"Yep. Worse trouble'n anybody thought they'd stir up. But the whole country's clamorin' to kick out the `savages' and open up Oklahoma for `decent' folk to settle."

Margo shivered, watching these men pack away their clothes, excess weapons, and whatever they considered valuable enough to take along. The rest, they abandoned along the road, in bundles and boxes, for anyone to salvage. "The more I learn about history, the more savage I find it was. These men are going out to murder as many Indians as they can get into their goddamned sights, aren't they?"

"My dear lady, you shock me! Such language!"

Gentle reprimand, steel-hard warning behind it. Ladies of quality did not curse like sailors in 1885, not even in the frontier. Of course, barmaids and whores could be expected to say anything and everything ... but Margo did most emphatically not wish to be associated with them.

Not Minnesota prudishness this time-she'd lost a lot of that on a beach in Southeastern Africa-but a cold, calculated decision in the direction of survival. Time scouts, as her grandfather Kit Carson put it, had to be bloody careful anywhere downtime. Especially if scouting an unknown gate. Shaking inside her frontier, multibutton, impossible-to-fasten boots (until Malcolm, shaking with silent laughter, handed her a button hook and explained its use) Margo recalled her formidable but lonely grandfather, a man who'd stepped through a gate to rescue her, not knowing if he'd survive the trip to the other side; then glared at the men in those murder-wagons, at the ones standing outside in little knots, smoking some kind of foul-smelling cigars, their boasts of killing no-account Indians like it was some insane game where they tallied score by the number of people they butchered.

Not that she thought the Indians shoved into that Oklahoma Reservation to be the peaceful, nature revering, squeaky clean role-models the TV ads and movies made them out to be. She'd read with a clinical, removed-from-the-dreadful-scenes detachment as her only defense against descriptions of massacres perpetrated by desperate and enraged young warriors, young men with their blood up, refusing to give up either tribal or manly pride. Pride! How much trouble that one little word had caused the world ... That was new-these insights and connections she'd begun making about all kinds of subjects, to the everlasting astonishment of her professors and the steady rise of her GPA.

She slitted her eyes slightly against the sting of windborne cigar smoke, thinking it all through as carefully and thoroughly as possible-as Kit and Malcolm had jointly taught her to do. No, the Native American tribes hadn't been peaceful nature lovers at all, even before the coming of Europeans; before that momentous date, they'd made war on one another in just as savage a fashion as they later made war against the pale invaders of their continent. But what the American government had later done to these people was hideous, unforgivable. margo liked getting her facts strait, more and more so the longer she was in college, delving through books she had once abhorred, so she could understand the real message behind admittedly biased writing on Native American Indians--contemporary accounts by trappers, traders, settlers, mountain men-as well as modern scholarly research-hero-worship crap about people who-according to several archaeological site-analyses written by the archaeologists themselves, tossed their meal scraps right out of the teepee's front door for weeks, maybe even months on end (at least, that was true of some of the plains tribes, well before the arrival of the European); people who thought nothing of making their immediate surroundings a latrine/cesspit and thought their women attractive in hair dressed in bear-grease applied six months previously. Margo shuddered delicately.

Ultimately, what she had found were two differing stories of two very different peoples, each savage in their own way. Who was to say which was worse? Warriors taking scalps as trophies of victory or men who calmly plotted the obliteration of entire tribes. She finally managed to choke out, "Will they give a damn about shooting women and children, too?" And this time, notably, she received no scolding for her anachronistic manners.

After a look of pain passed through Malcolm's expressive eyes, he said very quietly, "W e-e-l-l-l, not really. Least, not everywhere. But yeah, ma'am, it happens, here 'n there, all across the whole land. They say the first known record of biological warfare was takin' a load of blankets from a smallpox victim still aboard ship and delib'retly handin' 'em over to a tribe of six-foot Indians down in Florida, men who could put a long, heavy arrow through a mans leg, his horse, and mebbe catch his other leg on the way out again."

Margo nodded silently, letting him know she'd read about that already. "Now, these men," he nodded toward the wagoneers, "they're a tough bunch o' claim-jumping cutthroats with one aim in mind. They'll settle down in parts of the Oklahoma Reservation that don't no one tribe actually own, massacre a bunch from one tribe, just so's another would go on the warpath. Not just for revenge for a fellow tribe. Hell, the poor bastards just figure they re next, anyway, and who wants to be shot in bed, like a fat, lazy cow waitin to be milked?

"It's been gettin' so bad, Fed'ral troopers have done come in to stop it all and toss the Boomers, as they style themselves, out o' Indian land. But shucks, there's always ten, twelve men waiting to replace every corpse or kickin', cursing Boomer tossed out or arrested. That's decent farmland, compared to what was left everywhere else at a cheap price. What them men wanted was decent, cheap land to homestead. And the only place left to get it was in Indian land, see? Hell, ma'am, and 'scuse the language, but some o' them Boomers mean to have as much as they can beg, borrow, or steal by murderin' whoever's already there that ain't got a white hide. It's a dirty, rotten land-grab of a business, played like some damned child's game, only a long-sight bloodier."

"And there's nothing we can do to stop it?

A sigh gusted past her ear. "Nope. Not a goddamned, helpless thing. History cain't be changed. One of the first rules of time travel, and you should know 'em all by heart now."

Margo's sigh echoed Malcolms. "Rule One: Thou shalt not profit from history nor willfully bring any biological specimens-including downtimer human beings-into a time terminal. Rule Two: Do not attempt to-change history-you can't, but you can get killed trying it." She halted the rendition of `The Rules" to glare at the wagons. "Too bad. I'm a pretty good shot, these days."

Malcolm, who'd witnessed her performance in the "Lesson for a Few Rattled Paleontologists," silently agreed. "Quite a good one, in fact, at least with modern cartridge guns and most of the black-powder stuff. But we're not here to stop Indian wars. We're here to track Chuck Farley's movements and discover what disguise he'll wear back uptime to the station. Believe me, if it would do any good, Margo, I'd shoot every one of those mother's sons and leave 'em to bleed into the dirt.

"But, Margo," and he placed warm hands on her shoulders, which tingled at the contact through thin cotton calico, "that wouldn't stop the massacres of hundred of millions of innocents since the beginning of human existence, now, would it?" Margo shook her head, trying to hide the grief in her eyes, none too successfully given the look on Malcolm's face. "We can't, Margo. We simply cannot change it. Something will always go wrong, leaving you in the delicate position of run like hell or be painfully shot/stabbed/ sliced/burned/scalped/or done in through other, even more gruesome methods. Can you really imagine me just popping in to visit the Pope and saying, `Hey, I'm an angel of death. God's really pissed over your little crusade against the heretics in France. Ever hear of a thing called Black Death? It's the prize your butchers have earned for themselves.' Or maybe I could wait a few years, let Temujin grow up a good bit, then show up at his yurt one fine evening and change his mind about slaughtering half the population of Asia and Europe." He snorted. "Rotten as he is, if you ever get the chance, ask Skeeter Jackson sometime about that."