The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 1): First Time by Samuel Ben White Read Free Book Online Page A

followed the stream for some time before coming to his first sign of human habitation: a dirt road. It was really just two ruts cut into the grass that wound through the forest and crossed the stream at an easy ford. In a place or two, Garison could see where stumps had been cut down or pulled up to make travel on the road easier, but it was not, he knew somehow, an industrialized road. In fact, it looked to him as if the tracks he could see in the dirt had been made fairly recently, and by narrow wheels of either wood or iron. A close inspection of a few yards proved to Garison that no rubber tires with tread had been on the road in some time—if ever. Of course, he could only judge accurately what had passed along the road since the last rain.
    Still quoting Lewis Carol, Garison decided his best bet to find a phone or radio was to follow the road, but he wasn't sure in which direction to look first. The road ran, roughly, east to west and the stream he had been following ran northwest to southeast (which had seemed to him to bare out his original assumption of being on the east coast though it was by no means definitive). Still guessing that any settlements would be built near water, Garison decided to go right, or east, on the road. He continued to keep unobtrusively to the trees, but he was beginning to wonder why as he still had seen no signs of people.
    The road started up an incline and, at the top of the ridge, Garison thought from the looks of things that he was going to be forced to break from cover before he could get back into a forest. He eased up to the crest of the ridge and looked over into a wide valley that wasn't going to provide him much cover at all. But his heart lifted when he saw the wisps of smoke coming from a small town—really no more than a village.
    He lay down on the ridge—wishing again for binoculars—and reconnoitered for a while. He could see people moving about, and from the distance they didn't appear to be either Asian or Hispanic, but he couldn't be sure. The architecture was not of a sort he was used to, but neither did it appear to be the kind he associated with the formerly Spanish lands on the west coast.
    Garison looked around and could see no way to approach the village without being seen without going miles out of his way. Besides the obvious drawback to such a circuitous route, there was the problem of explaining, even if caught by "friendlies", why he was trying to sneak into or around town. If the people were not enemies, then his best bet was to approach the town in as non-threatening a way as possible. It occurred to him that that might also be the best way to approach enemies. "When in doubt," a somewhat larcenous old philosophy professor of his used to say, "Be honest."
    He thought his best bet would be to flip a coin but, as he had none with him, he finally just decided to stand up. He would walk right down the path and into the town and, if it proved to be hostile, try his best to get word to the Soviet consulate before being executed or thrown in a pit. He told himself he would keep his eyes open and, at the first sign of trouble, make a break for the nearest forest—which was off to his right. While not a fool-proof plan by any means, Garison was confident of his forest abilities and knew he could at least buy time. With time, he knew, there was always an opportunity to plan.
    With his hands casually at his side, he began to walk towards the town, making a conscious effort to try and look relaxed, which of course made him look nervous. It was tempting to put his hands in his coat pocket, which would look casual, but he wanted them free in case he were to suddenly need them, for fighting or vaulting over a fence. As he walked, he tried with each step to focus on more details in the town, hoping that—if it were a hostile situation he was walking into—he would spot something that would alert him. He was also marking in his mind every possible escape route.
    What he