Garrison looked away in disgust and all but thrust the little remuda's lead rope at Murphy, who took it while he remounted. Did gravity work differently for cowboys than for me?
"Where is Beauregard, Boss?" the younger man asked, sneaking another peek at me.
"Let him go," said Garrison.
"Where'd you—" But Garrison was scowling again, or still, so Murphy nodded nervously and simply escaped, horses in tow. I felt suddenly sad to see our four-legged friends disappear toward the bigger remuda. One less piece of familiarity.
Unaffected, Garrison thrust the sack he held at Cooper—no, to Benj; this was a first-name kind of guy—who caught it one-handed. When the Boss headed toward the distant wagon at the front of the herd, both our horses followed. I think Benj had some say in his case, though.
"Now I know you're just chompin' at the bit to tell me the whole story," Benj teased at Garrison's back, sharing the joke with a grin toward me as he balanced the sack on his knee. "Might as well stop holdin' back and let it spill out—thataways I can answer the boys' questions for you and let you save your breath for more weighty matters."
Garrison said nothing.
"Where in tarnation did you pick yerself up a girl? Or..." He glanced again toward me, clearly tickled by his train of thought. "Or did you up and elope?" Urging his mount forward, he reached across the space between their horses and slapped Garrison on the shoulder. Amazingly he didn't pull back a bloody stump. "I jest knew if you didn't cut loose sometime, you'd go and do somethin' loco."
Garrison glared at him.
"All right then," Benj supplied. "I reckon I'll have to guess. She was at the Harris residence."
Garrison shook his head.
"You and Beau did get to the Harris residence."
Garrison nodded, and Benj's expression sobered. "How'd they take the news?"
Garrison shrugged. "They took it."
Curiosity got the better of me, and I asked, "What news?" Both men looked back at me as if I'd appeared—*poof*—out of mid-air.
Surprisingly, it was Garrison who answered. "Boy died."
"Their boy?"
He nodded.
"And you rode over to tell them."
"And bring the boy home," clarified Benjamin. Did he mean—bring the body home? On horseback?!
"I thought you'd just gone to buy horses."
Garrison gave me a look, as if I should know better, which of course I didn't.
"It'd take more than a few mounts to pry this man away from his herd, darlin'. Especially on a dry run between the Cimarron and the Arkansas," Benj explained—sort of—before turning back to his friend. "Although his tale is missin' a few of its finer points. We expected you yesterday. Why did you fire Beauregard? And where did you get the horses and the gal?"
"Beauregard misbehaved," Garrison explained with finality. I felt suddenly lucky to have gotten this far with him. "Harris family was low on cash, wouldn't take their boy's full pay for a half job, so I bought horses."
I found myself studying his harsh, whiskered profile a little closer. That sounded almost... sweet. He noticed me staring and looked away.
"And this purdy little travellin' companion?" Lord, but this Benj guy had the makings of a con artist. He almost made me forget Murphy had mistaken me for a boy.
"Found her," Garrison admitted.
"In a creek bed," I contributed. "I don't know how I got there. I don't even know my own name."
"Slowed me some," Garrison defended. "Couldn't leave her there."
"No, I don't reckon you could—though I imagine you'd regret it. Poor little bit of a gal."
Little bit. Something about those words struck me as familiar, and the sympathy eased over me like cool water. "I need to get in touch with some kind of authorities, so that they can help me find my home."
Benj whistled in appreciation. "Well if that ain't a caution. So Jacob here got himself saddled with a sweet little thing he don't even appreciate, and our outfit is commencin' to get a whole lot more interestin'."
Garrison glared at him again. Apparently he didn't like the idea of an interesting outfit at all. "Jest to Dodge."
"The Bibulous Babylon? Not particularly fittin' for a young lady," Benj pointed out. That made two votes, his and Peaves', against the place.
"Better'n a creek bed," noted Garrison, and looked back at me again as if he wanted to say something. We'd halved the distance to the horse-drawn wagon, which moved ahead of all those cows. By arriving at the herd, I realized, an uncertain intimacy between us was ending. Not that he would treasure fond memories of our quiet conversations and happier times. He was probably just relieved. So why was he looking...?
