Darkness on Medicine Bow Peak

by Sevenstars

The Great Solar Eclipse of 1878 brings flocks of the curious to Laramie—and a party of supposed scientists to Sherman Ranch. But are they what they claim to be?

Darkness on Medicine Bow Peak

by Sevenstars

SUMMARY: The ranch family goes "off to see the totality" when the Great Solar Eclipse of 1878 draws near. But, of course, life can't be that simple. Takes place about four years after the series ended. Many thanks to Katy for the quick beta.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Secretary's Office, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C
Monday, July 22, 1878

"Professor Baird! Professor Baird!"

The full-bearded, fifty-something man behind the desk looked up at the whirlwind entrance of his assistant, then at the clock over the mantel, which showed barely past nine A.M. "Whatever is the problem at this hour, David?"

The younger man—barely twenty-two, and just recently, like his chief, raised to his position—looked nervously behind him, shut the door firmly and leaned against it, mopping his brow. "Sir—we've been robbed!"

Baird stood up quickly. "Robbed?"

David gulped, nodded. "Someone got in… it must have been over Sunday, or perhaps Saturday night… ransacked the coin and gem drawers… the California nugget's gone… and it looks as if they got into the art collection too, took some of the drawings and engravings. We found Joshua—" that was the night watchman— "in the janitor's room—unconscious, tied and gagged—he'd been hit on the head—" David shuddered. "It was brutal, sir. So much blood… I don't know if he'll live…"

That was only the first of the day's surprises. Baird was still downstairs with his staff, trying to get a clear picture of what exactly had happened, when a policeman arrived at the door and reported that two dead men had been found in the Potomac—one of whom had in his breast pocket a card case whose contents identified him as Lawrence Banks of the Smithsonian. It was only then that Baird realized that, in all the confusion, he hadn't noticed that Banks and another of his employees, Ernest Marshall, had apparently not reported for work. When he told the officer of the theft and the assault on the watchman—who had by that time been taken away in an ambulance—it didn't take long for a detective to arrive.

The watchman died that evening without ever regaining consciousness. Meanwhile Baird, leaving his staff to continue determining the extent of the loss, went to the municipal morgue to give an official identification. Though the coroner hadn't yet concluded his examination, his preliminary observations suggested that each of the men had been killed by a single shot from behind and pitched into the water. "By the size of the wounds," he said, "I'd say the weapon was a .22. It's a good choice if you want to end a life quietly; it doesn't bang, as most guns do—it pops, and at twenty or thirty feet you can hardly hear it. But at close range—and it was close, there are powder burns on the skin—it's quite as deadly as a .44. They must have died instantly. Can't have felt a thing."

The fish and crabs had been busy, suggesting that the men had been in the water for at least thirty-six hours before they were found, and making precise recognition difficult. The bodies had also been stripped of wallets and other valuables, such as rings, tiepins, and the like, by which they might have been identified. But the second man—the one who wasn't Banks—had been carrying a card case too; it had leaked at the hinge, spoiling the contents, but Baird recognized it. It was made of ivory, with a three-letter monogram on the front in black ink—EDM. "It's Ernest," Baird said firmly. "I've seen him take this case out of his coat any number of times."

The police found the tracks of a lightweight wagon—perhaps a buckboard—and a team of two horses in the spongy earth at the riverside, but could trace it only as far as the road and a few hundred yards along it; once the mud dried and fell off the rims and the horses' shoes, there was no way to tell where, on the hard, packed-down ground, it had gone. They had also found the shoe-prints of a single man, presumably the killer, which had been well preserved in the damp soil. "It looks as if for some reason each of your employees moved one way along the bankside—upstream or down," the detective told Professor Baird. "Possibly they were expecting to be picked up by a boat but weren't sure from which direction it would come. While they were watching and listening, the third man quietly crept up behind them—not difficult on that soft ground, with the frogs and bugs making a clamor—and shot them. After both were dead, he carried their bodies back to the wagon, robbed and dumped them. We took casts of his tracks, but frankly, casts are all very fine, but you have to have something to compare them to. With all the men in and around Washington who wear Congress gaiters, it could take years to find the one we want. That's assuming he doesn't simply buy himself a new pair and throw away the ones he had."

Gradually a picture of the night's events emerged. Banks and Marshall—both approximately of an age, mid-twenties, from decent if unspectacular middle-class families on the Virginia side of the river, and both connected with the Institution's earth sciences and astronomy division; Baird had personally detailed both of them to help assemble equipment for the Smithsonian's Wyoming eclipse observation team—had, of course, had keys to the building. They must have acquired the wagon somewhere, along with someone—their eventual murderer—to drive it and help carry their booty and load it aboard. They'd known the Smithsonian and its holdings well, as men in their position naturally would, and had, with their accomplice, quickly and efficiently chosen those items that would be most valuable both intrinsically and to collectors—and, incidentally, almost impossible to trace: ancient coins, gems, specimens of gold, silver, and other ores, a silver teapot made by a free black craftsman named Peter Bentzon fifty or sixty years earlier… small, lightweight things. "I shouldn't think they'd have needed more than half a dozen small crates," Baird told Detective Captain Dellinger, "if even that much—I'm assuming they used cotton or excelsior or something of the kind to ensure that the contents wouldn't rattle around and attract attention."

"Very likely, sir," Dellinger agreed. "Clearly an inside job, and planned well in advance. They knew no one would be here over Sunday, which, as they probably thought, would give them time to get well away—or perhaps simply to hide their plunder in some secure place; they may have intended to report for work this morning as if nothing had happened."

"Which would have diverted all attention from them, or at least a good deal of it," Baird observed. "Their positions were to do with planetary and astronomical science, not cataloging or the exhibitions. But, of course, they knew the building, knew the routines, knew where everything was, at least generally."

"Their mistake," said Dellinger, "was in choosing that particular assistant. Clearly he decided he didn't want to share the proceeds of the raid—or risk his presumed employers having second thoughts and betraying him."

"Why do you say presumed, Captain?" Baird asked.

"Because, from what I've learned up to now, these two young men had nothing in their history or their current situations that might suggest they were capable of a crime of this kind. They had no family crises that might demand large amounts of money, no gambling debts, no mistresses or other expensive vices. Neither was old enough to have any adult experience of the late war, which might have lent a political aspect to the act. I'm wondering, Professor, if someone else—someone from outside, perhaps—was behind this. Someone who, perhaps, knew something of the kinds of artifacts you have in your collection and suborned these men, taking advantage of the special knowledge they'd have. He may even have convinced them that what he had in mind was simply a prank, that the missing items would be returned in a week or a month—an object lesson, if you will, to yourself and the Institution's directors, to suggest that better security might be worth pursuing."

"And possibly," said Baird slowly, "it was he—not Lawrence or Ernest—who was responsible for hiring the man who killed them." After a pause: "Crime is your specialty, Captain, as natural history and the Institution's administration are mine. What do you suggest we do next?"

"The one thing we can't do," Dellinger replied, "is anything that might cause our unknown to panic. If he thinks he's in danger of being found out, he might get a small boat, sail down the river as if on a day's fishing expedition, and drop his plunder in Chesapeake Bay. I think, sir—with your permission—that our best strategy is to keep this entire incident as quiet as we can. That's why I've had your staff detained in the building—not simply so my men could question them, which I'm sure they expected, but so that they wouldn't talk to anyone outside about what's happened, most especially the press. You must speak to them personally and impress upon them the vital importance of keeping mum about what happened here. In the time that allows us, the Department can be making inquiries, trying to get some notion of how the items might be disposed of for best profit, contacting other law-enforcement entities to secure their assistance…"

**SR**

Laramie, Albany County, Wyoming Territory
Saturday, July 13 (nine days earlier)

"Excuse me, sir. Are you the sheriff here?"

"That's right. Mort Corey." He stood from his desk and offered his hand to the man who had just come into his office—a slender, yet muscular fellow whose well-tailored city clothes made his grace and fitness apparent to any man who, like a peace officer, had to make it his business to estimate others.

The stranger shook hands and produced an envelope from his inner pocket. "Fennimore Draycott, sir. My credentials."

Corey broke the seal and removed a single sheet of handwritten letterhead bearing a seal unfamiliar to him—a sawtoothed disc with a man's profile in the center and the words Smithsonian Institution arced across the top. As a veteran of not only the late war but the Grand Review that had taken place in Washington, D.C., he had a nodding familiarity with the name; he'd seen the Institution's red-sandstone Norman "castle" on the National Mall—it had been only a decade old at the time. He read the letter and scanned the large signature at the bottom, then looked up. "Professor Draycott. You're not the first man who's passed through Laramie chasing the eclipse. What can I do for you?"

"As I believe Secretary Baird has stated," said the other, with a nod toward the paper Corey held, "I've been placed in charge of a—shall we say, somewhat abruptly decided-upon observational expedition relating to the event. My colleague, Mr. McKinnon, is at the railroad station as we speak, making sure that all our equipment has arrived safely. We're aware that there are, or will eventually be, three other observation parties in the Territory, somewhat to the west of here, but our hope is to steal a bit of a march on them by finding a higher elevation than the ones from which they'll be studying the eclipse. And we're also aware—I noticed myself, on the way here, that your town seems inordinately busy considering its size, even allowing for the day of the week—that we're not the only eclipse-chasers in the vicinity. The Institution telegraphed ahead trying to arrange accommodations for us, but already most of the available rooms had been reserved. Given your position in these parts, you must know the people well. Can you recommend, first, some private home outside the town limits where my party might board till it's time to set out, and second, a man or men who can guide us to a suitable spot from which to view the phenomenon and make our observations?"

Mort hardly needed to think about it. "I think I can suggest a place that will satisfy both your needs. It's a small cattle ranch about twelve miles out. The owners, Slim Sherman and Jess Harper, know this area well—I've used them on posses any number of times—and their housekeeper and her husband set the best table it's ever been my privilege to put my legs under." His hand went automatically to his middle. "How many in your group?"

"Five altogether, counting Mr. McKinnon and myself, although we hope that a sixth will arrive before the event. We'll be needing some pickup assistance, but we can hire local men for that as the time gets nearer. Does this ranch have a large wagon we might be able to use for our equipment?"

"Yes, what we call a ranch wagon. Slim uses it to haul firewood and hay, mostly. It's a good two-ton freight type—would that be sufficient?"

"I think so," Draycott agreed. "Our equipment probably weighs in at around 2100 pounds altogether, not counting camping gear, tents and such, though we plan to leave it under lock and key at the station for now. Can you tell me how to get to this ranch?"

"I can do better. Just let me round up a deputy to watch the office and I'll escort you out myself. You'll want horses—I assume you can all ride?—and a buckboard for your luggage, but we can get those at Dennison's livery..."

**SR**

Sherman Ranch & Relay Station, 12 miles out
Wednesday, July 17

"ANDY!" Jess Harper's joyous bellow must have scared the bighorns up on the mountain. It certainly brought the rest of his family—Slim, Daisy, Jonesy, Mike—rushing from all quarters of the home place, to find him and the younger Sherman brother, now less than five months away from being legally adult, wrapped in a greeting embrace that outdid anything as tame as the Mexican abrazo.

Andy Sherman at twenty was still quite unlike his big brother in looks—five feet seven, a hundred forty pounds or so, slight and wiry, which, with his dark hair, made him look more like Jess's sibling than like Slim's; only the slightly turned-up nose, the black-brown eyes, and the much less angular face suggested otherwise. His hat was light gray, not black, but it had been creased and shaped in imitation of the Texan's, and the band was studded with modest silver ornaments, as Jess's was. He was dressed like a drifting cowhand—a brown leather vest over a good dark red cotton shirt, a good silk bandanna with a silver slide, tan corduroy pants tucked into V-notched high-top boots with scalloped edges, four-dollar spurs of black steel with silver trim, fine doeskin gloves—and slung around his middle was a Smith & Wesson Russian .44, reputed to be the straightest-shooting sidearm in the West, though not so powerful as the commoner Colt: its cartridges carried a 23-grain powder charge, against the Colt's standard forty. The weapon was unspectacular enough to look at—modestly blued metal, rosewood buttplates—but the holster was carefully soaped to let it slide out quickly and easily, the edge trimmed for easier access, and the action had been filed down, not to gunfighter standards but sufficiently to make it considerably more responsive than most men's weapons might be, by Jess after Andy had received it as a Christmas gift from his two big brothers in '75. His flaxen-maned liver-chestnut packhorse carried a full bedroll from beneath which protruded the metal-shod legs of a surveyor's tripod and the red-and-white-banded range poles that went with it; a pair of capacious homemade canvas saddlebags was tied behind his saddle-cantle, along with a blanket coat and a Cavalry rain poncho. His riding horse—twelve years old now but still strong and tempery—was Cyclone, the palomino he'd chosen for himself as a ten-year-old boy; a Winchester .45-75—first shown at the Centennial Exposition two years earlier and designed for big game, but equally useful against belligerent humanity—rode in a boot under his stirrup leather.

Laughing, he struggled free of Jess's arms, gently punching his boyhood hero on the arm, and went on to exchange a man's handshake with recently-turned-fourteen Mike, a hug with Daisy and a backslapping half-embrace with Jonesy, and what started out to be a handshake with Slim and almost immediately degenerated into a bruising hug that left the younger Sherman almost breathless. "Ow!" Andy protested. "Slim, you don't know your own strength!"

"Sorry," Slim apologized. "I'm just glad you got here. We weren't sure you'd make it in time. Where was it you were working last?"

"New Mexico Territory. Had to survey a new townsite down there." He grinned. "A flock of optimists—a hundred and fifty of them on the ground—think they've got the next Santa Fe or something, and they decided they wanted to get a charter from the Territorial Legislature. So they scraped together $400 to withdraw a half-section from the public domain, and hired me to resurvey the site and lay out the streets. Unless they can draw in a lot more people, it's just gonna be a wide spot in the road—there were seven business buildings and less than thirty houses when I was there. But what the heck, it's $950 for three days' work in my pocket, less what I had to spend to hire a couple of local men to help out, so who am I to complain?"

Slim nodded. "Better than a lot of men make in a year and support families on," he said. "How'd you come up—Colorado?"

"Yep. They haven't got the railroad through Raton Pass yet—the men I talked to, surveyors for the Santa Fe, said the rails probably won't be laid before Christmas—but once I got to Trinidad I could put Cyclone and Delilah on a horsecar and get up here fast—only took about thirteen hours."

Jess snorted and shook his head. "I can recollect when that trip'd run four days and a half with the best horse on the ranges. Dad-gum. Makes a man feel old."

Andy laughed. "You'll never get old, Jess. Not in any way that matters," he assured his best friend.

Daisy spoke up with the brisk competent air that made it hard for even her four adopted sons to believe she was past seventy. "Nathaniel, we must fix all Andy's favorite dishes for supper, to welcome him home."

"Don't have to tell me twice," Jonesy agreed. "Let's get to it." He winked at Andy. "Beat you at a game of crib later, boy."

"You wish," Andy retorted. "Jess, can you help me with my horses, or does Slim need you for the stage?" There were only two of them a day now, one northbound and one south, connecting Laramie to the Big Horn Basin and the Montana mineral country, but still enough that Sherman Ranch could count on a steady injection of cash from the franchise.

"Go," Slim told his partner. "How do you think I managed before you came here?"

"Not so good from what I've heard," Jess gibed back, "but I druther keep company with Andy than a stage team any day."

Slim laughed and aimed a cuff at him; Jess ducked, grinning. "Mike, you give this big lug a hand, okay? We'll be in the barn if you need any more help," he added pointedly.

Andy gathered up Cyclone's reins, Jess took Delilah's lead rope, and they led the animals into the dim shadowy environment of the barn. Just inside, Andy paused and took a deep breath. "All the barns I've been in, these last two years," he said, "none of them smelled quite like this one. Home's home, Jess, whether it's the house or the back pasture or anyplace in between."

"That's sure the truth, Partner," Jess agreed; he'd had to surrender Tiger to Mike after Andy came back for Christmas in '72, but the new nickname had become peculiarly apt once Slim made him a legal equal in the place. "Noticed it myself, a long spell back, when I was still comin' and goin' all them times."

Andy sighed. "I'm glad you don't do that any more," he confessed. "I know I'm not here to know about it most of the time, but I know Mike and Aunt Daisy—and Slim—need you a lot more than any of them ever wants to admit."

Jess led Delilah into a stall, tied her and began loosening the diamond hitch that held her pack. "You gettin' your fill of travellin' yet?" he asked.

The younger Sherman responded with a wry smile and a headshake. "Not yet. It took you ten years, didn't it?"

"That was different," Jess replied, his face darkening briefly. "You know that. You know why I was doin' it."

"And you know why I'm doing this," Andy pointed out. "Even Slim admits I'll never be a rancher. The West is the only real home I've ever known—that's why I went free-lance instead of staying with an Eastern firm; but all the work and worry that goes with cow-ranching… it's not for me." He paused a moment or two, stripping Cyclone's bridle and breastplate off and loosening the cinches. Jess, in the stall next door, waited patiently. He knew Andy hadn't really needed any help of his to look after two horses—not a youngster who'd taken care of stage-line four-ups when he wasn't yet ten.

