TROUBLE IN AN HOURGLASS
JODY LYNN NYE
They called her Trouble, because that suited her so much better than Kerrilynn, which was her real name. We all glanced over as she sashayed into her family’s saloon that Tuesday morning wearing a black corset so tight that you could put your two hands around her waist and still have room to lace your fingertips together. She looked like an hourglass, with plenty of sand on the top and enough on the bottom to look interesting. Though you’d better not take an interest, unless you wanted to find out what kind of Trouble she was. No matter how long a man had been out working his claim outside of Center City and would have fallen in love with a half-pretty mule, let alone a truly lovely girl of nineteen with a peach-skin complexion, cascading golden hair and bright blue eyes, it wasn’t worth it.
We stared down into our drinks on the battered wooden card table until she pouted and left the room again. I know I heaved a sigh of relief. I’d been the target many times when Trouble wanted to show off.
Her ma, Jo, ran the saloon, because her pa was no use at all, unless you count amusement value, that is. Denton Kuhn had a brain the size of the Rocky Mountains, and common sense so small you could fit it in a thimble. He was always spouting ideas that sounded like he was drunk off his ass, but if you sniffed his breath you never got a whiff of alcohol. No, his delusions were purely a function of his own mind. Nolan and Mick, their two sons, were nice, normal boys, interested in raising hell and chasing girls. Trouble took after her daddy. She had all the same pie-in-the-sky ideas he did, but less patience, so she was always jumping the gun when she ought to have waited a mite. We were less afraid of the shotgun Jo kept under the bar than we were of Trouble gettin’ enthusiastic about something.
“Three dollars,” I said, figuring the coast was clear. I had three sevens.
“Raise you two,” Dustbowl Bob MacNair said, pushing two silver disks into the middle of the table.
“Uh-oh,” Big Mike Simpson muttered, glancing up in alarm. “Save yourself, Duncan Wrayburn.”
It was too late. Two hands plunked down on my shoulders, and a cascade of sweet-smelling red-gold hair poured down alongside my ear.
“How’d you think I look?” Trouble asked. She wriggled into view so I could take in the corset at eye level.
“Uh, kind of nice,” I said. It was true, but as noncommittal as I could make it. Her touch was making my blood percolate.
“Got somethin’ I want to show you, Duncan.”
“Thanks, Kerrilynn, but maybe later.” I gestured at my cards. “We got this game goin’ on, and I stand to win enough to reshoe my horse.”
“Yeah,” George Simon said, tryin’ to save my bacon. “He’s the big winner so far. We got to have a chance to get it all back, Tr— I mean, Miss Kerrilynn.”
“Oh, you’ll be able to take it off him later,” Trouble said. She put her shoulder under my arm and heaved. It didn’t matter that I was somewhat over six feet and muscled enough to break horses. She was strong for a girl. My chair groaned as it slid backward on the board floor. I had no choice but to go with it. I looked sadly at my three sevens as I laid them face down. Big Mike gathered them up without turning them up, which saved my feelings a little. I had no time to think any more about it. Trouble hauled me out the door and around the back of the saloon, down the short path to the little cabin that her daddy called his lab-or-a-tory.
“You gotta look at this, Duncan,” Trouble said, pushing the door open and shoving me inside. “See what Daddy’s been makin’?”
I looked. At first glance, it seemed to be an elaborate contraption for distilling whiskey, with its floor-to-ceiling coils of copper tubing and glass vats. Then I realized I couldn’t smell no alcohol. The wood-fired boiler in the corner was set up to drive the gears in bronze and copper mechanisms fancier than the engine in Doc Mulligatawny’s new auto-mo-beel. They clacked and turned around the centerpiece of the whole thing: a massive blown-glass bubble that looked like a gigantic timekeeper. A big varnished box with controls on it stood nearby.
There was no sense in me guessing its purpose. I wasn’t no scientist.
“What is it?” I asked.
Trouble put an arm around the narrow center of the huge device and leaned on it as if it was her best girlfriend.
“Ain’t it pretty? It’s Daddy’s time machine!”
“It’s a clock? That why it looks like an hourglass?”
She came over and smacked me one in the chest with the back of her hand. It stung. Like I said, she was strong for a girl.
“No, silly. You use it to travel in time. Backwards and forwards.”
