by D. J. Butler
“Shh!” the old man chastised him. “I am the Seer, keeper of the knowledge of the air. By what token shall I know thee, Boatman?”
Sam felt like a fool. “I have the rubies, dammit!” he snapped. “Do you want them or not?” He pulled the bag from inside his jacket and held it up in the blue light. It was a fortune, he knew. More than once, he told himself that a smarter man than he was would have simply taken the rubies and fled the country. For that matter, it wasn’t too late for him.
He was out of the country already.
“Yes!” the old man yelled, his voice echoing over the rumble of the waters below. “And yes, I’m Pratt!” The blue light winked out and Pratt snatched the bag out of Sam’s hands in the darkness. So he really could see; Sam assumed it had something to do with the goggles the old man was wearing and was duly impressed. “Have you no respect for my need for secrecy? How was I to know I was dealing with the right man? Don’t you understand how dangerous this is? Do you think we’re playing a game, you and I? Do you want the whole thing to collapse around our ears and all of them to come down on us?”
The old man’s voice dropped in volume at the end of his speech and Sam heard his feet shuffling away in the darkness.
“Wait!” he called. “Wait a minute! Don’t you owe me something, Mr. Pratt?”
The shuffling stopped and Orson Pratt laughed, a high cackle in the gloom. “Yes I do, Mr. United States, yes I do. Meet me tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock at … at the north doors of the Tabernacle. I’ll bring all the plans.”
Creak.
The square of light appeared again, searing Sam’s eyes. He held his hands up to shield them and Pratt slammed the door shut.
Boom!
The echo of the door banged back and forth for a long time in the darkness and Sam felt vaguely defeated. Pratt had sounded like he was making up the rendezvous time and place on the spot and Sam wondered if the inventor had any intention at all of holding up his end of the bargain.
Well, if Orson Pratt wouldn’t sell the plans for his flying ships to the United States, Sam would just have to succeed in his primary objective. He would persuade Brigham Young to join with the United States government in preventing war.
And if that failed too, well, Sam had come prepared do bad things.
Ogden was a railroad station in the center of a tiny town surrounded by farms—Jed saw it all from the window as they rolled in, less than an hour after leaving the Great Salt Lake City. The station here was smaller, just two platforms for two lines. He and the boy spilled out in a wave of hayseed farmers and small-town businessmen and a couple of ladies with shopping bags and were swept along almost instantly in the street. It felt like a thousand small towns Jed had ridden into as a carny in his youth and his eyes instinctively raced up and down the street in search of policemen.
“Where’s the loc?” he muttered. “I mean, where do you live, kid?”
“Come on,” John Moses said, pointing up a broad hillside. “My house is just up there.”
Jed shot a suspicious eye over his shoulder several times before they lost sight of the station, but never saw a porkpie hat.
Trudging up a graded gravel road in the warm shadows of black walnuts and elm trees, Jed Coltrane suddenly became conscious of the fact that he smelled bad. He probably smelled bad most of the time, he thought, only most of the time he just didn’t give a rat’s ass. Now, for some reason, it bothered him. He was rumpled, too, disheveled and beat up and chafed, and generally unfit for human company.
He laughed out loud. Coltrane, you idiot, he thought, you’re acting like you’re about to meet the parents of your sweetheart. Cut it out.
“This is it,” John Moses said.
The dwarf looked up and down the street. The buildings were red brick bungalows, each on a small farm or orchard lot, and half of them looked like they belonged to some kind of tradesman. Jed saw a smithy, a dry goods store, and a tailor. And John Moses’s parents’ house had a wooden signboard out front like an old tavern, with a pair of crossed six-shooters painted on it.
Out behind the bungalow were rows of cherry trees, and a big brass pump station, quietly emitting a faint coal-smoke tail as it humped up and down and up and down, trickling water out of a cone-shaped spout into a maze of irrigation ditches swirling out in a circle from the center where it stood. Off to the side was a brick outbuilding with doors and window trim painted a bright fresh white, to match the bungalow.
No porkpie hats in sight.
