EXTRACT FOR
Learning The Trade: Little Jill: A Western Whore
(Nicola Nichols)

I let my gaze drift out across the desert landscape, wanting to revel for a time in its apparent, deceptive emptiness. The desert teems with life, but signs of it can be scarce. In some odd way, that reassured me.



 I traveled west, sharing a stagecoach with a preacher's wife who had made this leg of the journey tortuous. That we were both headed west was our only common bond. Her sights were set on Navajo country, where she would meet her preacher husband and save the heathen savages. She wallowed in her self-righteous view of the world and rambled on about the heavy burden shouldered by those doing the Lord's work, bringing them to God. 



For my part, I was continuing a journey intended to take me from my parents' house and reunite me with my husband who had gone ahead to homestead in Lizard Creek, in the New Mexico Territory. It had been an eye-opening journey, one of exciting experience that transformed me from a penniless young wife, to something grander.



Although I still headed for Lizard Creek, my life had changed, and while I still headed for Lizard Creek, I now traveled in a different universe??"one that the preacher's wife would never comprehend, even if she allowed herself to imagine it. I was a whore, new at the work, and while I was still learning the trade, I prided myself on being a quick and eager student of the profession.



Fortunately, at our next stop, in Samson Flats, the paths Mrs. Stuffy Preacherwoman and I followed diverged. While she went off to visit with her sister, I'd go off with a man, a man I'd never met. 



I knew the man's name, Clayton, and that he expected to meet a whore. He was paying to have me indulge his sexual fantasies during my layover in Samson Flats, but that was all I knew about him. The prospect excited my body and my mind, and I looked forward to providing him with whatever pleasures he desired. 



I'd taken to this life when it was suggested by a lover, a banker named Warren Lewis. I hadn't realized the amount of money I'd need to make the trip, and after feeding me and fucking me, he suggested that I could earn money by entertaining his clients. And, after I'd satisfied him, that client told me he had a client. 



I knew I had experienced little of this new life; I knew I had much to learn about what pleased men, both the things I'd like and the things I'd never thought of. Despite my inexperience but based on the way things had gone so far, I was certain I wanted to pursue it the life. I wanted to learn more about men, learn more about their desires, and what it might take to slake their hunger for women.



When I resumed my trip, Warren gave me his telegraph address. He also wired Clayton, singing my praises, he said. That was how it came to be that I was meeting Clayton... a rich rancher who banked with the branch there.



The preacher's wife would pray with her sister, and I would fuck a strange man.



At the station, I saw a dowdy woman embrace the preacher's wife and hustle her off. As the men unloaded the bags, I turned my attention to a tall, thin man in of middle age, dressed in a fine suite. He held a bowler in his hand and ran a hand through his thin, sandy hair. 



"Clayton?" I asked.



His eyes danced over me, then he smiled. "Little Jill?" he asked, sounding hopeful.



"That's right," I said.