Chapter 16: Desperado
(Abalone, Kansas, July 1-5, 1883)
"What?" Dipper asked. "You're going to hang him? Why? What's he charged with?"
"Not just charged, tried an' convicted, too. He shot a pore feller in th' back," the man said. "Git. I want to go back to sleep."
"Who are you?" Mabel asked.
"I could ask you the same question, Missy."
"Why don't you then?" Mabel asked.
"I think I will."
Mabel put her hands on her hips. "Yeah? Who are you to think you will?"
"I know who I am! I want to know who you-all are!"
"You first," Dipper said.
The man thrust out his chest. "You see that there star?"
"Um . . . no," Mabel said.
"Not one there," Dipper added.
"It shore is—oh, shoot, I went and took it off afore layin' down 'cause it sticks me in my sleep. Just a minute. It's here on the desk somewheres." He rummaged around and finally came up with a vaguely gold-hued tin star, which he pinned to his chest. "Ouch. Wait a minute." Second try caught the shirt, not the skin. "There! I'm Deputy Sheriff Barney Roscoe, that's who I am! Where was we?"
"Us!" Mabel said. "I'm Clara Belle Houston, of the Houston Houstons! And this is my brother, Deadeye Dan Houston! And, uh, he's a lawyer!"
"That's right," Dipper said. "Wait, what?"
The deputy's voice snapped with scorn: "You ain't no lawyer. You're too blame young to be a lawyer!"
Oh, well, when Mabel played the tune, you danced to it. "Not in Texas I'm not!" Dipper responded hotly. "You ever hear of the, uh, Robert E. Lee School of Law?"
Though he looked moderately reverent at the name of the non-existent law school, Roscoe said, "No."
"There, so how would you know?" Dipper said. "The defense rests!"
Roscoe scratched his head, his lips moving slightly as he tried to work all that out. "Where is this here school o' law, exactly?"
Mabel, full of aggression, shot back: "You ever hear of, uh, Durland, Texas?"
From the expression on Roscoe's face, Dipper could tell the man was about to bluff. Exposure to Stan had taught him a thing or two about that. And sure enough, the deputy said with false confidence, "Durland? Shore! It's right near the banks of the Rio Grande."
"Not even close," Dipper said, his voice dripping with contempt. "All right, I think Mr. Blandi—Bland is going to be my client. Did he have a trial?"
"Uh, sort of," Roscoe said. "The Judge is a long ways off, visitin' his nieces in Cheyenne. So as Deputy and persecuting attorney, I asked Bland if he was guilty or not, and he said he wasn't, and the Justice of the Peace said a guilty man shore would say that, and it was proof enough for him, and he passed the sentence."
"Was there a jury?" Mabel asked. "Did you serve them pug sundaes?"
"No, warn't no need for a jury! Everybody knowed that Shot Gunderson had a feud with Bland, and so when they found Shot's jacket with the hole in the back, they knowed it had to be Bland what done it! That's police work."
"Mr. Bland has a Constitutional right to an attorney," Dipper said. "My sister and I will go and talk to him. Right now."
"Hold on, there, sonny boy. I still ain't shore you're no lawyer. If you're really a lawyer, say something in Latin."
Dipper didn't know Latin, so instead, with the confidence of two years of high-school French under hsi belt, he said, "Seul un imbécile poserait cette question. That means if the local authorities don't recognize a prisoner's right to an attorney, they'll all lose their jobs."
The deputy blinked. "Well—seein' as how it's Latin. All right, I'll give you fifteen minutes."
"An hour!" Mabel said.
"I can't stay awake that long!"
"Half an hour, then," Mabel said. "And then you can tell us where we can get some breakfast."
Shuffling and muttering, Roscoe led them through a door to an array of three cells. Only one was occupied, the middle one. A lumpy figure huddled on a wood cot. "Wake up, Bland!" Roscoe yelled, unnecessarily loud. The figure in the cell fell off and onto the floor. Roscoe laughed. "I'm unlockin' your cell. This here's a lawyer from Phillydelphy-aye, or somewheres, come to see you hangs proper."
Roscoe held the door while Mabel and Dipper squeezed past him into the cell.
"Give us a light," Dipper said.
Complaining, Roscoe went back into the office. Blendin Blandin—of course he was the prisoner, asked fearfully, "Who-who-who are you?"
"Don't you recognize us?" Mabel asked. "How could you forget Globnar?"
"Shh!" Dipper warned. Roscoe brought back a candle stuck in its own wax in the middle of a cracked saucer.
Dipper took it, and Mabel said, "I'll wait right outside the bars for you." She squeezed past Roscoe again and leaned casually against the steel bars while he re-locked and shook the door to make sure it was firmly closed.