“Let’s go in, then, kid.”
There was a knocker on the front of the bungalow’s door, but no amount of hammering brought any result. “My mammas might be running errands.” John Moses adjusted his slouch hat, a little nervous. “I guess we should go talk to my poppa.”
Mammas?
Jed’s scarred knuckles rapped on the door of the outbuilding and produced an immediate result. “Coming!” called a man’s voice, and then the top half of the door swung open and inward, leaving the bottom half shut with a sort of built in shelf at its top like a little business counter.
The man who answered the door had no hair right up to the very top of his head, nor on his face, but thick brown sprouts of the stuff all around his ears, behind his skull, and under his jaw. Someone who liked the man might have suggested he looked like a lion. An observer in a less flattering frame of mind could have commented that he looked like a color-inverted black-eyed Susan, with a white bud of a face poking out in front of a dark curly bed of petals. Jed Coltrane didn’t care either way—he’d seen uglier.
Time was, he saw uglier all day, every day.
The thing that struck him was the apparatus on the man’s face. It looked like a shiny brass lobster, wrapped halfway around his head, front and back. One thin claw curled up along his bony cheek, forming a loop over his right eye, inside of which was wedged a convex lens of shiny glass.
The man looked over both their heads for a moment, and Jed cleared his throat.
“Hello,” the man said. He looked down at them and blinked. His right eye was gigantic, seen through the lens. “John Moses. And a short person.” He squinted through the monocle. “An adult.”
“Midget,” Jed said gruffly. “Dwarf. Pygmy. Runt. Tom Thumb. Did I miss any, professor?”
“Homunculus?” The man suggested. “Lilliputian? Bantam?”
“I guess that about covers it,” Jed growled. His ears felt hot and his hands twitched involuntarily at spots about his body where, by rights, knives should have been hanging.
“Poppa,” John Moses interrupted in a pleading tone, “this is my friend.”
“Ah.” The boy’s father swung the bottom half of the door open. “In that case, I am Jonathan Browning, and it is a pleasure to meet you. Will you be one of the crewmen of the Liahona, then? Brother Dan usually brings John Moses home himself.”
He invited Jed into the outbuilding and onto one of the three plush chairs, slightly frayed but comfortable, that crouched around a low circular table in the nearest corner of the room. Jed sat, but his eyes roamed the walls. “Jed Coltrane,” he murmured distractedly. They were covered with some kind of thin white board, pegged full of holes in a close grid. Into the holes were poked steel hooks, and on the steel hooks hung guns.
All kinds of guns.
Over all four walls of the building. More guns were stacked, more or less neatly, on the three large tables in the center of the room. Still more lay disassembled, or pinned in vises, or had important pieces that had been removed and inserted into obscure tooling machines. Jed didn’t consider himself a lover of guns—knives were more his thing—but the sheer overwhelming number of weapons on the wall made him whistle. He’d come to the right place. In his mind’s eye, he saw the underhanded Irishman shot to pieces in a thousand different ways, Jed at the trigger every time.
The two Brownings sat in the other two chairs.
“No, I ain’t one of the crew,” Jed said distractedly. He wondered for a mome
nt how he could steal a few of these weapons, then felt guilty for having the thought, then felt ashamed of himself for the guilt.
Coltrane, you damn crybaby, he told himself. You need a gun. You came here for a gun.
Of course, you could buy one. But with the cash you’ve got left, it’d be one cheap piece of shit.
Maybe you could borrow one. Of course, that would mean returning it, which would imply coming back to a place Coltrane had been before, which wasn’t something Coltrane had done very often in his life.
“Poppa, Injuns took the Liahona!” John Moses peeped.
Jonathan Browning’s magnified eye popped open even wider and Jed Coltrane flinched. “Was it the Shoshone? Has anyone been told? Does Brother Brigham know?”
Aw, hell. “Look, I jest … yeah, I reckon it was the Shoshone. But look, the boy and I escaped, he ain’t hurt, and he wanted to come home, that’s all.”
