He left the ruins of Georgia in the summer of 1874, another orphan of the War of Rebellion and one step ahead of the lynch mobs and night riders.
Headed west into the territories seeking out the promise of fortune on the far frontiers, but he was broke and hungry in the slums of St. Louis Missouri before the month was out. A young man without promise or prospect, shiftless, mean of spirit, scrawny in his form.
To keep body and soul together he joined the army, invented the name of James Cotter and listed himself as an apprentice leatherworker from Cleveland Ohio. The recruiting officer asked few questions, listed James Cotter as five inches taller than he actually was and noted that he could ride a horse, also a lie. As James Cotter the young man was given a bit of tin beef and an oversized uniform and two dollars advance. The next morning he was marched off in the company of other desperate men towards the West and a calvary regiment at Fort Ewing Texas.
Ten young men on the edge of starvation, silent and sullen as they stumbled towards the horizons. Presided over by a drunken Lieutenant on a brindle roan, one Timothy Given, who had lost an eye in the fighting between the States. The first military duties of the newly minted soldiers were to tie the officer to his saddle each morning, and to pick him out of the dust in the afternoon when he had finished his canteen of whiskey and slid from the saddle to be dragged in the dust of the road.
Each day they marched until the officer woke and bayed that he could ride no further, and then the new soldiers would do their best to build some kind of camp, to start a fire, to turn the flour from the sack each carried into something edible. Each evening they failed in the baking of bread, they ate the flour raw. In the night they could hardly sleep over the groans of their stomachs.
By the fifth day they could bear their state no longer, and when their small group saw a farm in the distance they did not need to debate or to discuss. They made for the farm and while two of the privates spoke to the farmer the others stole two calves from the pasture. That night while Lieutenant Given snored his charges roasted the calves over the fire and in the morning the man who called himself James Cotter received his first taste of military justice.
Just before dawn and the cook fire was still smoldering in the pit that the would be soldiers had dug, the charred and greasy bones scattered among their sleeping forms when the riders approached. The soldiers woke to find the farmer and three other men with rifles on their shoulders, demanding payment for two stolen calves. Their demands woke Lieutenant Given, whose own carbine was the only firearm available to challenge the riders, and before his first drink of the day the officer was hardly inclined to make a stand.
Given heard out the charges of the farmers, he took in the nervous soldiers and the remains of their pilfered feast. He noted the scrawny youth Cotter, sullen and gloomy as the rest, the hide of one of the calfs by his bedroll where he had rolled it as a pillow. Lieutenant Given pointed to the young men and announced that the culprit would be dealt with. He wrote out a receipt for the calves to the farmer on a slip of paper, redeemable he claimed at any Federal post, and then he asked the aggrieved farmers if they cared to see the guilty party punished for his theft.
"We didn't come all this way for a piece of paper." the farmer answered.
The Lieutenant nodded and he gave orders to the men to bind the accused's hands behind his back. Announced that they would hold the court martial there and then. Happy enough to see that only Cotter was receiving the blame, several of the men leapt forward to discharge their orders. Cotter had hardly processed just what was going on when he found his arms roughly wrenched behind his back, a length of leather bridal biting deep into his wrists.
"Hold on now!" the young man protested. "This isn't right..."
"The Army looks unkindly upon theives." was Lieutenant Given's calm reply. "You should have thought about that before you absconded with the beef, Private. Anything you'd like to say in your defense?"
"I wasn't the only one!"
"Sounds like a confession to me gentlemen." the officer shrugged.
He announced that he was finding the Private, whose name he did not know, guilty. That sentence would be carried out once he had dressed and had some coffee. He invited the farmer and his companions to dismount and join him in a cup and after a long ride in the early morning dark the riflemen were happy to oblige the invitation.
So the officer dressed and then he sat with the farmers beside the low fire and he chatted with those men about the war that had passed and the places he had been as the coffee slowly came to a boil.
