All Hat No Cattle (Part 11)

In which Larry, our protagonist, is held up to ridicule.  Literally.

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Usually about an hour after sundown, Barn C's lights were dimmed
and then extinguished.  Within minutes, the imprisoned male stock
began a comparison of experiences from the day just ended.  The
evening after the public torture of Larry's abusive handler, int-
erest in his impressions of the event was running high.  "What
did they do to her?", came a question out of the dark, "Was she
bleeding?", came another.  Inflated a little by the attention, 
Larry began to embroider his tale and then launched into some un-
flattering descriptions of the company officials responsible for
the afternoon's brutal object lesson.  The ensuing laughter in 
the dark barn encouraged him and he pursued his new popularity
with the avidity of a romance novelist, piling on imaginary de-
tails and completely unaware of management's recording device
positioned just below the rafters in the ceiling.

After his semen had been extracted by the milking machine the
following morning, and as he was lining up with the others for
his feeding, Larry was abruptly collared and pulled out of the
queue by two guards.  "You don't want to eat breakfast today,"
one of them pronounced, "you'll just end up losing it anyway."
"The Boss heard what you had to say about her last night," said
the other, "and you're really in for it now."  The dragged him
into the very area that had been used to torture the blonde
wrangler the previous day.  But now, where the stocks had been
earlier, there stood what looked like a truncated gallows, a
length of rough rope dangling from its rough-hewn cross-piece.
He was roped securely to one of the vertical supports and left
while the guards went to assemble his fellow victims.

(to be continued)