Thunder Mountain

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  He had his shirt off first.

  She wondered for a minute if she could breathe. He was in amazing shape, only a very slight sign of any love handles above his belt. Just stunning for a man in his early thirties.

  She pulled off her blouse and put it on the rock as he worked on stripping off his pants. Under them he had on boxers that looked more modern than this time period.

  Then he pulled off his underwear and she just stared at him.

  He was clearly aroused and looked perfect in all ways.

  She managed to strip off her riding pants and then her sports bra as he eased into the water and settled in to look back at her.

  A smile was plastered on his face as he watched her take off her underwear and then step down into the hot water.

  Bonnie was right, the temperature of the water was perfect. But the naked man sitting across from her had her so hot, she wasn’t sure if she was going to be able to stand the water for long.

  “Anyone ever tell you how fantastically beautiful you are?” he said, looking across the water into her eyes.

  “This guy just recently back in 1902,” she said, smiling.

  Then they were together again in the middle of the small pool of hot water, kissing.

  For a moment, she just kissed him, holding his head in her hands. Then she let her hands roam over his smooth skin and hard muscles of his back and he did the same for her.

  Finally he pushed her away, clearly breathless and said, “Turn around. You wanted your back washed and you’re going to get it.”

  She did as she was told, pushing back against him in the water and feeling his hardness against her back as he used the soap and rubbed it all over her back.

  She ducked her head under the water and washed her face as he kept working on her back and shoulders and sides, his hands sometimes going to breasts and washing them as well.

  She was so hot she was about ready to explode, and it wasn’t from the water.

  Finally, she raised up a little and pushed back and sat down on his hardness.

  He slipped inside her.

  His hands stopped moving and he pushed his face into her back just below her neck.

  She couldn’t believe how wonderful, how completely natural that felt. She wanted to keep this moment with her forever.

  “Don’t move,” she managed to choke out.

  “You’re kidding, right?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

  His hands moved around to her breasts and cupped them, but he did as she asked and didn’t move.

  Slowly, the feeling of him against her and holding her and inside of her built up in this wonderful wave of sensations.

  And built.

  And built.

  And then there was no longer any ability for either of them to hold still.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  DAWN HAD FOUND the week after they made love in the hot springs fantastic and difficult at the same time. With Bonnie and Duster with them at all times, she and Madison found it completely impossible to have any intimate private times except late in the evening. And even then that had become a challenge as they stayed in hotels along the route.

  She was traveling as a single lady and he a single man, so they had to be very careful as to how they acted around others. She didn’t much like that. She would rather walk along with his hand in hers, or reach over and just kiss him at times.

  That day in the hot springs had been fantastic. Never had she imagined making love could be anything like that. He was perfect in all ways, even though he warned her a couple times that he was not a perfect person by any means. She was in lust with him and she knew it and as far as she was concerned, at the moment he was perfect.

  And their lovemaking hadn’t seemed to dim his interest in her as she worried it might. It had actually increased it, and she found herself liking that extra attention from him.

  Also, getting used to the various aspects of living in 1902 was difficult. The clothing seemed to just perplex her at times. For a historian who focused on the human side of history, she was amazed that she had never really thought much about clothing before this trip. It clearly influenced a great deal. She had so much to learn and clearly Bonnie and Duster were right about how much a trip into the past would impact and influence her writing and teaching.

  Thankfully, for the trip she had decided to just stay with her modern underwear. The boots, the socks, the riding pants, the blouses and coats and hats all seemed like far too much. But at the same time, she was loving all the learning about how women of this time period just dealt with this as normal.

  On the fourth day out of Silver City, they reached a railhead near a farming town of Caldwell, Idaho. Duster had booked them on a train getting them up beyond a place called Emmett, where a wagon road was being built north up to the mining camps in the central region of Idaho.

  The train ride had been rough, but interesting. She had sat facing Madison and the two of them compared notes on the time in soft conversations.

  And they talked a little about the people around them in the passenger car.

  Dawn knew that Colonel Dewey in 1902 was in the final stages of building most of a wagon road from the Emmett railhead clear into the Monumental Valley. He never made it all the way with the full wagon road because the state had backed out of their promised share of the costs. But by the middle of the summer, not only would Dewey have heavy stamping equipment hauled into the valley by mule to process ore from the mines, but also the saloons would be filled with pianos hauled in over those same trails.

  Roosevelt, Idaho, would be a booming town when they arrived and the closer they got, the more excited she got.

  They had followed the wagon trail up out of Emmett and crossed the Payette River at a place called “Smith’s Ferry.” Then they had worked their way up the wagon trail and into a huge mountain valley. It was the south end of the same valley where McCall, Idaho, existed, the town where she had spent all her summers as a child.

  The weather, even though it was still early in May, was being nice to them. It had only rained one morning and they had just stayed in a hotel near Caldwell for the time, not leaving until after the rain stopped.

