Written in Time (38 page)

Always a voracious reader since girlhood—she’d devoured all the great Russian novels before entering her teens—Ellen Naile had often found that some seemingly trivial detail she’d read in years past might be extremely handy to recall. As she spotted a string of horse turds on the ground ahead of her, she slowed and dismounted. Finding a stick wasn’t the easiest thing to do in certain parts of Nevada, but in these higher elevations toward which she climbed there was ample vegetation. She was not about to use her fingers or even the blade of a knife for what she intended to do. Using her knife, Ellen Naile stripped an inch or so of bark from one of the twigs, then whittled the exposed wood into as abrupt an edge as she could manage. It would probably cut less well than a plastic knife at a picnic, but would be adequate to her purpose. Using the second twig to hold the largest of the lumps of equine fecal material steady, she cut through it with the sharpened twig.
 

Had it been the roasting hot days of summer, her experiment would have been easier to interpret. But the interior of the horse poop she examined was of essentially identical consistency to the exterior. Regardless of weather conditions, that meant that a horse had defecated here relatively recently. Considering the heavy rain of the night before, had her find dated from any time before morning, it would have been malformed at least, perhaps partially dissolved.
 

Ellen was following an animal that had passed this way since around dawn. Discarding the twigs and taking the reins of her horse from beneath her foot (where she’d held them secure while engaging in her research), she began walking forward, eyes scanning the ground. With the earth still damp, she didn’t have to walk more than a few paces before finding what she sought: two fresh sets of hoofprints over hoofprints nearly washed away.
 

It seemed likely to her that she had intersected the trail of either Titus Blake or her husband, but not both, since one set of hoofprints was more deeply etched in the ground than the other, meaning that one horse had been riderless. Watching Clint Walker and Jay Silverheels on television—not to mention Gail Davis, always her hero as Annie Oakley—had taught her that.
 

Suddenly very chilled, Ellen grabbed up her reins, clambered into the saddle and rode forward.
 

Without the benefit of an X-ray machine or any of the tests that might routinely be performed in a latetwentieth-century hospital, Peggy still felt confident that Liz would enjoy not only a full recovery, but a rapid one. Fortunately, Peggy knew the blood type of every member of the Naile family, and it was even more fortunate that Lizzie was an A positive, as was she.
 

With a rifle across her lap, Peggy sat in a rocking chair—it was bullet riddled but still serviceable—on the front porch, watching for she knew not what. The front porch, like the chair, though shot full of holes, was also still serviceable. What did she really wait for? The return of Ellen and Jack? Certainly not her husband, Clarence, and David, Lizzie’s brother. They would still be in San Francisco, assuming that they had arrived already. Did she expect Jess Fowler and his evil minions to sneak back for a second attack? More likely; that was why she clutched the rifle in her hands. But what would she do if they did try again? Could she take a human life, even in defense of Lizzie’s life or her own?
 

The bullet that had struck Lizzie had precipitated considerable blood loss and three wounds, one largely superficial. The bullet’s path was incredible to consider. The lead had apparently traveled at a slight upward angle. Perhaps it had been what was called a ricochet? Peggy didn’t know very much about guns and wished that she knew even less. Regardless, the bullet had creased the side of Elizabeth’s left breast, traveled upward and entered her body just slightly rearward of and below the armpit, exiting the lower shoulder without breaking bone, as best Peggy could ascertain. The entrance and exit wounds had been far more than superficial, producing considerable blood loss and pain.
 

Lizzie rested. Peggy would not allow this luxury to herself. She had gotten Lizzie—chilled—out of the sodden nightgown and into dry clothes, covered her with half the world’s visible supply of blankets and positioned two latetwentieth-century hot-water bottles to flank the girl while she slept. Something for pain, a tetanus booster and an antibiotic shot rounded out the best care Peggy could provide her friend, given their primitive circumstances.
 

Peggy had been so busy worrying over Liz, she had forgotten to worry about herself. Once Lizzie was resting, she’d changed into warm, dry clothes—not daring to take a hot shower lest Fowler’s men return and find her helpless, wrapped herself in a blanket and taken up her sentry duty.
 

