Jacob was conscious of one certainty. It all depended on him. If the plan failed, the fault was his and the tears of widows and mothers would fall, salty and hot, on his head. If Caleb Perry survived tomorrow and lived to continue his reign of terror, better Jacob O’Brien tie a millstone around his neck and jump into the deepest ocean.
He groaned and the rosary beads on his hand stilled. He’d lost the will to pray for a victory that might well be impossible, beyond the reach of even heavenly intervention. There were too many maybes in his plan, too many variables . . . too many ways it could end in disaster. As a man who lived with depression, the black dog that crouched in a corner waiting to spring, he knew there were also too many ways that could force him to take his own life.
That thought disturbed him and he rolled out of his cot, hurriedly dressed and buckled on his Colt. A glance at his watch told him it was almost two in the morning, but the blasting thunder of cannon forging went on where trolls served the machines, moving like naked automatons in a bloodred glare.
Jacob walked through an empty corridor to the foremen’s canteen. The place was empty but for a few cooks. He ordered a whiskey from the bar and sat at the piano. He forsook his beloved Chopin and began to play the hauntingly sad First Movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata that so perfectly fit his mood.
A few moments after Jacob began playing, the door opened and Valentine Kilcoyn stepped inside, wearing his gun. He drew up a chair and then soundlessly stared at Jacob for the entire seven-and-a-half-minute duration of the movement. When the last notes faded, Kilcoyn rose to his feet and applauded. “Bravo. You play well, Buck.”
Jacob turned from the keyboard and said his thanks.
“Big morning coming, huh? Lot of exciting things happening.”
“Seems like,” Jacob said.
“But I’ve been thinking. When a man soars into the air, free as a bird, he might take on strange notions. I mean, from up that high, he might start to see things from a different point of view. It could happen.”
Jacob nodded. “I guess it could at that.”
“But if a man is wise, he’ll keep his feet planted firmly on the ground. If he flies too close to the sun, he might burn up and that would be the end of him.”
“You got a man in mind, Val?”
“Can’t say as I do just yet. I got a strange feeling though, Buck. I’m descended from a great Irishman, King Niall of the Nine Hostages, and all Irish have the gift of second sight, do they not?”
“Not all, but most,” Jacob corrected.
“Do you?”
“Yes. I often dream about events before they happen. Maybe I’ll see you in one of my dreams, Val.”
“And you in mine, Buck. Just to let you know, I’ll be on the air frigate come morning.”
“Glad to have you onboard, if that’s the correct expression.”
“No, you’re not glad I’ll be onboard, Buck. I don’t need a dream to see the what-the-hell expression in your eyes as you sit there. You don’t want me anywhere near the airship.” Kilcoyn touched his gun. “And this is one cannon you don’t want onboard, either.”
“A man does what his inner voices tell him, Val,” Jacob pointed out.
“Then you tell me . . . am I welcome?”
“Of course you’re welcome. Why would I say otherwise?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll be there to make certain you play honest poker, Buck. Deal from the bottom of the deck and I’ll take it hard.”
Jacob rolled his shoulders and stretched his neck. “Will this night ever end?”
“Long, isn’t it?” Kilcoyn said. “I couldn’t sleep, kept tossing and turning. I put it down to wondering about what the morning will bring. Then I heard a flapping and thought a bat or a big bird had flown into my room. Of course, nothing was there. That’s when I decided to get up.”
“Maybe you should voice your concerns about tomorrow to Caleb Perry.”
“No, I don’t want to do that. He’d take it as a sign of weakness. I’ll handle it myself.”
“Handle what, Val?”
“I don’t know, but I can guess. There will be a lot of trolls onboard, a mutiny maybe? Yeah, it could be mutiny.”
“Then you should be wary, Val.”
“That’s what I intend to be, Buck,” Kilcoyn said. “Will you play again?”
“The Second movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is a scherzo in D flat major. It’s more light-hearted than the First and might cheer us up, huh?”
