Lattimore stopped at corner of the cookhouse as he was crossing from the main house of his ranch outside Laramie, Wyoming, to the corral to train the quarter horse he'd bought on the last cattle drive to Omaha. He leaned on a fence and watched young Kit chopping wood. The young man was stripped to the waist while he chopped.
Bulking up real good, Lattimore thought. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea to agree to give him a job out of that special school in Rawlins. Kit was slow of thought and Lattimore had been afraid that he'd be more of a hindrance than help around the ranch. But he sure was a looker. And with the two months of manual chores under his belt since he'd gotten to the ranch, he was shaping up to be a hunk of a good looker.
Kit looked up and saw Lattimore looking at him and gave him a shy smile. "Hi there, Mr. Lattimore."
"You pay attention to what you're doin' there, boy," Lattimore said gruffly. "You slice that ax in your leg, and it will be a long, painful ride into the doctor's in Laramie."
The gruffness didn't bother Kit. Gruffness was pretty much all he'd faced in life so far, and he knew Mr. Lattimore didn't mean it. He had reason to believe that Mr. Lattimore liked him—a lot.
"You still taking me with you to the rodeo down in Cheyenne tomorrow, Mr. Lattimore? You said you would. You still taking me?"
Kit had a puppy dog look about him. Lattimore could almost see the tail wagging. And Kit had a very nice tail. Still, Lattimore gritted his teeth. Kit had asked for the same reassurance three times a day for the last week, ever since Lattimore had said he'd take him. He looked around to see if any of the other hands were about. None were. They all were supposed to be off at far corners of the ranch today anyway. He looked back at Kit.
"Well, that depends, Kit. It depends on how nice you can be to me today."
"I can be real nice to you today, Mr. Lattimore. Does this mean you want us to go into the house now?"
"Yes, Kit, this means I want us to go into the house now." The quarter horse could wait, Lattimore thought. His current need couldn't. Kit looked damn good stripped to the waist with his new muscles rippling from chopping that wood.
Kit sucked him about to bursting, kneeling between his knees as he sat on the end of his bed.
"Enough, Kit. Want you to ride it now. Ride it and think about that rodeo in Cheyenne tomorrow."
Kit stood, unbuckled and unbuttoned his trousers, let them drop to the floor, and kicked them away. He stood there, looking shy, waiting for instructions.
"Want you to sit on it right here, Kit. Knees up on the bed."
Kit went up on the bed, crouched over Lattimore's sitting body, and slid his knees past Lattimore's buttocks on either side.
"Sit on it now, boy. Think about the rodeo. Pretend you're on a bucking bull. Bounce on it. Yes . . . yes . . . yes!"
Lattimore grabbed Kit's waist to keep the young man from careening off onto the floor and grunted while Kit groaned at the effort to fuck himself on Lattimore's tool. Lattimore pressed his face between Kit's pecs, sniffed in the scent of honest-work in the youthful sweat, and tongued the young man's pecs and nipples while he waited for his send off.
Later, in the night, Lattimore entered the small lean-to shed built against the side of the barn, where Kit's sleeping pallet was located.
Kit was lying, naked, on his belly, softly snoring. He woke, still drowsy, as Lattimore lowered himself at full stretch on Kit's back, fingers that he'd greased before entering the shed going to Kit's hole. With a groan, Kit automatically spread his legs and moved the top of his feet to lay on top of the backs of Lattimore's ankles. Lattimore had already been here several times since Kit had arrived on the ranch. Kit at first had worried about this special attention Lattimore gave him—but he had settled down to accepting it in exchange for how nice they had been to him on the ranch. A couple of the other ranch hands had been nice to him too—as nice as Lattimore was being.
The fingers were exchanged for something bigger, thicker, and Kit groaned and whispered, "Mr. Lattimore."
"Shush, Kit. Just lie there and take it. Think about the rodeo we're going to tomorrow. Think of yourself as a bull. A big, sexy bull. And I'm the rodeo rider. You can buck your butt like the bull, if you like. Yes, like that. That's nice. That's so nice."
Lattimore leaned over Kit's back, pressing the heels of his hands into Kit's shoulder blades, and raised a bit up on his knees, because, from the power of suggestion, Kit had gotten into the rodeo image Lattimore had woven and was bouncing his pelvis up to Lattimore's groin now, stroking himself on the cock Lattimore had buried in his channel. He was doing most of the work of the fuck.
"Wooeee!" Lattimore exclaimed, as Kit bucked underneath him. "Ride 'em cowboy. Ain't we havin' us a barrel of fun now! We got our own rodeo right here."
* * * *
"Look at that! Look at that, Mr. Lattimore." Kit was grabbing Lattimore's arm and bouncing up and down on the rough board of the stands.