They both worked in silence for a while, and then Andy said, "Jess… will you tell me something, honest?"

"I ain't ever been anythin' but honest with you, Partner. What's on your mind?"

Andy looked across Cyclone's withers and over the partition to meet his questioning eyes. "Do you think Slim's disappointed in me?"

Jess's jaw dropped. "Where in perdition'd that come from?" he demanded.

"You shouldn't have to ask," the younger man replied. "You had enough arguments with him about me when I was a kid. He was always so determined that I had to amount to something… that was why he insisted on my going away to school."

"That ain't the same thing," said Jess. "He set you some tough standards, I know that. Tougher'n he should, maybe. But he's been head of the family since he come back from the war all them years ago. I reckon he had a right to want you to be… well, worthy of your ma and pa. Only thing was I seen he was pushin' too hard. A boy's gotta find his own way in life. I told him that, out on the porch, first night I was here. Half reckoned he'd tell me to get gone after I did, too," he added wryly.

"Still and all," Andy insisted, "I wonder if he didn't have… well, bigger dreams for me. Not just the Academy, but college—maybe the law, or… I don't know…" He shook his head. "I'm not a rancher, Jess, not the way I know Mike will be one of these days. Not the way Slim is, or you. But all the same… I lived on this land, in this house, for thirteen years and more, and… I guess the Big Open got into me too. I can't see myself living my life in a suit and tie, sitting in an office, living off other people's quarrels or sickness or sins…"

Jess stepped out of the stall, running his hand along Delilah's flank to reassure her so she wouldn't kick as he went by, and stopped just out of range of Cyclone's heels. "C'mere, Partner," he said softly.

Andy slowly walked out to join him. The Texan put both hands on his young friend's shoulders, gripping firmly. "You're a Sherman, Andy. You always was, even when you and Slim was havin' all that trouble. You rec'lect that day Roney came? How it shook you to have me ask you to lie for me? Even then, there was more of your pa and Slim in you than you knew. I saw it, that day, and I figured that even if Slim didn't want me around no more, after what I'd done, you two'd find your way okay. I knew I'd made him think, that first night—he said as much—and I knew you wanted to make him proud or you wouldn't'a' been so troubled. You two, you always had it in you to settle what was messin' you up—all you needed was me to help set you on the right way to it."

"You haven't answered the question," said Andy, his voice low.

Jess sighed. "I'm comin' to it. Slim wrote you about the time we was in San Francisco, didn't he?"

"Sure." A ghost of a grin. "Wish I could've been there with you. Wish I could've met the Emperor Norton and Major Adams and the rest."

"And Johnny Lancer?" Jess suggested. "He was in kinda the same place you are now. Doubtin' about where he belonged at, whether his pa wanted him or not. But like Slim saw, them two was more alike than they knew. I reckon it always takes somebody from outside to really understand how things are between two people. Andy, Slim don't want you to be somethin' you ain't. He wants you to be a success, to be somebody your folks'd be proud of, but he don't want you doin' it at the cost of your soul. Men change—nobody knows that better'n me, Partner. You say now you can't see yourself bein' anythin' but what you are. Maybe that'll go on bein' so, maybe it won't. What Slim wants most—and me, and Daisy, and all of us—is for you to be happy. To make the most of who you are. Maybe, eight or ten years from now, you'll have your fill of travellin' and want to settle someplace—in Laramie, I hope. Maybe then you'll be ready for law books and an office. Maybe you won't. But right now, you're where you need to be for who you are. Slim knows that, even if he don't know he knows it. There's time for you, Andy. You still got the best part of your life ahead of you. Don't second-guess yourself just 'cause you know I do it."

Andy looked down a moment, then: "It really doesn't hurt him that I'm—well, drifting?"

"You ain't driftin'," said Jess with the faintest note of mockery. "Come to that, neither was I. We both had jobs to do, and we went at 'em the best we could. Right now, your job's surveyin' and settlin' in your mind if that's all you want. Things like that, they take time." He pulled the slighter man into his arms. "Andy, I'm gonna tell you a secret. You couldn't disappoint Slim if you tried from now till 1900. He knows that now."

"You're sure?" Andy insisted.

"Sure I'm sure, and so'll you be if you think on it. Like I said before, takes somebody from outside to really understand how things are between two people. You think on what you know about Slim and me. We been eight years together now, and I reckon I know him better'n any man alive does, except maybe Jonesy. Ain't that why you asked in the first place?"

"I guess so," Andy agreed. Then: "I guess it seemed kind of silly for me to be fretting about things like that, at my age… next time they elect a President I'll be old enough to cast a vote—it's just that…"

"Just that you're still a kid, still findin' your way," Jess interrupted. "Havin' doubts is part of that. But you just go on doin' what you do and bein' the best you can at it, givin' a fair day's work for your pay and tellin' the truth like a Sherman always does, and you'll turn out just what Slim wants you to be." He pushed Andy's hat back and ruffled his hair. "And no more second-guessin', savvy?"

**SR**

Supper was served at seven, the customary hour for that meal in summer. Already, thanks to the high dry air, the temperature was turning cooler, down from eighty degrees at three o'clock to sixty-six by the thermometer mounted outside the kitchen window; but even hotter weather wouldn't have stopped Daisy and Jonesy from setting out a proper welcome feast for Andy. His favorite meal—steak with onions fried in butter and crusty raw-fried "cowboy" potatoes—was on the long table, along with Daisy's corn and hot potato salads, Jonesy's best crisp-crusted hot biscuits, home-churned butter, tart buffalo-berry jelly and wild-cherry preserves, plump China Long slicing cucumbers with their crisp, firm, mild-tasting flesh, little butterhead Tom Thumb lettuces that made a serving apiece, and big mild Bermuda onions. For dessert Jonesy had baked two pies—green-apple and gooseberry—and Daisy had made a caramel pudding.

Andy was surprised to find the table set not merely for the six of them, but for five more. His brother looked slightly embarrassed when he asked. "I guess in all the excitement, you coming home, I forgot to tell you. We've got a party from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington boarding here till the eclipse—well, at least till they're ready to go set up for it. Mort brought them out last week. They want to get a look at things from higher up than the parties further out along the railroad—something like the people who've been gathering around Denver and Colorado Springs. They're paying Jess and me $150 to guide them to a good spot."

Andy whistled. "That's serious money. If they don't set up right on our mountain, it shouldn't take over four days to get them someplace that'll suit them."

"I said the same thing," Slim agreed. "Three or four a day is about the average for a guide for a private hunting party, and these are eclipse hunters, after all. But the boss of the outfit—Professor Draycott, you'll meet him—said that a hunting party's likely to be out for six weeks or more, and he was basing his offer on that. Plus they needed a place to stay—Laramie's jammed to the rafters."

Andy laughed. "I noticed when I got off the train that it seemed pretty busy. Where are you putting them all?"

"Professor Draycott and his straw boss are in the little back bedroom, and the others are sleeping in the bunkhouse. We don't see a lot of them, actually; they've been spending most of their time riding around, exploring, fishing, shooting deer and gamebirds—the meat they've brought in almost pays their board just on its own. They're better horsemen than I'd have expected—although, at that, the two leaders are from Virginia, so I shouldn't have been surprised—and good shots too. All I had to do was provide the rifles."

The boarders arrived about fifteen minutes before the meal was announced—just about enough time to strip the gear off their horses and turn them out into the home pasture. "Gentlemen, my brother Andy," Slim said, as they began finding their chairs. "He's come home to see the eclipse with us." He made introductions. Draycott proved to be twenty-eight or so, a slender yet well-muscled man with the fair coloring so often seen along the Tidewater, wearing a brown corduroy jacket and lace-up hunter's boots over gray whipcord breeches and a striped cotton shirt; he'd left his collar open but added a loose-knotted kerchief about his throat as a cravat in deference to the presence of a lady. His second, Wade McKinnon, was a year or two older, darker, more compact, with a carefully clipped beard running from ear to ear, and quick restless eyes that made Andy think of Jess when he'd first come to live here; his plain dark broadcloth suit, the pants tucked into high-cut Wellington boots, had been livened up with a bright yellow vest and a cravat pulled through a gold ring. There were also three other men, Gregory Rysdale, Theodore Hoyt, and Arthur Lindsey, ranging in age from early twenties to late thirties; like their leaders, they were dressed semi-informally, and all of them left casual hats—wide-brimmed planters' Panamas, broad-brimmed felts, a yellow straw with black binding and band—on the pegs near the door.

After everyone had taken the first edge off their hunger—Hoyt had rueful words to say about the way this clean Western air, increasing his appetite as it did, was endangering the fit of his clothes—Draycott spoke up. "We were on our way out, along the stage road, Mr. Sherman, when we encountered the morning coach. The driver pulled up and handed me a telegram that came into Laramie overnight. An associate of ours will be joining us tomorrow—he sent the message from Omaha when he changed to the U.P. He'll get into Laramie tonight around eleven. If it's no inconvenience to you, we'll borrow the buckboard in the morning and go get him—he can stay what's left of the night in town."

"I think we can spare it for a few hours," Slim agreed. "Mike, you harness up for them after breakfast."

"Okay, Slim," the boy agreed.

Jess's dark mobile eyebrows had assumed a suspicious angle. "How come you di'n't tell us nothin' about this feller before?"

"Jess," Slim said quietly.

"No, it's quite all right," Draycott assured him evenly. "Mr. Harper's a partner here, he has every right to ask. You see, Mr. Harper, there were certain precision instruments that we wanted to have on hand for the event, but the Institution couldn't provide us with them, so we had to track down a set—or rather Secretary Baird did, since we'd already left Washington—and then send Mr. Kilroy to borrow them."

Jess pondered that for a moment. "I reckon that makes sense," he decided at last, and gave his full attention to his food.

"Slim says there are three other scientific parties strung out west of here along the railroad," Andy observed. "So why add a fourth? I mean, what exactly do you hope to find out?"

"Well, to answer your questions in the order asked, it's obviously rather impractical to hope to get a good look at a celestial event without clear skies," Draycott replied. "Simon Newcomb, the director of the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office, has suggested that the odds of clear skies are more favorable farther north. As for the other, our main concentration is the solar corona—a kind of halo that surrounds the Sun but is only visible during a total eclipse. Newcomb's Popular Astronomy, which came out earlier this year, described it as 'a crown of soft, silvery light, like that which the old painters used to depict around the heads of saints.' But nobody knows exactly what it is. There are theories—a massive envelope of luminous gas, a cloud of dust particles that reflect sunlight, a swarm of meteors. Another perplexing sight is the tongues of flame that can be seen shooting out from various points around the edge of the lunar disc. They're known by various names—prominences, protuberances, flames. It was only during the eclipse of 1860 that a Britisher named Warren De la Rue took successive photographs of them and showed that they're physical features of the Sun, not the Moon, which he could see by the fact that it covered them by several degrees. Eight years later a Frenchman, Jules Janssen, used his spectroscope to show that they were made of hydrogen, with a minor amount of an additional substance which he was the first to discover and which was named two months later by Sir Norman Lockyer; originally it had been assumed to be sodium, but Lockyer found a yellow line in its signature that doesn't exist in sodium. He concluded that what he was seeing was an element in the Sun that's unknown here on Earth, and he called it helium. What exactly helium is remains a mystery."

"How did he find it, then?" Daisy inquired.

"By way of the tool I just mentioned, Mrs. Jones—a device called a spectroscope. Simply put, it's a series of prisms fitted to a telescope. We've found, in laboratory experiments, that when sodium is set afire, its light, passed through a prism, shows two different shades of yellow. Lithium exhibits a brilliant red line and a faint orange one. Potassium glows in red and violet. Each element seems to have its own signature of this kind, distinctive and unique to itself. We can therefore identify the chemical makeup of any hot, glowing gas by looking at its light through a prism. We've had this tool since about the middle of this century, and there were ten solar eclipses in the years 1851 through '75—in Norway and Sweden, Spain and Sicily, India and Ceylon, Siam, the Arabian boot, South Africa, in the wilds of northern Canada in 1860, and in North Africa and the Mediterranean in 1870. To this point, the best opportunity Americans have had to study the sun has occurred in August, 1869. That was when a total eclipse passed from Dakota Territory to North Carolina. Congress appropriated $5000 to underwrite the expenses of astronomers heading to the path of totality, and many did." He chuckled self-mockingly. "The problem for me was that I was only nineteen at the time, and still in college. I wanted to go, but I couldn't afford to do it myself, and my father wouldn't send me."

"But now you've got the government behind you," Slim guessed.

"Well, not entirely the government," Draycott replied. "Expeditions like this one require months of planning, you understand. An ideal spot must be reachable with a ton or more of equipment, and, as I noted before, should offer good prospects for clear skies; a single misplaced cloud at the crucial moment could obscure the view and render the whole enterprise worthless. In March, Admiral John Rodgers, the superintendent of the Naval Observatory, lobbied the House Committee on Appropriations for the government to send seven parties to the path of totality, from Montana to Texas. He pointed out that establishing multiple posts, widely spaced, would increase the odds that at least one party would enjoy clear skies. He didn't ask Congress to pay salaries; he promised that the Observatory would seek out astronomers who'd volunteer for the duty. He asked for only $8000—less than $1150 for each party." He spread his hands, shrugged. "They turned him down."

"That seems rather shortsighted," Daisy observed.

"Scientifically speaking, it was," Draycott agreed. "Not only that, it's provincial. The Denver Daily Tribune pointed out that if the totality had been predicted to cross over the White Mountains, Boston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, the peaks of Virginia, Chicago, San Francisco, Kansas City, even Topeka, Congress would have found the money. But because this particular event is to confine itself to the Wild West, they didn't.

"In April the National Academy of Sciences—the most influential and accomplished scientists this country can boast—met at the Castle. There was discussion of alternate means of observation—expeditions organized not by the government but by universities and research facilities such as ours, possibly the seeking of funds from wealthy individuals. The Institution has been sending out expeditions since about 1850; there was sentiment for simply bypassing the Navy and Congress entirely. Finally the Observatory got its funding—the whole sum it had requested—and began recruiting scientists. It bought them train tickets, loaned them telescopes and other instruments, arranged to ship their equipment ahead of time in a specially guarded Pennsylvania Railroad 'Fast Mail' car—ten to fifteen thousand pounds of it altogether. Within a short time after the funding came through, all the slots were taken, so private expeditions were made up. Henry Draper of New York University assembled one of them; it's at Denver. Princeton mounted another. The farthest west of the Wyoming parties belongs to the Naval Observatory; it's at Creston, which I'm told is the last proper station before the construction base. There's another government party at Separation, fourteen miles east. Thomas Edison is with the Rawlins party; he hopes to use a new device he's invented, the tasimeter, to determine the heat of distant stars."

"And then there's you," Jonesy added.

"That's right. I almost wasn't sure we'd get to come, to be honest. It wasn't till Secretary Baird took over in May that it became something more than a sort of pipe dream. His predecessor, Joseph Henry, was eighty years old in December, and not to speak ill of the dead, but I'm afraid he was failing so badly that he couldn't accurately assess the importance of the situation. My father had died the month before, and I suggested that I get an advance on my inheritance to fill out whatever the Institution could spare. Professor Baird agreed, and in recognition of the financial help I'd provided, named me to head up the expedition."

Andy frowned a little, as if he was trying to pin down an elusive memory. "Ever been to one of these?" Jonesy asked.

"Not a total eclipse, no," Draycott admitted. "There was one on the third of May, 1877, that I hoped to see; it would have been visible from Siam, and the Institution made up a party to go there, but unfortunately I'd gone to a cousin's wedding in New York the previous winter and come down with diphtheria for my trouble; my doctor wasn't certain my heart had recovered completely, and he absolutely forbade me to go jaunting off halfway around the world. I helped observe the transit of Venus in 1874—the phenomenon of Venus crossing the surface of the Sun. It's very similar to what we'll be seeing, but it lasts longer, because Venus is so far away from the Earth that its apparent speed is much slower than that of the Moon. Of course, that also makes it smaller to the eye, and therefore harder to make out. We went to India for that."

"So this will be your first," said Slim. "Ours too, I have to admit."

The younger man nodded. "Yes, they come so seldom, nobody should miss one if he has any opportunity. And it's not just the rarity of it, or the thrill of the sight. Scientists are seekers of truth. In essence, what we hope to unravel by observing eclipses is the nature of the sun itself. What is it made of? What fuels its colossal fires? The phenomena we see at total eclipses provide the best clues we have. Newcomb himself noted that 'most of what we have learned respecting the physical constitution of the sun has been gained by the hiding of it from view'—which he rightly termed a paradox. The main point we—that is, my group here—want to determine is whether the corona is only glowing hydrogen and helium, or whether, in addition, it contains solid or liquid particles that reflect the sun's light to the Earth."

