After The Bighorn 1. Loose Ends and New Beginnings

After the Bighorn    Part 1.

Loose Ends and New Beginnings. June 2016

As will be clear to anyone who knows Montana and San Francisco I have taken liberties with geography.  In this case, I have added an entire residential district to San Francisco in the Drysdale Hills.

 

 Smith

 

It was June 8^th and Smith was content. He was sitting in a wooden chair on the veranda of his new cabin on the Lazy F.  He had an explainable amount of ‘bug out money’ in his mattress, and even more under one of his aliases in an offshore bank. Nature was burgeoning and later he would go and withdraw a ‘sleeping library’ from some of the intelligent livestock down in the new processing centre that Hawkins was constructing.

 

From Smith’s Narrative.

 

I’ve always wanted to know more about Italian literature.  Fortunately a graduate student from Italy was careless in where she wandered down by one of the rivers of Pittsburgh. Just wandered right into one of the agents of Mr Willard Frick himself.  A full belly, a little learning, and a fine morsel to enjoy: my life is good.  Sophia will adapt to her new life as a slave. She still needed a little reminder of her new status, but the slave whip helped her learn.

  I landed in heaven here.  The last of what turned out to be Navy money was paid into my offshore account last night.  Why they let this investigation blow up into such a big deal I don’t know, but it played out to my advantage. If only the Fricks would give me Fliss, formerly Miss Florence Fabricant, my life would be complete.  Not much chance of that happening though, with her owned by Big Mr Frick himself, and his daughter Chelsea using her as a private maid.  I hear that girl is a terror when she visits the ranch.

Maybe after a few years, the Fricks will offer her to me as a bonus.  As an assistant foreman now, in charge of armory and supplies, I might rate a bonus.

Ah, well, it is good for a man to have a few dreams, no matter how content he has.  I’m forty-five and expect to age and die on the Lazy F.

 

On the San Diego Naval Base.

 

Anita Cruz scanned the final report from Smith and placed it in the file with the rest.  It read like very far-fetched fiction to her.  Why the Navy was paying for such stuff she did not know.  Although it had its moments it wasn’t a patch on the book she was reading, Harem Slaves of the Desert Sheiks. Now that was a story worth reading and it seemed a lot more realistic too!  Set in the 1920s, Lady Cassandra Montagu was adventuring in Arabia w ith a motoring expedition when dashing mounted riders had swept down on the group and carried her away. That was stuff that very likely happened, not this nonsense from Montana with sweaty cowboys.  Anita read the book at home when she thought her room-mate, Judith, would not know. The bold Sheik Ahmed was about to ravage Lady Cassandra in a great deal of detail when she had had to leave for work. After Anita left for work, Judith, who worked a later shift, retrieved Harem Slaves from it's hiding place.  She mocked Anita’s reading habits, but secretly read her books.

 

Anita took the file into her boss, Lt Cmdr Jimmy Spruance, who took the thick document, thanked her, and said she could leave a little early for the day.  Anita fled with joy.  She wanted to get home well before her roommate Judith, who mocked her choice of literature.  With a good hour and a half before Judith came home, Anita could sink into the tub with her dreams and read the detailed description of the ravishment of Lady Cassandra by the strong, muscular, handsome, but not at all sweaty Sheik Ahmed. 

Anita believed that modern stories of abduction by romantic sheiks were much better than the ones her grandmother had read.  Harem Slaves of the Desert Sheiks was just getting good at the point where her grandmother’s novels left off.

Lady Cassandra’s maid had been thoroughly ravished by three of Sheik Ahmed’s men in the chapter before, but she was just a servant and frankly a bit of a slut.  Lady Cassandra and the sheik were the main event.  Lady Cassandra was standing before the Sheik, bosom heaving, in the centre of his tent in the desert encampment.  The author spent a great deal of effort describing the heaving of Lady Cassandra’s bosom. It truly was a large and magnificent bosom. Lady Cassandra’s wrists were in heavy iron shackles attached high above her head, attached to the tent pole. She was clad only, as the author minutely described, in her corset, which covered her only from the top of her heaving bosom to her white and smooth thighs,lovely thighs. The sheik had cut off Lady Cassandra’s outer garments, an action that had taken the sheik and the author nearly thirteen pages to accomplish.

