December 3rd, 1907
Roosevelt, Idaho
JESSE USED THE break in the weather to bundle up in two layers of coats and two pairs of pants to take a ride up the valley to Bushnell’s cabin. The sun was shining, but it added no heat at all to the biting cold air. Jesse could see every breath he or his horse took.
The towering white-covered mountains that stretched above him on both sides felt comforting.
There was no one moving at all in the valley. The silence seemed almost like a weight. Isolation didn’t begin to describe this area of the country.
Bushnell was long gone. He had left in the summer right after he had been hit on the head, taking the one medal with him.
Jesse knew that he would see Bushnell the moment after he arrived back in the institute in Boise in two years. Of course, the institute wasn’t built yet and Jesse knew he had many lives to live before those two years of real time passed.
And there was a lot of work to do in real time, from what he was gathering.
He and Kelli had told Janice and Steven they would run their general store for them through the winter. Since the Roosevelt area only had about a hundred people in the valley during the winter, there wasn’t much to do, and Janice and Steven were happy to let them stay since they had survived seven winters in this valley already. They were ready for a break.
Bushnell’s small log cabin in the snow looked very sad, almost buried up to its eaves, not even protected by the tall pine trees around it.
Jesse tied his horse up to a small pine sticking out of the snow near the cabin front and waded through the knee-deep snow to the heavy log door and pushed it open.
There had been no tracks in the snow from anyone else since it started snowing.
There was very little inside the small cabin. Just a mattress against one wall stripped of all blankets, a cold stone fireplace that felt even colder without a fire going in its black mouth.
The windows were holding against the weight of the snow and the winter winds, but didn’t let in much light because they were covered from the outside. A clean sink sat to the left side of the cabin under one window and a few chairs were around a rough wooden table.
Most of the light came from the open door, but that was enough for now.
He thought about building the fire, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. He was warm enough in his coats for the moment.
And more than likely this was just a wild goose chase after all. He had told Kelli he was looking for a safe place to make sure the medals were lost for good.
But Jesse had a hunch he would find something better to do with them, and that came from a comment Bushnell himself had made.
“Kelli know you are here?” a voice said behind him.
Jesse turned around to face Duster.
Only not the Duster he knew, but a Duster aged to almost sixty.
Duster still wore the same coat and hat and it clearly looked like Duster, just an older version.
So the message had been accurate. Right to the time of day. Just not sent by the person who Jesse thought had sent it.
“She does,” Jesse said. “But she thinks I’m just out to check on the cabin here, find a place to bury the medals, and get some air. She did not see the message.”
“This valley can be claustrophobic at times,” Duster said, nodding. “Glad you understood the message.”
“But from my understanding,” Jesse said. “You can’t be here, since you are also in Boise right now. You know, the old two of the same people in the same spot kind of time travel problem.”
Duster smiled and laughed. “First trip back into the past and you already understand it better than most.”
Duster reached over and put his hand through the countertop.
“Let me guess,” Jesse said. “Hologram from your time sent back here.”
Duster again nodded.
“I thought that was Bryant that left the message,” Jesse said.
In the sink in a red blood-like ink a date and time had been written. Written under the date, “Jesse, meet me, please.”
“That kid is way after my time is gone,” Duster said. “But you told me about what happened here about ten years ago my time, even though you promised not to. I sent an assistant to come in quickly, write the message and get out while you were talking to the kid out front.”
“Okay,” Jesse said. “But why?”
“Because when you told me about meeting the Bryant kid from the future and what he had done, you and I talked about doing this in my time.”
“Not too much information,” Jesse said, holding up his hand. “I already know too much.”
Duster nodded. “Something came up that I needed to talk with you now, before you go back and get going with everything we do together going into the future. I figured this was as good a place as any.”
“Might as well get me while I am still confused,” Jesse said, laughing.
Duster laughed at that as well. “I’ve known you for a very long time now and I can’t remember ever seeing you confused.”
“I cover it well,” Jesse said.
Duster shook his head. “The future is a grand place. And this conversation won’t be that long and you can’t tell me about this meeting until June 8th of 2058. It’s June 7th for me.”
“Okay,” Jesse said, shaking his head. “I think I’ll just forget about it until you mention it to me.”
Duster shook his head sadly. “You can’t forget this. That’s the reason I’m here.”
Jesse just stared at the hologram of the older version of his boss for a moment. “Either something horrible happens, such as with the medals, or you are here for something else.”
“I’m here,” Duster said, “because this can never happen. What has happened to you during this trip into the past can never happen going into the future to any other timeline travelers.”
“You mean meeting three other time travelers from the future counting you?”
“Exactly,” Duster said, nodding. “I’m not going to tell you what happens as we go forward together, but make sure this sort of thing has a firm rule against it. Convince me and Bonnie without telling me about this conversation.”
