OverTime 03: Slipping (First 70 Chapters)

Chapter 64: Lookout (Garrison)

Garrison for sure deserved that.

He knew full well how his pard felt about "Lillabit." He knew that Cooper, up on the lookout rock, could hear anything commencing in camp. And he'd bedded Elizabeth, and let her shout her pleasure, anyways.

Could be that would learn Cooper not to make pillow talk with another man's wife, nor blather about heartbreak.

Now, even as he kept a watch-eye on their surroundings for any danger, Garrison felt surprised at his own coarseness. This seemed to be the night for conduct he could not countenance: leaving his herd, seeing ghosts, and engaging in bad behavior.

Even the pocket mouse steered clear of him, this time.

He'd been surprisingly rough with his wife, though not needlessly so--Garrison doubted he'd ever felt so needful in his life. The welcome of Elizabeth's warmth, of her soft embrace, even her smile, had gone a far piece toward easing that need without explaining it.

The distinct peent! sound of a nighthawk, hunting insects, broke the post-moonset darkness. The breeze carried the chill scent of sage and rabbitbrush. He'd done what he'd done--no sense regretting it now.

Assuming he could regret it at all.

Garrison hated the idea of Elizabeth leaving him, for sure. He'd figured he should weigh in, but he did not have the words. He had no patience with her plans or her lack thereof. He had not wanted to hear her reasons, nor evaluate their sanity, especially on a night forced him to question his own sanity. He did not know how or if to explain that her absence would leave him aching in ways he did not understand, or that he'd grown accustomed to her continued presence in his life. He had felt, gallingly, at a loss.

So instead, he'd just... kissed her.

Then he'd more than kissed her.

He admired the gal's spirit and stamina, both. Could be he'd been mistaken, trying to protect her from the harsher truths about Amos's danger, or Callahan's nearness. Could be that his wife's adventurous spirit could weather such winds better than a few men he knew.

But the threat of losing Elizabeth weren't the only event that had shaken him, earlier that night. He'd glimpsed the impossible: someone vanished over the edge of a cliff and never landed. And he'd heard....

Elizabeth had mimicked the wheezing that the mystery woman had made, mimicked it so spot on that, for a moment, he'd feared for her health.

Worse, the sound had brought back the day Lisle died....

She'd barred both doors. What with the cost of window-glass, he'd used an axe to chop his way into his own home, the baby screaming and the dog barking the whole time.

"Pawpawpaw!" the boy then howled from where he sat on the by the cold fireplace, stretching his arms up to be held. Tossing the axe aside, Garrison had obliged. His son's wet pants angered him. He'd only been gone an afternoon, and he'd left the boy changed and dry. Lisle might well be grieving their latest loss, but was it asking so much that she change the flannels of the child they did have? Likely it was. He expected so little of her, he felt some surprise to see she'd remembered to give the boy his bottle of goat-milk. It lay, still full, by the churn.

"Hush," he'd growled at the soggy boy in his arms. "Old enough to talk, too old to scream."

The baby had tried to swallow his cries and started hiccoughing instead.

The dog whined, and the stench of urine and vomit assailed Garrison's nose as he sought out his wife in her usual lair--the bed.

Seems she'd been sick all over it, and lay sprawled in the midst of the mess. Only as the dog, too, hushed did he hear her breath dragging weakly—too weakly—into and out of her lungs.

As he crossed the room to her, he'd stubbed his toe on a now-empty bottle of laudanum....

Garrison did not like remembering that day, despite that it had, in the end, freed him from the greatest mistake of his life. He did not like facing just how much his ignorance of women and their hysterias could have cost him.

No sense regretting it now.

Now he'd remarried and, more foolish yet, fallen in love with his wife. He'd thought her as different from Lisle as day from night... but could he be sure? He'd been mistaken, near criminally mistaken, before.

Again, Garrison checked behind him, just to make sure. Of course, he remained alone, other than a light snoring from Cooper, in the camp below, and the occasional, mewling murmur of Elizabeth as she dreamed.

He chided himself for lollygagging. He still had to plan how they could possibly keep his wife's "appointment" with Slade Callahan, without him and Cooper backshot and Elizabeth carried away to worse. For that, he would need all his wits.

But when the rising sun thinned the last of the night to nothingness, and Garrison finally got the chance to examine the tracks left by whoever had stood behind him, wheezing, he weren't sure he had any wits left.

Instead, he stared for some time at tracks that could not possibly exist.

Then he kicked dirt over them, so's his pard could not see and complicate matters with crazed theories, and he climbed back down to camp to start the day.