Chapter 5
CHAPTER 5
Thirty minutes later, Max returned to the house with Bart, Livia, Doc, and Roy, his mind churning. That was a real bullet wound in that young man named Porter. Max had seen bullet wounds in war. He’d seen that kind of agony.
He knew that scent of antiseptic and blood.
His gaze had met Livia’s across the young man lying in the infirmary, which was attached to a large, rectangular bunkhouse, and Max understood in that moment that she and the others had been telling the truth.
He’d traveled through time. Good Lord.
He stopped before ascending the porch steps. “Perhaps I should go,” he said, thinking of how close Robert Porter had come to death, Max’s family’s honor in shreds with these people.
Calliope, who’d been sitting on the porch, watching for them, bit her lip, making no protest, and he knew he’d lost even her.
“Go where?” Livia said in a low tone. “To the Evil Prince?”
Max’s stomach turned at all the trouble his ancestor was causing these good people. “Of course not.”
“Then where will you stay?” she said. “Everyone who meets you will think you are your relative.”
Max remembered how the doctor had recoiled at just the sight of him, thinking he was Evil Prince Hugo, even without the muttonchop sideburns and ridiculous moustache. “I had survival training in the Zalgravian Royal Air Force,” Max said. “I can take care of myself.”
“Out here?” Bart said. “Without a weapon?”
“I’ll manage.” Max’s shame grew to anger. Perhaps he would go see the Evil Prince. Perhaps he’d go instill a little family honor in the man, even if it meant fisticuffs.
Bart gave him a long look. “You believe us now?”
“I do,” Max said. “I don’t understand it, but yes, I believe you.”
“Then come inside,” Livia said. “You don’t want to miss Flora’s famous lemon cake.”
It was cooler inside the house. Not air-conditioned—no, not if this was the nineteenth century. But cooler. The furnishings were late Victorian mixed with pure American West, with a black upright piano in an elegant parlor through a doorway to the left of a great room which stretched out in front of Max when he stepped inside.
Thick woven rugs covered the great room’s polished oak floor, their red, black, and gray patterns as vibrant as Calliope. A grouping of furniture—a cowhide sofa and large comfortable-looking leather chairs around a large, square oak coffee table—took center stage in the middle of the sprawling room.
A tall mahogany grandfather clock, one that would be a valuable antique in Max’s time, ticked away the minutes to the left of the wide, heavy front door. Two tall windows, one on each side of the door, let in bright sunlight, which slanted past the porch roof into the room.
More light filtered in from the open parlor door, the parlor windows framing views of the nearby mountains and river.
And not a damned thing was older than the last decade of the nineteenth century.
Deputy Wilmo—who apparently had had a meal while Max and the others had been in the infirmary, and who was not, according to Livia, in on the time travel secret—was swiftly dispatched to guard the injured man.
Max himself could use a few more of the beef and ham sandwiches and lemonade, followed swiftly by a hot, cleansing shower—his skin had begun to itch from the film of mud still clinging stubbornly to him—and he was happy to see Mrs. Zandt—a blonde woman in her forties, with a spotless white apron over her neatly pressed, old-fashioned brown dress—bustle into the great room with a large tray filled with a glass pitcher, glasses, small plates, white cloth napkins, and a tiered silver serving dish filled with more sandwiches and sweets.
“Just to tide you over,” she told them all with a smile, setting the tray on the large coffee table in the center of the leather chairs and cowhide sofa. “Lunch will be served when the sheriff arrives.”
The faint scent of food baking in an oven—some kind of meat and bread—backed up her promise, the scent making Max’s stomach grumble as everyone gathered around the tray.
Calliope— Miss Calliope, Max had been informed by her mother—plopped herself down on the cowhide sofa, facing the front door, the young woman an odd but appealing contradiction, her beauty, her tomboy speech, the sparkle in her lovely eyes. Livia sat to Miss Calliope’s far right in one of the large leather chairs, Bart standing protectively behind her.
Miss Calliope’s mother, Mrs. James, stood behind the leather chair opposite Livia, her hands on its back as she supervised the distribution of glasses and small plates and directed Doc and Roy to the remaining two chairs facing the sofa on the other side of the coffee table.