He let his horse fall back and reached toward me, as if to touch my face. I waited, curious, almost hoping he wasn't relieved by the loss of our time alone. My breath pulled short, expectant... and then he lifted my hat, Eb Peaves' hat, from my head. When my hair fell free to my shoulders, he put the hat back.
I caught his meaning: Just to avoid any more mistakes like Murphy's.
"Explain her," he told Benj firmly. "Won't tolerate trouble."
"You won't even know I'm here," I promised.
He snorted, wheeled his horse away and rode toward the herd proper. His herd. I watched how several cowboys rode forward to meet him, and I felt even more displaced.
"Now don't you worry your purdy head," soothed his twinkle-eyed friend, clucking our horses back into motion. "We'll settle you in like you was meant to be here."
I smiled distracted thanks. Then I made myself stop being distracted. Tired or not, I didn't want to settle in. I had things to do! "Can you help me contact someone?"
He arched a brow. "Depends on whom you've a mind to contact."
Whom? What a varied vocabulary Benj Cooper had.
"Authorities," I reminded him. "Someone who can find out where I'm from."
He chewed on the side of his mouth for a moment of deep thought. "I reckon Fort Dodge would be as good a start as any. Assumin' you consider our nation's government an authority, anyhow." He laughed, with a touch of bitterness, at his own joke.
Uh oh. "The Babylon place?"
"No darlin', that's Dodge City. You'll find a touch more authority at the fort."
Okay, so we had a game plan. "How far is this fort?"
"Less'n a hundred miles."
I let out my worried breath. "That's not so bad," I said, and he gave me the funniest look. "So we should be there pretty soon?"
He recovered quickly, anyway. "Four or five days, God willin' and the creek don't rise."
Now I stared. Was this real? "I could probably walk a hundred miles faster than that!"
"True." A very easy-going fellow, he. "But you wouldn't have much meat left on you when you got there."
Oh. The cows. On to plan B. "Well this is a big operation, right?"
"Almost two-thousand mixed head and thirteen men left to trail them. Jacob thought we'd over-hired, but with losin' Beauregard, and the Harris boy gettin' throwed...."
"The Harris boy who died was thrown? Off a horse?"
"Pony stepped in a gopher hole."
I got better hold of my saddle horn. "And he died?"
Benj's smile wasn't quite as bright, this time. "You just keep goin' smooth and easy, darlin', and you won't have nothin' to worry about from them vicious gophers. You were askin' about the size of the outfit?"
Oh yeah. I watched the straight-backed form of Garrison getting smaller as he approached his dusty river of cattle. Cowboys, all conversation clearly over, scattered away from him again. "A herd this size must be valuable. So you must at least have a tel—"
Damn! The word had started to come, started to slide easily off my tongue like it was meant for me, but it stuck. Like it couldn't exist here. Like something about that fact scared me, on a deep, unreachable level. I closed my eyes in the effort of spitting it into being. "Tele—"
Nothing.
"Telegraph?" Benj grinned. "Now I admit th
is is becomin' a beaten path, darlin', but nobody's strung wire jest yet. Can't say as I'm not relieved for it."
But I shook my head, my ears ringing with the frustration of it. "No, that's not it, that doesn't sound right. I almost had it! Tele... Teleph...."
His eyes sharpened to a more intense interest as he cued, "A telephone?"
"Yes!" Yes yes yes! The sun shone, the birds sang and I, Mystery Woman of the West, had managed a word—a word that felt significant, too. I'd remembered something, and I could have kissed him with the joy of it! "Thank you. A telephone!"
He took a deep breath, released it slowly through his teeth. "Well, leastwise we've got us a better idea of where you might hail from, Darlin'," he said gently. "Back East a solid ways, for sure."
"You don't have a telephone?" It didn't make sense! Some things in this world where I'd found myself had actually begun to, after all. Under Garrison's tutelage the horses had started to make sense, and the hats to keep off the sun made sense, and even the hard-working Peaveses with their dirt cabin had made a little sense, from Garrison's perspective anyway, though not enough to marry. But my own memories remained as muddled as when I'd emerged into slow consciousness a day before.
