Chapter 39
CHAPTER 39
Max was reluctantly stepping away from Cally when racing hoofbeats came toward the house along the narrow dirt road that branched off toward the Fielding place from the main wagon trail. His head still spinning from their kiss, he stepped in front of her instead, pulling one of the six-shooters from his gun belt and, standing at the foot of the porch steps, aimed it toward the sound.
Roy and Doc came into view, riding fast for the house, dust rising behind them.
“It’s the ranchers,” Roy called out from atop his white stallion as he and Doc stopped ten feet away, the light breeze around the house gusting harder, hotter, rustling through the high branches of the nearby pine, sending the branches swaying. “Prince Hugo’s neighbors. They plan to ambush him.”
Max’s stomach clenched.
Nodding from atop his chestnut horse, Doc tipped up the brim of his cowboy hat and wiped his brow with his tan sleeve. “They intend to hogtie him and toss him into a wagon headed for Laramie, where they’ll put him on a train at gunpoint.”
“Vigilantes?” Bart said, coming fast down the steps from the porch.
“Can you blame them?” Doc said. “After what he tried to do yesterday at the horse race?”
Max’s stomach began to churn. “He’ll fight them,” he said, holstering his pistol. “He’ll kill.”
“Or be killed in the process,” Roy said, a faint film of trail dust on his black clothes. “Folks are real mad.
Max’s chest tightened, the foreboding he’d carried with him all day going deeper, down to his core. “They can’t do that.” Or had history changed because of Max? Had his rescuing Cally from Hugo’s castle, had saving her from being shot during the horse race, led to this?
Had his vow to protect her changed history, and now he and his immediate family were the ones in danger of dying? “That would be murder.”
“They can do it,” Doc said, accepting the glass of lemonade Marilee had brought out, one for him and one for Roy, and giving her a word of thanks before she turned and hurried back into the house. “And they can get away with it. There’s not a jury of their peers anywhere in the county who would convict them, not after what Prince Hugo tried to do at yesterday’s horse race.”
“We have to stop them,” Max said and started around back toward the barn for Ares.
Bart caught his arm before he could go more than a step. “Is this what happened in your history, Max?” he said in a low tone with a glance at the closed door into the house. “Is this how Prince Hugo is supposed to leave the state? It would solve everything.”
“I don’t know,” Max said, wishing he’d gotten a closer look at the history book he’d been given moments before he’d traveled to the past. “I don’t know that much about Hugo’s departure from Wyoming. Only that he left in a hurry. No one in the family ever talked about why.” Not until six months ago, when that letter from Mule Stop requesting the return of Cally’s trophy had arrived at Castle Balmont.
“So maybe they’re not planning to kill him,” Cally said, standing on the other side of Bart, next to her damned trophy, her face in a worried expression he’d never seen from her. “Just speed him on his way.”
Could it be that this was what had happened originally in the past? That Hugo had been run out of town by vigilantes, and due to embarrassment, had never spoken of it to family or anyone else in Zalgravia?
Max shook his head. “He doesn’t have the racing trophy.” Which told Max that Hugo wasn’t supposed to leave this way. His jaw tightened, guilt punching him in the gut. Somehow, in all the things he’d done to protect Cally, he’d managed to make things worse for Hugo.
Worse for himself.
Matthew strode out onto the porch from inside the house, followed by June and Livia. “What’s the trouble?” he said, his face grim.
“Prince Hugo’s neighbors have decided to ambush him as he rides back to the Crown,” Roy said and finished up his lemonade. “Along the Porter-Walford side trail right before it crosses onto his ranch.”
“You know about this, Matthew?” Bart said.
Matthew shook his head, his face even grimmer. “I don’t hold with violence. You know that.”
“How many ranchers?” Bart said to Doc and Roy.
“Six of the eight we met with four days ago,” Roy said, “plus adult sons and ranch foremen. No one from the Porter place that we know of, or here with Matthew and Marilee. It was one of those adult sons who decided we needed to be warned. Some folks were apparently all for killing the prince outright, but cooler heads prevailed. They left town this morning before dawn, in order to be in place when he comes along.”
Max tapped his cowboy hat farther down on his head. “Whatever happens,” he said, his heart racing, “we can’t let him die.”
Stepping around Bart, Cally thrust the trophy into Max’s hands. “Come back to me.”
Catching her in his arms, he nodded. “Whatever it takes,” he told her, then kissed her, then he was running with the trophy for the barn.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Livie said from the Fieldings’ back porch as she, Cally, and Cally’s ma watched Max and the other men ride away from the barn, the feel of Max’s urgent farewell kiss still on Cally’s lips. Livie turned to Ma. “June, we need to be there. If anyone needs medical attention…”
Cally’s heart bumped hard. Someone like Max? Or his evil ancestor, who had to live so that Max could live, too?
