Winter's Grasp Chapter 12
Beta's Saddletramp and Nakoosay
Jess's POV
My time of remembering the past was cut off before it had a chance to begin. A horse whinnying outside caught my attention and brought my dread of what would come through the door to a popping, blaring fire inside of my chest. It must have shown on my face because Josh smirked. Then getting up from the chair he walked, what seemed to me to be, so slowly to the door.
I lifted my head, but the windows were too high up for me to see anything. As the horse got nearer, the sound of wagon wheels split through the air as it came rolling up, squeaking and grunting with age, stopping at the front porch. I lay my head back down and started to struggle with the rope that tied my hands and kept me from defending myself.
Normally my body and muscles could stand up against pretty much anything but this time they failed me. I couldn't get them to work, not even to try and get myself into a sitting position although it would have been pretty much impossible to do since I was hog tied. But knowing that even if I was able to get free that my muscles wouldn't support me, messed with my confidence that I was going to get free somehow.
Josh and his men had worked me over well. I hadn't eaten for half a day when I rolled up to the house in the stagecoach and I hadn't had any water for the same amount of time. I didn't know how long I had been unconscious after the beating, but I knew that I was as thirsty as a horse in a dusty, gritty desert.
My wandering thoughts were thrown out the window as Josh opened the door and the backside of one of his men came walking backwards through the door. My heart stopped when I saw two men carrying something long in a blanket that was swinging low as they carried it. A hand fell away out from the blanket and in an ice-cold minute the fact hit me, it was a person. A thought struck me. What if it was Slim? I shook the thought from my mind. It isn't him I told myself I would have recognized his hand. Still the fear that it might be clung to me like a wet blanket, suffocating my hope that it wasn't Slim.
I wouldn't be able to bear it if Slim had been beaten the way I had been. I've been beaten before so I know that I can take just about everything. But Slim; Slim is just as good-no even better than I am. But I don't know if he would ever be able to shake the kind of beating, I had been given. I held my breath and got it jolted out of my body as the two men dropped the blanketed person onto the floor only 2 feet away from where I lay.
The blanket slowly fell from the person and revealed the persons face to me. So many things flashed through my mind as the blanket took it's time falling. But my mind cleared itself as fast as a street does when a gunfight starts except for thoughts of what if.
What if was Slim beaten and bloodied like me? or dead? Shaking those thought free once more I focused. If Slim had been hurt like me when we would get out of this mess together and I would help Slim get through it. The blanket finally fell off all the way and with a voice that sounded so strangled with worry and relief that I didn't recognize it as my own I whispered.
"Slim!"
TBC