Now it was getting good, which meant the author had reached the point that in Anita Cruz’s grandmother’s books where either the Sheik would be overcome by the luscious Lady Cassandra's innocence and offer honourable marriage or rescue would arrive. There was no such respite in Anita’s book.  The author described the impotent writhing of Lady Cassandra’s wrists (the only impotent occasion in the whole book; the sheik and his men certainly were not). The sheik’s gaze descended from those wrists down her lovely arms for three more pages, the author spending a great deal of time on the Englishwoman’s luscious lips and the lovely column (the author’s words) of her throat.  When the sheik observed how the beauty of that lovely throat would be enhanced by the collar of a slave, Anita nodded happily.  The author and the sheik returned to the lovely heaving of Lady Cassandra’s ample bosom.  Anita and Lady Cassandra began to melt as the sheik’s sharp and mighty sword cut away the top of the corset, freeing Lady Cassandra’s bosom, tipped with nipples as pink and beautiful as English roses.  Anita ran some more hot water into the tub.  Lady Cassandra had a lot more yielding to do before the chapter was over.  Anita’s fingers were busy as she read the passages twice before Judith returned.  Under her covers that night, she reread of Lady Cassandra’s yielding twice more. By the end of the chapter, Lady Cassandra had been thoroughly fucked and both she and Anita were quite satisfied.

 

Lt Cmdr Spruance read the dossier, initialed, and authorized a final payment to Smith.  He was not going to take any further action. In the first place, it all sounded weird.  But Jimmy had been on the Pentagon’s Roswell re-appraisal, and he would not rule out anything to do with UFOs.  The diplomatic angle worried him as well. Causing international incidents, even with picturesque European micro-countries was not a wise career move for a young officer who intended to be an admiral some day.

He forwarded the whole thing to Washington, let them deal with it. Spruance put the whole matter out of his mind and went to the Officer’s Club to scheme with his peers regarding getting the all-important sea duty assignments so necessary for promotion.

Washington June 13^th, 2016.

In Washington the file was whisked off the desk of the appropriate department and ended on the desk of J Morgan Cornelius.  Morgan Cornelius was impossibly senior and had been in Navy Administration for ever. No one knew his precise responsibilities, but it was agreed that ‘good old Morg’ did them extremely well. He dealt in favors and fixes, and everyone sooner or later was grateful for his help, which meant they were in his debt.

Cornelius was going to bury this file so deeply it would never be dug up again, God willing.  Cornelius did not believe the best place to hide a needle was haystack; but mixed in with a hundred-thousand other needles. The file was sent for filing in a off site filing warehouse, with the routing code altered subtly, just enough so it would be filed just a bit wrong. It was J Morgan Cornelius’s experience that destroying document would almost always come back to bite one. (He was the sort to say ‘bite one’ instead of bite you’). Losing a file: easy and no culpability.

Cornelius was no Friend of the Fricks, but no enemy either.  He had been inserted into the Navy long ago by one of the Old Families, but that Family had died out.  He had been a loyal servant of the McMurtys but the last McMurtry, a middle-aged lady, had died a few years ago.  He idly wondered what had become of the McMurtry properties and money. Likely scooped by greedy trustees and distantly related collateral relatives he supposed.

Cornelius put the McMurtys from his head.  He issued, by devious channel,s certain orders. The easy ones could be done immediately, but there was one instance where timing would be vital: Kathleen Collins.  Collins was a young thruster in the IG (Inspector-General’s) department.  As a young woman working for the Inspector-General, Collins wanted to advance women and make a name for herself.  It was she who had instigated the expensive investigation as to why Teresa and Florence had not applied for their benefits. Sending a spy to the ranch where they disappeared – ridiculous.

