by Devon Monk
He knew she couldn't see him in the darkness, and found that a mercy. If they stood in the light of day, there would be no hiding his feelings from her.
"I want...want to tell you that I know things have been difficult," he began.
Mae exhaled. She nodded, staring up at the dim sunlight far above them.
"But when...if...you ever want...need for anything, I–"
"Mr. Hunt! Mrs. Lindson!" Rose Small's cheerful voice called out.
Cedar couldn't believe Rose was back so soon.
"Rose!" Mae said. "We're here. Do you have the rope?"
Rose leaned over the pit so they could see the shadow of her face. "Right here in my hands. I'll have it set to go in a shake."
She ducked out of their view and Mae turned to Cedar.
"Were you going to say something more, Mr. Hunt?"
"No," he said, keeping his voice calm. "Just that."
"Cover your heads," Rose said. "I'm sending the rope down."
Cedar put his hand on Mae's arm and guided her back just a bit. He could see her smile slightly at his touch.
"Here it comes," Rose tossed the rope. Cedar stepped up to it, took it in his hands and tugged on it, then pulled off his feet to see if it would hold his weight.
"It's secured around a tree," Rose said.
"I'll go up first," Cedar said to Mae. "I'll help pull you up afterward."
"Thank you," Mae said.
Cedar strapped his rifle so it lay across his back, then set his boots against the wall of the pit and pulled himself up, hand-over-hand.
Just as his eyes pulled level with the forest floor, a gunshot rang out.
Chapter 15
Gunfire drummed a staccato against the glim-filled sky, peppering the air around the Swift. Captain Hink shouldered the wheel against the strain as Mr. Ansell tucked the Swift's wings.
Captain Hink knew his airship better even than the skin on his bones. And he knew they had one shot of disabling the big blower of a vessel in front of them.
Mr. Guffin's canon shot had to hit true. Otherwise they'd best give up their glim stake to Les Mullins and his claim-jumping pirate crew aboard the bigger, more powerful Iron Draught and run like hell to the horizon.
Captain Hink's breathing gear hung half off the ear-strap of his goggles. Breathing gear wouldn't do a man much good if all he was doing was holding his breath, waiting to see how much longer he was going to stay living.
The nine-pound Napoleon kicked to life with a gunpowder cloud of fire, filling the Swift with black smoke.
Mr. Guffin's shot got off clean, clipped one of the Iron Draught's port fans and must have done some further damage from the racket of explosions that followed.
"What the devil was Mullins carrying on that old barge?" Captain Hink said.
Mr. Seldom, his second, had some kind of rule against stringing too many words together all at once. But this occasion appeared to override his predilections. "Gunpowder," he said, then as another blast roared out. "Dynamite. A crate or two of nitroglycerin."
A piece of metal the size of a small pony came hurdling toward them.
Fast. Too fast for even the Swift to dodge.
Captain Hink spun the wheel hard starboard, and yelled, "Get down!"
Chapter 16
"Get down, Rose!" Cedar said.
But Rose Small was not listening. She half-knelt, stretching over the top of him. At first he thought she was going to help pull him up over the edge of the pit. Instead, she pulled the rifle on his back free.
"Rose, no," he said. But clinging to a rope half out of a pit with someone taking shots at him didn't exactly put him in the prime position to bargain. Especially not with a strong-willed woman like Rose Small.
"Hold on there," she said. "I'll be right back, Mr. Hunt." She stood, cocked the rifle, and ran.
She disappeared behind a tree, just as another shot rang out.
Rose took aim, and returned fire.
Wil, his brother still in wolf-form, was off the other way from where Rose had run. He growled.
"Mr. Hunt," Mae Lindson, at the bottom of the pit below him, called out. "Who is shooting at us?"
"I'll let you know." Cedar surged up out of the pit and hugged the ground. A bullet pinged again, singing a struck-metal bell tone as it ricocheted somewhere not all that far from his prone position.
Rose, still behind the tree, returned fire. Woman was a crack shot. If she caught so much as a glint of movement in the trees, their attacker wouldn't be standing.