"How can you not have a telephone?" Even as I asked that, another part of my mind whispered, Why should they? Don't be stupid. What do you know?
Benj indicated the canopy of blue sky encompassing us. "Nobody's done strung wire jest yet," he repeated, patient.
The idea that there should be wireless telephones blurred, then vanished, dismissed against his more credible certainty. "Oh," I whispered, all the more bewildered. So much for Plan B.
I noticed, from the direction of the herd, Garrison watching Benj and me. I couldn't see his face, he was so far from us, but I recognized the horse he rode bareback and, from the direction of both it and his cowboy hat, I could tell he was staring. I imagined he was so much in control, he could tell what we were saying. The conversation wouldn't surprise him. He knew I was touched in the head.
When I stared back, jealous of all his easy certainties, he turned away.
"Four days and we can put the Army on your trail, darlin'," promised Benj. "Now those fellows ought to have a telegraph. Purdy thing like you goes missing, they're sure to have heard of it."
The word purdy sounded less threatening from him than from the Peaveses. But gratifying though his predictions were, I realized I'd be more convinced if Cowboy Garrison had made them.
Something else that didn't make sense.
How depressing.
Chapter 5 - Benj
To go from hours of wide-open spaces with an almost silent companion to the activity of numerous horses, cowboys, wagons, and more cows than I'd ever imagined was bewildering to say the least, even from the outskirts of all that activity. That had to be why I kept glancing toward the herd, seeing if I could spot a familiar gray horse, a rider with a familiar black hat. There had to be some explanation for my distraction, because Benj Cooper was a lot more companionable than Jacob Garrison had been.
Useful, too. With his help, I finally began to learn who I was—or at least, who I might have been.
Riding comfortably beside me, rather than ahead of me, Benj had no qualms about looking me over closely and drawing me out. He declared me past my teens but no older than my early twenties, "and well-preserved if so." My hands, he noted, proved me unused to physical labor, so much so that Boy's reins had rubbed a blister onto my left hand. Benj tsk-ed at that and gave me his leather gloves, soft and worn and way too large for me, to help protect it. My assumption of telephones, he explained, indicated that I might be recently from a city in the northeast, likely Boston or New York, though my indeterminate accent held a mysterious touch of the foreign, rather than "pure Yankee." Not British. Not Scottish. Just… unusual.
He asked me to "figure some ciphers"—addition, subtraction—which I did. He asked me to spell some words, which I did. He said hello to me in French and, startled to hear the language out of a cowpoke's mouth, I still said hello back. But my foreign conversational skills faltered after that. I didn't catch his Latin at all, other than recognizing it as Latin.
"Just as I suspected," Benj concluded, knuckling his hat further back on his head. "You've had yerself some education."
"So have you," I countered, intrigued.
He leaned easily off his horse toward me, so that it seemed our shoulders almost brushed, and glanced both ways with mock furtiveness. "Let's jest keep that between us two."
My grin seemed to gratify him. He sat back as if to better see me and shook his head. "Seems we could find somethin' better to call you than 'that purdy l'il thing what the Boss brought in.' Anything in particular you'd fancy bein' called, leastwise 'til we find your proper title?"
I said, "Not Martha."
"Fair enough," Benj agreed, not missing a beat. "And we'll avoid Gertrude and Hortense for good measure; how's that?"
"And… Winifred." But my eyes searched out the distant herd yet again. They were a patchwork of different colors, with horns—a sea of long, curvy horns that made me glad I still hadn't seen them up close. The cowboys rode dangerously close to them though, paralleling the slow parade, sometimes urging an escapee cow back to its friends. I didn't recognize any of their horses.
"And Sophronia," teased Benj, recapturing my attention. "I never could warm up to a Sophronia."
I made myself stop watching the cattle drive for familiarity, once and for all. Why bother? I clearly didn't know cows, and I had better company right here, right? "And Snooki."
