Into the Light (33 page)

A small clod of dirt landed on the front of his shirt. He had denim trousers and a blue cotton work shirt on this year, but still.... He brushed the dirt off and frowned at Caleb, who wasn’t impressed.

“Stop daydreaming and pay attention or Jacey will beat you. The victor only gets the spoils if he wins.”

Deborah would be equally generous, win or lose, and Caleb had to know it because Norah would be the same, but he was right. Jacey wasn’t a threat to his father or to Trey yet, but he would be in a few years.

Some of the other shooters were decent. Ascher got better every year, and whoever the strangers were, they wouldn’t have entered if they didn’t think they were better than average shots.

Trey settled down and focused.

Switching off and using his father’s rifle to make his shot at each distance, Jacey made it past 450 yards and accepted Caleb and Trey’s congratulatory hugs and slaps on the shoulder with shy head bobs before jogging off the field. Ascher didn’t miss until 500 yards and was close to ecstatic.

The volunteers had foreseen this year’s distance. They had an elaborate signal system set up with flags so that the men checking the targets and replacing them knew when it was safe to go on the field and could signal hits and misses without anyone having to run back and forth.

Trey and Caleb had expected to be alone on the field past 500 yards, but both the strangers were still with them. The short fellow in the fancy shirt with silky looking fringes hanging from his sleeves carried an 1885 Winchester single-shot and tended to let out loud barks of laughter at times Trey would have preferred quiet.

The redhead in the duster was worse, his breech-loading Remington pointed every which way between shots. Trey only knew of the long-range accuracy of those models by reputation, but he knew they gave one advantage. The Winchester and the Remington together would barely weigh as much as a Sharps Big Fifty.

Duster’s position was to Caleb’s left. Shorty was on Trey’s right. Trey heard Caleb tell Duster to watch where he pointed his rifle, once, twice. The man was a fool. There wouldn’t be a third warning. Trey tried not to imagine what Caleb would do next.

Closing in on 700 yards, the target was no more than a white dot in the distance, and Trey’s pleasure in the contest and the summer day had evaporated into a grim determination to make Duster and Shorty wish they’d stayed home.

They passed 700 yards, and before taking his shot, Duster shrugged out of his coat and managed to shake it out so that it fluttered inches from Caleb’s face just as he squeezed the trigger. On Trey’s right, Shorty’s bark of laughter sounded louder and longer than ever in perfect time with the gesture.

Trey had to wait, drag in several long, calming breaths before taking his own shot. Caleb stood relaxed, and to Trey’s surprise the men down the field signaled all four shots had gone true.

They all set up again, raised their rifles. Something was wrong. After each shot, Trey had been aware of Caleb reloading, his movements mirroring Trey’s own. Not this time. Caleb hadn’t reloaded.

Trey whipped his head around in time to see Caleb flip his rifle, seize the barrel in both hands, and club Duster’s raised rifle into his jaw. The Remington would never be good for anything again. The man would be a long time healing. He fell as if poleaxed and lay still.

“I told you to stop waving things around,” Caleb said, looking down at the unconscious man. “This fellow isn’t going to make the next round,” he called over to the gaping Mayor. “Better get someone to drag him out of the way.”

“You aren’t making the next round either!” Shorty yelled, all but jumping up and down. “You can’t just kill a competitor. What’s wrong with you? Are you crazy? Someone needs to get the police.”

Leaving his rifle waist high but aimed straight ahead, finger on the trigger, Trey swung around toward Shorty. “He had two warnings. I’m giving you one. Shut up.”

Shorty was smarter than Duster. He shut up.

Trey had cotton in his ears to dull the sound of the rifle fire enough to save his hearing, but not so much he couldn’t hear at all. The muffling of sound had helped him tolerate the barking laughter although it still grated. He dug the cotton out now and listened to the Mayor and Caleb behind him. The Mayor sounded shaky, Caleb unconcerned.

“Mr. S-Sutton, I’m s-sorry,” the Mayor stuttered, “but what you did. I do think he tried to cheat, no police — at least I’m not — but I can’t, you know I c-can’t....”

“That’s all right,” Caleb said. “I’d disqualify myself if you didn’t, but next year, instead of telling us about the Declaration of Independence, how about you read some rules about behaving on the firing line. Say it’s for everyone’s safety. This fellow sure would have been safer behaving himself.”

Trey decided Shorty had calmed down enough to be no threat and looked around in time to see Caleb nudge Duster with the toe of his boot. A loud moan proved the man was alive.

Two volunteers carried Duster away. Caleb showed no signs of leaving. He cradled the big buffalo gun across his chest and stood beside the Mayor, unmoving except for a wink at Trey. “I’ll just help the Mayor monitor the rest of this contest. He’s upset.”

Trey almost barked out a laugh as loud as Shorty’s. He moved over to Caleb’s former position, putting more distance between himself and the other man, raised his rifle, drew in a deep breath, let half of it out, and steadied his sights on the minute white dot in the distance.

Shorty was good. Even after the violence and threats, he was good enough he didn’t miss until just short of 800 yards. The problem was Trey missed that shot too. His shoulder ached as viciously as it had last year in spite of the padded vest under his shirt that Deborah had designed for him. The Sharps felt as if it weighed more like sixty pounds than sixteen.

They set up again. Trey’s concentration wavered. He remembered how alone he felt last year, thought about how different things were now. He pictured Deborah in the stands waiting for him, keeping a secret she thought was only hers. How would she react to his winning? To his losing?

The words Caleb had used to lift him out of the chair the final time last year came back to him. Did he want to go down on his belly? He regained focus. They were at the outer limit of the range he could be sure of without a tripod or other support, but the same must be true for Shorty.