"By what I see in the paper," Slim observed, "Denver's become the main destination for many of the eclipse-chasers, probably because it's the biggest city in the path of totality. Newspapermen, judges, Senators, financiers, college professors—and at least thirty assorted pickpockets, till-tappers, and other petty thieves from New York alone, according to the police. Tourists are coming in at such a clip that they can hardly find space in the hotels. It begins to look as if the latecomers will have to be satisfied with tents. The group from Princeton's already bedding down between Cherry Creek and one of its tributaries, which at least act as a moat to keep range cattle from wandering in and disturbing the instruments."

"We won't have that problem, will we?" asked Draycott. "Have you and Mr. Harper decided where the best vantage point might be?"

"We think so," Slim agreed. "We've talked about it while we've been out doing range work. Of course the nearest good spot is our mountain here—" with a sidewise nod to indicate the one that reared up behind the ridge— "but getting to the top of it may be prohibitive, with the weight of your equipment to take into account. We're pretty sure that Medicine Bow Peak is your best bet. It's the highest point in the Snowy Range—a little over 12,000 feet—and it has a high, flat crest, which should make it ideal for eclipse-watching. It's also more than 3000 feet taller than King, out there, and 6800 higher than Rawlins, which should give you that leg up you asked about. It's around fifty-five miles from here; two-thirds of that distance is over level prairieland, then we'll have to start climbing, which will be slower. I figure that, with the big wagon full of your equipment, we'll have to allow a good three and a half days for the trip, plus the time it takes to load on all the things you've got waiting at the station in Laramie."

"We'll need some time to set up," Draycott pointed out. "And I'd like to have at least two or three days to rehearse what we hope to do when the event happens. Once it does, there'll be no second chances. Each of us will have to know exactly what he has to do and when he has to do it. We can't afford to waste our chances."

"I can see that," said Slim. He thought for a minute. "If we could give you five days—would that be better?"

"It would be sublime, but can you?"

The rancher grinned. "That's why Mort put you in our hands, isn't it? Today's the 17th. The eclipse is the 29th, twelve days from now. Figure four days for the trip, one to set up camp, five for your practice. That's ten. Means we have to pull out Friday morning. The wagon's already been checked over, and so has our buckboard. Jonesy and Mike have all our gear packed. Most of you gentlemen can get yours together tomorrow while Mike takes someone in to pick up your new arrival. Are you sure you have plenty of warm bedding?" he added. "The days can be warm in these parts, but the nights get pretty cold—and they'll be colder where we're going, since we'll be at a higher elevation."

"Perhaps that's something Wade can take care of when he goes in to find Mr. Kilroy," said Draycott. "I'd better stay here and make sure we don't leave anything behind. Most of the eclipse-chasers in town are probably local, and if they're not they're at least familiar with the country and knew to bring their own blankets."

"I think you're right," Slim agreed. "That's how we'll plan to do it, then. Jonesy, where are those pies?"

**SR**

With the details of the journey more or less decided on, the subject of conversation changed, and over dessert Andy talked about his work—surveying roads and making maps; laying out the streets of little towns all over the country and making a record of the buildings, entering the construction of each of them on his maps for the use of insurance companies; confirming boundaries in connection with wills, taxes, and lawsuits; and often finding work on behalf of the local and county lyceums, which compiled histories of their native towns and sponsored the making and lithographing of maps of them. A typical residential lot survey brought him about twelve dollars, with another four apiece for placing permanent stone boundary markers; a boundary survey of a parcel up to ten acres went thirty dollars, and a ten-to-twenty-acre parcel started at about seventy. "Wow!" Mike exclaimed. "If I couldn't be a cattleman, I think I'd want to be a surveyor!"

"Oh, the money's good," Andy admitted, "and it gets better for the big jobs, like the one I just finished. But it's a lot of travel, and sometimes a long dry spell between. Fine if you want a good excuse to see the country and make a solid living for your trouble, but you're like Slim, Mike—you're a homebody."

Afterward, he suggested that they go out in the yard for a while. "As long as we're all thinking about things in the sky," he said, "there's a good chance we can get a look at something pretty impressive, if we don't mind sitting up a while."

"Like what?" Mike wanted to know.

Andy winked. "You'll see, Tiger."

"How come you know so much about it, Partner?" Jess asked.

"Oh, I've been interested in astronomy for years," Andy replied. "My first year at the Academy, we had a course in it. Our textbook was A Fourteen Weeks Course in Descriptive Astronomy, by a man named Joel Dorman Steele—it was first published in '68. That got me hooked, and I've been studying the subject privately ever since, whenever I could find the time and a good book. The latest one came out just last year—by Sir Norman Lockyer, the man Mr. Draycott told us about who named that helium stuff."

By the time they got the dishes done and some chairs set up, the temperature was dropping steadily and the sun was a good hour out of sight. Jess pulled his old blanket-lined brush jacket on over his shirt and vest and settled himself to the left of Daisy's chair, with Andy on his right and Slim beyond him again. The scientists, to whom an everyday (or rather every-night) sky was probably old hat, had gone in to relax for an hour or so, perhaps decide if there was anything they needed to get in town tomorrow, and then turn in.

There were many things in Jess Harper's world that he found beautiful. Most horses. Many women. Sunsets. A flower-spangled prairie in the spring. Deer coming down to drink. A new colt wobbling to its feet, tipping and tilting and finally finding its mother's udder for its first meal. Cattle, quiet and contented, wandering aimlessly about a grassy bedground, feeding, nothing on their minds but full bellies and a night's sleep. A stand of aspens in the fall, trunks white, trembling leaves gone yellow as new gold. A fine spread of food lad out on a table, just asking to be dived into. A bull elk bugling, his head thrown back so his antlers almost touched his spine. Rain clouds building in the sky after a long spell of dry weather. A cat nursing her kittens. The mountain at almost any hour or season. A hawk or an eagle, banking and drifting in the sky, catching sun on the upturned flanges of its wings. The Milky Way in all its luster. Most of all the sight of this place—his home—and the faces of his adopted family at the end of a hard day's work or a long spell away. All these things invariably at once moved and reassured him, letting him know that the world was operating as it should and that he was more a part of it than he had often, in his drifting days, dared to think possible.

Almost above all of them he loved mountain nights. They were cold sometimes, but there were more stars than sky, or so it seemed. He'd thought the nights were starry back in the Panhandle when he was a kid, the skies boundless in their extent, but here in the Rockies, probably because of the higher elevation, the air was clearer and dryer, and the display all the more visible and amazing.

He'd never given the sky any real scientific study, of course. He knew the major stars and constellations, the ones by which a man could find his way or tell the time. He had seen a comet in '58, when he was thirteen, and another eight years later. His pa had told of one that had blazed across the sky in '35, the year before the War for Independence—right around the middle of August, he'd said, a month or so before Jess's oldest brother Ben was born. One moonless December night Jess had seen Venus, shining through a break in a line of trees, cast a long pathway of light running across a pasture covered with an icy-surfaced layer of snow. He'd marveled every year, in the middle of June's short nights and at the start of July and August evenings, at the big, prominent triangle of very large, bright stars—Vega, Altair, and Deneb—that hung high in the east, separated by two great glowing masses of lesser ones. They were there tonight, familiar and reassuring.

The sky was dark and richly starred. Suddenly a moving light broke the tranquility, spinning Jess's head to one side as he and Andy both shouted at the same moment. The meteor's flight lasted less than a heartbeat before stillness returned, but all of them were still stirred by what they'd seen. Then, two minutes later, another split the sky. This one seemed to leave a glowing seam in the heavens for a full second or two after it vanished. Their hushed but excited commentary was still going on when suddenly a third shooting star passed by—this one vivid green, sputtering, flaring, finally bursting. Mike yelled shrilly in excitement.

"Where they all comin' from?" Jess wondered.

"South, if you traced their paths back from where they first became visible," said Andy. "There's a regular shower of them every year about this time—the Delta Aquarid, it's called; peaks in late July."

Now a fourth meteor, golden and slower than its predecessors, glided into view from the north. "That ain't one of 'em—is it?" Jess demanded.

"No, that's from the ascending phase of the Perseid shower. An early bird, you might call it—a little bit ahead of the pack. We'll see that next month."

A point of light suddenly appeared in the darkness, flared in brightness, and vanished. "That one must have been coming right at us," said Slim. "What happened to it?"

"Burned up in the atmosphere, most likely," Andy replied. "Hey—look there!" A dim meteor was racing straight down the eastern sky, coming from neither the Perseid nor the Delta Aquarid point of origin.

"That can't have been from either of the showers you mentioned before," Daisy guessed.

"No, probably it was a sporadic. That's a meteor that doesn't belong to any known, charted shower. If you could come out every night and stay up till dawn, you'd see at least a few of them every night of the year."

Several minutes passed without incident. Then suddenly the night was seared by a meteor brighter even than Venus—a fireball—ripping across the heavens. In the midst of everyone's shouts of delight and surprise, they could see one another's faces plainly lit up, their shadows cast across the yard.

That fireball was the single best phenomenon of the night, but the meteors kept on coming. There were all different colors—blue, green, yellow, orange, red, even a pink one. There were fast ones with long paths and slower ones with short paths. There were two Deltas at once, one that seemed to be following a crooked course; several more "bombs bursting in air"—bolides, Andy called them, exploding meteors—and another that left a visible trail for all of ten seconds; thirty, to Slim with his field glasses. One crossed the entire sky so slowly and majestically that Daisy said it reminded her of a train.

"If we could sit up really late, we might see as many as sixty Deltas and almost twenty other meteors in our best hour of watching," Andy mentioned. "But that's nothing to the Leonids of November 1833. One estimate is over a hundred thousand meteors an hour, but another, done as the storm slackened, estimated more than twice that many during the nine hours of it over all of North America east of the Rocky Mountains."

"I remember Pa telling me about that one," Slim agreed. "He'd been carrying goods to the Horse Creek Rendezvous that summer, and taking furs back East afterward. Then he spent a few months catching mustangs before he headed back to Illinois for Christmas with his family. He said it was like nothing he'd ever seen—said the Sioux reset their winter count by it, and he couldn't really describe it to me—I'd have to see one for myself some day. And eventually I did. We did. You remember that one, don't you, Jess? '72, it was."

"There are a good half dozen regular meteor swarms, besides the Deltas and Perseids," said Andy. "The Geminid in December; the Quadrantid in January, which can be as rich as the Perseids and Geminds but has a much shorter peak duration, sometimes as little as a couple of hours; the Lyrids in April, first noted in the year 687 B.C., which makes them the earliest recorded of all. The Eta Aquariids are visible in April and May, peaking early in May, and the Orionoids come in late October. The Leonids are another long-known shower, first recorded in 902 A.D.; they're associated with Comet Tempel-Tuttle, but you can see them every year, peaking in November. The brightest ones not only light the ground, they flare with a fluctuating, flashing light as they fly. Fireballs like the one we saw tonight are common in that one, leaving glowing trails that seem to burn against the sky even after the meteors themselves have vanished; under best conditions you can see them for as long as eight minutes. Then there are the Taurids of late October and early November, slow and not very plentiful, but still worth watching for."

"Where do they all come from, Partner?" Jess asked out of his native curiosity. "Not the direction. What makes 'em happen?"

"Nobody knows for sure," Andy admitted. "It's only been since forty or forty-five years ago that they've been widely recognized to be extraterrestrial—which means originating from someplace other than the Earth. They used to be considered a purely atmospheric phenomenon—something that happens within the envelope of air that surrounds the planet, like lightning. That's why the study of weather is called 'meteorology,' even though weather and meteors probably don't have anything to do with each other. Maria Mitchell, the professor of astronomy at Vassar College and director of its observatory—she's leading a party to Colorado Springs, I hear; they got caught in the quarrel between the Santa Fe and the Denver & Rio Grande over Royal Gorge, and had a lot of trouble getting their equipment back—is one of the experts on meteors and comets, and even she doesn't claim to know. But in the storm of '33—the one Pa talked about—people all over the eastern part of the country saw thousands of them radiating from a single point in the sky, and that point moved with the stars, staying in the constellation we call Leo. Then, about a dozen years ago, astronomers gathered enough information on the Tempel-Tuttle comet to decide that it was the source of that particular shower, at least. Maybe the others are connected to comets too."

"Well," said Slim, "it would be interesting to know, but I think we'd better call it a night. If we're pulling out Friday, I want to take a ride up the mountain tomorrow and look over our stock, make sure everything's okay up there. I'll need a saddlebag lunch, Daisy."

"I'll have one ready for you," the woman promised. "Shouldn't you let the neighbors know we're gone, so they can check on our cattle as well as their own when they go up there?"

Slim grinned. "You're turning into a regular cattlewoman, Daisy. Yes, I should, but there won't be time to let them all know. I'll stop at Reed's on the way home, and he can pass it on."

"I can tell Bill Bates," Jess volunteered. "I'm thinkin' Andy and me should go see can we borrow his extra team, and the Miller boys' too—if Draycott's outfit's got better'n a ton of truck to move, we might need 'em, most of all if a horse goes lame or somethin'."

"Not a bad idea," his partner agreed. "You do that, and I'll tell Reed, just the same."

**SR**

Thursday, July 18-Tuesday, July 28

Before he pulled out next morning, Slim took Mike aside and gave him a piece of paper. "This is a list of a few last-minute things Jonesy figures we might need," he explained. "You give it to Mr. Watkins at the general store, and tell him to put it on our account—you might as well pick it all up, since you'll have the buckboard."

Mike all but glowed with delight at being entrusted with such an errand. "I'll take care of it, Slim," he promised.

"And remember Professor Draycott said something about tents and camping gear," the rancher added. "The best place they can go for that is the saddle store—show Mr. McKinnon where it is when you go by, and the hardware too, in case he wants to pick up some pots and pans and such. Stop at Ben's house, coming or going, and tell him we'll need him to come out and take over. Tell him he can hire another man to help him, if he wants to, though if Mort's got any disorderly-conduct cases littering up his jail that he can spare, we'll take those if he's willing to send them out. Stop at his office and tell him I said so."

"I will!"

Slim saddled up and took off for the summer pastures up on the mountain flanks. Mike harnessed the buckboard pair and he and McKinnon started for Laramie. Jess and Andy stayed long enough to service the morning stage, then got their own horses ready and headed for Bill Bates's place.

Jess was quiet for the first few miles, and Andy, knowing the signs, held his own peace. He could tell that Jess was chewing on something that had him troubled, and he needed time to lay out in his mind how to talk about it.

After a time his patience was rewarded when the Texan abruptly said, "Partner, I reckon I need your help."

"Anything I can do, any time, Jess. You know that. What's up?"

"It's them fellers from Washington," Jess told him. "Not all of 'em, exactly. Just them two boss-men, Draycott and McKinnon. I know I ain't had much to do with educated men like them, but…" He trailed off a moment, shook his head, and went on: "You know how I made my livin' them years before I landed here. A man in that line, he's got to get in the way of readin' people, 'cause he can't ever be sure which of 'em's like to be trouble for him. And once he's got it, he don't lose it. There's somethin' about them two…" Again a pause, a struggle for the right words. "They just make me twitch—inside, I mean. I ain't sure why it is, but I keep gettin' a sense like they ain't tellin' us everythin' they should."

Andy considered this for a minute. "You know, when Slim first said they were from the Smithsonian… something kind of went off for me too. It took sleeping on it before I realized. I was working in Texas just before that New Mexico job—Bosque County, it was. There was talk around there of how the Smith was sending a party to Fort Worth—it's only two counties north, so Bosque got the word pretty fast. Still… I guess there's no reason there couldn't be two Smithsonian parties. Like Professor Draycott said, the more outfits there are strung out along the path of totality, the likelier at least one of them will get a really clear look at what happens. Laramie's better than a mile higher up than Fort Worth is. You can see how Draycott might have lobbied to have a backup team here."

"I reckon I can," Jess agreed cautiously, "but it don't mean that they—or anyways some of 'em—might not have some kind of private business on the side. Does it?"

"No, I guess it doesn't," Andy granted. "But what would it be, Jess? It's not like they'll be in Laramie when the eclipse happens. If that was their plan, some of them could maybe rob the bank or something under cover of all the excitement—like that circus balloonist the first year Mike was here. But they won't be. I mean, honest, Jess, what do you figure they can do up on top of Medicine Bow Peak?"

"I dunno," the Texan admitted, "and that's what's got me jumpy. I'm just thinkin' it'd be best to keep an eye on 'em. And I could sure use you for backup."

Andy was silent a moment, then said, "Haven't you talked to Slim about this? He's your best friend."