“Why would anyone want to do that?” I asked.
Trouble’s blue eyes brightened.
“Money! All the good silver stakes within forty miles have been found out, but if we go back maybe two years, we can rush in and file a claim on the good ones before the prospectors do. Then we’d be rich!”
I shook my head.
“That ain’t ethical, Kerrilynn,” I said. “Preacher Dryhew would tell you that on a Sunday. That’d be robbin’ the people who did all the work findin’ them in the first place.”
“Oh.” Her pretty brow wrinkled. “Guess it ain’t ethical. It was a good idea, wasn’t it?” She wasn’t bad, but her mind ran too far ahead sometimes before her tiny lick of common sense rescued her.
“Kind of. It’d save a lot of trouble, but not our souls.” I glanced around, hoping Denton Kuhn could put his firebrand daughter under control. “Where’s your pa?”
She shrugged, making her bosom bound up and down in a distracting fashion. “Don’t know. When I found the gears turning like that, I thought he might have taken a little trip in time. He’ll be back. He always is. Do you want to try out the machine? We can go back and move Richard McGreevey’s gang’s horses out from in front of the bank so when he robbed it last year, they wouldn’t be there. That would be ethical.”
“But they were there, Kerrilynn,” I pointed out, trying to keep things reasonable. I looked around nervously. To mention McGreevey’s name was like calling the devil. I half expected to see him there leering at us from the corner. Besides, I was nowhere near convinced that Denton Kuhn’s invention would work. I didn’t want to end up in the middle of Si-beeria or the Sahara desert in case it mistook time for distance. I had a herd to maintain and a blacksmith bill to pay.
“Well…”
I saw that look in her eye. “And don’t you go messing with it neither, Kerrilynn!”
Trouble pouted, puffing up that pretty little lower lip of hers.
“Oh, all right, Duncan Wrayburn! I’ll leave it be. For now.”
Not completely convinced, I pulled her outside and shut the door. Out of sight, out of mind, like my grandpappy used to say.
I went back to the game. While I was gone, Big Mike lost five dollars to Dustbowl Bob, and he was sore about it. I was just in time to keep them from getting into it right in the middle of the floor. Behind me, Kerrilynn had taken her ma’s place behind the bar. While she poured drinks, she chattered on about her pa’s inventions. The stories were always good telling, because almost all of his creations had gone wrong somehow.
“…That so, Miss Kerrilynn?” a gruff voice asked. I took a peek back over my shoulder. Vince Slocum had one elbow on the polished rail of the bar. Almost everyone in town was afraid of him but her. The sheriff suspected he was part of McGreevey’s gang, but couldn’t prove it, because all the men had dressed up like scarecrows to rob the bank. The horses they’d ridden were stolen, and found wandering around in Peter Hickock’s meadow afterward. Kerrilynn’s idea of moving them before the men could make their getaway was a good one, if only it had happened like that. Slocum had been in the corner talking quiet-like with Ned Pearson, the clerk from the telegraph office. Pearson had slipped out a little while ago. Slocum clapped down his shot glass. “I’ll be going now.”
“That’s two dollars, Mr. Slocum,” Kerrilynn said brightly.
To my surprise, I heard the clatter of coins. He paid. Probably he thought it was bad luck to cheat someone who had been touched by the fairies. All of us at the poker table listened to the thumping of his boots across the floor and the creak of the door hinges, not looking up from our cards. He’d once shot a man for staring at him.
After a few more rounds, George Simon put his hands on the table.
“I got to get back,” he said, standing up and nodding toward the big clock on the wall. The hands said 11:30. “I promised my wife I’d get back before dinner.” He gathered up his stakes. He had most of our money. The rest of us scooped what was left into our pokes. I had managed to win four dollars. Not enough for my purposes, but on the way there. I dropped a silver dollar on the bar for taking up a chair all morning long. Jo came over to smile at me. She pocketed the tip.
“Where’d Trouble go?” I asked.
“Probably out back,” Jo said, with a rueful smile. She knew her daughter all too well.
“Then I’m goin’ out the front,” I said.
I shoved open the louvered double doors and strode out into the sunlight. I’d have to walk home because of my horse, but it was a nice day for a walk.
