OverTime 03: Slipping (First 70 Chapters)

Chapter 50: Lightning Creek (Garrison)

Eizabeth kissed him on the neck, likely the easiest place for her to reach. Her laziness had come to amuse him, or perhaps his satisfaction merely excused it. He'd never heard of nor imagined anybody so free with her kisses as his affectionate young wife.

"I love you, Jacob Garrison," she murmured, snuggling onto his shoulder. Her want for a reply hung in the air like smoke on a still day.

And I, you.

He could not quite draw a breath to speak those words. Did he love her? Was love any more real than her ghosts or her time travel?

Perhaps he should say it anyhow, if only to please her. But they'd promised not to lie, and he sensed the weightiness of this. He should be certain.

She'd become precious to him, moreso than he had ever expected. But love...?

"Good night, Mrs. Garrison." He tried to communicate with a kiss to her hair what he could not possibly corral into thoughts, much less words.

Best that he prove his dedication by keeping her alive.

As so often happened, danger struck from the direction he was not looking.

On their trek north, through endless grasslands that seemed created just for cattle, the herd had to cross a narrow strip of water that the maps called Lightning Creek. It weren't much of a creek. Its outside banks framed a ten-yard stretch of dry bed, warning of its true strength in flood. But August had reduced it to a mere nuisance. The channel that cut through the center weren't more than four feet deep and maybe six feet wide. Despite its powerful name, Lightning Creek was narrow enough that the younger boys dared each other to try jumping it on horseback, until Garrison put a stop to such foolishness.

Standing thigh-deep midstream, he was able to pick Elizabeth up by her trousered hips and swing her from the south bank to the north in three steps, and her not get the toes of her boots wet.

"I wish I was wearing my skirt," she admitted. Instead, she wore the trousers she'd inherited from Murphy, which she'd altered with questionable success, and his late cowhand's overlarge, pale green shirt. He felt her suspenders drew the loose material too tightly across her bosoms. He wished she were wearing her skirt too. "It would have swung so nicely," she sighed.

If only the rest of the outfit could cross so easily.

What Garrison most disliked about Lightning Creek was its channel's cut banks, especially in the stretch he chose that offered the least concealment to any bounty hunter might be following them. Instead of easing into the water, the earth dropped sharply. The men would have to push the cattle across slowly, to keep them from bunching and to avoid broken legs. And before eight-thousand cloven hooves churned the best stretch of it to mess and mud, they likely should cross the wagons.

He set Milton and Jorge to digging out the worst of the banks, hewing out steep, muddy ramps for the wagon wheels to roll into and out of the channel. They did not have all day to dig out enough bank for the mules as well—they were in the cattle driving business, not the dirt-digging business, and they'd done this dozens of times.

Still, when the chuck wagon took the creek, Garrison pulled half his boys off the herd. After checking for water snakes and quicksand, he made them dismount and wade into the shallow water on either side of the makeshift ford to serve as human buttresses if the big vehicle tipped.

Good thing he did, too. Even with the grade, Schmidt's mule team disliked the sensation of the wagon's front wheels splashing so abruptly into the ditch behind them. The two lead animals doggedly climbed out the far bank, but the two behind them balked, especially when the wagon's rear wheels dropped with a lurch into the creek just as they tried to haul the front wheels out.