Jess sighed. "Slim's got to where he knows to trust my instincts, after all these years—most of the time. Not all. Times he still gets blinded by the outward appearance—mostly with women, but not always. It ain't nothin' against him, Andy. You know I'd trust him with anythin' I got, includin' my life. But I know what he'd say if I was to go to him with this. Can't you just hear him? 'What would scientists from the Smithsonian Institution be up to except what they've told us?' And the thing is, he'd have some reason behind him. What would they be up to? I ain't seen nothin' so far that'd point me the right way to know. Only… last night at supper, when Draycott talked about that new man Mike and McKinnon went to pick up in town…" Again a headshake. "Times I wish to perdition these feelin's I get would be a little more—"

"Specific?" Andy supplied, when his friend hesitated.

"Yeah, I reckon that's it," said Jess. "Specific."

Andy thought this over for the next quarter-mile or so. "If you're right," he said then, "and they're up to something, we could be accused as accessories. After all, they're staying at the ranch, and you and Slim agreed to guide them to the Peak. How could we prove we didn't know what they were planning? It'd be our word against theirs."

Jess nodded. "Thought'a that. Seen enough set-ups in my time to know. This don't exactly feel the same, but still."

Andy's face assumed a grim expression. "It could mean our whole family's in danger. Mike, Jonesy, Aunt Daisy, as well as you and me and Slim."

"Yeah." There was a ring of iron under Jess's gravelly Panhandle drawl.

Andy turned his head, meeting the restless blue eyes with the pale beginning of a chill showing in them. "You can count on me, Jess. You tell me what you want, and I'll do it."

"Thanks, Partner. That takes a big load off my mind."

**SR**

When Mike brought McKinnon and his "new man" back to the ranch, the bed of the buckboard was full of camping gear, including a seven-by-nine-foot wall tent for McKinnon and Draycott to sleep in, a twelve-by-twelve for the other men, a six-by-six to serve as a darkroom, and a couple of compact peaked models, one of which, Draycott said, would serve to shelter the equipment at night. "After all," he observed, "as you pointed out, Mr. Sherman, it will be colder up on the mountain than it is here—and it seems to get fairly chilly around here at night, to judge by the way it feels to Arthur and the others when they come out of the bunkhouse for breakfast."

"It does," Slim agreed. "Laramie's more than a mile above sea level, and I don't really know how much higher we are than that. But I do know it's not unusual for it to hit the low forties in the yard around three or four in the morning at this time of year, and it's been known to snow on the Fourth of July on the high peaks."

"Exactly," said Draycott. "Delicate equipment needs to be sheltered from extremes of weather. We just didn't—or rather the Institution didn't—want to pay rail freight on anything we could get once we arrived. The same's true of the men Wade hired to help out around camp, cook, look after the teams and so on. It's policy that if a party requires assistance when it reaches its objective, local help is hired, to save on transportation costs."

The "new man" was introduced as Eamon Kilroy; he was a wiry, rugged-looking fellow, a classic "black Irishman," short, with dark, curly hair and black eyes. He wore a pepper-and-salt tweed sack suit and a square-crowned derby cocked at a defiant angle, and Congress gaiters. Jess didn't say anything, but he distrusted the man from the first. He looked more like a city tough, a prizefighter, or maybe a Pinkerton or plainclothesman, than like Draycott or any of the others in the party. And Jess could tell, by the way he stood and the way his clothes hung, that he had a shoulder-holster under his coat. Why would they need a man with a gun, if they're just what they say they are? he asked himself. Okay, maybe this equipment they got is worth somethin', but would anybody in these parts have a clue how to get its worth out of it?

Speakin' of which…

"Wasn't you expectin' some more gear?" he asked Draycott bluntly. "I don't see no sign of it."

"No need to carry it all the way out here just to take it back tomorrow when we go through Laramie," the scientist replied mildly. "We have to pick up everything we brought with us when we arrived; Eamon's contribution can be part of that."

"Reckon so," said Jess. But I still don't like it…

**SR**

In the morning they set out for Laramie, with Slim, Jess, and Andy riding three-abreast at the head of the procession, Jonesy and Daisy in the ranch buckboard immediately behind them, and the Smithsonian team with the big Sherman wagon after that, drawn by a four-up, the extra team horses tethered on behind. Mike, on his red-sorrel gelding Ember, ranged up and down the line, ready to carry messages if required.

In town, Slim dropped off at the sheriff's office to call on Mort, then went on to Ezra Watkins's store, where he expected there would be tinted glasses available by now—and indeed there were. He bought six pair, reasoning that Draycott's party would have their own. Meanwhile Jonesy and Daisy took Mike to the café for a light snack while the scientists went on to the depot to collect their equipment and the extra men they'd hired, who were to be waiting there to help load the wagon. Jess signaled Andy with a quick jerk of his head and they idled along behind, pausing in the shelter of a vacant cabin and watching from a safe distance. The team's temporary help was made up of local men Jess recognized, honest enough but somewhat inclined to be sporadic about the concept of work—a seventeen-year-old kid named Jimmy who did odd jobs around town, probably hired to wrangle the stock; an older man, Crawford, who had some name as a camp cook; and one known as Hicks whom Jess supposed was to drive the wagon. No real reason for suspicion there, he decided. He and Andy watched as an assortment of crates was brought out of the locked storage room and Hicks and Jimmy, with some help from the station baggage men, loaded them into the back of the wagon, where the tents and the six men's personal luggage were already stowed.

Jess admitted to himself that he hadn't a clue what kind of gear scientists would need to observe an eclipse, and the lettering on the biggest crates didn't help relieve his ignorance, though by the way the men handled the big ones, they were no light weight. There were also about half a dozen smaller boxes, all stenciled, Scientific Equipment—Fragile—Handle With Care. These must have been the ones Kilroy had brought with him; certainly he seemed to take an intense personal interest in how they were loaded aboard.

"I don't think we're going to learn very much standing here," Andy murmured.

Jess sighed. "Reckon we ain't. Well, maybe when we see what comes out of them boxes…"

"Maybe," the younger man agreed with a nod. "Meanwhile, how about we join the others at the café and get a cup of coffee and some cinnamon rolls or jelly doughnuts or something?"

**SR**

"You take point, pard," Jess suggested, "and Andy and me'll keep up the drags."

Slim laughed. "Well, if you don't mind eating dust all day, I'm not going to stop you." He touched up his blue dun Badger and placed himself at the head of the line. "Okay, let's move out!"

Jonesy snapped the reins over his pair's back, and they bent into their collars and pulled. The loaded Smithsonian wagon followed, with Draycott and his men mostly thrown out around in a loose mounted cordon—except for Kilroy, who, Jess had noticed, didn't seem inclined to get any nearer a horse than he could avoid; he was on the seat with the hired driver.

The teams were fresh and willing, though the equipment was heavy, and as Slim had told Draycott on Wednesday night, their way led at first over firm, level prairieland, much of it Cole Rogers's Double Circle range; they even encountered one of Rogers's riders, but he recognized Slim and made no objection to the party's presence. Around eleven they stopped, as a wagon train would do, and camped till midafternoon, letting the teams rest and feed during the warmest part of the day and enjoying the generous picnic dinner Daisy and Jonesy had packed. "After this," Draycott said, "we'll take care of our own needs in food. It's not that we don't appreciate your skills, but we'll probably be camping apart from you and doing drills just about all day."

Jonesy chuckled. "Come to that, these four boys of ours eat like a plague of locusts—Jess most of all. Ain't we don't appreciate what you paid us in board, but it'll be a bit easier on Daisy and me just doin' for family."

"Nathaniel!" Daisy scolded.

"Well, it will," Jonesy replied blandly. He was the only one of the five Sherman family men Daisy didn't have buffaloed, perhaps because of his many years' experience as a trail cook.

They camped for the night about twelve miles west of town, setting up the small tent and two folding cots for the Joneses, Draycott's two wall tents for himself and his men. The equipment was left in the wagon, covered over with a tarpaulin in case of heavy dew. Slim and Jess, Mike and Andy, and the hired helpers laid out their bedrolls, and a hot meal, prepared chiefly in Jonesy's blackened old Dutch ovens and camp skillets and frypans from his trail-cook days, was enjoyed around the cheery fire. Slim looked over the maps he'd brought from home and said, "We should make Centennial in time to spend the night, if we want to sleep inside."

"Oh, we're not as fragile as all that, Mr. Sherman," said Draycott with a laugh. "Remember, most of us have been on expeditions for the Institution before this, and often in environments a good deal less comfortable than this."

"You held up well for the day's ride, I've got to admit," Slim replied. "Most Easterners don't do that well, even if they're accustomed to the saddle."

To the south, Table Mountain, Sheep Mountain, and farther off Jelm and Ring Mountains stood forth against the vivid Wyoming sky. Centennial, as predicted, was reached late Saturday afternoon, and the party stopped to enjoy a last restaurant meal before starting up into the mountains. A few ranchers and hopeful homesteaders had been in the area since late last decade, in spite of some agitation by the Indians, but the town had only been founded about three years ago, when gold was discovered on one of the mountains and a mine was established. Individual seekers flocked in, as always happened in such instances, and while most of the gold had been dug out by '77, and the main vein in the biggest mine ended at a fault the same year, by that time the town was established and the merchants who'd come in to fill the needs of the miners stayed to cater to the ranchers. The arrival of the railroad made its permanence all the more likely. It was almost due west of Laramie, about thirty miles away, with Bald Mountain and Bunker Hill visible not far to the northeast.

Sunday morning they headed up into the higher ground, Slim riding on ahead to find the best routes for the heavy equipment wagon and leave markers behind him to show the way. Jess and Andy took over as caravan bosses, with Mike to assist. It was harder pulling, but the horses on the wagon had had time to get used to the job and tackled the rough slopes willingly. Travel was slower now, and they made perhaps six miles overland before stopping for the night.

Monday morning Slim and Jess hooked the extra team up to the Smithsonian wagon, and they went on. Around noon Slim called a halt and rode back to confer with Draycott and McKinnon. "This is about as far as I think my family and I want to go," he said. "We can water off South French Creek—" it was no more than 250 feet west— "and put our horses to feed on the other side of it. But you'll want to be as high as you can get, which is a little more than a mile along. Andy, Mike, stay here and help Jonesy. Jess, you come with me—if they get stuck we may need two lariats tallied on for an extra pull."

That last long haul brought them, finally, past the skirts of Sugarloaf Mountain close on their right and Browns Peak somewhat under two miles northeast of it, past a cluster of tiny mountain lakes, and a half-mile or less beyond the uppermost, to the crest. It was less like a mountain peak than like a small, slightly sloping prairie, paved with short high-elevation grass and scattered about with white and gray rocks, most of them not large. To the west, where it would block a good deal of the wind, a higher shoulder rose twenty or thirty feet above the level of the flat, then dropped off at a forty-five-degree angle to the steeper slopes below.

"That's Cedar Mountain," Slim said, pointing to a bumpy-looking ridge distinctly visible to the northwest. "Close to eighty miles from here if we went by the trails, but only twenty-odd if you're an eagle. It's the nearest mountain to Rawlins, but it's also more than 2000 feet lower than we are here, which makes this about the best vantage point Jess and I could put you on. And it doesn't have the high, flat crest Medicine Bow does. I figured you'd need a good level surface for your instruments."

Draycott nodded. "Yes, I think this will suit our purposes more than adequately. You've done a splendid job, Mr. Sherman, and more than earned the pay I promised you. Since you know this country better than we do, have you any suggestions for us, before you go back down?"

"Keep in mind it's high elevation and you want to move slow and easy as much as you can," the rancher told him. "Otherwise you're likely to get altitude sickness or worse. Once you get the wagon unloaded, you can send it downslope for firewood—that will weigh less and won't make the team so much work. In your place I'd keep your horses down by those lakes we passed, so they'll have all the water they want; leave Jimmy with them, and a saddle horse, so he can go back and forth between here and there in case he's needed, or they are. Maybe keep one more horse up here with you."

The scientist listened intently. "We'll do that. Again, Mr. Sherman, thank you for all your help. We'll set up camp now."

**SR**

"Still ain't got no notion what them boys is up to that puts my teeth on edge," Jess grumbled softly. "Maybe if I could get a look at what Kilroy fetched out with him…"

Andy looked quickly over his shoulder to make sure none of the others was near enough to hear. "You think that's the key?"

"I dunno why," the Texan admitted, "but yeah, I do. He just don't seem to fit so good with the rest of the outfit."

Andy thought. "There might be a way. Isn't there a sort of an uplift to one side of the platform where you left them? If you could kind of circle around, then come up behind that, you'd be hidden. Then, once you see they've bedded down…"

Jess brightened. "Didn't think of that. But you're right, Partner."

"I've got another idea," Andy added. "Suppose we give them time to settle in, then I'll take Mike up there one day, just act like a couple of curious kids. Maybe I can get a handle on where the new boxes are being kept. That'll give you less need to go prowling around looking for them, and cut down on the chance you'll be spotted."

Jess grinned. "Knew there was a reason I let you in on this. You do that. They ain't like to be as suspicious of you as they might be of me—supposin' they got anythin' to hide." Then his lips thinned. "And I'd still bet my share of the ranch that they do…"

**SR**

Apart from the chilly, thin air, that night was almost like a picnic, just the six of them, family, gathered around the fire. At this altitude water took forever to boil, so Jonesy just kept the coffeepot on the fire, simmering away, and instead of trying to cook beans from scratch he used canned ones. Potatoes were best dealt with by baking them in the ashes. Butter could be kept by simply putting it in a sealed bucket and anchoring it firmly in the waters of South French Creek. If they found themselves running out of anything, Slim noted, the boys could ride down to Centennial for it.

"Well, we're here," he said. "We've got a week to wait, but we can hunt and fish and just relax. Maybe after they get set up, in the upper camp, they won't mind if we go up and take a look through their telescopes at anything that's interesting."

Jess was frowning thoughtfully. "If one of these here solar eclipses happens on account of the Moon crossin' in front of the Sun, how come we don't see one every month? Don't the Moon go 'round the Earth once a month?"

"That's a really good question, Jess," Andy told him. "It does—once every twenty-eight days, to be exact—and we would, if the Moon were in a perfectly circular orbit, a little closer to the Earth, and in the same orbital plane. But it's off that plane by a little more than five degrees, so its shadow when it's new usually misses us altogether, and it doesn't orbit in a perfect circle—it's an ellipse, kind of an oval—so often it's far enough away from Earth that its apparent size isn't large enough to block the Sun totally. There are at least two solar eclipses every year, some years as many as five. Some of them are annular—the Moon passes directly in front of the sun but is too far out to cover it completely, so at the peak of the event the Sun appears as a luminous ring, which is called an annulus, in the sky. Others are partial ones, which occur over as much as twenty per cent of the Earth and let you watch the Moon take a bite out of the Sun's disc. But when it comes to the kind we're going to see, a total solar eclipse, the shadow's path is narrow—and seventy per cent of the Earth's surface is ocean, so a lot of them are only visible if you happen to be on a ship. Others traverse remote regions; some can be seen only at high latitudes, skirting the Poles. One of my professors told us that a total eclipse of the Sun will occur at a given spot on Earth about once every 375 years, but that's an average—some places have waits of just a few years in between, and Jerusalem hasn't had one since the year 1133, thirty-four years after the European crusaders captured it. That was the year Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his History, and they finished building Durham Cathedral—and started the one at Exeter."

"If the Sun is eclipsed by the Moon," said Daisy thoughtfully, "is the Moon ever eclipsed by anything?"

"It sure is, Aunt Daisy. When the Earth gets in between it and the Sun, then the Earth's shadow obscures it the same way the Moon's will the Sun. Lunar eclipses can only occur on the full moon, and solar ones on the new."

"Is that the only difference between them?" Mike asked. "I mean, I guess the Moon would mainly get eclipsed at night…"

"Mostly," his foster-brother agreed. "The biggest difference is that a total solar eclipse is visible as such only within the narrow corridor called the 'path of totality,' which can be little more than a hundred miles wide. And it lasts for only a few minutes at any given place, because the moon's shadow is smaller than the Sun's on the Moon. The longest ones, which occur when the moon is closest to the Earth, last more than seven minutes. Most go less than three. A lunar eclipse lasts for a few hours, and it can be viewed from anywhere on the night side of the Earth. There are at least two of them every year, and sometimes three or four."

Jess's angular features had a remembering look. "Ma told me there was one when I was just a little baby—not even two months old. First one I rightly remember, I was just around nine... it was in the almanac, so we knew it was comin', and Ma and Pa let us big ones sit up to see it, even let me wake my brother Johnny—he wasn't quite six then. Rec'lect one when I was servin' down in Mescalero country, too, November, it was, '64… scared the Apaches half loco."

"Doesn't surprise me," Andy observed. "Having the Moon disappear a little at a time isn't quite as scary as the Sun doing it—after all, we depend on the Sun for life, not the Moon. But in both cases, a lot of cultures—even the Chinese, who've been civilized a lot longer than anybody else—had a belief that something was eating it."

"You reckon my sisters'll see this thing?" Jess asked. "Francie's in California, and Sophie's in Arizona Territory, in Yavapai County."

