OverTime 03: Slipping (First 70 Chapters)

Chapter 02: Leaving Ogallala (Garrison)

As he rode out of Ogallaly, Jacob Garrison felt... unsettled.

He did not appreciate feelings in general. He especially disliked this one.

He could not fault the weather. A faint breeze, west-northwest, eased the usual Nebraska heat in a manner that, barring storms, would benefit man and beast alike. He could not blame the town, despite the excesses of carnival season, because he was leaving it well behind.

But he was bringing along the girl. The wife.

Garrison resented tasks he could not do well. Husbanding was one of them. He liked the girl well enough, perhaps too much. They'd sinned against God and the law in making the baby she carried, but likely the wedding put things right with God. As for the law....

Well, he'd never much approved of the saying that there was no law west of the Brazos and no God west of the Pecos. But legality was a different animal on the frontier.

Not two arm-spans away, the wife leaned forward in her sidesaddle to whisper at her sorrel gelding, treating it like a pet. She thought Garrison had kept the horse for some sentimental reason, but if she had not married him, he would have sold it from pure cussedness. He did not want to disillusion her, and so endured the ill-fit of false praise, instead.

I honestly don't know whether to hug you or hit you.

His wife thought a lot of foolish things and spoke too many of them. She wore her brown hair pulled back, like a schoolgirl's, despite their marriage. When she laughed, she laughed honestly, showing dimples and fine teeth. She'd proven surprisingly amiable to their marriage--and their marriage bed. She confused him. But he did not want to see her foolish pleasure fade any sooner than it must.

So Garrison did not tell her what Shanghai Pierce, the wealthy rancher who had given up his hotel room, had relayed.

"Met a fellow in Chicago," Pierce had said, while the girl visited the necessary. "Asked 'bout you."

"Me." Garrison knew nobody in Chicago.

"In fact," continued Pierce, "he asked about you in connection to your fiancée--I assume he meant Mrs. Garrison? Said she'd left you and the western territories both. He was looking for her."

Garrison had felt an unwelcome, prickly feeling at that. The scent of Comanche in the wind. The shiver of an enemy soldier drawing bead on him. The foreboding made little sense, standing in a hotel. But he hadn't survived thirty-nine years by ignoring such instincts. "Chicago got a name?"

And Pierce had said, "The man called himself Callahan."