by D. J. Butler
“This is bloody nonsense, Pocatello, aye, and you know it! When President Young hears what you’ve done—Hickman! Lee!” He looked astonished. “What are you doing here? Tell the Chief he can’t keep us locked up!”
Chief Pocatello raised a restraining hand and smiled wryly. “Spare me,” he said, “I already got the whole speech from Sister Eliza.”
Lee grinned. “I guess you did, Chief.”
Hickman thumped Chief Pocatello on the shoulder with enthusiasm. “Sometimes even an Injun can be a poor dumb unlucky son of a bitch, can’t he?” he shrilled in his high-pitched voice.
Jones looked from one face to the next, puzzled. “Will you not get us out of here, then?”
“Don’t worry, Brother Daniel,” Lee reassured him, “the Shoshone’ll let you go in the morning. None of your passengers will be any the worse for wear.”
“Did you Danites arrange this?” Jones demanded to know, and then he frowned. “This isn’t something Brother Brigham ordered, is it? If he wanted to change my schedule or my route, he could have simply told me so.”
Hickman snickered. “Naw, we ain’t done this. I guess Pocatello ain’t such a tame Injun as you thought, is all.”
“Why are you laughing?” Jones demanded. His face was turning red with rage and frustration. “Deseret’s premier land-ferry from the Wyoming Territory has been waylaid by former allies with all passengers and crew. Is that funny to you, Hickman? Are you amused that the Liahona was attacked?”
Hickman shrugged. “I got an eclectic sense of humor, I guess. I can laugh at jokes other men tell almost as easy as I can laugh at my own.”
“Don’t worry, it would take a railgun the size of a piñon pine to put a scratch on the Liahona,” Pocatello added. “And you must know that your Brother Brigham has not yet seen fit to sell me a railgun.”
“I’m not worried about the truck!” the Welsh captain barked, his voice projecting like a foghorn. “I’m worried about John Moses! I can’t find the little fellow and Jonathan Browning will kill me first and then die of grief himself if I lose his son!”
Pocatello’s expression seemed compassionate. “I’ll have my men check the truck again,” he told the Liahona’s captain. “Maybe he’s hiding. A boy that size, he might be under a chair and we just missed him.”
Jones nodded stiffly, his face still a mask of fury and fear, and walked away, throwing himself to a seated position in the sand. The others seemed to finally see Absalom and he cleared his throat by way of annoyed greeting. Perhaps these men could help him.
“Why look, it’s the Englishman,” Bill Hickman squeaked, and then walked past Absalom with no further salutation.
“We’ve already seen this one,” Lee added to the Shoshone Chief. He too walked on, leaving Absalom floundering alone.
Chief Pocatello shrugged and followed the two white men. The three of them paced around the pit, examining the Liahona’s passengers and crew. Absalom trailed them at a short distance, feeling ineffectual but unable to think of anything to say that would get their attention and respect. Some of the crew seemed to recognize the two white men and glared at them, but Hickman and Lee reserved their interest for certain of the passengers. They whispered to each other about Burton, and Hickman even bent to toss a small dirt clod at the man, like you might test a wild animal, but Ruffian Dick lay still, breathing deeply and giving no signs of anything but restful slumber.
They smirked at Burton’s lady friend Roxie, too, and separately at Absalom’s Angel, who sat with the older woman; the former spit on their boots and the latter looked away, bored. Hickman and Lee continued on, then stopped for a long time staring at the Egyptian antiquities showman Archibald. He sat quietly on the dirt and looked back, gently. Absalom positioned himself by the two ladies and tried desperately to think of something to say to confront their captors.
“That ain’t a natural beard, is it?” Hickman asked, squinted. He pulled up one of the torches and held it over the other man.
“No,” Archibald agreed, “it isn’t. I’m a showman. My show is a serious one and requires the gravitas of a beard. Lamentably, I myself do not grow a good one, so this beard is … borrowed.”
He smiled.
“Didn’t you have a helper of some kind, back at the Fort?” Lee inquired. “A short man, a dwarf?”
“I did,” the exhibitor agreed. “Tell me if you find him—he’s disappeared, along with some of my tools.”