Andy shook his head. "Sorry, Jess. Totality won't get any closer to California than we are right here. Nearest it'll pass to Arizona is the upper right corner of New Mexico. But you've got kin in East Texas, don't you? The totality band includes Dallas, so anything between there and the Red and Sabine Rivers should get a good dose of it."

Jess snorted. "They ain't worth it—most of 'em. The Harper ones, I mean. But the Smiths and the Coopers… yeah. I reckon they'll get an eclipse party all set up in my Aunt Meg's yard."

"I don't expect it's likely to make the Indians on the Wind River Reservation very happy," Slim speculated. "Guessing by the newspaper, they'll start seeing it a few minutes before we will—and they may not have any idea it's coming."

Daisy suddenly yawned enormously. "Heavens, I didn't even know that was coming. Excuse me."

Slim smiled tolerantly. "It's the high, thin air, Daisy. It can tire you out. We should probably turn in…"

**SR**

After a couple of days, Andy suggested to Mike that they take their rifles and horses and Jonesy's shotgun and go back down the mountain a ways, below timberline, to see if they could get a string of grouse. "If we can shoot enough of them," he added, with a quick look in Jess's direction, "we can even take some up to the Professor's camp. They should be settled in by now."

Mike was happy to go along, and Jess gave the younger Sherman a quick nod to let him know he understood. The two boys saddled up, Jonesy prepared some food for them to take and agreed to let them borrow the shotgun, and they set off down the creek, seven or eight miles till they got well into the conifer belt. From there they worked their way lower until they came to mixed woodland, rich in aspens, which was a particular favorite of ruffed grouse. The birds weren't easy to find, spending most of their time in thick brush, aspen stands, and second-growth pine timber, and their camouflage made it harder. But Jess had taught Andy what to do. He took the lead and moved through the trees making more noise than he needed to, until a grouse, too stressed to stay under cover, exploded from the ground near a rotting spruce log. Andy checked, drew his S&W .44, laid the shotgun across his saddlebows, held Cyclone in firmly and waited till he saw two others, frozen in their protective coloration. Human folks is the only critters can tell shape without movement, Jess's soft voice sounded in his mind. Game don't know you've seen it long as it keeps still. "Get ready, Mike, here we go," he said quietly. He shot one of the birds through the head, and five more flew away. A quick fusillade of rifle shots and two barrels of shot brought four down on the wing.

They gathered up their kills and decided to stop and eat before they looked for any more. Jonesy had packed them about a dozen sandwiches of baked ham, pickled pork, and homemade jelly on split biscuits, with a Mason jar of breaded tomatoes, some cider applesauce and pickled eggs, and wild-blackberry fried-pies, plus a flask of tart, refreshing lemonade. They split the food evenly and ate till they'd taken the first edge off their hunger, then made slower work of the dessert, savoring each other's company and the pine-scented quiet.

"What's got you worried, Mike?" Andy asked after they'd cleaned up.

The younger boy hesitated. "Who says I am?"

"You say. Oh, not in words. But Jess taught me how to read people. He said no matter what I ended up doing for a living, I'd never regret being one step ahead of everybody else."

Mike thought for a minute. "He's still writin' to that lady up in Sentinel."

"Jess is? The one who came here at Christmastime? Miss Audrey?" Even Andy was surprised at that.

"Every month now. He and Aunt Daisy and sometimes Slim go over what he calls his 'chicken-scratch,' to make sure she'll understand what he means to say. He quit for a while, last year, but he kept goin' up that way to visit." Mike paused. "Andy, I think he's gonna ask her to marry him."

"Well," said Andy slowly, "that would be a good thing, wouldn't it? If he decides to take a wife and bring her to the ranch to live—and he'll have to unless he wants to sell out his share of the place to Slim and me—that'll mean he's settled down for good. You won't have to worry all the time about him takin' off and maybe not coming back, like I used to do."

"But it wouldn't be the same!" Mike protested. "Why does he want to have an old wife anyhow?"

Andy barely smothered a chuckle. "That, Tiger," he said, "is something you'll understand in another year or two. But part of it is something I remember Slim telling me, the first Christmas you were here. Jess needs a family."

"He's got a family!" Mike retorted. "He's got you and me, and Slim, and Aunt Daisy and Jonesy. He's said we're his family, lots of times."

"That's all true," Andy agreed, "and he even adopted you, y'scut. But the thing is that none of us is his by blood. You know about what the Bannisters did, when he wasn't much older than you are. Jess is a Texan. Blood bonds mean a lot, where he comes from. It's not enough, exactly, that you're a Harper now. He wants to know there's somebody carrying on his name and his blood. His sisters have kids, but they're not Harpers. You're a Harper, but you don't have his blood. He wants to know there are people with both."

Mike considered this for a minute. "You mean decent Harpers, don't you? Like his Cousin Tell."

Andy sighed. "Yeah, decent Harpers, like Tell and his girls. And like you. There aren't enough of them, the way he sees it."

He wasn't sure if this had been any comfort to his foster-brother, but he thought he'd at least gotten Mike thinking. Like himself, the younger boy worshipped Jess; the possibility that he needed something more than he had in order to be completely content with his life at Sherman Ranch was both troubling and exciting. They caught their horses, tightened their cinches, and moved on through the woods. As they crossed an open space, two grouse exploded out of the tall grass and flew up and away, stubby wings whirring frantically. Andy whipped the shotgun to his shoulder and let go. The birds stopped in midflight as if they'd run into a wall, and dropped like stones.

"That's seven," said Andy. "Should be enough for our two camps; if they're not, Jonesy can fix ours with dumplings and we can stretch 'em out with a couple of cottontails. Let's not clean out all the birds on the mountain in one day. Come on. If we work our way straight up, we're sure to get to the upper camp sooner or later."

**SR**

Draycott and his people had erected their two sleeping tents, a tent privy, a mess tent, a darkroom tent for photography (supplied with water from a little seep spring Jess had found), and a couple of storage tents, and sturdy piers to hold their telescopes and spectroscopes, all grouped around a long fire trench. They seemed very pleased to receive the boys' bounty, and it wasn't hard for Andy to secure an invitation for a tour. Rysdale, the oldest of the men, proudly showed off the centerpiece of the expedition, a handsome brass telescope with a tube more than five feet long and an objective lens four inches across, set on an equatorial mount that allowed it to pivot easily atop a shoulder-high mahogany tripod. He explained that among their first tasks had been to recheck their latitude and longitude, something Draycott knew how to do but McKinnon didn't, and brought out the sextant he had used to do it—a wedge-shaped instrument something like a generous slice of pie, with a small telescope and a couple of mirrors attached at the point, which was held at the top. Along the curved bottom—the piecrust—was a graduated arc, like a protractor. By sighting through the scope and adjusting the mirrors, Rysdale told the boys, the Professor could measure the precise height of the sun in the sky. At sea he would have taken readings off the horizon; on land he used an artificial one—a small basin of mercury, under glass, shaped into a perfectly horizontal reflective surface by gravity. By tracking the increasing height of the rising sun, and with the aid of tables in the Nautical Almanac, he could reset the team's clocks according to local time. Once he had that, he could wait till noon and take more readings, determining the party's latitude. Longitude was harder; it required comparing local time to that of a distant location whose coordinates were already established. Planning for the possibility that their observation site wouldn't be directly on a telegraph line, the party had brought with them a rugged clock that could carry the time from Washington—whose longitude was, of course, known—without varying its rate even after weeks of travel.

"But why do you have to do all that?" Mike asked. "Slim told you how far away we are from everything—home and Centennial and Rawlins."

"He did," their guide agreed, "but establishing our precise location is critical to the usefulness of many eclipse observations; for one thing, it enables us to compare the predicted path of the moon's shadow to the one it actually takes, and so correct calculations of the lunar orbit. The more exact those are, the better our predictions of future events will be."

"Are you just gonna look through the telescope?" Andy pursued. "There's only room at it for one of you."

Rysdale chuckled. "Very perceptive. No, one of us will use the telescope, one will take photographs, and one—Mr. Lindsey, he worked his way through school as a sketch artist—will do backup drawings. The human eye can perceive far more detail and a much greater range of brightness than even the most advanced cameras developed up to now, so it's important, when an eclipse is to be studied, to have someone attached to one's party who can make accurate—and rapid—drawings of it."

"That's still just three of you," said Andy critically.

"Plus one to use the spectroscope, and one on the polariscope. Five," said Rysdale triumphantly.

Which leaves Kilroy with no job to do, Andy thought. Of course, if all he was really expected to do was nursemaid that extra equipment, that kind of makes sense… only in that case, why didn't he just go back East as soon as he'd seen it delivered safely?

Jess is right—something about this doesn't smell good.

**SR**

Jess carefully studied the sketch Andy had made in the dirt, showing where each of the tents was located and how the fire-trench was oriented, which would determine where men could place their bedrolls around it. "The three biggest tents are mess and sleeping—you can most likely forget about them," the younger man said. "And the two smallest are the privy and the darkroom. Any equipment that's not left out overnight's probably in one of these two."

"Yeah," Jess breathed. "That cuts way down on how long I'll have to be in the camp. You done real good, Partner."

"When are you planning to make your try?" Andy asked.

"Like Slim always says, no time like the present. I'll go up there tonight. That way, if I find anythin' that looks funny, we'll have plenty of time to figure out what's best to do about it."

"Be careful," Andy warned somberly. "And good luck."

**SR**

He couldn't leave the camp till everyone was asleep, which meant lying awake till he was sure they were. The mountain air made it hard for him not to doze off himself, but he managed it somehow, perhaps out of anticipation regarding what he might find when he got there. He wasn't sure what he expected it to be, but Andy's report that Kilroy would be without a job when the eclipse actually occurred had reinforced his conviction that he'd find something. Local men, hired for camp chores, were one thing; an Easterner who probably had to be paid—and by the Institution—for every day he was out here was another. If he wasn't going to have anything to do, why hadn't he gone back?

Leaving his spurs behind—even a green Easterner might notice their chime in the fantastic hush of a high-country night—Jess bridled his sorrel Monte, pulled himself up onto the gelding's bare back, and made his way quietly up the trail, swinging off just before he got to the lakes and circling around in a wide loop, as Andy had suggested. When he saw the shoulder of the peak on his right, instead of ahead, he knew he was where he needed to be. He moved in closer, dropped to the ground and continued afoot until he could peer past the sloping flank of the higher ground. The fire was a dim glow, barely visible in its trench; the tents were white blobs in the starlight. There was no sign of lights in any of them, or of movement anywhere, inside or out. Jess could make out the shapes of the hired help huddled in their warm bedrolls, though he was too far away to hear any movement or sound of snoring.

He studied the layout of the place, comparing it mentally to Andy's map, until he was sure of the location of the two tents the younger man was certain were being used for stores. Then he began moving in, using the tents themselves for cover, pausing and listening at intervals. He slid into the camp to the left of the larger sleeping tent, stopped again and waited till he was certain nobody was aware of him, located the first of the two he was interested in, and glided soundlessly around the perimeter until he came to it. The flaps had been tied shut and pegged down, probably as a defense against scavenging animals—Not that there's likely to be many this high up, Jess told himself—but that was easily taken care of.

He slipped in between the loosened flaps and stood still a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the greater dimness. A lantern hanging from the pole provided a prospect of better light than his own matches would, though he hesitated at first about using it—if somebody out there woke up and saw it… Nothin' worth the doin' comes without a risk, he told himself firmly, and wound up the chimney to set flame to the wick.

It didn't take him long to determine that this was the tent earmarked for food stores. Once he'd seen that, he didn't anticipate finding the boxes he was interested in, but he took time to make sure. No, they weren't here. He blew the lantern out and returned it to where he'd found it, slid out and replaced the pegs, tying the flaps shut behind him. Maybe his knots weren't quite what the last man out had tied, but in the early morning, half awake, Crawford wasn't likely to notice that.

He located the equipment tent, directly to his right, and started toward it, his feet silent on the mossy grass. As he'd half expected, this one hadn't been secured; animals wouldn't have any interest in scientific instruments. He was just reaching for the flap when he heard it—a grunt and a soft sigh from within, the rustle of a body turning over in a cocoon of blankets.

Jess froze, then dropped flat. Somebody's sleepin' in there!

Slowly, ever so carefully, he wormed backward toward the gap between the two tents, keeping his eye on the flap. There was a faint grumble from within, a snort, and a man-shape pushed its way out, pausing to stretch and scratch and look around. Jess flattened himself to the ground, hardly daring to breathe.

With the new moon less than a week away, the night was lit chiefly by the stars, and he couldn't see the man's features, but he didn't need to. Size, stance, breadth of shoulder, his walk as he slowly stumbled across the campsite toward the privy tent, told the Texan all he needed to know. Kilroy.

The Irishman was intent on his goal, not looking back. Quietly Jess wormed his way out past the edge of the ring of tents, then drew himself to a crouch and moved around until the big sleeping tent screened him from view.

He ain't sleepin' in with Draycott and McKinnon, not that I was expectin' it, Jess told himself. Their tent ain't big enough for more'n them. He ain't in here with Lindsey and the rest, and he ain't by the fire with the casual help.

Why?

What's in that tent that a man might want to sleep with—or that Draycott might want him to? Even greenhorns like them two should be able to tell that there ain't like to be no thieves up here.

Whatever it is, I'll lay odds it's got somethin' to do with them crates he fetched out.

But dad-gum, how'm I ever gonna find out what it is if he's in there with 'em every night? Too dang many people movin' around here for me to try it by day.

Maybe best I sleep on it. Got time yet… they won't be goin' till after the big show…

He kept the tent between himself and the camp as he retreated to where he'd left Monte, but there was no suggestion that he'd been seen. Pulling himself onto the horse's back, he drummed his heels lightly against its flanks and turned it back the way he'd come.

**SR**

"Harper worries me, Fenn."

"How so?" asked Draycott mildly. "He's just a rancher, the same as his partner."

"Nobody's just anything," retorted McKinnon. "Harper less so than many. Eamon told me he heard a few things about the man while he was waiting for me to show up. Harper drifted into Laramie about eight years ago with a name as a fast gun for hire. There's disagreement about how many men he's killed in his time, but none about the fact that his gun is still fast and accurate."

"Now what reason would he have to use it on us?" Draycott wanted to know. "Fast gun or not, he's hardly a lawman."

"He's been one. Corey's used him as a posseman and deputy more times than anyone can count. He's tough, and he's smarter than he sounds—stupid men don't reach the level he did in his profession. And they also don't get far without being able to read people and see beneath the surface."

Draycott thought about that. "You think he might suspect something?"

"I think it would be a bad mistake to automatically assume that he doesn't. We haven't gotten this far without planning for contingencies."

The other pondered. "I don't want to get into murdering women and old men."

McKinnon snorted. "You're already an accessory before the fact for one old man, at least, by what Eamon said. And so am I. But it's not likely. Harper's very protective about the ranch people; everyone agrees on that. If he decides to brace us, he'll wait till they're out of the line of fire. As long as they're near, we're fairly safe. But we need to start thinking about what we'll do if it comes to a confrontation…"

**SR**

In the arid terrain of southern Wyoming, in a bleached landscape of sage and greasewood, the Continental Divide itself divided, forming a high basin from which water couldn't escape except by evaporation. It was alkali desert—a desert Jess had walked out of, once, after a stage holdup; a wasteland that most travelers traversed as quickly as they could. But for eclipse-watchers in 1878, it had two great attractions: the path of totality and the railroad. Here the lines of these intersected. Though there were water-and-fuel stops beyond it, the last significant community before the end of track was Rawlins, a tiny town of 600 people—mainly Union Pacific employees—set among treeless hills just east of the Great Divide Basin. As such it had become a major destination for scientific observers—none of whom had any notion of what was going on less than twenty miles to their southeast.

From Wednesday through Sunday the Smithsonian party on Medicine Bow Peak drilled almost without cease. Hoyt rehearsed the steps involved in photographing the corona—inserting a plate into the camera, exposing it for a fixed period of three to sixty seconds, promptly removing it and inserting a new plate. Rysdale tested his polariscope, which divided light rays into those that oscillated up and down and those that went left and right, thereby making it possible (it was hoped) to gain some inkling as to whether the corona shone by its own light or merely that reflected from the sun. McKinnon practiced using his spectroscope with a fluorescent eyepiece that enabled him to see the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, which he hoped would reveal new information on the chemical composition of the corona and prominences. Draycott, who would be on the main telescope, timed them, encouraged them, and kept the temporary help focused on their chores. After each rehearsal, they rehearsed again, to make sure they could perform every step efficiently in the time that totality was expected to last at these particular co-ordinates. They worked from dawn till ten, with time out for meals at one and six P.M., and an evening stroll down to the lakes and back.

