Written in Time (42 page)

Jack waited.
 

Jess Fowler was the first of the riders to come into view. It almost seemed odd, seeing Fowler riding another horse besides the big black that was his usual mount. Trixie whinnied, and there was the sound of a stick breaking under the pressure of a footfall.
 

“Shit!” Jack Naile hissed through clenched teeth, rolling onto his back, thumbing back the hammer of his rifle.
 

Jess and two other men crept out of the trees, revolvers drawn, except for Fowler who had a Greener double in his hands.
 

The shotgun was the greatest danger. Jack stabbed the muzzle of the .45-70 toward Fowler and snapped the trigger.
 

Fowler went down.
 

Bullets from the Colts Fowler’s two henchmen carried whined off the jagged granite slabs around him as Jack sprang to his feet and vaulted over the rocks and half rolled, half skidded along the defile for several feet before crashing into something—he wasn’t sure what—and coming to a bone jarring halt.
 

He shook his head, tried to think. Looking along the remaining length of the defile, he saw the fake Jess Fowler—Fowler’s black frocked coat and high-crowned, broad-brimmed black hat comprising the costume—and three more of Fowler’s range detectives. They were skinning out of their saddles and drawing their guns.
 

Jack had lost the Marlin in the fall. As he came up to one knee, he snatched the brace of short-barreled Colt revolvers from his waistband and stabbed them toward the fake Fowler and the three range detectives with him. Jack emptied the ten shots the two six-guns held toward the four men. Their ponies shied out of the hail of lead and one of Fowler’s men was knocked down by his animal.
 

The fake Fowler went down, obviously dead or in the process of dying. One of the range detectives—a man about Jack’s height and build, wearing a high-crowned gray hat—clutched his abdomen and doubled up, falling against his already bolting pinto.
 

Jack let the two Colts fall from his hands and drew the long-barreled Colt from the holster at his right thigh. With the revolver at maximum extension of his right arm, he fired just as the one still-standing range detective from the road below fired. The range detective’s shot missed— apparently, Jack thought in the same instant, since he’d felt no bullet strike him. Jack’s shot didn’t miss.
 

Jack’s bullet struck the range detective in the throat— Jack could see the wound—and the man toppled like a felled tree.
 

There was still the fourth man, the one caught up under his pony’s legs.
 

There wasn’t time for him.
 

Jack wheeled round. The two range detectives who had been with Fowler at the height of the defile were just coming into view. One of the men was executing a half-border shift, flipping a revolver from his right hand into his left in order to draw the still loaded revolver from the crossdraw holster between his navel and left hipbone.
 

Jack punched the muzzle of his Colt toward the other man and fired simultaneously with him. There was a flash of searing pain along the outside of Jack’s left thigh, but he didn’t go down. Jack’s shot connected, too, striking into the chest of the man who had just shot him. The man fell back and out of sight.
 

Jack no longer consciously thought. It was as if all of the western gunfights he’d read about in books and watched in movies and on television had somehow synthesized in him to make him a killing instrument of consummate skill.
 

Jack arced his body a few degrees, the muzzle of his long-barreled Colt settling on the chest of the man who had shifted an empty revolver to his left hand and was still drawing the cross-draw-carried revolver with his right.
 

The man never completed his draw.
 

Jack shot him dead through the chest.
 

Jack turned around, his eyes scanning machinelike for the last remaining range detective, the one who’d had the problem with his horse.
 

Jack’s eyes found him, and the muzzle of Jack’s revolver followed. The man was standing, attempting to draw both revolvers from his belt. Jack fired once. His bullet struck the man square in the middle of the forehead, snapping his head back so violently that his flat crowned, weathered-looking hat flew from his head.
 

Jack turned his back on the dead and started up the defile as he opened the loading gate on his revolver, methodically ejecting the four empty shell casings, alternating ejection with introduction of a fresh round into each empty charging hole.
 

Jack’s left leg felt on fire, but he didn’t dare look at it.
 

