by David Boop
“I’m fine, Daddy,” she said, beaming, back to her bubbly self in a heartbeat. “You found us!”
Denton Kuhn looked at his own pocket watch, a confusing contraption cased in gold and blue glass.
“And right on time,” he said. “Ten eighteen on the stump.”
“You sure about all this, Denton?” the sheriff asked, glancing out the cracked window. He was a big man with graying temples in his slicked-back brown hair and the beginning of a pot belly. “Because I’m gonna look like a colossal fool if you’re wrong.”
“I’m not,” Denton said. He looked a lot like his daughter, tall and slim, with big, blue eyes, a shock of graying blond hair and a faraway look in his eyes. “Not if Duncan and Kerrilynn are right.”
I must have gawked at him like a gaffed fish.
“About what?” I asked.
“About the stagecoach robbery,” the sheriff said, turning to peer at me like some mu-see-um exhibit. “You two said nobody was hurt, right?”
I had no idea what they were talking about, but Trouble grinned suddenly.
“We didn’t see it yet,” she said. “But we will. I’m sure nobody gets hurt. Because I just said so.”
“Well, all right,” Sheriff Parker allowed, still looking wary. “We’ll wait until noon and not a minute more.”
“You won’t have to,” Denton Kuhn said. “Kerrilynn’s good about remembering the time. They’re gonna rob the coach at eleven-fifteen. They’ll be back here at twelve.”
Nervously, we settled down to wait. Nobody said a word. I had a million questions rumbling around in my head like startled cattle, and it looked like the sheriff had the same. We all got a little thirsty. I eyed the jug on the table but didn’t dare try the gang’s moonshine.
It was by the tick of the sheriff’s watch at the stroke of noon that we heard the thud of hoofbeats and the jingle of saddle tack coming back into the narrow valley. Every one of us crouched down below the level of the windows, guns at the ready.
McGreevey’s men rode up to the house and swung off their horses, cackling and laughing. Two of ’em held small wooden chests with the Wells Fargo insignia painted on them. The boxes looked pretty heavy. Sheriff Parker breathed out sharpish, and Denton Kuhn grinned.
“Bring those in here, and we’ll break open the locks!” McGreevey shouted, his teeth bright under his thick black mustache. He pushed back his hat and opened the door.
We let them all get a foot inside before the sheriff stood up and pointed his twin Colts at them.
“You just drop your guns right this second, Richard McGreevey,” the sheriff said. “We finally caught you. I been waiting a long time to get hard evidence against you and your gang. You’re under arrest.”
McGreevey’s usual air of suave superiority deserted him, and he gawked at us like a shocked chicken.
“Boys!” he yelled, going for his gun.
“She told ’em!” Slocum said, pointing at Trouble. “She knew!” McGreevey turned his gun on her. The other men started firing at us. Denton Kuhn pulled his daughter down behind a table.
My hand went for my holster. Automatically, I drew my pistol and pulled the trigger before he could get off a shot. At the same time, I remembered that the gun in my hand was back on the bench outside the saloon. How could it be here, too? I thought I had felt it settle on my hip just a moment before I pulled it. How?
I didn’t have time to puzzle it out then. My slug winged McGreevey’s arm. His shot hit the wall over our heads, and the gun fell from his bleeding fingertips. The sheriff put a bullet in his leg. McGreevey went down. Vince Slocum raised his rifle to blast through the table where Trouble was hiding. Diving for cover behind a chair, I fanned the hammer and put a slug into his trigger hand. He bellowed in pain. The shot went wild.
The rest of the posse came out from around the back of the house, drawing a bead on the others who hadn’t come in yet. The firefight was short. McGreevey’s band was far outnumbered by the posse. The boss and his men held their hands up in the air. I emerged from my hiding place, cocking my pistol. Firing on an unarmed girl got my blood boiling!
“Don’t kill any of ’em, Wrayburn,” the sheriff said, waving me back. “Justice is waiting for these villains.”
