OverTime 1 - Searching (Time Travel) (12 page)

Garrison gave up. The idea was so obviously ludicrous it apparently didn't need answering. He vaulted into his saddle, done with me and my
trouble
for the time being.

Strangely insulted, I
called, "I see you bought your saddle back."

That caught his attention, and at last he glanced toward me, obviously at a loss. Anger? Humor? His expression settled into one of exasperation as he thumbed his hat in stoic politeness. "Ain
't never sold it," he drawled.

The glare he saved for Benj; I didn
't even merit that. What was it he'd warned me?
They ain't supposed to like you; they're supposed to leave you be
.

Well here was a man who led by example on both counts.

I sat high on the seat of the parked chuck wagon, safely out of the way of all trouble from snakes to cowboys, and I watched the
distant cows being put to bed. Especially with the quiet of evening upon us, I felt increasingly lost. Useless.

I also had the strangest certainty that there should be harmonica music drifting across the scene.

For some reason, I'd never—that I knew of—pictured cattle actually lying down to sleep at night. I had a surprisingly firm image of them eating or mooing or plotting stampedes all night, in much the same way they did during the day, just standing still. These cows—two thousand head was a
lot
of cows!—were herded off what was literally a beaten path and onto a higher stretch of prairie which Garrison, waving his hat, had apparently picked for reasons beyond my meager, womanly understanding. The cowboys herded their charges into a wide spiral, doubling onto themselves until the animals couldn't really go anywhere and so just quit, content enough to eat the grass they found beneath them.

The
cowboy named Seth came back with the truant mules, and said "Ma'am," to me before leaving them nearby and riding to help with the cows. So much for trouble on
that
front. Some of the men working the herd seemed to be looking at me as they swung their ropes or made their horses dance.
That
didn't count as trouble, did it?

If Garrison happened to look my way, though, I didn
't notice it. Not that I was watching the trail boss, of course—I was watching cows.

Not real liberated animals, cows.

A few of them lay down right there and then, as if to announce what a day they'd had. Most of them just dined. Two cowboys headed in toward the back of the wagon and—I leaned over to see past the bedroll-stacked wagon—unsaddled their horses with a few well-planned jerks of leather.

One of those two riders I recognized as Benj, who sent a brief wave and grin in my direction with the hand not holding his saddle, but seemed to have more important things on his mind. The sweaty horses
headed, by themselves, toward the larger remuda where what looked like a child met them. The men homed in for the wagon. In a moment I heard the sound of metal on tin, and the scraping of plates with utensils.

My stomach growled. But everyone else continued to monitor slow-poke cattle which were still catching up. One elderly man unloaded what looked like three baby cows from a one-mule cart. I didn
't want to rush back and demand food while the people who'd actually done the work still hadn't eaten.

Though maybe my good manners came, in part, from the knowledge that at least one person would take notice if I didn
't show them? Garrison might be counting on me to mess up, but that didn't mean I would.

Assuming I could help it.

The sun was gone by now, leaving only a wash of orange light in the huge western sky, and the sheer remoteness of our camp added to the beauty of the scene. But I had that unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach that went beyond hunger or fatigue. Yes, you guessed it!

I didn
't belong here
.

When I tried to picture where I
did
belong—somewhere back East?—my memory wouldn't oblige. If I had a place in this world, damned if I could remember it. If anyone was looking for me, they hadn't found me yet. So here I sat in thick pants and long underwear and heavy sodbuster boots, surrounded by about fifteen men, fifty or more horses, approximately two thousand cattle and five or so mules, and I was alone. I'd been
found
alone. No tracks. How could I have gotten into that creek bed with no tracks?

My mind balked.
Something awful happened. Leave it alone
.

The person in charge of the horses returned with two more—plus the one he rode—and he really was just a kid. Benj and his friend saddled them, mounted them, and rode back out to the herd. Talk about your fast food.

Once the tail-end of the herd caught up to the front end and joined the grassy buffet, and groups of animals stopped trying to put in some overtime by hiking on alone and having to be herded back, other riders started heading in to the wagon. Two, then five. Men dismounting, claiming their saddles, sending their horses off to the horse-boy. Lots of scruffy, dirty cowboys.
Texas
cowboys.

Trouble?

A few glanced surreptitiously toward me. When I recognized a face—Ropes, Juan, Shorty—I smiled a tentative hello, and Juan and Shorty smiled briefly back, before looking away, but that didn't mean anything. I'd been intimidated by only two Peaves men. The murmuring group at the fire neared seven, then nine, then ten, until only three men remained amongst the multi-hued cattle and the prairie dusk. Two of those—the two who'd eaten first—seemed to be riding a wide circle around the herd, taking their own sweet time as if they meant to do it for awhile. And the third....

The third rode deliberately toward the front of the wagon, where I sat, growing increasingly familiar until he reined his horse in not twenty feet from me. I knew him immediately, even before he swung down from the saddle. Unlike the others, he didn
't unsaddle his horse, but instead loosened the straps, then slid the bit from its mouth and left it to crop at the grass, still ready for riding.

Then he looked at me. His eyes seemed bright in the hat-shadowed darkness of his face which, like the rest of him, was silhouetted against the dregs of light in the sky. I was vaguely aware that some of the other men were watching me too—had been, all along—but my attention focused on Garrison.

Because he was the first person who'd found me, I guessed. The words
Stockholm syndrome
floated into and then out of my traitorous memory.