“Oh, that’s going to be easy,” Jesse said, shaking his head.
“Maybe not, but it is critical,” Duster said. “What has happened to you on this trip cannot happen to anyone going forward. The world is a very lucky place because this happened to you and not someone else.”
“And since you can’t tell yourself to fix it, you have to tell me,” Jesse said. “But I’m betting that hologram could go back and tell yourself a ton of stuff.”
Duster laughed. “There is a real reason I tell you this that you will discover over time.”
Jesse waved that off. “I assume there is a mathematical reason for this as well, since this is coming from you in the distant future,” Jesse said.
Duster nodded “We just developed the next level of timeline math. And have the computers to crunch the immense amount of data.”
Duster shook his head.
“Tired of playing god?” Jesse asked.
Duster jerked and then nodded. “It is not our place to direct the future of trillions of lives. We only research the past as it existed and leave the future the hell alone.”
“That seems to be more than enough,” Jesse said. “I can almost understand the mess Bushnell did with coming back and simply trying to save those medals.”
“And with that I agree,” Duster said. “So make sure the rule sticks. Now I’m going to get out of here before I slip and say something that will cause more problems.”
With that he vanished like turning off a light without so much as “I’ll see you in forty plus years.”
The cabin was empty and cold and silent once again.
Clearly the technology had gotten a lot better than plugging in wires to a wooden box in a cave. And the hologram technology was clearly off the charts better.
Jesse went about making sure that nothing had been disturbed in the cabin, then he pulled the door closed and climbed back on his horse in the bright sunshine that reflected off the pure white snow.
The bitingly cold winter day was beautiful, with the air crisp and clear, the snow sparkling, and the mountains like walls to his own private world.
If he wasn’t actually living in 1907, after all this he’d be laughing all the way to the nearest bar.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
April 22nd, 1908
Roosevelt, Idaho
KELLI WATCHED AS Jesse dug in the frozen dirt under Janice and Steven’s store.
They had carefully removed the floorboards and now Kelli was using an old blanket to contain the dirt that Jesse was managing to break out of the ground with a pick and shovel. They were going to have to put all this back so for a year no one could tell they had done anything to the floor.
They had closed the store early and outside it was snowing hard, so no one was going to venture out or disturb them in any way. There were still less than a hundred people in the entire valley, and Jesse and Kelli knew the patterns of them all.
At first, when the first snows closed the valley, Kelli thought she was going to hate being trapped in such a deep, dark, cold place for eight months. But their cabin was comfortable, the people friendly, and she and Jesse had come to love each other even more.
Amazing how being that close day and night could really strengthen a relationship. Either that or kill it. But they had been lucky and the time alone together had made their relationship stronger by a long ways. They had enjoyed every minute of being together. And she had no doubt they were going to be together off into the future.
And a lot more trips into the past as well.
Jesse seemed to pace himself just fine as he dug, resting often and declining Kelli’s offer to help. They had decided that they needed to get the Season Medals out of the ground before there was any chance of anyone coming in over the pass.
They planned on leaving the bag in the ground to be found in 2019 by the dive expedition. Only with no medals in it, just some metal pans to help with metal detectors doing the searching.
They had not decided what to do with the Season Medals yet. But both of them wanted time to look at them before deciding.
One solution that Jesse had suggested was that they bury them next spring in the path of the landslide that came in across the valley and created Roosevelt Lake. That way the medals would be under a hundred feet of rock and mud and by 2019 a huge forest grew on the mudslide.
That was a decent idea, but she hated doing that.
And Jesse had said he did as well. But at the moment it was the best solution they had talked about.
After almost an hour, Jesse finally got to the bag and worked it loose from the frozen ground, putting it on the blanket next to the dirt he had shoveled out.
Then he stood and took a drink of water from a cup on the counter and nodded to Kelli.
“Unwrap them.”
“You think they are actually in this bag?” Kelli asked,
Jesse laughed. “After what has happened this trip so far, I’m making no bets.”
He hadn’t told her about his visit from the holographic Duster. He figured that was just better left between him and Duster years from now.
She took the frozen saddlebag to the big sink in the back room of the store and slowly poured hot water that she had been heating on the stove in pots over the bag.
It took three pots of hot water before she could finally open the bag and another full pot before she could pull out the first clump of medals.
She dropped them into another pot of lukewarm water to both clean and thaw them slowly.
After about five minutes, she held up one to show it to Jesse.
It was a medal quite a bit larger than a silver dollar and had very little wear on it. It shone bright, sparkling silver in the lamplight because it was wet.
On one side of the medal were stamped words surrounded by an olive branch on the left and maple leaves on the right. The reverse side of the medal showed a farmer sowing crops in a field.
“We can’t destroy these,” Kelli said. “These are the Season Medals. Only just over three hundred were originally made and almost none survive.”
