The Time-Traveling Outlaw (17 page)

Sturgess dropped the reins and began to walk. The crowd parted to let him pass.

Sally looked up into Logan’s face. “What just happened?” she asked.

“Good people just stood up against bad,” Logan said. “And they won.” He looked down the road at Sturgess’s slumped back as he walked away.

“What about those explosions?” Sally said. “How did you—”

“After they took you, I paid a visit to the tin mine on the edge of town,” Logan said. “I stole a wagon full of dynamite. Never worked with it before, but I do know explosives. I also robbed all the men working there, but all I took were their pocket watches.”

Sally looked confused. “I don’t understand.”

“Timing mechanisms,” the man with the moustache said. He stepped up and put out his hand to Logan. “I’m Emile Gleeson.”

Logan shook his hand. “Doc Gleeson,” he said. “Nice to meet you. And yeah, that’s right. It’s pretty easy to set up a simple timer with a pocket watch. You just attach the wires to the watch hands, and when they cross, they close the circuit.”

“Clever,” said a voice from behind. Logan turned and there was Gus Popper, the rifle now slung under his arm. He extended the other to shake Logan’s hand. 

“Thanks for saving my life,” Logan said. 

“Don't mentioned it," Gus said. "I’d say the whole town owes you a thanks. You and Sally.”

Someone was walking towards them, a lanky redhead with a shotgun in his hands. 

“Hello, Tommy,” Sally said. “Sorry to say, but Sheriff Hoskins is inside.” She pointed up the steps. “I’m afraid he’s dead.”

A murmur rose up in the crowd.

Tommy nodded, a grim look on his face. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. He raised his voice. “You all go back home and go to bed. We’ll get this mess sorted out.”

The crowd began to disperse. Tommy looked at Sally and Logan. “You two better get going as well.”

“Will you be staying in Lockdale?” Doc Gleeson asked Logan.

“I think so,” Logan said, looking at Sally. “I’m beginning to like it here.”

Sally leaned in to kiss him. “Let’s go home.”

Logan took Sturgess’s horse, while Sally took Winston’s. They rode out of town, headed for her ranch, watching as the smoke billowed up from the explosions. 

Logan had blown up the four cornerstones of the Sturgess empire in Lockdale: the lumber depot, the cotton mill, the granary, and the meat packing plant. None of the buildings were occupied that late at night, and they were all too far from any other buildings for fire to spread. 

As if to alleviate any concerns of fire, rain began to fall. Logan and Sally looked at each other, the first heavy drops pelting down on them. They laughed.

“That was damned foolish,” she said. “What you did back there.”

“I didn’t have many options left,” he said. “And I had to come for you.”

“Sturgess threatened to make me into a whore,” she said. She looked at him, waiting to see what he’d say. There was no good response to that, at least she thought. But he surprised her.

“Well, ma’am,” he said. “I’d say the whoring industry suffered a great loss today. But one man's loss is another man’s gain, wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s might presumptuous of you, Mister Carver.”

“I beg your forgiveness,” he said. “It was meant as a compliment.”

They laughed again. The rain began to fall harder, so they rode on in silence, getting soaked on the way back home. A flash of lightning lit up the road ahead, closely followed by the clap of thunder. 

When they turned off the main road to the little one that ran to her house, the rain had started to subside.

Logan spoke up. “Oh, sorry to say, but your barn burned down. Don’t worry, though. Maisy made it out.”

They saw the old girl wandering around in front of the house, as if waiting for them to return. The barn was a pile of black ash, now black slush after the rain.

“Seems a fair trade,” Sally said. “You for the barn.”

“I’ll build you another one,” he said. “I don’t really know how, but I’m a quick learner.”

“I bet you are.”

They rode down to the house and dismounted, taking the saddles off the horses. There wasn’t a proper place to stable them, and it didn’t seem right to tie them up all night, so they left them be. If they ran off, so be it. 

They went inside the house, Sally first, followed by Logan. Once inside, she turned to face him, pulling her wet blouse up over her head. Logan took her in his arms and kissed her so hard his hat fell off. She tasted the rain on his lips, felt the wet press of his sopping clothes against her bare chest.