“Lots of folks are vamoosing all of the sudden around here. Maybe,” Hickman suggested, eyes glinting cruelly as he planted the torch, stepped closer and pulled a long knife from his belt, “the little bugger’s hiding in that haystack on your chin.”
He lashed out quickly, like a snake, and grabbed the carnival man by his neck. Lee stepped back a pace and put his hands on the butt of the pistols on his belt, as if warning bystanders not to intervene. Doctor Archibald made no move to resist or flee, but lay limply in the other man’s grip while his false beard was shaved down to gum and stubble.
“There, now,” Hickman said as he finished the rough shave and re-sheathed the knife. “You look presentable, much more like your picture. I guess Brother Brigham’ll be happy to see you now.”
Like his picture? What was Hickman talking about? And why did he think the traveling presenter of Egyptian antiquities would be interested in an audience with Brigham Young? Absalom trembled, feeling out of his depth. He turned to the ladies, meaning to offer them a reassuring glance, and was surprised to see, for just a split second before she reasserted control, an expression of shock and surprise on Roxie’s face.
“Yes, but did you find my dwarf?” the showman quipped.
Hickman didn’t take the joke well. “No, Mr. Poe, I didn’t,” he squeaked, and pulled a battered revolver from a holster low on his hip, cocking it ominously with one thumb. “Maybe I didn’t search you closely enough.”
Absalom didn’t want to intervene. In his heart he knew that he was not a brave man and he desperately wanted Doctor Archibald, or Poe, if that was his name, to fight his own battles. He apparently had a history with Lee and Hickman.
But watching these frontier bullies threaten and intimidate a harmless old man reminded him too much of Abigail, of her being abducted by the notorious Rockwell—Rockwell, whom Absalom had met the night before and to whom he had done nothing, though the man richly deserved any thrashing that any person at all might be able to give him—and something in him pushed him to act.
Also, he couldn’t let his Angel watch him stand by any longer.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” he intruded, forcing his legs, by an effort of will, to carry him forward. “We were never able to finish our conversation last night, and I was unable to ask you a question I had meant to pose.” He almost stumbled to a stop, conscious of eyes on him. “I’m coming to the Kingdom of Deseret on official business, on business, in fact, of Her Majesty Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland,” he hoped that a little title-waving might help defuse the situation, “but I have personal affairs to see to as well.”
“Yes?” Lee prompted him slowly.
“My sister,” Absalom said, then cleared his throat. “I’ve come looking for my sister. Her name is Abigail Fearnley-Standish, though it’s possible …” he trailed off, mustering his strength so as to be able to speak the unspeakable, “it’s possible that she goes by the name of Rockwell now.”
Hickman paused and squinted in Absalom’s direction, pistol cocked and pointed at the sky, the lapels of Archibald’s coat clenched in his free hand. “Funny,” he grumbled, “I thought our conversation last night went on plenty long, and I didn’t hear nothing about no sister then.”
Lee looked surprised and amused. “I don’t think I know your sister,” he said. “Are you suggesting that she might be married to Orrin Porter Rockwell?” He and Hickman shared a look that was both knowing and surprised.
Absalom felt very conspicuous now, very vulnerable, and very alone. He al
so felt the gaze of his Angel upon him like a mantle of lead. Unsure if he could speak without bursting into tears or fainting, he nodded and thrust forth his jaw in that same stoic, ape-like expression he’d seen on Dick Burton’s face every day now for months.
“Well, ain’t that peculiar?” Hickman drawled, tossing Archibald to the dirt and turning his attention to Absalom. “’Cause as I recollect it, last night we asked you if you’d seen our friend Orrin Porter Rockwell, and you allowed as you hadn’t.”
I hadn’t, Absalom wanted to say, even though it would have been a lie, but he couldn’t force the words out. He managed to shake his head, and thought he kept his hands from trembling too terribly much.
“Not only that,” Lee remembered, his baritone becoming a menacing growl, “you suggested that you didn’t even know who Porter Rockwell was.”