“Yes, well,” Browning huffed. “Yes, thank you very much. Has Brother Brigham been told? If not, I should get down to the train station or the sheriff’s office and get a message sent immediately. Tell me how I can repay you.”
Uh oh. Can’t have that much attention, Jed thought. Besides, the Liahona wasn’t his problem. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Yeah, now that I think of it, of course he knows. Look, it’s all under control, I jest wanted to bring the boy back.”
“Yes.” Blink. “Thank you.” Blink, blink. Jed really wished Jonathan Browning would take off his eyepiece. The dwarf found it unnerving. It made the man look like a machine. “Tell me how I can thank you. Please.”
Jed chased a fist into his pocket after his precious few remaining coins. Poe had always had all the real money, and after buying the train ticket, Jed found himself running lower than he’d like, even aside from his need to get armed. Precious few coins and all of them Mexican. He sighed. “Well, Mr. Browning, as it happens, in our escape we had to leave my guns behind. I’m used to being around rough customers, as they say, so I’ve always gone armed, and I’d hate to change that habit now that I’m on the frontier. I see you’re a gunsmith. Maybe you could sell me something. Something on the inexpensive side.” He cleared his throat. “And I mean really inexpensive.”
Browning’s face broke into an indulgent smile. “This isn’t the frontier, Mr. Coltrane. This is the Kingdom.” He turned and gestured at the entire shop. “Please, I beg you. Take any one of them, as a gift from me.”
“Any one?” Jed wondered, stunned at the man’s generosity. There were guns as small as wrist-concealed derringers on the walls, but there were cannons too, big guns that would require horses to drag them around.
“Good heavens, you’re right, I’m ashamed of myself. You’ve restored my son to me. Take any two. Take what you need. I’ll fill a pack with ammunition too, and I’ll see what one of my two Elizabeths might have in the way of a loaf of bread or a pie.” Jonathan Browning stripped the eyepiece away from his face as he launched himself to his feet and strode purposefully from the shop.
“One’ll do very nicely, thanks,” Jed found himself mumbling in something that resembled polite manners. He saw himself holding a pistol to the Irishman’s temple and pulling the trigger. “One is all I’ll need.”
John Moses was grinning.
“What does he mean, one of his two Elizabeths?” Jed asked the boy as he started to browse through the weapons on the walls. He found a nice long-barreled pistol he liked, spun the cylinder, sighted along it experimentally, and set it on the table.
“There’s Elizabeth my mamma,” John Moses explained, like it was the most natural thing in all the world, “and Elizabeth his first wife, my other mamma.”
That accounted for his mammas. Jed grunted. He’d seen weirder, among the Chickasaw and the Creek and in the Ozarks. “You got two mammas,” was all he said, not a question and not a judgment.
“Yeah,” the little boy agreed. “And twenty-one brothers and sisters.”
“Holy shit!” Jed spat out, then checked himself. “Sorry, boy, I don’t mean nothing by it. I jest ain’t ever seen such a big family.”
“I know,” John Moses said. “Sometimes holy shit is what I think, too.”
Jed Coltrane laughed. “You’re alright, kid,” he said, and his eye fell on another gun he liked. It was bigger than a pistol but shorter than a shotgun or a rifle. It looked like a rifle, but built really short in the barrel and with a boxy round metal drum hanging underneath it.
John Moses looked. “That’s a sort of rifle,” he said. “Poppa calls it a ‘gas-powered, drum-fed, rapid-fire repeater’ to customers.”
Jed pulled the gun off the wall and hefted it. The stock felt good tucked under his arm. The gun was heavy, but then Jed Coltrane had strong carny arms. “It feels good,” he said. “It feels like a killer. Is it accurate?”
John Moses shook his head no. “But it shoots a thousand rounds a minute.”
Jed whistled. “No kidding?”
John Moses nodded. “When he’s talking to me, Poppa likes to call it his machine-gun.”
The dwarf looked at the weapon and its bulky drum. “How does it work?” he asked.
John Moses showed him. “It takes paper cartridges. You have to load up a whole drum ahead of time and that takes a good long while. When you shoot, though, it all comes out fast. You can really chew through targets.”
