She awoke lying in the tall grass of the prairie. Despite being wrapped in a quilt tightly from head to toe and in the sun, Sarah still felt chilled.

It was much better than what she had been going through. The night before, she was deathly ill with a fever so high it was believed she would not make it till daylight.

Slowly Sarah pushed apart the blanket and sat up. She looked around but saw nothing save the high waving grasses.

The only sound was that of the unceasing wind that blew day and night, playing tricks on the mind. It was a maddening tumult that made a life among the Conestoga wagons nearly unbearable.

Though unnaturally quiet, Sarah did feel better and was soon on her feet. As Sarah pressed through the grass, she found no sign of the thirty wagons she had been a part of since St. Louis.

She called out to her husband. He did not answer.

Finally, she found deep wagon ruts gouged into the thick sod. She followed it for as far as she could before finally sitting down and crying in utter despair.

How long she sat there and cried and screamed and wailed, Sarah did not know. What she did know was that she knew the sound of a wagon train, with the plodding of the oxen hooves, the crack of the whip, the sound of the wheels creaking and cast iron pans clanking beneath the heavy wooden wagon frames.

Then she saw the first Connie of the westward-bound wagon train. Sarah scrambled to her feet, racing towards it.

The startled oxen tried to move off the trail. They were beaten back onto the path by a man walking on the left side of the team.

“Help me,” Sarah said. “They left me behind.”

The man failed to acknowledge her. He didn’t even look her way.

Sarah ran down the line screaming for help.

The fifth wagon back, where a woman walked beside a man, she wailed, “Please help me.”

“Did you hear that?” she asked her husband, her face a mask of fright. “It sounds like a woman crying.”

“It’s only the wind,” he said.

Wally Barrieau, Sergeant, U.S. Marine Corps, returned from his third tour in Afghanistan a different man. He knew it, and so did everyone else, and that is why he felt it necessary to exit the service.

His sudden personality change happened after he became separated from his squad and ended up wandering around the desert, lost. During this time, April five through July 15, 2006, something so incredible happened to the Sergeant that he could not bring himself to speak of it.

It began with a massive dust-devil in the early morning hours. Once cleared, Barrieau found himself surrounded by wood-framed buildings, the kind he had only seen in old Western movies.

As he was assessing his situation, he heard a woman scream. Before he could react, he watched a man race from the nearby building.

Then he heard a door at the back of the building open and close.

“Where in the hell did you come from?” a voice asked from deep in a shadow of the building.

Barrieau paused, “You American?”

“Yeah?” the voice returned. “What else would I be.”

Barrieau had no time to answer as a man stepped out of the shadow and struck the confused Marine on the side of the head. Barieau dropped to his knees as a second blow fell.

Without thinking, Barrieau drew his service pistol and fired four times point-blank into the man’s body. The gunshots fell him instantly.

Bloodied and bruised, he was arrested while lying in the street outside the building with the man he’d shot on top of him. He was taken to jail to escape a quickly forming lynch mob.

That morning, Barrieau was presented before a judge, and a jury was hastily gathered.

“Why are you dressed so oddly?” the Judge asked.

“I’m a Marine and we’re at war,” Barrieau answered.

“What war is that?” the Judge asked, adding, “Not the Phillipines again?”

“Shut your mouth,” said Patrick McCarran, his defense attorney.

“Where am I?” Barrieau asked.

“Tonopah, Nevada,” McCarran responded. “Now shut up.”

The young man argued that his client had acted in self-defense against an attacker trying to avenge his mistress and not a lawman who was working in the line of duty.

Questions arose after Nye County Sheriff Tom Logan, a family man with eight children, was found dead clad only in a blue nightshirt. Logan had been spending the night with his mistress and brothel madam, May Biggs, not the heroic fight to stop a “pistol duel” between two “gamblers.”

Biggs claimed that Barrieau had been asleep in her parlor when she tried to rouse him and send him on his way.

“He elbowed me, and I yelled for him to ‘get out,’” she added.

“I was never inside any house,” Barrieau shouted before being ordered to remain quiet or be removed from the courtroom.

“At my scream, Tom burst from our bedroom and began beating him,” she said.

Seeing Logan had a gun and not knowing he was the county sheriff, Barrieau fired four shots, each striking Logan. The jury found Walter Barrieau innocent on July 13, 1906, and he became mostly lost to history.

Afghan sheepherders found Barrieau half-dead and informed a nearby Army patrol of his location. Barrieau laid in his hospital bed in Germany, not only suffering from a severe concussion and dehydration but unable to get the hallucination off his mind.

Eleven years later, Walter Barrieau saw the historical article in a newspaper column. And while his name was misspelled and the facts incorrect, he realized why he had disappeared from the pages of history.

“It’s one hell of a story and no one to tell,” he chuckled as he folded the paper up. “Besides who would believe me.”

As he left the casino’s restaurant, he walked to a corner store to buy a bottle of whiskey. Barieau would treat himself to a solid drunk because not only had he experienced a one-hundred-year-old time slip, he had also slipped the noose.

My Cousin Elmo says, “The only reason I speed is to get there before I forget where I’m going. Yeah, the cop didn’t buy it either.”

As I sat down to begin the job of researching news articles and seeing whom I might be able to call or visit to get a quote or statement, my wife came into the room, looked around, and sighed heavily.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“This mess,” she answered. “What am I going to do with it if you die before me?”

“Honestly,” I returned, a bit surprised, “I haven’t a clue.”

“Then we should get rid of it,” she said.

“That is easier said than done,” I protested.

“Why, if you don’t have any plans for all this crap?” she added.

It was my turn to sigh.