I checked to make sure there were no snakes lurking in the grass beneath the wagon, then
half climbed, half hopped stiffly down. I even managed not to scream in agony as my stiffened muscles protested the acrobatics. When I looked up, I caught the Boss lowering his hand, as if he'd considered extending it at my awkward leap. Stiffly polite to the bitter end.

Wendell Peaves had implied a dire future for me at the
cow camp
. Even Benj had mentioned that I wasn't as
off-limits
as other women who'd been on cattle drives—I guess his stolen kiss this afternoon confirmed that. But Garrison, who seemed to expect the most trouble of all, had promised I would be safe, and he was here now, and he understood this place better than anyone because he ran it. I took a deep breath and, head high, walked to the back-end of the chuck wagon where waited stew, and coffee....

And nine of the most polite
young men you could ever hope to meet.

I kid you not. Every one of them popped to their feet and took off their hats
as I approached. By the look of the empty metal plates, they'd waited for my arrival to start eating. And they all called me "Miss" and "Ma'am."

I blinked at them, bewildered. Wasn
't there supposed to be trouble?

Garrison cleared his throat behind me. "Come upon the lady in the mornin
', set afoot and strayed from her folk. She'll be with us to Dodge."

And that was it for speeches. In the morning, huh? But I didn
't have time to ponder how he'd made the others believe it had been today, because cowboys were nodding and smiling shyly and giving me their names in a jumble that, through dinner, I began to sort anyway. A special talent from my past, maybe?

Whatever my past was.

Unless me being the center of awkward attention was trouble, I couldn't imagine what Garrison and Peaves had been so worried about.

The stew, which came with biscuits, was delicious, too—real food, at last! Plenty of onions, and squash, and carrots, and tender chunks of white meat. I was halfway through my portion before it occurred to me that there were no chickens on this drive, but there
had
been a dead snake earlier.

I put my spoon down on my plate and peeked up at the others from beneath the rim of my floppy hat. In the flickering orange firelight they were all wolfing their stew without a second thought, white meat and all.

Surely Schmidty had been joking when he said I'd tenderized the snake?

"Is problem?" demanded the cook at that moment, stopping his bustling to examine my food. "You don
't like stew? You think you cook better?"

Garrison choked on a bite, and I had to imagine he was remembering the turkey.

The metal scraping of spoon-on-dish silenced as the other cowboys paused, torn between their own enjoyment of the food and their concern for my lack thereof. Great. I'd caused trouble anyway.

Well, if they could eat it, I could. "I couldn
't come close, Schmidty," I said, startling him with my best smile. "This is wonderful." And I went back to eating.

Yum-yum noises would probably be going a bit too far.

Schmidty leaned back from attack-position. "Good." Or
goot.

Then I took a sip of coffee and
almost did a spit-take.

Almost immediately, three cowboys—Shorty, Seth, and... Clayton?—clustered around me,
hovering without touching, asking if I was okay. For a moment I couldn't even answer.
Strong?
The bite of coffee filled my throat, burned my sinuses, tickled my ears. This wasn't coffee; it was coffee concentrate!

I finally got my breathing back to normal, and the cowboys sat back, not quite as worried. I sniffed, and had to wipe my eyes to see Schmidty back in defensive mode. Great, just great.

"That's...." The word came out a croak, but I decided to pretend it hadn't. "That's some coffee."

The cook nodded, suspicious, but the other men relaxed and took several long draws of their own, celebrating the moments of their lives. One man, Jorge, said "Yes, it is.
" Seriously.

"Strong," acknowledged the Boss. I
'd almost swear, serious face or not, that his eyes danced as he added, "Ain't it?" Practically a double-dog-dare.

"
God yes," I gasped, and his amusement vanished. The sudden discomfort among the cowboys returned too, with nervous glances and shifting positions. Had I said something?

Apparently I had. "Best mind yer language," he warned me.

My
language
? All I'd said was "God." He must be the religious type; that would explain a
lot
. I held his gaze, glare for glare, and considered arguing. The words pushed at my throat.

The others began to eat more quickly, as if embarrassed. Of him, or for me?

Leave it, Lillabit. Leave it
. He was the boss—no, the Boss!—and I needed his good will to get through the next few days. Let the man have his little idiosyncrasies.

"Fine," I agreed, only a little sharply, and went back to my stew. But I didn
't enjoy it as much, even after Garrison put down his metal plate and left.

In fact, I spent the rest of my brief evening restless. After dessert—
a strange mix of biscuits and molasses, which they called "lick"—Schmidty took me up on my offer to wash the dishes, only to inform me that to save water, we would be using dirt.

Swear to God. I mean, to gosh. I did it, but the silent, repetitive chore gave me even more time to ponder how I did
not
belong here. And the stars that littered the sky over us... had I ever seen that many stars? Was I even on my own
planet
?

The only privacy I got for my
"toiletries" was a small tent, like a wigwam, someone had set up for me, some distance from the wagon, with a small hole dug beneath it—"Yer own outhouse," Benj said proudly, so I knew what it was for. I didn't like it; the moon wasn't even half full, and I couldn't resist a gut-deep fear that when I came back out, nobody would be there. As if it could all vanish,
*poof*
, just like that.

It
's hard enough to do your business in the dark, almost on your hands and knees, wearing freakin' long-johns and using grass as paper, without a full anxiety attack. As soon as I could, I didn't crawl, I leapt out of the canvas confines, my throat closed, my whole body shaking—