  The huge mountain valley smelled of marshlands and pine trees and she couldn’t get enough of it as they rode along.

  She was now much more used to riding and her aching muscles had eased. She was very glad she was back riding, actually, since they seemed to be crossing small streams every hundred steps.

  It had taken them most of another day in that high mountain valley before they started back into the mountains just east of the future site of the town of Cascade.

  From there they went back to alternating between walking and riding over the ups and downs of the wagon trail, since they were in no hurry in the slightest.

  And along the way they took breaks often.

  Both Bonnie and Duster said it was the way they liked to travel and Dawn didn’t seem to mind at all. When you have all of time at the tips of your fingers, there really didn’t seem to be much point in hurrying.

  As the week went on and they spent more and more time around other people, it started to finally completely sink in that she really was in 1902. Madison mentioned that a great deal as well, that he believed this finally.

  They were often passed on breaks by wagons and other groups, mostly men headed into the last great gold rush of the lower forty-eight states, hoping to strike it rich.

  Dawn found it fascinating to sit and watch the men and a few families go by. Everything about her work and research was about the people of this time period and now she found herself actually getting to see them.

  And she hoped in Roosevelt to get a chance to talk with them as well.

  On the other hand, Madison was fascinated by some of the equipment they were carrying and was looking forward to seeing Dewey’s stamping mill in action.

  It took them almost two days after leaving the large valley near Cascade before
they made it to the small mining town of Yellow Pine.

  She was stunned beyond words. The exact same saloon she had eaten lunch at in 2014 earlier in the summer was there, newer, less smoke-smelling, but exactly the same.

  She just sort of walked around staring until Madison asked her what was wrong and she told him in whispers so that the owner of the place wouldn’t hear her.

  From Yellow Pine they started the long two-day climb the next morning toward the Monumental Summit. They all rode for most of that, resting the horses often, with a stop for a time in the new mining camp of Stibnite, which forty years later would be a major producer of different minerals for the Second World War before finally falling into ruin.

  Dawn had made it from Yellow Pine to the top of that summit in a van in 2014 in just under four hours.

  Now it was going to take them two days on horseback.

  The night air going up that mountain was always cold, and twice it snowed lightly on them as they got closer and closer to the top.

  Snow still blanketed almost everything and was piled in drifts under the trees. In a number of places the streams they had to cross were rushing torrents over rocks. That bothered Dawn a great deal, but her horse managed them just fine.

  “We wouldn’t make it in here much earlier,” Duster said at one point, pointing at a snowdrift to one side of the wagon trail.

  “Usually didn’t open until real early May at the earliest,” Dawn said. “And everyone who stayed in the valley was snowed in from the middle of September onward.”

  “Wow, that’s a long winter,” Madison said.

  “And a brutal one,” Dawn said. “Which was why after the first major year, this year, actually, not many people spent winters in here. The snow and the cold pretty much stopped the mining except in the big mines like the Dewey.”

  It was in the middle of the eighth day after leaving Silver City that they finally reached the Monumental Summit. Nine miles ahead of them and down one thousand feet was Roosevelt.

  They decided to camp for the night on the summit on the flat area about a hundred paces to the north of the trail. The wind had kept the snow from building up in the area and the spring sun had melted what had been there, leaving a wonderful open meadow.

  After they had camp set up and Duster was cooking, she stood on the edge looking down into Monumental Valley a thousand feet below them.

  Madison stood beside her, holding her hand.

  She could see the smoke from a few campfires in the valley winding up into the crystal clear air. On one side, Thunder Mountain loomed over the valley, its steep, rocky slopes still mostly covered in snow.

  On the other side, a tall ridgeline seemed to drop over loose shale and rock straight to the floor. They could faintly hear the sound of Monumental Creek below them flowing down through the trees along with faint sounds of axes and shovels from minors working along the stream.

  The newly completed wagon road ended near the other end of this ridge and from there a trail cut down the side of the valley on the left. Somehow Dewey and his men had gotten mining equipment down that trail to the valley floor.

  Or up and over a worse trail to the north called the Elk Creek Summit trail.

  Looking at the trail in front of her slashing through the snow across the hill, she had no idea how that was possible. About halfway down a group of men with two horses and a dozen donkeys seemed to be clinging to the cliff face as they worked their way down slowly.

  The sun was still barely lighting the valley floor and the air was so clear and crisp she could see almost to the end of the Monumental drainage to the Middle Fork of the Salmon River twenty miles away. To her right, she could see to the sharp ridges and snowcapped mountains that towered over the River of No Return.

  She had loved this summit when she had gone over it in 2014. She loved it even more now.

  “This is magical,” she said, softly.

  He squeezed her hand gently. “Yes, it is. More than I had ever imagined. And I’m glad I’m standing here with you. That makes it even more magical.”

  She smiled at him, then glanced around to make sure no other travelers were close by. Then she kissed him, long and hard.

