Chapter 6
CHAPTER 6
Silence dropped over the great room, all but the tick of the elegant grandfather clock. Stunned faces gaped at Max.
Adorable in her cowgirl clothes, Miss Calliope turned to him with a furrowed brow, her rose scent momentarily distracting him. “Does that mean the Evil Prince can’t hurt you?” she said.
“Don’t see why not,” Doc said from his chair opposite her, adding a small glazed fruit tart to his plate. “It won’t harm the Crown Ranch’s Prince Maximilian—Hugo,” he amended at Max’s sound of protest, “if our Prince Max from the future dies. It’s our Prince Max who suffers if his ancestor dies before his time.”
“You mean, we have to let the varmint get away with his crimes?” Miss Calliope said, new outrage in her voice. Her pretty, youthful face filled with disgust, and Max felt a cringe of shame at the thought of his ancestor, though he agreed with Miss Calliope’s assessment.
“We don’t know that he’s committed any himself, yet,” her mother said. “Not directly.”
But to Miss Calliope, it seemed, the dam that Evil Prince Hugo was building—that’s what the ten men and their wagon had been doing alongside the Elkhorn River when Max had come to, Miss Calliope had told him on the ride to the Sky Top—was crime enough. “He ain’t got the water rights, for one thing,” she said, more disgust in her voice. “They’re ours. And he ain’t got no right to deprive the animals downstream of their water.”
“Doesn’t have,” Mrs. James said gently.
“I’ll see to him,” Creede said, stepping forward to set his lemonade glass on the silver tray.
“You spend half your time going after outlaws,” Miss Calliope said. “Every time your back is turned, the Evil Prince can do whatever he wants.”
Max turned to Miss Calliope. “Are you considering some vigilante justice?” he asked her, that rush of elation filling him again, that he was in the past, the Wild Wild West past, to be exact.
The Wild Wild West past of Sheriff Sam Creede.
Miss Calliope’s eyes lit with inspiration. “Brother,” she said, turning to Bart, “we could?—”
“No,” Bart said.
“But I could?—”
“No,” Bart told her again, and Max felt his stomach tighten. He hadn’t meant for Miss Calliope herself to be involved in taking on the Evil Prince. It had been himself he’d been thinking of, sneaking onto the Crown Ranch and destroying any new attempts to build the dam, and anything else Hugo was doing that would harm the wildlife or the land.
Or the Crown’s neighbors.
He hated the thought of the wildlife being penned in by barbed wire as much as Miss Calliope did, their habitat disturbed by Hugo’s new roads and dams. He was as disgusted as she was over Hugo’s treatment of her friends.
And the stain Hugo was at this moment creating on Max’s family’s reputation among these good people was more than Max could stand. “Perhaps you will allow me to assist in your endeavors,” he said to Miss Calliope with a small, seated bow of his upper body.
She gave him an assessing look, a womanly look that surprised him. “What do you mean, prince?”
“I could be the one to damage what’s left of the dam, and anything else Hugo chooses to build in contravention of the local laws and property rights. If I were ever caught, I could pretend to be him, long enough to escape.”
Her gaze narrowed. “You ain’t a spy or nothin’, are you?”
“How may I prove myself to you?”
Miss Calliope glanced at her mother for a long moment, then gave Max a smile that sent his blood thrumming. “Go tear down that fence Evil Prince Hugo strung across a corner of Matthew’s land. That’ll convince me.”
Bart frowned. “We are not going to?—”
“We sure as blazes are,” Creede said, pacing across the rug behind Doc and Roy, a sandwich in his hand. “That fence is as illegal as Kuthbert shooting Robert Porter.” He gave Max another hard look, and Max—despite the threat in the man’s gaze—had another rush of elation. Adventure, he thought. In the Old West.
The real Old West. At the side of the legendary Sheriff Sam Creede.
“You mean what you say?” the sheriff said to him. “You’ll help?”
“Of course,” Max said and stood, more than ever convinced this was a hallucination. “I’ll need clothing to fit in with your time.”
“You know how to use a rifle, Max?” Bart said.
“That’s Captain Balmont of the Zalgravian Royal Air Force, to you,” Max said. “Fighter jets,” he added at Livia’s questioning look.
“Ah,” Livia said.
“What?” Miss Calliope said. “What’s that mean?”
“It means,” Livia said, “that your prince has almost as good eyesight as you.”
Miss Calliope nodded, clearly impressed. “I’ll saddle Apollo,” she said and headed for the front door.