“Duncan?” Trouble’s voice came to me from the left. I stiffened, worrying what she wanted. But for a change, it sounded kind of quavery and nervous, not at all like the girl with all the confidence in the world. Warily, I turned.
On the wooden sidewalk just at the edge of the saloon wall, Trouble stood with her hands in the air. An arm in a black leather sleeve encircled her tiny corseted waist. Trouble looked as if she had two heads. One of them was hers, golden hair, big scared eyes, and all. The other belonged to a man with a big, black moustache and crazy, cold green eyes. I knew that face. It was on wanted posters nailed up in the saloon and down on the front wall of the sheriff’s department and the telegraph office. He had a gun pointed at Trouble’s temple. My heart sank to my boots.
“Richard McGreevey,” I whispered.
“You come here, Duncan Wrayburn,” he said, real low and menacing-like. “I don’t want to have to put a bullet through this girl’s pretty head right here. Put your gun down on the bench, and come over slow and easy.”
“Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir.”
I eased the heavy Colt Peacemaker out of my holster and set it down, then edged toward him with my hands up. He gestured with his pistol.
“Walk ahead of me. Keep your hands in the air!”
I had no choice but to do what he said. I kept glancing back over my shoulder to make sure Trouble was all right. Her big, blue eyes were wide with fear.
“Where we going, sir?” I asked, through a dry throat.
“Denton Kuhn’s shack. Just walk!”
We stepped off the sidewalk onto the dry dirt and sagebrush. As we came around the corner, Vince Slocum came alongside us, looking pleased with himself. I looked at the rear door of the saloon. I didn’t know whether to hope Jo Kuhn would come out or not. She was a good aim with that shotgun she kept under the bar, but she wouldn’t have it with her if she was just throwing out dishwater.
At the door to the shed, McGreevey waved us on in. We stood at the side of the room with our hands up while he looked over Trouble’s pa’s latest invention.
“Vince here said you told him it was a time machine,” he snarled at Trouble.
She tossed her head. “I say a lot of things.”
I groaned softly to myself. McGreevey was a dangerous man. Now was not the time for her to show some sass!
“He said you can make it work.”
“Maybe so,” Trouble allowed. “Maybe not. Daddy does new things to it all the time. He might have it set up different than it was this morning. I ain’t seen him since breakfast.”
McGreevey cocked his gun and pointed it at her.
“Make it work, or I’ll blow a hole in you.”
“Now, look here, McGreevey,” I said, starting forward, “leave the girl alone! She hasn’t got no sense. You know that.”
Slocum smacked me across the face with his pistol. It hurt, but I stood my ground.
“If you shoot me, I can’t make it work,” Trouble said.
McGreevey turned the black eye of the pistol toward me.
“Then I’ll shoot him.”
Trouble’s mouth opened into a little O, but nothing came out. She bustled over to the box at the side of the hourglass and started fussing with the ivory and brass dials and levers embedded in it. Since none of us could figure out what she was doing, there was no way to know if she was doing it right.
“When do you want to go?” she asked. McGreevey pulled his fob watch out of his vest pocket.
“Nine this morning,” he said. “Yeah, that ought to do it.”
Trouble took hold of a big crank that was on the side of the box and wound it three times. The gears attached to the glass bubble let out a big moan, and the bubble itself opened up like a book. Trouble pointed at it.
“There you go,” she said. “Step in, and the next thing you know, it’ll be nine o’clock again.”
“Oh, no,” McGreevey said. “We ain’t getting in there so you can send me back to Bible times. You’re coming with me! Move it!”
He gestured with the gun.
“But there ain’t room enough in there for all of us!” I protested.
It didn’t matter. Samuel Colt’s cold steel did the persuadin’ for him. Trouble twisted a dial on the box, then got in the glass bubble and pressed as tight against the rear of it as she could. We piled in after her. I had to hold one arm straight up in the air and the other down across my back as the two gunslingers pressed in and the hourglass closed. It was a real tight fit.
“Nothin’s happenin’!” Slocum snarled.
Then, suddenly, the glass seemed to shrink around us, crushing us close together. The small enclosure stank of Slocum’s body odor, McGreevey’s expensive cologne, and my nervous sweat, tempered with the clean smell of lavender soap from Trouble. The room outside got real bright until I couldn’t see nothing but pure white light. My guts felt like they were being crushed by Trouble’s corset. I tried to yell, but I had no breath in my body. Just when I thought my stomach was going to come out past my spine, the squeezing stopped. The bubble grew back to its normal size, and split open.