  And he kissed her back with the same amount of passion.

  She belonged in his arms.

  She knew it.

  And she belonged on this summit, and in the valley below.

  She knew that as well.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  MADISON COULDN’T BELIEVE how comfortable he felt standing there with Dawn on the top of Monumental Summit. In all his life he couldn’t have imagined this.

  He had grown more and more comfortable as each day went on being in the past, the same past, the same time in history that had been his life’s work to study. He kept waking up in the morning, looking at the tent above him, and thinking he was in a dream. But when he left the tent, he found himself actually in the past with a woman of his dreams.

  Since he was a kid he had been fixated on the west, on the mining in the west, on every detail of the real Old West, not the west told in old westerns. That fixation had all started with a history lesson in the sixth grade in Washington Grade School in Boise.

  His teacher gave a presentation about how a former governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, had been assassinated in 1905 because of his stance against a mining union. Then the teacher had taken them to the Boise Capitol Building on a field trip to see the dome and the statue of Governor Steunenberg standing in a small park right in front of the capital.

  That had gotten young Madison’s interest focused on history, and he never let it go.

  Now he stood here, in that history.

  In May 1902, Idaho had only been a state for twelve years. Stuenenberg had just finished his term as governor a year ago, but would not be killed for his stance against the mining unions for another three years.

  Below him in a valley was one of the great hidden secrets of the West, the town of Roosevelt that Zane Grey had found so fascinating he had written a novel about it.

  Dawn had said that this was magical.

  Madison completely agreed.

  She was magical, the valley, the history, and the fact that they were together in this past moment.

  They stood on that summit overlooking Monumental Valley kissing and just holding each other until Duster called out that dinner was ready.

  Over a dinner of fresh grouse that Duster had shot, combined with a wonderful potato dish that Bonnie had made from dried potatoes and chopped, dried vegetables, they talked about the area.

  Dawn told them a lot about the people, about what the town was generally going to look like when they went down the hill tomorrow. Madison was impressed with her knowledge of the little stuff, even though she didn’t feel confident about much of it.

  And Madison was really, really excited to see what Colonel Dewey was building for a stamp mill. Dewey was one of the great figures of the Old West mining, and a town below Silver City had actually been named after him.

  At one point, Duster said that he knew Dewey pretty well in a few other timelines. “I know what the man likes,” Duster said, smiling. “I might be able to figure out a way to get us inside the entire works.”

  That got Madison really excited and they agreed to come up with a backstory to tell Dewey later.

  Both Bonnie and Duster were surprised that in all their trips, they had never been into this area before.

  “I’m betting it’s because the area just didn’t last long enough,” Dawn said. “The mining season is very short and in just six years the mines will be played out and that town we’re going to see down there will be mostly abandoned. Then in the spring of 1909 it will be covered with water and lost to history and this entire area will be mostly forgotten.”

  Both Bonnie and Duster nodded at that.

  “So many towns came and went that fast in the west,” Duster said. “Glad we’re finally given an excuse to see this one in its prime.”

&nbs
p; After that, the conversation turned to how Bonnie and Duster survived in the past, how they got money, that sort of thing. Madison actually turned the conversation in that direction because he had been wondering since Duster bought them first-class passage on that rail car over to Emmitt.

  Duster laughed at the question. “We have been back here so often, we know when stocks are going to go up and when they are going to go down. When banks are going to boom and when they will go bust. We know which businesses to invest in and which to avoid.”

  “And which real estate to buy and when to sell it?” Madison asked, nodding. “It’s because you have made so many trips, you know all of this?”

  “Exactly,” Duster said. “We bring a lot of gold with us to start each trip, of course. Usually more than enough to be comfortable, but even when we go different directions, we tend to do small investments to make more.”

  Bonnie nodded. “Since I have spent so much time in San Francisco, I know all the history there and the land and I tend to become one of the rich women of the town very quickly.”

  “When you are there, do you leave before the big quake?” Dawn asked.

  Bonnie looked haunted again, as if the memories had overtaken her.

  “I’ve rode it out a few times,” she said.

  Bonnie clearly didn’t want to say more about that at all.

  The fire crackled and they sat there in silence.

  The night was slowly falling on the mountains and the air was chilling down. So far no other travelers had decided to stay on the summit for the night, which pleased Madison. He and Dawn could enjoy an evening completely together.

  And he was looking forward to that a lot.

  After a moment, Dawn sort of glanced around at the flat area of the summit through the pine. “I’m sort of surprised there is no sign of anyone building the rumored hotel up here yet.”

  “Rumored?” Duster asked.

  Dawn nodded. “No one has ever been able to find evidence of the site of the hotel, or even pictures of it.”

  “Maybe it was only talk and no one actually did it,” Madison said, looking at Dawn who seemed disappointed. “After all, if I understand right, this is only one of three ways into this valley.”