“Yeah, I think we need some cheering up, Buck. Let’s hear it and leave morning until morning comes.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Shawn O’Brien refilled the coffeepot at the stream. When he returned to the campsite, Matt had a fire going and was slicing bacon into a fry pan. He asked the reverend, “Is there anything you don’t have in your wagon?”
“Well, I don’t have a woman and I don’t have a dog, but I aim to get both pretty soon. Nothing makes a nicer pair than a pretty, yellow-haired woman and a yellow dog. At least, that’s my thinking anyway.” He glanced at the lean-to where Flora March was asleep. “I’m always willing to compromise.”
As Shawn grabbed the sack of Arbuckles’ that lay close to the fire, Matt added, “Throw a good fistful of coffee in the pot and then get it on the bile. Bacon’s gonna be fried before the coffee’s ready.”
A morning mist cleared over the graveyard and the night shadows melted like black snow. The morning promised a hot, sunny day with no breeze. Shawn stretched a kink out of his back. “You all loaded up, Matt?”
“Wagon or guns?”
“I’m only interested in your guns today.”
“Sure am. Got all six chambers of my Colt loaded and two loads of buck in the Greener. Now it’s up to you to point out a target.”
Shawn grimaced. “I have a feeling there will be plenty of those.”
“Then I’m ready to smite the unrighteous.”
“Those seven men you killed, were any of them named guns?”
Matt hesitated. “Well, they all had names. Boy, this is going to be tasty bacon, I can tell. The smell is delicious. Making my mouth water.”
His suspicions roused, Shawn said, “Tell me about the shooting scrape and the time my brother Jake saved your life.”
“Just between us? I don’t want Miss March to hear.”
“I won’t tell her if you don’t. Now what about all those bad men you’ve killed.”
“You want the truth, don’t you?”
Shawn nodded. “I can tell a professional shootist by the way he conducts himself and talks. I don’t think you’ve ever been in a gunfight, Reverend.”
“All right then.” The man sighed. “Jake saved me from being hung by vigilantes for horse theft. Even though he notified them, those boys didn’t want to be cheated out of their fun and it came down to gunplay. The hemp party left two of their number dead on the ground and the rest lit a shuck. See, they’d never had to deal with the like of Jake O’Brien before.” Matt looked miserable. “Here’s the truth . . . I didn’t shoot anybody.”
“What about all that left hand, right hand stuff?” Shawn asked.
“That’s not how it was, but how it’s going to be. I’m just getting started in the salvation or slaughter business. I had a vision you see after I overheard some Texas Rangers talking about Falcon Haven and how it was a bandit town. It was to the Rangers that Deacon Galahad Smolley had sent a wire, not me. However that night my vision told me to journey—”
“I don’t give a damn what your vision told you,” Shawn interrupted. “Since you got here, all you’ve done is tell one big windy after another. Hell, I have a good mind to put a bullet into you myself.”
“What’s all the bellering about?” Flora March had her skirt hiked up and scratched a mosquito bite on her thigh.
“The draw fighting reverend has never shot anybody in his life,” Shawn explained. “He’s not going to be of any help in the street. Just a liability.�
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Matt tried to make himself small. “I’m not a reverend and my real name isn’t Matthew Mark Luke John Lombard-Fullbourne, it’s Archibald Lark. Before this, I worked as a clerk at a clothing and women’s sundries store in El Paso.”
Flora shook her finger. “You’re a bad boy, Archie.”
“But I am headed for the Glass Mountain country and Falcon Haven, Miss March. Honest I am. And as far as the Good Lord is concerned, I’m a reverend.”
“Can you even shoot?” Shawn asked.
Lark brightened and seemed to grow in size. “When I bought a Colt’s gun in El Paso, the store owner took me out back and I hit a peach can. Mr. Foster said I was a natural.”
Not yet convinced, Shawn asked, “How far away was the can?”
“At the end of an empty beer barrel. I shot into the barrel, you see.”
“Go home to El Paso and sell woman’s fixin’s, Archibald. You don’t want to be in the street with me come noon.”