“I don’t know him,” Absalom gulped out, and he put up his hands, palms forward, in a non-threatening gesture. “Please be calm, I don’t know Mr. Rockwell.”
“I’m inclined to think that you’re lying to us,” Hickman said, and he leveled his pistol at Absalom’s forehead. “And if you don’t come clean now, I’m inclined to shoot you.”
***
Chapter Five
Jed Coltrane spent the night lying on the rooftop of the Liahona’s wheelhouse with the boy, John Moses. After the Shoshone had disarmed and unloaded the steam-truck’s passengers and crew they’d turned the boiler down and idled all the electricks and in the blue-firefly-dotted darkness that followed Jed had slipped down briefly to collect a few items to make the night a little more bearable: a pea coat from the wheelhouse, a couple of wool blankets from one of the cabins, a large tin of chocolate cookies and a bottle of milk from the galley, and a flask of brandy from his own room. He’d stuffed the big-eyed boy into the pea coat and then wrapped each of them inside a wool blanket and they’d munched cookies together in silence in Jed’s little stick joint on the wheelhouse roof.
He’d taken one other thing from the wheelhouse, which was a long, telescoping spyglass, of steel-bound brass construction and providing an impressive degree of magnification when fully telescoped. Jed had let John Moses look through the spyglass briefly, but then the boy had fallen asleep in his puddle of wool. Jed had spent a couple of hours alone, examining the Shoshone camp carefully and trying to figure out his next move.
Not far behind the Liahona, a couple of clocksprung horses had galloped up to the gate of the encampment and been admitted. Jed had seen plenty of clocksprung animals in Eli Whitney’s South; clocksprung men planted and harvested cotton, clocksprung mules pulled every domestic load imaginable, and soldiers and cavaliers rode around the roads of the country, roads so bad for the most part that only the ruggedest trucks could have survived them, on the backs of clocksprung horses. These two mechanical animals clop-clop-hissed through the welcoming Shoshone braves and he thought about stealing them, but they too quickly disappeared with their riders, two white men in long coats, in the direction of the central bluff.
Jed snapped his spyglass shut in frustration.
So much for that idea, Coltrane, he thought. Only a real mark would work at how to sneak deeper into the camp in order to steal his means out. What are you, Coltrane, new? The dwarf sat back and returned to considering his other options.
If the steam-truck were smaller—much smaller—he might be able to operate it himself and try to break out of the compound that way. He might be able to steal a horse, he thought, but he didn’t know how to get the gate open. He considered flight, tunneling, disguise, and everything else he could think of, watching the Shoshone sentinels drift occasionally through the witch-lit camp, and had finally reached the point of surrendering to the inevitable and settling in to wait, when the Shoshone opened their gate and a second truck rolled in.
“Good hell,” he muttered to himself. It was the Jim Smiley.
He trained the pilfered spyglass on the smaller truck and wished he had a better way to listen. Even without being able to hear the words that passed between them, though, there was no mistaking the friendliness of the greeting that Sam Clemens and his skinny, porkpie hat-wearing Irishman got from the old Shoshone and his braves who ambled up to receive them. With the telescope, too, Jed could clearly see the nut change hands—Clemens carefully counted out a series of gold coins and passed them over to the Shoshone, who whooped in gleeful appreciation.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “What’s going on here?”
Clemens and the Indians walked together, chatting and grinning and slapping each other on the back, on toward the bluff in the center of the encampment. As Jed watched through his spyglass, they disappeared into the tunnel mouth into which all the Liahona’s crew and passengers had been taken.
Leaving the Jim Smiley unattended; thin twists of steam and coal smoke jetting from its pipes.
Jed looked again at the compound’s gate. It was an electricks work, so Jed would be afraid to touch it with his hands, but he knew enough about the subject to believe that rubber protected you from electricks, and the Jim Smiley was a steel capsule surrounded by walls of rubber—big India-rubber tires and an inflated black rubber belt most of the way around. That ought to be enough, he thought. He could sneak aboard the Jim Smiley, bring her out of her idle and simply charge out the gate. How hard could it be? And by the time anyone wised up to him, he’d be halfway back to Fort Bridger. There he’d …
He faltered. He’d what, exactly?