Slocum jumped out and looked around.
“It’s a fake!” he bellowed. “Nothin’ changed!”
I pointed out the window.
“Look at the sky,” I said. “The sun’s back in the east.”
“Well, God in His Heaven,” McGreevey said, tilting his hat back with the barrel of his gun. “All right, you two. Move out!”
“You got what you wanted,” I said. “Why don’t you just let us go?”
“Because I ain’t got what I wanted yet,” McGreevey said, curling his lip. “Not another word!”
The men made us mount up on their horses ahead of them, and whipped them up with the end of their reins.
We rode all the way out of town, and into an arroyo choked with sagebrush several miles outside Center City. I kept my eyes wide open the whole time. Sheriff Ezekiel Parker had gathered us all as a posse at one time, thinking McGreevey’s hideout had to be there somewhere, but we never found it. Now I saw why, but it wasn’t going to do us no good.
A beaten-up, gray-walled cabin huddled against the side of the arroyo. A sunburnt man in dusty leather chaps and long johns open at the neck leaped up from a chair on the porch and ran to take the reins as we swung off the horses. Slocum pushed us both into the house.
Inside, it was as smoky as the inside of a chimney. Eight or nine men sat around a table, drinking from a shared jug and puffing on cigars while they played cards. When the boss stalked in, they all jumped to their feet.
Slocum pushed us toward a couple of the men.
“Tie ’em up,” he said.
“You get your hands off me!” Trouble protested. I did my best to defend her. Both of us kicked and struggled, but we were outnumbered. They trussed us up like pigs for the spit with a couple of old ropes and then dropped us into a corner.
“Didn’t you just leave, boss?” one of the men asked. “You were gonna stake out the Wells-Fargo gold shipment.”
“I been gone for hours,” McGreevey said. “Gather around, boys. You got to hear this. Vince?”
“I been talking to Ned Pearson,” Slocum said, eager to please McGreevey like a schoolboy. “The Wells Fargo gold is comin’ in by the noon stagecoach.”
“Why, that dirty dog!” Trouble exclaimed. “Those messages are confidential!”
McGreevey tipped his hat to her.
“That kind of language is unbecomin’ to a lovely lady like you, Miss Kerrilynn. I’d be obliged if you would shut the heck up.”
The air of menace in his voice was enough to silence even Trouble. She clapped her mouth closed, but she kept glarin’ at him.
“The sheriff’ll already know about that,” a gap-toothed man with stringy red hair said. “He’ll be waitin’.”
“No, he won’t, Carson,” Slocum said, with a broad grin. “He won’t hear it until ten o’clock, and then he’ll be staying close to town, waiting to escort it through. Pearson said that the coach is comin’ in by way of the north road past the Sioux village. It ought to be passing there in about”—he glanced at his pocket watch—“maybe an hour. We got time to get there and hide out in the valley at the bottom of the hill and rob the coach long before it ever gets to Center City.”
“How can you be here when you were there?” Carson asked, frowning. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“Ask Denton Kuhn—later!” McGreevey laughed. “Come on, boys! Let’s ride out!”
The men scrambled for their hats and gun belts, and lit out, leaving us behind. I waited until the sound of hoofbeats receded in the distance, then struggled against my bonds.
“We got to get to town and warn everyone,” I said. “Can you cut me loose?”
Trouble looked abashed. She glanced down at her tight bodice.
“Got none of my tools,” she said. “Ma don’t like it when I do experiments in the bar.”
I wriggled until I had my back to her, roughing my face on the splintering boards of the wall.
“See if you can undo my bonds, and I’ll untie yours,” I said. My fingers poked and prodded at the knots around her slim wrists. Frustration made me impatient as I failed to undo even a single one. She didn’t have much more luck.
But we didn’t have to. Just at that moment, Denton Kuhn came barreling into the cavern and scooped up his daughter.
“You all right, honey?” he asked, cutting her free with a sweep of a wickedly sharp Bowie knife. He bent to sever my ropes, too. I stood up and rubbed my hands, marveling as Sheriff Parker and a dozen men, including George Simon and Dustbowl Bob, armed to the teeth, streamed into the little house and hid themselves behind the battered furniture. I hadn’t even heard them arrive. Trouble gave her pa a kiss on the cheek.
