Free Giants (A Distant Eden Book 6) by Lloyd Tackitt Page A

purely hates disruption. You might not get fed if you’re late.”
    “I’ll get the paint saddled and go, this one is done for the day.” I pulled the reins around and rode to the barn. Our barn isn’t a normal barn, but then Pa isn’t exactly a normal rancher. Fact is, there’s not much that is normal about him. Pa liked to invent machines, steam-driven machines mostly. Pa has a real thing about steam. The barn is huge, almost an entire acre in size. It’s made of metal, with trusses that span from side to side so that there are no columns inside. It’s an amazing structure, and folks have come from miles around to admire it.
    There are, of course, stalls for the horses, and the usual tack items are allocated space, but the vast bulk is taken up with steam-driven machines. Trip hammers, cutters, rollers, stampers, and much more line up in the dark with shadowy, lumpen shapes that only hint at their purpose. Coals in the furnaces still glowed softly from the day’s heating. I pulled the saddle from the chestnut and then grabbed a dry tow-sack and rubbed her down, drying her coat of the pungent and earthily pleasant-smelling sweat. Giant coming or not, Pa taught me to never mistreat a horse, never put one up wet, always see to their needs before my own. I brushed her out quickly, then put oats in the bin for her, and made sure her water was running clear through the watering trough Pa had rigged up for the horses. Then I put the saddle on the paint. I was in and out of the barn in under five minutes.
    Pa waved to me from the porch and handed me a pair of ham-loaded biscuits wrapped in a dish towel and a cup of warmed-up coffee loaded with cream and sugar that he made me drink on the spot before leaving. I was right proud of him for thinking of me that way, I hadn’t eaten since daylight of what was now the day before, and my stomach thought my throat had been cut. As I rode away I had the strange thought that Pa had just treated me the way I had treated the chestnut mare. I laughed out loud at the thought, knowing the truth of it.
    I rode the paint hard to Mr. Hank’s ranch. The difficulty of riding hard at night is that the horse can injure itself, running in the dark. Had it been daytime, I could have made the trip quicker – going across country in a straight line – but I elected to stay on the wagon road for the horse’s sake. Regardless, I arrived at Mr. Hank’s around two a.m. and woke him up.
    I started shouting his name from as far off as I thought he might hear me, and kept on shouting right up to his front porch, where I saw him waiting in the dark corner shadows, out of the pale moonlight, with a shotgun levelled at me. And that’s why I’d been shouting. I knew he would hear the horse coming, but I wanted him to know who was on the horse. The fact that he still took necessary precautions didn’t bother me in the least. It’s what we do out here.
    I delivered the warning from the back of the paint. Mr. Hanks replied, “I’d invite you in for a bite to eat before you go on back home son, but I’ll saddle up and go warn Mr. Rivera right now, sounds like he might be in the path, too.”
    And so the warning would go on. I thought about it on the ride home and figured that if I were to graph it out on paper, the warning would start as a point – that point being where the giant was actually spotted – then gradually widening out into a cone shape as the distance from the giant increased and accurate prediction of its line of travel decreased. I was purely guessing, but from what Mr. McReary had said about the giant’s location, it would be a good guess that we were in the narrow top of the cone. Still, a near-miss is as good as a mile, so I’d be sure to ask Pa about it.
    I got home before the sun crested, but the sky was considerably lighter off to the east so it would only be a few minutes coming. I rode into the barn and unsaddled the paint, rubbed him down and fed him, then went to the