Limping to the height of the jagged, rocky defile, five rounds once again filling his six-shooter, he suddenly realized that he had lost his hat, only because he saw it lying in the rocks near his feet. Jack Naile bent over to pick it up, and, as he raised his head, he noticed Jess Fowler trying to stand.
 

Jack holstered his revolver.
 

The striped trouser leg over Fowler’s right knee was drenched with blood.
 

“Fowler. It’s been a long time coming to this and I don’t have the patience to let it continue. Get on your feet and we’ll have this thing end right here. You don’t have anyone backing you up—your range detectives are dead or dying. It’s just you and me. If you can’t stand up, I don’t care. If you can’t draw your gun, I’ll shoot you dead where you lie.”
 

Fowler’s body attitude could be described with only one word Jack could bring to mind: Fowler cringed.
 

“I’ve got a whole passel of money, Naile—it’s yours. You want land? Hey. All of my land is yours. Look, Naile! Listen to me! We can make a deal. Please?”
 

“‘Come on down!’ I don’t think so, asshole.”
 

Fowler managed to get to his feet, his right leg oddly bent, his face a grotesque thing, a mask of pain.
 

“You’re used to murdering people, Fowler, or fighting it out with defenseless women. This’ll be a new sensation: a fair fight. Make sure that the hammer loop is clear of that Colt on your hip. And whenever you feel like it—but, don’t make me wait too long, or you’ll bleed to death first—go for your gun. With two men of close to equal skills, the man who draws first has an overwhelming advantage, almost invariably insurmountable. But I grew up on a diet of this, practiced when I was a kid until I could outdraw Richard Boone and James Arness every Saturday night on television.
 

“My revolver is hand-crafted. It has a fourteen-ounce trigger pull,” Jack told Fowler. His voice was low, his cadence even.
 

“Who’s them fellers? What’s a—”
 

“It’s a large box that shows pictures and sound and is partially to blame for the decline in practical literacy among the American population a hundred years hence, where I’m from. You won’t live to see a television set; some might say that I’m being merciful by pointing that out. Draw your gun pretty soon, or I’ll just kill you. You attack women. You don’t have the balls to fight someone who can fight back.”
 

“Anything you want, Naile! You want me to beg?”
 

“No. Dying will do. Draw.”
 

Jess Fowler went for his gun.
 

Jack’s left leg flexed instinctively, painfully, bent at the knee, his right hand flashing to the butt of his revolver. The series of motions, practiced since childhood, caused his leg to draw the holster away from the gun as his hand drew the gun away from the holster.
 

Jack’s single shot came a split second before the shot from Fowler’s gun.
 

Jack’s bullet struck its target—Fowler’s chest—and Fowler’s muscle jerked and his shot went wild.
 

Jack Naile holstered his gun and looked down at his thigh. The blood wasn’t exactly spurting out, and his conscience felt oddly sound.
 

Still wearing her “man” costume, packing more ammunition into her saddlebags as she sat at the kitchen table, Ellen told Peggy, “Jack should be pretty well exhausted, so he might need the help. Once he and I return, Peggy, we’ll change horses and ride back to the time-transfer base Helen and I saw. Jack has to see it, and then we all have to figure out what’s going on.”
 

“What about leaving a note, even some photographs, in one of the capsules by the site of the original time base? They’d have the message and the pictures within a couple of hours at the most, and we’d have a response almost immediately.”
 

“I’ve considered that, and maybe we’ll do that. Maybe. But what if Alan’s time-transfer operation has been compromised? I mean, this isn’t supposed to happen. From what Clarence said, Alan’s great-grandfather—David— passed down commentaries Jack had written, which Jack’s been writing. Everything from the origins of World War I through the JFK assassination through just before the last election. Remember Jack’s face when he’d heard that the Democrat had actually won?! But nothing in Jack’s chronicles ever referred to a nephew coming back in time, nor to any regular communication back and forth between this time period and the future. And there was never any mention of any kind of time transfer base at all, because there wasn’t one. We’re in virgin territory here, on unexplored ground. We may already have screwed up the future. That time-transfer base could belong to anybody, anybody at all, any government or organization—somebody very evil.” There seemed little sense in belaboring the point; Peggy already appeared ill at ease.
 