“ No ,” every other person in the room said.
Miss Calliope ignored them and strode outside.
Max caught Bart’s arm and pulled him off to the side of the room, over by a doorway that opened onto an oak-furnished office of some sort, everyone else finishing up the sandwiches and sweets in preparation to either help tear down Hugo’s illegal fence, or to go arrest Kuthbert.
Whatever that meal was that was cooking in the kitchen would have to wait.
“Keep your sister away from my ancestor,” he told Bart in a low tone. The grandfather clock chimed the hour. “She’s not safe around him.”
Bart gave him a frown. “I know.”
You don’t know , Max thought, but how could Max tell him more? If Miss Calliope—Cally—was truly the girl Evil Prince Hugo had supposedly killed, and if Max told Bart, Evil Prince Hugo would be dead by sunrise, and Max would be no more.
These folks may be law abiding, but to know in advance of a murder…
“Listen, Bart,” he said. “In my time” —damn, he couldn’t believe he was saying that— “my ancestor is remembered for harming young women.” Which was true.
Bart’s eyes narrowed. “From what my wife tells me, you’re no saint yourself.”
Max choked, aghast at being compared to Hugo. “I enjoyed parties , Bart, when I was younger, just like every other young man—and woman—in my time. Music. Dancing. Highly publicized parties, because of who my family is. And I did a few harmless pranks that have been blown up so out of proportion I can’t recognize myself in the stories. But damn it, Bart, I don’t harm women. Hugo does . Good God, I told you my own family calls him the Evil Prince.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because” —Max took a deep breath, walking a tightrope between Miss Calliope’s safety and his own, but he would be telling Bart nothing of the future, only the truth of this time’s own recent past— “before I left the trees Miss Calliope had ordered me to stay in above the wrecked dam, I overheard Evil Prince Hugo tell his thugs to go capture her to teach her a lesson for trespassing on his land.”
An hour later, dressed in a borrowed brown cotton Western shirt tucked into a borrowed pair of straight-legged denim trousers, his cowboy boots still damp, Max was back in hiding among the trees at the top of the gentle-sloped hill overlooking the remnants of the dam Miss Calliope had desired destroyed. Bart and the others had wanted to see for themselves where Max had washed up, before splitting into two groups, one to Matthew’s place, the other to Hugo’s to arrest Kuthbert.
“Down there,” he said to Creede, Roy, Doc, and Bart, his borrowed brown cowboy hat pulled down low over his brow, his borrowed red bandana pulled up over his chin in an attempt to disguise his resemblance to Hugo. He pointed to the spot where he’d been standing when the lightning had struck, and seeing it again, his ears seemed to roar anew with the memory of the floodwaters, of tumbling head over heels in the churning water, the memory making him dizzy for a moment.
Surprised he’d survived it at all, he propped his hand against the boulder he was crouching behind to steady himself. “Where those men and horses are. The bridge was just below that flat spot where they’ve parked that wagon.”
The bridge, and according to Miss Calliope, the dam, which she’d had a glimpse of before the flood had hit. A flood that had done a good job of meeting her wish to have the dam destroyed. Not a sign of it remained, that Max could see. Whatever barrier had been built before the flood was gone now, the ten workmen, a quarter mile away, sloshing through the mud left on the riverbanks, and gathering up large, heavy stones and logs scattered by the floodwaters.
The river itself was flowing peacefully within its banks, belying the churned up hillsides it had ravaged when it had flooded, boulders and more logs strewn between the water and the flood line the full length of the small valley, and Max was struck now, having had time to recover, by the force of the water, and the destruction it had left in its path.
He was lucky to be alive.
“Cally is right,” Bart said, crouched behind the boulder to the left of Max.
Birds chirped in the high pine branches overhead. Elk grazed peacefully on the upper hillsides farther down the valley that would disappear underwater if Hugo had his way.
Bart frowned at the workmen. “Prince Hugo has no right to dam this river.” Anger filled his voice, a cold steel that sounded more dangerous than any fiery fury. “That water belongs to the Sky Top.”
“Something I’m sure Miss Calliope would like to tell Hugo face to face,” Max said, the thought of her anywhere near Hugo sending a silent shudder through him. “How’d you convince her to stay home?”
Bart gave him a glance that Max could have sworn held a hint of amusement. “Threatened to hogtie her to the piano in the parlor.”
“Shh,” Creede whispered from Bart’s other side, holding up a leather-gloved hand. He nodded at the workmen, reminding the rest of them how easily sound carried out here, though Max doubted their voices could be heard over the rush of the river.