In the lower camp, the Sherman Ranch family relaxed and enjoyed the wait. Slim and Jess, Jonesy and the boys, spent a good deal of their time hunting and fishing, and Daisy gave her attention to the basket of mending she'd brought from home, her knitting, and several recent ladies' magazines. They all pored over the Laramie Gazette (fetched up from Centennial, which didn't have a paper of its own yet, by Andy and Mike) to learn what sights they might hope to see and where to look for them—Procyon almost directly below the sun and quite a distance away from it, Venus considerably to the right of Procyon, Castor and Pollux above Venus, Mars and Mercury above the Sun and further left, with Regulus—the handle in the sickle of Leo—between them. When Slim wasn't doing anything else, he stretched out in the sun with a book. I'm glad Jess made me see that a man needs to have balance in his life, he told himself. Work is necessary, and I find mine fulfilling. But it can't be everything. There has to be time out for yourself as well.

In Denver, Colorado Springs, Laramie, and other cities in and near the path of totality, newsboys and other wandering vendors did a brisk business in pieces of blue glass at three cents apiece, which some people fitted into the bottoms of boxes or the tops of old stovepipe hats. One newsboy in Denver was thought to have made $70 from this trade. Children collected shards of glass and blackened them over candle flames. Every newspaper of any importance was full of eclipse material. It was perhaps the biggest story since the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

In Colorado Springs, windows in church steeples that would face the eclipse were leased for fifty cents, and tent space in the Garden of the Gods public park sold for a quarter. The best view was on Pikes Peak, but it came at a price. Some scientists had gotten to the area a week in advance to climb up and set up camp there, but they were plagued by snowstorms and altitude sickness. Cleveland Abbe, known as the father of the National Weather Service, had to be carted out on a stretcher. Hotels ran out of rooms, and tourists who didn't get a cot had to beg residents of private homes to let them stay. One man reportedly slept on a pool table.

After five days Draycott's party were satisfied that all was in readiness. They sent Jimmy down to invite the ranch family to take a magnified look at the night sky, which was eagerly accepted. After a good meal at the upper camp, they took turns peering through the scientists' telescopes at double stars, distant nebulae, and Saturn's rings, which were then angled directly toward the Earth and gave the effect of a knife slicing through the middle of the planet. Even Jess found, for a time, that the wonder of it distracted him from his concerns about those mysterious crates. Still, he was certain that they were the key to whatever was going on. Andy's description of what he and Mike had seen on their earlier visit suggested to him that the team's equipment had come almost entirely out of the big, heavy crates, not anything as small as Kilroy had brought with him. Which meant that no matter what was printed on them, they weren't likely to be "scientific equipment" of any kind.

Then why bring 'em all the way up here? Jess wondered.

"Well, tomorrow's the big day," Slim observed at last. "When can we expect anything significant to happen?"

"By our calculations, a partial eclipse should first be visible around 2:13 P.M.," Draycott replied. "It will take somewhat over an hour for the Sun to be completely obscured, and that will last about three minutes. Then we'll go to partial again, ending at 4:31, when the rear limb of the Moon will clear the solar surface. Weather permitting, of course," he amended.

Slim knew what he meant. In recent days the sky had clouded up each afternoon, a pattern which, if it continued on Monday, could put everyone's hard work and preparation to naught. "About how wide will the path of totality be?" he asked.

"About 118 miles. Larger than many of these events. It should be ninety per cent visible across 500 miles, and eighty per cent within 820—not that that helps us very much."

"Don't be troubled, Professor," Daisy advised cheerfully. "I've lived in Wyoming for six years, and I don't believe I've seen a day at this season that's entirely cloudy."

"I certainly hope the pattern you've observed continues, Mrs. Jones," Draycott admitted.

**SR**

Monday, July 29: The Event

Sunrise was chilly, but the sky was deep blue and cloudless. A cloud bank thickened in the east, but a few hours later it moved off to the south. A little after noon the wind picked up, with sharp gusts. In some places, astronomers erected temporary fences against it, but on Medicine Bow Peak, the shoulder behind the upper camp broke most of its force. Draycott and his crew set up their instruments one more time, fitting dark filters over their telescope lenses to protect their vision. Hoyt laid out his developing equipment in the darkroom tent and made certain that the lining blocking light from passing through the outer canvas was securely pinned in place. All over Wyoming and Colorado, wherever eclipse-watchers had gathered, they assembled on high rooftops and any convenient hill.

In the lower camp, Slim and his family went about their morning chores as usual, then lingered restlessly near the fire; nobody wanted to be too far away to share the event with the rest when it finally occurred. Jonesy managed to persuade Daisy and the boys to join him in a game of four-handed euchre, but nobody really had their minds on it. Jess brought the horses in and groomed them, one after another—and then did it again. Everyone kept consulting watches and peering at the sky. Even midday dinner couldn't distract them entirely—it only served to remind them that the wait was growing shorter.

Mike was the lucky one. Looking up through his blue glasses—Slim having insisted that everyone put them on no later than two o'clock—he spotted it. "Slim! Andy! Everybody! Look, it's starting, it's starting!"

Indeed it was, though the event's beginning was barely perceptible; a subtle dent or flattening along the Sun's western edge as the Moon appeared. Even though they all knew that the interval between it and totality was more than an hour, anticipation increased: as the Moon nibbled at the Sun, there was a constant urge to gaze upwards. One-quarter covered, half, three-quarters, yet still there was no noticeable reduction in daylight. As the Moon carved an ever-larger bite out of the solar disc, the Sun itself seemed to grow moonlike—a shrinking crescent.

Then, about fifteen minutes before complete blockage, strange things began to happen. Down on the lower ground, below timberline, beneath the trees, where the sunlight filtered through a thick layer of aspen leaves, what dappled the ground were not points of light, but crescents. Everywhere shadows grew sharper, and objects seemed more clearly defined, as if displayed at high contrast. The air turned chillier, and eclipse-watchers pulled on more layers of clothing. People in Centennial noticed that the upper quarters of the mountain and the sky beyond it had turned lilac in color, while the upper sky deepened to a very dark warm blue. The Sun's light turned pale and gray; all the yellowness seemed to fade out of it.

The final minutes before totality were now upon them. The pace of change seemed to quicken, and eerie alterations in the sky, the air, and the landscape brought a sense of marvelous foreboding. The temperature dropped abruptly—perhaps twenty degrees or more—and people struggled blindly into jackets. Birds flocked confusedly to their roosts; horses whinnied uneasily. Frogs croaked from streams; bats flew aberrantly in the afternoon. The quality of the sunlight, coming entirely now from the Sun's very edge, was dulled and reddened, yet it made the landscape look oddly drained of color, taking on a dull silvery-straw hue. The Sun's reflection in streams, in ponds, in horse troughs went from its usual strong, widespread glitter to mere isolated gleams. Shadows became bent, and the dappling of the sunlight under the leafy trees turned to multitudes of even thinner crescents—pinhole pictures of the Sun produced by chinks in the foliage.

In the ranch family's camp, everything took on an air of unreality, seemingly thrown into bold relief. The landscape dimmed—not turning gray, as if beneath cloud cover, but a faint yellow, as if lit by a fading kerosene lamp. Eerie strips of darkness began to swim across the entire landscape, especially on the pale surface of the bare ground, all of them moving in the same direction, and with the same speed, on the ground as the prevailing wind in the air. "Not shadows," Andy murmured. "Dimmer areas in the variations of light. The crescent Sun's become so thin that the turbulence in our atmosphere makes it twinkle—like stars do."

About eight minutes before totality, Daisy cried suddenly, "Look! Is that Venus?"

A dot of brightness, dazzling the eye, had appeared in the general vicinity of the Sun. "That's right, Aunt Daisy," Andy agreed. "We can see it because the sunlight's not smothering it out." He glanced at his watch. "Just a few more minutes now."

And sure enough, the Moon's shadow was approaching. The high, thin clouds made it even more apparent than it might otherwise have been. It looked something like the purple or blue-black mass of a mighty thunderstorm building up, but one or two hundred miles wide and racing across the sky at an unimaginable velocity. "How fast is that thing goin'?" Jess asked.

"Almost 2300 miles per hour," Andy told him. "But if you think that's a lot, it's only about three per cent as fast as the Earth goes around the Sun."

"Dad-gum," Jess whispered unbelievingly.

A wind blew in, chilling them. All across the totality band, fireflies winked into view, owls emerged from their daytime hiding places, and grasshoppers folded their wings and fell to the ground. Lower down, cows turned homeward, pigeons went to roost, and all the roosters within the shadow began to crow lustily and in regular succession. A star suddenly materialized, then two. The air stopped moving. The birds ceased their chatter.

Three minutes to totality. The sun was a mere sliver; the landscape had taken on a lurid hue. A minute now. The narrow bands of light and shade still rippled across the ground, as if the Sun were being projected through shallow water. Each was about three feet wide, made up of a six-inch dark zone and the rest light, and their edges were wavy.

It was almost like a religious experience to watch as the Sun's blinding surface was completely hidden by the dark disc of the Moon. The solar crescent had now grown exceedingly slender—little more than a filament. Still it continued to shrink, like an ember burning itself out at the ends. Then came a final brilliant display. As the shadow's edge reached the Sun, a kind of corona just above its surface flashed out pink, and the glare of the remaining solar crescent, till now still dazzling and dangerous to even glance at, broke into a string of fiery dots, shimmering jewels, dancing points of light. "Baily's Beads," said Andy. "It was Edmond Halley who was the first to describe them, in 1715. It took till 1836 for the man they're named after to explain them. They're the last sections of the solar crescent seen through the lowlands on the edge of the Moon."

Then a few final ripples of light rushed over the ground—and darkness descended with a disorienting rapidity. The dimming light didn't just surround them; it swallowed them. The very ground seemed to give way. Just as Andy finished speaking, the pearly corona of the Sun leaped into view, a gently glowing wreath around the jet-black, profoundly round silhouette of the Moon, which was now completely hiding the blinding ball of the solar disc. "It's safe," he said, and they all removed their glasses.

The Sun's disappearance brought, not utter darkness, but a sensation of having fallen through a trapdoor into a dimly lit, unrecognizable reality. The sky seemed somehow unearthly—not the starry dome of night, not the immersive blue of day, but an ashen ceiling of slate. In it a few bright stars and planets shone familiarly. From the astronomers' site up above, clearly audible in the thin, crisp air, came the steady clang of a timekeeper marking off seconds by banging against a plate, keeping track of time for the watchers themselves, letting them focus their full attention on their tasks.

The Sun was gone, replaced by a magnificent ring of golden light—a halo. It was frilly, finely textured, as if made from spun silk, with hints of ruby at its base and luminous, immense streamers like pearly wings projecting many times the sun's own apparent diameter toward the east and west. It was so intensely bright nearest the black disc of the moon that eyes could scarcely bear it. Its light was no stronger than that of the Moon at full, but the fall to darkness had been so precipitous that their eyes couldn't completely adjust. It felt more as if they'd suddenly been plunged into deep night. It was as if someone had rotated a dial to dim all the light in a room over just a few seconds—but the room was all of outdoors, a hundred miles or more around them. It sent a chill of wonder down the spine. Everyone was hypnotized, dazzled, by the twisting cones of light that rose like pearly mountains from the hidden disc of the Sun.

In the deep twilight Slim's field glasses passed from one to another. The corona wasn't the only light shining. All around on the horizon was a wide glowing band of orange-red—a 360-degree sunset. "Light leaking to us from lands beyond the Moon's central shadow," said Andy, "coming from so far away that it's turned ruddy by its passage through Earth's atmosphere." Most of the sky was a deep midnight blue, in which a few bright planets and stars could be made out. Against that dark backdrop, weird green rays shot out from above and below the moon-shadow, while to the sides a great swath of the same color was visible, against which tiny red-edged flames could be made out leaping from the lunar disc and tumbling back again. "Solar prominences," Andy called them.

Twenty seconds into totality, and suddenly the wind ceased entirely, leaving utter stillness in its wake. The shattering beauty and strangeness of the moment was so great that they couldn't keep still; everyone in the camp was shouting, crying, babbling over and over—even Slim. It was as if the reality they had learned to construct as small children had been ripped open to let a gleam of eternity burst through—beyond words or even thoughts, a blast of raw, pure wonder.

The event packed its staggering power into so short a time that it left them virtually breathless. It seemed much longer than it was—no more than three minutes. Now the sky grew brighter in the west as the rear edge of the shadow approached the Sun. Then, suddenly, the light from a single point of the blazing solar surface—smaller and more precise than the Baily's Beads, almost like a mighty star—burst through the deepest valley on the edge of the Moon. Initially far brighter than the full Moon, it was concentrated for just a few shattering, unbelievable seconds into a single point of light. Gasps and exclamations of awe and reverence ran down the line of watchers. Then it turned into a wire-thin, blinding arc of exposed Sun. "Glasses!" Andy ordered, keeping his head through all the wonder of it. The light of common day was rushing back in. Totality was over.

Jess and Mike whooped aloud. Daylight returned, it seemed, much faster than it had gone. Stars, planets, the corona, vanished beneath the brightening scrim of blue daytime sky.

It was over—but none of them would ever forget it.

**SR**

Monday, July 29: Afterward

"If Harper's going to make any kind of move," said McKinnon thoughtfully, "it will probably be tonight or tomorrow night. He and Sherman won't want to stay away from their ranch and their relay business any longer, now that they've seen what they came for."

"Perhaps we should see when they plan to leave," Draycott suggested. "We have to pay them, so one or the other will probably come up expecting it. And they did earn it."

"I'm not disputing the fact," McKinnon replied. "When do you want to…?"

His counterpart considered the question. "Everybody's still pretty keyed up, after the eclipse. Some may not sleep too well tonight—and we don't want to take any undue risk of their hearing us. Tomorrow. I'll make an excuse to Sherman…"

**SR**

Tuesday, July 30

Slim and his family were tearing down their camp and packing the buckboard when Draycott came down from the peak on his S-R chestnut. "Well, Mr. Sherman," he said cheerfully, "how did you like the show?"

"It was something, sure enough," Slim admitted. "How was it up above?"

"Mr. Hoyt's photographs came out very well," the scientist replied, "and Mr. Lindsey's drawings are almost better. As for the rest of us, we've got reams of notes to transcribe. We also have some other observations we want to make here—comparisons. I can see you're getting ready to head home. You needn't wait for us; we have our own cook and driver, after all. I did want to catch you before you left—" He reached into the inner pocket of his corduroy jacket and pulled out a wad of bills. "One hundred fifty dollars for your services, and Mr. Harper's, as guides, and seventy-five for our board, as agreed. Plus fifty more for the wagon and teams, and forty-five for the use of your horses till we can send them back to you. Count it if you like."

"I don't think I need to," Slim replied with a smile. "When do you expect you'll be finished?"

"Oh, only another day or two. Since Hicks and Jimmy are local, they can bring your wagon and the horses back to you, if we find we have to hurry to catch the eastbound train. Will that be satisfactory?"

"I can't see why not." Slim offered his hand. "If we don't see you again, have a good trip home, and I hope your Secretary is pleased with what you've learned."

He watched as Draycott headed back up the trail. "Couldn't help overhearin'," said Jess's gravelly drawl at his back. "So we maybe won't be seein' 'em again."

"No," Slim agreed, "I can see how they'd want to get home with their observations." He held up the wad of money. "That's about the easiest three hundred twenty dollars I can ever remember earning."

"You speak for yourself, boy," Jonesy put in. "You didn't have to feed 'em!"

**SR**

"I'm thinkin'," said Jess as he and Slim saddled their horses, "maybe Andy and me should ride on ahead, get on back to the ranch before you. No use havin' to pay Ben and whoever for any more days'n we need 'em. You can bring Daisy and Jonesy and the buckboard on, you and Mike. Us two, with just our horses, if we push we can be home by tonight."

Slim considered. "That's true. Andy's okay with it?"

Jess grinned. "Shoot, hardcase, you know he's always happy to spend more time with me. We'll see you in two-three days or so."

**SR**

"Did he go for it?" Andy asked.

"Swallowed it like a trout on a fly," Jess grinned. "Slim's trouble is he never stops to really listen, not when it's somebody he trusts. I didn't say we was gonna go home, I just said we was thinkin' on it."

"I kind of hate deceiving him," Andy admitted, "even if it wasn't exactly a lie."

Jess's lean face took on a grim look. "Still," he said, "somethin' about that outfit don't smell right, and I aim to know why. C'mon. We'll get well ahead of 'em and then circle back…"

**SR**

They dropped down into the timber belt, swung to the left, and began circling. When they were a good four miles off the path the buckboard would follow, they eased their way back up to the edge of the trees and, when they were certain that they'd be invisible to the rest of their family, started moving slowly back toward the crest, aiming for the shoulder behind which Jess had hidden himself on Wednesday night. Short of it and well off to the side, they paused and had a cold meal from their saddlebags, then waited till the sun had almost vanished and began the last leg of their climb, moving slowly and steadily and letting the gathering dusk hide them. After an hour or so they reached Jess's previous pausing point, ground-tied their horses, and went up the back of the shoulder to take a look at their target. Nothing about the camp seemed to have changed, except that the horses had been brought up from the lakeside grazing ground and a picket line arranged, which suggested an intention to get started first thing in the morning. Jess, whose distance eyesight was the better of the two of them, said he was pretty fair sure that some of the crates of gear—leftover food and such, maybe, or part of the equipment—had already been loaded into the wagon, too. Draycott's party appeared to be finishing their supper around the campfire. "We'll need to wait till they bed down," said Jess.