Peggy was tired. It was falling off the adrenaline express train, of course, and she had, after all, transfused Lizzie with about a pint of her own blood. The letdown from the terrifying rush and the depletion of her own blood—she’d nibbled on some crackers and consumed half a glass of red wine (the French method) by way of fortifying her-self—made her feel exhausted. But she dared not doze.
 

The negatives of her present state, current potentially dire circumstances discounted for the moment, basically consisted of three factors in conflict with one another: she was female; she was a doctor; she had medical knowledge that far outstripped that of any other person on the planet.
 

To use that knowledge—demonstrable, easily provable as science rather than quackery—might alter the entire course of subsequent human events. The Spanish-American War was past, but World War I loomed ever closer over the horizon. The enormous death toll both from the military conflict and the lethal epidemic of influenza that followed/would follow it could be drastically minimized by the knowledge she carried in her head.
 

Which was the worse sin? To alter the future or to conceal lifesaving knowledge from mankind?
 

There was another issue.
 

Jack and Ellen, one evening, had spoken about their old home in Illinois, before they had migrated to Georgia. An older couple with whom they had become friendly had been survivors of World War II. The woman, much like Anne Frank, had been sheltered from the Jewish persecutions by caring Christians. Eventually, her identity as a Jew was discovered, and she had been captured and sent to the death camps. She’d survived, unlike six million others.
 

Foreknowledge of the coming Nazi storm might minimize or even totally avert its effect. Wasn’t it the greater good, rather than preserving the brutality of the future, to alter it for the better? Perhaps one of those lost six million souls would discover the cure for cancer, or the means by which to achieve world peace.
 

In films and on television, in books of science fiction, the time-traveler was usually someone to be envied, flitting from one era’s adventure to the next. But, the “awesome responsibility” of future knowledge was not a blessing; it was a curse, worse than that of any fictional demon of fantasy, more painful than those in mythology that some hapless hero had labored to expiate. Future knowledge was a sentence of moral death, the possessor of such foreknowledge damned whatever her choice might be.
 

The very procedure of blood-type matching in order to successfully transfuse blood was unknown in this time, such a thing as the Rh factor probably never even contemplated.
 

No physician in human history had ever had such an opportunity to alleviate needless suffering.
 

Peggy gripped the rifle, energized, standing, swaying back and forth, her feet tight together beneath the hem of her dress. Her oath was to alleviate suffering. She began to walk, pacing.
 

Peggy had decided, the clarity of the moment, an epiphany in the truest sense, coursing through her veins. She would be true to her oath.
 

Ellen had turned back, obsessed with knowing the fate of her husband, abandoning her search for a possible time base, backtracking the unevenly weighted sets of hoofprints, reasoning that the process wouldn’t cost her that much time.
 

In under an hour, she was riding up on what had been the campsite presumably shared by her husband and Marshal Blake. She shuddered. There was something wrapped in a blanket on the ground near the ruins of a campfire; it was shaped like a man’s body.
 

Lest the tableau be some sort of trap fabricated by the men her husband and the town marshal had set out to pursue, Ellen Naile restrained herself from jumping down from the saddle and running to the blanketed form. Instead, hands trembling, she walked her horse slowly, inscribing a rough circle around the campfire. She eased the revolver at her right side in its holster, the hammer thong tucked away, her fingers contacting the Colt’s smooth wooden grips.
 

There was no evidence of an ambush.
 

Slowly, keeping her right hand touching the revolver, Ellen dismounted. Cautiously, Ellen approached the body as she drew one revolver, then the other. As she raised her eyes, she spotted something shining up at her from near her right boot. Holstering the revolver from her left hand, she crouched, picking up the shiny object. It was a cartridge case, big enough to be a .45. Her glasses were in her saddlebags, but when she held the yellow-brass case at just the right angle and distance, she could make out what Jack always called the “head stamp,” and it read “FC.”
 

Jack used commercially available ammunition from the period for some of his target practice, but refused to use anything but the Federal Cartridge ammunition in his special Colt, or any revolver he might carry for defense.
 

