OverTime 1 - Searching (Time Travel) (13 page)

And there it was, the campfire, the chuck wagon, the handful of cowboys. While I was gone, they
'd unloaded the bedrolls. Several of them were helping put up the wagon's canvas top, making it a real covered wagon, like a scene from....

From....

Never mind. Whatever it reminded me of, it became my rickety bedroom, with borrowed blankets and two sacks of grain as my bed.

Is it any wonder I couldn't sleep right off?

I could probably blame the coffee concentrate. I could blame the noise from outside the wagon—nothing loud or rowdy, but a constant backdrop of sound nonetheless. Some cowboys
asked Schmidty for a shave; he refused. Others murmured low conversations from their bedrolls, punctuating their words with an occasional bark of laughter, or intermittent, soft spitting. Cattle lowed—now I know what that means. "Lowed."

Sometimes, from the rope where about ten mounts were tied, not far from the wagon, a horse neighed. Crickets chirped
and chirped and chirped. And it seemed that the men riding slow circles around the distant, mostly-sleeping cows were singing, though I could only hear snatches of that.

I tried to snuggle
onto my feed-sack bed, to tell myself I
liked
small, firm mattresses. It didn't work. A faint orange, from the coals of the fire, cast the barest light up at the wagon cover. It felt like camping, but...
wrong
.

I rolled over,
careful not to knee the supplies stacked around me, hoping then I might drop off. No go. So I listened to the clunk of metal-to-metal whenever a cowboy would pour himself another cup of "javy," and I counted the number of times the word "her" or "she" or "gal" crept into their low snippets of conversation.

Maybe an hour of frustrated exhaustion later, a particular noise caught my attention:  footsteps. The jingling footsteps of someone wearing spurs, nearing the wagon. Danger?

"Boss," greeted one, and then another cowboy who'd remained awake for as long as I had. No, not danger. I could easily picture Garrison nodding his silent acknowledgements. A
whump
noise quickly connected in my mind to the sound of a saddle being put down. A minute or so of soft shuffling... what? Even in the sudden absence of conversation, I couldn't make anything out. Then something momentarily blocked out the orange light from the fire. A moment or so later, I smelled tobacco smoke.

Bad for you
,
I thought, still straining.

I listened through another minute or two of nighttime silence. Then, "Bout time for you two boys to go to work, let them others get some sleep.
" The drawled suggestion was every bit a command. I heard the two in question tossing down empty coffee cups and retrieving their own saddles to obey the order. "Night, Boss," they said, in vaguely familiar voices.

Garrison must
've merely nodded again; no audible response.

The others
' conversation didn't take up wherever it had left off. I could still smell tobacco smoke, and knew I shouldn't have to breathe it, but I breathed it anyway, like incense. It affected me like a tranquilizer, mainly because of what it meant.

It meant things were quiet enough for Jacob Garrison to take a break. He might be a hick, maybe a Bible thumper, a smoker, even a male chauvinist pig. But from everything I
'd seen, he was also competent.

God, I wanted that. Competence, I mean. Unable to picture more tangible goals, I focused on that
one. Capability. The peace it implied.

Fat freakin
' chance.

But at least I could stay as close to it as possible.

Through the canvas, I mimicked the hands who'd just left. "'Night, Boss."

A long pause followed. He
drawled, "Ain't yer boss," his voice only inches from me. Then, just as I decided he would
never
give me an inch, he added an awkward, "Good night."

More silence followed, I don
't know how much.

Tired of feeling so confused, I fell asleep.

But I didn't like where that took me.

Chapter 7 – Heifer Branded

"We can't afford any publicity," explains the executive coldly.

The woman eyes the two men behind her, blocking her escape from the conference room. She fights her rising fear with logic. Why would she need to escape a conference room? They likely don
't intend the threat she senses. Or if they do, they're testing whether she can play hardball with the big boys. These are her colleagues, her superiors. Surely they mean her no harm.

No, I thought, turning my face into rough material. Push past them. Run!

As if at my will, the images blurred—but stronger than me, they returned.

Her hesitant search for explanations proves her undoing. She cries out at a sharp bite on her arm, and spins to witness her betrayal in a third
well-dressed man who holds a now-empty syringe. She knows she has lost all chance of escape now. Even as she stares in confused disbelief, her vision tunnels and an unnatural chill snakes through her veins, through her mind. If only she hadn't made trouble...if only she'd refused to answer the summons...if only she'd left the room the minute she saw Everett there....

Clutching her arm, as if to belatedly protect it, she attempts a step toward the door. The drug has worked quickly; her foot barely moves. Her shoe turns beneath her. As if from a distance, she sees her twisted ankle, but cannot feel it.

I reached out to catch the woman, to help her escape, but something held my arms to my sides. I couldn't move either?

No! Not again....

The woman's corporate world—the dark paneling, the long conference table, the track lights, the leather chairs—blurs not into unconsciousness but into unreality, into total helplessness. Inside she screams but her body, crumpled onto thick carpet, cannot form words of protest. Inside, she flees, but her body won't move. She can only watch the ring of disinterested faces moving in on her and wonder how, why, she ever doomed herself through hesitation.

Why couldn
't I move? I fought my constraints; they only tightened around my arms. "
No
!" It couldn't happen again. It must
never
happen again! I threw everything I had into my blind struggle now, twisting and straining my arms, kicking my feet, thrashing. I hit my head on something hard. Everything hovered in a moment of startling weightlessness. "
No
!"

With a thud, I
rolled into rough wood and kicked something that clattered, frightening me into another shriek. My eyes flew open, and the tangled blanket that had bound my arms loosened at last.