And in the air all around them, a tension seemed to vibrate among the James family and their other guests, to get to the bottom of Max’s presence in the past.
Max, as unsettled as the others, had just sat down on the navy-blue towel Livia had draped over the end of the sofa nearest her—he was, unfortunately, still dropping clods of mud from his clothing—and was reaching for the sandwiches, when the dogs located somewhere near the barn set up another round of barking.
The thud of horse hooves swiftly followed.
Miss Calliope jumped up from beside Max and ran to the window. “It’s Sheriff Sam,” she told the others and opened the front door wide.
More bright sunlight slanted in, outlining the tall man approaching the doorway. He strode into the great room, trail worn and dusty, his body lean, his face hard. Leather chaps covered his denim trousers. A gun belt was slung low over his hips. Halfway across the distance between Miss Calliope, who was closing the door, and the rest of them, he raised his hand toward the brim of his hat, whether to tip it or take it off, Max didn’t know, because before the tall man could say a word, before he could touch his hat, Max had recognized him with a start.
“Good God,” Max exclaimed to the others, swallowing fast the bite of ham sandwich he’d been chewing, and stood up like a shot, stopping the newcomer in his tracks. “It’s Sheriff Sam Creede.”
Everyone turned to stare at Max.
Sheriff Sam Creede’s eyes narrowed, his hand shifting to hover by the holster on his right hip as he scrutinized Max from head to toe from twenty feet away, his stance tense, ready to fight, his tooled-leather cowboy boots planted on one of the woven rugs.
Yes, indeed, it was Sam Creede—those cheekbones and jaw, that oval face, the blond hair beneath his dusty brown cowboy hat, just like the television show based on his life—and shaken, Max reconsidered whether this time travel stuff was real, or just a crazy, weird dream.
“Who the blazes are you?” Creede—that’s what they called him in the TV show and the books the show was based on, just Creede—said.
“Sam,” Bart said from behind Livia, his voice solemn. “This is Prince Maximilian.”
Creede’s dusty face went stone cold. His hand shifted closer to the pistol in his right holster, the silver star badge on the leather vest over his long-sleeved blue shirt proclaiming his authority. “I was just on my way to talk with you, prince. Robert Porter?—”
“Not that prince,” Bart said.
Creede turned to Bart—just the slightest, most of his gaze was still on Max—and raised a dusty blond eyebrow.
“We’ve got two princes,” Bart said, a look going between the two men that Max couldn’t decipher. “And one is from the future.”
“Which one?” Creede said.
“This one,” Miss Calliope said, walking back across the rug toward Max and the sofa—and the food, most likely. “I found him down along the Elkhorn River this morning, when he tumbled out of a flash flood.”
That hard, cold expression came back to Creede’s face. “Then how the blazes does he know who I am?”
“ The Death of the Danzig Gang ?” Max said, naming some of the nineteenth-century books he’d read. “ The Gunfight of 1896 ? Good God, man, you’re a legend.”
Creede’s lean body tensed at Max’s words. “You mean those damned dime novels written about me?”
“My God, yes,” Max said, “they’re a TV show now. You’ve been the hottest thing onscreen this last year.” Not that he hadn’t followed all of Creede’s adventures before that. There’d been over fifty dime novels fictionalizing the man’s time as a sheriff in the nineteenth century, first editions of all of them shelved in the library of Max’s family’s castle, and Max, as a boy, had read every one of them.
Creede looked startled. “ TV show?” His eyes narrowed until they were nearly slits, and he took a step farther into the room.
A step closer toward Max, trail dust wafting from the sheriff’s boots.
Max waited for Creede to demand an explanation of what a ‘TV show’ was, and when no demand came, he wondered if Livia had already shared that information with the others. “I’ve heard they’re going to make a movie.”
“Damn,” Creede said under his breath, then turned to the elder Mrs. James, whom the other guests called June. “Sorry, ma’am.”
“Under the circumstances,” the elder Mrs. James said, seated now in the chair to Miss Calliope’s left and pouring out a glass of lemonade for Doc, “I believe a bit of swearing might be beneficial for us all.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Creede said with an apologetic smile that took the harshness from his face, then he turned back to Max, the steel returning to his features. “When?” he practically growled at Max. “From when in the future did you come?”