The target was as much in his imagination as his sight. Even the muffled sounds around him faded. The world narrowed down to the long corridor of distance between him and the white square of paper, the weight of the rifle, the scent of gun smoke. Shorty’s rifle spoke. Trey hesitated, took another breath, squeezed the trigger gently.

Flags fluttered. Caleb whooped and almost knocked Trey down with a whack on the shoulder. Trey whacked back and gave his own whoop, celebrating the end of it all as much as the victory. Ignoring Shorty, who looked too stunned to notice, Trey shook the Mayor’s hand, thanked the volunteers.

Spectators streamed out of the viewing stand toward them, small in the distance. Trey matched Caleb stride for stride, eager to get back to Deborah. At first he searched in vain for her in the crowd. There. Her dress was pale green, a yellow ribbon fluttered behind her.

Clutching her raised skirt in one hand, holding her hat with the other, she sped toward him, more beautiful than any woman had a right to be.

Trey forgot everything else. The rifle slipped from his hand, and he began to run, awkward at first, then with the same ease he’d once thought gone forever.

He slowed and caught her before they crashed together, lifted her in the air, and kissed her. Right there, in front of family, friends, neighbors, and strangers, Deborah wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back. And when he raised his head, she kissed him again. And she laughed.

T
HE PAPERBACK VERSION
of this book is dedicated to my first readers (beta readers), but since I suspect in an ebook a separate dedication would be overlooked, I’m copying it here.

This book is dedicated to my first readers, who have made my romances better books, and who didn’t fail with this one. Bringing Deborah and her sisters back a second time in
Beautiful Bad Man
was the idea of one reader, which in the end inspired the entire story of
Into the Light
. The idea for the setting of the Afterword in this book came from another first reader.

Thanks, ladies.

That said, more than for my previous romances, my first readers had questions about historical matters this time, so I’m going to enlarge on some of them here. First of all, as to “patent” medicines. Until the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in the U.S. in 1906, anyone could concoct any recipe and sell it as a cure for anything.

These were “patent” medicines, which weren’t patented at all. The name was a holdover from the good old days in England when the King put his seal of approval or patent on certain recipes. And you could buy anything in 1898–1900 America. The medicines almost all had a high alcohol content, but they also often contained narcotics and sometimes contained a dash of a poison like strychnine.

Vendors advertised their cure-alls in wonderful and inventive ways, and small papers like the
Hubbell Herald
relied heavily on advertising revenue from patent medicines. Some of these formulas worked, and some survive today in modified form: Absorbine, Bayer Aspirin, Luden’s Cough Drops, Phillip’s Milk of Magnesia, Vicks Vapo Rub. I’ve used all but one of those (the Absorbine on horses).

It’s also true that quinine did not magically fix up all those who suffered from malarial fevers and that far more men who fought in the Spanish-American War were laid low by fever and disease than bullets. Patent medicines containing quinine and methylene blue did work for some of those men when pure quinine did not. In 1891 Paul Ehrlich proved that methylene blue, a dye he was using to stain slides, could kill malaria.

Were soldiers returning from the Spanish-American War really hospitalized and quarantined in tents in Montauk, New York? Yes, absolutely. Remember that Long Island in 1898 was not like Long Island today. The tent hospital, called Camp Wikoff, was situated on 5,000 acres leased by the government for that purpose. For more background and a photograph, see
www.spanamwar.com/campwikoff.html.

Did you wonder about Trey’s paralysis and recovery? Yes, complete (inability to move or feel) paraplegia can happen from such spinal trauma. And, yes, there have been cases of spontaneous recovery, rare, but it has happened, almost always within four months of the original injury.

Were there really police in 1899-1900 as opposed to the town marshals and sheriffs we’re all used to? Oh, yes. Not only yes, but to my surprise I found that in 1873 Wichita, Kansas (when Wyatt Earp enforced the law there), what Wichita had was a police department. Wyatt was a policeman.

Electric cars were another surprise for me. In the early days of automobiles, electrics beat out both gasoline and steam. In 1900 New York City, the vast majority of taxi cabs were electric vehicles. Gasoline engines came into prominence after battery-powered ignition systems were developed and hand cranking was no longer necessary to start the cars (and Henry Ford pioneered more affordable gasoline automobiles). Also, of course, the vehicles with gas engines could go much farther on a tank of gas than an electric could go on a charge, and in the end the gasoline vehicle could go much faster too.

The Columbia Runabouts I mention in
Into the Light
would have been the Ford Focuses of their day, small and economical. Even so, consider the price Jamie was charging ($950) versus the average American annual income of the day, which was about $450 or the equivalent of about $5,000 in 2004. Median annual income back then was $1,200 for male manual labor.

If you’d like to see some of those old vehicles, you can find wonderful old photographs online. I particularly liked the collection at
www.earlyamericanautomobiles.com
although the Columbia shown there is not a Runabout.

When I first dreamed up this story, I thought Hubbell’s annual Fourth of July shooting contest was my unique invention, born of a desire to use Trey’s and Caleb’s talents with a gun. Imagine my surprise when a little research showed me that in that time period shooting matches were popular spectator sports! Thousands came to watch the biggest matches, and distances started at 1,000 yards and went to as much as 3,000. Needless to say rules were more complicated, but I kept Hubbell’s event smaller and simpler.

Oh, and lastly, if you would like to see a Sharps rifle “in action,” rent
Quigly Down Under
. Not only does it feature a Sharps buffalo gun, you get Tom Selleck in one of the best “Western” movies ever.

I hope you enjoyed
Into the Light.

Ellen O’Connell

Ellen O’Connell lives in Douglas County, Colorado, where she raised, trained, and showed National Champion Morgan horses for over twenty years as Serendipity Morgans. She still keeps a Morgan mare, Serendipity B Wichin, although she now concentrates on rally, carting, and drafting competition with her dogs.