“Supposin’ we rode up to Prince Hugo’s house and confronted him there,” Roy said quietly from Max’s right. Roy, Max had discovered on the ride back to the river, was in general a quiet man, quiet and thoughtful. Doc was pragmatic, Creede exactly like the stories in the dime novels. “There’s been an attempted murder by one of his employees.” Roy nodded toward Doc. “Kuthbert might even need doctoring.”
“He needs it, all right,” Creede said. “I got him in the shoulder.”
“Why is it you haven’t met Hugo yet?” Max asked him.
“Been back East on business for my new car company,” Creede said tersely.
Max nodded. The Creede-Danner Automobile Company in his time was a leading manufacturer of solar-powered electric vehicles. Not that he would tell Creede that, as it had to do with the future the man was so allergic to. “I can come with you to Hugo’s instead of Matthew’s place,” he said, wanting to speak to his ancestor for reasons of his own. “Pretend I have a missive for him from his father the king.”
Roy raised a skeptical brow. “Would he believe you?”
“He will if I bring something marked with the royal seal.” Max held up his hand with the signet ring he’d worn to Wyoming to seal the water rights deal he’d hoped to make. The gold ring, cleaned of the mud that had encrusted it, had been passed down through the family line from Hugo’s father to Max’s, and shone now in the sun. “As much as I’d like to have words with him, however, I can’t help but feel I should be better dressed if I’m to get his attention.” A clod of mud fell from his hair to his shoulder, as if to prove his point.
“You,” Creede said, pointing his finger at Max, “aren’t going anywhere near Prince Hugo.”
“Well, then,” Max said, knowing how Creede felt about him stumbling around in the past, like a nineteenth-century rookie, “if you lawmen wish to confront Hugo with his lawlessness while the rest of us tear out the barbed wire fence at your friend Matthew’s place, I’ll be delighted to proceed.”
Doc, crouched on the far side of Roy, turned toward Creede. “More likely you’ll get Prince Hugo’s ear if I’m along. He’ll be glad for a doctor for Kuthbert, unless he’s brought his own physician with him.”
They all glanced at Max, their grim faces in the shade behind the boulders dappled with bits of sun through the tall pine trees.
“He does travel with one, as a matter of fact,” Max said, pine needles crunching beneath his boots as he shifted his weight toward the horses, releasing the fresh scent of pine. “A German doctor, whom he never shares with his men.”
“Not even for a serious wound?” Bart said.
Max shook his head. “He lives a life of high privilege. And thinks quite highly of himself compared to others, especially those he employs.”
“So a local doctor might be welcomed anyway?” Roy said.
Max nodded. “Perhaps you’ll learn something if you arrive to help, Doctor Jannings.”
“Help, hell,” Creede said. “I’m going to arrest Kuthbert if it’s the last thing I?—”
A low, sharp whistle crossed the air.
Max’s head jerked up at the sound of the whistle. His gaze spun right, then left.
Beside him behind the clump of boulders, Bart sighed. “Cally,” he said to the others in a low tone.
“Varmints,” the young woman called out, and Max turned, searching for her through the thick trees and wondering how she’d snuck up on them, especially the legendary Sheriff Sam Creede. “Headin’ right here from the south.”
Max shifted his gaze in that direction. In the distance, two riders were coming toward them fast, from what looked like the direction of the Crown.
“Does she always do that?” Max whispered to Bart. “Ignore your instructions when you tell her to stay home?”
Bart shook his head, not in answer it seemed, but in exasperation. “She has a mind of her own,” he whispered back. “Something she needs to curb at the moment, while your ancestor is in these parts.”
“Prince Hugo?” Creede called back to Miss Calliope.
“Can’t tell yet,” she said, and following her voice, Max found her astride her stallion among a dense patch of pine, her dark clothes and black horse blending into the shadows among the trees. “But they’re ridin’ fast. Might be looking for a doctor for Kuthbert. Word goes around quick when Doc is in the area. Or they might be heading for?—”
“Livia,” Bart said, turning on his heel at the word. He ran at a crouch toward the horses they’d secured on the north side of the hill, out of sight from anyone coming from the Crown.
“Go,” Creede told Max, nodding after Bart.
Max hesitated, the urge to confront Hugo with his misdeeds, past and future, rushing through him. “I could stay in the back of the group when we got to Hugo’s house and just listen to your conversation with him.”
