Never had a stampede had better timing.
Garrison stood in his stirrups and leaned forward over his mustang. The mare's mane whipped at his hand as it flew through the dark over unseen ground toward mortal danger. Most of him focused on calculating his distance from his men--closing--and his distance from the cattle--closing faster. But part of him caught his momentary relief.
It disgusted him. Better timing?
That brief, terrible thought proved his partner and his wife right, and proved Jacob Garrison to be a lily-livered coward.
Advance from the front right. Form a line, like cavalry....
The wife wanted more time with him. She'd kissed him, the kind of kissing he'd not believed existed, before her. If he preferred a stampede to conversing with his own little wife, he had himself a problem.
It was no life-and-death, facing-down-thousands-of-rampaging steers problem. But once the dust settled, he must face--
Had she just said she loved him?!
Deal with that later. Could they drive a wedge against the right flank without putting themselves directly in the path of the stampede?
He veered alongside Cooper, who was yipping rebel yells over the four-beat staccato of horse hooves and the thunder of the approaching onslaught. Cooper rode so smoothly, he all but floated atop his charging black pony.
He caught sight of Garrison and grinned, calling, "Fortune favors the bold!" Likely he was quoting something.
"Let's rush 'em!" Garrison shouted. "Turn 'em left!"
"Don't ask much, do you?" But Cooper's grin just widened, white in the darkness. He lived for nights like this--and he was smart enough to see Garrison's reasoning. Always before, half their challenge was catching up to their own running animals, who generally had a head start. This time, they had the advantage of being well in front and, just maybe, charging the run head on.
Too bad Garrison had never seen it done. Easier to figure the odds, if he had.
"Pass the word." Spurring his mare forward, hoping the animal could see the rushing ground better than he could, Garrison veered over to Shorty and Ropes. "Form a line, push 'em left!"
They set wide eyes on him, shaken by either the command or the stampede itself. Running cattle liked to turn right--if at all. Likely, the animals' own crew was trying to take them that way. But the wife, the chuck wagon, the cart, and the Trail G herd all sat unseen to the stampeding steers' right.
I'll be fine, she'd promised. I love you. Go!
"You deaf?" he bellowed.
Shorty shook his head. Ropes shouted, "Turn 'em left. Yessir!"
And so on. Quickly, they closed the distance between themselves and the oncoming herd, more of a roiling dust storm with horns than distinct, individual cattle. The Trail-G outfit formed a ragged line, at full gallop and--whooping and waving their coiled ropes or firing their six-guns in the air--they attacked the stampede from the front right, like a pitched battle in wartime.
A pitched battle against a horned freight train as wide as the Mississippi.
If the cattle veered left, the men could ease into them and keep pushing the turn. But if the cattle held course, someone was going down--
And it wouldn't be the thousands of eleven-hundred-pound steers. If Garrison chose wrong, this could be the deadliest stampede in history.
He considered the chuck wagon. The cart. The Trail G herd.
The wife. Who, for some blamed reason, said she loved him.
Garrison charged.
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OverTime 03: Slipping (First 70 Chapters)
Romance"And they lived happily ever--uh oh." Time traveler Elizabeth, aka "Lillabit," hardly expects miracles from her 19th-century marriage. But abandoning her modern world for love of an 1870s trail boss is hard enough without stampedes. And storms. A...