Ellen stood, grabbed her heavy saddlebags and picked up her cowboy hat. “How do men stand wearing these things?” Ellen queried rhetorically as she placed the hat on her head. Passing her daughter’s bedroom—Lizzie was sleeping soundly—Ellen reassured herself that her daughter would recover fully.
 

Exhausted, but with no time to rest, Ellen stepped out onto the front porch. Resting her saddlebags across the bullet-hole-riddled porch railing, she started to say, “I’m going to grab one of Lizzie’s Palominos and saddle—”
 

But, in the distance, she spied a cloud of dust. “Grab a rifle,” Ellen ordered her nephew’s wife. Ellen drew both pistols from their holsters and stepped halfway back through the still-open doorway.
 

Peggy was gone for less than a minute, but it seemed an eternity. Ellen’s eyes were focused so intently on the figure within the dust cloud that they literally ached.
 

The dust cleared for a split second and Ellen smiled, lowering the muzzles of her revolvers as she sagged back against the doorframe.
 

Only because Ellen had insisted that he do so, Jack had taken a quick shower, washed his hair and let Peggy dress the deep crease along his left thigh and the earlier wound on his neck. The antiseptic Peggy used hurt far worse than had the strikes of the bullets. “I washed the area very thoroughly, Peggy, and it bled profusely for some time. I’m sure the wound is as clean as a whistle. Really. Are you listening to—ME! SHIT—excuse me. What is that stuff?” The wound dressed (a wise move, of course, because lead bullets picked up dirt, lubricant, more dirt and fiber), Jack dressed in a black shirt and pants and a clean pair of boots. Strapping on his gun as he stood in front of the mirror, Jack wished there was time to wait, not go to what was, indeed, almost certainly a time-transfer base that did not belong to Alan Naile, his great-great-grandson from the future.
 

He had cleaned his revolvers, paying the most scrupulous attention to that very special Colt holstered at his right hip. In the mirror behind him, he saw Ellen. She had showered and changed as well. Rather than the traditionally male attire with which she had disguised herself as she’d ridden out to rescue/assist him, she wore a long-sleeved pink blouse that buttoned up the front and a dark brown suede split skirt, avant-garde but socially acceptable attire for a woman to wear when she went riding—except for the Colt revolvers carried crossdraw, positioned between navel and hip bones. “You’re beautiful,” Jack told his wife. As was Ellen’s wont, she would either acknowledge such a statement with something flippant or with total silence. She chose silence this time. “You amaze me, constantly. Knowing you, I’ve come to realize that the mark of the truly beautiful woman is the failure to appreciate the reality of her own beauty, which only serves to enhance that beauty, both without and within.”
 

“Right.” Ellen groaned. “It felt good to wear pants again. This skirt business gets old.”
 

“You look pretty.”
 

“How are you going to explain Titus Blake’s death?”
 

Jack allowed his wife the option of changing the subject. “The truth, in a manner of speaking. He and I went after the men who’d kidnapped young Helen. Truth. Blake was killed. Truth. If he had a mother—which might be rather dubious—she’ll be proud of her boy’s memory.”
 

“And Fowler and his men?”
 

“It seems logical that they encountered some of the same outlaw bunch and met their deaths because of it. In a manner of speaking, that’s also true.” His eyes dwelt on the brace of Colt revolvers his wife wore. They were Third Generation Colts, made in the 1970s. “I think staghorn grips on those six-guns you’re wearing would look rather stylish, Ellen.”
 

“You know I don’t like stag on anything.”
 

“You always liked Guy Madison as Wild Bill Hickok, and, of course, the guns Roy Rogers wore on television had stag grips, too.”
 

“No stag grips, Jack. Wood is fine.”
 

“Not just wood. It’s American walnut.”
 

“Keep talking about grips and I’ll get Clarence and David to start pestering you again about how those black buffalo-horn grips on your gun look like black plastic.”