he wanted her, and agreeing, reluctantly, to meet him one night behind the hen house.

Hiram was moving his thing in and out of her now at a rapid pace, and she increasingly was able to accommodate him and the pain was receding into the background. She had been told that she should moan and groan and tremble for him, and so she did. She knew this was how babies were made, and, after thinking long and hard, she knew that the only way she was going to get out of Natoma and escape a life of drudgery in service of her scowling, thin-lipped minister father was to shock the pants off him. To do something that would get her banished once and for all from his sight—and, more important, from the withering looks and wagging tongues of any of his parishioners.

Hiram Leffler had been the answer to her dream, or at least the closest thing to an answer that she'd seen in this dreary town. True he was almost as old as her father, and nearly as stern and serious. But that was a given with preachers. The difference was that Hiram Leffler was an itinerate preacher. That meant that he had come from somewhere and that he would be leaving here and going somewhere else. Ada's fervent wish was to go someplace else, and she had become obsessed with the dream that when he did leave, she would leave with him. She would go as his wife and the mother of his child.

He was almost handsome, tall and sinewy, and he had those big strong hands. It was the hands, with their long, expressive—and dare she even think it, sensuous—fingers that had told Ada that she loved Hiram and wanted to go with him, fingers that she fanaticized stroking through her hair.

Hiram, in fact, had used these fingers to calm Ada down when they had met in the dark and had reached and then, both all atremble, surpassed the limits of their earlier fumbling love making. He hushed her shaking down by stroking fingers through her long, dark hair with one hand while the other guided his member to what he sought until he had gained purchase there. That hand was now palmed across Ada's belly, holding her pelvis to his. They were in the bushes, against the wall of the hen house, on the side away from the house, where the Reverend Albin was reviewing his sermon for the next morning following a dinner where his itinerate associate, Hiram Leffler, had been a guest.

The Reverend Albin assumed that Ada had withdrawn to her own room and Leffler was safely tucked away in the small storage room at the back of the church hall that had been made over into living quarters for him. But that wasn't so. Ada, the tail of her skirts lifted above her waist and her pantaloons down around her knees, had been pushed up against the splintery boards of the hen house, her cheek and breasts against the wall. And Hiram, fully clothed, but his fly unbuttoned and gaping, was dominating the young woman with his insistent body—and pumping his virginal conquest with a raging cock that could no longer be denied. He was in a world of his own, mindlessly reciting scripture and making little mewing sounds as his member sank deeper and deeper into her honey pot. He became lost in his conquest, forgetting to be gentle, pumping and pumping her with increasing ardor and boldness until his fury and shame were released deep inside . . . her ass canal.

Three evenings later, a mumbling Hiram Leffler was at the parlor door, satchel in hand, giving his halting good-byes to the Reverend Albin and doing everything he could to avoid eye contact with Ada. Right up until she'd seen Hiram and that satchel, Ada had been glowing. She had received the advertisements she'd sent for. It was the year of the biggest world's fair of all time, or at least the year the fair was supposed to open in St. Louis, only one state to the east. The advertisements she'd received said that the fair could not open now until next year, 1904, because of all of the new buildings that would be built there. But Ada hadn't cared. She was sure she was pregnant now with Hiram's baby and that he would take her away from Natoma. She had convinced herself in her awake dreaming that the first place he would take her would be to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the world's fair in St. Louis. She was aching to see the world and to see it as Hiram's wife. The man of the world, Hiram, with those sensuous hands.

Ada sat paralyzed, her dream world collapsing about her, as her father and Leffler briefly talked of Leffler's leaving. He was going farther west, into the new Colorado territory. Not east. He was leaving. He was leaving without her, and he was going west, not east—to the even more primitive wilds than dreary Natoma, not to the opulent, lively cities of the east.

Hiram hadn't gotten a foot off the front porch, however, before Ada let out a wail of betrayal and despair and ran past her father to the door out onto the porch, spewing out all that she and Leffler had done and that she was sure that she was pregnant by him now and that, as a man of God, he surely understood that they were already man and wife.

Still not looking at her, Hiram covered his embarrassment with his own raging.

"Man and Wife?" he blustered. "I have not lain with you in the eyes of the Book, woman. We have not fornicated within the biblical context. I did nothing in your womb. That would be a sin. You cannot possibly be with child. You cannot get with child from what we did. And if you be no virgin, it isn't by my doing. Besides, you enticed me. You are a Jezebel. That is why I am leaving. To put you and your wiles behind me. You would have led me astray. I am withdrawing from the temptation of you while I can."

And then he was gone. And Ada's father had heard it all. So, in the end, Ada got what she wanted from Hiram. She got expelled from Natoma, Kansas—before the small town's tongues could start to wag. Hiram was not there to loosen those tongues, and neither Ada nor her father were about to speak of her folly publicly. But the Reverend Albin knew now. And he was not the kind to either forget or forgive.

Thank goodness, though, that she had an aunt on her mother's side in Slater, Missouri, who was far less judgmental and far more understanding and forgiving than the Right Reverend Albin was. Two weeks after Ada's dreary world in Natoma had collapsed, she was on the stage headed east, to Slater, which happily had an opening for a school teacher and which even more happily was nearly three quarters of the way, in almost a direct line, between Natoma, Kansas, and the St. Louis World's Fair.

Ada was an optimistic soul at the foundation. She refused to be daunted by what had happened to her in Natoma. Even with the disaster she had left behind, she was headed toward her dream, toward what the St. Louis Fair represented in her life. And she refused to be cowed by what she had learned of men from both Hiram Leffler and her father. After the initial pain, she had enjoyed what Hiram had done to her. And she would not let him think that all of the pleasure to be had from that was his or that she didn't account for anything. Hiram had allowed himself to be overwhelmed by her despite his strict religious taboos—even though he was only fooling himself about those—because of who she was and what she had brought about herself. She had enticed him; he had not be lying about that part. She had wanted him to do what he did, and she had arranged for the opportunity and the motivation of their coupling. She knew she needed to learn much more about what happened between a man and a woman, but she knew equally that she could orchestrate what that would be. And she was determined now never to couple with a man on unequal terms—to receive generously for whatever she choose to give, and, yes, to enjoy the giving as well.

Wolf Creek Ch. 02



"He's miscounted again," Ada said. She took the thirteenth apple of the dozen she'd bought and held it up to the light from the window in Aunt Martha's kitchen. It was lustrous. Everything about Slater, Missouri, was lustrous when lifted up for comparison with the Natoma, Kansas, she had so recently escaped.

"Who's miscounted what, Dear?" Martha asked as she bustled around the cheery little room, tucking their purchases from Hagen's here and there.

"Mr. Hagen," Ada responded. "He's given us one more apple than we paid for. This is the third time he's done something like this in as many weeks."

"Perhaps he's waiting for you to catch on, Little Miss," Martha said with the knowing little smile of hers. "But don't lose your innocence on my account. It's a blessing for my overflowing larder."

"What could you mean, Aunt Martha?"

"He's sweet on you, Dear. Surely you've noticed that yourself. He's the most eligible young bachelor in this town, and you are now the most presentable young woman here. What could be the mystery in why he's favoring you with his wares?" Martha sat down at the kitchen table, her back to her young niece so that the young woman couldn't see how broadly she was smiling. She didn't know why her sister's child had so suddenly come to her from Kansas, but there had been nothing but blue skies and sunshine in this town since the child had arrived.

Ada had, in fact, figured out already that the proprietor of the town's emporium and lumber lot, William Hagen, was, as Aunt put it, "sweet" on her. Ada had seen that look in a good many men before. And she was flattered, she certainly was. But every evening she returned from the town school, where she taught more enthusiastically here than she had in Natoma because here half of the students hadn't been students with her, Ada spent several minutes alone in her room looking through the advertisements on the St. Louis World's Fair. The fair had opened now and was located not more than 150 miles to the southeast of Slater. She still pined to start her life. Everything to this point had just been marking time. Wasting time. She had just been suspended in time. Her life had not yet begun.

But as the weeks dragged by, 150 miles began to seem like it was on the other side of the world, and Ada's dreams of the World's Fair started to dim. She began looking at the bustling proprietor of the town's emporium in an increasingly favorable light.

William Hagen was a well built and comely man, Ada had to admit. And he treated her like a princess. Why was she expecting so much more out of life? Was she the natural tease and Jezebel that Hiram Leffler and even her own father believed her to be? Slater was so much better than Natoma had been.

Ada resolved to be the good woman. She started to respond to William's smiles and attentions, and the naturally shy and gentle William started to become bolder and more assured of himself.

But he wasn't moving nearly quickly enough for Ada now that she had resolved that William was the best option in the limited world she was growing to accept as her lot. Ada had said she wanted see the Missouri River and William had taken a day away from the store and hitched up the delivery wagon and taken her to the banks of the river for picnic. She was using her wiles to tease him to progress from treating her like some sort of porcelain doll on the shelf, and while they were reclining after the meal and watching the waters of the river languidly pass by, she maneuvered so that his hand brushed one of her breasts.

William blushed to a deep red. "Oh, I'm sorry, so sorry, Ada. Forgive me. I don't know . . ."

"Oh, you needn't be so shy, William," she said, giving him an "almost" coquettish smile, not wanting to scare him away, though. "You've been so good to me. It's the twentieth century now. We can show our feelings for each other."

"Our feelings for each other? You have feelings for me too, Ada? Oh, Ada."

It didn't seem he was going to take the moment any further now, almost as if he'd already surpassed his slow, deliberate courting plan. So Ada turned his shoulders toward her and took his lips, gently, with hers.

His kiss was sweet, but he was handling her like glass. This just wasn't developing fast enough for Ada. If the length and breadth of her world was going to be Slater and William Hagen, they might as well get on with it. She opened her lips to his light touch there and took his hand and placed it on her breast. There wasn't much for William to feel there—she was cinched up in several layers of material—but Hagen's response was electric. He almost lost it and then when Ada brushed her own hand along his upper thigh and on to the now-distinct bulge below his belly, he did lose it.

Briefly, but only briefly, William's lips hungrily worked on Ada's and his hand squeezed her breast. But then he had gone on overload and had let loose of her and was babbling nonsense and was acting like they'd already consummated their coupling and he had debauched her.

If another carriage and a family of picnickers hadn't shown up just then, Ada had no idea what would have happened. But what did happen was that William quickly started gathering up the blanket and the remnants of their own picnicking. And he was still babbling in a false voice several steps up from his normal tone and continued doing so, talking about everything but what had just happened all the way back to Aunt Martha's house.

Even later in life Ada often wondered what would have happened as a result of her attempt to jump start William's courtship if the other picnickers hadn't shown up or if they had taken up where they left off on their next outing. But it was one of those mysteries she was never to be able to solve, because the next day Charles Raven came into her life.

Where William Hagen was all respect, shyness, gentleness, and steadiness, Charles Raven was edgy, sassy, bold, dangerous, and uncertainty. He was the greater world. He was the World's Fair in Ada's eyes. He was every she was dreaming of.

Charles Raven was something of a traveling salesmen, but on a higher level. He was a direct representative of Vaughn's Department Store, the sophisticated merchandise center in the greater-world city of Chicago. And his job was to promote placement of modern household appliances being introduced at the St. Louis World's Fair in emporiums across the land.

He came to Hagen's Emporium on a bright, sunshiny morning to place his wares with William Hagen, who had been a childhood friend of his. And Ada came to Hagen's Emporium at the same time to determine how she stood with William, whether she had pushed him too far too fast on the previous day.

Raven was lounging against a showcase, his sinewy, lithe body emblazoned with a close-fitting fawn suit, a bright white ruffled and starched shirt, flashy gold rings and watch fob, and a straw hat set at a saucy angle on his glossy blond hair. He had a moustache that focused attention on his sensuous lips and mischievous eyes that promised mystery and danger. As soon as she saw him, Ada completely forgot that she had come to talk to William, who was standing there, dumbly behind the counter, not yet sure what to say to Ada when he next saw her—whether to beg her forgiveness for his gross, animalistic behavior or drop on his knees before her and beg her to be his wife. Ada only had eyes for her dreams, however. And her dreams were standing before her, lounging comfortably against the showcase in a fawn-colored suit. Her ticket to the world.

Raven was a man of the world with a depth of experience. He recognized instantly everything that Ada wanted and everything she was likely to do to get there. And she was beautiful. An exquisitely shaped body, and those beautiful hazel eyes, inviting lips, and that luxurious dark hair cascading down her back beyond her shoulders.

William found his voice at last. "Charlie, this is my . . . my . . . uh, this is Miss Ada Albin, our new school teacher. She's from Kansas. And, uh, Ada, this is Mr. Charles Raven. He's a representative of Vaughn's Department Store in Chicago. And he's an old friend of mine as well. He's here to tell us about the newfangled copper boilers, knife sharpeners, electric heaters, and sugar boiling machines that are being introduced at the world's fair over in St. Louis and that Vaughn's thinks we need to be buying here in Slater."

All Ada heard from that was Chicago and the St. Louis World Fair. She was lost to this Charles Raven, this visitation from the greater world, and Charles Raven could clearly see in her eyes that she was lost to him.

He gave her his most winsome smile, and said, "And certainly Kansas's great loss you are, Miss Ada. But I must say that Kansas is a good place to be from."

Ada could only agree with him, but she wasn't really focused on that. "The St. Louis World's Fair. You're going to the St. Louis World's Fair?"

"I didn't actually say he was, Ada," William said with a frown, feeling entirely left out of the strange and worrisome glances that were being exchanged between his friend and his intended—or who he intended to be his intended. "What I said was . . ."

"But, as a matter of fact, that's true, Miss Ada." Charles interjected. "Tomorrow I go on to the fair. Mr. Vaughn will be there, and I will be something of a personal secretary to him while he's there."

Charles didn't misinterpret the longing and neediness in Ada's eyes when he had said this.

"Say, William," He then said. "I think I've left that catalog of what Vaughn's is trying to place in your store back in your storeroom. Be a good fellow will you and go back and get it for us. Won't you, please? I think our Miss Ada here might be a good judge of whether these items will sell well in your store."

William went—reluctantly, but he went.

And when he was gone, Charles languidly uncoiled himself and moved to her with fluid motion as she stood, transfixed in the door of the emporium. When he reached her, he took her hand in his. "And would you like to see the St. Louis World's Fair, Miss Ada?"

The pressure of his fingers on Ada's hand was almost unbearable. He was electricity; he was fire. She melted to his touch. "Yes, oh yes, I would," she managed to say in a strained, small voice.

"And what would you do to be able to go to the World's Fair, Ada?"

"Anything . . . anything," Ada answered breathlessly. He was stripping away all defenses and anything but a totally honest response.

"If you come with me back to my room, Ada, I will take you to the World's Fair tomorrow."

When William returned, not having found the catalog anywhere in the storeroom, the store proper was, of course, empty. The missing catalog was lying on top of the showcase Charles had been leaning against.

Charles had Ada stripped down to her corselet expertly in no time after they had gotten to his room at the hotel. She had no idea what to do, but he was doing it all. They were sitting side by side on his bed, and he was encasing her shoulders with one arm and pushing her bodice down to below her breasts with the other. And then his lips were on her pert nipples and she was sighing and moaning and arching her back from him, which raised her breasts higher to his appreciative lips.

"Ah, you are so beautiful, he was murmuring. An angel. An angel from out of Kansas. Who would have supposed it?" he buried a hand in her hair at the nape of her neck and pulled her head back, exposing the curve of her lily-white neck to him, and his lips moved up there and he was kissing her deeply in the hollow of her lovely neck. His other hand moved down her trembling belly and ran down between her thighs and pushed them apart. A finger was moving, searching in the folds between her thighs.

This was something Ada had never felt before. She had thought that Hiram had made expert love to her, but Hiram hadn't done anything like this. And she hadn't felt the stirrings she now was feeling when she was with Hiram.

She murmured to Charles, begging him to be gentle, to go slowly. She was telling him of her innocence, but he wasn't hearing her. He was listening only to the loud waves of lust pounding in his brain, his need to possess.

He had his finger at her entrance. She gasped as he found her clitoris, something she thought only she knew was there and that perhaps she and only she among women could be aroused there. He obviously knew as well. She was shuddering and trembling and mewing for him. And she was beginning to flow. She was supremely embarrassed. What could he be thinking of her lack of control? But it seemed to be exciting him rather than disgusting him.

He was pulling at the stays of her corselet, and then it was gone and she was there just in her undergarment. And the bodice of that had been folded down already. He had her reclined back, one of his hands still buried in the hair at the nape of her neck and he was leaning over her now, kissing her from lips to neck to nipples and through the undergarment on her belly. His other hand had pull possession of her mound now. He was cupping it in his palm and his middle finger was pushing into her, opening her to him. These were whole new sensations for Ada now. This isn't the approach that Hiram had taken at all.

Then Charles pulled away from her and she collapsed back on the bed and watched him move like a cat over to his valise and extract an envelope and take his coat off and pull his pants down. He was still in his ruffled shirt, though, and Ada could see that the shirt was tented out noticeably below his belly. She had seen men naked before; she had taken peeks when she shouldn't have—at her father and at other men. So, she knew what lay behind the tented shirt and she knew that it was going to be stuck inside her. Hiram had stuck his inside her. But she was confused here, he had stuck it up her bottom, which she'd sense learned was not where it naturally went. Charles's lovemaking just now, however, had given her a very good idea where that member of Charles, which was tenting out the front of his shirt, was going to go. But he was going to take her to St. Louis. He was her ticket to the World. And he was handsome. As handsome as a prince.

Charles came back to her and stood over her and took something from the envelope and started to put his hands under his shirt and bring out that thing of his—that thing that he was going to put inside her. And he was doing something there with what he'd taken out of the envelope.

"What . . . what are you doing? What is that?" Ada asked haltingly, regretting what she had impetuously asked as soon as she asked it. What would he think of her? Would he think she'd never done this before? But of course that was the actual truth.

"A French letter," Charles said. And then he laughed, for the first time showing an edge of nerves an uncertainty. "You do know what a French letter is and what it's for, don't you?"

"Yes, of course," she answered. But then, just as quickly. "No, I'm sorry. No I don't."

"You have lain with a man before, haven't you?" He was incredulous.

"Yes . . . ," she responded weakly. "Well, just once. And that was standing up behind a shed. And he says it wasn't really fornication. That nothing could come from it."

"He fucked you in that ass?" Charles blurted out. But then when Ada's eyes opened wide, he quickly went on. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I didn't realize. This is a French letter. It's a cap I'll put on myself here so that you won't get pregnant. Do you understand? We can do it and there won't be anything to show for it. Or wouldn't, if you weren't a . . . . Oh, Christ, I don't know what to say. I had no idea. The looks you gave me back at the emporium. . . ."

He was panting now. No longer in full control. This discovery had thrown him off his stride. But it had done something else as well. It had aroused him to new heights and had whetted his appetite as no woman had done for some time. He was to be the first with this one. He had to think. A gentleman would back off. But his desire for this woman was long past that. He had to think. He had to have her, but he had to play this carefully.

There was a long pause, and then Ada took control. She looked up at Charles with teasing eyes and said. "Say you'll be gentle with me. Just that. And say you'll take me to St. Louis tomorrow. Beyond that you don't have to say anything."

And she lifted her arms to him, and he came to and into her. And he was gentle and he was expert, and she arched her back and cried out in pleasured pain as his gentle-as-possible piercing deflowered her and then, increasingly, she cried out in passion and shared lust and pleasure as he moved more assuredly and deeper and more possessively inside her and as he held her tightly to him, one hand on the small of her back and the other buried in her hair. He devoured her lips and nipples with kisses even as he filled and stretched her and moved in and out relentlessly to a mutual flowing and sighing and crying out.



Wolf Creek Ch. 03



Ada was in ecstasy. Just by going down the Pike, pulling an amused Charles Raven behind her, she was transported to Rome, Jerusalem, Paris, the Tyrolean Alps, Siberia, an Eskimo village, Japan, and a floating trip through the whole Creation. Her world was limitless now, just as she had known it would be if only she could get to the St. Louis World's Fair. The Pike was to the 1904 St. Louis Fair what the Midway had been to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair—the entertainment sector of the exposition. This was worth everything she had done to get here, even though she had to admit that she had enjoyed what she had done. That was all part of the greater world she wanted to grasp. It was the twentieth century and she wanted to be a twentieth-century woman.

Charles hadn't been able to fully understand this. He had understood only that she wanted to get to the St. Louis Fair and that she was willing to lay with him, to let him make love to her, to get there. But Ada fully realized that the fair was only a symbol. It was a symbol of all she wanted out of life. It represented sophistication and wonder and the greater world. And Ada wanted all of that. She wasn't selling herself to get it. She was opening herself to new pleasures and understandings. And she was doing so on her own terms. On her own terms, no matter what a conniving Hiram, or a sour-dispositioned father, or a pursed-lipped Aunt Martha, or a crestfallen William Hagen, or even, yes, even an amused Charles Raven thought.

But she loved how Charles Raven made love to her too. He was teaching her so much, giving her so much pleasure. Their first night in St. Louis he had shown how she could heat and melt to him even without him forcing that thing deep inside her and wiggling it about and stroking it in and out. That had brought her pleasure, certainly. But that first night in St. Louis, when he had sat her on the bed and pushed her back onto the satin spread and held her wrists in his hands and used his tongue and only his tongue to bring her to flow and a shooting off of electricity within her, she had reached heights of pleasure and fulfillment that she had never imagined possible.

And then he had taught her how she could excite him with her tongue and lips as well, how she could make that thing of his, what he called his cock, expand and throb and then enter her and make her groan with pleasure pain and moan all over again. She had had no idea. She had had no idea what wonders there were. It all made Natoma, Kansas, and her father's sterile world look all the more dreary.

Ada did fleetingly wonder why Charles seemed to be pressing to teach her the ways of love in such depth so quickly. It gave her the sense that he was fleeting himself. She did surmise briefly, but only briefly, that he may be so taken with her that he couldn't help himself. But the realist inside her told her that Charles was only really totally taken with himself.

Only when Charles had suggested that they might just stay in the hotel room and make love and learn new aspects of making love forever did Ada snap out of her new, opulent world. No, she had come here for the fair. They must go to the fair.

And here she was in the very center of the Pike, gazing in fascination at the Magic Whirlpool and its sixty-foot circular waterfall. And looking to the top of that, she saw in the near distance the 265-foot Ferris wheel that had been brought here from the Chicago fair of 1893. They simply must go on that. She must be on the top of the world. But she was on the top of the world already without the Ferris wheel. And they said there would be a full-scale naval battle at two that afternoon they could not miss and there would be snowfall at the ice skating rink after that even now in the dead of summer, and then they must try that ice cream in a cone she'd heard about, and . . .

It was hours before Charles was able to bring Ada back to earth and get through to her that he wasn't there only for pleasure—that he was here to work—and that, since she was here with him, she wasn't here fully for her own pleasure either nor could she expect him to spend every moment they weren't making love here at the attractions of the Pike.

And even then it took some time for his entire meaning to sink in. They were eating lunch beside a make-believe Venetian canal and he was telling her that they'd have to put in an appearance soon at the Palace of Varied Industries outside of the Pike, where his boss and benefactor, the Chicago department store mogul George Vaughn, was snapping up orders for the household appliances of the future that no one would understand how they existed without ten years from now. And Charles also wanted her to meet his younger brother, John, who was temporarily working for Vaughn's close friend, the automobile manufacturer James Shaffer, who had an exhibit at the Palace of Transportation.

Charles was sitting at the café table stroking Ada's forearm and sending chills of pleasure through her when he carefully moved into talking about just how far what she could be doing to aid his work here at the fair extended.

"You are actually particularly blessed that you will be meeting Vaughn and Shaffer," he was saying. "They are tremendously powerful men."

"Umm, yes, and you are a tremendously powerful man," Ada said, as she brushed her hand unobtrusively over Charles's groin under the table.

He winced and pressed on. "No, I mean, you say you want the whole world, that you want to live large and broadly. These men can do that for you, Ada. And in the process you could be helping me tremendously."

Ada was perhaps a little innocent, but she was no dummy. The chills from Charles's stroking hand were augmented by chills from the stroking of his tongue.

"You mean you want me to be nice to these men, Charles. Especially nice."

"Yes, I do mean something of that sort, Darling. I mean if they are taken with you—and I can't imagine they wouldn't be taken with you. Anyone would be taken with you. I mean it's something you might enjoy as well."

And it had better be something I would enjoy, Ada was thinking darkly even while trying to keep the smile plastered on her face. Otherwise she had no intention of being nice in that way. She hadn't grasped control of her world just to lose it as quickly as all that.

"We'll see, Charles," she said in a prissy little voice and removed his stroking hand from her forearm. "We'll just have to see." At least she now knew what Charles had been giving her such a complete and hurried course in lovemaking. And there was a glimmer now of leverage she could have over Charles. Yes, she'd try—but she'd just have to see about what he was suggesting.

They met Charles's brother John at a restaurant in a pavilion at the Palace of Fine Arts for lunch. John was little like his brother. He was as handsome and finely constructed as Charles, but he was more like William Hagen in disposition than he was like Charles. He was very shy and quiet. But he was Charles's brother, so Ada turned her full charm on him—and John was mesmerized by her. Before lunch was over, Ada was convinced that John would follow her anywhere or do anything for her that she asked him to do. She learned that John lived in the lake district of north-central Indiana, where he would be opening an insurance business of his own after the fair was closed. Both his employer, James Shaffer, whose automobile manufacturing plant was near Detroit, Michigan, and Shaffer's friend George Vaughn, whose department store was in Chicago, Illinois, were helping John get his firm established—so John was setting it up between those two cities.

After lunch, the three of them visited Charles's and John's employers at the Transportation and Industrial palaces. While the two brothers reported on their professional activities, both Shaffer and Vaughn, in turn, ogled Ada. Neither Charles nor Ada were surprised that the two of them were invited for dinner that evening at the home on Lindell Avenue in the nearby fashionable district that Shaffer and Vaughn had rented together for the duration of the fair.

That evening Charles spent as much time and energy on what Ada was wearing to dinner as he did on his own attire. And Charles was such a dandy about his own appearance that Ada had no illusions concerning how important this evening and her participation in it would be.

Both of the industrial giants were charming and full of intelligent conversation at dinner, conversation that treated Ada as an equal and as a worthy dinner companion. She was charmed and formed an instant liking for both of the men. They were both bigger than life, in stature as well as in intellect. And the two were ruggedly handsome. Both were from sturdy northern stock, Shaffer descending from Norwegian immigrants and Vaughn from French Canadians dating back to the pre-Lewis and Clark expedition fur trapping days around the Great Lakes. They could both be described as robust—not exactly rotund, but well fed. They carried their weight well, though, and both obviously believed in exercising the body as well as the mind.