“And we can’t let the world know they exist, either,” Jesse said. “If Bryant is correct. At least not for some years of real time.”
Kelli nodded. The wonderful medals in her hands were major parts of history. As a researcher of history, her job was not to destroy history, but to find the truth and document it.
She would be willing to end her book on a simple statement after the lake dive expedition came up empty.
“With luck, the great lost treasure of the Season Medals will someday be found.”
But she couldn’t make herself guarantee they would never be found. Ever.
Jesse put his arms around her, looking at the medals. “Remember that Bushnell said no one but us originals even knew where the mine and crystal cavern are located.”
“You thinking we take them back to the cavern and leave them in there?” Kelli asked, turning in Jesse’s arms and looking into his eyes. The idea excited her more than she wanted to admit. At least there they would be safe for a very long time.
“I do,” he said, smiling at her. “We just got to get them out of this valley and to the cavern without telling anyone what we are doing.”
She kissed him, loving the idea and loving him. Then she looked up at him again. “Do we tell anyone when we get back to the cavern?”
“No,” Jesse said. “At least not for a decade or more. But I’m betting Duster will guess because we’ll need his help a little. While you keep everyone else entertained, I’m going to take the medals and stash them. I know a perfect spot.”
She nodded again and kissed him again. Then she pushed him back slightly before they got too hot. “Thank you for honoring the past.”
“It seems,” Jesse said, “since we are going to be living and working in the past a great deal, it’s the least I can do.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
June 8th, 1908
Roosevelt, Idaho
JESSE STOOD NEXT to Duster and Madison and Kelli on one of the board sidewalks of Roosevelt that ran from the general store on down to some saloons that were banging out piano music that sounded desperate.
The town was dying. Of that there was no doubt. Most of the mines had played out or never found color at all, and one of the big mills hadn’t bothered to even bring in the big boilers to start up the place, even though it was built and lumber was cut for the fires.
A number of stores were boarded up and the town’s only lawyer had not come back for the summer.
In a few years, if the town had been left alone, it would have been a ghost town, Jesse had no doubt. But the town didn’t even have that long to live.
A huge mudslide would come down the nearby Mule Creek and fill the entire valley to the depth of over a hundred feet, backing up the spring runoff behind it and forming a lake over Roosevelt.
The lake would be named Lake Roosevelt.
Jesse and Duster and everyone else had no desire to stay another winter and watch the destruction. It was about time to leave, head back to Boise, and then after a few months, back to the mine and then the future.
Their real present.
Kelli and Jesse had their winter home here locked up and the extra supplies were on two packhorses. Next spring the home would go under water as well.
Duster and Madison had come down from the lodge to help them get up the trail.
Kelli and Jesse had the medals in money belts strapped under their clothes and in secret pockets in their saddlebags. There was no way to tell that they were carrying thirty-one rare medals between them. To Jesse, he liked the feel of them against him.
It felt as if he was doing something special, something important.
And from what he gathered about hi
s job going forward, and he and Duster creating the Institute, his work would continue to be important.
The four of them had just come out of Janice and Steven’s general store after saying goodbye. The sun was warm, the day about as good as it got in this remote and deep valley.
They had all stopped, standing in the sun, sort of taking in the almost dead town one last time. Kelli leaned around behind Madison and said, “Cameraman on the wagon.”
Jesse laughed as he looked up.
It was clear the photographer had just taken the photo that would start all this between him and Kelli.
The photographer wore a dark suit with a narrow-brimmed hat. He had his camera set up on a four-legged tripod in the back of a rough supply wagon to get it up off the ground. He had the wheels of the wagon locked into place and the wagon bed braced with logs to keep it from even slightly moving.
The reason Kelli had her back slightly to the camera in the photo was because she had leaned back to tell Jesse about the camera.
“Let’s get going,” Duster said, laughing, “before he gets more pictures that will get us all in more trouble.”
Kelli moved over and kissed Jesse.
“Wouldn’t it have been something if I had found a picture of us doing that?” she asked.
“I think it worked out just fine the way it was,” Jesse said.
“I completely agree,” she said. “And when we get back, I’m framing that picture and hanging it on a wall in our home.
“We’re going to have a home?” he asked. “I’ve only known you for a day.”
“Damn right we are, mister,” she said, laughing. “And as I keep telling you, I’ve had quicker.”
With that, they all mounted up and turned their back on Roosevelt, Idaho, headed up the valley toward the Monumental Summit Lodge.
Jesse had no doubt he would be back here at some point. He had no idea what this past, or any past in his future held.
He glanced over his shoulder and for a moment he thought he could see Lake Roosevelt, beautiful and clear and bright blue, covering the town like a mirage in the sun.
Smith's Monthly #16 Page 18