No glossy, oversized table. No leather chairs. No dark-paneling on the walls. Just me and the
crowded chuck wagon. In the pre-dawn gray I could make out the chaos of supplies looming around me; bullets from a box of ammunition scattered everywhere; my feedbag mattress; the spare tire—no, spare
wheel
—against the side. I knew this place.

I
'd woken here the last two mornings.

The canvas flap
on the side of the wagon was pulled up. Gasping breath, still panicked from the threat that somehow pursued me out of the dream and into the here and now, I spun against new danger. For a long moment I stared at Jacob Garrison while he stared back at me, his steady gaze establishing my safety.

I must
've yelled particularly loud, this morning. Yesterday and the day before, I'd awoken with my garbled protests fading from my ears beneath the sound of him forbidding anyone to check on me. Benj Cooper's voice had surprisingly seconded him, citing the dangers of waking "troubled sleepers."

Today, I
'd scared them into checking.

It occurred to me that I
'd stripped off my shirt before going to bed; self-conscious, I wished I had a bra on under my long-johns. Not that I had anything Garrison, who'd found me naked, hadn't seen before... or was likely interested in. I sat up amidst the clutter of blanket and supplies to show myself unharmed, and noticed he also wore long-johns. At least, the soft cloth across his shoulders was the faded red of a union-suit, the top button popped off, a hint of brown chest hair peeking from the resulting V of the neckline. The underwear caressed and delineated the muscles of his upper body.

Unfair. He was too much
of a bossy prude to have such a fine body."I'm..." I started to say, and had to clear my throat to achieve voice. "I had a nightmare."

His bearded jaw set, as if he was angry at me for the nightmare, but he nodded. Permission for nightmare granted? Or merely confirming that he believed me? In any case, he turned away, dropping the flap between us.

I flopped bonelessly back onto my feed-sack mattress and took a deep breath to steady myself on
several
counts. Just one more day, I told myself. Tomorrow, by midday, we were supposed to reach civilization.

"She
's fine," I heard Garrison assure the other hands—a completely different use of the word
fine
than I'd had for his union suit. The first morning, I worried that I might have woken them with my sleep-talking. But by now I knew I'd have to go delirious a helluva lot earlier in the morning to do that.

"What happened to her, Boss?" asked one concerned voice—a young one, like Clayton or Tomas, depending on whether the two teenagers had switched out horse duties for the morning yet. You
'd think they'd have realized that if they could hear me, I could hear them. "When you found her, was she...?"

Silence followed. Garrison had probably issued one of his executive glares.

"Now I don't see as that's any of you boys' business," drawled Benj's voice, to ease the extended silence. "Whatever happened to that poor gal, she's movin' away from it and don't need none of you ladies turnin' her thoughts backwards."

He sounded awfully awake, and I could distinctly smell coffee and bacon. I glanced at the meager light on the canvas. It wasn
't "overcast day" gray, oh no. It was "not enough light yet for a sunrise" gray.

I
'd practically overslept—well past Garrison's usual call to camp of, "If you can't get up, there are men in the next town who can." What would the Boss think?

But as I hurried to get myself "decent" in the cramped quarters I
'd been given, I
knew
what the Boss would think. He'd think I was lazy. Useless. A troublesome charity case. I hadn't helped counter that opinion by screwing up almost every time I'd tried to be helpful, these last two days.

When the hands hinted about needing some mending done, I gave it a shot. I now had numerous needle holes poked in my fingers and thumb, and I
'd dropped Schmidty's thimble and had to crawl around in the tall, toasting grass, fearful of snakes, until I found it. My stitches turned out so uneven and staggered that they could've been done by a blind drunkard with a nervous tic. Benj had said, "They was done by a feminine hand, darlin', and that's what matters most to these boys."

But when I looked at Garrison for the truth, he just shook his head in wonder. I was such a bad seamstress, I inspired
wonder
in the man. One more thing to scratch off the list of what I might've been in my recent life.

When the Boss decided the men would work through lunch yesterday and, I presume, today, to lessen the chances of the
thirsty cattle trying to turn back, I volunteered to carry sandwiches to and from the cowboys. It gave me a chance to ride Valley Boy again, albeit bareback, and to see the longhorns more closely—which means, still not close enough to have thrown something at them, but close enough to make out some individual cows as their  cowboy keepers rode out to meet me at a safe distance. I started with the men who rode point—meaning at the very front, where they could point the herd—and had worked my way down one side, past the flank riders and the swing riders and all the way down what could've easily been a half mile of cows until I reached the drag riders, who worked in back. Their job, complicated by the dust kicked up by two-thousand cows, was to harass the special-needs cows, like the elderly and the very young, into keeping up with the rest of the herd. It was there that a stony Garrison pulled me off donut dolly duty. As the dust cleared, I saw that while the drag riders had been talking to me, we'd left about seven cows, confused by their sudden freedom, loitering behind us on the trail.

"Trouble,"
the Boss said.

I decided he was a lot more comforting when he kept his distance, like he
'd been trying to do.

Then yesterday, when Schmidty complained once too often about the effort of cooking for this many men, I convinced him to show me how to make biscuits. On my first try, for the luncheon sandwiches, I burned them. But if you fall off a horse, you
're supposed to get back on, right? Determined to make a better showing, I tried again—and used all the sourdough starter, which is a lump of wet dough, really going sour, which he kept in a jar. Sourdough starter makes the bread rise. Turns out you only take part of it, and add flour to the rest each time, so that it will continue its yeasty fermentation. It would take more than a week before new starter could be ready to use. To hear Schmidty tell it—and oh he told it, straight to the Boss—he'd been working off that same batch of starter for years, and an Old West tradition had been brought to an untimely end through my incompetence.