The hot breeze that had been gusting out front was gusting out back, too, gusting harder, sending swirls of dust around the packed-dirt area between the house and barn.
Livie’s expression turned grim, and Cally reckoned she was remembering the hot, gusting breezes two years ago that had always seemed to signal someone would shortly travel through time. “This might be the moment Max goes back home,” Livie said when Ma looked unconvinced about following the men. “If he has any confrontation with Prince Hugo, or has to protect Hugo from the ranchers to keep him alive…”
Cally turned grim, too, at the thought.
“We won’t have to go all the way to the Porter-Walford trail,” Livie said, starting down the back porch steps toward the buggy, which was standing in the shade of a patch of cottonwoods near the barn, the buggy horses in the Fieldings’ corral, Livie’s black medical bag tucked under the buggy seat. “If Max is leaving, it’ll be from the river he arrived at. If he’s there, Prince Hugo will be there, too. Max won’t leave him alone, not until the vigilantes are stopped.”
Cally followed Livie down the porch steps, taking them faster, heading for the buggy horses, in a hurry to get them hitched up. “I didn’t promise not to go the river,” Cally told her ma, turning to look back at her. “If Max is leaving, I need to be there.”
Looking even grimmer than Livie, Ma gave a swift exhale. “All right,” she said. “As long as the two of you promise to stay with me.”
Cally nodded, but in her heart, she knew she’d already made a superseding promise, one she would never break—a silent promise, that she would have Max’s back.
Cally’s silver trophy cup, tucked into a big saddlebag slung behind Ares’s saddle, bounced against the back of Max’s denim-clad thigh as he and the others raced toward the Crown of the West Ranch, taking a diagonal shortcut southwest across the Fieldings’ grasslands, Max’s foreboding beating at his head.
Was history murky about Cally’s fate because she’d been caught in the crossfire between the vigilante ranchers and Hugo?
Max glanced to the west, where dark clouds were swiftly gathering over the Wind Dance Mountains, the clouds looking eerily familiar, and his heart clenched, his foreboding driving harder, back into his chest. Would he be forced to leave this place before dealing with Hugo?
Would Cally still be safe if he had to go before Hugo returned to Zalgravia?
Hot sun beat down as Bart led the way to the far end of the extensive grasslands, then up a high, pine-covered ridge farther south that formed a part of the border between the Fielding ranch and the Crown. At the top, Max pulled Ares to a halt, along with the others, and tugging his binoculars from his saddlebag, scanned the terrain with a single-minded focus. Save Hugo from the vigilantes. Send him home to Zalgravia today, with the trophy in his grasping, arrogant hands.
The land stretched out for miles below them, the only higher spots being Horace Hill to the southwest on the Crown, and Lookout Peak to the northwest at the Madden place. Not a mile away straight west, the small Elkhorn Valley he’d arrived in was hidden by the top of the wooded hill at the valley’s east end, atop which he’d hidden when he’d first seen Hugo.
But it was to the south where he focused his binoculars, where the Porter-Walford trail traveled along the southernmost borders of the Porter and Crown ranches. And it was there he found what he was looking for, a couple of miles away, along the creek that ran just inside Robert Porter’s property line with the Crown: a crowd of twelve or so vigilantes on horseback—tiny figures at this distance—chasing a man in a blue military uniform atop Hugo’s gray stallion.
A half mile behind the vigilantes, two more riders—Creede and Wilmo?—were galloping all out toward the larger group, seeming to gain a little ground, but the men going after Hugo were closer to him than the lawmen were to the vigilantes.
Max’s heart froze.
Bart swore, loud and furious. “We’re too far away to stop them.”
“But not too far to doctor anyone who gets hurt,” Doc said, starting his chestnut horse fast down the ridge toward Hugo, who had begun to skirt the flanks of Horace Hill, which stood between him and his castle in the large Walford Valley on the other side.
“Where are Wulfdag and the others?” Roy said, swiftly following Doc. “You think the ranchers got?—?”
“Wait a second,” Max called as he and Bart followed Roy, his gaze still on Hugo through his binoculars, his foreboding giving another dig at his chest. The rider being chased was all wrong, his body too stocky to be Hugo, his posture, his very attitude, too subservient. “That is Wulfdag,” he said with a shout, nodding at the man on the gray stallion. He glanced around the countryside fast, his foreboding dropping to his stomach. “Which means Hugo is somewhere?—”
A horseman came over a low rise halfway between the vigilantes and Max, heading north toward him and the others atop the reddish-brown horse that Max had last seen Wulfdag ride, the horseman dressed in Wulfdag’s black livery, the horse’s hooves galloping on the grassy ground.
But nothing could disguise Hugo’s posture and command over the horse. Nothing could disguise the man’s highly polished riding boots—Hugo would never relinquish his own boots—which gleamed in the sun as he veered northwest, straight for his illegal dam.
“— there .”