"You want your gun back, Mr. Hunt?" she asked, keeping the rifle steady as she scanned the trees.
"Keep him busy." Cedar tossed his ammunition pouch at her feet, and Rose snatched it up quick.
"Mae," he said, "take hold of the rope."
His heart pounded hard, the beast inside his bones wanting out, wanting to kill the unseen gunman, wanting to destroy the man who was putting Mae in danger.
Two more shots cracked out.
Rose fired back as Cedar hauled on the rope as fast and hard as he could.
Wil shifted in the cover of brush, his weight on three feet, bleeding. He growled again, the glowing copper of his eyes carrying a man's intelligence instead of that of a wolf. He wanted their shooter dead too, but was in no shape to hunt.
Finally, Mae was at the edge of the pit and pulled herself out and onto her hands and knees.
Cedar knew they had no advantage over the gunman here. "Rose, give me the rifle."
She darted out from behind the tree and tossed him the rifle. She pulled her own pistol from her belt. "We run for it, Mr. Hunt?"
"Indeed you do, Miss Small. You too, Mrs. Lindson."
"Cedar," Mae began, "please don't–"
"I'll be right behind you," he lied. "Go!"
Chapter 17
"Go, on now, go," Hink muttered to his ship. The Swift fled across a sky made of smoke and fire, every drop of the little airship's steam and glim burning hard, fans growling, wings tucked tight.
Captain Hink had only one goal: escape. His feet were set wide, boots set into the floor bracers, eyes on the heavens above. They were going to make it. They were going to out-run the flaming chunk of shrapnel burning toward them from the foundering Iron Draught.
But hoping did not make a thing true. They were not going to be fast enough this time.
The shrapnel was seconds away from collision with the little airship.
"Fly, girl," Hink whispered. "Just a little more. Just give me little more."
The port door ripped open with a pop and blow that jolted the ship. Hink threw a look over his shoulder, expecting to see half his ship blown apart.
Instead, he saw his second-in-command at the door. "Seldom!" he yelled. "What in the blazes are you doing?"
Mr. Seldom didn't seem to hear him, which was not likely. The Irishman could out-hear a herd of rabbits.
Then Captain Hink knew exactly what Seldom was doing. The door was open, and Seldom was manning the canon.
Crazy. The man had gone out-of-his-head crazy.
Mr. Seldom took aim and lit the fuse. The nine pounder went off in a blast of sparks, fire, and smoke, striking the pony-sized chunk of shrapnel and sending it plummeting off their tail.
Captain Hink yelled in victory, and the other crewmen joined in. Mr. Guffin stumped over to Mr. Seldom and helped him muscle the door shut.
Captain Hink tugged on the bell line, signaling for his boilerman, Molly, to cool her down.
Hink swung the Swift in a wide arc, heading back for the glim ground they'd just abandoned. The Iron Draught was about as on fire as a ship could get. It was going to take a tough captain, and a tougher crew, to douse those flames and bring that big bruiser out of the flat belly-spiral she was taking to the ground below.
Captain Hink cussed softly, and Mr. Ansell got on to praying in his native tongue. Mr. Guffin just shook his head, while Seldom wet down the barrel of the canon.
It wasn't that Captain Hink had a particular fondnes
s for the other ship. They had been out to jump his glim claim, which he could not cozen. But harvesting glim was only one of the things he was in the sky for. As a US Marshal, he was also here to sniff out the people behind the illegal glim trade.
He suspected Les Mullins might have been in touch with just that kind of information. Maybe even information about his old enemy, General Saint's whereabouts too.
Now Mullins wasn't worth much of anything except as bait for the buzzards.
"Turn our wings glimward, Mr. Ansell," Captain Hink said.
"Captain," Mr. Guffin said from the back of the ship. "We got us a problem."
Chapter 18
The only problem Cedar had was his brother. Wil limped out and stood in front of him, telling him by the lowering of his ears and hunch of his shoulder that he was not going to let Cedar hunt the gunman.
