The lovestruck merchant sent
the piano player baubles from the General Mercantile. In the flowering of green womanhood, for the lovestruck merchant,
it was love at first site. She sent over a cameo brooch to the piano player at the saloon across the dusty street where
the noonday stagecoach had just left.
The lovestruck merchant watched out the General
Mercantile plate-glass window. The piano player pinned on the cameo, and with her wealthy bosom heaving from its cleavage,
walked to the saloon's plate-glass window and winked discreetly. This wasn't the century for lesbianism. Can you
read the headlines? LESBIANS LYNCHED WITH THE THREE-STRAND EYE-SPLICE.
Keeping within sensible limits, the lovestruck
merchant in all of her maidenly devotion, gathered up a bustle of a plan to meet up with the piano player when the saloon
closed in the wee hours of the morning.
Never mind that the noon stage delivered Laura
Ingalls Wilder, author of "Little House" books. She stopped in the General Mercantile for a box of quills, unruled
tablets, and two bottles of writing ink, for she had a prairie novel set in her mind where wagonwheels were the vehicle that
turned the page and oil lanterns lit the way. Laura Ingalls Wilder tore a blank page from the unruled tablet she had
purchased and signed her popular name to give to the lovestruck merchant. Imagine that! An autograph before the
book was written.
If compliments were whiskey, the men would have
been spitting dust instead of tobacco juice. The whiskey was drying up like the dusty street and it would soon be time
for the yarn spinners and poker players to call it a night.
Tonight, the piano player signaled the lovestruck
merchant by playing Buffalo Gals...Won't You Come Out Tonight. The lovestruck merchant had long closed the
General Mercantile and spent the rest of the evening listening to the goings on at the saloon from her room above the Mercantile.
Never mind what she could see out the other window---a bunch of saloon whores skinny-dipping in the moonlight in the wild
waters of the horse tank at the livery stable.
Instead, the lovestruck merchant watched the saloon
keeper sweep the sleeping drunk and grit off the floor out into the street and the dead one with an ace tucked up his coat
sleeve along with the other lowly dirt. She waited until she saw the piano player put the flame to a lantern in her
window at the boarding house above the saloon, then the lovestruck merchant drew her curtains, smoothing the lacy gap so as
not to give her away while watching thieves helping themselves to bullion shipments on the midnight stagecoach and the whiskey-runners
ride like white lightning to make their after-hour deliveries after the sheriff's head was down.
The piano player turned the wick down to douse
it, then quickly rolled the glowing wick back up for a signal to the lovestruck merchant that the town was clear. Buffalo
Gals...Won't You Come Out Tonight...
* * * * * * *
*
CONTINUED...This is the second
in a series of a three-part dream. The lovestruck merchant gave a soft-knuckle knock on the piano player's door.
"One chair, one table, one lamp, one bed," the lovestruck merchant whispered the password.
"Washboard and lye basin...come in
'fore they hang us dead," the piano player answered, quite knowing her bustle was about to come up.
The red velvet floral wallpaper matched
the fine couch the piano player received free for spending fifty dollars in profit sharing certificates from ordering merchandise
from Sears Roebuck and Company.
Theirs was a cliffhanger serial affair---picked
up where it left off. The piano player's wicked sensuality drove the lovestruck merchant wild. At thirty, the
piano player was an exceptionally built woman with a voluptuous bosom and a small waist, sparkling green-blue eyes and long
chestnut hair she wore in a lesbian knot at the nape of her neck. She bathed herself in Milk of Roses and powdered herself
with La Dore's Powder de Riz made from fine rice flour, both toiletries from France, available through Sears Roebuck
and Company mail order.
Raising the piano player's bustle,
the wire frame she wore to puff out the back of her dress, the lovestruck merchant purposely took the hem out of the piano
player's dress to disguise their affair. This was the lovestruck merchant's bustle of a plan to meet up with the piano
player in the wee hours of the morning after the saloon closed. She carried with her, merchandise from the General Mercantile;
gold-filled thimble, silver sewing scissors, pins, needles and needle emery, and spools of assorted colors of threads.
To ease the sexual guilt, she bought and paid for the sundries out of the modest salary she paid herself even though she was
the proprietor of the General Mercantile. Simply, in those years, this is all it took---a traveling sewing kit to masquerade
lesbianism through the seamstress. It would be quite believable to modern-day "hemmed-in," closeted lesbians
that "the hem was being snagged on the piano bench when the piano player rose from her seat."