“All I want when I die is to be remembered for more than taking up space,” I said. “I don’t want to be famous, and I don’t need butt-loads of money, I jus’ wanna be remembered as someone who wore his heart on his sleeve and worked hard to make that happen by writing, painting, taking pictures and collecting stuff that people tend to no longer value.”

“So, in other words I’m stuck with all this shit until after your dead,” she replied.

“Pretty much,” I smiled. “Unless you kick the bucket first.”

Instead of writing as I would have liked to have been doing, my day has been a myriad of chores. That is how Wednesday’s go as it is the only day I have off from my usual duties — in other words, I do not chase news stories on this day.

No. Wednesdays are filled with stripping the beds, washing and drying the sheets, and then remaking the beds. I also do all of the towels in the house, from both bathrooms to the kitchen.

I also wash all of the white cloths, fold and put them away.

Between washing, drying, folding, making, and hanging, I listen to music or do some reading. This morning I picked up my old copy of Gray’s Anatomy for no particular reason.

The book is a bunch of line drawings of the human body and labels. I used to use it for my emergency medical studies.

As I was looking at an illustration of the foot, I saw the name of the small strap of muscle that controls the outward flexion of the little toe. It is called the “abductor minimi digiti.”

Our hands have the same muscle, which also controls the outward flexion of the little finger. While I was quick to realize I could flex my little fingers outward from the accompanying four, I cannot move my little toes in the same manner.

Because I became obsessed with making my little toes do my bidding, I ended up behind in my chores. And this is why I am so late in writing this evening.

I have concluded that my little toes are not actually attached to my nervous system, and therefore the little band of muscle is as beneficial as a ruptured appendix.

It’s been a long-held belief of mine that the politics between plants and drought are a double-edged sword that cuts both ways. Case in point…

A new Nevada law outlaws about 31 percent of the grass in the Las Vegas area to conserve water.

The ban targets what the Southern Nevada Water Authority calls “non-functional turf.” It applies to grass that virtually no one uses at office parks, in street medians, and at entrances to housing developments, but excludes single-family homes, parks, and golf courses.

The measure requires the replacement of about six square miles of grass in the metro Las Vegas area. By ripping it out, water officials estimate the region can conserve 10 percent of the water supply and save about 11 gallons per person per day in an area with about 2.3 million people.

When the ban takes effect in 2027, it will apply only to Southern Nevada Water Authority jurisdiction, including Las Vegas.

Meanwhile, Tiehm’s buckwheat, which grows only in Nevada’s high desert, should be protected according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The six-inch tall wildflower with yellow blooms is fewer than 30,000 individual plants and hasn’t been found growing anywhere else in the world. It can only be found along Rhyolite Ridge, west of the Town of Tonopah, in the Silver Peak Range.

This is “another man-made problem” problem.

My Cousin Elmo says, “According to Facebook, I have a very anti-social life.”

My Cousin Elmo says, “I’m in Home Depot and some little shit called me an old fart. So, if you are missing your kid, they’re on aisle 17, red dryer.”

It was jus’ before midnight as I left my friend’s home in Virginia City. Once out the front door, there is a set of well-lit stairs to the right of the porch.

The night breeze coming down from Sun Moutain, now known as Mt. Davidson, felt delicious, and so I paused, letting it cool me off. As I stood there, I saw a quick movement from the side of my eye.

Someone had peeked around the corner at the bottom of the stairs. I was sure they were planning to scare the crap out of me.

“Hello?” I called. “I saw you.”

No answer.

So I raced down the stairs to see if I could catch them. As I did this, I turned my camera on and let the flash engage.

My plan was to ‘blind’ them temporarily. It did not work out that way.

When the flash lit the area beyond the corner, I realized I was not dealing with anything ordinary. Whatever it was, it left my butt puckered as I stumbled up the stairs and ran to my truck.

A tall, beautifully-built blonde with green eyes met him at her apartment door as he was preparing to knock. Vicky had a way of doing that to Tim.

Raised in what some would call a “commune,” but what followers believed was a “community, Vicky intrigued him, and he hoped that he did more for her than that. She was like two different people, one fun-loving and adventurous, the other academic, serious, and he was still learning to distinguish between the two.

She was fun-loving and adventurous today.

“I have a surprise for you,” she said as she pulled the door closed behind her.

Tim followed her out to her Mini Cooper, “But we can’t take my car, so we’ll have to take your truck.”

“No prob,” Tim said.

Forty-five minutes later and several miles of rugged dirt road behind them, they came to a rise that overlooked a ghost town hidden in the folds of the Nevada desert. Vicky smiled as she watched the look of amazement on Tim’s face.

“Wow,” he said.

“I knew you’d love it,” she said.

They slowly drove down the steep embankment and into the wide center strip of land that had served as the main street at one point. The buildings, though old and abandoned, were in good shape.

Tim reached behind the seat of his truck and pulled out his camera. Vicky could see that he was excited about the photographic possibilities of the place.

“How did you find this?” Tim asked.

“I didn’t,” she answered. “It found me.”

He wanted to ask her to explain, but it wasn’t the first time she had said this, so he knew it was useless. Instead, he allowed his mind to wander to a favorite subject, the Spann Ranch.

The ranch, as it was known, had been a one-time movie set. Forgotten since the hay-day of Western films, save for Charlie Manson and his followers, Spann was hardly used, except for a hang-out.

Not counting location, the abandoned town could be the same.

Without thinking, he said, “And to think I’m here with a woman whose family was considered ‘the Manson family of the East Coast.’”

The smile slipped from Vicky Lester’s face as she replied, “I know, why do you think I brought you out here.”

Tim felt a sudden chill of death’s hand surge over his body as he came to realize his mistake.