War of the Wild West: a TIME DEFENDERS action

By Scott Tomasheski

Imagine that you can travel through time, and that you can meet your great-Grandparents and your great-Grandchildren, because THEY can travel through time, too … MEET THE ATHERTON FAMILY. Ambassador Bartolomea Atherton – a.k.a. 'Mrs. A' – along with her great-nephew August, and their family members and other associates on the Council of Time Defense, have a huge responsibility: they have vowed to defend the Timeline against those who attempt to change it, in their quests for wealth, power, and revenge.
The temporal war between the Council of Time Defense and the alien warlord Klomtoo has reached a new and deadly battlefield on the American western frontier, circa 1866. Now, as their younger selves face the overwhelming might of an armada of time-traveling warships, August and Mrs. A must undertake a perilous journey, beset by dangers at every turn, to find the one piece of technology that might avert a Timeline disaster!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098335274

Book preview

2018

CHAPTER

1. RECONSTRUCTION

2. SKULLDUGGERY

3. THE WILDCAT

4. A CROOKED GAME

5. THE TIME-HAMMER

6. THE BOUNTY HUNTERS

7. SPEED TRAP

8. OUTLAWS

9. LAST FLIGHT OF THE SKAGWAY LIZZIE

10. GUN SMOKE

11. A POCKETFUL OF DOLLARS

12. EDGE OF THE KNIFE

13. IN THE JAILHOUSE NOW

14. ENEMY ABOVE

15. FROZEN IN TIME

16. FORCES JOINED

17. SEVENTY GRAINS OF BLACK POWDER

18. BATTLEGROUND

19. THE KILLING ARROW

20. WHAT BECAME OF CALIFORNIA JOE

Chapter One.

RECONSTRUCTION

1947.

The Black Hills of South Dakota.

United States of America.

The sculptor’s hands were strong, long, lean and sinewy.

He held them near the campfire and rubbed them together briskly. He cracked the knobby, peglike knuckles one at a time, using the heel of the opposite hand to leverage against each knuckle in turn. Then, he opened both hands and placed the exposed palms quite close to the licking flames of the crackling fire.

The flesh of most other hands would surely have been burned, or singed, but the hands of a sculptor such as Korczak Ziolkowski, who had spent the better part of his forty-plus years gripping hammers and chisels and rope winches and sticks of dynamite, were lined with a protective layer of callous that was as insensitive as heavy-grit sandpaper.

It’s been an interesting year, hasn’t it? The sculptor laughed, and having warmed his hands slightly, he reached for a pouch of tobacco and a carved wooden pipe, having no further use for the fire, except for the light it would cast upon the tanned buffalo hide that was streteched on a frame, like a blank canvas on a painter’s easel.

This was not an ordinary buffalo hide. This one had been carefully selected for its size and quality, and it had been judged an acceptable medium for the Winter Count, a sacred recording of the annual activities of any tribe or group that chose to record its heritage. Maintaining a Winter Count was one of the great traditions of the Lakota of the Black Hills, and Korczak was determined to carry out the tradition.

This would be the first Winter Count of the Ziolkowski family. A fair amount of optimism was invested in the Ziolkowski family’s Winter Count, because at the present moment, Korczak was unmarried, childless, and knew of no relatives. He hoped to take a wife some day, sooner rather than later, and raise a family, but for the moment he had no inkling how this might occur.

He was at the commencement of a great endeavor, the very first item to be recorded on the Winter Count. It would take decades to complete, maybe a century, or more. He knew for a certainty that he would never live to see it completed. He could only hope that his family would follow his example and his highly detailed, written plans. Perhaps his future great-grandchildren would see the completed project as Korczak imagined it.

It was an effort to pay tribute to the people who lived in the Black Hills for many generations. And with the greatest respect toward the Lakota, he would use his sculptor’s hands to transform a mountain, a beautiful masterpiece of nature, into a different kind of masterpiece.

The elderly woman who sat by his side did not warm her hands at the fire, but, like Korczak, she also withdrew a carved wooden pipe, from deep within a coat pocket. And, always a gentleman of the old-fashioned variety, Korczak generously filled it for her, from his own pouch of tobacco.

She lit the pipe herself, with an appropriate length of smoldering wood from the blazing campfire. Some knew her as Ambassador Bartolomea Atherton of the Council of Time Defense, and some knew her as Mrs. A, or Aunt Barty or simply Barty, but any friend or enemy or acquaintance knew that she was often in want of tobacco, but she always preferred to light her own pipe.

An interesting year indeed, said Mrs. A, as she regarded the nascent Winter Count of the Ziolkowskis. But I suspect there will be more interesting years to come.