Cedar scanned the trees where the shooter should be. He didn't see anything, but he heard a cracking of underbrush and the distant rhythm of horse hooves fading off. Was the shooter riding off? He supposed it was possible Rose had hit the gunman, though Cedar didn't smell blood in the air. It was possible the man had tired of trying to shoot them.
But not likely.
"Hurry, Mr. Hunt," Rose said. "And bring Wil."
The curse put Wil in wolf form for much longer stretches than Cedar. And while the curse carried a much quicker healing time, Rose was right. Wil would not be able to run out of this forest on his own.
Cedar slung his rifle over his shoulder then bent and picked up the wolf, muscling him across his shoulders. Wil whined, but didn't struggle.
They made their way quickly out of the trees, Mae and Rose in the lead, both with guns drawn.
"Hold up there," a man's voice called out.
Both women pivoted, guns aimed at the speaker.
Bryn Madder, one of their traveling companions, stopped dead in his tracks as a man who was staring down two barrels ought. The monocle over his bad left eye glittered ruby in the overhang of shadows from the trees at the forest's edge. "Trouble I should know about?" he asked calmly.
The women lowered their guns and Cedar strode out of the trees.
"We need to move," Cedar said. "Quickly."
Bryn Madder spent no time arguing. He had gathered up all their horses, including Rose's that must have run off a ways.
The big wagon that the other Madder brothers were traveling in was just on the other side of the river.
"Can he walk, Mr. Hunt?" Bryn asked.
"I'll take him over the river."
Must have been the look in his eyes, or maybe the growl in his voice that kept all three people from arguing with him.
The water was cold, but did a world of good clearing Cedar's head. He crossed the river at the shallowest point, water up to his knees. Wil held very still across his shoulders. They made it to the other side quickly and safely enough. Though Cedar expected a gunshot at any moment, it never came.
Why? Why would someone so set on taking shots at them suddenly ride off? Had Rose trespassed, and now that they were across the river, the shooter was uninterested? Or was the shooter riding ahead, setting up an ambush?
The beast in his bones stirred. He knew this wasn't the end of it. Someone didn't waste that many bullets and not want to see the job finished.
Rose and Mae helped Cedar get Wil into the back of the Madder's big wagon, and then Cedar swung up onto his horse.
"Not so bad a place to stop for the day," Alun Madder, the eldest of the brothers noted from the driver's seat of the wagon.
"We're not stopping here." Cedar's answer was short, but then, so was his temper. He wanted as far from this place as they could go. And quickly. He'd need to find a defensible position before the sun set.
Before he could start on the trail, the wind shifted. And brought with it the sound of a rider.
Chapter 19
"Rider on the ridge," Mr. Guffin said. "Starboard."
Captain Hink leaned down over the wheel a bit and glanced out the windows of the Swift. Sure enough there was another airship steaming the sky, puffing along the top of the Sawtooth Mountains, like she was looking for huckleberries in the treetops.
Not as sleek and quick as the Swift, nor as heavy and armed as the destroyed and burning Iron Draught below them, Captain Hink knew that boat. It was the Powderback, Les Mullin's old tug.
"Well, I'll be damned, boys," Captain Hink said. "Looks like Mullins's had himself some back up. Might even be old Mullins wasn't on the Iron Draught after all."
The heavy metal door at the back of the ship pushed open. Molly Gregor, the ship's boilerman, stomped out. Her shirt sleeves were rolled up past her elbows, and a fine sheen of sweat covered her face and put a bit of slick in her dark hair.
"How much fire we got left in our belly, Molly?" Captain Hink asked.
"Enough to catch glim, if you'd stop horsing around."
"Don't think I like your tone of voice, Miss Gregor," Captain Hink said with a grin.
"Well, then," she said, pouring the sweet on each word, "if you'd stop horsing around, Captain, we might make our stake before we kick the sky for good."
"Captain," Mr. Ansell, at navigation said. "Winds are changing."
"Story of my life, Mr. Ansell," Captain Hink said.