And the men were very comfortable with each other. Ada knew that they must be very powerful men separately, but their power must expand exponentially when they went into projects together. Their deep and close friendship one for the other was evident if only from their decision to share a house during the fair. There was no evidence of a Mrs. Shaffer or Mrs. Vaughn anywhere in the house, but Ada was too polite to follow that line of questioning.

Ada was sitting beside Vaughn, who was at the head of the table, during dinner, and like many of the French Canadian stock, he was quite expressive with his hands. Expressive and free with his hands. Off and on during the meal, he had placed a warm, dry hand on her arm in expressing a point to her, and toward dessert, she found him stroking her forearm with his fingers as Charles had done earlier in the café. It all happened so naturally, and Ada enjoyed it, so she made no effort to withdraw. Thus welcomed, he had a strong grip under the table on her knee while they were finishing the meal with coffee.

From the other end of the table, James Shaffer announced that he was going into the parlor for a brandy and a cigar and anyone who cared too was welcome to join him. Charles quickly accepted the invitation, but George Vaughn said he wanted to tarry for a while and get better acquainted with Ada.

Ada thought that George was already becoming very well acquainted with her—his hand under the table had now moved a lot closer to her mound of Venus. He was soon to discover, she thought, with some sense of excited anticipation, that Charles's choice of her clothing for the evening did not include undergarments. She was past any qualms about this assignation, however. She found George Vaughn fascinating, with or without his department store. If she had any qualms, it was that James Shaffer had left, because she found him equally desirable.

After Shaffer and Charles had left the room, Vaughn turned to her and in a low, tremulous voice propositioned her. "Would you mind terribly, my dear, rising and coming here and sitting in my lap a bit. I must admit that I find you irresistible."

He stood and pulled his chair, which had arms on it, out away from the table after Ada had left her chair, and then he pulled her armless chair a bit away from the table as well. He sat in the chair she had vacated and then, when she came over and started to sit down in his lap with her back to his chest, he turned her. And as he pulled her down into his lap, facing him, he lifted her skirts.

Vaughn gasped, with a deep intake of breath, when his hands under her skirt discovered that she was naked of foundation garments. As he pulled her down into his lap and started rocking her pelvis back and forth on his groin on the now-stretching material of his trousers, he was panting and groaning. She looked into his eyes and they already seemed to be filled with semen. She knew in an instant that he would be strong and virile, and he didn't disappoint.

He pulled her bodice off her breasts and tried valiantly to swallow her nipples whole while he continued to rock her private parts on his engorging manhood. She loved what he was doing to her there and felt herself beginning to flow for him. She arched her back and lifted her chin and let her hair cascade about her bare shoulders.

Ada felt the store magnet fumbling around with the buttons on his trouser and then his prodigious member was free and he was rubbing it against her clitoris, getting it slathered with her flow and making her moan and sigh for him. Then he was entering her and plowing her at great length and rocking her back and forth now on a fat, throbbing spike.

She didn't know how long Shaffer had been standing in the room, watching them in their possessed lust, before she noticed him. But when she did, he was standing there, near the table, a sloppy grin on his face, his eyes hooded in arousal. He held both the brandy snifter and a smoking cigar in one hand, and he had his trousers fly open and his penis out and was stroking himself with the other hand. His member wasn't as big as Ada thought Vaughn's must be, but it was a large one.

At length, he came over behind Vaughn and leaned down, put his head on Vaughn's shoulder, and took Ada's lips in his. He was a fine, sensual kisser. Then he put his lips to Ada's ear, told her she was beautiful and then spoke. "Charles tells me of your lovemaking with your Kansas beau. I want you now too. May I have permission to join you two, Mam? May I mount?"

Ada was gasping, lost in the plowing that Vaughn was giving her. And she wanted Shaffer too. She simply rolled her eyes and smiled wanly in assent. Shaffer was behind her now, lifting her skirt and hunching his strong thighs over those of Vaughn. Vaughn reached under Ada's skirt and took one buttock in each hand and tilted her up as he spread them. Ada heard Shaffer spit into his hand and also rub his hand around in the flow that was being created in Vaughn's lap by their lovemaking. And then Shaffer slowly entered her ass with his engorged cock. She was being possessed by both powerful men now, powerful in position and powerful in lovemaking. They were sharing her deeply, rocking her back and forth. Vaughn was kissing her lips and her nipples. Shaffer was kissing the back of her neck and fondling her breasts in his strong, auto mechanics hands.

And then Vaughn and Shaffer with kissing each other on the lips too, across Ada's shoulder. And their hands were roaming among each other's clothing, and all three were groaning and moaning and sighing and fucking.

After both men had released themselves inside Ada, they continued rocking her on the chair in syncopated rhythm for several minutes. And then they unentangled themselves from her. Shaffer lifted Ada up in his arms and Vaughn led the way to what appeared to be their shared bedroom, with only a single gigantic bed in the center of it. Vaughn undressed Ada and Shaffer together and then Shaffer bent Ada over the bed and fucked her in the ass again while Vaughn undressed and watched. Ada was then handed over to Vaughn, who turned her on the bed and plowed her vagina, while Shaffer plowed Vaughn's ass.

When Charles tiptoed into the room and pulled Ada away from the ménage à trois and they quietly left, Shaffer had Vaughn on his belly in the center of the bed, and he was closing covering his colleague from behind and stroking his cock down between Vaughn's raised butt cheeks.

Ada had no way of knowing it then, but this was how a life-long three-way friendship was struck.

Later Charles told Ada how grateful he was that she had helped him with his career in this way and tried to give her cash. She didn't tell him that she had only done what she had enjoyed doing and would not have done it otherwise. But she did refuse the cash. She wasn't stupid, however. When his gratitude extended to wanting to buy her a new dress, she agreed readily. She refused his favorite, though, and picked a smart walking suit in sage accented in white linen. The dress Charles had picked had been very pretty too. But it had been cornflower blue—Hiram's favorite color. Ada would never again wear that color.



Wolf Creek Ch. 04



Ada was standing at the door of the school house, watching the children filing out and trying her best not to burst into tears. Watching the children file out. The children.

Returning to her life in Slater, Missouri, had been easy enough. All thanks to Aunt Martha. Her aunt hadn't been nearly as judgmental about Ada's fling with Charles Raven at the World's Fair as Ada thought she'd be. Her lips, indeed, had been pursued and her arms folded tightly across her chest when Ada arrived at her home. But there was a twinkle in her eye as well and she melted to Ada's florid description of the fair and of nearly everything that had happened there. Nearly everything. But Martha was no dummy. She had discerned much of what Ada hadn't said—at least where it concerned Charles Raven. There was a glow about Ada that could only have one explanation.

Martha had been young once herself—and hadn't held back herself a time or two. Ada's hurried departure from Slater had provided Martha the opportunity to explain away her absence by saying that Ada's father in Natoma, Kansas, had taken ill suddenly and the dutiful daughter had flown directly to his side until the crisis had, thank the Lord, passed. The explanation was so simple and so much in keeping of the disposition Ada showed to the world that even the hopeful emporium proprietor William Hagen had believed the story, completing understanding now why Ada had just disappeared from this store that day along with his old friend Charles Raven. Ada had, of course, received the news about her father that very day, while William was briefly in the storeroom, and she had rushed out to run to his side. And Charles had gone with her to smooth her journey.

Life had gone back to normal for Ada—or almost to normal. She had a job she enjoyed, an aunt who she could trust and confide in far more than she had ever assumed she would be able to do, and an ardent—well, steady and persistent—and highly eligible suitor in William Hagen. And the ache to experience the greater world wasn't even as pronounced now that she had experienced it. She, of course, wanted to experience it again, but now it had definition and was no longer the frustration it once had been. And the visit to the "greater world" had also encouraged her to take up a talent that had been discovered in her but had been disparaged and hindered by her strict minister father. Ada was a born artist, and all of the wonders she had seen in St. Louis had prompted her to take up her paints and canvasses again. It didn't matter that her subject matter was the relatively mundane landscapes around Slater. The ornateness she had seen at the World's Fair had given Ada a good eye for the simple strength of the landscape around her and, more important, the ability to reveal that simplicity and strength in art.

But Ada's world was destined to challenge and surprise her and deny her any promise of stability. Just as she was beginning to adjust to this world and a future with William Hagen, her world had collapsed inside her.

She let out a little, involuntary sob as the last of the children filed out of the schoolhouse. She busied herself briefly inside, setting up for the lessons of the next day, and then, with a sigh of resignation, a sigh that had a little catch of a sob in it, she closed the schoolhouse door and walked down the path to the street, easel and paints in hand, bound for an escape into the world of her art.

"Howdy, Miss Ada," Horace the postman sang out as he came up the road on his bicycle.

"Howdy back at you, Mr. Trap," Ada called to him.

He tipped his hat. "Mighty fine day, Miss. Ada, but it will turn cold soon enough. You off to Hagen's to be the first to snag one of those newfangled electric heaters that man from the fair over in St. Louis is pushing?"

That man from the fair? Ada stopped dead in her tracks. Her heart was racing. "What man, Mr. Trap? What heaters?"

"Don't you know? That fancy sales guy is back from the fair with all those new things they were introducing over there. He's at Hagen's now, settin' them up. Seems we're real privileged that he and Bill Hagen are close friends. We're about the first to get to buy those things that big Vaughn's Department Store in Chicago is merchandising from the fair."

Ada couldn't run fast enough. Luckily Mr. Trap had kept on down the road away from her on his bicycle or he would have been shocked to see her just drop her books, paints, and easel she was holding in her arms, tear her bonnet off, and run toward town, toward Hagen's Emporium, toward Charles.

Charles. Charles was here. Everything was all right now. Everything would work out.

She arrived at the doorway into Hagen's breathless and flushed. She couldn't have been more enticing to Charles Raven, who was alone in the display room, arranging the samples of wares he had brought for Hagen to sell.

There were no words. He looked up and he and Ada exchanged knowing looks, looks of flashing desire that stripped each of them naked to the other. They flew into each other's arms, and Charles just scooped Ada up in his arms and glided to the back of the store, through a door, and into the dimly lit storeroom. He set her down on her tiny feet, pushing her up against and wall, closely pinning her to the wall with his body, and they devoured each other's lips. He pulled away but just to kiss her eyelids and her cheeks and kissing the hollow of her neck. He was unbuttoning her dress and pushing her bodice down and then his lips were devouring her breasts, suckling her nipples. One hand was buried in her hair, now cascading down her back after he had undone her hair ribbon. The other hand was pressed into the small of her back, holding her to him.

Ada was moaning for him. Here at last. He had come back for her. Had come back to her. She pulled the front of her dress up to her waist, and undid, first, her own undergarments and then unbuttoned his fly. And she was stroking him, making him grow, pulling him to her.

Charles withdrew his hand from her hair and was fumbling around in his pocket.

"No need for that, my love," Ada whispered to him in a breathy voice. "No need for that now. Just love me. Make love to me."

But Charles already had the condom out and was sheathing himself.

When Ada felt the helmet of his cock at her entrance, she climbed his hips with her legs and threw her head back and gurgled in pleasure and at being possessed as he pushed his way, strongly and steadily, up into her. And then he was fucking her hard and wildly against the wall. And she entwined his neck with her arms and lost herself in the stroking, sliding her body up and down on his cock as she was pinned between his heaving breast and the storeroom wall, completely wanton and lost in the pleasure of the taking and the giving.

So lost were Ada and Charles in the eroticism of the moment that they didn't notice that William Hagen had returned to the emporium and was standing in the doorway between the sales floor and the semidark storeroom, paralyzed, watching on his shock and dismay, his whole world shattered.

They were alone once again when Charles had finished and had obligingly kept stroking into Ada until she too lurched in orgasmic satisfaction and relaxed in a sighing heap against the man she loved, the man who had come back to Slater to save her and take her back into the greater world. Everything would be fine now.

"I guess this means you are glad to see me," Charles murmured. He gave her that big beautiful smile and kissed her tenderly on the lips. But he continued holding her there against the wall, letting her feel him soften inside her."

"The French letter wasn't necessary, Charlie," she was whispering. "You came back to me. I knew you would. You wouldn't leave me like this. Not now."

"What do you mean it was unnecessary?" Charles asked, but not completely focused on what she was saying, what she was trying to tell him, once more stroking her hair and nibbling on an earlobe.

"I mean that I'm pregnant, Charlie. We're going to have a baby. I've been to the doctor, and he's confirmed it."

Charles was focused now. And then he laughed. "That old codger. Still has it in him. Who would have known."

Ada looked at him blankly. She had no idea what he meant and why he was saying this under the circumstances. Was he called the doctor an old codger? The doctor wasn't particularly old. In fact, Ada had been terrified and deeply embarrassed when he started telling her what was wrong with her, why she was feeling so poorly of mornings.

"The baby can't be mine, Ada," Charles said. And then that little laugh again, a bit more nervously now. "That's what these French letters are all about. I didn't get you with child. It had to be someone else."

"But you're the one I went to St. Louis with," Ada said. She was shocked and confused. "I assumed . . . and others will assume too . . ."

Yes, Charles thought, others might assume. His mind was racing. And Charles was nothing if not a quick thinker. He had the solution worked out in a flash. If it was Mrs. Raven Ada wanted to be, it would Mrs. Raven that she'd be. And, problem solved in his mind, his awareness returned to the now. In the now, he had a beautiful woman against a wall, sheathing his cock. His cock got the message and started to come to life again. He wanted her again now. And thinking that there was a life growing in that womb that his cock had been reaching for enflamed his ardor.

"Oh, Charles. What are we going to do?" Ada whispered.

"Don't worry, Ada. I'll take care of you. But right now what we're going to do is fuck again. And without a French letter. As you said, that's beyond being necessary now."

He withdrew from her and rolled the condom off his cock. Then he turned her, belly to the wall, and she pressed her palms and cheek against the rough surface of the wall, and Charles thrust his throbbing tool back up into her from the rear, alternating plowing her in her two entrances, enjoying immensely the skin on skin rubbing and stroking with no worries of the consequences while Ada moaned and groaned in ecstasy, being taken again by the well-endowed, masterful worldly man of her dreams.

Hours later, William Hagen, the man who had loved and, in his temerity lost, the love of his life, Ada, found the used condom on the floor of his storeroom and doubled over onto the floor in a sobbing fetal position as if a knife had been thrust into his belly. Within two weeks, much to the surprise of the entire town of Slater, including the unwitting Ada, Hagen had put his store and lumber yard on the market and was preparing to move west. He said he had his eye on a pristine valley running down from Wyoming into Colorado, where he planned to harvest the lumber that would help build the settling of the settling of Colorado that had recently taken off like a wild fire. It was a new life he wanted in an a virgin territory, he was saying. And although everyone he told this to thought they understood what he meant, they no inkling of the true depth of his meaning and motivation.

For her part, Ada had little time to contemplate either Hagen's abrupt change in the direction of his life—even less his motivations for the change. Ada was busy preparing to become Mrs. Raven.

On a cold, windy, rainy Saturday autumn morning in 1904, in an ironic twist of Ada's infatuation with the greater world, Ada Albin arrived at a small chapel in the appropriately named Warsaw, Indiana, to join in wedlock with a flabbergasted and busting with pride and gratitude Mr. Raven—Mr. John Raven. Charles's brother John.

Of all involved only the world-weary perceptive realist Aunt Martha seemed to fully realize and understand the ramifications of what had happened in Ada's world. And Aunt Martha could only purse her lips and fold her arms tightly across her chest. Ever the optimist as well, however, she also was determined just to bide her time and do what she could where she could. She loved her niece as deeply as she had her own sister. And she was determined that Ada would not be lost to mediocrity and life as her sister had suffered with the Reverend Albin.



Wolf Creek Ch. 05



Ada sighed, leaned her head back, and kissed the automobile manufacturer James Shaffer deeply on the lips and then turned back and watched Shaffer watching her in the mirror. Shaffer, naked, was sitting on a velvet-upholstered boudoir chair closely facing a wide, full-length mirror. 

They were in the master bedroom of the Highland Park lakeside mansion of James's department store owner friend, George Vaughn, on the banks of Lake Michigan in the northern suburbs of Chicago. Ada, also fully naked except for red lace-up dress boots, was sitting in his lap, also facing the mirror. He had his legs spread a bit, and Ada's left leg was lying on top of Shaffer's left leg, and her right leg was held higher above his right leg by the crook of Shaffer's right arm. His right hand was palming and squeezing Ada's left breast, the fingers of his left hand were rubbing inside her slit and flicking at her clitoris, and his cock was encased in her ass.

Shaffer was gently stroking up and down inside Ada, and from time to time he'd elevate her pelvis with his thighs so that both he and she could watch the root of his cock sliding in and out of her, at sight that enhanced both of their level's of pleasure and desire. The fingers of Ada's left hand were engaged with those Shaffer was rubbing her clitoris with, alternating between moving his fingers with hers to heighten the pleasure he was giving her and moving her fingers to touch where the root of his hard and thick cock was stroking up into her. He was making deep, rattling, and gasping noises at the base of his ragged breathing as both of them watched themselves giving and receiving a long-practiced pleasure.

The third person in the room, George Vaughn, was standing next to the mirror, also fully naked, and stroking his erection as he watched James and Ada take their pleasure with each other. He had been able to stage this occasional ménage à trois because his wife was somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on a ship en route to a shopping spree on the European continent,

After a few moments of voyeurism, Vaughn came over to the chair and crouched down, his thighs on either side of Shaffer's, and Shaffer accommodated his friend by elevating Ada's pelvis and by spreading the lips of her vagina wide with his fingers. Vaughn's cock was then slowly fed into the shared Ada. Ada panted and moaned heavily as she always did as the two friends bottomed themselves in her and started a well-practiced rhythm of double penetration.

For some twenty minutes there was only the sound of bass and baritone groaning and grunting and a higher, feminine-pitched moaning, sighing, and purring. And then, nearing mutual ejaculation, Shaffer and Vaughn became more wildly active, kissing Ada's lips and neck in succession and each other across her shoulders, and using their hands to squeeze her breasts and work on each other's nipples and to lift and sink her body on theirs in ever-quicker motion until Ada's cries of fully being taken and of flowing inside both of her passages marked the shared climax. As the three cooled down, they stayed there in front of the mirror and murmured endearments to each other and explored each other's curves and crevices with their hands.

And then, in what had almost become a ritual, as the two men slowly became aroused again, Vaughn pulled Ada up from Shaffer's lap and carried her over to the edge of the bed, laid her gently down there on her back, spread her legs, and slowly entered her once more with his reengorged cock and fucked her while Shaffer came behind Vaughn, entered the department store mogul's ass with his cock, and, in turn, fucked his friend. And, as their periodic meetings of the fourteen years that had now transpired since their first three-way coupling all ended, Ada eventually left the two men on Vaughn's bed, entwined in each other's arms, Shaffer fucking Vaughn, and went to her bath and then to her own room for the night—alone.

The fourteen years of Ada's marriage had actually been very happy and rewarding ones. John Raven had proven to be a gentle and devoted husband and, although no Charles Raven in bed, had been devoted to giving Ada full satisfaction there too. And Ada had been happy with John's lovemaking. But she had always wanted more and more variety, so she had continued to find opportunities to meet with James Shaffer and George Vaughn in either Detroit or Chicago at least twice a year during the last decade and a half. She also had continued to find opportunities to be taken by Charles. Shaffer and Vaughn were just men she enjoyed coupling with—together. And she had matured considerably since she was smitten blind by Charles. She had grown to be able to see him as the self-centered opportunist and dandy that he was. But being able to see through him didn't mean that she wasn't interested in continuing to couple with him at opportune moments, usually just beyond public notice, which excited them both, and hurriedly and wildly and overwhelmed with mutual lust. Charles was a masterful cocksman, and Ada had not been willing to give that up. And she didn't give it up right up until Charles was killed in Europe the previous winter, his World War I American volunteer Lafayette Escadrille airplane having been riddled full of German bullet holes high over the rolling Belgium countryside.

Now her extramarital lovemaking solely entailed James Shaffer and George Vaughn, which only made her stolen nights with them all the more valuable. Not that she didn't receive offers of fuller activity. At thirty-three, Ada was still a beautiful, nubile woman, who any hot-blooded man would lust after. And she and her family had, to this point, been blessed and lived in high visibility in the northern Indiana region. John's insurance agency had been highly successful and had brought them a large house in Warsaw and an even more sprawling house on the banks of Winona Lake, just a short distance outside of the town, where they spent their fall and spring weekends and the summer months. John had weak lungs, though, and they also spent much time on a dude ranch in Arizona, where Ada delighted in "roughing it" and helping with the cooking and the running of the ranch while they were in residence. It was also during their sojourns in Arizona that Ada learned much of Native American remedies for illnesses and wounds from an old Indian woman who lived by a usually dry gulch not far from the ranch house and where she acquired an individualistic style of painting western landscapes and of revealing the essence of the western spirit in oils.

Ada had been blessed with four children, beginning with her eldest son, Dan, born in 1905, and followed in three-year intervals by another son, John junior, and a daughter, Charlotte. Hugh, the baby of the family, was barely three years old now.

John had served several terms in the state assembly and was now running for the position of attorney general of Indiana, with heavy financing from old friends and acquaintances of he and his brother, Charles, including the industrialists James Shaffer and George Vaughn. His campaign was winding down now toward an April election, and this was why Ada had managed to slip away for an assignation with Shaffer and Vaughn in Chicago. John was on a campaign stump in the southern region of the state.

John wasn't the only successful politician in the family. Ada herself was entering her four year as the elected town clerk of records of Warsaw. She had proven to have a fine sense of business and management as well as an independent streak and a determination to be a person in her own right, not just an appendage of a successful husband.

Ada returned to Warsaw a few days before the election and a day before John arrived home. They both had their pictures taken at the polls to appear on the front of the Warsaw newspaper the day after the election to help celebrate John's victory. The election was on a Tuesday. They celebrated his victory on Wednesday. On the following Friday, a gloomy and rainy day, John was dead. The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 and 1919 killed more than half a million in the United States alone, and over fifty million in Europe, quickly and with almost no forewarning. The disease had spread from Europe to the United States on the transport ships brining America's doughboys back from the First World War. John's weak lungs had been his undoing. He was dead within a day of having gone down with a sore throat, headaches, and a fever, which even the doctors had initially attributed to his frenetic campaigning and sudden release from this activity.

As John was gurgling his last, dying despite Ada's valiant attempts to use every Native American defense she knew of against what was essentially was a European disease, John Junior, Charlotte, and baby Hugh were sent to their beds with sore throats, headaches, and fevers. Luckily, Dan had been at the lake where John had arranged work for him with a wealthy family from the north in what seemed to be a successful attempt to stem the boy's rebellious and resentful nature. And for some reason no one then living at the lake came down with the mysterious disease.

On Sunday, as the funeral cortege rolled away from the family home in a downpour that had continued from the previous Thursday and that had the roads awash, the doctors said that there was little they could do for the children and that they probably would all be dead before Ada returned from her husband's burial. Ada herself was too exhausted and grief-stricken to do as she wanted at the moment—to remain with and administer to those still clinging precariously to life rather than follow the dead, even though it was her husband. But they were public people and those controlling the funeral just bundled her into a funeral wagon and carried her off to the graveyard.

When Ada returned, baby Hugh still lived, and Ada adamantly refused even to leave the funeral carriage. She ordered the house servants to bundle Hugh up and get in the carriage, and they just flew out to the lake house as fast as the carriage could carry them, where Ada sat, nursing her baby until he pulled through the crisis. The overwhelming chore of caring through every moment for her youngest son was the only thing that helped her survive the loss of her middle son and only daughter.

It was a good thing she had left Warsaw, because the rains had stopped and a lantern had been turned over in the town hall, and a quarter of the town of Warsaw burnt to the ground that night—including the town hall, the family's insurance agency, and the Ravens' town house. Within a week, Ada's blessed, idyllic life had turned to dust. Her husband and two of her children were dead. Her house and the family business were burnt to the ground—and whatever she could recover from the business would have to go to paying off the insurance of the other buildings that had burned, because, of course, everyone in Warsaw had insured with John's company. And even Ada's own job had evaporated. What town needed a clerk of records when the town hall, which houses all of the town's records, had burnt to a crisp?

The first one who appeared at Ada's door at the lake house to console her was the town's mayor, the highly odious Henry Denbo. He was quick to offer her the position of his mistress and to pay her a monthly stipend for her sexual favors. He was so full of himself that he actually believed this was the ultimate answer to all of Ada's problems and that she only had not hopped into his bed all of the times he had propositioned her because she had a husband who was so highly successful. Well, now her husband was dead and she was broke. Ada bounced him out of the house on his tail, but he didn't leave before telling her she no longer had a job because the town no longer had a need for a clerk of records—but that he might be able to find a paying job of some sort for her if and when she reconsidered his offer of help.

Ada was like a zombie for a week, staying alive herself only to nurse her baby past the crisis. By the end of that week, however, her Aunt Martha had arrived from Slater, Missouri, and had organized the house and started to bring some semblance of order back to Ada's life. All but two of the house servants were no longer there. They would have stayed on with Ada's family, even knowing the family's income had evaporated, but all but two of them had contracted the flu themselves and been taken away from the lake house. And two of them, the less robust ones, were also now gone.

Ada had been so focused on trying to keep young Hugh alive that, beyond being assured that her eldest son was still well and with the other family across the lake, she had not given much thought to Dan. But on Tuesday of the second week Dan appeared at the lake house—in the company of George Vaughn.

Momentarily, Ada wondered if she also had now contracted the flu. The two worlds she had so earnestly kept separate were now standing in front of her, and the strong resemblance between George Vaughn and her eldest son were unmistakable. Her shame had found her on the steps of her lakeside home. Her life in Indiana could never again be what it once was—happy and secure. 



Wolf Creek Ch. 06



Ada had nearly become unhinged at seeing her Chicago industrialist lover at her doorstep in Indiana, not the least because he stood beside his natural son—her eldest son, Dan. When Dan had been conceived, Ada was too innocent to know that Vaughn was the father, but Charles had set her straight on that. While pointing out that he couldn't be the father because he'd always used a condom when they had sex, he also said he knew that Vaughn and Shaffer hadn't used condoms when they shared Ada at the St. Louis World's Fair. As Ada hadn't had sex with anyone but those three men at the time and since, as Charles carefully explained to her after having her describe all that she'd done with Vaughn and Shaffer—that only Vaughn had engaged in sex with her that could impregnate her—it became obvious that Vaughn was Dan's natural father.

John had always known he wasn't the father, but he had assumed it was Charles—and it had resulted in strained relations between John and Charles henceforth. It had also led to an unintentional, but natural, holding back in John's fathering of Dan that had resulted in Dan growing up resentful and rebellious. And as Dan grew into his early teens, it became obvious to Ada from her son's visage and his mannerisms that he was George's son. She had always been fearful that John would someday remember his brother's former employer as well and would also figure it out. But he had been so sure the father was Charles that he was blind to the truth.