As the coffee was being readied James was sat upon his bedroll, growing pains in his bound arms. He pleaded with his fellows to cut him loose, that he could slip away while the coffee offered a distraction. His fellows were unwilling to oblige. Having seen how simply Lieutenant Given had laid the blame on one, it stood to reason that he could just as easily shift it toward another. Perhaps too they were curious to see the act of punishment, and it was not as if they had known Cotter long or held him in any great esteem.
Lieutenant Given took his time over coffee, seemed to enjoy the company of the armed men who had woken him. When he was finally through he rose to his feet and he gave orders to the men who milled around to collect the guilty party, that lacking any tree or post to tie him on the open plain that two of them should hold him up.
Again Cotter protested, desperate then, fearful of what was to come. His pleas went nowhere however, and he was held firmly between two of his fellows as Lieutenant Given retrieved a riding crop from his saddle, tested its weight upon his calloused hand.
"Penalty for theft is fifteen lashes, well laid on." the Lieutenant announced, though there was some faltering as he came to the number, as though that digit was not wholly fixed in his head.
"You men hold him up tight and I'll show this runt that the army dosn't tolerate thieving from civilians."
But as the soldiers held tight to Cotter's trembling arms, as the young man's pleas echoed out into the wide and empty plains, a look passed across the officer's face for just an instant. It was missed by all assembled, as was the twitching of the brow above the man's lost eye.
"Someone skin him of his britches." Given ordered. "They'd soften the blow and I'd like these gentleman here to see that the US Government puts their tax dollars to hard use."
Once more Cotter protested but there was no hesitation on the part of the crowd, not even from the farmers, who only giggled a bit as the pant's of the Private's uniform were roughly yanked down to his ankles.
"Nearly as pretty as a girls." someone joked but then Given called for quite and he went foreward, slicing the crop through the morning air in practice arcs. His eyes fixed to the waiting flesh of the private's bared ass, a light hue of pink in the skin and the soft sack of the testicles dangling just below.
When Given was behind the culprit he rested his free hand for just a moment on the small of the young man's back, told Cotter in a low voice to brace himself and that he would do no lasting harm.
But when the Lieutenant brought the crop down it was in earnest, and the pain of it exploded through the Private's taught body and caused him to yelp in fear and in agony as Given called out the number of the stroke just delivered.
As the Lieutenant went on he felt the stirring in his trousers with each administered blow, each time he brought the crop down against the reddening flesh of the ass before it. He admired the way that the testicles leapt and retreated with each fresh lashing blow, and the way that the young man whined and mewled as he trembled and fought to escape the grip of the men who held him fast.
For James, each blow seemed to cut all the way to his heart, each fresh falling kiss of the quirt revealing nerves and sensations of the body that the young man had never to exist. Until it was not just the flesh of his buttocks that were on fire, the pain lived in his toes and in the roots of his hair, it filled up the empty spaces of his numb fingers and threatened to burst from his ears.
By the eighth stroke of the crop the tears were streaming openly down the young man's face, and his cries against the injustice of the act had been replaced by promises that he would be good, that he would steal no more, that he would do anything that was asked of him if only the blows would stop. By the eleventh stroke he could support his own weight no longer and he sagged between the men who held him fast and could no longer form words with which to beg.
When the last blow had fallen the men who held him let him go, and James Cotter fell foreward upon his face and there he lay in the long grass, unmoving and without a single sound. The soldiers and the three farmers gathered close around, stunned by the stillness of the body and fearing that the pain had killed the youth. Yet when Given ordered the body to be turned over the soldiers gasped and recoiled from the sight.
Given alone shrugged his shoulders and nonchalantly announced that it was normal.
"Something about the circulation of the blood, the physicians say. Carries pain to all parts. Does strange things to the anatomy."
On the ground the youth lay reposed as if in sleep, eyes closed and breathing so shallow as to be imperceptible, but between the man's pale legs his long prick was hard and swollen and colored to an angry and a painful red. A pearly drop of jism glistened upon it's tip and then slowly rolled down the length of the shaft leaving a wet trail to mark its passage.
"Satisfied?" Lieutenant Given asked the farmer and his confederates staring down at the feinted body of the young soldier. "Or is there something else your after here?"
