Many thought a resignation would allow them to forego the lashes. Torbert refused to accept their resignations, punished them and sent them home anywa....More surprising were the nine that accepted two additional lashes and offered a vow to help restore the Noble Guard image.Finally it was time for the man who had caused this outrage to be brought forward. Lippit had cheered among the loudest at the cruelty Seni displayed to Jorgarn. The more punishment Seni dished out, the more likely Lippit was. “This is so like marine boot camp,” Julie noted, “I deal better with this than chatting with flowery diplomats.”We walked to the edge of town just to look around and stretch our legs. Julie was the first to comment on the sickly plants in the field. I hadn’t been paying attention, but the dirt here wasn’t much better than what we’d seen at Scratch’s family farmstead. The local variety of corn didn’t look healthy, even I knew corn was picky about its soil. If it wasn’t a soil problem these. The horrific slump seemed to have gone away. I was making a contribution.But with three games left in the season, I looked back at the past week and realized that I wasn't going to make folks forget about Ted Williams.I'd been hitting around .265 for the month of September, and of course my season average was creeping steadily downward. It would require a flurry of hits in the season-ending three-game series to creep back over the .400 mark.Hitting .407 was already an impossible dream. Ted's. The end result was a digital "oil painting" of an erotically beautiful young woman in a midnight garden. She had dark hair, and her youthful curves glowed in sensuality, as in a painting by an Old Master artist. She appeared to be teasing her panties away from her beautiful crotch. Her name was Francesca.How had he ever sunk to this? It started when he looked at a photo of her, taken a few years ago. He found himself fantasizing about her in the nude. He scanned the photo into his computer,.