Turning Dan over to Aunt Martha as quickly as she could without raising the suspicions of either her son or her aunt, Ada took Vaughn down to the bench on the family's lake dock to try to make sense of what was happening, what George was doing here with her son.

"Charles eventually told me, Ada. And I'm glad he did. I have no children. My wife was never able or willing to have them."

Ada was silent, confused, both hating and loving Charles for having passed her secret on.

"So, I've had a house here on the lake for several years," George continued. "I took every opportunity I could to come to the lake and to watch my son grow up from a distance. I didn't tell you because I didn't want to upset you or your life. I could see that you were happy with your husband. I didn't want to make claims on you. But I couldn't help myself; I had to see my son."

Ada could see the rightness of this and they spoke for several minutes in tones of mutual respect and support. But eventually Vaughn got to the central point.

"I want to underwrite your expenses, Ada. At least until you can get on your feet."

Ada flared up then in defensiveness and her strong sense of self-reliance. The couplings with Shaffer and Vaughn happened because she enjoyed them. She would not be a kept woman—not of Vaughn any more than of that loathsome mayor, Denbo.

George quickly noticed the change in her stance. "Just until you can find something that will cover your own needs. I know you want to be independent and I respect that. I know you have considerable skills and will be able to take care of yourself and your baby. But you've been knocked off your feet. Most women would have gone crazy from what has happened to you in less than two weeks."

"Take care of myself and the baby," Ada said dully, getting to center of why Vaughn was here tonight even before he had figured out how to broach the subject.

"Yes. I'm the one Dan has been working for here at the lake, Ada. John remembered who I was, although I had to work through intermediaries. Dan looks so much like me that I couldn't let John see me again. St. Louis was so far in the past, I had to hope that he didn't really remember what I looked like. Charles made me promise not to let John know I was Dan's real father. Charles had told John that he was the father and that he had forced himself on you. He didn't want anything done that would make John worship you less than he did."

Ada began to cry, but she fought back the tears. This was no time to collapse. What they were negotiating here was just too important. This was her son. She had lost two children this week. She knew what George was leading up to. Could she afford to lose another child? Did she really have the right not to? What was best for Dan?

"Dan and I are getting along splendidly, Ada. I'm sure you have noticed that he has become happier and far easier to live with since he has been working for me out here. You are going to have your hands full with nursing the baby back to health and getting back on your feet financially. Let me take Dan back to Chicago with me—as a business arrangement. Indenturing him to the department store business. Just an old friend of John's helping out a family in need, taking their eldest son under his wing and teaching him the business. He's my son too, Ada. I need someone to teach my business to as much as your family needs to provide the best opportunities for Dan in difficult circumstances."

"I don't know," Ada said, churning the options, all of the angles over in her mind. "Dan will think I'm abandoning him."

"No he won't, Ada. We've had a long discussion about this. If anything, his only reservation is the feeling that he will be abandoning you. But we've talked it out. I know he aches to go. And only a adverse reaction from you would change how he feels about it."

One last hurdle. But one that should have been obvious to Vaughn.

"But your wife, George. She'll know the instant she sees Dan. It will ruin everything."

"She hasn't come back from Europe, Ada. And she says she isn't coming back. I don't think I'll ever see her again. We've never really been man and wife. You know why. You of all people know why. And so now I'll be alone. Unless I can have my son with me for a few years."

Ada's plight in the weeks after she had helped see Dan off to Chicago with George Vaughn did not improve much. Thankfully, baby Hugh returned to gurgling smiles and rosy cheeks, but Mayor Denbo didn't let up on his pressure and on his meddling in Ada being able to find employment. As it was, it took most of her time to clear up John's insurance business. The only good thing is that their remaining assets had covered the payouts for the fire damage policies—but only just—and she hadn't been able to keep the lake house. George had told her she could move into his house across the lake, but she would only do so as a last resort.

She was at her most desperate when the letter arrived. Her old beau from Slater, Missouri, William Hagen, had heard of her plight and wondered if she would be interested in helping him with his own plight. His saw mill in Colorado had done so well that a town had grown in the valley below where he was taking the timber and he had opened an emporium there. But he couldn't run the saw mill and the emporium at the same time, and the new town also needed a postmistress. If Ada could get to Colorado, Hagen sure could use her help in running the emporium and post office.

Ada almost cried when she read the postmark on the envelope. It was from Slater, Colorado. He had named the town after the one where they had met and that, ever so briefly, offered so much promise to them both, together.

Ada half thought she would accept the offer if there was any way she could get her household out to Colorado. But it wasn't like she could just pack a suitcase and bundle up baby Hugh and walk out there. She had some possessions she just couldn't leave behind, even if she had a way to transport just the baby and a suitcase that far. Colorado was still primitive; she wouldn't give up some of what she had accumulated of the greater world for anything.

And how had William Hagen heard so fast of her plight anyway? She only had to look at the twinkle in Aunt Martha's eyes to figure that one out. It was obvious that Aunt Martha had contacted him on Ada's behalf. What was less obvious was that Aunt Martha had been in continued contact with William Hagen ever since he had left for Colorado. And she had done everything she could to keep some spark of connection between Hagen and her niece.

There were limits to Aunt Martha's pulling of strings in the background, however, and no one ever knew what led to the appearance in front of the lake house the next day of two Shaffer-manufactured Golden Eagle touring sedans, with drivers who had instructions to drive Ada and her household anywhere in the world the automobiles could reach.

Not more than six weeks after John Raven's death and the total collapse of Ada's well-ordered life, she, baby Hugh, Aunt Martha, and two drivers, one young and handsome and the other not so young, but immediately taken with Aunt Martha, were rolling over progressively rougher roads across Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and then across the lower swath of Wyoming, through Cheyenne and then Laramie, and, finally, on dirt roads through towering mountains to a dusty town of Baggs, where they would turn directly south and drop down to the brand new town at the mouth of a mountain valley of Slater, constructed out of the wood from Hagen's saw mill up in the high timber in the Rocky Mountains.

By the time they entered Nebraska, the couples had just naturally paired off between the two automobiles, based on their ages and what they were comfortable talking about. The area they were moving through was largely unsettled and there were several nights they had to pull off the road and sleep under the loaded high-chassis touring sedans manufactured by Ada's good friend James Shaffer.

Aunt Martha and the older driver, Thaddeus, were the first ones who gave into the inevitability of their circumstance and human nature.

The night was warm, with a gentle breeze as the two automobiles sat beside a slow-moving shallow river just to the west of North Platte, Nebraska. The sky had been cloudless, the moon full, and there were shooting stars that amazed and delighted the two couples as they sat somewhat apart from each other and murmured ever-more-personal thoughts on the lives they had lived and the experiences they still wanted to have. Ada hardly noticed when Martha and Thaddeus left her and the young, handsome driver Peter Fair. But it wasn't long before she could hear the rustling and giggling under one of the Golden Eagles. And then the moaning and the panting and the unmistakable sounds of fornication.

Both she and Pete were blushing and their discussion was becoming more strained. But Ada felt chills going up her arm when Pete touched her there and then began to stroke her arm. He must have felt the chills too. He was kissing her on the cheek and in the hollow of her neck and then on the eyelids and the mouth. His hands were fumbling with the buttons on her dress and then he had freed her breasts and he was fondling her breasts and rubbing her nipples. Ada felt herself begin to flow. Pete was far younger than she was, and achingly handsome and hard bodied. It had been weeks since she had been fucked, and she was a hot blooded woman. She had not gone this long since Charles had first taken her in his hotel room in Slater, Missouri, and good thirteen years earlier.

She wanted Pete. She realized she had wanted him since they had rolled into Iowa, two days earlier. She unbuttoned the rest of her dress and opened it and pulled off her own undergarments and unbuttoned Pete's fly. She found that he was already hard. Long and thick and hard. He obviously had wanted her for some time too. She was melting. He was so hard bodied and muscled and ardent. She hadn't had a young, throbbing cock inside her for years. She wanted that. She wanted it now. She had held herself so tightly in reserve these past few weeks to maintain her sanity. She wanted release. She wanted a hot, throbbing cock inside her. She wanted Pete.

She was initiating everything now. Pete had no illusions about what she wanted and whether she wanted it. She was flowing for him, and his fingers could tell that she quickly was ready and able to take him. He rolled her onto her back, their pelvises together and she opened her legs to him. He was on his knees between her legs and positioned his cock and pushed it inside her just enough to gain purchase. And then he held her hands over her head by the wrists and slowly pushed inside her and then stroked deep and slowly. Ada made her hips move in rhythm with his stroking, and Pete lost himself in the moment and began fucking her hard and fast. It obviously had been some time since he'd done this as well and that he had wanted her from the first moment he'd seen her.

Having set this motion, Aunt Martha and Thaddeus went quiet underneath the Golden Eagle and, at length, Thaddeus could be heard snoring contentedly. But the younger couple, Ada and the virile Pete, fucked on. After taking her in the missionary position, Peter turned her on her belly and lifted her onto her knees and took her from behind. And then when Pete had tired, Ada pushed him onto his back and she straddled him and rode him to a third ejaculation.

Despite the vigorous exercise, Ada and Pete were up and preparing the cars for the last stage of their journeys before Martha and Thaddeus rolled out from under the Golden Eagle—on opposite sides. Thankfully, the baby had slept through the night, the first night since he had taken ill that he hadn't awakened in the night and required attention. And there was nothing for the rest of that long day on the road to upset his well-rested good disposition, as, although none of the four adults referred to anything that had happened in the night, they were all humming happily to themselves the whole day long.



Wolf Creek Ch. 07



James Shaffer's Golden Eagle touring sedans were made to last—on the macadam roads of the midwest. They were really challenged by the mud and gravel paths those in Wyoming in 1918 called highways. The sedan Pete, Ada, and little Hugh were traveling in veered off the side of the road and down a shallow embankment and broke an axle not more than fifty miles shy of Baggs, Wyoming. There was nothing for the little caravan to do but for Pete and Ada to stay with the broken automobile and for Aunt Martha and Thaddeus to take Hugh and struggle on to Slater and bring back help to unload the sedan for the last leg of their journey.

It was a mild day and Pete and Ada went down the embankment and sat on either side of the sedan's radiator. For the first time they realized just how beautiful the landscape was toward the south. The partially snow-capped Medicine Bow mountains, a side extension of the Rockies, were poking toward the sky. Where the timberline changed to gray rock and trailings stood out real well, and the trailings of snow reflected in the morning sunlight.

"Whoowee, it's getting hot out here," Pete said. Then he stripped off his shirt, and he was leaning his long, lithe body back on the hood of the sedan next to Ada.

She looked over at the young man who had made love to her under the stars throughout the night just a few nights ago, and she began to melt. She hadn't any intention of giving into this temptation again. She'd only done it then because the world had moved too fast for her. She was a widow at thirty-three, displaced from her home, and two of her children and her lover dead in almost simultaneous events. Her life was suddenly over, but she felt entirely too young just to fade away. She had been loved frequently and well, and she had clung to the first young, hard male body that had come her way. That had been Pete. And now, when she looked at his muscled torso in the light of day, she could hardly hold herself back. She had fully intended on giving herself to William Hagens when she reached Colorado if he wanted her still, out of gratitude for his saving of her and providing an opportunity for a whole new life. She has lost out on her chance with William before in Missouri; she couldn't lose out now. But she looked over at Pete and his beautiful body and he was giving her "that" look.

"You were the best ever the other night, darlin'."

"Please. I just lost control the other night, Pete—egged on by what we were hearing Martha and Thaddeus do."

He was licking his lips and giving her a dreamy look and running the palms of his hands around his torso.

"Look, this just won't do, Pete," Ada said in a husky whisper. "I'm too old for you for one. I'm thirty-three and a widow already. You need someone younger, someone closer to your age."

Pete moved one hand over to her arm and he was stroking the down on her forearm now. The other hand was rubbing his crotch through his worn, low-slung jeans.

"You rode with me all night long, darlin'. There isn't anything old and used up about you. I figure you're just about exactly what I need."

"Stop that, Pete," Ada said, trying to be cross. But her voice cracked, showing the emotion he was pulling out of her. She moved his hand from her forearm, but he put it right back and she didn't move it this time. He rolled toward her, and the hand that had been rubbing his crotch snaked over and cupped her mound through her dress, quickening her flow.

"Oh, no, Pete, we mustn't. They'll be back at any moment."

"Gawd, woman. They won't be back for hours. We can fuck until sunset and they won't find us doing it."

He had raised his hand from between her legs and was fumbling at the buttons of her dress at her bodice.

She just gave up and in a weary voice said, "Here let me do that. You'll tear this dress, and I don't have all that many with me."

As she unbuttoned her bodice and exposed her breasts, she heard Pete give a chuckle, even as he was pulling up her skirt and running his free hand underneath.

"What's so funny?" she asked.

"Your titties, Mam. They look just like those peaks over there in Colorado. You go'n let me climb them?"

"Yes, yes, anything you want," Ada said in a small voice. But even as Pete buried his face between her breasts and his fingers reached their goal and started to invade and prepare her for his strong, young dick, Ada was determining that she certainly would have sex after this when it pleased her not when the man had to have it; from now on it was going to be on her own terms. But for now, she would let herself go and enjoy this virile young man.

Pete pulled her over onto him then, her back encased by his naked torso. She moved her hand down to his and guided his fingers to her clitoris, thinking that she might as well train him in what a woman would most want, while his other hand cupped and squeezed her breasts and his lips were buried in the hollow of her neck.

It wasn't long until he had his cock free from his jeans and was pumping Ada from the rear as they lay on the hood of the broken Golden Eagle and Ada watched hawks lazily circle the forested area between the road and peaks of the Medicine Bow range.

Afterward, Pete pointed out that they would be more comfortable and could become more naked in that cubbyhole in the backseat of the Golden Eagle where they had stashed little Hugh among the stacks of Ada's now-meager possessions.

And Pete was right. It wasn't until nearly sundown that William Hagen and Thaddeus and some men from the saw mill come up in a big, open-backed truck and a Ford sedan to retrieve Ada. Ada and Pete were long spent with each other by then, but Hagen could clearly see—or could see well enough to have serious suspicions—some sort of electricity going on between the two as soon as he drove up and saw them.

Ada was all for just unloading the Golden Eagle and leaving the now-useless hulk where it was, but William insisted on taking the time and effort to lift the chassis, stored goods intact, on the back of the truck and taking the whole shebang back with them.

"Why, William?" Ada asked wearily. "It's just useless junk now."

"Nothing is just useless junk out here, Ada," William said in a serious voice as he was giving her a steady stare. "There isn't anything here that can't be useful again, that doesn't deserve another chance to contribute and have a purpose. No matter how broken down they've become."

And when he said that, Ada felt like William was looking right through her, that he knew more about the essence of who she was than even she did. And it put steel in her back where only hours before she had felt so tempted, weak, and out of control.

"Well, that's it," William said when they'd tied the Golden Eagle down as best they could in the truck bed. "Time to go home."

"Home," Ada whispered, and she lifted her weary eyes to the now-black silhouettes of the Medicine Bow Mountains against the night sky.

That night they only went as far as Slater, just across the Wyoming border in Colorado, where William Hagen got Ada, Martha, and Hugh bedded down in his store and the rest of the men dispersed around in various hay sheds.

The next morning, the weather glorious, with sun shining and temperature nearly perfect, they continued on down the winding mountain valley into the heart of Colorado along a fast-running stream in the valley floor just west of the rise up into the Medicine Bow Range.

"Does the stream have a name?" Ada asked. "It's lovely. It's looks so cool and refreshing."

"We call it Wolf Creek," Hagen answered. "It forks just up a ways where I've started building your cabin. And the smaller stream runs down from the saw mill camp, which is another half hour's drive up into the mountains to the east."

"My cabin? You're building me a cabin."

"Yep. It's almost finished, at least the outside is. Most of the first floor is river rock from the stream; the upper story is timber. It will be a nice house, Ada. We have everything we need in the way of building supplies up at the mill. Not much finished inside, though. I thought you'd want to have a hand in that yourself. Of course if you want to live in Slater, so you won't have to drive or ride into there every day . . ."

"No, the cabin sounds fine . . . at least for a while. It will be good to have some peace and quiet in a beautiful setting like this at least until I can get myself grounded again. But it's really too much, William. You are being too good to me." Ada was already feeling the guilt of having Pete nearby. Less than a day here, and she was already into complications.

"Don't complain to me," William said, a big grin on his face. "I'm just doing with Martha tells me I have to do. If you want anything changed, go talk to her. She's a real bully."

Ada loved the cabin, which was more of a house than what she imagined a cabin would be out here in this wilderness. It was set in a little meadow in a depression lower than the road to its east. Two branches of Wolf Creek forked near the house, with one branch coming up from the south on the valley floor and the other cascading down the mountainside to the west from above Hagen's saw mill up in the tall timber area.

There was a wooden section on rock foundation turned gable-ended toward the front of the house on the left, with a wide rock chimney running up the side of the house with a double-hung window to the left. The front door, under an overhang porch was just to the right of the chimney in a pitched-roof section running toward the south. There was a window to the right of the door. And there was another window on the second floor in the gable end to the left of the chimney. The roof was already on the building; it was tin, painted red.

Inside was a central living area, with an L to the left and with a room in the back corner that could be used as a bedroom. Another small room was off to the right from the front door. The dining area was raised three steps in back of the living area and there was a start of a balcony railing between the two sections. The kitchen was in the back corner to the right. Stairs went up to three more rooms and a washroom under the sloping roof above.

The land sloped down toward the back to the creek, so there was a basement underneath that was mostly above ground in back. Ada did a double take when William took her down to the cellar, as a stream offshoot from Wolf Creek ran right through the middle of the basement.

"What?" Ada exclaimed.

"Congratulations, you have the best refrigerator in the valley," William explained with a chuckle. "This water will always be cold and running. You can preserve your milk and other provisions in here just like you had electricity. I'm afraid it will be some time before we can get real electricity into here, though. But do you like it Ada? Do you like the house?"

"Oh, William, I love it." She threw her arms around William and hugged him tighter than she had done since that disastrous picnic back on the Missouri River a decade and a half earlier. And William's eyes sparkled.

"I'll have the men start bringing in your goods, Ada, and we'll get you some basic furniture. But while they're doing that, why don't you and Martha look around the place? You have a little land here, but most of the land around you belongs to a big rancher over to the south, up the valley. If you come over to the window here, you can see his house and barn spread up there on that knoll below Hahn's Peak. His place is called the Wolf Creek Ranch. Thousands and thousands of acres. A lot of cattle. But you won't want to try to get too friendly with him. He's a mean son of a gun, and he's got some wild sons he doesn't try too hard to control. His wife isn't anyone you're likely to want to associate with either."

Ada was beyond weary, so she took William up on his offer, and she and Aunt Martha took little Hugh, who was fussy now, probably for the first time feeling some permanence in the offing and thus able to enjoy the privilege of being more demanding than downright terrified, down to a cottonwood grove where the two branches of the creek met and they all just lay out in the grass and snoozed.

Ada was awakened by hammering sounds coming from the house, and she made her way up there just in time to see William fashion the last of the four defunct Golden Eagle tires into the balcony railing between her new living room and dining room. Looking around, she saw that bits and pieces of the rest of the automobile had already been inlaid in nooks and crannies around the house and remade into useful hooks and brackets and such.

Ada fell into William's arms, laughing, as William told her that she now would have memories of her journey to Colorado about her in her new home forever. At this moment, Ada only had eyes for William, a much more playful and masterful William than she had remembered in her earlier life. Martha arrived in the house, Hugh in tow, and joined in the mirth. She was beaming at William and Ada in turn, her delight in how well her planning was working out obvious to all.

Standing off to the side, Pete drank all of this in, realizing for the first time just how intricate Martha's planning had been, and also realizing that he really wasn't part of Martha's plans. Thus, when William, for reasons of his own, offered Pete a full-time, live-in job up at the saw mill, Pete went quietly. He'd had his fun with Ada. And who knows, he might have occasion to have fun with her again. And, in the meantime, there must be more willing women up here in the mountains, ones that did come with quite as much history and baggage that Ada apparently came with. 



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.



Wolf Creek Ch. 09



Ada was laughing and tipping a champagne flute to her lips as James Shaffer massaged her nipples with soap bubbles. They were reclining in George Vaughn's huge bathtub in the master suite of his Michigan lakeside house. It had only been three hours since Ada and George had stood on the train platform in Chicago and seen their nineteen-year-old son, Daniel, off to his first year at the prestigious Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ada fortuitously was in Chicago attending an opening of her first one-woman art show, an opening that had gone fantastically well.

George had been busting with pride the previous evening when the four of them—Vaughn and Ada and their good friend, the Detroit automobile manufacturer James Shaffer, and the youthful Daniel Raven were sharing a last dinner at George's mansion—Dan still being completely unaware still that Vaughn was his biological father. Dan's training through the Vaughn department store system had been a great success, and George was effusive in bragging to Ada and James what a good head for business Dan had. His faith in Dan's instincts had actually now overshadowed the counseling James Shaffer gave him in finance.

"The business prospects in this country couldn't be brighter," Shaffer had boomed enthusiastically in describing the national investment environment in the country late in 1924. "I say it's time for you to scrape together all of the capital you can find, George, and get it into the stock market. You'll make millions."

"I've already made millions," Vaughn said dryly, "and young Daniel here tells me he thinks we should actually concentrate more on our bread and butter. And that would be literal," Vaughn said with a chuckle. "He says we should diversify our department store holdings and even get some of them into the European and South American markets and that we should concentrate in enlarging the supply chain of basic consumer goods and get them to our customers faster and cheaper—that we shouldn't be putting our money into stock market paper at all."

"Well, I know your Daniel has done wonders in learning your trade, but . . ."

"Oh, let's not get into that further on Dan's last night here, James," Vaughn had cut his friend off good-naturedly. "In fact, let's celebrate that Dan's mother, Ada, can be here in Chicago for an opening of her art just when she can also have the privilege of seeing her son off to business school. I've promised both her and Dan that he'll become manager of one of our biggest stores when he's finished at Wharton. Let's drink to that."

And they did drink to that, and both Vaughn and Shaffer were good enough to keep their hands off of their shared lover, Ada, that night in respect for Dan's presence.

But as soon as Dan was on the train, the three long-time lovers returned to Vaughn's mansion posthaste and in high spirits. Shaffer had been the first one to sink into the warm, bubbled bath water, and Ada had then come in and settled in their long-established positions, Ada nestled into Shaffer's lap with his hard cock spearing her ass passage. Vaughn stood, naked, by the tub for several minutes, watching his two favorite people writhing around in the tub and sending waves of soap-iced water sloshing up the sides. Then, he took Ada's champagne flute from her hands and put it down along with his on the marble top of the sink counter and entered the tub, facing the reclined Ada and Shaffer. He spread Ada's slender legs wide and lifted them to rest on the lip of the tub and then, his knees encasing the hips of both of his lovers, he moved into her and slowly penetrated her vagina with his hard cock.

Ada was once more being taken together, fully, by the two millionaire industrialists, and she was thoroughly enjoying the taking—as always. Shaffer and Vaughn made love to her and to each other until all were exhausted and then they left Ada to soak comfortably in the tub and withdrew to Vaughn's room, as always, to play out their passion for each other.

Ada stayed for a glorious two weeks in Chicago, reveling in the success of her art show, reacquainting herself with the "greater world" that had always beckoned to her, shopping her heart out, and being introduced by Vaughn and Shaffer to a whole new world of art patrons to buy her paintings and giants of the art and literary scene to stroke her ego and sweep her into their circle. Ada loved her adopted Colorado valley, but she wanted it all. She wanted this new-found art and literary scene as well.

She had been living with Frank Wolf at the Wolf Creek Ranch for three years now. He had divorced his wife for desertion and, completely understanding Ada's fear of his two wild sons, had settled their inheritances already—each with a ranch spread as far away from the core of the ranch as possible—and had banished them from his remaining holdings. There was only Jessie to worry about now anyway. Festus had stopped at the Brook House after they had left what they thought was a dying father and had stolen Ada's Golden Eagle and turned it over in a snow bank. They hadn't found his body among the wreckage until the spring thaw months later. Through the stipulation of the land division, ownership of his ranch reverted to his father.

In the time she'd been at the Wolf Creek Ranch, Ada had transformed the main compound into a place of beauty, watered by the new well Frank had drilled to replace the one with the contaminated water. She also had at least partially transformed Frank into something less than an mean-spirited land baron. From the moment his divorce decree had been signed, Frank had pestered Ada to marry him, but thus far she had not done so. She did not hold back from him in bed, but she wasn't ready for another marriage yet. She still dreamed of the greater world. And to Frank's credit, he did nothing to try to crush or control those dreams. He had been his idea that she go on tour with her paintings and hadn't batted an eye at the arrangements for her to go to Chicago and to George Vaughn.

Ada had been honest with Frank from the start. She had told him of her former lovers—he hardly could have neglected to notice how well versed she was in the art of lovemaking, so he had to have known she had had more lovers than just her first husband. The only thing she held back about George Vaughn and James Shaffer was that they were lovers to each other as well as to her separately.

On this trip Frank had welcomed Ada's absence, as her nine-year-old son, Hugh Raven, was showing both a talent and an interest in ranching, and Frank, having been disappointed in how uncontrolled his own sons had turned out, was grateful for another chance to focus solely on training someone he hoped to make kin to pass his ranch on to.

Thanks to the connections of her friends in Chicago and Detroit, Ada was immediately propelled into the inner circles of a significant, sophisticated Midwest circle of artists and writers. She was mesmerized, as everyone was, by the best-selling writer, J. Harvey Kincaid, the rough outdoorsman writer of novels of man against the elements, and he, in turn, introduced Ada to Estelle Hopewell, the writer of deep-thought "spirit of the environment" books, who accompanied her gentleman adventurer husband, Quinten on various record-breaking treks, and then wrote broadly read articles and books about them. Kincaid and Estelle were obviously lovers, but as soon as Estelle met Ada, she latched onto the artist from Colorado like glue on paper and went on to insert Ada into the Chicago artist community.

Kincaid and Estelle Hopewell pumped Ada for verbal descriptions of the subjects of her paintings of Wolf Creek's valley, and they, as well as many others, expressed the desire to see this pristine and remote valley for themselves. Estelle was so adamant about visiting Colorado that, when Ada finally was on a train bound for home from Chicago, Estelle was there beside her in their private compartment, fairly trembling at the prospect of a new adventure she could wax spiritual about.

And Estelle was definitely the trembly kind. To see her would be to assume there was no way this woman could have crossed the Atlantic with her husband, Quinten, on a small sail boat or accompanied him in his successful search for a lost tribe in New Guinea. She was small and delicate looking—she seemed and moved like fine crystal, ready to break at a moment's notice. She was dark haired and trim figured and tiny boned. And she was frenetic—a chain smoker and her eyes were always darting about. Those who didn't know her, though, would not have appreciated that little was lost to those eyes or that she had considerable talent in conveying the essence of everything her eyes saw to an adoring fan base of readers.

