would blind and probably panic the horse, and the sound would kill it, and he didn't need to have a horse bucking in terror or falling over dead on him while he was training his large, awkward weapons on War Bonnet.
He slipped into the harness Edison had made that held the heavy battery onto his back, lay the weapon he'd dubbed “the deafener” gently on the ground, and held the one he called “the blinder” across his chest after making sure it was connected to the battery.
He stood motionless for a long moment in the blazing sun, wondering if Geronimo had finally been wrong about something. But then a huge shadow fell across the ground just ahead of him, and he found himself facing War Bonnet, who seemed to have gotten even taller and more massive since their last encounter.
“I have come for you, Roosevelt!” thundered the creature. “And this time there are none to protect you.”
Roosevelt tried to lip read, but it was futile; the monster had no discernible lips. So he simply pointed the blinder at War Bonnet and prepared to fire.
At the last second he realized he hadn't flipped down his special lenses. He reached up, lowered them in front of his glasses, hoped War Bonnet was either standing still or approaching in a straight line, because he couldn't see a thing, and then he pulled the trigger.
Roosevelt couldn't hear it, but War Bonnet's scream of surprise and anger could be heard within a radius of five miles—and suddenly he could see, plain as day, through the almost-opaque black lenses. He depressed the trigger for another four seconds, then laid the weapon on the ground, removed the clip-ons, and saw the creature staggering blindly around, some thirty feet away.
Roosevelt knelt down, picked up the deafener, attached it to the battery cord, and pressed the firing mechanism. War Bonnet screamed, though Roosevelt couldn't hear him, took a blind step toward his enemy, then clasped his hands to his ears and screamed again. Roosevelt kept the mechanism depressed, War Bonnet kept screaming and clasping his ears, and then, about ten seconds later, he literally exploded in a thousand pieces.
Roosevelt lay the deafener down next to the blinder and walked around the area, making sure there was nothing alive and moving where War Bonnet had been. Satisfied that the creature was totally gone, he turned to load the weapons onto his gelding, only to realize that of course the sound had killed the horse, too.
“Damn!” he muttered. “It's going to be a long walk.”
“You have done a service to your country and saved both our lives. You will not have to walk alone.”
And suddenly Geronimo was beside him, picking up the smaller of the two weapons. Roosevelt, the battery still on his back, retrieved the blinder, and the two men walked back to town, ignoring the burning rays of the desert sun as best they could.
As they came within sight of Tombstone, Geronimo came to a stop.
“Is something wrong?” asked Roosevelt.
“I will see you one more time before you return home. And again, many years from now.”
Before Roosevelt could ask what he had meant, Geronimo, the chief medicine man of the Apache nation, had vanished.
HOLLIDAY DRAGGED HIMSELF OUT OF BED, turned a handkerchief red with the blood he coughed up, walked painfully to the sink in the corner and splashed some water on his face, then stared blearily into the mirror on the wall.
“You look worse than usual,” he managed to croak, and was sure his image agreed.
He was getting ready to put on his clothes when he realized that he hadn't taken them off the night before. He seemed to remember getting back to his room just about the time the sun was rising, and he thought he'd won something like three thousand dollars, but he wasn't sure of anything. Everything would become clear after his first drink of the day, as usual.
He retied his tie, felt for his Derringer, realized it wasn't in his pocket, looked around, and saw that he'd left it on the nightstand. Just as well. The safety catch was off, and he might have blown a hole in his chest if he had rolled the wrong way.
“It's so easy to go to bed,” he muttered. “Why is it so goddamned hard to get out of it?”
He found his holster on the floor where he'd let it drop, put it back on, checked to make sure his gun was loaded, then looked around for his