“I’m fine, Daddy,” she said, beaming, back to her bubbly self in a heartbeat. “You found us!”
Denton Kuhn looked at his own pocket watch, a confusing contraption cased in gold and blue glass.
“And right on time,” he said. “Ten eighteen on the stump.”
“You sure about all this, Denton?” the sheriff asked, glancing out the cracked window. He was a big man with graying temples in his slicked-back brown hair and the beginning of a pot belly. “Because I’m gonna look like a colossal fool if you’re wrong.”
“I’m not,” Denton said. He looked a lot like his daughter, tall and slim, with big, blue eyes, a shock of graying blond hair and a faraway look in his eyes. “Not if Duncan and Kerrilynn are right.”
I must have gawked at him like a gaffed fish.
“About what?” I asked.
“About the stagecoach robbery,” the sheriff said, turning to peer at me like some mu-see-um exhibit. “You two said nobody was hurt, right?”
I had no idea what they were talking about, but Trouble grinned suddenly.
“We didn’t see it yet,” she said. “But we will. I’m sure nobody gets hurt. Because I just said so.”
“Well, all right,” Sheriff Parker allowed, still looking wary. “We’ll wait until noon and not a minute more.”
“You won’t have to,” Denton Kuhn said. “Kerrilynn’s good about remembering the time. They’re gonna rob the coach at eleven-fifteen. They’ll be back here at twelve.”
Nervously, we settled down to wait. Nobody said a word. I had a million questions rumbling around in my head like startled cattle, and it looked like the sheriff had the same. We all got a little thirsty. I eyed the jug on the table but didn’t dare try the gang’s moonshine.
It was by the tick of the sheriff’s watch at the stroke of noon that we heard the thud of hoofbeats and the jingle of saddle tack coming back into the narrow valley. Every one of us crouched down below the level of the windows, guns at the ready.
McGreevey’s men rode up to the house and swung off their horses, cackling and laughing. Two of ’em held small wooden chests with the Wells Fargo insignia painted on them. The boxes looked pretty heavy. Sheriff Parker breathed out sharpish, and Denton Kuhn grinned.
“Bring those in here, and we’ll break open the locks!” McGreevey shouted, his teeth bright under his thick black mustache. He pushed back his hat and opened the door.
We let them all get a foot inside before the sheriff stood up and pointed his twin Colts at them.
“You just drop your guns right this second, Richard McGreevey,” the sheriff said. “We finally caught you. I been waiting a long time to get hard evidence against you and your gang. You’re under arrest.”
McGreevey’s usual air of suave superiority deserted him, and he gawked at us like a shocked chicken.
“Boys!” he yelled, going for his gun.
“She told ’em!” Slocum said, pointing at Trouble. “She knew!” McGreevey turned his gun on her. The other men started firing at us. Denton Kuhn pulled his daughter down behind a table.
My hand went for my holster. Automatically, I drew my pistol and pulled the trigger before he could get off a shot. At the same time, I remembered that the gun in my hand was back on the bench outside the saloon. How could it be here, too? I thought I had felt it settle on my hip just a moment before I pulled it. How?
I didn’t have time to puzzle it out then. My slug winged McGreevey’s arm. His shot hit the wall over our heads, and the gun fell from his bleeding fingertips. The sheriff put a bullet in his leg. McGreevey went down. Vince Slocum raised his rifle to blast through the table where Trouble was hiding. Diving for cover behind a chair, I fanned the hammer and put a slug into his trigger hand. He bellowed in pain. The shot went wild.
The rest of the posse came out from around the back of the house, drawing a bead on the others who hadn’t come in yet. The firefight was short. McGreevey’s band was far outnumbered by the posse. The boss and his men held their hands up in the air. I emerged from my hiding place, cocking my pistol. Firing on an unarmed girl got my blood boiling!
“Don’t kill any of ’em, Wrayburn,” the sheriff said, waving me back. “Justice is waiting for these villains.”
