'Ma'am, is it the drapes again?' Jake asked, thinking she might have got a little too much sun through the long windows beside her bed.
'It ain't the drapes, thank you, Jake,' Inez Scull said.
'My sweet boy,' she added. 'I do so fancy dimpled boys with curly hair.' 'Mine's always been curly, I guess,' Jake said, at a loss how to respond to the remark. Madame Scull still had the same, sun-flushed look on her face.
'Stand a little bit closer, so I can see your dimples better,' Inez Scull said.
Jake obediently placed himself within arm's length of the stool, only to get, in the next moment, the shock of his life, when Madame Scull confidently reached out and began to unbutton his pants.
'Let's see your young pizzle, Jakie,' she said.
'What, ma'am?' Jake said, too startled to move.
'Your pizzle--let's have a look,' Madame Scull repeated. 'I expect it's a fine one.' 'What, ma'am?' Jake said again. Then a sense of peril came over him, and he turned and dashed out of the room. He didn't quit dashing until he had reached the ranger stables. Once there, he squeezed into a horse stall and got his pants rebuttoned properly.
He spent the rest of the day and most of the next few days as far from the Scull mansion as he could get and still do his work. Jake didn't know what to think about the incident--at times, he tried to persuade himself that he dreamed it. He desperately wanted to find someone to confide in, but the only person in the troop that he could trust with such dangerous information was Pea Eye Parker, a gangly, half-starved youth from the Arkansas flats who was not much older than himself. Pea Eye had come to Texas with his parents to farm, only to have both parents, a brother, and three sisters die within a year. Woodrow Call had happened to notice Pea Eye in an abandoned cornfield one day--the farmer had been burned out and his wife killed by Comanches. Pea Eye was sitting by a fence, eating the dried-out corn right off the cob.
'Ain't that corn too dry to chew?' Call asked him. The young fellow looked to be seventeen or eighteen--he didn't even have drinking water to wash the dry kernels down with.
'Mister, I'm too hungry to be picky,' Pea Eye said. He looked hollow in the eyes, from starvation and fatigue. Woodrow Call had seen something in the boy that he liked--he had let Pea Eye ride behind him, into Austin.
Pea Eye soon proved to be adept at horseshoeing, a task most rangers shunned.
Augustus McCrae particularly shunned it, as he would shun cholera or indigestion. Pea Eye had wanted to ride out with the troop, of course, but Captain Scull had left him in town at first, considering him a little too green for the field. But when the time came to visit Fort Belknap, the Captain decided to leave Jake and take Pea Eye. It was the day before they were to leave that Madame Scull put her hand in Jake's pants. Jake could not, with the troop's departure at hand, bring himself to say anything about the incident to Pea Eye, fearing that, in his excitement, he might blab.
On the morning the troop was to leave, Jake half expected Captain Scull to walk up and kill him, but the Captain was as pleasant to him as ever. As the troop was preparing to mount, the Captain turned to him and informed him calmly that Madame Scull wanted him to be her equerry while the troop was gone.
'Her what?' Jake asked--he had not heard the term before.
'Equerry, equus, equestrian, equestrienne,' Captain Scull said. 'In other ^ws, Inez wants you to be her horse.' 'What, sir?' Jake asked. Since he began to deal with the Sculls, he had come to question both his eyesight and his hearing: for the Sculls frequently said and did things he couldn't understand or believe, even though he heard them said and saw them happen. In his old home in Kansas, nobody said or did such things--of that, Jake was sure.
'She'll have her way, too, boy!' the Captain said, his temper mounting at the thought of his wife's behaviour. 'She'll ride you to a lather before I'm halfway to the Brazos, the wild hussy!' 'What, sir?' Jake asked, for the third time.
He had no idea what the Captain was talking about, or why he supposed that Mrs. Scull wanted to ride him.
'Boy, are you a stutterer, or have you just got a brick for a brain?' the Captain asked, coming close and giving Jake a hard look.
'Inez wants to mount you, boy--ain't that clear to you yet?' he went on. 'Her father's the richest man in the South. They've three hundred thousand acres of prime plantation land in Alabama, and a hundred thousand more in Cuba. 'Inez'' ain't her name, either--she just took that name because it matches mine. In Birmingham she's just plain Dolly, but she was raised in Cuba and thinks she has a right to the passions of the tropics.' He paused, and glared at the big brick house on the slope above the creek. Around him, the men were mounting their horses for the long ride to Fort Belknap. Inish Scull glared at his mansion, as if the house itself were responsible for the fact that his wife would not desist from unseemly passions.
'Lust is the doom of man--I've often forsworn it myself, but my resolve won't hold,' the Captain said, stepping close to Jake. 'You're a young man, take my advice. Beware the hairy prospect. Do that and improve your vocabulary and you'll yet make a fine citizen. Old Tom Rowlandson, now there was a man who understood lust. He knew about the hairy prospect, Tom Rowlandson did.
I've a book of his pictures right up in my house. Take a peek in it, boy. It might help you escape Inez. Once you start tupping with slavering sluts like her, there's no recovery: just look at me! I ought to be secretary of war, if not president, but I'm doing nothing better than chasing heathen red men on this goddamn dusty frontier, and all because of a lustful rich slut from Birmingham! Bible and sword!' A few minutes later the troop rode away, planning to be gone for a month, at least.
Jake felt regretful for a few hours--if he had tried harder to persuade the Captain to take him along, the Captain might have relented. After all, he had taken Pea Eye. If there was a fight, it might have meant a chance for glory. But he hadn't pressed to go, and the Captain had left him with the problem of Madame Scull.
With the Captain gone and the threat of immediate execution removed, Jake found that his mind came to dwell more and more on what Madame Scull had done.
There was no denying that she was a beautiful woman: tall, heavy bosomed, with a quick stride and lustrous black hair.
It seemed to Jake that the Captain, for whatever reason, had simply handed him over to Madame Scull. He was supposed to be her equerry--t was now his job. If he didn't do his equerrying well, the Captain might even