“I think Archie’s got sand, Professor,” Flora said, studying the man’s face. “He’s not going to run away. And he did shoot a peach can in El Paso.”
Shawn shook his head. “Let’s get breakfast started. Flora, you’re as loco as he is.”
* * *
The sun climbed higher in a blue sky as Shawn made his way through the graveyard in the direction of town. Trailing behind him, Lark and Flora walked hand in hand. Archie was there because he dearly wanted to prove himself and Flora was there because she did whatever the hell she wanted.
Cemeteries can be quiet shady places well suited to deep contemplation. Shawn, raised by punchers who had passed on to him all their many superstitions, felt uneasy walking through the headstones. It was the baddest kind of luck to visit Boot Hill before a gunfight, or so old Luther Ironside had told him.
“Hold on there, Professor,” Flora said. “You’re walking too fast.”
“I’m supposed to be on the street by noon,” Shawn argued.
“Plenty of time.” She reached beneath her blouse to let out the side buckles of her corset and loosened the laces between her breasts. That done, she lifted her dress to mid-thigh and tucked the hem into the waistband. “Ah, that’s better. You can carry on now, Professor.”
Irritated, Shawn frowned. “You should have done that fixing before we left camp.”
“I wasn’t hot before we left camp,” Flora pointed out.
“It is getting hot,” Lark said.
“Don’t encourage her, Archibald.”
* * *
The word that an Abaddon aerial steam frigate was making a test run had been broadcast around town by Caleb Perry’s men, and an added attraction was that the foundry would supply beer and cake and ice cream for the ladies and little ones. Thus was Perry’s plan—to attract as many people as possible to his killing ground.
Shawn was surprised to see that the noisy street and boardwalks were crowded with people in a holiday mood, as though it was Independence Day. The six-piece Big Buck brass band was in attendance and played renditions of “How Sweet the Roses” and “Where the Woodbine Twineth” to considerable applause.
Jake had told Shawn to be on the street at noon and according to the fliers posted around town that was when the airship would lift from the foundry’s construction bay. The clock above City Hall claimed it was as yet only eleven-thirty and Flora and Lark went in search of ice cream. Shawn found himself a rocker on the hotel porch and settled down to wait. Amid laughing, bright-eyed people, he was the only one who dreaded what the noon hour would bring.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
The frigate was already crowded when Jacob O’Brien clambered onboard. The gun crews under the watchful eye of Manuel Cantrell were clustered around their cannons and technicians made last-minute checks on the ship’s furnace, boiler, and the tangle of brass pipes, levers, handles, and dials that were the veins and arteries of the craft.
Valentine Kilcoyn, wearing two guns in crossed cartridge belts, had stationed himself at the prow, the painted dragonhead looming over him. Egbert Killick would not arrive with the bomb until just before launch, but he stood on the gantry with Caleb Perry anxiously watching the preparations.
The roof, raised by steam power, lifted slowly, its massive gearwheels and greased pistons smoothly taking the strain of the enormous weight. The black bats painted on the balloon bobbed up and down as though they were ready to take off and fly at any moment.
Kilcoyn made his way through the gun trolls gathered in the ship’s waist and stood beside Jacob at the stern. “We’ve got an audience, Buck.”
“Yeah, I see him.”
“Mr. Perry is expecting great things of us today. This will be the first aerial bombing attack in history. You have the key?”
Jacob showed the key on the chain around his neck. “A clockwork bomb. It sounds so harmless.”
“You won’t think that when you see it wipe Big Buck off the map,” Kilcoyn said. “What an experiment this going to be, the future of modern warfare.”
“We’re going to kill a lot of innocent people,” Jacob pointed out.
“Why would you care, Buck? They mean nothing to you.”
Jacob nodded. “No they don’t.”
“When fleets of steamships like this one drop bombs on cities, do you think the men who fly them will fret over the numbers of people they’re killing? No, of course not. They’ll be bombing bridges, roads, factories, and seats of government, not people. Mr. Perry calls dead civilians collateral damage. That’s how you need to think of the Big Buck dead, just incidental casualties. Understand me?”