* * *
“Been waitin’ for a chance to take this gang down,” Parker told us with some satisfaction, as we rode back into town ahead of the wagon the posse had thoughtfully brought along with them to carry the McGreevey gang. People turned out from the general store, the barber shop and the telegraph office to watch the procession. “There’s a reward waiting for the two of you. About enough to pay for that reshoeing you need, Duncan. And a bunch more.”
“How’d you know about that?” I asked. The sheriff gave me another one of those real strange looks.
“You just told me, about half an hour before we rode out to McGreevey’s cabin,” he said. “Just one thing I can’t figure: How’d you get tied up between then and now?”
“It wasn’t between then and now,” Trouble said, with a knowing look. She rode ahead of me on the saddle on McGreevey’s own horse, with one of my arms around her little waist. “It’s between now and then. You’ll see. It’s all scientific and stuff.”
The sheriff shook his head. If he wasn’t used to the Kuhns by now, he’d never be.
“Well, come on down to my office, and I’ll give you the money, soon as I get these boys locked up. A hundred dollars in gold.”
“Yahoo!” I yelled, overwhelmed with joy. I could have done cartwheels down the main street. “See, Tr—I mean, Kerrilynn. We struck gold, and we didn’t have to sneak on nobody else’s claim to do it. Let’s go claim it.”
“We can’t do it right now,” Trouble said, putting her hand on my arm. She smiled at Parker. “We’ll be back, Sheriff.”
She swung off and headed down toward the saloon.
“Why can’t we go get it now?” I asked, trailing after her like a calf following its mother. “And where did my gun come from? I know I left it on the bench!”
“I put it there,” she said. “I just came in and put it back in your holster.” She preened, putting her hands on her waist and twisted this way and that in a fashion that made my nerves fizz like a gasogene. “You never told me how good I looked from behind in my new corset.”
I shook my head to clear the distraction. “How could you bring me my gun? You were there in the shack with me!”
“I won’t be later,” she said. “I’ll get it then.”
“All this talk of thens and nows is getting me confused, Kerrilynn,” I said. I pulled away and headed for the saloon door. “I need to go get me a drink. It won’t take but a moment.”
“You can’t do that,” Trouble said. She took my hand and hauled me back to her pa’s lab-or-a-tory. I kept forgetting how strong she was. “Your mind has to be clear, so you’re a good witness. We got to go see the robbery and tell Daddy where the hideout is. We got to get to the pass below the Sioux village first so we have time to hide before McGreevey gets there.”
She set the gears and pushed me into the time machine. After getting tied up and shot at, my stomach wasn’t happy to have another go at being squeezed out of my ribs.
“I’m gonna lose my breakfast!” I shouted.
“I’ll make you lunch,” Trouble promised. “Hang on!”
The light was coming at an angle from the east when we squeezed out of the hourglass. I gasped for a moment with my hands on my knees, until Trouble grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the door.
“Hurry up!” she said. “It’s about nine-thirty now. Daddy!”
Just as we were opening the door, Denton Kuhn was reaching for the handle to come in. His eyes widened.
“Have you been touching the time carrier, Kerrilynn? Honey, I told you not to play with that! It’s serious.”
Trouble was undeterred. “Got somethin’ more serious, Daddy,” she said.
She explained about the hideout and where it was, and all abou
t the robbery that was going to come. It was real strange to me, since I saw him coming to our rescue only a short time ago. But Denton Kuhn was one of the smartest men I ever knew, and it took him a far shorter time to put the facts straight in his mind than it was taking me.
He looked at his pocket watch.
“Well, you’ve got things going on all over the place, baby girl, but I think you’re putting it in the right order,” he said. “Half past nine. I’d better go back to about eight o’clock and tell the sheriff. It’ll take time to get a posse together and put it in position.” He shook his head. “You’re a bunch of trouble, Kerrilynn, but you’re a good girl. See you in a while, then.” He set the controls, dove into the hourglass and vanished.