Targets. “You ever shot at anybody, kid?” Jed asked. “I mean, at a real live person?”
“Not yet.” The little boy chewed his lip and looked down at the machine-gun. “But I guess I could do it if I had to. I could be brave. But I think it’d have to be for a real good reason.”
“Like family, kid,” Jed suggested.
“Yeah, like family,” John Moses agreed.
Jed imagined himself firing a thousand rounds into the Irishman. A thousand rounds a minute was a whole lot of death. “That’ll do,” he said.
Time to get back to the Deseret Hotel. Death and hell to any porkpie hat he spotted on the way.
The message paper curled up at the edges as the bellboy took his tip and retreated. Sam automatically smoothed back the paper with his thumb, and to his surprise he smudged the ink. “That’s fast,” he muttered. The message was hand-printed in a lovely copperplate, all in capital letters like a telegram.
To: Mr. Samuel Clemens
In Care of the Deseret Hotel
Sir:
President Young informs me that he is presently working in the office of the Beehive House and that you may find him there for the next several hours. He welcomes your visit at your earliest convenience.
You will find the Beehive House adjacent to the Lion House, where you and I met. I trust I will not strain your powers of discrimination if I observe that it is the large residence with balconies and a beehive on top and not the adjacent Tabernacle.
Regards,
Geo. Cannon
Sam crumpled the sheet up, lit it with his smoldering Partagás, and tossed it into the grate. Other men’s sarcasm made him feel like his territory had been trespassed upon. Well, his earliest convenience was right now, he calculated, so gripping the cigar in his teeth he pulled his jacket off the back of a chair and shrugged into it, heading for the door.
He’d just been sitting around, anyway, wondering.
He wondered where in tarnation his criminal Irishman had gotten to.
He wondered if his Irishman had made off with the dwarf and the boy, or vice versa. He hoped the boy was unharmed.
But most of all, because the Irishman and his vendetta with the Appalachian midget seemed like a sideshow in more ways than one, he wondered what was going to happen with Orson Pratt.
As Sam pushed his way out of the big front doors of the Deseret Hotel, he thought he saw, just for a moment, a reflection in the glass windows across the street. He would have sworn, in that moment, that he was seeing the midget Coltrane and that the man must be off to Sam’s left, fifty feet or so.
He jerked his head around to see, though
, and the dwarf wasn’t there.
Trick of the mind, he thought. Illusion, self-deception. He was wondering where the dwarf was and his brain produced an image of the man. He spun around to his right and paced in the direction of the Beehive House.
Sam’s mission objectives were clear, though he’d expected from the start that things on the ground would get considerably foggier. His superiors had expected it too, he thought; that’s why they’d sent a man of judgment and perception.
“Ha!” he barked a single peal of laughter at his own vanity and spat the stub of his cigar into the sparkling clean gutter. As the next headgear-doffing couple passed, Sam twinkled empty fingers at them in a way that made him feel like a bawdy house flirt.
First, persuade Brigham Young to visibly ally with the United States in deploring the secession of any individual State or association of States. Get him to put pressure, with the threat of his famous airship fleet, on the so-called Confederate leadership, head off the secession, get them back to the table to keep talking about tariffs and railroads and all the other nonsense that was threatening to split the United States apart. He was on his way to pursue that objective this very instant.
Second, and right under Brigham Young’s nose, secretly deliver rubies (a negotiated quid pro quo) to an agent of the famous Orson “Madman” Pratt (and in the event, it had been Pratt himself, and not an agent, to take delivery), in exchange for comprehensive schematics of Pratt’s, and Deseret’s, airship technology, including designs of its individual airships. Sam had delivered the quid, the rubies. Pratt had given him an appointment to deliver the quo, which would be a pile of papers in some shape, but the spurious, off-hand manner of the appointment’s making led Sam to consider the possibility that Pratt had no intention of following through. Sam would be at the appointed place at the appointed time anyway, of course, but if Pratt didn’t show, Sam would have to think seriously about the remainder of his objectives.