Old Soul Syndrome |ONC 2020|

June 26, 1870

I'm beginning to wonder if I'm stuck here in this place. In this time.

I guess it could be worse. I could have been stuck for a week in World War II. Longer. At least it's warm here. At least bodies aren't piled like cordwood along the paths that wind between the patches of pine and outcrops of rocky hills. A soft breeze is always rustling the green leaves of the cottonwoods that grow along the stream west of the house.

The beauty of this place is breathtaking, untouched and wild. The mountains are crisp and blue in the distance, painted orange and red and stunning purple at sunrise and sunset. The sky is impossibly wide.

Every night, Dan says he should be moving on and every morning I find a new reason to ask him to stay.

Every day he does. Every day I realize I've fallen a little bit more in love with him. Or...Abigail has fallen a bit more in love with him. But since I feel like she feels and think like she thinks, does that make me her? Did I swoop into her body and somehow steal away someone else's life?

My head starts to ache and my heart squeezes down into a nasty little knot whenever I start trying to puzzle this out.

It's quiet now, with the sun beginning to make his bed in the mountains. From my vantage point on the porch, I can see Dan in the corral, talking to the buckskin gelding he rode in on. His movements are still a little stiff, but as he lifts a lean hand to scratch behind the gelding's pricked ears, I can see the inherent grace he possesses.

As he walks back toward me, I can see the fluidity that makes him a good gunfighter, if good is really a word that can be applied to such a life.

He's smiling at me now, watching me as I write. Even now I can't keep my eyes from wandering curiously to the gun sitting on his hip. He's never without it, but I can hardly blame him. 

Dan said he never intended to be a gunfighter. He was just blessed—or cursed—with a sharp eye and quick reflexes. He'd killed his first man at nineteen in Cheyenne. After that, people had started to recognize his name as rumor whispered in the prairie grass and the coyotes yipped their warnings to any who cared to listen.

He's been forced into ten shootings since, chased out of towns who had no use for the trouble he might bring, harassed by foolhardy young kids who figure they've got to prove something.

Maybe tonight, he'll tell me about that last shooting.

The one that left him bleeding.