Free OverTime 1 - Searching (Time Travel) by Yvonne Jocks

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