Each affair began first with either
undoing the hem or sewing it back in so the piano player could wear the floor-length dress downstairs to the saloon in the
morning, giving her an excuse if they were ever caught as to why the lovestruck merchant, "seamstress" was making
afterhour visits to the piano player's room. Alternately, the lovestruck merchant laughingly sewed the hem back in to
make it look like it had been repaired, otherwise the piano player walked with her hands at her waist, hoisting her dress
up so she didn't step on it and trip. Hem in, hem out, hem in, hem out, hem in, hem out. It was
doubtful that the men in the saloon looked at her hemline, but were rather interested in her bustline. Centuries of
cleavage...bosom full and fantastic.
Ladylike, the lovestruck merchant picked
a bushel of breast from the piano player's cleavage where she kept her English Lavender smelling salt in a glass-stopper bottle.
In the flowering of green womanhood,
at twenty, the lovestruck merchant was oppositely built from the piano player---small breasts and a bushel of waist.
She was a charming young girl who enjoyed having her "ivories" tickled by the piano player far more than attending the store
left to her by her deceased parents.
"If nature has not favored you..."
the piano player said, "with that greatest charm...bosom, full and perfect..." She tickled the lovestruck merchant's
"ivories" with the Princess Bust Developer from Sears Roebuck. Finely made from nickel and aluminum, the breast plunger
cup exercised the breast muscles and increased blood flow through the capillaries, developing and expanding the bustline...will
enlarge any lady's bust 2 to 3 inches, so said the advertisement in the catalog.
For this reason the piano player and
the lovestruck merchant "expanded" their affair a little longer tonight...if you are not fully satisfied, please return
it to us and we will gladly refund your money...
CONTINUED...this is the third and final in a
series of a three-part dream. Unfortunately, modern-day life is more likely to imitate the history of the frontier West...yarn
spinners, whiskey-swillers, hellraisers, thieves, gunfighters...and just as blood-curdling where today's deeds of violence
and vengeance is just as common as the wagon ruts destined for the rough-and-tumble frontier life.
The trouble started when a ton of bad attitude
helped itself to a bushel of breast. The piano player had always hoped her departure from life might be peaceable and
tranquil...but the man who took it was a self-styled horse thief who suggested she ply her trade upstairs because "women
were in short supply and his need would take less than five minutes."
Telling the whiskey-diseased and foul-mouthed
man who always rode in on a fresh horse that he had her confused with the saloon whores did not set well with him. Not
gentlemanly, he picked a bushel of breast from the piano player's cleavage, knocking her English Lavender smelling salt from
its groove. Spitting curses, the words got ugly, never mind the author's warning that this was just another historical
abuse of silver women that leached into and tarnished modern-day society, confirming it when he reached for his befouled hash
knife and pierced the piano player's kidney.
Watching the murderous scene from her
plate-glass window, the lovestruck merchant ran across the street into the saloon where the piano player fell to the floor,
gasping for breath. The last thing the piano player saw were the tear-filled eyes of her beloved lovestruck merchant
clutching a Sears Roebuck catalog every bit as sacred as the Bible. The lovestruck merchant read the piano player her
last rites from the catalog, Sears Roebuck and Company's Message of Good Cheer...
"With malice toward none and charity for
all, we extend our sincere wishes for greater prosperity, health, and happiness. Let us think as well of our neighbor
grocer or clothier across the street. Let us rise above the petty jealousies and differences that so often grow out
of competition, so that in the evening of the day's work your competitor will be as welcome to break bread at your table as
would be your doctor or your banker."
The murderer walked out
to the horse he had stolen and beat its face
bloody with the reins for its refusal to move
one hoof from the hitching post.
Never mind that
there was a woman dead on the saloon floor.
The lovestruck merchant draped a bolt of black
cloth over the Beckwith upright parlor piano and turned
out the piano lamp. "Amen." Then she called
the funeral parlor.
The Dalton Brothers
rode up, declaring the horse thief stole their horse.
"Hang him---he's a damn horse thief!" the brothers broadcasted. Never mind that there was a woman dead
on the saloon floor...
Which novel is this excerpt from? I invite you to buy the novel when
it is released to get the whole story. Will the lovestruck merchant lay her beloved piano player to rest? Who does
this dream belong to? What does the everlasting life of the cameo have to do with it???