He took a new heading, steering the Swift into the soft greens and wavering roses and gold of glim that hovered, delicate as lace, high above the clouds.
"Lower the arms and throw the lines," he said.
Molly gave him a nod. "Make it a short run, Captain," she said as she strode back to the boilers. "She'll hold the sky up for a few minutes more."
The crew got busy working the winches and pulleys, setting the long, netted trawling arms.
Harvesting glim was as close to a spiritual experience as Captain Hink was ever likely to know. Glim was so delicate, just the passage of a ship through it tore it up like a hard wind through mist.
He eased the Swift down beneath the misty lights that snaked the sky in long, undulating wedges. Just low enough the trawling arms would stir through the glim, copper wires feathered out at the edges of the netted arms, catching glim like raindrops, and sending that rare and precious substance down the lines and into the glass holding tanks.
The Swift passed through glim once, twice. Then the winds changed for good, scattering the rare substance, and leaving nothing but sky and cloud behind.
"That's it, men," Captain Hink said, letting out a breath he'd been holding. "Stow the nets."
"Heading, Captain?" Mr. Ansell asked.
Captain Hink thought about it. He'd promised the boy, George Rucker, he'd be back before winter hit. But winter was still a few weeks off. He wanted to get a bead on the illegal glim trade and more so, he wanted to know if Les Mullins and his destroyed ship had anything to do with General Alabaster Saint. General Saint was the one man the president of the United States most wanted Hink and the other US Marshals to bring in for trial. If Hink was going to look into the matter, they'd need a perch for awhile.
He knew the perfect place to hole up, close by in the Bitterroot Mountains near Oregon Territory. They'd have fuel enough to get there, and plenty of opportunities for a bribe or two among the pirates and harvesters who riddled the peak.
"Northeast, Mr. Ansell," Captain Hink said. "If the winds are willing and our wings are true, we'll set anchor at Stump Station before nightfall."
Chapter 20
Nightfall wasn't far off, but no matter how long they rode, Cedar had not once caught a glimpse of the rider he knew was following them.
They set up camp, Wil still inside the wagon, the tent pitched for the women. Bryn and Cadoc, the younger two Madder brothers, had backtracked across the river and dragged back with them the metal contraption that Rose had wandered after. They said they thought it was some kind of mining device, built for digging and running on a track.
Cedar didn't point out that the brothers had effectively stolen the thing. He'd long ago given up tr
ying to understand the Madders.
Still, the beast in his bones was restless. His hand kept wandering to the gun at his hip, and he found himself standing too long and staring too hard at the horizon. Blood pumped in his ears, and the sure knowledge that someone was stalking them sat heavy on his nerves.
The beast wanted out. Wanted to hunt, wanted to kill if that's what it took to keep Mae Lindson safe.
"Mr. Hunt?"
Cedar startled at Rose Small's soft voice. She was standing a good distance from him, her shotgun in her hand.
"Is there something out there we should know about?" she asked. "You've been pacing and staring at that crop of trees for over an hour now."
Cedar took a calming breath, trying to push the beast's rage away. He was a scholar, a learned man from the universities back east. Not educated in the wild sciences of metal and steam, but in history, and the gentle arts.
He would not let the Pawnee curse that had robbed him of so much take that away from him.
"Must be something if it's taking you that long to answer," Rose said with a smile.
"No," Cedar put as much ease as he could manage into his tone. "Or at least it's nothing I can see."
"Sometimes it isn't our eyes that show us the truth of things," Rose said.
And before Cedar could answer, he heard the crack of a branch behind him.
A man strode out of the forest. Hard-ridden, dirty, with eyes as smooth as granite. He had a gun in each hand and was aiming those guns straight at Mae who stood no more than a few feet in front of him staring off at the distance as if she hadn't yet seen the man.
But the man had seen her. He glanced at the Madders on the far side of the wagon, glanced at Rose, who was even now lifting her shotgun, and locked gazes with Cedar.
Cedar was already moving, had been running the instant he heard the branch break.