“Yeah, I get it,” Jacob said. “You’ve clearly stated the case, Val.”
Kilcoyn slapped Jacob on the shoulder. “I had my doubts about you, Buck, but no longer. By God, you’re a white man through and through.” He glanced at his watch. “Fifteen minutes to launch. Are you ready?”
Jacob forced a smile. “There ain’t a bump in the road ahead of me that I can see. Yeah, Val, I’m ready.”
“You’re true blue, Buck,” Kilcoyn grinned before he went back to the prow again.
* * *
Five minutes later, Egbert Killick approached the frigate. Behind him, two nervous trolls lugged the bomb in a specially made rack with two handles at each end. The Mexicans looked as though they were carrying a large Christmas pudding on a stretcher.
“Mr. Ross, are you ready to receive ordnance?” Killick called up.
“Bring it onboard, Mr. Killick. Take the loading ramp.”
“You didn’t forget the key, did you?” Killick hollered.
Jacob dangled the key so that the little man could see it.
Killick turned to his helpers. “Right, up the ramp with you two.” He brandished a bulldog revolver. “I’ll kill the man who drops it.”
Without the clockwork firing mechanism being wound, the bomb was relatively stable and was loaded onboard without much difficulty.
Killick followed, mopped his brow with a red bandana, and took his seat at the helm. “I must confess, Mr. Ross, I was worried about the bomb. Had one of those fools dropped it . . . well, I don’t know what would have happened.”
“Something mighty unpleasant, I guess.”
“Mr. Ross, you are a master of understatement.”
As the time for launch drew close, the brass band had moved closer to the foundry and was playing selections from The Pirates of Penzance, including “A Rollicking Band of Pirates, We.”
Jacob thought it apt.
* * *
All over the foundry at a minute before noon by the clock on a construction bay wall, steam whistles shrieked to herald the coming event. Up on the gantry, Caleb Perry raised fists above his head and pumped them in the air, then he and his entourage of gunmen left to climb to his aerie on top of the roof where he would have a grandstand seat to watch the proceedings.
The clock on the wall chimed twelve followed by roaring orders.
“Cast off fore and aft!”
“Cast off amidships!”
“All hands to stations!”
“Steady as she goes . . .”
The steam frigate rose majestically as the balloon soared through the roof and for a moment, held itself motionless against the backdrop of the blue sky. People cheered themselves hoarse in the street as they watched the great airship gain altitude and then come under the power of the steam engine. The propeller at the rear of the craft sputtered a few times and then roared into life, spinning in a glittering circle like a steel saw. Under power, the frigate, its eight cannons bristling, headed north away from town. Moans of disappointment rose from the crowds of onlookers as they wondered if the beautiful airship was leaving them.
* * *
“Mr. Perry ordered me to fire a test broadside before we level the town,” Kilcoyn said to Jacob and Killick. “He doesn’t want this ship to go down the first time we try to fire the guns.”
“Embarrassing.” The breeze at an altitude of a hundred feet tugged at Jacob’s clothing.
“Worse than that if we lose the British and German contracts. Heads will roll and us three will be the first.” Kilcoyn tapped Killick on the shoulder and shouted above the din of the steam engine. “Take her down fifty feet, find an open spot, and we’ll cut loose.”
Killick nodded and swung the tiller. The airship turned to the west toward open brush flats. Jacob watched how the little pilot handled the unwieldy craft and was aware that Kilcoyn was watching him. Manuel Cantrell seemed to feel the growing tension. He stood on the swaying deck among his gunners, his face set and concerned.
Killick looked over the side and found a spot that suited him. “Roll out the guns,” he shouted. Then after a few seconds, “Fire!”
The four starboard cannons crashed in unison and belched sheets of flame and smoke. The frigate rolled slightly and threatened to yaw, but Killick had her firmly in hand and kept her to a straight and level course. A cheer went up from the gun crews the moment they realized that the ship had remained steady under recoil and they were still alive. Kilcoyn grinned and looked relieved.
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