"Yeah, but for what?" Andy asked. "You said Kilroy sleeps in the equipment tent…"

"They didn't use whatever was in them boxes," Jess replied slowly, "but there's gotta be some reason they hauled 'em all the way up here. What if…" He trailed off, thinking. "You know what? I got me a notion whatever's in 'em, they don't mean to take it back down to Laramie with 'em."

Andy frowned. "You mean the whole outfit's in on it, whatever it is? 'Cause if they're not, Mr. Rysdale and the rest of 'em are sure to question why a lot of their equipment's being left up here on the mountain."

"They won't if they think it ain't," Jess pointed out. "S'posin' that—sayin' you're right, which maybe you are and maybe you ain't, Partner—s'posin' that they're aimin' to take the boxes back, all right… but with nothin' in 'em. Or maybe just some of these here rocks you see layin' around."

It took Andy a minute to work his way through that; Jess's thought processes could sometimes be a little tangled. "I get it, I think," he said then. "They're gonna hide it, whatever it is. And the best way to do that would be to bury it."

Jess slapped him on the back. "Now you're on the trail, Partner. Let's just watch…"

**SR**

It must have been around eleven—a good couple of hours after the camp had settled down for the night—that Jess spotted a shadowy figure pausing in front of the smaller sleeping tent, its form clearly outlined against the light canvas in the bright high-altitude night. "There," he whispered. "See? Lay you odds that's Kilroy. Moves like him, anyhow."

"I see him. There, he's going in," said Andy.

"Been makin' sure the rest of the outfit's asleep, I'd bet money," Jess guessed. "Now—look. Three comin' out. Kilroy, Draycott, McKinnon. Watch where they go… uh-huh. Right to that equipment tent…"

They watched as the three dark figures made a couple of round trips, seemingly carrying something from the equipment tent to the sleeper. There was a pause, then a lantern was lit inside the latter. It wasn't turned very high, which made details difficult to make out, but it appeared that the men were pulling the canvas ground-sheet to one side, baring the earth on which the tent had been erected.

"Just like we figured," said Jess. "Okay, I'm gonna go down and see can I get a better look, or hear somethin', maybe."

Andy frowned. "Is that really a good idea? If we know they're burying it, that means they plan to leave it. And we know where—the grass'll stay bleached for days after they pull out. We can come back and get it out…"

"Yeah," Jess allowed, "we could—but I'd sure a lot rather know what it is they're hidin'. That way I'll have somethin' to tell Mort. Maybe it's somethin' stolen, but maybe it ain't."

"I don't get it," Andy confessed.

"Could be somebody else is gonna come back up here after they go, and take it out," Jess suggested. "Could be, they do that, by the time we can bring Mort in, it'll be gone. But if we know what it is and how long it's to stay there, we'll know can we take our time or not."

"I don't like it," the younger man told him. "There's three of them and one of you."

"Yeah, but they don't know I'm comin'. And I've had worse odds in my time, you know that, Partner."

Andy sighed. "I guess so. What do you want me to do?"

"You stay here with the two rifles. You hear me whistle, you start layin' down fire. Just a few shots, enough to make 'em know you got 'em covered."

"Okay, I guess," Andy agreed reluctantly. "But you be careful, Jess, 'cause I'm not going home and tell Slim you've gotten yourself killed."

**SR**

Andy watched Jess's careful progress across the open flat that separated the camp from the shoulder, saw him silhouetted a moment against the bigger sleeping tent. He raised his eyes to see what was going on in the smaller one. From what he could tell, as they had guessed, the men were engrossed in digging out a hole in the floor of it, probably with the same kind of short-handled camp shovels that would have been used for the fire trench and the privy. He looked back for Jess, but the Texan had disappeared.

Down in the tent there was a pause, movement, what appeared to be something of an oblong shape—a cot, maybe—being lifted up and set on its end near the outer wall. It looks like they're draping part of their ground-sheet over it, Andy decided after a minute. Maybe they misjudged where they should have started their hole… Is that Jess? A dim form had appeared against the light side of the tent. Looks like him. Yeah, it makes sense. He doesn't want to be near the doorflap in case one of them comes out for some reason. Anything they say, he can hear it from there. But they can't see him—not with their lanternlight blinding them.

Time passed—maybe fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. Andy kept his eyes moving from the small tent to the bigger one, just in case somebody else was in on this thing—whatever it was—or just woke up inopportunely. He was never sure, afterward, how long the man had been there; he only knew that, suddenly, he rose up against the tent-side, Jess whirled toward him and grabbed for his Colt, and one of those short-handled shovels made a short, terrible arc and the Texan sprawled limply to the ground…

**SR**

His first impulse was to charge to the rescue, but then Sherman caution took over and he made himself stop and think. Whoever it is, he decided after a minute, he must've used that draped-up ground sheet for cover, so his shadow wouldn't show, and gone out under the back of the tent. That means either they knew Jess was there—and he moves quietly enough that I don't think they did—or they just had some reason to suspect he might be.

It doesn't look like anybody but the three of them are involved in whatever's going on. That means they're not likely to shoot him—the sound will carry in this quiet air; it might not wake Mr. Rysdale and the others, but Crawford and Jimmy and Hicks might react.

Jess thought the wagon was already partly loaded. Could they put him in it, drugged maybe, or gagged, and take him along?

No. Why would they? If they're doing this in the middle of the night, they won't want to leave a witness. And there'd be too much chance of the rest of the men, the ones who don't know what's going on here, spotting him…

**SR**

"Harper," said McKinnon in a vindicated tone, as Kilroy dragged his victim in through the front flap of the tent. "Didn't I tell you, Fenn?"

"You told me," Draycott agreed. "Good work, Eamon. But now what?"

"First," McKinnon decided, "let's finish what we're doing. Harper won't be going anywhere. Tie him, Eamon, and gag him too."

"I can finish him now," Kilroy pointed out. "I've my little sweetheart that took care of the boys from the Castle—she's quiet, so she is. Nobody outside us will hear."

"Not till we decide what we're doing with him," said McKinnon. "We may end up disposing of his body in some situation where we don't want it found with a bullet in it." He picked up his shovel. "Let's finish the hole, Fenn."

**SR**

Are they planning to bury him right there? Alive? Andy wondered. Oh, God, I hope not. I'll never have a chance of saving him before he suffocates…

**SR**

One by one, the boxes were emptied and their double-bagged contents placed in the tarpaulin-lined hole. The loose earth was shoveled back into the cavity, tamped down with the backs of the shovels; what wouldn't fit was thrown into the empties, which were carried back to the equipment tent, and the ground-cloth was put back over the floor. Jess watched, somewhat woozily, from the cot where he'd been dumped. He still had no idea what the trio were hiding, but it was clear that they didn't mean to leave any clues to its location. And he'd been right: they must be planning to take the empties with them when they pulled out.

McKinnon looked up, wiping his forehead, and gave the Texan a cold smile. "Not used to this kind of physical work," he said. "And now, Mr. Harper, I daresay you're wondering what exactly we've been up to, aren't you? No, you needn't answer," he added with a look of amusement. "But since you've gone to so much trouble—and loss," he went on pointedly, "you might as well know. As soon as Fenn and I knew we were being sent on this trip, we began planning how to get something more out of it than simply scientific data. I don't suppose you've ever visited our Institution, have you? The collection exceeds three million objects of all kinds, including art, gems, ore samples, rare coins—one collector offered more than $14,000 for just one of them. Most of it isn't even on display to the public. Eventually they're going to have to put up another building…"

"Don't torment him, Wade," Draycott interrupted. "He played a good game, he deserves courtesy. To make a very long story short, Mr. Harper, we simply arranged to have certain items of the collection find their way out of the building one dark night. Then Eamon packed them in the crates we had previously prepared, and brought them out to Laramie, which—thanks to a bit of shrewd politicking—we had persuaded Secretary Baird to choose as the location of our observations. Now we'll simply leave them here, where no one's likely to look, for a year or two. By then the Secretary and the police will probably have assumed that they've been smuggled out of the country or simply disposed of on the underground market. Wade and I will then hand in our resignations, and… you can guess what will happen. We have the co-ordinates I determined; no matter how this mountain changes in the interval, we'll be able to find the site again."

"Have you gentlemen decided what we're to do with the lad?" asked Kilroy.

"I think so," said McKinnon. "Where that shoulder tails off, there's quite a nice steep drop. We can take him out just before dawn and dump him. By the time the scavengers finish with him, there'll be nothing to suggest it wasn't simply a tragic accident…"

**SR**

Andy watched as the lantern was blown out. Coldhearted lot, aren't they? he thought. Going back to sleep as if nothing was happening…

But I haven't seen them carry him out—or lift him up and drop him in the hole. I don't really think they'd had time to make it deep enough to hold him, anyway.

No, he's alive. I have to believe he's still alive.

I could try to creep in and get him… but if they catch me, that's the end of everything.

He watched as Kilroy—he supposed it was Kilroy—left the sleeper and returned to his bed in the equipment tent. Hostage for hostage? I could slide in and put my .44 to his head…

But maybe the other two won't place that much value on him. After all, if he's dead, it's a bigger share of—of whatever—for each of them.

His eyes drifted across the silent camp and came to rest on the horse line—and a smile spread over his face in the dark.

That's it.

**SR**

Wednesday, July 31:

Leading Monte behind him, Andy quietly made his way down to the horse line, sliding out of the saddle before he actually got near the animals and approaching them from upwind, talking quietly to the Sherman wagon team and the five saddle horses, giving them his scent. They, of course, knew him, and since they remained calm, the others did too. He slipped their halters, got up on Cyclone and began quietly urging the whole band downslope toward the tree line. Once he was well inside the sound-absorbing envelope of conifers, he took down his rope and began whipping at the drags with it, coyote-yelping, giving Cyclone the signal that told him he could use his teeth if he felt like it.

Cyclone always felt like it, when there were other riderless horses around.

The drags lunged forward, the pressure from the rear started the leaders going, and soon the whole bunch was on the move—downslope, as frightened animals will always instinctively go if given the chance. Once Andy was sure they were well started, he turned back, and inside half an hour he was back on the shoulder.

First light would be around four-thirty, by his best guess, and sunrise half an hour later. It must have been about four when Kilroy, Draycott, and McKinnon urged Jess out of the tent and along the foot of the shoulder toward the break on the north. Andy had already jacked a shell into the chamber of his Winchester. He waited his moment, took aim, yelled, "Jess, run!", and squeezed off a shot over the quartet's heads. He'd figured that Jess would have been expecting him to make some kind of move, and Jess had: he ducked his head and started zigzagging. He tripped once—it was almost impossible to keep your balance well with your hands tied behind your back—and went down, just in time for Kilroy's reflexive shot, fired from what looked like a gun pulled out from under his jacket, to go high; scrambled up somehow and got around the end of the shoulder. Andy kept pegging shots through the darkness, not really expecting to hit anyone under those conditions, but figuring they'd duck automatically when they heard the rifle go off.

Jess struggled up the slope and plopped down beside him. "Cut me loose!" he growled. Andy dug in his vest pocket for his big multi-bladed stockman's jackknife, fired off another warning shot, and did. "Good goin', Partner. Thanks," Jess acknowledged, chafing his wrists.

"You'd have done the same for me. What's our situation?"

Jess gave him a quick version of it. "They got my gun, and Kilroy's got a shoulder holster and I think a derringer or somethin', but th'other two don't appear to be armed."

Andy jacked another round into the Winchester. "That's good. Even a couple of city greenhorns should know better than to charge up a slope into rifle fire without anything to shoot back with."

Crawford, Hicks, Jimmy, and the other three scientists had been awakened by the racket and were shouting questions. "What about them?" the younger Sherman asked his friend.

"I got a notion they ain't none of 'em part of it, by what Draycott said," Jess replied. "Gi'me the other rifle, though, and I'll cover our backs."

Kilroy had quit firing. "Professor Draycott!" Andy yelled. "This is Andy Sherman! You'd better give it up. If you look back to the south, you'll see your horses are gone—I turned them loose. They won't stop running till they get back to their own corrals." Jess gave him a questioning look, but he responded with a signal he'd seen Slim use when he meant Later. "You're on foot. You can't get away."

"Neither can you!" Draycott hollered from below.

"Matter of opinion," said Andy. "We have horses—and rifles. And you've got some people in your camp who'll be asking some pretty pointed questions. What do you plan to say to them?"

He could see this give them pause. "Good thinkin', Partner," said Jess, who had picked up on it too: even if the trio could silence them, they'd then have to kill the other six and walk out.

On the east, the sky was lightening steadily…

Centennial:

Slim Sherman ambled out onto the gallery that fronted the town's main hotel—it was a lot less crowded now than it had been even a day or two before, since most of the eclipse-watchers had headed home, whether by horse, wagon, or rail—and paused to take a deep breath of the cool, piney air before starting downstreet toward the livery barn. He'd order his horses and wagon gotten ready so he and his family could pull out as soon as they finished breakfast. Without the heavy wagon to hold them back, they might even make it home by late this afternoon: the buckboard could reel off sixty miles in a day, over a good road or level ground, and it was only about thirty back to Laramie.

Like most liveries, this one had a large corral to one side for those horses (his own among them) whose owners, for whatever reason, elected not to have them stalled overnight. When Slim reached it, he found great confusion at the gate: his horses sticking their heads over the fence at a mob of loose ones outside, and the town's resident lawman—one of Mort's few permanent deputies—questioning a puzzled and loudly expostulating stableman. "I don't know where they come from, doggone it, Frank! They were here when I got here!"

Just as Slim began to recognize the loose animals, the deputy, Frank Hyatt, spotted him. "Slim! Some of these horses have your brand on them. What's up?"

"I don't know any more than you do about it, Frank. I hired them out to that party of eclipse-watchers up on the mountain." He moved cautiously through the crush, talking to the animals, letting them recognize his voice, looking them over for injuries. They weren't even sweaty; they must have been here for at least a few hours. "Something must have happened, but I can't tell you what."

Frank was a bright young fellow and made connections quickly. "Maybe we'd better go up and take a look," he suggested.

He ordered his horse and Slim's saddled, and got the two-dozen-plus horses roped together in two long lines. Slim sent word back to the hotel to let his family know where he'd gone. With the strays strung out behind them, they started up the trail.

The summit:

After a hurried council, the half-dozen men from the camp—still holding separate from Draycott's trio—had sent Rysdale forward with a handkerchief on a stick, requesting permission to come up and talk. Jess and Andy willingly granted it, and Jess told him what he knew. "They was aimin' to pitch me off the side of the mountain, then go back to Washington with the rest of you. They ain't got much choice now. Crawford and the rest've got more guns than them, and they gotta know we'll have told you what they done."

Rysdale clearly thought the whole thing sounded fantastic, but he couldn't deny that there had been shots fired, and why would Jess and Andy have started the duel unless they had good cause? He went back down, and they could see him conferring with the other five.

Presently Rysdale, attended by Hicks with a sixgun and a Winchester, strode across to where Draycott's trio was standing. "Some pretty serious accusations have been made against you, Fenn," he said evenly. "I don't know if I believe them—I don't want to believe them. But unless you let us dig up the floor of your tent, I'll have no choice but to believe something shady has happened."

Draycott was in a bind and he knew it: if he didn't agree, he'd be suspect; if he did, the proof would come to light.

Jess and Andy couldn't hear the exchange, but they could see its consequences. Crawford, with his sixgun, took up a position at the flap of the smaller sleeping tent, while Hicks and Jimmy went in with shovels. "Reckon we can go down," Jess decided. "Draycott ain't dang fool enough to start shootin' now."

They made their way to the level and set themselves in a position that would allow them to watch the tent and its former inhabitants easily. Jess kept a particularly close eye on Draycott, whom he suspected was the brains, though McKinnon was the more ruthless.

He still didn't have enough data to guess at what Kilroy was thinking. But Kilroy was, after all, the only one of the trio who had actually murdered anyone. Just as the diggers hit something, he broke. "I'll not hang without taking them along that gave me my orders!" he shouted, and whipped out a Sharps four-barrel .22 derringer that must have dated back to the war. At that range, it was genuinely deadly. Two shots, and both scientists hit the ground.

Kilroy lunged for Monte and Cyclone. Jess hesitated—his code wouldn't allow him to shoot anyone in the back. Andy had no particular scruples against it, but he wasn't a murderer either. Looking grim, he pulled his S&W and fired, once, twice. Kilroy screamed out in pain and fell, both legs broken below the knee.

Hooves thundered against the sod as Slim and Hyatt arrived, having left the two lines of horses behind when they heard the .44's bark. Slim pulled up hard as he saw his brother and his partner—or perhaps more accurately, his two brothers. "Jess? Andy? What are you doing here?" he demanded.