I stood, staring at the machine in wonder. I’d never seen anyone else use the time machine. The big glass bubble kind of spun him into a beam of light, then swallowed him up. No wonder I felt like I’d been ground up and spat out. I was still convincing my innards to stay where they belonged.
“Come on, Duncan Wrayburn,” Kerrilynn said, putting out her hand for mine. “Let’s go watch us a stagecoach robbery. I bet it’ll be the most exciting thing you ever see.”
“Nothing compares with you, Trouble,” I said, but I gave her my hand.
THE BUFFALO HUNTERS
SAM KNIGHT
Kansas
1867
“I got another one!”
The young Russian woman’s accent thrilled Tommy as he watched black-powder smoke curl around her delicately arranged black hair.
The train they rode in, the Kansas Pacific Railroad out of Fort Hays headed for Denver, continued to slow as passengers fired out open windows at the racing buffalo herd. Tommy thought the lace finery Miss Veronika wore, and the extravagant red-velvet bench seat she knelt one bent knee upon, to be at stark odds with the rifle in her hands and the fierce grin on her face.
The contradiction excited him. He had never met a woman so exotic. She was so cultured, yet so…wild.
“Hoo-Ya!” Baron Avram Alexandrovich, Veronika’s father, roared over the sound of the train, the volley of gunfire, and the thunder of the buffalo herd outside. He fired his own rifle repeatedly with the glee of a child on Christmas morning.
Expertly, Veronika levered open the trapdoor on the top of the rifle barrel and pulled out the spent black-powder cartridge with her fingertips. She sucked air in through her teeth as she dropped the hot metal casing and held her hand out to Tommy. He handed her a freshly opened box of .50 caliber cartridges and admired the smooth proficiency with which she reloaded the Springfield rifle, turned back to the window, and shot again.
The jostling on the train tracks made aiming difficult, but there were so many buffalo it was hard not to hit one. Although Tommy could see where Veronika was aiming, he couldn’t tell which of the massive creatures she fired at.
Cheers rose from somewhere ahead of the baron’s private railcar as three more buffalo dropped from the racing herd. Harsh guttural laughter filtered back with the powder smoke drifting through the windows, thicker than the smoke from the steam engine’s fire box. The ten Russian soldiers the baron traveled with were apparently enjoying the sport, as well.
Baron Avram fired again. “Forty! I get forty. Was forty? I lose count!” His roaring laughter filled the car. Boisterous, hairy, and barrel chested, he was nearly the opposite of his daughter in every way.
“Forty-two,” Marcus corrected. Marcus, Tommy’s childhood companion turned business cohort, wore a boyish grin that matched the baron’s as he handed a fifth box of ammunition to the big man.
Tommy knew Marcus would rather be shooting instead of just restocking others, but they had been hired as local advisors for the baron and his daughter, and the money was the best they’d earned since setting out on their own. Their fun would have to wait.
Another empty shell clinked to the wooden floorboards as Veronika loaded and fired again.
Shaking his head, a smile slid across Tommy’s face as he watched her shoot. Actually, this was the most fun he’d had in a long time.
The roar of gunfire lessened and dropped to sporadic reports as the buffalo herd veered away and raced south. Brakes squealed and brought the train to a halt as a last few passengers wasted ammunition on targets now out of range.
“Good God! Never before I run out of rifles to shoot because all too hot!” Baron Avram’s face was ruddy with excitement as he held his rifle out in front of himself, carefully touching only the wooden stock. Marcus still held one of the other two the baron had been using, having been ready to trade it out again just before the herd turned away.
Tommy took Veronika’s rifle as she stepped off the seat she had been kneeling on.
“Now what?” she asked, eyes sparkling with enthusiasm.
“The train will stay here for about an hour while the buffalo runners collect skins and tongues,” Tommy said.
A dozen men were already visible through the windows, walking through the prairie grass with knives out.
“Papa?” Veronika’s soft brown eyes nearly melted Tommy, even though they weren’t aimed at him.
“Da da da. We go too!” The baron nodded to Tommy and Marcus before stopping and looking down at his resplendent military uniform. “Ah!” He stopped and pointed at Veronika. “Change clothes!”