She also was a coquette. While they were sitting in the rail station's café, waiting to board, she had given a handsome young businessman the eye, and he had practically melted on the spot. She had him with no more than a welcoming glance. Ada was amazed at this ability her new friend had, but what she didn't seem to realize was that she had that natural ability too and that it was highly questionable just who the young businessman was reacting to.

The train hadn't even chugged out of Illinois before Estelle showed Ada that it wasn't only an adventure in Colorado that had prompted her to seek to accompany Ada there. She asked Ada to read to her and then handed her a racy English translation of a French novel of lesbian love. And while Ada read, Estelle started, slowly and unobtrusively at first but ultimately quite brazenly, a scene of seduction as an accompaniment to what Ada was reading from the novel.

Ada probably could have stopped the seduction when Estelle was just running her fingers along the fine down on Ada's forearms or when Estelle gripped Ada's thigh through the material of her traveling suit, but Ada was attracted to Estelle and was attracted to what she was reading as well—and had been mellowed by her repeated lovemaking with Vaughn and Shaffer during her brief visit to Chicago.

When Ada got into a love scene of one woman suckling on the other's exposed breasts and having a hand up under the woman's skirts and finding and caressing her at her very core, Estelle was already making such love to Ada.

Ada was trembling as freely now as Estelle was and her breathing was becoming heavy and she was fairly panting from lust and desire and being made love to, when the door to the corridor almost unobtrusively opened, and the young businessman from the station café slid into the compartment, closed and latched the door and hung his travel coat over the window in the door, and sat across from the two women, who hardly noticed him in their consuming passion for each other.

Estelle had the skirt to Ada's travel suit off now and had rolled her underskirt up to her waist and was pulling her panties off. Ada's legs felt like jelly and they spread out, giving Estelle's delicate little fingers full access to her mound and her clitoris and her passage.

The young businessman had himself unbuttoned now and he had brought out a very presentable cock and was stroking himself to hard as he watched the smaller, dark-haired woman make love to the more voluptuous raven-haired beauty on the seat across from him. Ada had her head thrown back on the seat and was moaning and groaning in a soft, fully-satisfied purr.

Not being able to remain a voyeur any longer, the young businessman rose and lifted Ada off the seat and out of Estelle's arms and turned her as he turned to the seat she had vacated and sank down into it. He pulled Ada down into his lap, turned from him. His hardened cock was rising between her legs and the upper side of it was rubbing up along her slit. Estelle knelt before them and between their legs, Ada's legs now draped over the young businessman's heavily-muscled thighs, and she alternated between sucking the young man's cock and tonguing and kissing Ada's clitoris. While Estelle was thus engaged, Ada was arched back into the young man's fully clothed chest, and he was cupping and squeezing her breasts. Ada turned her face to that of the handsome young man and then were kissing deeply when Estelle had taken the man's cock and curved it upward to Ada's entrance and helped him guide himself inside Ada. Estelle's fingers went in Ada alongside the man's cock, and she guided him in his stroking. With the fingers of her other hands, and her tongue, Estelle continued to work Ada's clit. Ada was moaning and writhing and completely in her own world of being fully possessed and taking her pleasure as she liked it.

Ada saw nothing of her former state of Iowa as the train sped along it, because she was being taken long and deeply by her new, very attentive friend and by the handsome stranger on the train. 



Wolf Creek Ch. 10



Estelle Hopewell proved to be Ada's saving angel—and far more than in their intimate moments, of which there were many in the ensuing years. Estelle immediately fell in love with the hidden Colorado valley of Wolf Creek, and she virtually moved in with Ada and Frank in the Wolf Creek Ranch main ranch house. Frank never really took to her, but he tolerated her for Ada's sake. Estelle was visited in turn by her adventuring husband, who one day looked in the passenger seat of the RC-38US Douglas Ward Cruiser DWC he was test piloting, noticed that his chronicler companion wasn't there, and came looking for her. And she also was visited by her lover, the male bonding novelist J. Harvey Kincaid, who took to the Wolf Creek valley like it was his Atlantis or Nirvana.

The spring of 1926 saw the release, to international acclaim, of the novel Estelle wrote, Pristine Valley, while she was in residence at the Wolf Creek Ranch and that was being touted for a Pulitzer or National Book Award now that her Quentin had come and swept her away to Europe to celebrate the publication of a book of a young, charismatic German political leader who had piqued Quentin's interest as the statements therein matched many of his own views. Estelle didn't understand the man's book, Mein Kampf, but she could not refuse following her husband on his various adventures. Before she had left the ranch, however, she had planted in Ada's mind the notion of turning the Wolf Creek Ranch into a dude ranch for those in the literary and art world who wanted to escape the cities and prepare their art in peace. The publication of her own book would surely, she said, provide the impetus for the flocking of the literary and art world to this pristine Colorado valley.

And so it did. Ada barely had time to prepare for the influx of celebrity visitors to the newly established Wolf Creek dude ranch before their sleek automobiles, completely unsuited for the mountain terrain, started kicking up dust on the canyon road entering the valley. Frank was all for turning his spread into a dude ranch as long as Ada did all of the arranging; the cattle business had slowly been going down hill for several years, and he had had to let William Hagen's logging operations, now part of a large and prestigious construction firm headquartered up in Denver, creep ever farther into his virgin timber areas in the foothills of Hahn's Peak adjacent to the Medicine Bow National Forest.

It was during the summer of 1925, after Estelle had departed and when Ada was able to focus more closely on the real world around her, that Ada observed just how totally her ten-year-old son, Hugh, was bonding with Frank and just how much the youngster loved the ranching life. It occurred to her that both Frank and Hugh would love for the ranch to pass from one to the other and that this could only smoothly happen if she married Frank. But he hadn't asked her to marry him for months, and she was afraid his intentions might have changed—especially as he had watched with some irritation Estelle's possessive mannerisms and observed how often they had disappeared from his view for long periods of time and had both come back into his company with the unmistakable of air of sexual fulfillment in the air.

She must rekindle Frank's ardor—and his proposal of marriage, she realized.

She prepared for him one day after he had ridden the range all day checking the fences that had become necessary to separate his cattle grazing areas from those of the sheep of neighboring spreads. If sheep got onto cattle land, they grazed the grass so short that the grasses were killed and no longer good for feeding cattle, so the cattle ranchers had to keep constant vigil on their grazing lands.

"Frank, you look so tired and worn," Ada called out to him from the porch. "You really should stop riding the range yourself on horseback. I worry about you."

"The day I can't ride a horse into the ground is the day I die," Frank said grumpily. But as he descended from the saddle, he noticed that Ada looked particularly beautiful this afternoon and was wearing one of the dresses that made his juices flow.

Ada drew him a warm bath, and as he was soaking and almost dozing off, she came and stood before him and disrobed. By the time she had finished, he was in full arousal, and when she slipped into the tub with him and reached for his manhood and stroked him with her hand while kissing the nipples on his weather-beaten and deeply tanned, barrel chest, he was panting and wanting her badly.

She did not tease him long or disappoint him, but straddled him with her pelvis when he was engorged and rode him in ways that he didn't ride his horse.

By the time he had ejaculated deep inside her in a full-throttled pumping action, he had whispered his marriage proposal to her yet again, and she, at last, to his great astonishment and delight, had accepted him.

Hours later, when Ada had at last worn out the vigorous and virile rancher, they sat, drinking coffee, in the kitchen of the rambling ranch house, and Frank decided it was time to set the direction for their lives.

"I know how much you want this celebrity dude ranch," he said. "And it if will keep you from needing to escape to the big cities as often as you do, I'm all for it. It's time we moved ahead on that, I think."

"Thanks, Frank," Ada said. "I'll start thinking about what we need and who we can get to do it."

"If we're going to do it at all, we're going to do it right," Frank said. He set his coffee cup down with a thump on the table. He'd known this moment was coming and he'd been avoiding it, as Ada's past life was not secret to him. "I've already been in touch with the Rocky Mountain Construction Company. They are all the rage now, as they are rebuilding the lodge at Old Faithful up in Wyoming at Yellowstone Park. If we're going to attract the celebrity dudes, we have to be up to date. So I want the same thing RMC is building up at the park: High-ceiling rooms, log siding, big picture windows, and mammoth rock fireplaces."

Ada had been paralyzed from the moment Frank had mentioned the RMC. "That's William Hagen's company, Frank. I don't see how we could work with William on this."

"I don't see how we couldn't, Ada. I've talked to him and he's interested in our project. What he created down at Brook House is exactly what I think we need here—but on a grander scale. We need our look to be the same as they are building up at Old Faithful. It's just good advertising."

"You've talked with William?" Ada asked. "And he's willing to work with us?"

Two weeks later, Ada was checked into a suite on the seventh floor of the venerable Brown Palace Hotel in downtown Denver. William Hagen's main offices for the Rocky Mountain Construction Company, which now included a full architectural arm and was the builder to get for all of the mountain mansion projects starting up in the mountain villages to the west of Denver, were right across Tremont Street from the hotel.

William Hagen, now very distinguished looking and still handsome and trim, met Ada in the hotel lobby and walked her over to his offices. If he had any reservations about seeing her or working with her on the basis of his painful past in trying to court her multiple times, he didn't show it. He fairly beamed at seeing her and told her, with much delight, how radiant she looked. Ada did, in fact, look radiant and far younger than her age in this fortieth year of her life. She came from an excellent gene pool and, if anything, she had grown more beautiful and intriguing—and with that added little jolt of sensuality—with each passing year. And now a famous artist in her own right, she also showed superb fashion flair and the confidence of one who was supremely comfortable with herself and her impact on the world at large.

"I'm so glad that you and Frank have chosen us for Frank's lodge facility construction up at Wolf's Creek, Ada," William said when he met with her in the lobby of the Brown Palace Hotel. "And how is Brook House holding up? I've used quite a few of the concepts I used there in my later projects. It would be nice to know the roof hasn't caved in."

"The roof hasn't caved in, William," Ada said, already uncomfortable and a little fearful about where the conversation was going. "But I haven't lived in Brook House since you left the saw mill. I live at Frank's ranch now. We're . . . we're to be married next spring."

"I see," William said. He didn't show that he was crushed at the news, but, of course, he was—as he always was whenever he thought he might have a chance with Ada. "Well, come on over to the office. We've already started working on plans for the new lodge, and I think you'll be impressed. They are quite impressive."

"Not too impressive, I hope," Ada said with a slightly nervous laugh as Hagen handed her out the front door of the Brown Palace and looked for a break in the traffic so they could cross Tremont.

"Not to worry there. I actually have a proposition to make for you that will bring the cost to almost nothing."

Ada suddenly felt naked. Had William changed? Was he going to directly proposition her after all these years of near misses? She hadn't thought that possible, but her mind was now racing. What would she say if he did? She owed so much to Hagen. And he was still a handsome and obviously well-built man. Could she deny him attentions now after all he'd done for her?

Ada was so taken with the "what iffing" of these thoughts when they entered the three impressive stories of the Rocky Mountain Construction Company that she was completely unprepared for what happened next when she'd entered the management suites of RMC.

"Ada, I'd like you to meet—or at least to become reacquainted—with my Denver operations chief. I think you know each other."

Ada was completely nonplused. There, standing before her, by the table in the conference room where the proposed plans of the lodge at the Wolf Creek dude ranch were rolled out for inspection, was Pete. Pete Fair, her mountain lover. And a Pete Fair who was still stunningly handsome and in good form. A Pete Fair who stepped forward and took her elbow and supported her as unobtrusively as he could when there was every evidence she would faint dead away on the spot.

"I don't understand," Ada stammered as soon as she was able to gain some control of herself. "I thought . . ."

William Hagen was looking at the plans on the table, not at either Ada or Pete during this unexpected introduction. Whether he was purposely not looking at them, not wanting to see a rekindling of a primeval connection between them, or whether he was innocently turned away, ready to start his pitch on his architectural plans for the dude ranch would never be known. But he did break into Ada's weak-voiced statement before she could say something that would embarrass both her and the two men in the room, both who had loved her—one with his heart and one with his cock.

"Pete showed such promise at his work at the saw mill that I offered him the job of opening my company offices here in Denver. And he's made all of the difference. We would never have become the premier architectural and construction firm in Colorado without his drive and ambition."

Ada, who had known quite a bit about Pete's drive and ambition in a different vein, recovered quickly, and, after saying a few niceties to Pete and learning that he had become quite the politician in Denver and was even contemplating running for public office—with the backing of his new wife's father, a political kingmaker in the western states—she turned her complete attention to William Hagen and the plans he'd had drawn up for the Wolf Creek ranch lodge and the stable buildings.

Her reaction to the situation must have pleased William greatly, as he warmed then to both her and to his presentation of the plans.

At length, after she had poured over the plans, Ada sighed and said. "If only this could happen. We can't afford this, William. It's just what we need to attract the celebrities, of course, but this is far more ambitious than we can afford. We'll need to start off with something far less majestic than these plans and work our way to this."

"Ah, this is where my proposition comes in," William said.

Ada steeled herself for "the" proposition. She'd already decided that she wouldn't deny William anything he wanted if he wanted sex. She was more than somewhat pleased that he had changed to the point of making such a proposition to her. Steel in the crotch had always been the main element he had lacked.

"You are such a well-known artist, now, Ada. You catch the spirit of the West perfectly and you have such style with colors. My proposition is . . . if you'll become the interior design stylist for RMC's line of vacation mountain cottages up in what are developing as popular ski areas to the west of Denver—and you allow us to use the lodge in our advertising, which would be good advertising for your dude ranch as well—we will construct the lodge and stables and new ranch hand quarters—the whole coordinated complex—for the costs of the supplies. And, as we'd be taking the logs off the mountain right there by the ranch, the cost of most supplies will be very low."

Ada was so overwhelmed by the proposal, which made perfect sense from every angle she could readily see, that she bounced up from her chair at the table and hugged and kissed William.

This not only surprised Hagen, but it inflamed him. He had never given up on the possibility of winning Ada, and the closeness of her now and her impetuous embrace sent him over the moon. As they were concluding their deal on the construction of the lodge, which William said could start almost immediately, Hagen threw caution to the wind and asked Ada to have dinner with him in the hotel's posh Palace Arms restaurant that evening. And Ada, in her enthusiasm for the concluded business of the day, readily accepted the invitation.

When she left the offices, Ada told William that she could see herself out, and William let her go, which was a big mistake on his part. Pete Fair was waiting for Ada in the reception area on the first floor.

Three hours later William, stood at the door of Ada's seventh-floor suite at the hotel, a dozen red roses in one hand and his heart on his suit sleeve. And he knocked and he knocked and he knocked, but no one answered his call. In a panic, he convinced the hotel evening manager to check Ada's rooms, but they were empty. Ada, having forgotten her dinner appointment altogether in the glow of what Pete had proposed to her in the lobby of the RMC, was then in another suite on the hotel's ninth floor, flat on her back on a soft bed, her legs spread wide, and Pete Fair splitting her asunder with his long, thick cock and pumping her to orgasm after orgasm in their long-remembered dance of exuberant lust and desire.



Wolf Creek Ch. 11



Ada Albin Raven and Frank Wolf were married on a beautiful, clear and crisp, spring morning in 1927 in the glade by the cascading eastern arm of Wolf Creek about midway between Brook House and Hagen's Saw Mill in the lower reaches of Hahn's Peak. Ada had wanted to be married in the open air of the Rocky Mountains, and she could think of no more beautiful spot than the one where she and Pete Fair had met and made love. She meant no disrespect for her new husband, but her afternoons spent dallying with the young Pete Fair in this glade had been the happiest of her recent memory, and she wanted to recapture that atmosphere for her second wedding day.

The construction of the main lodge at the Wolf Creek Ranch had progressed quickly and smoothly and there would be a large open space under a massive roof and protected by log walls for the wedding party to retreat to. If the failure of his latest attempt to court Ada had been reflected in William Hagen's demeanor toward her after she had stood him up for their dinner appointment in Denver's Brown Palace Hotel—and had not returned to her room the entire night while he frantically kept trying to get in touch with her—this never became apparent to Ada. Hagen gave the construction of her dude ranch complex priority. Ada, in turn, came to Denver frequently to consult on the interior design work for his other projects—and when she was in Denver, Pete Fair continued to find a way to meet with her alone and ravish her body, as she melted to, with his masterful, youthful cock play.

William Hagen did not attend Ada's wedding to Frank, and if she had any inkling that he could not bring himself to do so because it was just too painful to lose her in marriage to another man yet again, she did not permit herself to think about it. Pete Fair did attend, however, while being on the scene to supervise some aspect of the lodge construction. And Ada's choice of their love nest for her wedding was not in the least lost on him. Aunt Martha and her Thaddeus, of course, were there as well as young Hugh, who at twelve, no longer could be called little; he was growing up with promise to be straight and tall and handsome. And to Ada's delight, her other surviving son, Dan, also was in attendance, accompanied by her old entrepreneur friends, George Vaughn and James Shaffer, who declared not only that they wanted to accompany Dan on the journey but that they also wanted to come see the miracle that was rising in the hidden Colorado Valley that Estelle Hopewell so famously had written about. And Estelle was there along with the novelist J. Harvey Kincaid, scouting, they said, for where they were going to force all of their literary and artistic friends to congregate as the ranch's first paying guests. Estelle, in particular, was claiming that this was her project, that it was her idea and initiative to create a celebrity hideaway here in this Colorado mountain valley—and to a great extent she was justified in thinking so. 

Estelle's husband was no where to be seen. He had become very taken with the activities of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in Europe and was using his extensive prestige in the United States as the modern adventurer darling to promote U.S. isolationism in the disturbing gathering of storm clouds across the Atlantic. Estelle had decided that she couldn't stomach his politics—at least not as much as she could stomach the masterful lovemaking of the famous rugged adventure author, J. Harvey Kincaid.

Besides Ada's now-feeble minister father, of the surviving family members on both sides, only Frank's son, Jessie, was not at the wedding. Frank had established in no uncertain terms that Jessie would not be there; he was to keep to his side of the extensive Wolf holdings if he didn't want Frank to pull the financial underpinnings from under him. And Jessie might have a mean-streak still, albeit it reputably was being muted with maturity, but no one ever accused him of being dumb.

After the ceremony, the small group of friends returned to the nearly completed lodge and Frank filled the guests with fine food and wine, while the charismatic J. Harvy Kincaid mesmerized those gathered with his fascinating story telling of men combining their talents and strengths to successfully fight the challenges of the wilds and the elements of nature. While J. Harvey entertained, Ada and Pete slipped away momentarily and he pulled her behind one of the small outbuilding sheds, pushed her against the rough planking, her palms and cheeks against the wood, hiked up her wedding skirts and fucked her deeply from behind. As Ada turned her face to his for a sensual kiss and sighed and moaned for the working of him inside her, her mind could not help but surface the irony of where this had all started back behind the hen house in Natowa, Missouri, when that somewhat bumbling evangelist Hiram Laffler had pushed her against the wall and been the first to fill her other channel with throbbing manhood. As ironic as the situations were, however, Ada would not have asked for anything different. She had grabbed life by the balls and turned it to her own pleasure—and fully intended to continue doing so. Frank would not suffer. She would love him to exhaustion later that night. She had never left a man unsatisfied. And if there was a way to get George Vaughn and James Shaffer alone while they were still here, she would give them a workout as well. And she was capable of doing all of this and remaining the perfect hostess for all of her other guests.

By the spring of 1929, the new dude ranch was completed and the first guests were enjoying an extended residence. Ada had seen to it that the rooms of all of the writers were well appointed with everything they needed to write and that all of the windows from these rooms overlooked an inspiring scene but did not overlook the rooms of any of the other guests. To the extent they'd want and/or need total privacy for their writing, they had it. As for the fine artists, one of the buildings that looked like a barn had, in fact, been especially constructed for the needs of the painter and had been oriented to catch the light perfectly. The days were reserved for private work and contemplation, but from the point of the hour before sundown, when rocking chairs aplenty and drinks and nibbles were set up on the wide verandah running across the downslope front of the lodge, through the supper hour, to the salon gathering immediately afterward, where the various celebrity residents could mingle and exchange bantering and jibes and brilliant ideas, the residents were thrown together. This, unless they continued to seek privacy, in which case they could take supper in their rooms.

J. Harvey Kincaid quickly became the center of the supper table conversation. He was a veritable stallion of a man, the epitome of the rugged, handsome, square-jawed, determined man in his virile late twenties battling the elements, whatever they were—and winning and possessing what and how he pleased. His stories were awe-inspiring fables of man, in concert with other men, battling the elements and prevailing. And the way he told them to those who worshipped at his feet was spellbinding. Most of those who retreated to the ranch when he was there—and he continued to come to the ranch three or four times each year for some three decades after it opened—were caught in his web and refused to miss either the communal dinners or the after-dinner salon.

As driven as most of members of the art and literary set were, however, most of them then retired to their own well-appointed rooms to work late into the night on their craft. Some, however, including such as the writer of hard-boiled detective stories, whose Catholic wife would never divorce him, and the bitchy but brilliant New York playwright whose lesbian lover would never accept the reality that the playwright was bisexual, took advantage of this time and of having "coincidentally" come to this private haven at the same time, to fuck for long hours behind closed doors.

After the first few days of this initial gathering, the atmosphere became too heady for the far more simple-lifed Frank Wolf, and he "discovered" that he needed to get out on the range for a week or two and ride his fences to make sure they were being maintained. Ada regretted his leaving, but she knew that he wasn't rejecting what she had made of the ranch but could only personally take it in small doses. She also regretted the thought of her bed being unoccupied for as much as two weeks, but Estelle very soon erased that concern. The swishing tail of Frank's horse was barely out of sight before Estelle had taken Ada's hand and the two had retired to Estelle's rooms, where Estelle slowly disrobed Ada, sat her on the edge of the bed, and slowly descended her ruby-lipped kisses down between Ada's spread legs and made Ada arch her back and claw the bedspread with her fingernails and pant and moan and writhe to multiple orgasms under Estelle's expert ministrations.

After Frank had been gone nearly two weeks, J. Harvey Kincaid came to Ada one morning and pouted that he was bored and that it was all her fault.

"I'm sorry to hear that," Ada said, most distressed because she easily discerned that Kincaid would be the ranch's mainstay attraction of other celebrities for years to come if he was kept happy.

"Yes, life just isn't exciting enough here. I'd actually come to hunt the elk that I was told were the most magnificent here. I'm told there's a good dude ranch for that up in Wyoming, though."

"Hunt elk?" Ada said. "Yes, we have elk up on the timberline on Hahn's peak, no more than a four-hour ride from here. I often have gone up there to paint. There are elk in some of my paintings, you know."

"Yes, I know, Ada," Kincaid said and he gave her that big, handsome, melting smile he was so well known for. "The elk in your paintings are what first attracted me to you."

"My elk?" Ada said with a little frown. "That's quite a compliment for a woman, you know."

"Ah your beauty needs no compliment, my dear," Kincaid said smoothly. "It exists above description. There, in fact, is no description that could do justice to your beauty."

"So, now you are mocking me," Ada retorted, her eyes dancing, telling him both that she was in good humor and that he'd struck deeply with his arrow.

"It is the spirit of the elk that moves me. Have you not seen that in some of my writing?"

"Yes, I have. I've seen that you've used several beasts of the wild like the elk for your images of perfection."

"Ah, yes, you do understand then. I see them as everything I must possess. That's why I want to hunt the elk—not for the sport of killing them, really, but for the need to possess them and what they represent. But . . ." and here he sighed, "it seems I won't be hunting elk here."

"We, of course, could lay on such an outing for you," Ada said hastily. She didn't want to see what was likely her golden goose slip the noose. "It's a pity that Frank is out on the range. He could have taken you on a hunt. But I can get one of the ranch hands he didn't take with him . . ."

"Ah, foisting me off on the hired help," Kincaid said. He was smiling and gave a dry little laugh, but Ada was fearful that he more than half meant he thought he was being insulted.

"Well, we'll have to . . ."

"You could take me up." Kincaid said.

"Me? But I'm no hunter. I . . ."

"You are a painter, and you said yourself that you've already been to the timberline and captured the elk on your canvas. You know where to go. You could take me."

There was nothing else to do. Kincaid had boxed her in. But there was no way they'd be able to do this within the confines of a day. So, Ada spent the rest of the day preparing to leave the ranch in the hands of others and in gathering what she and Kincaid would need for the overnight outing. She called down to Slater, and Aunt Martha arrived by evening to take over the management responsibilities.

The worst of Ada's preparations turned out to be Estelle, who, at first declared she was going too. But Kincaid scotched this, saying she would distract him too much with her radiance—that he couldn't have eyes for the elk while she was there. Then Estelle pouted until Ada took her into her bed after the evening's salon and left her exhausted and at least temporarily satiated when the early morning departure time arrived.

When they first started working their horses up into the foothills of Hahn's Peak, Ada was quiet. She more than a little resented this somewhat petulant demand on her time and resources that the self-possessed novelist had made. She had little idea how to track elk and Kincaid had taken her away from all of her other guests. But J. Harvey Kincaid was a patient man, a very patient man. And he proved to be a fascinating travel companion, as profound, humorous, and lyrical in his observations of what was going on around them in the wild, beautiful Colorado mountain wilderness as he was in an opulent dining room amid gleaming silver and shining china and crystalware.

The two rode across the isolated ridges for the morning and afternoon, straight for the tree line, where Ada had seen elk in her painting excursions. By evening their horses were worn out and although they had seen elk, it had been at a great distance and only fleetingly; there had not been time or opportunity for Kincaid to get off a rifle shot. Ada secretly was pleased with this, as she hated any thought of the killing of any of those magnificent beasts.

As the sun was setting, Kincaid suggested that they just lay by in a stand of cottonwood trees next to a fast-running stream in a sheltering ravine. They ate that night over an open fire, leaning against the saddles they had slung on the ground between the bank of the stream and a line of cottonwoods. J. Harvey was his charming best, weaving a story of primeval earth just for Ada. He told her of the village of simple, close-to-the earth people of beauty and purity who were on the eve of being invaded by the despoilers of the outside world. He described in great detail of the last night of lovemaking across the village, with the men warriors of the village knowing that they had to meet in the new dawn in a cataclysmic and surely final battle in the meadow separating their primeval forest from the cruel modern world.

Kincaid focused on one woman of the village who knew the precise moment that her husband and her only surviving son died in this battle, and how, in her grief, she ran deeper into her forest, only a short time ahead of the invading "moderns" to die in the forest, to become absorbed by the earth. He told in poetic words how, exhausted, she leaned into an old oak tree, which slowly morphed into her lost husband, making deeply possessive love to her there, as she was absorbed into her virile oak of a husband, gone to this world when the despoiling "moderns" reached and then passed by the base of the oak. The intriguing metaphors of Kincaid's imagery possessed Ada's soul as his rich voice rolled over her, using the words of earthy love that did not sound dirty on his lips and that stirred her to the quick.