She had done this when Cornelius was in Africa on certain private business for the Families; when he had returned, he had made sure that future reports were routed to him.  Now the investigation was concluded something needed to be done about the over-curious Miss Kathleen Collins before she could find the report he had hidden.  But not too quickly, so no connection between the missing report and fate of Miss Collins could ever be suspected.  But not too slowly either: something had to be done before the too curious Miss Collins could cause more trouble.

Orders given, Cornelius went home to dinner.  At the door he was met by his kajira, prostate in obedience position, just as he had found her for the past twenty-five years.  J Morgan was still vigorous and could enjoy a young and vital kajira, but mostly he cherished his old girl.  He was very fond of her, and often let her sleep at the bottom of his bed, ankle braceleted to the post to be sure. Once he had cherished dreams that they might retire to Gor together, but with the demise of the McMurtry Family there was no one to sponsor such a great gift, despite his great services to the Families.

“What did you make for dinner, old girl”, he asked as he closed his front door,

 

The Orders of J. Morgan Cornelius

 

The quiet indirect methods of J Morgan Cornelius had rapid results.

Three days later Lr Cmdr Spruance was promoted to full Commander and ordered to report immediately to a Cruiser in the South China Sea.  Once on the cruiser, he would be far too busy to gossip about missing sailors who did not apply for their benefits, UFOs, or strange quirks in International Law.

Anita Cruz temporarily had no one to report to, so it was almost ten days before she was missed.  When Jimmy Spruance’s replacement arrived, he wondered where his office assistant was, but no one could really remember when she had last been seen in the office.  When the police conducted a wellness check, they found both Anita and her roommate Judith gone, but their apartment contained lots of pamphlets and travel brochures regarding middle eastern travel.  That along with some lurid, highly erotic novels regarding harems and Sheiks led the investigators to suspect the girls had made some ill-advised travel plans involving the Middle East.

 

The Cloisters of the Bliss of the Natural Order

 

 

J Morgan Cornelius’s plans for Miss Kathleen Collins took longer to mature.  After a decent interval, the beginning of July, to be exact, his final orders in the Fabricant case were executed.

When her assistant returned to the office following the July 4^th weekend, she found three pieces of paper on Miss Kathleen Collins normally immaculate desk. The first was a memo from the files dept advising that they still had not tracked down the Fabricant file, but were sure they would find it soon as it was likely just slightly misfiled.

The second was a deed making over her property to the St Louis Cloister of the Bliss of the Natural Order.

The third was Miss Collins’s resignation saying the stress of such a responsible position was too much for her and she was retiring from the world to join the St Louis Cloister.

Her friends were surprised by the letter, as Miss Collins was a thrusting, aggressive modern young woman who had previously seemed to thrive on stress. The case was a cause celebre for the New Feminists who gleefully pointed out that it was better for a woman to stay home and nurture a man than take on too much in the outside world.

Her family was more concerned with getting their hands on Miss Collin’s property.  They had not liked her much, but the property in her estate was valuable and prompted them to take some action. When they finally got an order to investigate, they showed up at the gates of the St Louis Cloister of the Bliss of the Natural Order.

It was the beginning of November by the time they met with the Prior of the Cloister. He looked exactly as one would expect the head of a new age cult to look: bearded and tall and resplendent in blue and yellow robes. He said unfortunately that there was no one of the name of Miss Kathleen Collins in the St Louis Cloister.  Of course, that meant nothing; the new intakes often had their names changed. In addition, acolytes and initiates often moved between Cloisters.

Disappointed, the relatives had to be content with that.  After all, there is no law against a person disappearing or giving money to quasi-religious cults. The prior had spoken the truth though. By the time in late November when the Prior spoke to her relatives, the former Miss Kathleen Collins was in Thentis learning the painful lesson that curiosity did not become the likes of a girl like her.