Veronika looked down at her elaborate dress and pouted her lips but disappeared into her private room as Baron Avram hurried into his own.
Marcus and Tommy, in their worn ranch clothes, looked each other over.
“This is all I got to wear,” Marcus said. “You?”
Tommy punched him in the arm.
* * *
Blood stained the baron’s arms up to his rolled sleeves as he worked his knife around the carcass of the two-thousand-pound bull. Wearing simple pants and white shirt, the supple leather satchel on his hip, with an elaborately stylized emblem of a rearing bear, was the only indication of the uniform he had worn earlier. After a skinner named Riggs demonstrated how, the baron had been eager to help. His boisterous laugh and enthusiasm made quick friends of all the men as Marcus and Tommy held and turned carcasses for him to skin. The knife the baron used, easily twice the size of everyone else’s, was the center of the afternoon’s jokes.
Until Veronika arrived.
Separating from the crowd of idling passengers, Veronika strode confidently through the grass wearing knee-high boots and wash-leather riding pants. A satchel, matching her father’s, rode low on one hip and was the only thing breaking up her womanly outline. She brought many of the men, including the baron’s own, to a complete standstill as they watched her pass.
Tommy flushed at his own thoughts, and those he suspected were in the other men’s minds. Unable to do anything about the other men, he tore his own eyes away from her figure and forced himself to look at the train instead.
Unmoving, it sat on the tracks as waves of the golden sea of grass splashed around it in the light breeze. A wispy white puff escaped the smokestack at the front while the baron’s private car, lacquered black with polished brass trim, was at the opposite end of the train. A dust devil kicked up and swirled chaff around, following the path the buffalo herd had cut through the plains.
“Do you have a knife I could borrow?”
Veronika’s unexpected voice at his side made Tommy jump. Her brown eyes, meeting his, looking only at him, stole any possible words from his mouth.
“Everyone else seems to be using theirs.” The corner of her mouth pulled up as Tommy looked to see most of the men still standing dumbstruck, watching her.
Swallowing hard, Tommy glanced to Baron Avram.
“Give her knife,” the baron grunted, still pulling at the bull’s hide. “She can use.”
Drawing his knife from its sheath, Tommy handed it to Veronika.
“Do you know how to skin a buffalo?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “I mean, yes, Miss Veronika.”
“Good. Let’s start
on that one.” She pointed with the knife. “Show me how.”
* * *
“None of the meats?” Baron Avram’s voice boomed off the side of the train.
Marcus shook his head, taken aback by the Russian’s intensity.
“What is it, Papa?” Veronika asked as she and Tommy approached, both bloody to their elbows.
Avram waved his arms expansively. “They leave all this meats to waste! All!”
“Too much to eat before it would all go bad anyway,” Riggs, carrying a bucket full of tongues, said as he passed by on his way to the train.
“There’s a bounty on the hides and the tongues,” Tommy said. “A lot of men make a good livin’ off the buffalo.”
The train whistle drowned out the baron’s response, but the expression on his face was more than enough for Tommy to decide not to ask him to repeat his words.
“Train leaves in five minutes!” the conductor, walking the length of the train, called out while ringing a hand bell. “All aboard!”
Avram snorted and stalked off toward his men, who had gathered in a small group beside the private car. He waved his arms and shouted in Russian. The harsh guttural language made it impossible for Tommy to guess the baron’s temperament, let alone the meaning of the words.
“Don’t mind Papa,” Veronika assured Marcus and Tommy. “You two are doing a wonderful job.” She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand but left a bloody smear on her face anyway.
“Oh, here.” Tommy pulled out his handkerchief and offered it. When he saw how gray and dingy it was, he regretted the decision, but it was too late to take it back. She probably had beautifully white lace ones in her satchel.
Veronika took it, wiped at her nose, and gave it back. “You are sweet,” she said. “Thank you.”
The train whistle blew again.
“We should board now,” Veronika said and headed for the train.