The air was crisp and slightly chilly, and Ada had been siting close beside him as they leaned against his saddle and shared the single blanket to aid the glow of the campfire in warding off the cold wind. As Kincaid melded his story to slowly enfolding Ada to him under the blanket, he reasoned in whispers that they would be so much more comfortable making maximum use of their shared body heat. And Ada, lost in his storytelling believed him and melted into him.

The story was sad and poignant all at the same time and Ada was crying. Kincaid kissed her tears away. And he kissed her cheeks. And he kissed her lips. He told her not to cry, in that mesmerizing poetic baritone voice of his. He told her he loved her. She whimpered that she had disappointed him; that he had not bagged the elk he wanted. He asked if she hadn't understood his story at all—that she was the elk. The elk only symbolized her and it was Ada he needed to possess. Ada was the spirit of his elk.

He asked Ada if she trusted him and if she loved him too. And then, at that moment, she surely did. He unbuttoned her shirt and comforted the hollow of her neck with his lips, and then he cupped her breasts and comforted her nipples and her belly with his hands and his tongue.

He unbuckled her jeans and slowly unbuttoned the fly, all the time telling her that he loved her and wanted to take care of her. And asking her if she loved him and trusted him. And she did and told him so. And then he told her he wanted to be her virile oak. That he wanted to fully bond with her, for them to melt together in one unit. Then he unbuttoned himself and turned her and placed his lips and tongue where Estelle had so recently played and was pushing his huge manhood between her lips.

At length he moved her again, on her belly over the saddle, and he knelt behind her between her spread legs and fucked her long and deeply, all the while making love for her with the poetic murmurings of his rich baritone voice. He possessed her fully and several times and in various positions in front of the crackling fire throughout the chill spring night. Her young, masterful, virile oak.

The next afternoon Ada and Kincaid were riding over the last ridge and within sight of the Wolf Creek Ranch compound on the hillock below them, when the riders who had been sent out to find them did find them. They spoke briefly and breathlessly to Ada, who, leaving all of them behind, spurred her horse in a hell bent for fury tumbling ride down the mountain slopes. But she was too late. Frank Wolf was already gone when she reached the lodge. His horse had been spooked by a rattlesnake at the far reaches of their fenceline, and the horse had thrown him and then landed on top of him, crushing the man's ribs and piercing several of his vital organs. The ranch hands with him and improvised a litter and brought him back to the lodge as gently as they could. But the damage to his body had been too extensive. He had, as he had frequently said he wished to do, died riding the range of his ranch.



Wolf Creek Ch. 12



At his own request, Frank Wolf was cremated, and Ada and Frank's surviving son, Jess, took the ashes up to the glade of the upper fork of Wolf Creek, where he and Ada had been married and, together, they scattered the ashes. Jess was a perfect gentleman, which Ada found quite surprising. But Frank had told Ada some time earlier that Festus's death had sobered and mellowed Jess considerably, and, by all evidence, Jess's father's death had completed that process. Ada had thought it only right to let Jess know his father had died when his horse had thrown him and fallen on him out on the range, although she hadn't really expected Jess to respond in any way. But the same night he was told, he rode up to the Wolf Creek Ranch lodge and respectfully paid his condolences to Ada.

Frank hadn't spent all of his time that last week riding his fences. He'd gone to Jess's ranch and made his peace with this son. but he'd also told Jess how happy Ada had made him and that if anything happened to him, he expected his son to support her and not give her trouble. Jess had shown up at the ranch stating his intentions to follow his father's wishes. He also told Ada that the biggest reason his father had come to see him was that he'd just been told he had inoperable pancreatic cancer—and he wanted to get some decks cleared before he told Ada.

The fact that Frank had been under a death sentence anyway didn't console Ada all that much, but it gave her pause for thought. Frank had been an expert horseman. Her first response when she heard that he had been thrown was that this wasn't possible with the Frank she knew. Now she wondered if Frank perhaps hadn't welcomed his manner of death.

For the first two weeks of her renewed widowhood, Estelle Hopewell tried to transport Ada beyond the present during the days with her magic tongue and fingers working on Ada's body, and J. Harvey Kincaid took up the torch by night, spinning stories for her in the darkness of his room and searching deep inside her with his throbbing manhood. It was always in Estelle's or J. H.'s rooms, however. Never in Ada's. Ada did find sex a helpful consolation in her second bereavement, but never in her own room, never in the bed she and Frank had shared.

By the end of the two weeks, though, Estelle had grown too jealous to be sharing her own erstwhile lover with another woman, even if it was Ada. And when her pouting and little tantrums couldn't get Kincaid to visit her rooms by night rather than withdrawing to his own rooms with Ada, Estelle made a big production of how Ada's loss showed her that she must reconcile with her own husband, and she flounced out of the Wolf Creek valley in search of the great adventurer in the National Socialist lairs of Europe.

For his part, J. Harvey stayed for a further two weeks, but he was more helpful to Ada in her grief. Estelle had been transcribing his notes for his new book on a daily basis and now he was bereft of help. But in Ada he found what was actually a far better editor. She could type better than Estelle could and she had a better head on her shoulders for enhancing his distinctive, masculine prose, where Estelle had battled with him incessantly in an attempt to give his wordings the ethereal, much more feminine tone of her own work. And in working with Kincaid in this way, Ada herself found new purpose in life and a steadiness and structure to her days that she now needed.

When he heard about Frank's death, William Hagen came down to Wolf Creek, ostensibly to do last-minute detail work on the lodge, but really to give her whatever support he could and to see what the chances were to rekindle the snail-like pace of his decades-long courting of Ada. Once again his timing was way off. He arrived one evening in time to see Ada enter Kincaid's rooms, and when he saw the two together the next morning, he was left in no doubt that he hadn't even made the starting gate this time.

Nothing at all was heard from Ada's current sometimes lover, Peter Fair. Elections for the U.S. Congress were coming up and Peter was being groomed for a run for that office. His kingmaker of a father had heard the rumors that Peter was womanizing, though. He hadn't narrowed down on Ada, but Ada, in fact, wasn't the only one Peter was dallying with. The father-in-law had lowered the boom, and Peter was cutting all of his relationships cold turkey because he wanted a congressional seat so badly that he could taste it. Sex was one thing. But power was something far more important—especially since, once he was established in the congressional seat, his power would not be as dependent on his wife's daddy as it was now, and power was a great conduit to more sex.

Ada more or less coasted for the next four years, if working her tail off to keep her ranch from going under could be called coasting. The celebrity dude ranch didn't lose its appeal to the national literary and art set as much as that the writers and artists became largely preoccupied with events that swept over American and then throughout the world in the last year of the second decade of the twentieth century.

nearly a year and a half after Ada lost Frank, she suddenly lost another of her old, dear friends. One Friday in October 1929, a distraught George Vaughn called her from Chicago.

"He's gone, Ada. James is gone?"

"Who, what?" Ada had just been up four hours helping to foal a horse and wasn't prepared for the intrusion of the outside world.

"Black Tuesday and Black Thursday," George continued. "They did him in. James. James Shaffer. He's dead."

After she had recovered a bit of her composure, Ada asked for specifics.

"Surely you know about the stock market crashes, Ada. This Tuesday and then even worse yesterday. The bottom has dropped out of the American economy. Just like that. Surely that news has made it to your little valley."

Well, it had. Of sorts. But the world of finance was a long way from the remote Wolf Creek valley reaching down into the center of Colorado from an even more remote Wyoming. Ada had been much too busy entertaining a full house at the lodge and keeping her now much-smaller cattle herd fenced in.

"It's bad, Ada. Bankers and financiers have lost everything. They're jumping out of windows, Ada. Literally jumping out of windows. James too."

Ada froze. "You don't mean literally. He couldn't have . . ."

"He did, Ada. He called me right before. He was sad and nostalgic and his good-bye was a strange one. But I had no idea he'd do that. I had no idea he was that tied up in the stock market. His wife says everything is gone. She'll lose the company, the house. Everything. I'll see that she doesn't go destitute, of course, but . . ."

Ada focused on the immediate, wanting to know about services and such and saying that, of course, she'd have to go and wondering if her Dan would be able to make it from St. Louis, where he managed the Vaughn network of stores in Missouri. But then the full implication of what might be happening in the outside business world hit her.

"God, George. Your stores. Dan. What . . .?"

"Vaughn's should be same. Mainly safe, Ada. Thanks to Dan's advice on how to develop our business. We'll have to close some stores, certainly and retrench a bit. But we have our money in inventory of necessary consumables, not in paper stock. We'll be able to ride the storm . . . if anyone does."

And by 1933, it was becoming apparent that Vaughn's would indeed, survive the Great Depression, albeit with many more store closings and more retrenchment than George Vaughn could have imagined in his wildest dreams. But by that time, Vaughn himself was spent. Not only was the effort to keep the company fluid and in business a great strain on him, but he never really recovered from the loss of a friend, James Shaffer, who was far more to him than anyone but Ada knew. By the middle of the 1930s, Ada and George's son, Dan, not year thirty, was already president and controller of what was left of the Vaughn business empire—which, thanks considerably to Dan himself, was much more of a business empire still than most of the American business sector.

Not even Ada, in her distant valley, escaped the effects of the depression entirely. She was somewhat blessed, because the ranch was largely self-sufficient—or she was able to make it so. Its rustic charm ambiance was, in fact, constructed on a great deal of self-reliance and minimum of frills. In addition to this, the literary and artistic community was probably the least disadvantaged by the depression, at least those who were still producing their art and hadn't invested heavily in business on the side. Writing and art are renewable resources, there was still money floating around to support this community at least somewhat better than the average American worker, and, if nothing else, the Great Depression itself was a gold mine of literary and artistic inspiration.

William Hagen's Rocky Mountain Construction company survived the Great Depression as well, but it was much depleted and barely able to breathe for most of the decade of the thirties before coming back full-blown in 1938. The depression completely killed the company's big money-making vacation house divisions, however. Bigger government projects continued but at much smaller profit margins. There was no need for Ada's interior design services, and so requests for her to travel to Denver to consult withered, and her contact with William Hagen also diminished concurrently to the exchange of seasons greetings at Christmas time. Ada had no contact in this period with her erstwhile lover, Peter Fair, at all. He had won his congressional election and was spending most of his time—and all of the energy he once had given to Ada in vigorous lovemaking—in Washington, D.C.

The artists and writers still came to the Wolf Creek Ranch, especially as such mainstays as the Hopewells and J. Harvey Kincaid continued patronizing the ranch—if not necessarily at the same time—and kept sending their friends and acquaintances. They just didn't stay as long as they used to or tip as well. They still drank and smoked as much, though, and the ranch had a healthy markup on supplying their unhealthy habits.

Ada's clientele had even branched out. American government bureaucrats and diplomats had discovered this special retreat. One diplomat, in particular, Stanfield Walker, a New Hampshire patrician, made annual, prolonged visits to the ranch each year starting in 1930. Ada had little difficulty in discerning that he came to see her rather than the rugged landscape or the elk at the Hahn's Peak timberline. He had proposed marriage to her during his visits in both 1931 and 1932. And here he was, in 1933, back again and courting her in a desultory way the old money New England aristocrats were prone to do. Walker was a handsome man, tall, straight, and every inch both the patrician and the diplomat. He was past his sixtieth year in 1933, but, at forty-eight, Ada wasn't exactly young either, although she was still as beautiful and statuesque as ever and had the bearing of a queen even when she was wearing jeans and a cotton plaid cowboy shirt.

In the early fall of 1933, both Walker and Kincaid were in residence at the ranch at the same time. Both were euphoric, because Walker was being named American ambassador to Malaya and would take up his posting in 1935, and Kincaid had just received the Pulitzer Prize for a deep and dark novel on male bonding against the challenges of nature in a remote Colorado valley. Ada was celebrating with Kincaid, as she had typed and edited draft after draft of that novel, and she knew better than most, that Wolf Creek was that valley being celebrated throughout the literary world. The conversations at the supper table were lively, and the two men obviously were vying for Ada's attention by competing with the considerable power of profundity, wit, dramatic delivery, and glibness that they each possessed in abundance. Walker had a vast knowledge of the world at large and an extensive and rich vocabulary. In a heavily contrasted style, Kincaid had a mastery of imagery and earthiness and master storyteller talent. Both obviously were performing for Ada. But as polished as Stanfield Walker was, it was J. Harvey Kincaid who took Ada into his bed at night.

Ada's no-longer-so-young son, Hugh Raven, a fine, handsome, strapping youth of eighteen, was now old enough to take on much of the management responsibility of the ranch, while Ada concentrated on entertaining and feeding the celebrity guests. He ate at the high table with the more important guests now. Wolf Creek valley was virtually all he'd ever known and he didn't have the wanderlust that his mother had been simultaneously blessed and cursed with, so he was not much taken with the worldly, urbane Stanfield Walker. But he was simply mesmerized by the rugged adventurer and novelist J. Harvey Kincaid.

One evening Kincaid was trying to explain the central symbolism of the elk and the hunting of this beast that were vital to his Pulitzer-winning novel at the supper table, and Walker wasn't understanding—or was choosing not to understand—either the relevance or the import of this symbol to anything of value in American society, noting that this nation, like Europe was rushing toward a world conflagration that had already raised its ugly head in East Asia. Thus, elk as a symbol of anything wasn't, in his opinion, relevant enough to merit a major literary prize—and he certainly couldn't see anything morally redeemable in hunting the majestic animals.

This worked J. Harvey up to the point of saying he did hunt elk and would jolly well continue to do so—and, in fact, that he wanted to hunt elk from the ranch by the end of the week.

Ada was about to tell him that the ranch didn't make up hunting parties for anything larger than deer when they were in season any more when young Hugh piped up and volunteered to take Kincaid on such a hunting party himself. Preparations could be made within two days. And so that was settled.

Kincaid and Hugh were gone for three days, and they returned with an elk slung over the saddle of the provisions horse and with glowing eyes and a good deal of camaraderie and back slapping. It almost seemed to Ada like Hugh had transformed from her young son to a mature man in just those three days. And, seeing the way Kincaid and her son had bonded made her decide that, if Kincaid proposed marriage, she would make the plunge even though she had decided soon after Frank had died that she would forego the grief that brought. She liked a good roll in the hay, but there was no reason, at her age, that she need marry the guy. This had been her immediate reaction when Stanfield Walker, trying to take advantage of Kincaid's absence hunting elk up on Hahn Peak to propose to her for the third time. She had refused him as politely and gently as possible and, unbowed, he'd made reservations for his visit the next year and warned her that he would propose again when he next returned.

By 1935, her fiftieth year, though, Ada indeed had wed again.



Wolf Creek Ch. 13



After his successful elk hunting trip, Kincaid returned to visiting the ranch four times a year—he had cut this down to no more than twice in the deep of the Great Depression. And each time he returned, he and Hugh would go up to the Hahn's Peak timberline for three days—and they almost always came back with an elk. Kincaid made clear he didn't want the elk for itself. He only symbolically wanted to conquer the elk, again and again. He was happy to let the ranch have the meat for the supper table and the antlers and hides for whatever decorative or functional use they could be put to.

One afternoon during his fall 1934 visit, several days after his hunting trip with Hugh, J. Harvey and Ada were working on a manuscript in his room and he was standing behind her and rubbing her shoulders. The moment got the best of them, and he found himself running his hands through her luxuriant hair and then kissing the hollow of her neck and running his hands down inside the bosom of her dress and cupping her ample breasts. He hadn't bedded her since before he and Hugh had gone up into the mountains, and he'd be leaving the next day. For these reasons Ada was in heat for him. She turned in the chair and unbuttoned his trouser fly and freed his cock and began making love to it.

In all the intervening years since J. Harvey had first taken Ada on the mountain, they had never made love in the light of day. It had always been in the dark, in his room, with the lights out and the drapes drawn. But now Ada could see him clearly. He was a good fifteen years younger than she was and he was in magnificent shape. She melted to him as he removed his shirt and dropped his trousers while she was making love to his cock. He was handsome and hard and strong bodied.

He swept her up from the chair and carried her to the bed and disrobed her completely. And then he made love to every voluptuous nook and cranny of her with his strong, sensuous fingers and his tongue. She was panting and flowing for him when he gently pushed her legs apart, briefly worked her clitoris with his tongue and teeth and then invaded her deeply with probing fingers. Then, as she lay on her back, her pelvis supported upward by a pillow and her legs spread, he mounted her in a long, stretching slide that had her gasping for him. He encased her body closely with his, applied his lips firmly to one of her nipples, and then just rode up and down on her body with his, holding her close, letting the friction of the swinging gait move his reaching cock up and down inside her, rubbing against her clitoris. She held him close with her arms around his waist and her calves hooked over his, sharing his desire to merge as one, to become one deep-probing, flowing unit.

His beauty and masterful cockmanship overpowered her, and she orgasmed once . . . and then again, as he rocked back and forth on and in her. She was panting and moaning for him and he for her, and then he gave a little lurch and cry and was filling her deep, deep at her center. They rested briefly as they tenderly explored each other's bodies with their hands, lovingly and with awe, as if for the first time. And then J. Harvey turned Ada onto her belly and he placed the pillow under her pelvis and moved between her legs and entered her strongly and deeply again and pumped her hard until she was crying out for him and they were both seeing sparks, together, and their juices were flowing and mingling. They lay there, exhausted and entwined for nearly a half hour more, while he kissed her nipples and the hollow of her neck. Then he whispered that he had an important question for her but that he needed to leave her briefly. He slowly disengaged from her and padded off to the attached bathroom in his suite of rooms.

Ada lay there, fully satiated, purring her good fortune. She drowsily looked around the room and there, on the nightstand, nearly touching her—close enough certainly that when she looked at it, it filled her field of vision—was a framed photograph she had never noticed before. It was of two men standing beside some sort of pole arrangement from which was hanging the carcass of an elk. Two men, both looking very proud and satisfied with each other. One was standing right next to the elk and the other, the taller, older man, was standing at the other side of the youth. The older man had his arm around the youth. Not just a casual touch, Ada realized increasingly as the photography came into focus. It was a possessive embrace. A knowing embrace. An intimate embrace. The older man was J. Harvey Kincaid and the youth was her own son, Hugh Raven. The realization of the pose hit Ada like a strike of lightning.

Kincaid's elk. She had been Kincaid's elk the day Frank had died. And it wasn't her, for her own sake, Kincaid wanted to possess. He just wanted to conquer. And he had done exactly the same thing with her son—just to conquer. It was all in his books. It was the centerpiece of the book she herself had typed again and again, the title changing, but the message never varying, just as Kincaid's readers liked them. And she hadn't seen it. Only the capturing of a moment in time in a black and white photograph told the unfettered truth. A photograph Kincaid kept on his nightstand. The audacity of it. The cruelty. What had happened to her family? How had Kincaid gotten this much control?

When J. Harvey Kincaid came out of the bathroom, Ada was gone from his bed. And she was no where in evidence for the remainder of his fall 1934 visit at the ranch. He left without seeing her again.

Stanfield Walker visited the ranch in late October 1934, in keeping with the reservation he had made the previous year. And Ada Albin Raven Wolf wed Stanfield Profit Walker in the chapel of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., on 22 December 1934. The wedding was quickly arranged and the wedding party was small. Just as the photograph Ada had seen on J. Harvey Kincaid's nightstand was utterly revealing, so was the official wedding photograph. Everyone lined up on the verdant lawn outside the Gothic-style brownstone chapel—from the few in the groom's family who deigned to make the trip to Washington from New Hampshire, including his two sour-faced old maid sisters; to Dan and Hugh Raven; to Aunt Martha and her Thaddeus; to even the groom himself—looked dazed and confused, as if the whole event had just dropped on them from the sky unexpectedly, as indeed it had. Only the bride looked composed and determined, if a little sad. It wasn't a photograph that the Walkers were ever to display prominently in their home.

Little of the wedding was displayed in the Walker home, actually. The wedding was something Ada wanted to quickly forget. It wasn't until her wedding night that she discovered that Stanfield was impotent. In her hasty and cataclysmic reaction to the revelation of what J. Harvey Kincaid had done to her family, Ada, still a full-blooded and lusty woman, had trapped herself in a sexless marriage. But, other than that, Stanfield Walker was an attentive, doting husband, and a perfect intellectual match for Ada. 

The ranch was left nominally in the hands of Hugh Raven to run while the Walkers took up their new posting in Malaya. But an aging Aunt Martha and her husband, Thaddeus, agreed to move to the ranch to help him in consideration of his young age. However, Hugh enjoyed the responsibility and control that management of the ranch gave him, and he did not burden Martha or Thaddeus with a onerous decisions. Hugh had been raised to the life of the ranch and reveled in running both the ranch and the celebrity dude lodge.

The literary and artist visitors continued coming to the ranch. More and more came each year, as the nation pulled itself out of the Great Depression. And J. Harvey Kincaid continued his quarterly visits to the ranch. And each time he and Hugh Raven went up onto Hahn's Peak to hunt elk. And whether or not Kincaid bagged an elk during each hunting trip, he did bag a Raven.

He never dwelled much on why Ada had changed direction so suddenly the day he was going to ask her to come back to Chicago to continue transcribing his books. Kincaid was totally self-involved. Ada agonized every day about the split and what had precipitated it; J. Harvey Kincaid didn't really think about it at all.



Wolf Creek Ch. 14



The chandeliers were dripping with crystals that reflected sparkles all over the groaning board of the massive dining room table sitting on a huge Oriental carpet in the Kuomintang government of China's embassy in Kalomara, the diplomatic section of Washington, D.C. The room was permeated with the sound of the lilting laughter of the most expensively gowned, bejeweled, and coifed grand dames of the nation's capital, taking the edge off the guffaws and boisterous self-important statements of some of the most powerful government leaders and diplomats who could be gathered between Paris and Tokyo.

Anyone who was looking down on this demonstration of conspicuous consumption and excess would not, in their wildest imagination, have guessed the purpose of this gathering. It had been arranged by the Chinese leader's personal emissaries, the Kuomintang foreign minister, T. V. Soong, and his delicate yet steely celebrated sister, May-ling, better known to the world as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the ruler of China. All of this ultraexpensive wining and dining was being done to convince the United States to make good on its promises to underwrite the relief of the starving Chinese people, who were already in a deadly two-pronged war with the invading Japanese and the inside-the-tent Chinese communists. Thus far the Chinese were taking the brunt of the actual warfare unleashed by the combined Axis powers, and they were campaigning heavily to convince their allied governments that, if these forces weren't stopped in China, the fighting would soon flare across the world.

Ada Walker, the newly popular bride of the new U.S. ambassador-designate to Malaya, Stanfield Walker, was seated between Seni Promoj, the Thai ambassador to the United States, and a Thai prince in his own right, and the congressman from her own state, who had been invited because he sat on the powerful House Foreign Relations Committee, and thus would be either an ally of or barrier to T. V Soong's plans. The Walkers were there as much because Ada had taken the capitol city by storm with her forthright western manner and her brilliant table conversation as because her husband was about to take a diplomatic post in East Asia. It hadn't hurt either that she knew all of the leading writers and artists in the country and was an artist of national fame herself—not to mention that, at fifty, she was one of the most beautiful and intriguing women in the city.

Throughout the meal, Ada, somewhat nonplused by the seating arrangement, had focused her attention on Seni Promoj, to her left, who had proved to be a delightful conversationalist and someone who Ada had immediately warmed to, as he obviously had done to her as well. This had fit perfectly with the dinner partner on the congressman's right, the exotic and alluring May-ling Soong, because her assignment for the evening was to seduce Congressman Peter Fair. Stanfield Walker and the congressman's wife were seated across from Ada and Peter, but the table was much too wide and the conversations around them much too loud for any discussion in that direction. This was just as well for Ada, because as hard as it was to be seated next to her oh-so-recent and long-standing lover, who had abandoned her to pursue his political ambitions, it would have been excruciating to have to chit chat with his wife. Ada and Peter's wife had never met, but Ada knew much of the woman and there wasn't anything about her that Ada could find to like. Ada briefly pitied her husband, who had to converse with the woman tonight, but Stanfield was a trained diplomat, and Ada reasoned that he would be able to cope.

Madame Chiang was using her most powerful wiles on the young congressman from Colorado. The intelligence on this man that the highly sophisticated Chinese intelligence had been able to dig up and pass on to T. V. Soong was that the man was a notorious skirt chaser, that he couldn't keep his cock in his pants for very long. Madame Chiang had no intention of letting the man bed her, but she knew how to enflame a man to do her will. There were many who said she controlled all of China with her beauty and her woman's technique—neither one of which would have gotten her far in the staid Methodist women's seminary she had attended in America's South.

She spent much of the meal using this technique on the congressman, and eventually to letting her hand do her talking for her under the tablecloth. She was sure that she would have no difficulty luring Fair into private discussions with T. V. Soong—and into a compromising position, if that was necessary—whenever her brother considered that would aid the Chinese cause in Washington. And she was enflaming Peter Fair all right, but not exactly with the results she had intended.

As the meal was concluded and the guests were rising to reform either in the lounge to listen to the usual string quartet that had been brought in to entertain them or to various smaller meeting rooms in the building to plan or cajole or be cajoled concerning the various crises affecting their respective nations, Peter rose, took the hand of his dinner partner on his left who had said barely a word to him, and whispered in her ear. He did not let go of her hand until she had acceded to his request.

They met at one of the French doors to the walled garden in the glass conservatory that ran across the garden façade of the embassy building, the former town house of a nineteenth-century robber baron.

"I only came here, Pete, so that there wouldn't be a scene in the dining room. We have nothing to say to each other."

"Oh, I think we do," Pete said. "You know I didn't want to leave off with you. I was forced to. I wouldn't be here if I hadn't."

"And is being here so very important?" Ada said.

"Yes it is. You know it is. That's why you are here too, isn't it?"

He was dead wrong. But Ada knew she couldn't say that she had discovered that someone she'd been bedding at the same time she was involved with Pete was screwing her son as well as her and she was here on an impulsive rebound. No, she couldn't admit to that. So, she remained silent.

Fair took this as capitulation. "Come with me into the garden, Ada."

She didn't respond.

"Now."

"No, we can't, Pete," Ada said. "It's over. Finished. I'm married again now. I have responsibilities. We leave for Kuala Lumpur soon. I've begun a new life—left the old one behind. That includes you."

"Who's fucking you now, Ada?" Pete had come a long way from the subservient driver who had transported Ada from Indiana to Colorado nearly twenty years earlier. "I said, who's doing you now, Ada? I know your character. I know you must have a lover. And I know your new husband is a complete dud in that department. Everyone knows that."

"I won't stand here and listen to this," Ada hissed. "I'm going back to my husband. Or perhaps I should go back and sit by your wife and get to know her better. She seems to be the one wearing the pants in your family. The pants her daddy bought you."