Would he tell the locals that he was a secret agent for a covert leadership faction of the southern States, men who were illegally organizing a shadow government in preparation for an expected civil war, and ask for volunteers to come help rescue his fellow secret agent from wild Indians? Jeez, if he had cash, he might be able to hire some muscle, but he didn’t even have that, and even if he went door to door in the Liahona and burgled all its rooms, he doubted, from the look of the passengers, that they’d have enough wealth all together to hire a single one-eyed gunman and a spavined nag.
He could jump into the Jim Smiley and ride jock down the mysterious tunnel, but that seemed like suicide for a lot of reasons.
He gnawed his knuckles and schemed. He knew that Poe was carrying something that Brigham Young wanted, though Jed wasn’t sure what it was. Not that it mattered; he couldn’t pack all of Poe’s Egyptian knicks-knacks off the Liahona and onto the Jim Smiley—it was too bulky for him to do it alone, and even if he had help, he couldn’t manage it without being seen.
If he could get a message to Young, though, then the man might send Deseret troops, or some of his feared Danite assassins, out to rescue Poe and retrieve whatever it was he and Poe were negotiating about. But Jed had never before been west of the Mississippi and he wasn’t sure of the way to the Great Salt Lake City.
But Clemens knew the route. That was where he was headed.
And Jed could stow away.
He checked his shoulder holster and big jacket pocket; the gun and the scarab cylinder were secure. He could hide in the Jim Smiley’s lockers and kill the two Federal men before they got to Deseret, just to be sure. The boy, of course, he’d leave here.
He looked down at John Moses, asleep with a cherubic smile on his face.
He shivered. The night was getting cold. The boy was wrapped in a pea coat and a blanket, but he still might feel the chill. Plus, when he woke up alone, he might be afraid. And if the Indians found him, who knew what they’d do?
Jed shook himself.
“What the hell are you thinking, Coltrane?” he demanded out loud. The boy was warm and sleeping like a log, and if he woke up, there were cookies and milk to finish. Sooner or later, someone would find him, and he’d be taken care of. If he got too nervous he could always let himself down.
He scooted to the lip of the rooftop, then paused. Aw, hell, he thought. The boy might talk. He might talk to the Shoshone, tell them he’d been up here, and they might figure out Jed killed their braves. They might even figure out he�
�d stowed away on the Jim Smiley and come after him. Worse, they could figure it out while the Jim Smiley was still sitting in the compound, and then it would be all over, Jed Coltrane, you miserable little dwarf.
He’d have to kill the boy.
No time to have qualms about it; Jed forced himself to grab the Pinkerton’s gun and jerk it from its holster. He pointed it at John Moses’s head. He felt freezing cold sweat running down his own face and he blinked stinging salt out of his eyes.
John Moses snored, softly.
What if he needed someone to show him the way to the Great Salt Lake City?
What if things went wrong on the Jim Smiley and he had to kill the two Federals early? He’d need someone like the little midshipman to show him which turns to take.
Damn you, Coltrane, you’re fooling yourself.
But in his heart he knew he wanted to be fooled.
Jed re-holstered the gun and shook John Moses gently. “Come on, you little shit, nap’s over. We got to get moving before the sun comes up.”
The antiquities exhibitor began to cough. Hard, loud, wet coughs racked his chest and his entire body jerked in obvious spastic pain. He doubled over, elbows digging into his knees, hacking and coughing and making retching sounds as he spat into the dirt.
“Damn, old man,” Hickman drawled through his nose, “you don’t sound good.” He turned his head to look at the showman, whose false beard he’d shaved off.
A Shoshone warrior shouted an objection, jumping forward—
—but there was Absalom’s Angel, spinning improbably in the air like a beskirted top, the heel of her boot slamming into the brave’s breastbone, impelling him backwards and to the earth—
—and Burton was standing at Absalom’s side, revolver cocked and pointed at Hickman’s jaw. Lee and Hickman both started, taken by surprise, and then froze.
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence during which Absalom focused on willing his bladder not to betray him.
“He stole my gun,” one of the Shoshone grumbled sullenly.