"I'll be back in half an hour," the deputy warned. "So, git about yore business!" He left them alone.
In the uncertain flicker of the candle, Blendin looked terrible. His brown hair was disheveled and sweat-plastered to his forehead. His bushy walrus mustache—Dipper remembered it from the photo—straggled unkempt and untrimmed, and he had a three-or four-day growth of whiskers. "I-I-I d-don't know you," he stammered. "Who-who-who are you?"
"Dipper and Mabel!" Mabel said, holding onto the bars and peering into the cell. "He's Dipper! I'm me, Mabel!"
Blendin had lost his goggles. He reached for a pair of round spectacles and hooked them over his ears, blinking. "You-you-you both look older!"
"We're not twelve any longer, Blendin," Dipper said. "Look, we were sent back to find you—"
"By my great-great-seventeen-times-great grandson, Lolph!" Mabel said. "Cute widdle Wolphy!"
"Oh, no! No, no, no!" Blendin said, and they couldn't tell whether he was stammering or just terrified. "The TPAES is after m-m-me for set-set-setting up Time Baby's d-disintegration! Th-they'll k-kill me!"
"They won't!" Dipper said. "Get hold of yourself. Listen: You were supposed to come to us right after Weirdmageddon and together you and we were supposed to go to Time Baby and work out a plan that would save him. That's what you have to do now. Let's go!"
"I c-c-can't," Blendin said. "My t-time t-tape—"
"Train hit it, you sent us a letter," Mabel reminded him.
"Oh, y-y-yes, I-I-I remember that! Th-that was th-this p-past January. I-I-I've been in the Old West for t-two years—"
"Lolph gave us this," Dipper said, taking out the sophisticated time-travel disk.
"Uh-oh," Blendin said, leaning away from it. "Th-that's advanced tech! I-I-I'm not c-cleared to u-use that. It's cl-classified! It's f-from the sneventieth century!" Then he added, "Those are al-always s-set up to b-bring the t-traveler back when the j-job's done, anyway, even if the t-traveler's unconscious or d-d-dead. If you were s-sent to find m-me and it hasn't taken us b-back, it's malfunctioning."
Mabel said, "Hand me the magic bag of hold on!"
"Holding," Dipper said, unhooking it from his belt.
"Whatever!" Mabel took the bag from Dipper and rummaged in it. "We collected all the stuff you stashed in time," she said. "Hey—what was the deal with World War I and San Francisco? Those were horrible!"
"Oh, I-I-I w-wanted to d-discourage anybody on m-my t-trail," Blendin said. "We time-travelers n-never get involved wi-with any of that t-traumatic s-stuff. W-well, I do, b-b-but none of the higher-ups will t-touch m-missions like that. I-I-I knew that only you t-two would have the gu-guts to ge-get through it."
"Listen!" Dipper said. "We only have a few minutes!"
"Not necessarily," Mabel said, and grinning, she reached through the bars and handed Blendin the old-fashioned time tape they had picked up.
He didn't look hopeful. As Blendin explained, the problem was that he had deliberately jammed it. "I could f-fix it if I h-had my t-tools," he said. "B-but right n-now, it'll only take you forward or b-back for a muh-maximum of ten years."
Dipper said, "Take us back to just before you were arrested, then!"
"It's h-hard to cut it that cl-close," Blendin said. "B-but I'll t-try."
"Wait, wait," Dipper said. "It won't do any good if we're locked in the cell—"
"Boop!" Mabel pronounced, holding up the deputy's keyring. "I snuck it off his belt." She unlocked the door and opened it slowly, because it had a tendency to creak.
"H-hang onto m-my arm!" Blendin said. Mabel grabbed him, Dipper held onto Mabel—
And in a flash, they were back four days, to the early morning of June 30. Mabel unlocked the cell—it had of course been locked four days earlier, and now someone else was snoring loudly in the last cell on the end—and they tiptoed out. The same deputy—in the exact same clothes—lay asleep on his cot, and they slipped out into the night.
Except for not being stormy, the night was nearly like the one they had come from. Stars spangled the sky this time, though. "C-come with mu-me," Blendin said.
He led them down the silent street to a small shop tucked away between a dry-goods store and a general store. Blendin reached up over the front door, retrieved a key, and unlocked the place. "Shh," he said. "I-I-I'm asleep in the b-b-back r-r-room, the p-past me, I mean, and they s-s-say if a time traveler muh-meets himself, reality implodes."
"Good to know," Dipper said.
"Gimme the bag again, Brobro," Mabel said. She took it and, kicking off her boots, slipped through the inner door into the back room. She came back looking smug. "It's OK now. Past Blendin'll sleep through anything. I snitched some of the chloroform from World War I."
"Why?" Dipper asked.