Creede shook his head. “Low profile, remember? You tear out that fence at the Fielding place while we keep whoever is coming toward us busy. Damn it,” Creede said when Max still didn’t move. “You need to stay out of your ancestor’s way.”
“Why?” Max said, feeling as responsible for Hugo’s actions as if he’d done them himself, family pride and honor on the line. Farther back on the hill, Bart’s and Miss Calliope’s voices rose quietly in argument. “Will we self-destruct if we meet face to face?”
Creede’s face turned hard, harsh and unforgiving. “You’re going to stick out like a sore thumb among the rest of us. And I don’t want you messing with my future by changing what’s supposed to happen while you’re here.”
“But I am here.”
“Which is why you’re going to stay out of Hugo’s way. The law will handle this.”
Knowing that Creede—based on his more-than-a-century-old reputation—could handle anything, Max slipped through the trees and mounted his sorrel horse among the shelter of the northside pines and raced after Bart and Miss Calliope, Bart apparently having convinced her to go with him. Retreat wasn’t Max’s preferred approach, but Creede’s words made sense, and it was Creede’s time and territory. There’d be other opportunities for Max to get another look at Hugo.
Unfortunately, Max’s horse, while lively, was nothing compared to the stallions Bart and Miss Calliope rode. Quickly outpaced—he wondered if they even realized he was following them—and with little hope of catching the pair, he retraced the path they’d taken from the Sky Top.
Keeping his gaze on the immense rock wall miles ahead, the best landmark he could find to know he was going in the right direction, he made his way to the high, flat stretch of land he’d crossed on foot earlier that day. In the distance, he saw Miss Calliope and Bart at the wall’s foot, the two arguing again.
“I ain’t goin’ home until that fence on Matthew’s land is torn out,” Miss Calliope was telling her brother when Max rode up, her pretty face set in the determined expression that so often characterized her. “Prince Max here can help me.”
Bart frowned, first at Max, then at his sister , who looked like the proverbial immovable object. “Livia?—”
“Livie’s fine, Bart. Doc can help Kuthbert, if those two riders we saw coming this way across the Crown are looking for a doctor.”
“She’s right,” Max said. “Creede promised to intercept whoever those two riders are and take them back to Hugo’s house until he gets his questions answered about Robert Porter. Doc Jannings is going with him and Roy, to offer his services to Hugo’s injured henchman if needed. From what I’ve seen of your friends, Bart, you can count on them.”
Miss Calliope gave him an approving glance, then turned to her brother, her black stallion dancing beneath her. “I’ve got to do something, Bart, or my insides are goin’ to bust with anger. Besides, Prince Max here promised to tear down that fence, and he won’t be able to find Matthew’s place by himself.”
Max held his breath. Bart wouldn’t leave her alone with him, not a stranger from a different century with the nickname ‘The Prince of Partydom.’ Either they were all going to Matthew’s place, or they were heading back to the Sky Top.
With a long look at Miss Calliope, then with a heavy sigh, Bart turned his palomino stallion to the left and headed east along its base, away from the trail to the Sky Top.
Matthew Fielding, a thin but wiry man a few years younger than Bart, was cuttin’ barbed wire from the renegade fence when Cally and the others reached the southwest corner of the Fielding place, the corner abutting the Crown of the West.
The steep cliff face of Two Horse Hill rose up to the south. The grasslands that made Matthew’s land so valuable, and the creek that ran through them, were sitting quiet and calm in the midday heat—quiet and calm on the wrong side of the fence.
Dressed in sturdy brown canvas trousers, a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, and one of them brown striped work shirts like her brother Kit had bought from the Sears catalog last year, he was sweatin’ in the hot sun as they rode up. “That blasted prince,” he said with an angry face when he caught sight of Bart, Matthew lowering his wire cutters, then he caught sight of Max.
Max slouched lower in his saddle, but apparently Matthew was able to see past the pulled-down brim of the cowboy hat Bart had loaned him, and the red bandana pulled up over his chin, enough to recognize the supposed resemblance between Evil Prince Hugo and his relative from the future, because he gave an outraged exhale and strode fast to Max’s side.
“Get down off that horse,” Matthew said, his voice shaking with his rage, “and face me like a man.”
“He’s not the new prince at the Crown,” Bart said in a low tone as he dismounted from Zeus.
“Then who the blazes is he?” Matthew said, holding his wire cutters like a weapon, not seeming to be willing to let his anger go. “He looks just like him.”
Max gave that little flinch again, like he did every time someone mentioned his evil ancestor.