Max felt a rush of fan elation go through him. There weren’t many men in the world who had his true admiration, but Sheriff Sam Creede was one of them. “2019,” he said, skirting the coffee table and striding toward Creede, holding out his hand. “It’s an honor, sir. Good God, you look just like your old photographs.”
Smelling of leather and horse, Creede ignored Max’s hand. “What photographs?”
“The ones taken in the 1890s.”
Creede’s gaze bored into him. “These are the 1890s.”
“So I’ve heard.” Max shoved his hand out again. “Truly an honor, sir.” And he realized that Vivian Dee of Royalty Watch would know all about his admiration for Sheriff Sam Creede; his love of westerns was common enough knowledge among his friends. Common enough to make its way to her ears, and he couldn’t help wondering again if this was all an elaborate prank, his mind still resisting the idea of time travel, even as his body was settling into the past.
Looking bemused, Creede shook Max’s hand with a firm grip, bits of mud dropping from Max’s arm to the floor. Letting Max’s hand go, the sheriff frowned for a long moment at Max’s smartwatch. “How can you be sure he’s from the future?” he said to the others.
“We gave him a test,” Miss Calliope said, plopping down again on the sofa beside Max’s towel. “He knew all kinds of things that won’t happen for another fifty or more years, according to Livie.”
“We could check one more thing,” Livia said with a mischievous grin. “According to his friend at Royalty Watch , the Prince Maximilian of the future has a special tattoo.”
Everyone turned to Max.
“A tiny crown just under my left shoulder blade,” Max said to Livia.
She nodded, the mischievous grin deepening.
“An error in judgment,” he said to the others, feeling a hint of a flush creep up his neck. His father had been furious. Princes of the realm could get all the tattoos they wanted, but they sure as hell didn’t announce their status with one. “A youthful indiscretion. I was nineteen.”
“How old are you now, prince?” Miss Calliope asked from the sofa, her eyes dancing.
“An elderly twenty-six,” he said, her vitality a thing of wonder.
Seated to Livia’s right, a plate filled with food on his lap, Roy cleared his throat. “You mind telling us what happened that brought you here?” he said, half-turned in his chair toward Max and Creede.
Reluctantly, Max pulled his gaze from Miss Calliope. “I was in Mule Stop to dedicate the Elkhorn River Bridge at my family’s property, the Crown of the West.”
“So it’s stayed in your family,” Bart said.
“Yes.” Driven by hunger, Max strode back to the sofa and sat beside Miss Calliope. “But we’ve been a poor neighbor in that time, and neglectful of the land. I established a wildlife sanctuary along the east side of the property and built the bridge to connect to a short trail for the townspeople to enjoy a small part of the sanctuary, while leaving the rest fully to the wildlife.”
Miss Calliope sent him a shining, approving glance.
He gave her a grin. “I have additional plans to remedy the previous neglect on the rest of the ranch and had traveled to Wyoming from Zalgravia to put those plans into motion, as well as to attend the dedication.”
“We could do with less detail,” Doc Jannings said from the chair between Mrs. James and Roy, Doc a man with a round face and kind but tired eyes. His clothes, a dark-green long-sleeved shirt, denim trousers, and boots, seemed as authentically Western as the others’. “It’s better we don’t know about the future.”
“Right,” Max said. Better the James family didn’t know about their descendants, the ones who’d rejected Max’s overtures to negotiate water rights. If he really was in the past. “Suffice it to say, I was standing on the new bridge, holding a silver trophy I was returning to the town from my family’s personal holdings, awaiting the mayor to join me, when someone shouted, ‘ Flash flood .’ Before I could react, the flood drove me from the bridge an instant after lightning struck the trophy, and I was washed downstream.”
“Right into the past,” Bart said, pulling a wood chair over to the space between Livia and Roy for Creede, which Creede ignored, coming to a stop behind Roy, his gaze still hard on Max.
“So it would seem,” Max said.
Miss Calliope screwed up her brow. “You said there was a thunderstorm about then?”
Max nodded. “Some way upstream to the west. Rain in sheets so thick it was visible from a few miles away.”