Peter turned beet red and it looked, for a second, like he was going to strike her. But instead, he took her wrist in a strong grip, opened the French door with the other hand, and propelled her out onto the stone patio of the garden. He dragged her over into the bushes and against the blank side wall of a pool house, and trapped her there with his body.

"If no one is giving it to you, then, Ada, you must be ripe for it. How long has it been? Since before your wedding day?"

"No, don't," Ada whispered hoarsely. But it had, in fact, been since before her wedding day. And Peter knew her so well, so intimately, and had known her for so long—and so satisfyingly.

He had his mouth on hers and his hands running all over her body. And although she tried not to respond to his kisses, she just couldn't resist and was soon giving as much as she was getting. He took her hand and moved it to his crotch and showed her that May-ling Soong had enflamed him well. He was already ready for Ada.

She was moaning as he pushed the front of her gown up above her waist and stripped off her panties, and she cried out in ecstasy as he entered her strongly and began to work her in those old familiar ways. He grabbed her butt cheeks and spread them with his hands and moved her up and down on his pole, with increasing speed and urgency. And she gasped and groaned and moaned for him and held on to him for dear life.

They met frequently, always in a different place and as unobtrusively as possible, in those final months that Ada and Stanfield were preparing to take up their post on the other side of the world. As the time of parting came closer, their passion exploded, and the only real regret Ada could think of in seeing the American shore slip away behind her was why Peter had been there to get her lustful juices flowing again—and how she was going to live without him when she had lost him for the second time.

T. V. Soong's dinner was all for naught. The Americans continued promising support and putting off delivering. The country was divided, and prominent isolationists like the husband of Ada's literary friend, Estelle Hopewell, were responsible for their full share of America's pretending to itself that the world wasn't sinking into what it was already well on its way to do. At least May-ling Soong's failure to get Congressman Peter Fair's attention had done no damage to the cause. He came out as a strong advocate of giving the Kuomintang everything it needed to expel the Japanese and purge the communists within China.

When Ada and Stanfield Walker departed for their ambassadorial posting in Malaya in the summer of 1935, Dan Raven was the only family member at the pier in New York to see them off in person, although the Thai ambassador, Seni Promoj, had become so taken with Ada that he was on hand as well, bearing a farewell bouquet of long-stemmed yellow roses, noting that yellow was the royal color of his country and that Ada was his queen. Ada and Martha had exchanged warm and tender letters, but only a terse good-bye telegram went to Hugh.

Soon after attending Ada's wedding the previous December, Hugh himself had wed, and Ada hadn't found out about it until well after the fact. He had been smitten with the daughter of a Hollywood leading man when that family had come to stay at the ranch and had married the daughter with almost no courtship time. Ada wondered if his marriage was a reaction to her own impulsive change in direction. She hadn't mentioned having seen the photograph of her son with her lover and all that it signified. She didn't give this marriage a ghost of a chance, not just because of Hugh's confused orientation but also because she couldn't see the pampered daughter of a Hollywood actor taking on the life of a rancher wife in a remote Colorado valley for any length of time. In any event, she had taken the wedding that he'd heard about only after the fact as a slap at her for having left the ranch so abruptly.

Nothing by way of a farewell went to Chicago, as George Vaughn had died of a sudden heart attack earlier that spring and Estelle Hopewell was off adventuring on safari in Africa with her husband. Ada and Peter Fair did have one last, farewell fuck in the back of his Buick in a turnoff from a deserted Virginia road near the Bull Run battlefield park, with Ada sitting facing away from him in his lap as, hands under her breasts, Peter had lifted her passage up and down on his engorged pole until both had flowed and lurched in orgasm.

William Hagen didn't even know Ada was abroad until the following February when he received her terse and somewhat detached distantly posted Christmas card for 1935.



Wolf Creek Ch. 15



In many ways, the six years Ada spent with Stanfield in diplomatic service in tropical Kuala Lumpur were the happiest of her life. As rich and official Americans they lived like royalty, and every whim was seen to by someone else. Although they were physically closer to the gathering world war than anyone in the United States was, in terms of its effect on their lives, they were as far away from trouble and concern as they possibly could be.

Still though, Ada had some reason to regret that she wasn't home. In the spring of 1937, she became a grandmother. She didn't feel like a grandmother, certainly, and those in her community certainly didn't see the raven-haired beauty as a grandmother. But Hugh and his wife, Beth, had produced a son nonetheless, who they named John, after both Beth's and Hugh's fathers. Not being able to be there in person, Ada pursued her life as a grandmother through a series of exotic gifts for the child, exchanged with photographs his parents sent her as little Johnny grew from a baby to a toddler. The photographs were both delightful and disturbing all at the same time. The baby, of course, was sheer delight to behold. And by seeing photographs of Beth, showing her down-to-earth beauty and the way she wore the western clothes so comfortably as if she been raised in them and the way she looked at and responded to both her child and her husband in the still poses, Ada gained confidence that this, indeed, was a fine wife for her son and mother for her grandson and that perhaps the marriage would hold after all. But then she looked at her son, Hugh, in the photos and she became concerned all over again. It wasn't that the photos revealed any lack of love and affection toward his wife and his child. It was that he looked so haunted and confused. Ada could not look at her son in this photo without the visage of the other photo, the photo she'd found on J. Harvey Kincaid's nightstand, rising up out of the ether to float alongside it. And her heart stopped beating, if just for a second, each time she looked at one of the photographs of her son's family.

But then Ada would simply tuck the photograph back into her scarf drawer, give a little sigh, and return to her fantasy world. She had longed to be out in the greater world, to be playing on a much grander scale than Natoma, Kansas, or even of Warsaw, Indiana, or the Wolf Creek valley. Washington, D.C, had suited her dreams just fine in this regard, but now she truly was out in the world. As isolated as they were, it seemed like the whole world passed through Kuala Lumpur and their dining room—but at a pace that Ada could easily cope with and savor.

And Ada's art flourished as well. Whereas her fame in the States had come to rest on her winter scenes of the Colorado mountains, in Malaya she was using bold colors to capture the vivid beauty of the tropical jungles. She was shipping paintings off to the Chicago and New York galleries and had become the darling of a whole new generations of art collectors, many of whom beat their way to her remote paradise to worship at her feet and to share with her the continuing sagas of her literary and artist friends at home. In all she did, Ada's husband indulged his wife and presented her to his world with pride and affection. This was an ideal marriage for him.

Although Ada loved and respected her husband dearly, this wasn't at all the ideal marriage for her. But it wasn't long before Ada had met a man who took all of the tension out of her lack of a bedroom relationship with her impotent husband. She encountered him at one of those interminable cocktail parties at the French embassy. And he was about the last person on earth she would have expected to sweep her off her feet.

Sun Li was a Malay of Chinese extraction, and he was nearly twenty years Ada's junior. To the Americans and Europeans, he was primitive, a tribal warlord from the wilderness of the isolated Genting Highlands, in central Malaya, northeast of the capital city. But to the Malay, he was a truly Renaissance man. He had been educated at the Sorbonne in Paris and was an accomplished violinist. Conversely, he was a warrior, the leader of a fierce, untamed tribe. And to his people he was a god. When Ada first met him in the drawing room of the French embassy, he was wearing a tuxedo—and wearing it quite well—and was the center of an obviously erudite conversation in French with a small, select group of diplomats and Malay government leaders. If it hadn't been for his Chinese features, dark bronze skin, and the pony tail that his black hair was pulled into, Ada would have assumed he was yet another European ambassador. But, no, she had thought. He was much too powerfully built to be anything but the leader of men in battle.

Ada didn't even realize at the time that she had made an impression on Sun Li, but obviously she had. He started appearing at whatever party or event she and Stanfield appeared at, and, after they had been introduced and had engaged in several chit chat conversations over a couple of months, she was telling him of the beauty of the wilderness of her Wolf Creek valley in Colorado and he, in turn, was telling her of his own paradise, the Genting Highlands.

"They sound delightful," she said. "I'd like to see them someday." She was thinking of the area in terms of a setting for her painting.

"And so you shall, my dear, so you shall," the tribal chieftain responded, with a patient, but knowing gleam in his eyes.

The opportunity came a few months later, in the fall of 1937, when Stanfield had been called back to Washington for consultations on the increasingly disturbing political and military moves the Japanese were making in the southern Pacific.

Ada had chosen to remain in Kuala Lumpur, if for no other publicly acknowledged reason than that the trip back to the States was becoming so much more dangerous with each passing day. But Ada didn't fool herself. She and Sun Li had become closer and closer, each knowing what was happening between them and not wanting to deny it, and with Ada becoming more and more frustrated for sexual release in the never-ending months of living with an impotent husband. Sun Li had been honest with her; he had three wives up in the Genting Highlands, and he fully accepted that Ada's residence in Malaya was short-lived and she would return to far-off America soon. But he was smitten with her and he wanted to couple with her—and tribal warlords in Southeast Asia were not given to subtle courting. Most Malay men in his position would have just taken her—and, truth be known, this power—as well as his restraint—were part of what drove Ada toward Sun Li, and there were moments in the dance around that they did in public that she wished he would just do that—sweep into her garden and take her roughly and fully against the wall, as Peter Fair was prone to do.

But Sun Li was trained in Western ways enough to be patient and to not go beyond what Ada said she wanted as well. His patience paid off when Stanfield departed for Washington. Ada's husband would be well out of the way and on the other side of the world for at least three months. Sun Li asked Ada if this would be a good time for her to journey up to the Genting Highland as his guest, and Ada told him it would be a perfect time. Both knew full well what would happen in the Genting Highlands.

The distance between Kuala Lumpur and the mountain fastness of the Genting Highlands wasn't far at all in physical miles, but it was separated by centuries in cultural differences. As Ada rode into the mountains, first by car, then by horse-drawn carriage, and finally on the back of an elephant, she sensed the years of progress—not always healthy progress—melting away, so that, when she arrived at the sprawling palace of interconnected wooden decks and open pavilions meandering around cliffs above deep, jungle-infested ravines that Sun Li called home, she had been transported back a century or more. There was no question from the moment they were helped off the elephants at the entry arch into the complex that Sun Li was both ruler and god here—that whatever he wanted would be done and was quite all right with all of his subjects.

Ada was met by a line of twittering young women, among whom she knew Sun Li's wives lurked, who bustled her away to the women's pavilions and bathed and perfumed her and wound a brilliantly colored sarong around her naked body. Appearances were deceiving, however. The more Ada talked with these young women, the more she realized that several of them had lived in the West and had been well educated. They had chosen to return to this remote fastness and to live with Sun Li in the old ways.

That evening, as the sun was setting, Ada ate alone with Sun Li on a wooden deck, one corner cantilevered out over a chasm. Across the ravine from them, a waterfall fell a hundred feet or more from an even higher promontory from where they were sitting. While they dined, kneeling on colorful straw mats on either side of a low lacquered table, attendants moved in delicate, fluid motion between them and one of two pavilions abutting the deck against the rising mountainside. The soft sounds of lutes and flutes wafted from the other pavilion; both structures were draped in curtains so that, when the meal was over and the dishes and table had been cleared away, Ada and Sun Li were virtually alone, enjoying the lilting of the music and the sinking of the last pink, red, and lavender bands of the sunset. As they had departed, the attendants had lit tall torches at the edges of the decking, and those cast soft light across the deck, creating interesting contrasts of light and shadow. Idiotically, Ada found herself noting that she must try to achieve this effect in a painting or two.

Sun Li was draped in a heavy brocade robe, which rustled as he moved closer, without rising from his kneeling position, to Ada across the straw matting. He was whispering his love for Ada and the honor she had done him by visiting him here in his home. They were very close together now, facing each other. Sun Li took up a lotus blossom that had been in a vase on the table and had been left beside him when the table had been cleared and brushed the fingers of one hand through Ada's long, raven-black hair—still black with only the hint of gray strands at her temples—while he threaded the stem of the lotus into her hair.

They were very close together now, their foreheads touching, and Ada watched, her eyes downcast, as Sun Li unfastened her sarong and opened it and dropped it to where it lay in folds around her naked hips. She was naked and completely open to him. Taking considerable time, he kissed his way down her body, along the hollow in her neck, around each of her nipples and heaving breasts in turn, and down toward her navel. She arched her back toward the decking as he moved his face down her torso, his arms encircling her waist.

Ada felt Sun Li take the lotus blossom from her hair. He was kissing her navel and then moving his lips lower. Ada arched back farther, her shoulders touching the straw matting, and her eyes locked on the cascading waterfall across the ravine, itself magically illuminated by torches set down the mountainside around it. She felt his strong lips on the ones she had between her thighs, and she began to moan and sigh, the dreams of so many sexless nights lying beside her husband being fulfilled beyond her wildest expectations. She felt a pricking sensation at her entrance and she rose far enough to see, when she looked down the long, trembling line of her torso, that Sun Li had inserted the stem of the lotus there He was kissing and licking all around the blossom at her opening. He had his lips and teeth planted on her clitoris now and he was tonguing and sucking her. He held her pelvis steady with his strong hands on her hips as he was making love to her here, and she writhed in ecstasy below him. She wanted him inside her now, fucking her deeply. But Sun Li was relentless in his attentions to her clitoris. He just kept holding her still there and tonguing and sucking her until, with a cry and a lurch, she erupted in orgasm and then collapsed back onto the mat.

Sun Li was telling her how much he had enjoyed that and hoping that she had as well, as he opened his robe and revealed himself fully naked, a dark bronze god, underneath the robe. His cock was in full erection and curved up toward his body. He gave a little laugh as he inserted yet another lotus blossom in the slit in the glans of his penis. Ada watch this blossom, mesmerized, he lowered the head of his cock to her entrance, below her own lotus blossom, and then she both watched and felt as he fed his member into her flowing opening, crushing the lotus blossoms together. She felt the lotus blossoms being pulverized between their lower bellies as Sun Li pulled her pelvis into his and raised her breasts to his chest. The flowers released a strong, intoxicating scent in their joining and bruising. As Sun Li's lips went down to Ada's breasts, he pulled the robe around both of them, and they made long, languid love within their brocade cocoon.



Wolf Creek Ch. 16



Sun Li was masterful throughout that night and for the next two nights Ada spent in the Genting Highlands. And in succeeding months, he proved that he was inventive and capable of surprises as well. Their greatest challenge was in finding opportunity and location to carry on their affair. But somehow they managed through the next three years. If Stanfield suspected anything—if he noticed that Ada had taken on a special glow when he returned from Washington or that she had turned to painting mountain fast scenes with cascading waterfalls that he had to assume came entirely from her imagination—he said nothing. He was too much in love with his wife and not unaware of the impediments his own inability to perform sexually presented. And beyond the bit of adultry, Ada was the perfect wife, hostess, and intellectural foil for Stanfield.

As 1940 moved into 1941, that gathering storm in the outside world began intruding into Ada and Stanfield's idyllic paradise. Stanfield spent more and more time at the embassy in increasingly frustrating problem solving in a corner of the world that was slowly being isolated and beleaguered by the rising sun of the Japanese empire. For her part, Ada remained sunny side up to the Kuala Lumpur international community, but her true feelings could be seen in her painting. This would forever be known as her "gray" period. She was still painting the lush foliage of the Malayan jungle, but her painting was now being done in monochrome—in white and shades of gray and black. Just like a photograph; just like those other photographs, the one on J. Harvey Kincaid's nightstand and the ones she was receiving of Hugh's family. And, like the photographs, her paintings were study of subtle but clearly understood concern and fear for the future as much as the present. In all of this, Stanfield was her intellectual touch stone and Sun Li was her sexual release.

It wasn't only world events that had brought Ada to this period of her art. The early part of 1941 had also brought personal sadness to her from the far distance. In April she received a letter from her Aunt Martha informing her that her father, the Reverend Henry Albin, had died peacefully while taking a nap on a Sunday afternoon, after having given a rousing sermon to a handful of parishioners in his Natoma, Kansas, weather-beaten wooden church. Ada mourned the news, but she didn't mourn the loss of her father so much as she mourned her father's life—the life he'd never really had; the life he had denied himself.

She had hardly kept in touch with him after she had left his side, learning of his activities—or lack of them—from Aunt Martha. And now all she could feel for him was the sadness of what had never existed between them—or for him. The Reverend Albin had lived to be eighty-eight. Ada, who had always been told her dominate characteristics came from her father's side, could take comfort from his longevity. However, she told herself that, if she had the choice of living quietly to ninety or to live life to its fullness and die decades earlier, she'd choose the shorter life for herself without hesitation.

What had really brought her grief and had slapped her in the face with the trouble that was brewing in the world, however, happened the following month, in May. An experimental aircraft Quentin Hopewell and his wife, Estelle, were very publicly taking on an around-the-world adventure on a National Geographic assignment disappeared off the tracking charts in a group of Japanese-held Chinese islands off the coast of Hainan Island. A storm had put the aircraft significantly off course; it wasn't scheduled to go anywhere near those islands. But the reporting from Estelle had abruptly stopped and they didn't make their next scheduled landing. Soon thereafter they had planned to stop in Kuala Lumpur to visit Ada, and the Walkers had already laid on all sorts of media-covered events for them. But they simply disappeared. The Chinese authorities noted that they themselves had no access to the islands even though they supposedly were Chinese territory—and they used the opportunity to somewhat acidly point out to the Americans that they'd have to contact the Japanese, whom the Americans seemed to be ignoring were slowly gobbling up the world from the east. The Japanese government, when queried, simply said it knew nothing of any such flight—that their permission had not been requested for any such overflight of the islands and that permission would have been denied if it had been requested.

Stanfield, who had never liked Estelle and who certainly was repelled by Quentin's very public National Socialist leanings, commiserated with Ada's grief, but he also couldn't resist the opportunity to point to the irony of the possibility that the famously National Socialist apologist Quentin Hopewell had been brought to ground by the Japanese allies of National Socialism and shot as an American spy. Ada saw the irony but wasn't, in the slightest, amused that Stanfield had succumbed to his little joke.

The first week of December, 1941, was the worst in Ada's life. Although Stanfield told her to keep up appearances as best as possible, he also told her that war with Japan was becoming ever more likely and to quietly start packing their valuables for a quick evacuation. He also began to go around to the Americans in the international community in Malaya, cautioning them on the sly to prepare to be evacuated as well. Ada could tell that the tension and the burden of his responsibilities were wearing Stanfield down. He was moving slower and the worry was painted across his face during his every waking moment—not that his nightmare-tormented nights brought him any relief.

Regardless of the years of warning and days of planning, Ada and Stanfield were as shocked as the rest of the international community in Malaya when they were awakened on the morning of the December 8th to the news that the Japanese were attacking Singapore, that great Chinese merchant city at the base of the Malay peninsula. They actually heard of this assault, because it was so much closer to their current home, before they received the news that the Japanese had attack the U.S. bases at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii almost simultaneously, on December 7th on the eastern side of the International Dateline.

The 9th and the 10th were spent sending plane after any sort of plane that could be had stuffed to the edge of endurance with American citizens off to Australia as the Japanese began a relentless invasion up the Malay peninsula with only token resistance. With each plane departure, Stanfield begged Ada to get on board. But Ada staunchly refused, saying she would take the last plane with Stanfield—when the last American who wanted to go was on board a plane.

There was no last plane for the Walkers. The Japanese seized the Kuala Lumpur airfield before the Walkers could evacuate, although, thanks to Stanfield's perseverance and preparations, nearly all American nationals who were willing to leave had done so—and most, but not all of the evacuation planes had made it safely to Australia.

The last hope of escape having escaped them, Ada and Stanfield calmly returned to the American embassy compound to await whatever would be their fate. Stanfield looked exhausted from his weeks of tense activity and collapsed into a bamboo chair in the garden before he could make it to the house. Ada went for a glass of water. The house was deserted; they had convinced all of the servants that they must dissolve into the countryside and not reveal they had been working for the Americans. When she returned, Stanfield was draped in the chair, both of his arms in his white linen suit dragging over the chair arms toward the patio stones, and his head lolled to one side. Ada knew before she reached him that he was gone. She placed the glass of water on a table and sat in a bamboo chair beside him and waited, waited as the light of day dimmed and as the din of the approaching Japanese army grew louder.

The noise Ada eventually heard outside her garden gate, however, wasn't the Japanese. It was a voice that she knew so well and melted to on a regular basis. She rose from her chair and out of her lethargy and rushed to the garden gate, unlatched it, and flew into Sun Li's arms. He was dressed in the garb of a Malay peasant and had other, similar clothing in his arms.

"I've just heard you didn't make it out," he said through heavy breathing. "I've come to take you and your husband up into the mountains, where you will be safe at least until we can figure out how to get you away from here. Here, you both must put these clothes on so you won't be so conspicuous."

Ada broke down at that point and, pointing to where Stanfield was seated in his final repose in the garden, said it was too late for them.

Sun Li, sizing up the situation immediately, merely swept Ada up into his arms, ignoring her protests that she couldn't just leave Stanfield like that, and headed for the waiting carriage out on the road.



Wolf Creek Ch. 17



"I never want to move from here," Ada whispered dreamily, as she gazed at the paddle fan slowly revolving in the painted rafters over her head and listened to the songs of the jungle birds and clicking of the geckos out in the lush green vegetation beyond the pavilion. She moved her hips, seeking the assurance that Sun Li was still deep inside her.

"Hmmmm," Sun Li murmured. He enclosed one hand over one of Ada's breasts and held the other on her belly, pulling her ever closer into his lap as he lay stretched out behind her on the silk-sheeted platform bed in the middle of the open pavilion. "But even this is transitory, dear love. All is just a passing shadow."

"I've had enough the world," Ada persisted stubbornly. "I've lost three husbands to the plagues, hardships, and wars of the world. I want to spend the rest of eternity in anonymity, here in your arms."

"That would hardly be fair to your family, Mrs. Walker," Sun Li responded. Ada had moved a hand back between their pelvises and had a thumb positioned at the underside of his cock, right at the base, putting pressure on a thick vein there. The cock came to attention and Sun Li began to groan. His hips went into motion, and he was moving deeply and strongly within her for the second time since they had awakened that morning.

"Ahh, you are so naughty and s-o-o amazing," he murmured in a husky voice. "A devil of a woman. Letting you go will be the greatest challenge of my life."

"Ohhhh, yes. Like that. Again. Ohhh," Ada was once again transported in the taking by a young, virile, strong body, and there was no more discussion for a while, as they moved in consort to the rotation of the overhead fan and to the rhythms and music of the jungle just beyond the pillars of the pavilion.

"What do you mean give me up and being fair to my family?" Ada asked an hour later, abruptly picking up on the exchange between them right before she had been transported back into the dream world that she wanted just to swallow her up and hide her from the real world forever. She was sitting at a table with a mirror on it and stroking a brush through her long lightly gray-streaked raven-black hair. Sun Li was standing behind her, naked save a silk robe open at the front, his own straight black hair cascading to his shoulders, his big, strong hands cupping her breasts and his cock running up the small of her back, ever reminding Ada of what was and what was to come.

"I haven't been idle these last weeks, Ada. You must return to your own country. Thus far the Japanese haven't dared venture too far into the highlands. They've just bypassed us here. But that won't last forever. As they consolidate their power here, they will come for us, and this won't be a safe haven anymore. This will be a battleground. I will have to fight. You must go, both for your own safety and for the safety of those of us who must stay and fight."

"But how I can leave here? And where can I go? Oh, Sun Li, I want to stay here and face whatever comes," Ada said in an exasperated tone and dropped her brush on the tabletop and looked up into his eyes.

"As you wanted to stay in your garden down in Kuala Lumpur, beside your dead husband, and await the Japanese invaders?"

"Yes," Ada said in a whisper. "Oh, Sun Li, I'm so tired of all of this. I would gladly stand by you to the last here?"

"I see. And would you force the same fate on my wives and children?"

"Excuse me? What do you mean?" This response had brought Ada up short. Her attention was focused now. She rose from the table and away from Sun Li's encased hands and wrapped a silk robe tightly around her voluptuous body and turned to face him. One chieftain to another.

"I want you in safety regardless. But I've struck a deal with friends in Thailand. They are sending an airplane for you, to take you to Bangkok. And if the plane comes for you, they will take my wife and children to safety as well. You will be saving them, not just yourself."

"An Airplane? Bangkok? For me?" Ada couldn't quite grasp all that he was saying.

"Yes, it seems you still have friends and family. Powerful friends and family. They want you back in safety, and they are putting elaborate and dangerous plans in motion to make that happen."

"Oh." Ada was overwhelmed. To her mind nearly all of her friends and family—at least those she hadn't alienated—were already gone. It seemed she wasn't going to be able to shrink for a connection with the world after all. She looked at Sun Li again as she crossed her arms tightly under her breasts. "But Bangkok? Thailand is under Japanese control too."

"Not quite like Malaya and much of the rest of Southeast Asia are," Sun Li said. "The Thai are much more clever than the rest of us. While we were putting up hopeless and ineffective resistance, the Thai had a convenient supposedly pro-Japanese coup and welcomed the Japanese as allies. But then they have just continued to be independent and balancing act Thai just below the surface."

"This all seems somewhat far-fetched. I don't . . ."

"The Thai actually contacted me about you before I could set my own plan in motion for getting you to safety. Their agents knew that your husband had been found in the garden of the embassy, but no one knew anything about where you were. Your State Department, pushed by some very powerful connections of yours in the States, scoured all of the evacuation points, looking for you. And then they put their intelligence services, such as they are in this region, to work and determined that, if the Japanese were holding you, they were doing so in extreme secrecy. I was one of the contact points they tried in a second sweep. And as soon as they learned you were here, someone in the States put a rescue plan in action."

"Well. If they've gone that far . . ." Ada really didn't know what to say at this point. It seemed this was all out of her control. Perhaps if she wasn't the "freedom card" for Sun Li's own family. But she did owe him this much and much more. He had made her life bearable in terms of her sexual weaknesses for years—and thus had probably kept her marriage to Stanfield a happy one for both of them—and he had saved her life in Kuala Lumpur, although she was still uncertain whether that was a favor for her, in reality.

Ada's shoulders came down and her arms fell to her sides and she came as close to looking her full fifty-six years as she ever had. "So, when do I have to leave?" she asked at length, not being able to look into the handsome face of her lover, the man she never wanted to leave again. She almost laughed at the irony of that thought. She had had a progression of young and virile lovers she had never wanted to leave again. And yet, she had lost them all. She was feeling so defeated.

"In an hour or two, I'm afraid." Sun Li answered immediately. He respected Ada too much to play games with her. "The Japanese aren't far away and they will have airplanes up soon looking for pockets of resistance. There also are rumors that they have ack ack guns being brought up from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur. Each day we delay, the more likely an airplane can't safely fly in and out of here."

Even as he spoke, Ada could hear the droning of propellers growing louder, moving toward them. Coming to take her away. Away from Sun Li.

"Don't be so sad, my lotus," Sun Li said. He had brought her to him and had his arms around her and was stroking her hair. "I had been saving this, but, come, there's something I want you to see."