Cally had scrutinized the newspaper Livie had shown him when he’d first arrived that morning at the Sky Top, giving the photograph on the front page of his ancestor Prince Hugo a good look while he was at the infirmary with Livie and the others. While Cally could trace the resemblance in the eyes and chin and nose, not much more of Prince Hugo’s face could be made out, between him facing a bit to one side, and his bushy sideburns covering most of his cheeks, and an overlarge mustache drooping over his mouth, hiding his upper lip. The brim of an ornate, gold-braided peaked military hat covered his brow.
Comparing what she remembered of the photograph to Max, here in the flesh, she was surprised folks mistook him so quick for his ancestor. Prince Hugo’s eyes were haughty and uncompromising. Max’s were often smiling—leastways, smiling at her. Where Prince Hugo’s expression was arrogant, Max’s—now that he understood where he was—alternated between being friendly to her family, and disgusted at his ancestor.
Maybe it was the way he carried himself that made folks think right off he was Prince Hugo. Even slouching now like he was in the saddle, he couldn’t hide that strength in his body, that confidence in himself that could tip over into haughty when pushed.
That sense that he would take the lead when needed, could rule, even, as the situation required.
“He’s someone from the same country,” Bart told Matthew, saying what they’d all agreed on as they’d neared the Fielding place. “Someone who thinks differently from the prince.”
Max got off the sorrel gelding Bart was willing to loan him in a swift, athletic movement that reinforced Cally’s belief he was accustomed to horses, and held out his hand to Matthew. “Max Balmont,” he said in his foreign-sounding accent, a hot breeze rustling through the grasslands, the clean scent of summer grass in the air.
Matthew scowled, but he shook Max’s hand. “He still looks like that damned prince. They’ve got that same damned chin and nose.”
Hastily, Max tugged up the bandana that had dropped to his neck when he’d said his name.
Matthew squinted against the bright sun into Max’s face. “The same damned eyes.”
Max tipped his hat brim down even lower. “We’ve come to tear down this fence,” he said. “Looks like you’ve made a good start.”
Ten minutes later, the four of them, wearing heavy work gloves Matthew had provided, were taking down the fence, Matthew sworn to secrecy that another Zalgravian was in the area.
Nothing, of course, was mentioned about anyone being there from the future.
Cally had been afraid Max might—when it came to actual hard work—behave as if he was too big for his britches, but he jumped right in and did more than his share.
He downright tore out the fence with gusto.
It wasn’t all that sturdy to begin with. She wondered if the hearts of Prince Hugo’s locally hired workers had been in the job they’d done. Most folks around these parts liked Matthew and his wife.
“You’re strong there, prince,” Cally said with a grin, in a low tone that Matthew couldn’t hear, the afternoon growing hotter. Sweat ran down Max’s forehead from the brim of his cowboy hat as he worked to remove the fence post to her right, Cally snippin’ away at the barbed wire. His shirt had been removed five minutes before, to Bart’s disgust and disapproval, that Max would do that in front of her, but the prince had ignored the disgust and disapproval, and Cally was glad, her insides all a-tingle at the sight of his powerful arms and chest.
He was a mighty fine specimen of a man, something she’d been payin’ attention to the last few months, finding herself interested in a way she’d never been before, Cally admiring the muscles in his chest and back, and his shoulders and arms, all of him just what a man should be. No one could say he wasn’t a credit to Zalgravia’s Royal Air Force, whatever an ‘air force’ was, even with the tiny crown tattooed beneath his shoulder blade, the rest of his bared skin brown from the sun.
Grasping the fence pole with his muscled arms, he bent his knees to lift the pole from the ground that was still damp from last night’s rain, his strong thighs flexing beneath his denim trousers.
Cally had found a new appreciation for a strong man’s thighs the last few months, too. Ma said it was a good sign that she was ready to marry.
He lifted the pole and tossed it to the ground, then pushed the brim of his borrowed hat up his forehead a bit and gave her a grin. “It’s not a very well-built fence,” he said and wiped his brow with the back of his glove.
“I reckon the workers didn’t have it in them to trespass on Matthew’s land,” she said.
“But still, they built the fence.”
“Some folks need the money,” she said, grateful her own family had the Sky Top. She glanced over at Matthew, who was working forty yards away with Bart, working toward her and Max. “Is it different in your time?” she asked, letting out the curiosity that had been surging through her since she’d discovered him that morning.
And when he didn’t even roll his eyes or flinch at the words ‘your time,’ she reckoned he was starting to truly believe.