Miss Calliope nodded. “That’s what it was like here.” She leaned forward and removed a chocolate-laced bar cookie from the top tier of the serving dish. “The storm clouds got stuck on the Walford Peaks and dumped rain like I’ve never seen.”
“I reckon the rain upstream caused the flood,” Roy said.
Max nodded, Miss Calliope’s pretty face interfering with his focus. “I suspect that was what had Deputy Henderson and his wife running for the parking lot,” he said. “They seemed to recognize?—”
“ Henderson ?” Bart, Creede, Roy, and Doc all half-shouted at the same time.
A shocked silence dropped in the room.
Cally felt her heart bump fast. Zeb Henderson—Bart’s friend since childhood—and a lady visitor to town had died in a fire some three years ago, Zeb beloved by the town and folks from miles around.
She narrowed her eyes at her brother. Had Bart suspected Zeb had traveled to the future instead?
Was the lady visitor, Miss Melody, from Livie’s time?
Doc had said two years ago, when Livie had first arrived, that women from the future had been falling on Mule Stop like manna from the skies.
“ Zeb ?” Bart said in an urgent tone to Max, stepping around Livie’s chair toward him. “Was Deputy Henderson’s name Zeb ?”
Max sent a questioning gaze around the group. “I believe that’s what his wife called him.”
Cally’s heart stopped.
Livie leaned forward. So did everyone else.
“Wife?” Bart prompted.
“Melody,” Max said after a moment’s thought that had hushed the room as quiet as church. “Pretty brunette. A baby on her back in one of those carry packs.”
Sheriff Sam caught his breath so fast he nearly choked.
Livie exhaled. “Whew,” she said, dropping back against her chair. “You have no idea how hard it’s been to keep their presence in the future a secret. How lovely for them to have a child.”
The faces that had turned stunned at Max’s words turned to her.
“ You knew about them ?” Cally said, her eyes wide, the rest of her feeling horribly left out.
“Not until I traveled here, Cally,” Livie said, “and heard the story about the bank fire. Before that, I had no idea one or both of them might have traveled to my time from the past. Though Melody’s family?—”
“Young lady,” Doc interrupted. “Not another word.”
Cally turned to Max beside her on the sofa, Max looking like someone had struck him with a fire poker. Sunlight sparked in his dark hair where there weren’t no mud. His tall, handsome body was as still as a stone, as if he was in as much of a shock as the rest of them. “We’re not supposed to ask folks from the future about the future,” she told him. “Somethin’ about maybe changing the future for the bad.”
An odd expression crossed his stunned face. “About that,” he said. “There’s something?—”
“Not another word.” Doc’s voice was firm, his expression final. He set his glass of lemonade down on the coffee table with a thud . “Young man, tell us what happened, without naming names.”
Max took a long moment, his mouth seemin’ to struggle to hold in the words he wanted to say, and Cally could see that something was wrong, bad wrong. Something Livie had said bothered him greatly. “Well,” he said and took a deep breath, “the sheriff seemed to suspect something about that storm, too. He took a long look at the rain clouds, then told me to hold on tight to the silver trophy.”
“Did the trophy have a special significance?” Ma said, pouring Sheriff Sam some lemonade.
“Something to do with Hugo,” Max said. “Your time’s Prince Maximilian,” he explained to Sheriff Sam, who was frowning at him from where he stood behind Roy, but Cally had a feeling Max knew more than he was telling. “He brought it to Zalgravia when he left Wyoming.”
“When was that?” Bart said, sitting on the arm of Livie’s chair and taking her hand, as if that could protect her from another time traveler in the room.
“Not a word,” Doc warned Max.
“Really,” Max said, “I believe you would find it enlightening to know?—”
“Stop right there,” Sheriff Sam said, taking a step around Roy, a threat hard in his eyes. Cally hadn’t seen him so riled up in a long time. “Don’t tell me the future.”
“But—”
“You tell me the future,” Sheriff Sam said, “I might change what I do here in the past, and folks’ lives might change. Now. Twenty years from now. A hundred and twenty years from now.” A haunted look came to his face. Stepping forward, he reached down across the end of the coffee table and gripped Max’s forearm, tight, Cally could see Max’s strong, muscled, mud-flecked arm tense beneath his torn short sleeve. “Don’t tell me or anyone else a damned thing.”