He took her by the hand and led her through the compound to a dining pavilion, which was dominated by a huge teak table with ornately carved legs. Curtains were drawn around the room. Sun Li moved Ada to stand next to the table in the center of the room, and he circled the pavilion, drawing open curtain after curtain and revealing a large collection of paintings Ada had rendered in her years in Malaya—six years of productivity, revealing the progression of her emotions from delight at the colors and wild life and floating architecture of the exotic country, to the monochromes of her gray period, to the sensual, lust-charged paintings of the period in which Sun Li had been her lover.

"How?" Ada burbled, almost overcome with joy and surprise.

"My men enjoyed the outing tremendously. They swiped these from the embassy compound right from underneath the eyes of the drunken Japanese. They have never been so proud of a raid as this one. I will try to keep these safe for you and send them back to you after the war. We have hiding places here the Japanese would be hard pressed to find. And when they come here, they won't be looking for museum-quality paintings. We must be optimistic and believe that there will be an end to the war and another beginning for us."

"Oh, Sun Li. I don't know how . . ." She opened her arms to him as he swiftly returned to her.

"Shush, my love. I know your painting is your soul. I could not let you lose such a vivid reflection of your life in my country. Shush now. One last time before you leave."

Sun Li was pulling at the sash to Ada's silken robe and drawing the sides apart. He wrapped his strong arms around her, between the silk and her warm flesh, and brought their bodies together. His lips to hers, her nipples to his, their heaving bellies smashing at each other. He pushed her back and sat her on the edge of the massive teak table, and Ada arched her back from him and opened her legs wide to him. He entered her swiftly and deeply, and she gyrated her hips against his pelvis, wildly and hungrily, pulling him deep inside her one last time. Hungrily. Sobbingly. Never wanting this coupling to end.



Wolf Creek Ch. 18



Ada and Sun Li's wives crouched in the dark DC-3 airplane cabin, holding tightly to and shushing the frightened wailing of children. The women and older children—the ones who knew that the real danger wasn't having been swallowed by a big silver bird—held their breaths as the airplane banked out over the Gulf of Siam, waiting for discovery and the dreaded rat tat tatting of antiaircraft guns. Ada had been surprised by the luxurious appointments of the two-engine commercial workhorse craft. The plane obviously was owned by someone of importance. This only added to her confusion of who her rescuer was and how this would get her home. Home to Wolf Creek. She was conflicted. She ached to be home in Wolf Creek and far away from the reality of the world—the greater world that she had pursuing all of her adult life. But, at the same time, she ached to be back in the Genting Highlands of Malaya, home there in Sun Li's arms.

The DC-3 touched down in the darkest hour of the morning on a remote stretch of tarmac on the Ban Muang airfield outside of Bangkok, Thailand. The gods were with them. A blinding squall was going through the area as they landed, and there was little danger that the Japanese guards in the control tower had any idea an airplane had landed, although the Thai controllers certainly knew about the plane and that it was coming in for a landing. They had no idea who was on the plane, but it was a plane they were able to account for no matter where in the world it was.

The visibility was so limited and the rain so drenching that Ada experienced the quick deplaning as a mere blur of activity and pounding raindrops before the DC-3 took off again to make another approach and an innocent landing right in front of the control tower. A line of black limousines was parked just steps away from the ramp to the plane, and Ada was smothered in a tarp and a huge umbrella was held over her head as four slightly built, olive-skinned men with determined and concerned looks on their faces bundled her into the lead limo. She was able to glance around only long enough to catch a partial view of Sun Li's wives and children being similarly bundled into the other cars. It was the last time she ever saw any of them.

The limousine drove into the night, a military jeep in front and another behind, at a speed that was far in excess of safety in these weather conditions. The vehicles were driving without lights, and it was only by the miracle of the storm raging about them that they didn't sweep bicycles and ox carts off the road into the water-filled canals on either side of the badly worn road.

Ada was alone in the back of the limo. She tried making out what was alongside the road in passing, but it was all a dark blur until she saw a glow of a large city ahead through the slackening rain. They entered the suburbs of an Oriental city. They were passing a blur of concrete compound walls, above which peeked the tops of palm and other lush-leafed trees and high-peaked wooden roofs with shiny tiles and turned-up corners. Every few hundred feet, the road would rise and they'd cross a canal on which long-tailed boat traffic was increasingly evident the farther they penetrated into the city. The traffic on the canals seemed much heavier than on the road, but now that Ada focused on the road traffic, she could see that all of the bicycles and sampan drivers ahead were looking back at the convoy as it swept down on them and that they then pulled immediately to the side of the road and lowered their faces, almost, it seemed, in homage to the cars. As she gazed over the hood, Ada saw that the limo she was in was flying a solid-yellow flag from the corners of its bumpers—the color reserved for Thai royalty. It looked like this is what those on the road ahead were focusing on when they drew aside as quickly as they did.

They were in the center of the city now, following the sweep of a wide river, already busy with road traffic this hour before dawn. And the limousine carrying Ada and the two military jeeps that had been preceding and following her car had detached from the rest and no longer was part of the convoy carrying Sun Li's household. The buildings in the section of the city Ada's limousine had entered were larger and more grand and more colorful then where they had been driving before. The buildings were all a variation on the steep-roofed pagoda style that were in Sun Li's mountain fortress and on the buildings behind the walls in the suburbs, but they were made out of more expensive-appearing, brightly painted wood or concrete and their roofs were tiled in shiny colored tiles and had elaborate dragon- and snake-tail style curlicues on their corners. Also, the lawns were broader here and were covered with grass.

Ada's diminished convoy pulled across the small end of a huge oval parade ground, around which were clustered a breathtaking array of magnificent temples and ceremonial buildings, and turned sharply to the right, sweeping into large iron gates in a high compound wall that opened, almost by magic, upon the convoy's approach and clanked shut almost as quickly in their wake.

They were in a large, crushed-seashell covered courtyard before one of the tallest, most ornate pagoda pavilions Ada had seen in her various trips through Southeast Asia. The steps leading up to it and the platform on which it's white-painted, gold-leaf topped columns stood was well-scrubbed white marble. And its roof was of golden fish-scale tiles with borders of emerald green and sapphire blue tiles.

And standing at the foot of the stairs up to this structure was a diminutive Thai man, short and thin as a rail, a monocle in one eye, but decked out in an exquisitely tailored dark suit, his eyes intently on Ada as she was handed out of the limousine and escorted toward him. He was holding a bouquet of long-stemmed yellow roses, and, at last, all of Ada's questions about this fairytale escape were beginning to come into focus. But only just.

The tiny man stepped forward. "Hello, Mrs. Walker," he said in impeccable British English. I am Pridi Phanomyong. Welcome to Bangkok. These roses are for you."

"Hello. Thank you. Thank you for everything," Ada said. "But the roses . . .?"

". . . Are from your good friend, Prince Seni Pramoj, our emissary to the United States."

"I surmised as such," Ada answered, remembering the roses that the Thai ambassador had brought to her New York departure six years earlier. "And do I have him to thank for all of this . . .?"

"Partially, only partially," Pridi responded with a smile. "But we must not linger here long. We must get you inside."

As they climbed the steps and moved into halls of incredible opulence, Ada gave voice to the burning questions.

"Where am I, if I may ask. And who is responsible for getting me here? And where do I go from here. This wouldn't seem any safer from the Japanese for an official American than Malaya was."

"All good questions, Madame. You are in the Grand Palace in Bangkok."

"The Grand Palace," Ada said with a gasp. "The Thai king's . . .?"

"Yes, his palace, but he isn't here. He's safely in Europe . . . on an extended stay at a health spa. You could say that he finds not being here just now good for his health, but you'd have to be very circumspect who you said that to." Ada's host gave her a playful little smile before continuing.

"I am the royal regent, so I speak and act for him here. I have no idea when—or whether—the king will return. And as for the Japanese, this would be the last place they would think to look for you or anyone else they might be looking for. For that, the location gives a certain number of Thai, such as me, an opportunity to indulge in activities which the, ah, Japanese, ah, are unlikely to look kindly on. On that basis, I have been in contact concerning your situation not only with your good friend and our emissary in America, Seni Pramoj, but also with some powerful Americans who were concerned about your plight."

"Powerful Americans?"

They had reached section of the palace grounds overlooking the broad Chao Phya River, the life artery of the Thai mainland. "Yes, very powerful Americans. But perhaps I am not the best one to discuss this with you. As much as I would love to keep you here for a bit, having heard what a delightful conversationalist you are from Prince Seni, you have a departing tide to catch, and we mustn't miss your opportunities. Come, could you follow me to the pier?"

"To the pier? Departing tide?" Ada was still very confused. And then she saw it. A magnificent, gigantic old, gleaming white yacht lying in the middle of the river, foregrounding the spires of what she would be told was the Wat Arun temple on the opposite bank of the Chao Phya.

"Do you like it, Mrs. Walker?" Pridi asked as they walked out to the pier and to the waiting launch. "That's the Maha Chakri, the king's yacht. I see that it goes down the river to the Klong Toey docks at least twice a week and back so that the Japanese accept this as our routine. But, thanks to the Maha Chakri, our routine now includes transporting arms and other needed supplies from the docks on the first leg of their journey into the jungles, where the resistance is building. You've come in good time. You will be hidden aboard throughout the day and will sail down to the Kong Toey in the evening."

"And then?" Ada asked.

"As I said, that perhaps is better answered by others. Indeed, I don't really know where you go from Kong Toey, nor is it safe for me to know that much. I just know you are in very good hands.

Ada offered her profuse thanks to the royal regent as she stepped into the launch, and then, turning and watching as the launch approached the steps up into the Maha Chakri, Ada saw for herself what Pridi Phanomyong had meant by "good hands." Standing at the top of the ladder, looking both worried and relieved, was her oldest son, Daniel Raven.

Over a lavish luncheon, which Ada initially said she couldn't possibly have an appetite for but which she devoured in hunger and in partial relief from the terror and tension she had felt for the previous three weeks, Dan started to explain to her what had happened and what was yet to transpire to return her to the States.

"The Japanese were quick to report that they had found Stanfield dead by natural causes in the Kuala Lumpur embassy garden, and they brought in several other captured ambassadors to verify that was so. I guess they didn't want to be charged with killing him, especially since they didn't do it. But no one knew where you were."

"But so quickly, Dan? Why with all that was happening across the world—in Pearl Harbor and all across Asia. Why was anyone so concerned about me or found the time to do anything for me?"

"As for the latter," Dan said, "we can thank your congressman, Peter Fair. I knew you two knew each other, but I had no idea how interested he was in your welfare. He's a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, you know, in addition to being your congressman. He called me. I had no idea the plight you were in until he called me. And he called the Thai ambassador too, who knew you as well. They greased the wheels. We just provided the means. Vaughn Enterprises has stores throughout South America, as I'm sure you know. The South American countries are still recognized as neutrals in the building war. We regularly import tapioca from Thailand to Rio de Janeiro. So the means is right here, at the Klong Toey docks. We sail on the tide for Rio, Mother."

Having it laid out, and especially hearing of Peter's hand in the mix, overwhelmed Ada. This and the rich food and the strong wine, and, particularly, unexpectedly seeing her son here, coming to her rescue, abruptly pressed down on her. "You said 'we' . . .?"

"Later, Mother. You look completely done in. Let me take you to your cabin, where you can rest until we reach Klong Toey. Pridi wants you completely out of sight anyway." He started to help his mother up from the table, but he hesitated before preceding and put a protective hand on her shoulder. "As for your first question, we all rushed to your aid because . . . because we love you so much."

Ada was overcome with tears, although she had managed to stave them off until she was in her cabin and sitting in front a mirror at a dressing table and running a brush through her long, thick hair. This very gesture was more than she could bear. Not more than twenty-four hours earlier, she had been sitting at a similar table, brushing her hair, and Sun Li was cupping her naked breasts and preparing to make love to her. She suddenly was very, very vulnerable and distressed with herself—with her whole life, with her selfish, life-long pursuit of the pleasures of the "greater world." And in the face of this, her eldest son, from whom she kept his true parentage secret, had come from the other side of the world to save her and was saying that everyone she had been so ready to abandon back in the States loved her. What disillusion, Ada thought, as she sobbed. So many had been quite happy to feed her lust and zest for a "greater world" life, but could they really love her? How could they love her?

She was weary to the bones again, a weariness that had flowed into her when she returned to the garden in Kuala Lumpur and found her husband dead, her husband, who had given his very life fulfilling his responsibilities, evacuating those Americans he was responsible for from Malaya in the face of a Japanese invasion. And she? What had she done beyond dallying with a mountain chieftain.

Ada dragged herself over to the bed in the stifling heat of the enclosed cabin and had barely enough time to pull the mosquito netting around the bed before she drifted off into a deep, troubled, drink-, rich food-, and guilt-induced sleep.

Hiram was pushing at her, screaming that she was a Jezebel, and she knew he was right, but she was pulling her breasts from a cornflower-blue dress and wiggling them at him. But it was Charles who was suckling her breasts and waving something in front of her face, saying everything was fine, that French letters never failed. Charles was pulling away from her and sneering at her as an angelic John Raven stood with her in front of a magistrate, the front of her incongruously lily-white dress bulging out. Guilt. Guilt. There in the background, even farther in the shadows, stood old reliable William Hagen. There in the background, holding a hand out to her, for the remainder of this awful, long, rambling nightmare. John, playing with his son, Dan, while a sad-looking George stood nearby, reaching out to Dan but not being able to touch him, even as John faded into the distance. Ada, torn, holding her dying daughter, Charlotte, in her arms as a fading John pulled her toward him, toward a black hearse drawn by four black horses. "Charles, oh Charles," Ada moaned in her troubled sleep. "I never told you Charlotte was yours. I never told you, Charles. I never told you, Dan, about George. Dear, loving, loyal George. Please forgive me." James falling from high up in a building, his eyes wide in fear, his mouth forming the word "George" as he falls. But at the window, the window from which he perpetually falls, Ada in the embrace of Peter, each with eyes only for each other. Did James fall or was he pushed?

Ada moaned again in her sleep. She was bathed in sweat. The air wasn't moving; she was suffocating in the stifling cabin, but, try as she might, she couldn't bring herself out of her tortured sleep. James still falling, and pulling farther beyond the entwined Ada and Peter in the window of the skyscraper, appeared the watchful, damning eyes of Peter's wife and father. Frank now, but just the vision of Frank, slung on a stretcher between two horses, descending the rocky and snow-flaked mountainside while she lay in a thick-post poster bed in the lodge with a thick-cocked J. Harvey pushing in and out of her, the two of them moaning in ecstasy with him moving in and out in and out as her husband's spirit slowly flows out of him in a never-ending approach to the lodge from the mountain. Photographs. Damning photographs flowing around her now. J. Harvey moving out a photograph and pulling her son, Hugh, with him. A thick-cocked J. Harvey embracing a naked Hugh, pushing in and out of him, the two of them moaning in ecstasy, as J. Harvey smiles up at Ada and beckons her to join in. She recoils in disgust but finds herself moving toward them—only to have a photograph of a loving, trusting Beth and an innocent grandson, John, jump up between Ada and the image she cannot stand. Ada, straddling the loins of a sleeping Stanfield, pumping hard, but getting . . . nothing.

Ada whimpered and turned again. The sun had abated to be replaced by a torrential rain outside the cabin window. The daily afternoon drenching. The sudden relief of temperature. Sun Li rising in Ada's dream now. Embracing her, comforting her, carrying her to his low bed in the middle of a pavilion perched on a rock outcropping high above a ravine. Water cascading from a fall across the ravine. Cascading thick, black hair on her breasts and belly and thighs. A cooling tongue heating her up at her very core. The sound of lutes and flutes and the filling of her inside by a throbbing cylinder of strength and peace and passion. Sun Li humming to her, comforting her, as he rises up inside her, reaching for her heart, for her very soul.

Daniel stood outside his mother's cabin door, relieved now that, at long last, the crying and moaning had settled down inside the cabin. The cooling rain had broken the ovenlike heat permeating the inside of the old yacht and, he hoped, had brought his mother some modicum of peace and rest at last.

It was almost dark when the launch took them the short distance from the sleek Maha Chakri over to the far-less-than-sleek, all-business merchant steamer lying well off of the docks at Klong Toey, just waiting to get under way for the tide and routine clearance from the Japanese authorities now controlling the port.

Ada, still full of guilt, decided this was as good a time as any to start making amends.

"Dan, about your father . . ." she started to say as the launch approached the side of the steamer.

"I know, Mother. I've know for some time I've had two fathers. Two wonderful fathers."

"You know . . .? You know that George Vaughn was your father?"

"Look up there, Mother, up at the bow of the boat, just below the railing."

Ada's eyes followed the direction of Dan's pointing hand. Written on the side of the ship, the name of the ship, the Ada George. Dan had named the vessel after his mother and true father, the founder of the Vaughn department store enterprises.

But even before this could sink in, Ada's eyes continued on up to the rail above the name plate. Standing there, looking ever watchful and steady, was the man who had waited patiently for her since she was a girl of eighteen in Slater, Missouri, William Hagen.



Wolf Creek Ch. 19



William Hagen met Ada at the top of the gangplank up to the deck of the Ada George. The two were still hugging tightly when Ada's son, Daniel Raven, puffed up the ladder and put foot to deck.

"I see you've found Mr. Hagen," Dan said dryly. "He wouldn't stay home, and if it hadn't been for him, this wouldn't have happened—at least as quickly as it did."

"Good, sweet, reliable William," Ada was murmuring through her tears of surprise and relief. "And is this the last of your surprises, Dan? Mother's not at all sure she could survive another."

But there was one last surprise and not a particularly welcome one, although survive it Ada did.

Dan and William quickly escorted Ada through a door and to a somewhat cleaner and more refined cabin area below the deck of the merchant steamer. While doing so, both men examined the harbor area around them, looking for any sign that the boarding had been observed by the Japanese or anyone who would serve the Japanese.

As they entered a small lounge and mess area that was to be shared by the cabins of the secret travelers, Ada gasped at what was blocking the doorway. J. Harvey Kincaid in all of his charismatic glory, fairly glowing in the waning light from beyond the portholes and holding his arms wide to embrace his erstwhile lover. Ada went on the offensive, giving him a brief hug of her own to keep up appearances but dancing away from his enclosing arms before he could catch her up in his enticing web once more.

The four sat at the mess table, while Dan and William provided some explanation—and Kincaid sank into a somewhat pensive mood.

". . . and so, with the congressman's help and the help of that ambassador, we had the means to do this," Dan was saying. "But it took Mr. Hagen to show us how well and how quickly all of the pieces could fit together. The Ada George was already here, preparing to take in a cargo of tapioca for export to Brazil. That met our needs perfectly. Dan and I flew out to Australia by the southern route, keeping out of the Japanese areas as much as possible. And then we took a smaller steamer up here. We could have brought you out sooner, if we'd arrived sooner."

"And Mr. Kincaid?" Ada asked. She had noted that Dan hadn't mentioned Seni Pramoj directly or given specifics on how she had been whisked out of Malaya. She also noted that J. H. hadn't figured in Dan's rescue plans as he described them. So why was he here, she wondered. And having wondered it, she voiced the question to her eldest son.

"Ummm. He comes in on the money end," Dan replied.

"I'm already a war correspondent, Ada," J. Harvey spoke up for the first time. "You know me, quick to the mark."

Boy did she know that was the truth, Ada thought bitterly. Always the opportunist.

Kincaid caught the facial expression that went with the thought, and it gave him slight pause. He never had been able to figure out why Ada had suddenly gone so cold on him. Of course it hadn't particularly worried him either. He wasn't given to pondering the needs or emotions of those around him. But then he continued.

"I'm working for the Times now. I already was in Australia, looking for a way to get to southern China, when the Japanese pounced. I met up with your Dan there, and I made a call into the Times and cleared a little change in my assignment. The Times threw some extra money into the rescue project's kitty, which helped Dan, William, and me to get on the boat up here through dangerous waters. And, here I am." He smiled broadly as if no other explanation—or greater event—was desired than that he deigned to be here.

"Your assignment? What's your assignment?" Ada's suspicion was only outweighed by her confusion.

"You. You're my assignment. The famous artist and ambassador's wife escaping from the Japanese. You, Ada Raven."

Ada gave him that "you're kidding" look.

"It's true. You're news, Ada. Or at least the Times can make you news. My original assignment was tracking the mystery of the disappearance of Estelle and her husband over Hainan Island. The Times had already published my preliminary articles on that. And Estelle and Quinten had been headed for a visit to you when they disappeared. I convinced the Times that I could reangle the story since now there's no way I'm getting the Hainan island, not with the Japanese crawling all over the South Pacific. But I can segue out of that story line with a scintillating story of the rescue from Japanese invasion of Ada Raven, the famous painter and widow of a hero ambassador. You know that your Stanfield is already a tragic hero in the States for his evacuation efforts, don't you?"

"And rightly so, I'd say," Ada said somewhat heatedly. She was in no mood to discuss her husband with a former lover.

"So, now," Kincaid said, taking a pen and small pad of paper from his jacket pocket. "The boys here have been pretty sketchy about this daring rescue. It's time to titillate our readers."

"No, I don't think so," Ada said somewhat haughtily. "I certainly won't tell you any more than they have. People put their lives on the line for me—and what they did for me was only a kind side service for more important activities. You're just going to have to make a fascinating story from what can be passed on in general. I think you can do that, J. H."

Kincaid chose to take this in stride because, of course, he could easily weave a great story out of this for the readers of the Times. "You know me so well, Ada," he simply said. And both Dan and William gave him somewhat startled looks when he said this, because neither of them had any inkling just how well Ada had known Kincaid—or how often and deeply he had known her.

Later in the evening, after they had taken a light dinner, Kincaid at last was able to isolate Ada enough from her son and Hagen to whisper a message in her ear.

"Tonight, my love. I will visit your cabin tonight."

But she whispered back. "And if you do, you'll find the door locked."

He did visit and the door was locked. He tapped on it for a few minutes, but Ada was planted on the bunk of her cabin, her eyes held tightly shut, her fists covering her ears, and her mind summoning up the visage of Sun Li and calculating how she could return to his side—just as soon as it was safe enough to do so.

Ada had resolved after she had awakened from the harrowing nightmare the previous afternoon on the Maha Chakri, and able, even if she hadn't wanted to, to remember every damning, guilt-ridden aspect of it up until Sun Li had entered the dream and had entered into her and calmed her, that she would return to him as soon as possible. It would only add shame to guilt to reject all of the trouble her loved ones had gone to to rescue her and to fly back into his arms now—if, of course, there was any way to do that through enemy lines. But as soon as the blush was off this episode, she would find a way to return. She didn't care that there was a world war raging. Her happiness was in Sun Li's arms. And Sun Li's world was removed enough from her own that if she was with him, she wouldn't be planting further grief in the lives of her family and friends.

All of this resolve dissolved later the same day, however, as Dan came out and sat beside her in the deck chairs in the covered passage outside their cabins. It was perhaps a bit soon for them to be out on deck, but Ada simply couldn't be cooped up any longer in that confined space with three men who had been such an overwhelming part of the life she wanted to leave.

"Mother, you might be wondering why Hugh isn't here too," Dan said as he sat down beside her. They were keeping to the shadows and below the railing as much as they could. They had steamed pretty far out into the Gulf of Siam already, but they were following the curve of the Thai coast, and all of the land they could see now was in Japanese hands. They, by no means, were anywhere close to safety yet. The world had been tossed into danger and uncertainty. They would be looking for the wake of torpedoes all the way across the Indian and Atlantic oceans.

"Oh, Lord, no," Ada said with a quick little laugh. "I'm overwhelmed that any of you are here. Hugh has a family and a ranch to look after."

"Well, no he doesn't, actually, Mother. Hugh is in Norfolk, Virginia."

This news took Ada's breath away. "What? How? When?"

"Right after Pearl Harbor, he signed up for the Navy. He went right off to Norfolk. I don't know if he's been assigned a ship yet, and we probably wouldn't be told if he had. But I know he isn't at the ranch."

"So, is Jess . . .?"

"No, Mother, the world is just exploding. Jess Wolf was in the Colorado National Guard. He's already been enlisted in the Army and has shipped out for Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The word is that the Colorado Guard guys will be going to the European Theater soon."

"Oh . . . then our ranch . . . and Jess's too . . .?"

"Beth is doing a great job, but it's overwhelming for her. She wasn't born to it. And Aunt Martha and Thad are there, but Thad isn't doing well at all . . . and they are getting pretty old . . ."

"And they need me to come back to Wolf Creek. . . ." Ada saved Dan the trouble of saying it by saying it herself. And thus ended her brief fantasy of running away from her rescuers into the Genting Highlands and Sun Li's arms. The greater world was going to keep its grip on her after all. She had responsibilities, and she would step up to them as fully and loyally as her friends and family had done in arranging this daring rescue of her from half way across a war-torn world.

She was still somewhat stunned and feeling sorry for herself after Dan left her side and when J. Harvey Kincaid slid into the deck chair beside her. He was carrying a deck blanket, which he proceeded to stretch over their laps.

"It's cold out here," he said with a sloppy grin on his face, "We wouldn't want to catch our death's of cold, would we?"

"Cold?" Ada said with surprise. "It's not cold. I'm sweating. It's hot."

"And likely to get much hotter, my dear," Kincaid said, as he reached for Ada's hand under the blanket and brought it to his crotch, showing her how much he wanted her.

"J. H., no!" Ada said sharply, trying to pull her hand away, trembling at the renewed knowledge of the strength of him and desperately wanting Sun Li between her legs. He grasped her wrist tight in his hand, though, and held it to the bulge in his trousers. He was cupping her mound roughly under the blanket with his other hand. He was assured of himself. He had known Ada intimately many times already. He would get what he wanted.

Ada forced her eyes to look over his shoulder and down the stretch of corridor. "Dan!" she said, as if in surprise that her son was standing there.

Kincaid flinched and turned his head, giving Ada the opportunity she needed to escape his grasp and bound out of her chair. No one was really there, of course.

Ada had escaped Kincaid physically but not necessarily emotionally. For all her resolve to remain true to Sun Li at this point, Kincaid had aroused her appetites. She was distraught and disgusted with herself that she had these appetites that could so easily be aroused. She lay, naked on her bunk that night, quietly crying. Her breasts where trembling and shimmying and she was panting shallowly, as she rubbed the fingers of her hand between her thighs, bringing herself to the brink and then cooling down and then bringing herself to the brink again. Seeking release and relief from the needs she could not deny she had and would have to fight against across two oceans—knowing that powerful, masterful, desirable relief was just two cabins away from her.

Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, William Hagen built up the courage finally to ask Ada to marry him.

With great sadness and an obviously difficult effort to control her emotions, Ada regretfully declined.

"Is there someone else?" was all once-again disappointed Hagen could ask.

"Yes, there's someone else, I'm afraid," Ada answered in a small voice, her thoughts going to that waterfall cascading outside the Genting Highlands open pavilion of her lover tribal chieftain.