* * *
“Been waitin’ for a chance to take this gang down,” Parker told us with some satisfaction, as we rode back into town ahead of the wagon the posse had thoughtfully brought along with them to carry the McGreevey gang. People turned out from the general store, the barber shop and the telegraph office to watch the procession. “There’s a reward waiting for the two of you. About enough to pay for that reshoeing you need, Duncan. And a bunch more.”
“How’d you know about that?” I asked. The sheriff gave me another one of those real strange looks.
“You just told me, about half an hour before we rode out to McGreevey’s cabin,” he said. “Just one thing I can’t figure: How’d you get tied up between then and now?”
“It wasn’t between then and now,” Trouble said, with a knowing look. She rode ahead of me on the saddle on McGreevey’s own horse, with one of my arms around her little waist. “It’s between now and then. You’ll see. It’s all scientific and stuff.”
The sheriff shook his head. If he wasn’t used to the Kuhns by now, he’d never be.
“Well, come on down to my office, and I’ll give you the money, soon as I get these boys locked up. A hundred dollars in gold.”
“Yahoo!” I yelled, overwhelmed with joy. I could have done cartwheels down the main street. “See, Tr—I mean, Kerrilynn. We struck gold, and we didn’t have to sneak on nobody else’s claim to do it. Let’s go claim it.”
“We can’t do it right now,” Trouble said, putting her hand on my arm. She smiled at Parker. “We’ll be back, Sheriff.”
She swung off and headed down toward the saloon.
“Why can’t we go get it now?” I asked, trailing after her like a calf following its mother. “And where did my gun come from? I know I left it on the bench!”
“I put it there,” she said. “I just came in and put it back in your holster.” She preened, putting her hands on her waist and twisted this way and that in a fashion that made my nerves fizz like a gasogene. “You never told me how good I looked from behind in my new corset.”
I shook my head to clear the distraction. “How could you bring me my gun? You were there in the shack with me!”
“I won’t be later,” she said. “I’ll get it then.”
“All this talk of thens and nows is getting me confused, Kerrilynn,” I said. I pulled away and headed for the saloon door. “I need to go get me a drink. It won’t take but a moment.”
“You can’t do that,” Trouble said. She took my hand and hauled me back to her pa’s lab-or-a-tory. I kept forgetting how strong she was. “Your mind has to be clear, so you’re a good witness. We got to go see the robbery and tell Daddy where the hideout is. We got to get to the pass below the Sioux village first so we have time to hide before McGreevey gets there.”
She set the gears and pushed me into the time machine. After getting tied up and shot at, my stomach wasn’t happy to have another go at being squeezed out of my ribs.
“I’m gonna lose my breakfast!” I shouted.
“I’ll make you lunch,” Trouble promised. “Hang on!”
The light was coming at an angle from the east when we squeezed out of the hourglass. I gasped for a moment with my hands on my knees, until Trouble grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the door.
“Hurry up!” she said. “It’s about nine-thirty now. Daddy!”
Just as we were opening the door, Denton Kuhn was reaching for the handle to come in. His eyes widened.
“Have you been touching the time carrier, Kerrilynn? Honey, I told you not to play with that! It’s serious.”
Trouble was undeterred. “Got somethin’ more serious, Daddy,” she said.
She explained about the hideout and where it was, and all about the robbery that was going to come. It was real strange to me, since I saw him coming to our rescue only a short time ago. But Denton Kuhn was one of the smartest men I ever knew, and it took him a far shorter time to put the facts straight in his mind than it was taking me.
He looked at his pocket watch.
“Well, you’ve got things going on all over the place, baby girl, but I think you’re putting it in the right order,” he said. “Half past nine. I’d better go back to about eight o’clock and tell the sheriff. It’ll take time to get a posse together and put it in position.” He shook his head. “You’re a bunch of trouble, Kerrilynn, but you’re a good girl. See you in a while, then.” He set the controls, dove into the hourglass and vanished.
I stood, staring at the machine in wonder. I’d never seen anyone else use the time machine. The big glass bubble kind of spun him into a beam of light, then swallowed him up. No wonder I felt like I’d been ground up and spat out. I was still convincing my innards to stay where they belonged.
“Come on, Duncan Wrayburn,” Kerrilynn said, putting out her hand for mine. “Let’s go watch us a stagecoach robbery. I bet it’ll be the most exciting thing you ever see.”
“Nothing compares with you, Trouble,” I said, but I gave her my hand.