Max stood and pulled his arm from Creede’s rough grip. He didn’t know what precisely he’d said that had upset the man, but upset Creede most definitely was.
Max was upset, too. The instant Livia had called Miss Calliope ‘Cally,’ Max’s mind had flashed on the name of the young woman Evil Prince Hugo had supposedly killed in nineteenth-century Mule Stop, a name which Deputy Henderson—apparently Zeb Henderson from the 1890s—had told him. Told him with a great deal of anger: Cally James.
He turned to the lively young woman beside him on the sofa. No wonder the deputy had been so angry. He’d been a friend of the nineteenth-century James family.
A friend of Miss Calliope’s—who among her friends and family was apparently known as Cally.
James.
Damn.
“I’ve heard enough,” Creede said, the angry, haunted expression on his face fading. Seeming to shake off whatever it was that was bothering him, he stepped back beside Roy and took the glass of lemonade Mrs. James was holding out. “As long as this prince” —he nodded at Max— “stays out of sight and out of trouble until he goes back home—and keeps his mouth shut about the future—there’s no problem.”
“I’ll go home?” Max said, sitting back down on his towel.
“That’s the usual way of things,” Doc Jannings said. “I’ll send a letter to my descendants to let them know what happened to you.”
Max raised his eyebrows. “A letter?”
“Will you go see your friend about Prince Max?” Livia said when Doc didn’t elaborate.
Doc shook his head. “He’s not there at the moment. The family is traveling up north for the summer.” He turned back to Max. “Another week or two, or maybe four, you’ll head home the same way you arrived here.” He grinned. “My friend has spoken of the rivers of time, but this is the first occasion I know of in which it’s happened literally.”
“Livia is still here,” Max pointed out, picking up the half-eaten sandwich he’d abandoned and wondering just who this friend was.
“Just see that you keep an eye out for any thunderstorms that can take you home,” Bart said, and there was that protect-his- wife sternness again in his face and tone. “Or flash floods. In the meantime?—”
“We’ve got to stop Evil Prince Maximilian,” Miss Calliope—good God, Miss Cally —said.
An anger swept through the room, these good people banding together against Max’s family, and he felt some of the anger shift his way. “ Hugo ,” he said, then grabbed another sandwich in case the James family decided to throw him out to fend for himself. “Evil Prince Hugo .”
“I thought his name was Maximilian, like yours,” Creede said across the coffee table, his eyes narrowing again.
Max swallowed a quick bite of ham. “That’s his official name. He goes by Prince Hugo, to avoid confusion with his father, who’s also a Maximilian. Like I told the others, my family—my current family, in my time—simply refers to him as the Evil Prince.”
Roy scowled. “Your Evil Prince insists we call him His Royal Highness.”
“From what I’ve read about him in the family archives, I’d believe that,” Max said and got another bite of sandwich in.
Miss Calliope’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t care what we call him. We need to keep him and his people from shootin’ any more of our neighbors.”
Keep him from shooting Miss Calliope, Max thought, chewing fast. Staying out of sight and out of trouble in 1897 was not going to be an option for him, not if he had to protect her from Hugo.
Miss Calliope’s eyes lit. “We could put our Prince Maximilian in his place,” she said, setting her empty plate on the coffee table, as Machiavellian as any minister of state. “Accordin’ to folks who’ve seen them both, they look a mighty lot alike.”
“But what would we do with Prince Hugo?” Livia said.
“Whatever we do, we have to be careful,” Bart said. “He’s still royalty. A Crown Prince, in fact. His country could argue that as a member of the sovereign’s family he has diplomatic immunity.” Miss Calliope had explained to Max earlier that Bart was an attorney.
“Immunity be damned,” Creede said. “I’ll put a bullet in him if that’s what it takes to haul him to jail.”
Max stiffened, the latest bite he’d swallowed seeming to stick in his throat. “ No guns ,” he said, his heart beating faster. “ No shooting . No one must harm him.”
The group turned suspicious eyes on him, the anger ramping up again.
“Why the blazes not?” Creede said.
“Because he’s my great-great-great-grandfather, and his firstborn child, my great-great-grandfather, hasn’t been conceived yet.”