Jack had been shooting here, and had been well enough afterward to empty the spent cases from the revolver after he was through. Her heart leapt, but she’d always felt that she should have been born in Missouri rather than Illinois—she’d believe that Jack wasn’t the body under the blanket when she confirmed the fact with her own eyes.
 

Dropping the empty case back into the mud, she walked toward the body. Just to be safe, she kicked the body in the side, where the hip would be. There was no movement. Again, she kicked it, in the ribs. Nothing.
 

Looking over her shoulder, glancing all about her, Ellen turned her eyes to the blanket-covered form and tugged the rough gray fabric from the face and downward.
 

“Oh, shit,” Ellen gasped. It was the face of Titus Blake, blue veins tracing a map across gray skin, eyelids rolled back, eyes staring. She drew the blanket downward. Blake’s torso was heavily blood spattered, the blood caked and brown. He’d been shot, at least twice, a careful inspection for additional wounds not something in which she had any interest.
 

The man leading the riderless horse was her husband; and, although she couldn’t be certain, Ellen would have laid odds, whatever the reason, that the bullets inside Titus Blake had traveled down the barrel of one of Jack’s Colts.
 

Pulling the blanket up, tucking it around the dead man as securely as she could, Ellen Naile took a deep breath.
 

Jack and Lizzie were the religious ones of the family, but she shot a glance heavenward before grabbing the reins of her horse and holstering her revolver.
 

Helen Bledsoe, a heavy rag tied over her face, obscuring her eyes and mouth, visibly shivered. She was bound around her upper body and legs with—Jack Naile focused the binoculars more precisely—barbed wire. Her filthy, tattered dress was everywhere splotched with blood, some of it clearly dried, some of it obviously fresh.
 

The eight men who had set their midday camp in the cratered out depression of gravel and dirt, a poorly made fire at its center, were drifting up into the higher surrounding rocks, leading their horses, the cinches loose. Some of the men held their saddle carbines cradled in their elbows or swinging at the end of an outstretched arm.
 

The Bledsoe girl, Jack thought, was clearly the pathetic cheese in the mousetrap.
 

The plan, apparently, had been for Blake to lead Jack into the killing ground, Helen Bledsoe’s plight so intentionally and obviously tragic as to force anyone with the slightest modicum of human compassion to fling caution to the winds in an attempt to aid her. Blake would likely have declared, “Jack—get her and I’ll cover you,” or something to that effect.
 

Jack was not short on compassion, but neither would getting himself killed help Helen.
 

From his observation point well over two hundred yards out at the height of a rocky defile, he meticulously noted the position of each of the eight would-be ambushers. He waited and waited some more.
 

An hour passed by the face of his leather-cased Rolex, then another and half of a third. The eight men were already shifting uncomfortably. At least two of them had dug cat holes to urinate. One man was nursing a pint bottle of whiskey. Still another had set down his rifle, turned his back on the scene below and pulled the ragged brim of his high-crowned tan hat low over his eyes, as if sleeping.
 

Jack had written countless times of stealthy heroes creeping up noiselessly on dull-witted but nevertheless dangerous sentries, dispatching them coolly with the thrust of a knife or a deftly placed karate blow. He had never done anything like that in reality. “First time for mostly everything,” Jack reminded himself ruefully and half aloud. He left his vantage point in the rocks and started toward the horses, another hundred yards back.
 

Ellen remembered John Wayne’s character in The Searchers admonishing Jeffrey Hunter to rest his horse rather than ride it into the ground in what would prove a fruitless attempt to intervene against a Comanche murder raid. “Right, Duke,” she murmured as she reined in and slipped down from the saddle. Her horse needed rest, and, if it gave out, she might never reach her husband before he rendezvoused with whatever danger lay ahead of him. She tied the horse, loosened its saddle, got its muzzle into the feed bag. Sitting down on a flat rock, Ellen ate the second half of the sandwich from earlier, the bread not so soggy tasting this time. She wished, however, that she had a cigarette instead.