She reached up between them and grabbed his shirt, pulling it open and ripping the buttons off. They clattered the floor. She wanted to feel his bare chest on hers. She wanted to drink him in.

He moved his lips down to her throat, licking the rain from her as she pulled his shirt all the way off. She went to work on his jeans next, working the buttons free. He did his part, pulling at her skirt and working it loose enough to drop to the floor. She wore bloomers underneath her skirt, soaked through, so that when Logan tugged hard at them, they fell down around her ankles with a soggy thump. 

He kicked off his boots as she began to work his jeans down around his hips, his cock springing free. 

Soon they were both naked, standing in the middle of the dark kitchen, licking the rain from each other’s bodies. 

Logan crouched down to Sally’s breasts, sucking them one at a time as he cupped her wet ass in both hands. She stroked his wet hair, relishing the sensation of his lips on her bare skin, now moving to her nipple. He sucked the rain from one nipple, then moved to the other. 

She reached down and felt for his manhood, already stiff as a board. She took hold of it in her hand, warm and wet. 

“I want this inside me now,” she said.

“What my Sally wants,” he said, lifting her up and carrying her to the wall, “my Sally gets.” 

He pushed her against the wall, grabbing himself and guiding it inside her. She spread her legs to welcome him, feeling the knob of his head push against her wet lips. 

She wrapped her arms around his neck, lowering her head over his, dripping rain on top of him as he pushed inside her.

Sally let out a cry. God, it felt so good. This is what ancient women must have felt when their men came home from war, she thought. Only this time, they had both gone to war, and escaped death by the narrowest of margins. That had heightened their lust to a razor's edge, and their blood simmered as they clutched one another.

She took him into her, and he slid easily. She felt as wet down there as she’d ever been. He pushed his chest against hers, and she felt her hardened nipples, sensitive against the soft, wet hair of his chest.

“Fuck me, Logan,” she whispered in his ear, before biting the lobe.

By way of an answer, he thrust himself up and deep inside her. 

She let out another cry, this one of surprise and delight. He thrust so hard into her he nearly knocked the breath out of her.

She wrapped her legs around him as he pulled halfway out, then plunged into her again. His head was between her breasts now, his wet hair rubbing against her breastbone.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh dammit, yes!”

He pulled and thrust, jamming himself inside her roughly. This was no soft, gentle act of lovemaking. This was the carnal release of a man and a woman who weren’t sure they’d still be alive only hours before. She bucked him like a wild bull, riding his cock with reckless abandon. Sally felt as if she was fucking him as much as he was fucking her. 

They came together, clutching each other as if each were drowning, their bodies locked in a rictus of pure ecstasy. Logan buried his head deeper into her bosom, squeezing her ass as a warm bloom of his seed plumed into her. Sally threw her head back and screamed at the sky, squeezing her eyes shut so hard tears dripped out of each corner, mingling with the rain on her skin.

He pulled out of her, lowering her down from where she had been pressed against the wall above him.  

He leaned in and kissed her deeply, cupping her jaws in his palms. She ran her fingers across his back, kissing him back fiercely. Then they pulled away from each other, looking into each other’s wild eyes.

“I love you, Sally Macintosh,” he said.

“And I love you,” she said.

She moved close to him again, and he hoisted her up once more, this time to carry her to bed.

Sally woke the next morning, her arm and leg draped over Logan’s sleeping body. He was snoring softly. The sheets were damp from the rain off their bodies, but Sally didn’t care. She was as happy as she thought she’d ever been.

The early morning sunlight prismed through drops on the window, making little rainbows on the far wall. She felt like a completely new woman. She’d been tied in that goddamn chair for who knew how long, then she’d been set free, and the ride through the rain followed by a night of lovemaking made her feel rejuvenated and whole again.

She climbed out of bed, careful not to wake Logan. She pulled a dry nightgown over her head and tugged on her boots. Then she walked into the kitchen and took the broom from the corner and headed outside.