"That's a long story, Slim," Andy replied. "Deputy Hyatt? There are a couple of men over there who've been shot—I don't know how bad off they are…"

McKinnon was dead; Draycott was alive, but seriously wounded. Rysdale joined them and reported to Hyatt regarding what his diggers had just found—much of which he could personally attest to being part of the Smithsonian collection.

It took till nearly noon to get everything straightened out. Kilroy's legs had to be splinted and space left for him and Draycott in the wagon, which meant arranging everything else around them. Most of the booty could be loaded onto Draycott's and McKinnon's horses. Draycott himself managed to give Frank Hyatt a statement before he lost consciousness. "I don't know if he'll live," the deputy said somberly, "but we'll get him down the mountain to Centennial and a doctor. Anyone who wants to can have him, I guess, once he's healed up, if he heals up. Kilroy too."

Andy explained to his brothers what he'd done after Jess was captured. "I knew the horses would probably stop when they got to Centennial, because that was the last corral they'd remember. And I figured that on a downhill trail, without the big wagon, you'd have gotten there in time to stop for the night." He grinned. "Knowing Aunt Daisy, she'd have wanted to do that just so she could get a bath. So you'd find the horses this morning and figure something was up—maybe not that we were part of it—"

Slim shook his head ruefully. "I should have guessed you would be, though." Slapping Jess on the shoulder, he added, "I used to have a pretty decent kid brother, till you came along."

"Still do, pard," Jess replied. "Saved my life. Could've killed Kilroy easy as not, but he took'im down alive. If I'd been alone, you all might'a' never known what'd become of me."

"There is that," Slim agreed, a shudder passing across his shoulders at the thought of how close he'd come to losing the other half of himself. Then: "Let's get going. Jonesy and Mike and Daisy are never going to believe this… unless Frank's willing to let them see some of what Draycott's outfit stole…"

**SR**

A month later:

Draycott died three days after he was shot. A team of U.S. Marshals eventually made their way out to Centennial to pick up Kilroy and the recovered booty (which was, after all, Federal property). On their way, one of them stopped off at Laramie and took a ride out to the ranch to let Slim and his family know what the situation was. It was only then that they learned of the deaths of Marshall, Banks, and the Smithsonian night watchman. "That was Kilroy?" Slim guessed.

"We think so, going by what Deputy Hyatt had to say in the report he sent us," the lawman agreed. "At least we know that Kilroy had a .22-caliber Sharps, and he was the only one of the three who did. Since both Marshall and Banks were killed with a .22, we have the beginnings of a good circumstantial case for double murder against him. That's assuming his shoes don't match the casts that were taken of the prints found along the Potomac riverbank."

"How much were the stolen items worth?" Slim asked.

"I really don't know. The nugget from California would go for nearly a thousand dollars just on weight. Some of the rarest coins, I'm told, could fetch five figures apiece on the private collectors' market. Certainly several million dollars altogether."

"Wow!" Mike exclaimed. "Are we gonna get a reward?"

"The thanks of your country, young man," said the marshal, "and this." He produced an envelope with the Smithsonian's address imprinted on it. Inside was a letter personally written by Secretary Baird, promising that if any or all of the ranch family should ever visit Washington, they had only to call on him to be provided a personal tour of the collection—including what wasn't open to the public.

Jess grinned. "Now who'd ever reckon that an old Reb like me would end up on the receivin' end of somethin' like this?"

"You earned it," Slim told him. "You and Andy both." He thought of the personally signed note from Abraham Lincoln that was packed away with his old Army uniform up in the attic. He'd always felt a bit guilty over never letting Jess know about that. Maybe now… he told himself.

"Will you stay to dinner, Marshal?" Daisy inquired. "We'll be dishing out in another few minutes."

"Thank you, Mrs. Jones, I'll be happy to."

"Then all of you get washed up," Jonesy ordered, "before we throw it to the chickens. Letters from Washington are all well and good, but food's got to be eaten while it's hot."

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Note: I couldn't have described the ranch family's experience without the help of 's article, "Moon Shadows Over Wyoming," or Fred Schaaf's sometimes-approaching-the-poetical text in The 50 Best Sights in Astronomy and How to See Them, stumbling across which at a special display in my library solidified my idea of writing a fic based around Territorial Wyoming's first solar eclipse. (Another occurred in 1889, crossing Yellowstone Park and the far northwest corner, and a third after Statehood, in 1918, which passed almost directly over the town of Laramie itself.) Most important of all—a completely unexpected discovery—was David Baron's American Eclipse, the story of the Event of '78 and how science set about observing it.

In the eighteenth century astronomers became able to forecast the path of eclipses with a modicum of accuracy. In 1824 an astronomer named Fredrich Bessel finalized the math necessary to predict them, and thereafter it was possible to do so with great accuracy and plot their path decades—even centuries—in advance; an impressive accomplishment when you remember that scientists of the day only had paper and pencil to work with. Early in July of '76, the British journal Nature—one of the most influential scientific publications on either side of the Atlantic—reported that in two years' time, a total solar eclipse would pass over America's Western states and Territories, and provided details of where the Moon's shadow would fall. In 1877, a map of Asia's easternmost tip, all of North America, and the northwestern region of South America showed an array of lines labelled Eclipse ends at Sunrise, Middle of Eclipse at Sunrise, Eclipse Begins at Sunrise, Southern Limit of Eclipse, Eclipse Ends at Sunset, Middle of Eclipse at Sunset, Eclipse begins at Sunset, and a series of loops with more precise times, along with the Central Line—totality. Newspapers printed front-page maps of how the last would cross their area—the Chicago Times had one dated exactly one week ahead, while the New York Weekly Tribune offered one on July 24 which showed that totality would pass exactly between Rawlings and Creston, Denver and Central City, Pike's Peak and Pueblo, Fort Lyons and Las Animas—so people could position themselves for the best view, and some garnished them with the time at which the darkness would hit at stated intervals, much as papers and websites do today. Yet only less than a decade earlier an Adventist preacher named Nelson H. Barbour revised William Miller's calculations from the '30's and '40's and offered a book entitled Evidences for the Coming of the Lord in 1873 (published 1871). And on the day of the event, in Johnson County, Texas, a black sharecropper named Ephraim Miller—who had been heard to say that morning that he'd learned the world would end that very evening—killed his ten-year-old son with an ax as the Sun vanished, then cut his own throat in his tiny attic. (His wife, young daughters (aged two and four) and infant child escaped.) It took more than a week for papers outside of Texas to relay this tragedy to the rest of the nation.

The comets Jess remembers seeing in '58 and '66 really were visible in those years: the first was Swift-Tuttle and the other Tempel-Tuttle, and you can search for them online. The one that presaged the Texan War for Independence was, of course, Halley's, in the light of which Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens was born. The meteor shower Slim and Jess saw in 1872 was the Andromedids, which produced spectacular displays of several thousand meteors per hour in late November/early December of that year. They were described as mainly of faint (5th to 6th magnitude) meteors with "broad and smoke-like" trains and a predominantly orange or reddish coloration. In England, Lowe estimated the same shower as producing at least 58,600 visible meteors between 5.50 and 10.30 pm, observed that the meteors were much slower than the Leonids, and noted noises "like very distant gun-shots" several times to the northwest.

In our reality, the Smithsonian sent only one team of eclipse-watchers West—to Fort Worth, as Andy notes. But Simon Newcomb did indeed suggest that viewing conditions were likely to be better as you went up the path of totality, so I decided that if a second team had been made up, Wyoming would have been a logical place for it to go. The instruments Draycott's party uses, the knowledge they seek, and how they go about it are exact; I adapted them from what several of the actual parties had and did.

In this history, the Union Pacific, building westward from Omaha, was stalled at Cheyenne for nearly 10 years by, first, the early and unexpected revelation of the Credit Mobilier scandal, second the bankruptcy occasioned by the legal fight that followed, and third the Panic (depression) of 1873, the effects of which lasted till the spring of 1879. In the confusion connected to the last of these, the Kansas Pacific, headed by visionary VP Gus Morgan, managed to gain (at a scandalously low price owing to the Panic conditions) control of the UP and began slowly building westward again, reaching Laramie in the spring of '78. At the time of this fic, its hell-on-wheels (end of track) is located at Point of Rocks, just under 100 miles west of Rawlins, but the tracks themselves extend only as far as Creston—a bit less than a month's worth of tracklaying from Laramie.

What I've called Cedar Mountain (because that was probably its name at the time) is known today as Pennock. It's 10,047 feet high, about 50 mi. SE. of Rawlins and 75 from Laramie, and 4760 feet higher than the former. It was renamed around 1928 in honor of Taylor Pennock, a prominent sheep-grazer of that region. Medicine Bow Peak and its surroundings are as described, and you can even find a photograph of the crest—including the "shoulder" that figures so prominently in the story—at the Peakbagger website.

The Smithsonian Institution, as most people probably know, began with a bequest of $508,318.46 (in 1838 money, equivalent to about 11.6 milliontoday) from a British scientist named James Smithson. At first the Secretary (chief executive officer), Joseph Henry, and his family lived on site in the east wing of the (then) single building of the organization. In the summer of '78, he'd been recently replaced by Spencer Fullerton Baird, a naturalist, ornithologist, ichthyologist, and renowned collector from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, who had been elected to the office on May 17 of that year, four days after his predecessor died in his quarters. Henry, who had helmed the Institution from December 3, 1846, had suffered a paralytic attack soon after his 80th birthday, and deteriorated rapidly thereafter. He had worried from the first about the costs of maintaining a museum collection and exhibits—he saw the Institution's role as being more one of pure research, in keeping with Smithson's phrase "an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men"—and was reluctant to use the Smithson fund for a national library or museum. For that reason, in 1865, he transferred what remained of the art collection—following a fire, caused by careless workmen, that burned out the entire second floor of the building and destroyed the collection of John Mix Stanley Indian portraits—to the Library of Congress and Corcoran Gallery of Art. The following year he transferred the Smithsonian library to the Library of Congress and had the provision for copyright deposit at the Smithsonian repealed from the legislation pertaining to the institution.

Baird was named Assistant Secretary—and first curator of the National Museum at the Smithsonian—in 1850, when he was only 27. He came to Washington bringing with him two boxcars' worth of his personal collection of items relating to natural history. His interpretation of Smithson's phrase was much more liberal and all-inclusive than Henry's, and he soon set forth a program for a world-class museum, acknowledging Henry's stated policy of gathering only materials not previously collected by others, but proposed concentrating on collections illustrating the natural history of North America. He created a system of exchange using duplicate specimens and proposed to furnish travellers with the means of "determining the character of objects collected in various part of North America," thus creating an expansive network of collectors. He encouraged the development of young scientists, and in 1857 and 1862 was grudgingly allowed by Henry to bring in the collections amassed by the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, a predecessor of the Smithsonian, as well as the valuable loot from Lieutenant Charles Wilkes's expedition of 1838-42, the models from the Patent Office, and the great surveys of the American West of c. 1850 and onward. In 1858 Henry agreed to accept a Congressional appropriation to care for them, and in 1872 he gave Baird full responsibility for management of the U.S. National Museum. This was just in time: Baird used the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia as a chance to increase the Smithsonian's collections and visibility. He oversaw the construction of award-winning exhibits for the exposition (including an authentic Arapaho tipi), and at the exhibition's close he convinced other exhibitors to donate their specimens and collections to the Smithsonian. Thus by 1878 the Institution's collection was becoming much more varied and the old "Castle" was beginning to bulge at the seams, and the next year Congress approved funding for the construction of the first U.S. National Museum building, which is now the Arts and Industries Building. In 1880 Congress passed an Act stipulating the deposit in the National Museum of "all collections of rocks, minerals, soils, fossils, and objects of natural history, archaeology and ethnology, made by the Coast & Interior Survey, the Geological Survey, or other parties of the Government, when no longer needed for investigations in progress." This caused the collection to balloon again, and the Regents found it necessary to ask Congress for funds for another building—the Natural History Building, which opened in 1909.

Owing to time limitations—it's possible to search all the Annual Reports of the Smithsonian online, but I wanted to get the fic published within a reasonable time of the more recent eclipse—I had to fudge a bit regarding what Draycott and his team actually stole. However, when I inquired, the Institution staff told me that "The Arts and Industries Building, which housed the National Museum, was not completed until 1881. There was thus a great deal more in storage than on display in 1878." And since from the first (as noted above) the Institution's main focus was natural history—meaning just about anything, living and otherwise, connected with the Earth itself—I decided to take an educated guess, based on The Smithsonian: America's Treasure House, by Institution historian Webster Prentiss True.

By 1950, True tells us, there were over 30,000,000 objects, connected to every field of natural science and human endeavor from skulls and fossils to astronomy, in the Museum's catalogues—of which only two or three hundred thousand (0.66-1%) were on public display. These included "beautiful minerals in endless variety, gems worth a king's ransom… natural and cut specimens [of precious minerals]… crystals of the strangest shapes and tints, large and small mineral specimens of every rainbow hue, gems and precious stones of incredible size and beauty… a 1.022-pound beryl from New Hampshire, a 95-pound section of a huge piece of topaz… semi-precious stones… [a] 155-carat [1.09349-oz.] blue topaz from the Ural Mountains, a 93-carat [0.656096] red topaz, deep red rubies from Ceylon, large and beautiful tourmalines—green ones from Maine and pink ones from California, a 40-carat [0.282192-oz.] aquamarine from Connecticut, blue zircons from Australia, a 50-carat [0.35274-oz.] white topaz from Japan… small cut stones and large chunks of opal… one of the largest gold nuggets ever found in California, [weighing] 61.9 ounces Troy [just under 4.25 pounds, and worth, in the prices of the time, $990.40, or over $25,000 today, not even counting the higher price of gold]… the actual first flake of gold found by James Marshall at Sutter's Mill… the National Numismatic Collection, comprising coins, medals, and paper money… over 60,000 specimens… [including] a sample of each type and date [coined by the U.S.]… issues of foreign countries of all periods in various metals from base metal to gold and platinum… seals, signets, necklaces, and nose rings from Bible lands… actual coins of Bible days… shekels; the coin of Agrippa II, the last Jewish king; tetradrachms of Sidon and Tyre; coins of Babylon, Syria, Ephesus and Tartarus, Macedonia, and Athens… the staters of Lydia… coined about 700 B.C…. the first silver coins, silver staters from the island of Aegina… [dating] from about 600 B.C…. [coins of] Ptolemy I of Egypt, 323-285 B.C., the first man to place his portrait on a coin… the long series of Roman portrait coins which begins with Julius Caesar and continues to the late Roman Empire some 500 years later… the Venetian ducat, the florin of Florence, and the Spanish doubloon… ceremonial vessels [from Ancient China]… priceless assemblages of antiques, old silver and ceramics… etchings and woodcuts of great masters…," including "one [rare coin] which a private collector offered to buy for $35,000 [in 1878 dollars, $14,043.45]." Many of these objects began as family heirlooms, passed down from generation to generation, until "some descendant realize[d] that [they] should be placed where [they would] have perpetual care and where all Americans [might] see [them]." By 1990, the collections numbered more than 137,000,000 objects—a 450%-plus increase over 40 years, averaging 2,675,000 per—and were growing at a rate of about 500,000 per year.

By 1950, there was a guard stationed at every entrance, each of them punching a recording device for each visitor who passed him. Other guards circulated regularly through the exhibition halls during visiting hours. No one carrying a package could leave without a special pass. All through the night guards made complete rounds of the buildings. But since even banks—which were crammed full of actual money—seldom had more than one guard on duty in those days, and that usually only in the daytime, I decided that the 1870's Castle probably wouldn't bother with more than a night watchman.

In the early years of Washington's history, law and order was maintained (more or less) by two different forces, who came to be generally regarded as inept: the Washington City police, which was formed by the city council, and the Auxiliary Guard, which was formed by the U.S. Congress, as well as the constables assigned by the state of Maryland to patrol Washington County. During the Civil War, the Federal city quickly filled with soldiers, government employees, and citizens hoping to cash in on the current situation. The crowds, crime, and the constant threat of enemy spies, made the capital into a rowdy place barely under control. On August 6, 1861, President Lincoln signed into law an Act of Congress forming the Metropolitan Police, who enforce the law in Washington to this day.

In my version of the Laramie future, Jonesy came "home" to be with his "sons" in 1875, after Andy had completed his three years at the Academy in St. Louis and eighteen months or so working for an established surveying firm to gain practical experience. He and Daisy "sneaked off" and got married in the summer of '76. Jess met "Miss Audrey," the "lady up in Sentinel," in my fic "Missing," which takes place about three years before this one and can be found at this site. His sister Sophie, his Aunt Meg in East Texas, and his cousin Tell Harper and Tell's "girls," will be introduced in future fics. Jess's adoption of Mike comes in a story to be titled "Horsethief Pass." Use the "Follow" button to stay informed!