That surprised him. From his expression I could see he'd never heard the name. I closed my eyes and hung onto my saddle horn as everything became so unreal I felt dizzy, as if—were I not careful—I could disintegrate into nothingness at any moment. Disintegrating seemed a bad idea. Benj's hand on my elbow brought me back to what was reality, though—cows, horses, a wagon, a dead boy's set of clothes, and real, live men. Cowmen.
Something was so wrong.
"I'm sorry," I whispered. "You're really helping, but I wish I could remember more myself! It's been like this since he found me—I say things that don't make sense, and then I feel so stupid...."
"Jacob Garrison tends to have that effect on folks," he assured me dryly, releasing my arm for a friendly pat on my shoulder. "Little bit of sunshine like you—I'm surprised that ol' judge didn't scare you clear into Colorado."
There it was again—the whisper of familiarity. "Little bit...."
He waited, and I shook my head. "It's silly, but that almost sounds like a name."
"Ain't so strange at that." He considered. "Littlebit. How's Lillabit sound?"
It sounded... nice. Oh, it still wasn't my name—not quite —but it was more identity than I'd had in two days. I was Lillabit, an educated young woman from the east!
Well, I could be. I beamed my thanks.
"Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Lillabit," said Benj with a return grin, bowing toward me from his horse. "Now, Miss Lillabit, jest how long has it been since you had yourself some vittles?"
Very useful company, this man.
So we caught up to the chuck wagon, which looked like a covered wagon minus the cover. I mean, it had hoops for a cover arching over it, like empty ribs, maybe so that they could put the top up in bad weather? But it currently sat open to the elements, riding higher on its wood and metal wheels than seemed natural and piled higher yet with what looked like sleeping bags—bedrolls, I reminded myself. On the outside of its wooden bed hung barrels and boxes and pots, rattling and clattering, and the back end was built up with what looked like a chest of drawers. Four lanky, long-eared horses with funny-looking noses pulled it, and a dour man with pale hair drove it.
Benj introduced that one as Schmidty, the burly old cook, and raised the sack he'd been nursing as we rode. "Jacob done brought you some treats."
Schmidty just eyed me with suspicion.
Benj balanced the bag on his saddle in fr
ont of him, untied the strings, and opened it. "Hoo-whee!" he exclaimed happily. "Lookee here! Carrots, and squash, and what looks to be a passel of green beans. Onions...there's plenty onions. The Boss done brought a whole garden with him!"
"He traded a horse for vegetables?" I thought better of mentioning the clothes, but even with clothes thrown into the deal, it didn't sound like the smartest business decision.
"Yep." Benj lifted out a couple of carrots by their feathery green stalks and handed me one. I rubbed it clean on my pants leg and bit into it—mmm! Okay, so personally, a carrot was worth a lot at this moment. But a horse?
"Good," said Schmidty, like a German would: Goot. The German accent mixed oddly with his drawl. "Now put away."
Returning from that particular task, Benj brought a can, which he opened with a jackknife. I'd finished my carrot, but my mouth began to water when I caught the tangy smell emanating from the can. I swallowed. Several times. Then he handed me the can, and I looked at the pulpy red interior and paused. "What is it?"
"Tomatoes," Benj announced. "Eat 'em up afore any of the boys sees 'em and gets greedy—ain't Sunday."
I must've still been smarting from Garrison's earlier attack on my manners. I managed to form the words, "I should share," as if I weren't drooling.
"Th'others nooned almost two hours afore now," Benj countered, which was enough for me. Despite my sense of lingering unbalance astride Valley Boy, I used my leather-clad reins hand to hold the can. Careful not to cut my fingers, I delicately pulled out a soggy hunk of tomato pulp, then popped it into my mouth. I couldn't imagine having eaten one like this before, but I don't know why not. It was juicy and delicious. I chewed happily, then swallowed, then sighed.
It seemed I should be more closely watching where my horse was going, though. "So it's about two p.m. now?"
Benj glanced at the sun. "Nigh on." He seemed content just to watch me eat, so I obliged him, apparently with such enthusiasm that he said, "You're plumb near starved! Should've guessed Jacob wouldn't know how to treat his women any better than he'd know how to dance the can-can."
OverTime 1 - Searching (Time Travel) Page 6
