Simon Hawke: The Six Gun Solution

The pretty young saloon girl standing before him had a hard time meeting his gaze. Not just because of the force of his personality, but because he was her creator.

“It was what the others called him,” she said. “I don’t know what his real name is. If he gave it, I didn’t hear.”

“And you say his speed with a gun was almost superhuman?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.” she replied. “I’ve seen Wyatt Earp’s draw and even he isn’t that fast. He fired off two shots in a fraction of a second, without even aiming, and he hit both men in the heart.”

“Interesting.” said Nikolai Drakov, with a smile.

“You think he’s one of them? The agents from the future?”

“There was a young man whose path I once crossed in London.” Drakov said. “He was part of the support team working with Delaney, Cross and Steiger. And he was unusually skillful with lead projectile firearms.”

“What was his name?” the girl asked. “What did he look like?”

“We never actually met face to face,” Drakov replied. “But his name was Neilson. Scott Neilson.”

The girl shook her head. “I don’t know.” she said. “He looks very young. Just a boy, perhaps sixteen or seventeen-”

— Appearances could be deceptive if he’s from the future,” Drakov said. “With the antiagathic drugs, he could be anywhere from sixteen or seventeen to twenty-five or thirty. What else can you tell me about him?”

“He has light blond hair. He wears it long, like a plainsman. But he has the look of a gunfighter. Dark suit, vest, green calico shin, black Stetson…”

“How does he wear his gun?”

“In a cross draw holster on his left side.”

“A Colt?”

“Yes, nickel-plated, with a short barrel.”

Good for a fast draw. What about jewelry? Was he wearing any jewelry.? A bracelet of some sort, perhaps?”

“Yes. Yes, he did have a bracelet. I saw it briefly. It was one of those silver Indian bracelets, with a large turquoise stone.”

“Like these?” asked Drakov, opening a drawer in the end table. There were three matching Indian bracelets inside it. He took one out and held it up so she could set it.

“Yes. exactly like that,” she said.

Drakov smiled. “You didn’t hear what he and the others, the Earps and Masterson, spoke about?”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry. They were all sitting together at a table and I didn’t want to seem as if I was trying to eavesdrop. And it was noisy in the saloon and-”

“That’s all right,” said Drakov. “You’ve done well, Jennifer. I want you to cultivate his acquaintance. It would be perfectly logical for you to do so. You saw what happened, you’re fascinated by him, you want to get to know him. Find out his real name. Find out anything you can. But try not to arouse his suspicion. Be friendly and curious, but not too curious. Don’t push it.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“Yes, I’m sure you will. Did you find out where he was staying?”

“In the Grand Hotel.”

Drakov nodded “Keep an eye on him. I want to know everything he does.” He smiled. “Things are starting to get interesting. The players are almost all assembled.”

He toyed with the Indian bracelet and opened the hinged cover, revealing the chronocircuitry controls of the warp disc.

“We will move slowly, and with great care.” he said. ‘I will not underestimate them this time. It should prove to be an interesting little drama. Imagine, the Network, the S.O.G., the Temporal Underground and the T.I.A., all gathered in one place, at one strategic time. It will be like playing chess against a roomful of opponents, simultaneously. Only they’ll be playing against each other, little realizing that I control the board.”

He snapped shut the cover on the warp disc.

“And so the game begins,” he said, softly.

The one-horse rig Masterson had rented pulled up in front of the cabin in the Tombstone Hills. It looked abandoned. It was a small, primitive adobe structure with a dirt floor, similar to many dwellings in the area. It couldn’t really be called a house. Building lumber had to be hauled in from the Huachucuas and the only local wood was mesquite, of which a quantity had been chopped and piled up outside the cabin. It gave off a pleasant aroma when burned. The Observers had a well dug and there was a makeshift shed about twenty feet away, with a crude corral beside it.

“Well, this is it,” said Masterson, as he reigned in.

Neilson looked at the place. There was something rather sad about it. It would have been cramped quarters for three men, but this was how a lot of people lived in this time, in this part of the country. They came out from the Eastern cities or from farms and ranches in the Midwest, or from cities on the coast like San Francisco, chasing the dream of making a rich strike. A few of them, like Ed Schieffelin, got lucky. Most didn’t. But still, they kept on coming.

This was how it all started. Neilson thought. One man came out to this barren desert territory, populated only by Apaches, scorpions and lizards, struck silver and, as word got out, the boom began. Tombstone grew up on Goose flats, at first nothing but tents and adobe cabins and a few buildings made of lumber that had to be brought in, then saloons and fancy hotels, the railroad coming in to Benson, stage lines connecting the town to nearby points. Arizona was still a Wild territory, its raucous towns peopled by miners and gamblers and cowboys coming through with their herds, “hurrahing” the town with their six-shooters after months on the trail and blowing all their money on cheap whiskey, dance hall girls and at the faro tables. The Wild West as it really was, a brief, colorful period of American history, one that shaped the nation’s character for years to come.

The men that achieved fame in this period seemed bigger than life. They were men like Wild Bill Hickok, with his brace of Navy Colts tucked butt forward into his belt, and Buffalo Bill Cody, the scout and buffalo hunter who would do more than perhaps any other man to give birth to the legend of the frontier with his traveling Wild West Show. Men like Clay Allison, the rowdy gunfighter and rancher who would contribute the word “shootist” to the language and who once, for lack of anything better to do, hurrahed a town by riding through it stark naked. Men like John Wesley Hardin, one of the fastest guns who ever lived, an outlaw who eventually became a lawyer, and Billy the Kid, whom legend was to paint as a misunderstood, romantic young hero but who was, in fact, a mean spirited psychotic. And here in Tombstone were men such as John Henry “Doc” Holliday, the frail, tubercular dentist from Georgia who, as Bat Masterson would write, was “… a weakling who could not have whipped a 15-year-old boy in a go-as-you please fist fight, and no one knew this better than himself, and the knowledge of this fact was perhaps why he was ready to resort to a weapon of some kind whenever he got himself into difficulty.” And his skill with those weapons made him feared throughout the West.

Then there was Masterson himself, the gambler and lawman, who shot his six-guns from a crossed wrist position and had been credited with killing thirty-seven men, and Wyatt Earp and his brothers, who within a few short months would stride into frontier legend in their famous shoot-out with the Clantons. Yet, for all those larger-than-life, colorful figures, the real men who had built the West were men who lived like this, in small shacks and adobe dwellings, scratching a livelihood out of the dirt and aging quickly in the merciless desert sun.

The blow dust got into their lungs, their faces became lined and wrinkled prematurely, their backs worn from constant toil. They were, frequently, men who walked on both sides of the law, ranchers or miners by day, rustlers and stage robbers by night. Even Wyatt Earp was once accused of horse stealing and, in later years, he would be accused of being a stagecoach robber and a murderer, as well. In the Wild West of legend, the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black. In the real Wild West, things were very seldom seen in black or white.