"Just in case," Mabel said. "Obviously!"
Blendin pulled the shades, lit an oil lamp, and sat at a work bench. He opened a drawer and took out an array of tools. "If I j-j-just had a so-sonic screwdriver, this would b-b-be easy."
"Sonic screwdriver?" Mabel asked. "What the heck is that?"
"It's a u-useful tool," Blendin said. "B-but you have to be a p-p-pretty high-r-ranking time traveler to b-be issued one."
"Can you talk while you work?" Dipper asked.
"S-sure. I've f-fixed these l-lots of times."
"OK, what happened with you and Shot Gunderson, whoever he is?"
With a grunt, Blendin worked away as he explained. His explanation included a lot of stammering, so let's cut to the chase.
Buck "Shot" Gunderson was a shady character, rumored to be a highwayman who often traveled from his small ranch near town to distant points, where he supposedly held up stagecoaches. Anyway, he always came back to town flush with money, from cattle sales, he claimed, though nobody could tell that his small herd ever went anywhere. He was mean and, though he was no quick draw, people were afraid of him.
He didn't take part in showdowns on Main Street at high noon, a gunfighter bent on a duel in the sun with a lawman. However, he did have a suspected habit of slipping up behind people he held a grudge against and shooting them in the back. Over the years that had happened at least three times. He'd never been caught in the act, however. There was only a suspicion.
Anyway, on that same day, the last Saturday in June, Gunderson was going to walk into the shop around ten in the morning and insist that Ben Bland repair a valuable gold watch that his grandfather, on his deathbed, had sold to him, or so Gunderson claimed. He gave Ben exactly an hour to do the job and then went to force the saloon keeper to open shop so he could have a few drinks.
Blendin explained that, once he had opened the watch, he saw the problem was a misaligned cog. That was an easy enough fix, but he was out of the light oil that he needed to lubricate the watch works. Without the oiling, the watch would tick for about five minutes, then stop.
"I-I-I didn't want to m-make him m-mad at m-me," Blendin told Dipper and Mabel. "S-so I u-used the c-closest thing I h-had."
Butter.
"You buttered his watch?" Mabel asked.
"It was the b-b-best butter," he said defensively.
However, even when Gunderson picked up the watch and found it working, he refused to pay unless it ran and kept time for a week.
He was back in two hours. The watch had stopped.
Gunderson roared and threatened and bullied—but three other customers were in the shop to witness his outburst, and one ran to get Sheriff Mark Dilton, who came in and broke it up. "You get back to your ranch," he had warned Gunderson. "And if Mr. Bland gets back-shot, I'll know who to look for."
On the morning of July 2, one of Gunderson's hired hands, Dumb Jimmy Mook, had ridden into town with Gunderson's jacket. He'd gone to the Sheriff's office and explained he had found it out back of the ranch house. It looked as if somebody had dragged a body to the river, he said. There was a bullet hole squarely in the center of the jacket's back, with a little blood around it. Obviously it was a .44-caliber bullet hole.
Dilton was out of town, having left early that morning for Kansas City to make a deposition in a case, so Deputy Roscoe heard him out, then went to the watch shop. Bland insisted he didn't own or carry a sidearm—but when the deputy searched the shop, he found a Colt Dragoon revolver, .44 caliber, with one fired cartridge. It had been clumsily hidden under a pile of bills and receipts.
The Justice of the Peace—who was Gunderson's cousin—convened a jailhouse court, heard the testimony, looked at the jacket, and found Bland guilty, and that was that.
"No body?" Dipper asked.
"N-n-no. Th-they th-thought I'd s-sunk it in the r-river."
"You've been railroaded!" Mabel pronounced.
"I think I see the plot," Dipper said. "You'll be hanged at eight o'clock on July Fourth. Then Gunderson will show up all innocent—he was just out of town on one of his trips—and you'll be gone without him bothering to shoot you, since the Sheriff warned him about that."
"OK," Blendin said, holding up the time tape. "It's f-f-fixed. Where do we g-g0?"
"When do we go?" Mabel corrected. "I vote for home! April 2016, and step on it!"
"Not so fast," Dipper said. "I think we ought to show up Gunderson if he did what we're pretty sure he did. Are you game, Blendin?"
"N-n-n-n-n, oh, I guh-guess so," Blendin said unhappily.
Dipper briefly outlined what amounted to a plan. Mabel said, "I'll take charge of keeping Past Blendin asleep until then!"
"And," Dipper said, "I'll hide when Gunderson comes in. Then all you have to do, Blendin, is the exact same thing you did the first time around."
"I-i-including the b-butter?"
"Especially the butter!" Mabel said. "And if there's any left over—I'll eat it!"
Then all they had to do was wait until ten A.M.
And that was one of the hard parts.