Rodeos were the greatest entertainment you could get all across the West in those days. Those and traveling shows like Wild Bob Hickok's. Kit had never been to one before, and Lattimore turned in his seat and laughed at how much like a child Kit was being in his reaction to the rodeo. He'd lay him over on the seat and fuck him right here if half of southwest Wyoming hadn't come out for this.
They were watching a lithe young cowboy, who the menu card tacked on the nearby post identified as Howling Hank, buck around the ring on a horse that was snorting and rearing to beat the band. Hank was howling too, which Kit thought might have something to do with his name. Kit couldn't quite make out some of the names on the board. They didn't seem to be ones a mother would give a child, but what did he know? This was as far from Rawlins as he'd ever been. In any event, Kit watched the young, blond cowboy with special interest, because he didn't look much older than Kit was himself. Kit could fantasize about that being him. Traveling the world with the rodeo. He couldn't think of anything better.
His eyes really bugged out, though, when the bull riding started with the featured cowboy, Rodeo Bob. The man must have been destined for rodeo fame, Kit thought, from the time his mama had given him his Christian name. Kit could see why he got top billing. He stayed on the bull longer than the other man Kit saw ride a bull that day, and his bull was angrier and bucked more, kept red-hot angry by two clowns teasing and tempting him as he bucked Rodeo Bob around the ring—that and the strap they had bound tightly around bull's nuts.
The bull charged the edge of the ring right where Lattimore and Kit were sitting, and Kit reared back in fear and knocked the beef jerky pack Lattimore was holding out of his hands and down under the open stands.
"Wooeee!" he yelled, both scared and exhilarated, as the bull veered off at the last moment.
Lattimore started to admonish him about losing the beef jerky, but Kit looked so much like an excited child that he couldn't.
The clowns pulled out of the ring after one pulled the strap from around the bull's belly, and the animal quieted down. The audience applauded the skill of Rodeo Bob, giving no credit in the bull's loss of ire to the clowns having stopped harassing it.
Kit turned to Lattimore, eyes wide open and face flushed. "He's the best, ain't he, Mr. Lattimore? He's the fuckin' best."
"Yes, he's good," Lattimore agreed, his mind actually concentrating on how much pleasure he'd get out of fucking Kit that night.
"Oh, look, another bull rider," Kit exclaimed as he turned his attention back to the ring. "But he looks like he's dark brown, Mr. Lattimore. Don't he look dark brown to you? Have you ever seen a man who was dark brown like that?"
"Yes, he's dark brown, Kit," Lattimore said. "Don't see many this far north, but, yes, there's darky cowboys. A slew of them came into the West from the South after the war. Freed but not knowing what to do with themselves. He's too young to be one of those, but probably from a darky daddy and an Indian squaw mammy. No white women would have let a darky from the war touch them."
"He's good too," Kit said, but soon added, "but not as good as Rodeo Bob." He watched the black cowboy, identified as Black Tex on the board, careen off the bull in an arc that put his ass on the ground. The clowns cajoled the bull away from him, as the cowboy scampered up, seemingly unharmed despite the delicious sound of alarm that had gone through the crowd when he went soaring, and hobbled off to the side of the ring.
Lattimore remembered his beef jerky was gone. "Go to the food trailer and get me more jerky, Kit," he commanded.
"Yeah, sure, Mr. Lattimore. Sorry for losing it for you."
When Kit got down from the stands, he got the notion to look for the jerky that had gone under the stands before wasting Mr. Lattimore's money by buying a new pack. He could just wipe them off and save Mr. Lattimore the money. No thought of keeping the money crossed his mind, nor was there any thought that Lattimore might not want jerky that had been in the dirt under the stands along with anything else that had been thrown under there. Such thoughts were a bit complex for Kit to get his mind around.
When he went under the stands, though, he saw two men standing close together. They were kissing and rubbing their hands on each other's bodies. This didn't particularly disturb Kit, of course, because he'd been doing some of that himself with Lattimore and a few of the other ranch hands over the last couple of months. It didn't disturb him when one man pushed the other down on his knees in front of him and started to unbutton his jeans either. He'd had that done to him too.
But it did make him knit his brow when the guy wouldn't go down on his knees but, rather, broke away and walked off along the line of the stands to a break in them and back to the circle of wagons where the ticket and food wagons and a couple of game wagons were.
Kit pulled away from the stands. The man who hadn't gotten what he wanted walked right by Kit and into the circle of wagons. Kit gasped. It was Rodeo Bob. And he looked angry. Rodeo Bob, the biggest attraction at this rodeo wasn't getting what he wanted—what he deserved as the rodeo star. Would he be so angry that he didn't ride anymore? That would be a real shame, Kit thought.
He followed behind the man as Rodeo Bob moved to the second line of wagons. He was opening the door of one when he turned and saw Kit standing there.
"Yes, what the fuck you want?" he growled.
"I saw you under the stands."
"So fuckin' what?"
"I can give you what that man wouldn't."