Korczak nodded, and grunted vaguely in assent.

But why are you asking me to do this? he asked. This will be my life’s work. My dream. I’ve already invested time in planning and engineering. You’re asking me to change what I’ve --

I’m not asking, Korczak, Mrs. A interrupted, I’m insisting. And I will provide you with all the engineering details. My experts believe it will actually save you a fair amount of effort, when you follow their instructions.

But if we dynamite the cave, how can you be sure that it will never be --

Leave that to me, Mrs. A interrupted him, again, before he could fully articulate a new objection.

Korczak went silent for a moment. He held the pipe between his teeth, and again moved his strong hands near the fire and rubbed them together, vigorously and purposefully.

At the very least, can you tell me what it is? Why it’s so important that we bury it here, at the very place I’ve chosen to work? Korczak pleaded, unable to bear the silence any longer, fearing the inevitability of his acquiescence to Mrs. A’s relentless determination and singularity of purpose.

Hully hullay! she exclaimed. Always asking questions!! You remind me of my nephew. Well, I suppose the great artists have always shown a streak of non-compliance with the normal.

Perhaps if you ever answered a question, or two… Korczak allowed his speculation to hang in the air, like smoke from the campfire, and from the two carved wooden tobacco pipes. What then prompted Mrs. A to suddenly become much more expansive on the topic at hand, Korczak could not be certain; it might have been his prompting or it might have been a random fluctuation of the mighty gears of her mental machinery.

Think of it as a toolbox, Mrs. A said. That’s how it was first described to me, by my mentor. But it is not an ordinary box, and they are not ordinary tools. They come from a different time and place. They must be stored carefully – burying them under half a million tons of rock? – that’s a nice solution that fits the specifications precisely. If they are ever needed again, those who know how to use them will have the necessary skills to recover them, without disturbing your work.

But how --, Korczak began to ask, before Mrs. A stopped him with a glance and a small gesture of her hand, the one that held the pipe.

She leaned forward, directing her gaze into the blazing campfire.

Let me tell you a story, Korczak, said Mrs. A. But first, we should gather some more wood for the fire. It is a long story. It might take a while to tell.

***************

1866.

Martinsburg, West Virginia.

Shop Headquarters of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

The great American Civil War was over.

The great American President, Abraham Lincoln, had been laid to rest.

And the great American Reconstruction was slowly, agonizingly moving along, in stutter-steps and back-steps, through the process of transformation from a dream, to an idea, to a movement.

Scars and wounds and open sores, both literal and figurative, plagued the badly broken nation. In many remote areas, stragglers were still finding their ways, to long-lost homes, to find people they barely recognized, children who had grown up, loved ones long gone, and some grieving widows who would not or could not ever abandon hope.

The wounded and healing Union needed help. It needed goods and supplies, it needed homes and factories and schools rebuilt, it needed farms and fields and stockyards restored to productivity. It needed transportation, technology, manufacturing. It needed paved roads, railroads, seaports, bridges. It needed workers. It needed healthy men with all or most of their body parts intact. It needed women who stood ready to work with hammers and steam engines and iron foundries.

Mr. Albert Fink, Second Superintendent of Truss-Bridge Sectionwork of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, was in charge of hiring for the day, and he needed workers.

And Barty Atherton needed a job.

Name? Mr. Fink growled, without a hint of friendliness.

Barty Andrews, Barty lied about her last name, and used an abbreviation of her first name, the full extension of which would immediately draw suspicion to the fact that she wished to mislead the gullible into an assumption that she was of the masculine gender.

Mr. Fink was seated upon a rickety wooden chair, that had apparently, somehow, miraculously, survived the Civil War without turning to firewood. And judging by its apparent age, it might also have survived the Revolution, the Crusades, and the Peloponnesian Wars.

Barty, however, had no chair, so she was obligated to stand before the perspicuous Mr. Fink.

That your real name? he asked.

No, sir, Barty replied.

Albert Fink cared not a whit for the manner of men he hired, as long as they showed up on time, put their backs and shoulders into their work, and caused no trouble. Causing trouble, in Mr. Fink’s opinion, was objecting to the horrific and dangerous working conditions, poisonously spoiled food rations, or the lawlessness and destitution that dominated his work-camps.

Half the men he interviewed were deserters from either the Union or Confederate armies, or they were escaped convicts, or former slaves who still feared re-capture and indentured servitude. Nearly all of those applicants presented themselves under pseudonyms.

And yet, most of those he hired proved to be decent workers, once they were cowed by the brutal, whip-cracking sadists he employed as overseers and supervisors.