Wolf Creek Ch. 20



Ada's return to the Wolf Creek Ranch for the duration of the war years was a period of fantasy isolation from the world gone mad around them punctuated by shocking reminders that they were part of that world.

Beth proved to be a real delight for Ada—the daughter she had always wanted but that the Spanish flu had ripped out of her arms. Ada didn't know how she ever could have gotten the notion she'd had that being the daughter of a Hollywood movie star would make Beth's adjustment to life in the Wolf Creek valley an impossibility. The ranch did, indeed, need Ada's guiding hand, but Beth had done very well in managing both the ranching part and the celebrity entertainment part of the business. The clientele now was slightly different than it once had been, being composed more of the actor friends of Beth's parents rather than primarily artists and writers of Ada's days. But upon Ada's reappearance, her own set of artists and writers began reappearing. This war was even more frustrating and debilitating for Americans than any prior upheaval since the Civil War had been. In such circumstances, there always were the well-heeled and high-tempered celebrities who wanted to drop out of the limelight and the realities of life from time to time. And Wolf Creek Ranch was still good medicine for that.

Ada doted on her grandson, John, now nearly five when Ada returned to the ranch in early 1942. He was a sunny and active child, and Ada couldn't resist think of the namesake grandfather he would never know whenever she watched him playing in the sanding drive in front of the vast lodge front porch.

There were few men about to be employed at the ranch, all of the able-bodied and productive ones having gone off to war. But there were a few ranch hands who had been with the Wolf Creek Ranch for decades who helped Ada and Beth with the hard work required to minimally maintain operations. Some of the other ranching families in the valley weren't as lucky, however.

Ada's love for her daughter was solidified when Ada was called to the nearby valley-bottom farming ranch of an old friend of hers, whose husband had died and sons were now all off in the war. They'd planted the hay before they left and it was now sitting in the field, waiting to be harvested. But there was no one to harvest it—or at least not enough hands to harvest it. This was where Wolf Creek Ranch had been getting its hay for the horses used at the dude ranch stables for decades, but the hay was sitting there in the field. It would rot, the dude ranch wouldn't have the hay it needed, and Ada's friend would go under in a mound of debt.

Ada and her friend were standing on the porch of the woman's ranch house, commiserating with each other about how much damage wars did to the fabric of the economy much less people's lives, when Beth rode up with several of the guests at the ranch. She had told them of the situation and made cutting and bailing of hay sound like a real neat dude ranch outing, and they all pitched in and had the woman's fields stripped and her livelihood protected for that year within a week. The guests left saying this was the best vacation from the worries they had waiting for them themselves in the greater world that they ever could have wished for—and steeped in a good yarn to impress their city-bound friends and in the satisfaction of having accomplished basic manual work—and Ada and Beth left arm and arm, with a renewed respect and love for each other.

The first, straight to their hearts, jolt of war lightning stroke the peaceful Wolf Creek valley ranch in February of 1943, when Beth received notification that Hugh's ship, the destroyer USS De Haven, had been sunk in the South Pacific in the Battle of Guadalcanal, with Hugh listed among the missing seaman. Relief came weeks later when they heard he had survived and was being transferred to the destroyer USS Kearney in the Mediterranean theater. But the death's hand had already been sighted from the knoll on which the lodge sat for the first time, and no arrival of the post or knock at the door would be the same for the remainder of the war.

The Colorado guardsmen, who included not only Ada's stepson, Jess Wolf, but her former lover and savior, Congressman Peter Fair, as well, were rolled into the Army's 157th Regiment of the 45th (Thunderbird) Division and inserted into the war in Oran, Africa, in the summer of 1943. They were part of the army that landed in the boot of Italy and worked its way all the way up the Italian Peninsula, through France, and into Germany through the next two, grueling years.

Ada learned of the death of Peter Fair, at the Anzio beachhead landing in February 1944, when a tearful Aunt Martha called her from the Slater post office and told her all of the Colorado government offices had been told to fly their flags at half staff for their fallen congressman. Martha's husband, Thaddeus, who had been close to Peter since they had been sent from Detroit over twenty-five years earlier by James Shaffer to drive Ada and her family from Indiana to Colorado, was devastated by the news. By the summer of that year, Thaddeus was also dead, of a heart attack, an unacknowledged victim of a seemingly never-ending world war.

Soon thereafter they had received word that Jess Wolf also was missing in battle, just north of Anzio, but eventually they learned he'd worked his way back to Allied lines from a surrounded position and was doing fine—and, in fact, had been promoted to major and was up for a medal for having brought his men and the wounded men in what had been a hospital position to safety. But the war was dragging on, and so many of the Colorado men were being killed in the fighting, that Beth and Ada were losing hope for those in their own family.

It was almost a bittersweet comical scene one day in late August 1944 when Beth came rushing out of the lodge toward the stable where Ada was brushing down horses and, scattering celebrities left and right and waving a telegram in her hand, jubilantly cried out to her mother as she ran, "Good news, Ada! Jess's been shot."

The good news part was that he had received nonlife-threatening wounds through the muscles of his calves in a sniper attack in the Vosges Mountains of France when the regiment was preparing to push into Germany and had been sent back to Rome to recuperate. This meant he was out of the fighting, if for only a little while, and wouldn't have to face the German army defending its own homeland on the Rhine.

It was then, while he was recuperating in Rome, that Jess started to correspond with Ada, at first asking about how the family and his ranch were doing and, eventually, over the next three months in three exchanges that went between them, how Ada herself was doing. They both went into what they each wanted to do after the war, and Ada felt that, through these letters, she could open up and discuss where she was in her life as she couldn't do and hadn't done with anyone else.

Then the day came near Christmas of 1944 when a large truck rolled down the narrow valley road and drove up the hill into the Wolf Creek Ranch compound. A ranch hand came running for Ada, who once more was out in the stables brushing down the riding horses. He was babbling something about a large Oriental man with a big truck full of paintings being up at the lodge.

"Sun Li. My paintings!" Ada cried out. She dropped the brush and ran from the stables toward the house. Those indeed were her Malaya period paintings being unloaded from the truck. But her steps slowed as she came closer and realized that the big Oriental man standing there wasn't Sun Li. She knew as soon as she saw the expression on his face. And all of her dreams now, what had been holding her together during this horrific war, came crashing down.

The Genting Mountain tribal compound where Sun Li had been lord had been overrun by the Japanese almost as soon as Ada's airplane had taken off for Bangkok. Sun Li had been dead for all of these years. But he had left instructions about the paintings, and now that the Japanese had been forced to retreat down the Malay Peninsula, Sun Li's surviving followers were returning the paintings to her.

There was a final letter to Ada from Sun Li as well. She retired to her room in the lodge and did not appear again for two weeks.

When she did reappear, her eyes were a little glazed over and even her grandson, John, now seven, couldn't seem to get her to focus. The pills her doctor had given her to control her crying fits had quite a bit to do with the glaze.

Her daughter, Beth, found her sitting and rocking on the porch one day and sat down beside her and rocked in rhythm with her for a good half an hour before speaking.

"There are two more letters here for you from Jess, Ada. They've been on the table by the front door for some time now. Don't you want to open them?"

"Tomorrow, maybe tomorrow," Ada responded in a tired, distant voice.

"The horses miss you, Ada," Beth said. "No one can work with them and brush them as well as you can. They trust you the most."

"I'm sorry. I know I haven't been pulling my weight these last two weeks," Ada said.

"Please, Ada. I know you've had some sort of a shock. I didn't mean what I said to be criticism. You've more than earned your way here. If you want to rest, by all means rest now. We're doing fine. Even little John is becoming a work horse. He's growing up just like Hugh. He loves it here."

"Yes, yes, just like Hugh," Ada replied. And then she leaned over and patted her daughter on the arm. "But nothing would be working here, Beth, if it wasn't for you. You are the greatest gift to this valley in years. Just give me a bit more time. I'll pull myself out of this state I'm in."

"Those paintings you did in Malaya are beautiful," Beth said, embarrassed at what her mother had said, but glowing at the praise.

"Thank you dear."

"About those pills, Ada. Do you think . . .?"

"Just for a few days," Ada answered. "They help me sleep. Just for a few days more."

"You should start painting again," Beth then said. "I can tell from your paintings that you receive solace and power from them. You should do some more painting."

"Perhaps I shall, dear," Ada said and, then she withdrew into her own world of grief, a world she never wanted her fine daughter to ever enter.

It started a few days later when Ada had the urge to see how Brook House was doing. It wasn't exactly abandoned, but no one had lived there since she had left it when she came up to pull Frank Wolf through his bout of water poisoning. Then, when she saw Brook House and saw how the wild flowers had taken over the yard, she had the urge to clear it out. But this was overtaken by the urge to paint it as it was. And when she started painting at Brook House, she couldn't stop. And when she had painted her heart out at Brook House, she moved on to the other settings that she had painted in the winters ten years earlier. She wanted to paint them in the spring now. And it was the spring of 1945 and the meadows were coming alive—and the war was winding down at last. 

Thus it was that in a warm afternoon of May 1945 Ada found herself in "her" glen, where the waters of the upper Wolf Creek tumbled down to meet with the main stream along the valley floor half way between Brook House and Hagen's saw mill, the glen where she and Peter had made love and where she had released the ashes of her husband, Frank, into the pure, dancing waters of the brook.

The day was warm, and Ada was in a world of her own, with her painting and the beauty of the glen and the flooding in of her memories here, mostly of her happy years with Frank Wolf. More of coming here and making love with him than of the earlier trysting here with Peter Fair. Ada was in a haze, created partially by the setting and her absorption in her painting but also partly by the drugs she was taking, and the day was becoming increasingly warm. She wanted to feel free and unencumbered and, without really realizing she had done it, she had disrobed completely and was perched on her little stool in front of her easel, trying to capture the vivid hues of the wildflowers of the field, when she saw him from a distance.

Frank. Her Frank was here with her again. Those were carefree days, the days rollicking here in this glen with her Frank. She ran to him, in a hazy slow motion. He was standing stiffly there at first, but her kisses and caresses loosened him up. And they were dancing, closely together around the glen, moving in a close embrace of lips and gliding hands and laughter and murmured words of affection, turning to gasping directives of needs and burning desires and cries of passion, as they fell to the ground, him on top of her, and she tugged at his clothes until he was free and she had her hands wrapped around his tool and was pulling it into her. He struggled against her advances initially but then was overcome by the situation and entered her deeply. He was holding her close and riding her and riding her and riding her and she was writhing under him in remembered passion. He was filling and vigorous and long-lasting and able to touch her deeply and make her moan and sigh and overflow, again and again. Frank had always been able to do that for her.

They lay spent and panting beside each other in the tall grass. Ada looked at him with clearer eyes, the effects of the pills retreating, having been counteracted by the adrenaline she'd been pumping.

"Jess!" she cried out in wonder and despair. Not Frank. Not Frank at all. But the spitting image of a far younger Frank. His son.

"Ada. Ada. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean . . . I came upon you and you overwhelmed me . . . you were such a vision . . . and so insistent. It was such a surprise . . . You knew I was coming home . . . I wrote."

But by this time Ada was gone. She had jumped up and quickly grabbed up her clothes and had fled down the mountainside.

Three weeks later she was living with Stanfield Walker's two tight-lipped maiden sisters in a gigantic old, drafty, almost sterile pile of granite on the banks of the Merrimack River in Manchester, New Hampshire. Three aging women, sitting in straight chairs and watching the hands on the clock move, just waiting for death to overtake them.



Wolf Creek Ch. 21



The atmosphere in the Manchester Walker mansion was so cold and austere—and judgmental—that Ada could feel herself drying up and withering away from the inside. But this is exactly what she wanted; if she had known how to enter a convent, she would have done so. She wanted this cancer of sensuality inside her to be lanced and to flow away.

The Walker sisters were more than willing to oblige her. That sat stonily, day after day, in their drafty drawing room overlooking the sluggish Merrimack River and stared judgment and admonishment at their offending sister. They didn't condemn Ada for her sensuality—they would have fainted away and died on the spot if they had any notion of that whatsoever. They blamed Ada for their brother's idiotic journey to that heathen land of half-naked little brown people in Malaya, half way around the world. And they did so regardless of the knowledge that Ada hadn't even married Stanfield until after he had accepted the posting to Kuala Lumpur. But above all, they blamed Ada for Stanfield's death. He had left with her and she had returned alone. There was no saving her from this offense.

They sat there through 1945 and 1946 and 1947, politely pouring Ada tea while willing her to wither before them with their cold stares. And wither Ada might have done if it had not been for her art. After she had grown so tired she could hardly breathe from her grief over the deaths of so many who meant so much to her and of her guilt at having mistaken Jess Wolf for his father and her husband, Frank, when she was in a pill-induced haze in addition to so many other actions and thoughts she regretted, Ada slowly turned to what gave her the most solace and release—her art.

As always, Ada's painting clearly reflected her mood of that period. And the Manchester period of her painting could only be described as the period of the dead. She painted dead things, and the winter months were her most active. She painted leafless trees against the frozen Merrimack. She painted a fallen bird or doe against the snow-covered forest floor. She painted a broken window in a barren, unused room and the bouquet of flowers in from the sterile dining room the week after it had been cleared and dumped in a pot by the mud room door for composting. She painted the barren pile of the Walker mansion she now called home. And, above all, she painted the Walker sisters at tea, already dead but just not knowing they were.

The Walker sisters didn't approve of her painting, of course. They didn't approve of any commercial work, and what Ada painted she was able to quickly sell through her Chicago agents, which meant the Walker sisters could not, no matter how much they tried, make Ada dependent on them. Although Ada was now painting dead things, her talent and the strength of her art didn't fail her; the paintings were still magnificent and, if anything, more moving to the beholder than anything she had painted before.

No, Ada was in no way financially dependent on anyone else during this segment of her life. For some reason her paintings, any painting by her, were in great demand. There was a rumor that some rich collector was searching them out and buying them up. The probable truth to this was evident when Hugh, back at the ranch now after successfully surviving his Navy stint in the now-ended Second World War, had called her in one of their rare telephone exchanges, saying that someone who knew the Malaya collection of her paintings was at the ranch wanted to buy them all and all of the paintings that were the original artwork in the lodge when they first opened up the dude ranch. Ada had said to go ahead and sell them. She hardly could have them here in New Hampshire. The Walker sisters would be scandalized.

When Hugh had first returned to Colorado from the war, Ada had contemplated traveling back to Wolf Creek valley, if only for a visit. But in their first telephone conversation, Ada had learned that J. Harvey Kincaid had also resumed his quarterly trips to the ranch and his hunting trips with Hugh up to the Hahn's Peak timberline. That had put an end to any desire on Ada's part to be at the ranch or to be in her son's presence for any length of time. She could hear the strain in his voice from across the country. She didn't know how she could relate to Hugh knowing what she did about those hunting trips.

Ada did, however receive periodic photographs of the family, showing Beth as sunny as ever and Ada's grandson, John, now a preteen and showing promise of being a handsome heartbreaker. A true Raven. Surprisingly enough, most of what Ada heard about her family and life at the Wolf Creek Ranch came by way of Missouri. Aunt Martha, as resilient and tough as always, had returned to a retirement home in Slater, Missouri, but she kept in constant contact with the Ravens in Colorado and her own niece, Ada, in New Hampshire—ever the interested go-between, always looking out for Ada well-being.

Aunt Martha was also as prescient and patient—and as interfering—as ever. She watched her niece from afar and, by the spring of 1949, she knew it was time, that Ada was ready. One beautiful morning—even in New Hampshire, barely awakening from its winter—a visitor for Ada appeared on the marble front steps of the Walker manse. A twittering and scandalized Walker sister ushered him into the drawing room, and the sisters, not wanting to be any part of whatever terrible thing was about to transpire in their well-ordered, withdrew immediate to leave Ada to manage this intrusion on her own.

"William!" Ada exclaimed in both surprise and pleasure. William Hagen had appeared once more, as he was prone to do at Ada's major junctures in life.

"I need your help, Ada. I need you to come back to Denver. Can you possibly tear yourself away from here and come help me?"

"Tear myself away?" Ada was almost choked by the laughter that threatened to bubble up from her throat. "How could I possibly help you?"

"Just as you have before," William answered. He had taken one of her hands in his, and Ada felt her fingers warming for the first time in four long, cold years. William's timing could not have been better, as Aunt Martha well divined. Ada had grown weary of blaming herself for her desires to live life to the fullest and to take the grief with the joy, the mistakes with the triumphs. The Walker sisters were both withered and withering and hadn't change a zot in the whole time Ada had been here. She was dying to revolt.

"My company has been building a new art museum out near Lakeside next to that golf course at Lake Berkeley. I need someone to do the interiors. I need you. Will you come back with me?"

The Walker sister's jaws dropped and stayed locked in that position at how fast Ada was able to prepare to leave for Colorado with William Hagen. And it was with great politeness, restrained civility, and absolutely no regrets from any quarter that Ada and the sisters saw the last of each other the following morning.

William Hagen hadn't exactly lied when he said he needed Ada to do the interiors of the new art museum in Denver, but he'd certainly played loose with his wording. When they arrived at the nearly finished building the day after their train had pulled into the Denver station, Ada found that the interiors had already been "done" and by her. The collector who had been buying up Ada's paintings was William Hagen, and the museum was the Ada Raven Museum of Art.

Ada walked through the tastefully understated and well-lit exhibit rooms with her mouth hanging open and her eyes overflowing with tears as, from one room to the next, she moved through her early Colorado mountain valley period to her East Coast period to her three Malaya periods and, at last, to her bleaker Merrimack River period. Beyond this room, however, was another, one that was essentially a wide corridor around a sunny atrium. They stopped in the doorway when they reached this point.

"These paintings in the New Hampshire room are magnificent, of course," William said. "But I hope there will be another, more uplifting, period now that you've returned to Colorado. One that we can celebrate in this hall someday."

"There will be, depending on you, Bill," Ada said, turning her tear stained and sparkling eyed face to his.

"Depending on me?" William asked.

"Yes. Will you marry me, Bill?" Ada asked.

Hagen was overwhelmed that she had asked that from out of the blue. He had pursued her for forty years—and it had taken him nearly that long to work up the courage to ask her to marry him. And she had refused. She had said there was someone else.

"I don't understand. You said there was someone . . ."

"There have many, many someones, Bill. I can't and won't lie to you about that. But they have come and gone. And even while they were coming and going, there was always you. You were always there, and I was just too blind to see it. Well, a handful of years in the deep freeze that is my sister's environment was enough for me to see more clearly. I have no idea how you put together all of these paintings or how you found me in Manchester or how you came to me just when I needed you again—and this time with my eyes open. But I want you now. I completely understand if you don't want me anymore. And if you don't, I will live with that. But, yes, I'm asking you to marry me . . . if you will."

This wasn't a spur-of-the-moment whim on Ada's part, one set off by the overwhelming surprise of seeing that William Hagen was paying her the homage of opening a museum dedicated solely to her art. She had known as soon as he entered that drawing room in Manchester that she wanted him if he'd had her. And she was resolved not to care if sex was not to be part of the picture. She was nearly sixty-five now. She could live without sex now. Lord knows she'd lived without in her sisters' house for several years. She'd be content with just the companionship now.

But the surprise was on her. They celebrated their engagement that evening at the dining room of the Brown Palace Hotel and then, to Ada's surprise and delight, a little later in an upstairs suite at the Brown Palace, where William Hagen showed her, in his slow and steady, but sensuous and completely fulfilling way that, although he'd waited on her patiently these last several decades, he hadn't waited for her to the point of celibacy. He took her expertly and gave her complete satisfaction in several hours of rising and falling and inning and outing and quiet moans and orgasmic spasms that left her in no doubt that he still wanted her and had every ability to enjoy what he wanted.

For nostalgia sake, Ada Albin Raven Walker married William Hagen in the quiet glen halfway between his saw mill and her Brook House by the upper branch of Wolf Creek on a sunny morning in June of 1949. Ada was just shy of sixty-five years of age. Hugh's family; Ada's other son, Dan; and her stepson, Jess Wolf, were all on hand to celebrate the occasion with her. There was no tension or guilt between Ada and Jess. They had long ago come to terms with the unfortunate mistake they had made, realizing that he had taken her letters to him to mean something more than she had meant when she wrote them and that their short sexual interlude had been instigated completely by her when she was in a drug-induced fantasy world and had mistaken him for his father. Several of the celebrity guests from the ranch were also there, including J. Harvey Kincaid, who stood by, making small talk with the other ranch guests that had them tittering about with laughter and taking the whole event with much amusement. Beth was radiant and young John was a delight, at twelve trying to act like a serious man, but Hugh was tense and nervous throughout the ceremony and the reception at the lodge afterward. Only Aunt Martha was missing, far too old now to make the trip from Missouri. She marked the day with a small glass of sherry at the precise hour vows were being exchanged and a sigh of satisfaction of a job well done.

At one point during the reception, Ada thought Hugh was about to say something to her, but then J. Harvey wafted by and the moment had passed. Ada ached for it all just to come out in the open. Having to work their way out of reality couldn't possibly be worse than what they had now, Ada thought.

Immediately after the wedding reception, Ada and William were off on the road for the long drive through the Rocky Mountains and over Rabbit Ears Pass and down into Denver, where Ada commenced a life that was as different from her cloistered years in exile in New Hampshire as it possibly could be. The Hagens, major art patrons now that they had opened their own museum to the public not to mention all of the other cultural endeavors they supported, became the talk of the town, cultural moguls and benefactors. William's construction company worked on some major public buildings and monuments gratis, and the acclaimed artist, Ada Raven, became not only the hostess of choice in the city but, dredging up her early history in politics, ran for and easily won a seat on the city council.

Although Ada did represent the arts interests on the council well, what she really became famous for was her work for services for the elderly. She was beginning to feel her age now even though she was only partially gray and still was the most beautiful woman in any room she entered. She had been concentrating on both ends of the spectrum in Denver. She did everything she could to enhance the cultural opportunities there, but she didn't neglect seeing the poverty around the center of the city and, especially, the plight of the elderly poor. She became the talk of the nation in 1953 when she rose in the Colorado Senate as a guest speaker and rattled off the essential guts of a detailed plan for a revamped elderly care plan for the state and declared that she, one of the elderly herself, was going to stand at the podium until everyone in the assembly stopped talking about what they could do and started doing something. The Senate roared with laughter at her audacity, not to speak of the seasoned rancher's wife expression that were coming out of an elegantly dressed and coifed culture icon, and they sat down and voted the bill she essentially gave them within weeks rather than their usual pace of years and decades.

Everything was going like the end of a fairytale until . . .

On a winter day in 1956, a weary Ada, today looking every one of her seventy years of age, struggled up the dirt road from Brook House toward Hagen's saw mill, being supported on one side by her husband, a somber William Hagen, and on the other side by Ada's only surviving son, a quietly snuffing Daniel Raven. Ada was carrying a small casket under her arm because Beth Raven couldn't bear to handle it herself. When they reached the glen halfway between Brook House and the mill, Ada stooped next to the partially frozen stream of the upper Wolf Creek and consigned the ashes of her son, Hugh Raven, to the waters of the creek.

Ada and William had been in Chicago that January when a distraught Hugh had shown up at the door of their Denver house. The housekeeper had tried to calm him down and offered to phone Ada so that they could talk even though she wasn't home, but Hugh had just stumbled back into the face of a sudden raging snow storm. Everyone in Colorado knew you didn't try to go west from Denver and up over Rabbit Ears Pass in a heavy snow storm coming from the west. Everyone who had lived in Colorado for any length of time knew that. But that's what Hugh Raven then did. They didn't find him, inside his stalled car, frozen, for another week after that—not until Ada and William had returned to Denver from their consultation with Ada's art agents and not until a frantic Beth had set the state safety patrol into action.

Beth had no idea what had upset Hugh so and why he was searching his mother out. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened that she was aware of. He had gone off to a reunion of his Navy buddies in San Diego in the late fall, but that had been planned well in advance and he always liked going to those reunions. The only unusual thing that happened around then was that their regular guest, J. Harvey Kincaid, had shown up for his quarterly visit at a time other than when he was scheduled to visit. Always before Hugh had been there to take Kincaid on his regular elk hunting trip up on Hahn's Peak. This time, since Hugh hadn't been here, their son, eighteen-year-old John, had taken Kincaid on the hunting outing. Other than that, nothing unusual had been happening at the ranch at all.

When Beth told Ada this, Ada did everything she could to maintain control of herself. But as soon as Beth left her room, Ada broke down in tears and wasn't able to pull herself together for weeks after she and William had returned to Denver.

What she did now—or at least tried to do—was what she should have done years ago and might have done if Hugh had not frozen her out of every attempt to talk to him about his relationship with J. Harvey Kincaid. She tried to reach Kincaid by phone at first, determined to tell him it was time for him to do his hunting elsewhere—and that she would make his life a living hell in public if he didn't back off his obsession for possession of her family. When trying to connect with him by phone didn't work, she found an excuse she could reasonably give to William to visit Chicago, and she went off to bring Kincaid to ground in person. In Chicago, though, she learned that Kincaid was on African safari and couldn't be reached. Ada returned to Denver in defeat and shelved the issue for when she'd heard Kincaid had returned to the States.

Later that spring, Ada decided she wanted to paint another seasons collection of the landscape around Wolf Creek, but she didn't want to stay at the lodge. William provided the solution. He had taken a look at Brook House when they were there for Hugh's funeral, and he wanted to fix it up. In fact, he already had crew up there working on it—putting in electricity, new appliances, a coal stove insert in the central chimney, better insulation, and a telephone. They would return to Brook House for the year. He was very much aware of the toll Hugh's death had taken on Ada. It was like she had aged twenty years over night. Little did he know that Ada had much more than the departed Hugh to think about.

That spring, summer, and fall of 1956, indeed, was the medicine Ada needed. Living there, back in Brook House, and reliving her memories there—even running her hands over the tire inserts in the dining room railing of the Shaffer touring sedan Pete Fair had driven her from Indiana in—were grounding Ada again rather than upsetting her. She had come back to Brook House for release and she was getting this through the environment here, her ability to translate her feelings in her art, and to the calm steady presence of her husband by day and his continued fulfilling lovemaking at night.

By early winter Ada had done so much painting that the house was overflowing and she decided to send the spring, summer, and fall canvasses back to Denver before starting her winter season work. They spent all day packing up paintings in their first-floor bedroom and, as darkness was falling and the truck was leaving for Denver, their bedroom was a packing room nightmare.

They decided to just sleep in the big bedroom upstairs that night and clean up the mess in their own bedroom the next day. The last thing William did before going upstairs to Ada's bed that night was to stoke up the coal in the stove insert in the fireplace. It was going to be a very cold night.

* * *

The next day, Beth couldn't raise Ada on the telephone. She had missed coming up the hill for breakfast at the lodge and had promised that she would be there.