She smelled the wet dirt from last night’s rain, a good smell. Water still clung to the grass and the weeds. She glanced over at the pile of wet ash that used to be the barn, and as she did, she caught motion out of the corner of her eye.

Maisy was trotting across the field toward the house. 

“Aww, come here girl,” Sally said, and Maisy came straight to her. Sally hugged the old horse, stroking her nose. “Poor girl,” Sally said. “You spent the night out there all by yourself? Let me get you fixed up.”

She went back inside, where she’d kept some of the feed. She spent the next half hour tending to the horses, making sure they were watered and fed.

Then she took the broom from where she left it on the porch and walked to the ruins of the barn. The box had been on the far side of the barn. She walked across the black mud, mushing under her boots. Then she began to poke the handle of the broom down into the ash, flipping wet chunks of it aside. It took her another fifteen minutes or so, but finally the wood of the broom clanked into something solid.

She crouched down and dug the box up, turning her hands black. It looked intact. The latch still worked, so she thumbed it and flipped the box open. Inside were papers, the deed to the land among them. And sitting on top was the silver pocket watch Logan had brought across time on his last journey.

“You found it,” he said.

She jumped, let out a little laugh, then looked over her shoulder. 

He stood there in rumpled jeans and a cotton shirt, his boots blackened by the ash.

He’d talked about going back, but she didn’t want him to. She didn’t quite know what she had intended to do this morning. Part of her was hoping the watch had been destroyed, that he wouldn’t be able to return to the future. Another part of her thought to get rid of it and tell him it had been destroyed. That would have been no way to start their life together, with a lie. But they wouldn’t have a life together if he left and never came back.

But he had spared her having to make that decision.

“Yes,” she said. “I guess this old box did its job.”

“You’re worried I won’t come back,” he said. He was no fool, and neither was she. Sally knew his intention wasn’t just to save the scientist and his daughter. He had a wife there, one he loved very much. And if what he had done here had saved her life and made their marriage possible again, then what use would he have for some widowed woman far in the past?

“The thought had crossed my mind,” she said, looking down at the watch. He knelt and picked it up, and they stood together, looking into each other’s eyes. “The thing is,” she said, “I don’t even understand how you’d get back. Didn’t you say they needed this watch to track you?”

He slid the watch into the pocket of her nightgown and took her hands in his. “Well,” he said. “I reckon the only way my plan works is if you’ll marry me, have my children, and live a long life together here with me.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, flustered. “I mean, I want that. But I don’t see how—”

“If I’m right, and I altered the future by what we did, then I think, I hope, that a lot of things will be different. But a man named Sam Tidwell is still going to be born. He’s still going to invent time travel. And he’s still going to send me back to you. He has to, because it already happened, right?”

She had never tried to untangle the intricacies of moving about through time. Since Logan Carver had entered her life, she hadn’t had much time to think straight about anything.

“I suppose so,” she said cautiously.

“So for that to happen,” Logan said, pointing at her pocket, “that watch has to make it into Sam’s hands at some point in the future. Over a hundred and fifty years into the future. I could try to leave it somewhere for him, bury it in a box somewhere. But then I’d need to send him a message as well. I figure there’s an easier way.”

He looked at her while she worked it out in her head. “Our children,” she whispered. He had mentioned having children with her, but it took her a little time to make the connection.

“Yes,” he said. “We’ll pass that watch down through our family, generation after generation, with explicit instructions to find Sam Tidwell and give him the watch when the right time finally rolls around.”

“This makes me dizzy thinking about it,” Sally said. “You said it was easy to find people in the future. That information was at the tips of your fingers.”

“Yep.”

“But do you think our children…” she paused, swallowing. They were talking about generations of their own kids that hadn’t been born yet, hadn’t even been conceived. Or had they? It was way too early to feel the signs, but she and Logan had made love several times, and some instinct told her something might already have happened. “You think our children will do that? Hand down a watch to their sons and daughters, only to hand it over to some stranger a hundred and fifty years in the future.”

He smiled. “If I’m right,” he said, “they already have.”