He credited nothing but his own, overinflated sense of keen judgmental acumen for his perceived record of success.

But rarely had Mr. Fink interviewed, for hire, a woman who attempted to pass muster as a man. And this one, he noted, was a particularly youthful candidate.

She was just sixteen years old. In fact, it was her sixteenth birthday, but Barty Atherton could not celebrate the occasion in any kind of style.

She was already well on her way to a level of accomplishment that could be equalled by no one, male or female, of any age, but she had little need for a birthday party.

How old are you? Mr. Fink asked, in a tone of voice that indicated he would suspect her of lying, no matter what age she claimed.

Twenty-two, Barty lied again.

The line of men behind Barty stretched out the door of the crude, ninety square-foot wooden structure that served as paymaster’s office for the company. Dozens of men were lined up outside, waiting for paychecks or work contracts.

Some of the men on the line murmured and muttered. They folded their arms and tapped their feet on the wooden floor planks inside, and the stairway outside, that rose above the muddy causeway upon which many other men stood.

The processing of applicants having significantly slowed, some of the men became impatient, pushing forward, and the single-file line began to devolve into a less-organized crowd.

But Mr. Fink was in no hurry. Despite the impatience of the other solicitors, some waiting for jobs and others for paychecks, he sized up this one particular applicant.

You’re a liar, he coldly accused her.

If you say so, sir, Barty replied.

But it ain’t your name, or your age, that I give a hoot about, said Mr. Fink.

No, sir, said Barty.

Mr. Fink leaned forward in his wooden chair. It creaked audibly and threatened to collapse beneath him. Why ain’t you on line with the washer-women?

Barty shrugged. She was very tall for her age, but never would her efforts, her education or training, or experience, ever widen her slender shoulders.

She gestured toward the back of the room, where the stalled procession of impatient men crowded the room and pushed down the rickety staircase.

They told me to get on this line, sir, Barty said, the washer-women were on a different line.

Mr. Fink clutched a short stack of papers in his thick hand. The sheets of paper were some thirty in number, and they came in a variety of sizes and quality grades. Some of the papers were severely weathered, others heavily folded and creased.

There was also a brown and battered paper envelope in the stack, and when Barty implored Mr. Fink to open it, he regarded her, again with a suspicious eye.

Why? he demanded.

Because, sir, it has my letter of recommendation, she explained, without the slightest trace of the sarcasm or rudeness, those tones that Mr. Fink was waiting to jump upon. And, it also has my Army discharge orders. Honorable discharge, I mean to say. And my service record, too. Sir.

He took his time with the envelope, bending and fingering it, holding it up to the light, examining it from every angle.

Where were you born, girl? he asked finally.

Iquitos. In Peru, sir, Barty replied.

Say again?

Peru. It’s in the South Americas, sir, she started to explain.

I know where it is! he snapped. "So what are you doing in this country? And where is your family?"

I haven’t any family, she lied.

Lost, or killed in the war, were they? Mr. Fink asked, drawing out his question to the point where it strained beneath the heavy weight of suspicion.

I don’t know, sir. This reply had a grain of truth to it.

He scrutinized her again carefully, now taking a particularly keen interest in her worn but well-maintained raiments.

Where’d you get that jacket? he demanded.

It was a United States Army field jacket, with insignia that indicated the rank of Sergeant Major. She had worn the jacket, and the well-earned insignia, on some of the bloodiest battlefields of the War.

And there was no law that prohibited civilians from wearing military uniforms during peacetime. But still, Mr. Fink was visibly perturbed. He found the jacket to be an odd sartorial choice for a girl who claimed to be twenty-two, but was probably much younger, and born in Peru, but who could have been born anywhere on Earth.

In the Army, sir, she replied.

Don’t get smart with me, girl, Mr. Fink snapped. "I see it’s an Army jacket. What I’m asking is, where’d you get it?"

Like I said, sir. In the Army. I served three years. I was at Fredricksburg, and Cold Harbor, and Gettysburg, sir. And…

Mr. Fink, having strongly doubted each of her claims since the commencement of the interview, cut her off by firing a question at her, that he expected and fervently hoped would expose the girl as a poseur.

What unit? he snapped, with a note of irritability in place of respect for her service, and he rudely pointed a thick, accusing forefinger in her direction.

Fourth New Jersey, for most of the war, she explained. Started out in the nursing corps. I was under Colonel Barron, sir. Like I said, sir, my discharge papers and service records are in the envelope. And a letter from Colonel Barron. Sir.

This was a completely true claim. Inside the envelope was not only a standard Army discharge order, with honors, but also a hand-written, personal letter of recommendation from Colonel James Barron of the 4th New Jersey Regiment, calling attention to some of the remarkable items on the wartime Service Record of Barty Andrews.

If Mr. Fink had elected to open the envelope, he would have seen, among the items verified by the Colonel in his letter of recommendation, a lengthy and detailed account of the tumultuous event described in modern history books as the Catoctin Station Raid.

Historians disagree on some minor points, but it is generally agreed that on the twelfth of June, in the year 1863, the massed Confederate Army under the command of General Robert E. Lee approached the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad station near Catoctin, Maryland, and captured four trains, loaded with valuable materiel and supplies.

The trains were destroyed, and the tracks at the station were pulled up and made useless. Certain valuable items, including small but healthy livestock herds and dozens of barrels of salted pork, were taken by General Lee, who would put them to great use, as he and his army continued their march North, toward an ultimately fateful encounter in the fields of Gettysburg.

Anything deemed of no value to Lee’s army was burned or otherwise looted or destroyed. The losses were very inconvenient and expensive for the Baltimore & Ohio, and also for the Union Army, who stood in need of those very supplies, to bolster their defenses against that very march North by General Lee’s army.

Each of the four engines pulled ten cars, and every car was packed solid with freight.

But there was a fifth train, a newly built Jupiter 2-4-2 tender locomotive, that was the pride of the B&O, pulling fourteen cars. Seven of those were passenger cars, filled beyond capacity with a complement of almost entirely women and children plus the weighty baggage of typical war-zone refugees, and the other seven were flatcars and boxcars carrying mixed freight, including barrels of molasses and sugar and salted meat, and coffee and flour, and crates stacked upon crates of Springfield rifled muskets, .58 caliber Minie ball cartridges and explosive percussion caps.

That train, and those supplies, did not fall into Confederate hands.

That train, according to Colonel Barron’s first-hand account, sped up the tracks to the northwest, shooting out of Catoctin Station and away from the pursuing Confederate cavalry, somehow achieving a miraculous burst of acceleration and exceeding its expected maximum speed, just seconds after it was at a full, cold, dead stop, its firebox nearly empty and awaiting a load of combustible fuel.

That train did not slow its clip as first one, then another, and another, then two more, then another, and then three more bearded sons of the South were jetisoned from the engineer’s compartment, or from atop one of the cars, each man tumbling ungracefully into the dirt beside the tracks, somewhere on the line between the Catoctin and Hungry Valley stations.

It may be supposed that the most fortunate of the soldiers landed not on the hard, rocky ground, but instead in one of the grassy or weedy patches that dotted the side of the line, but such speculation was beyond the Colonel’s purview.

General Lee’s vastly superior force would have overwhelmed Colonel Barron’s division, the 4th New Jersey, who just happened to be in the vicinity of Catoctin Station, but the melee resulting from the escape of that train enabled them to beat a hasty retreat, with minimal casualties. At first muster, the Division found itself missing only one person: the youngest and pluckiest of the three hardy females who comprised the Division’s nursing corps.

In language that was colorful in places, Colonel Barron went on to describe his astonishment when he caught up with that train, and how when he found it, he also found the missing, plucky young nurse, Barty Andrews.

Colonel Barron would never quite understand how she had managed to foil Robert E. Lee’s plans, single-handedly recovering the train from the Confederates who had it in their possession. He could not fathom the chemical engineering skills the girl employed to create whatever it was that she put in the locomotive’s firebox, powering the engine to a speed never before achieved by this particular variety of rolling stock on the Baltimore & Ohio line. He would always remain somewhat perplexed by her explanation of how she had been able to disembark the nine soldiers, that she had taken some by surprise, and defeated the others so quickly by simple employment of the basic wrist-lock of modern wrestling, and the fundamental body throws and bone-breaks of the fighting style from some ancient civilization he had heard about in boarding school.

But the Colonel was so astonished by her heroic and miraculous actions that he took her explanations at face value, and, according to his letter, immediately conscripted the girl into the infantry as a Corporal, at a Corporal’s rate of pay. Regulations strictly prohibited women from service in the United States Army, but Colonel Barron employed a sub rosa approach to those regulations that was typical of commanding officers during times of war, and in the fog of battle, and while standing atop railroad cars that were packed solid with high-caliber explosive percussion caps.

And, according to her official Service Record, this was not the end of promotions for Barty Andrews, also known as Bartolomea Atherton, who claimed to be eighteen years of age at the time of enlistment in the year 1862, but was actually just a few days past her twelfth birthday.

And within a few short months, her battlefield heroics earned her one advancement after another, until she effectively topped out at the rank of Sergeant Major, since the Colonel was not willing to press his already questionable appointments, and promote a woman to an Officer’s rank.

But Mr. Fink, who had taken an immediate and completely irrational dislike toward the girl, still had not opened the envelope, so he had not glimpsed her service record, or the lengthy letter of recommendation from Colonel Barron.

You know anything about trains? Mr. Fink snarled.

Barty shrugged. About as much as the next fellow, I suppose, sir.

Misunderstanding her colloquialism, he belched, and frowned, and waved a rude hand at the crowd of men behind her, who were massed at the very brink of a full-blown riot.

What do you mean? he thundered. These goldbricks don’t know a steel section from a cow’s udder! And here you are, talking about trains and how smart you are! Think you’re pretty smart, do you?

Yes, sir, Barty replied levelly.

"You trying to tell me how to do my job?? You think you know more than me??"

I don’t know, sir.

The other document in the still-unopened envelope was a single sheet of foolscap, covered with tiny printing on both sides. Barty herself was the author of this document, painstakingly drawn with a tiny stub of lead pencil. It was a modest description of her experience and abilities, something like a résumé of qualifications, neatly summarized for the benefit of potential employers.

In addition to her proven abilities and applied knowledge of railroading, of engines and trains and switches and tracks and railroad bridges, Barty had skills and examples of similarly successful endeavors in the fields of seamanship and celestial navigation, cordwaining and cobbling, tintyping and beekeeping, chemistry and machinery and shop mathematics, cooking, butchering and hide-tanning and animal husbandry, metrology and meteorology, droving and driving and muleskinning, lens-grinding, smithing and scything, fishing and crabbing and large-game hunting and field-dressing, metallurgy and armoring, carpentry and stoneworking, botany and surgery and medicine-making, baking and brewing and jumpsteadying, weaving and sail-stitching, gunsmithing and candle-making.

But still, Mr. Fink had not opened the envelope or examined its contents. Instead he glared at Barty, with a brand-new countenance of dark and deliberate unpleasantness.

You got any skills? he growled.

Some, sir.

As the other applicants continued to stew and steam, Mr. Fink continued to mull this one. With a demolitionist’s mentality, he was determined to measure her up, and keep hammering away until he found her breaking point.

Can you cook a pan of skillygally? He asked with a distinctly condescending tone if she knew how to prepare the basic wartime field-meal that came by so many names, always consisting of bacon grease or lard, crumbled hardtack biscuit, and any other available and edible ingredients – dandelion greens, birds’ eggs, wild onions, berries, tubers - cooked in an iron frying-pan over an open fire. The recipe varied greatly but the ingredients seldom did so, except in quality and quantity.

Yes, sir, she replied.

You ever done any cooking? he rudely demanded.

Yes, sir. For a while, I was Chief Cook in my outfit, in the 4th New Jersey. They called me the Queen of Skillygally. In fact, sir, the men had a song about me.

Mr. Fink was not placated by her response. In fact, he took great exception to what he perceived as insolence.

He shot to his feet, and the flimsy wooden chair finally shattered into scrap wood, as he knocked it aside with a burly hand.

I’ll tell you about songs and skillygally! he fulminated inarticulately. And I’ll wring your skinny little neck!

But the mood in the room was beginning to turn against him. Throughout the interview, the men near the front of the line leaned in, listening carefully to the conversation, and now they were transmitting to the others their observations, and soon the general consensus of opinion was that the pace of processing of the applicants had slowed to an unreasonable degree, and that the blame lay not with the current applicant, but with Mr. Fink himself.

A steadying hand on his shoulder saved him from being tarred, if not feathered, and most certainly ridden out of town on a rail, of which many were available, this being a railroad yard.

The hand belonged to a very important man, a wiry and sharply-dressed man of influence, whose presence quieted not only the explosive Mr. Fink, but the entire roomful of near-riotous applicants.

Take a rest, Fink, said Arliss Hoage, Special Attaché to Andrew Johnson, the President of the United States of America.

He delicately plucked the unopened envelope from Mr. Fink’s grasp, and turned to Barty.

Come with me, Sergeant Andrews, said the Attaché to the President, or perhaps I should call you ‘Miss Atherton’?

Yes, sir, Barty replied, and she smiled broadly, and she followed him out of the noisy room, leaving the stunned and flabbergasted Mr. Fink to deal with a newly resolved crowd of impatient men who wanted work and paychecks.

And he was obligated to conduct business across the table, in an uncomfortable standing position, since he now had no chair to sit upon.

*************

1910.