by D. J. Butler
The sour-faced, hunch-shouldered Danite drew a long-barreled pistol and clapped it to the temple of one of his prisoners. “Stop right there, helldammit!” he squealed as he yanked the sack away to reveal the threatened person.
His hostage was President Young. The man was bleeding and he looked as if he had been shot but he was alive.
Poe hacked up blood and phlegm onto the grass.
“Stop right there!” Bill Hickman yelled again. “Stop or I’ll blow out his prophetic brains!”
***
Chapter Twelve
Sam smelled apples and heard a ruckus and he wondered how he would know when to make his move. Probably, he thought, the first thing he’d hear clearly would be the Danites shooting Orrin Porter Rockwell full of holes, and then it would be too late. It was enough to make even a cheerful man despondent and Sam knew himself well enough to know that he was not a naturally cheerful man.
He was a joking man precisely because he wasn’t cheerful. All humor, Sam thought, was gallows humor, because every man spent his whole life waiting for the drop. At that moment, the drop seemed imminent to Sam.
And then what?
“I’ll kill your precious Ambassador, too!” Hickman shouted and Sam heard the click of a gun’s hammer. The man’s porker-squeal of a voice was, if it were possible, even more unpleasant when strained through burlap. “Now drop your guns, helldammit!”
Focus, Clemens, he told himself.
Sam heard the thud of weapons being thrown to the ground. Had he already waited too long?
“We’ve disarmed ourselves,” Sam heard a man say, and the voice sounded familiar. The words ended in a lengthy fit of coughing. Sam racked his brains for a moment until he realized that it sounded like the gypsy at Bridger’s Saloon, who had tried to warn him off his mission. He vaguely thought he’d seen the man again, at the Shoshone stockade.
Hadn’t he been part of that face-off against Hickman?
Sam managed not to chuckle out loud. He should have known. And the swindler had had the impertinence to ask if Sam took him for a huckster!
“Let them go, Hick.” This was a woman’s voice, unfamiliar to Sam. He considered making his move right then—Hickman might be distracted by a pretty face. He held back, telling himself that it was because he didn’t know the woman and he couldn’t be sure she had a pretty face.
She might be homely and then her presence wouldn’t be all that helpful to Sam.
She wasn’t done talking, though. “You can tell Lee you were overpowered by the Mexicans,” she suggested, “or you can just light out right now for California. Lee will never know.”
Sam wondered if O’Shaughnessy was in California by now. He’d heard yelling outside the springhouse door that had sounded something like O’Shaughnessy’s voice but the words were indistinct through the chinked logs and all the gunfire and Sam had convinced himself that the voice belonged to some Irish Danite. At least, surely, O’Shaughnessy would be on the road westbound, heading for the Pacific. Sam couldn’t imagine the Irishman sticking around to complete their mission with Sam out of the picture. The man was hired muscle and a brute, a bruiser Sam had picked up in Chicago because he needed help and his bosses in Army Intelligence couldn’t be sure that their own men were loyal.
Unless, of course, O’Shaughnessy had no idea that Sam had been kidnapped. The man could very well be lying dead drunk on the carpeted floor of the Hotel Deseret bar. Or just lying dead. Maybe he and Henry were having a drink on some heaven-sailing riverboat at that very moment.
Or maybe O’Shaughnessy was lying in the back of an eastbound steam-truck, wearing Pinkerton shackles on his wrists and ankles.
“I ain’t letting nobody go,” Hickman snarled, “and I ain’t getting overpowered by no corn-eating Mexicans. Not so long as I’ve got a gun to the head of my portly gentleman friend here.”
“Watch it!” yelled a voice Sam didn’t know.
“England!” The voice was a man’s, fierce and bellowing, and more familiar. It was hard to tell in two syllables, but it sounded English. It almost sounded like it might belong to Richard Burton.
Pow! Sam heard a sound like a heavy object falling, with a metal crack in the center of it.
“Where the hell’d he come from?!”
Bang! Bang!
“Rockwell’s loose!”
Time to act.
Sam whipped the sack off his own head. Rockwell had cut the ropes on his wrists inside the springhouse, after digging through three barrels of dried beans and finally finding his Bowie knife by touch alone. Now armed with that same knife, the man charged splashing through the stream, racing straight at six Danites dripping with pistols. His opponents, in the middle of jumping off the back of a parked steam-truck, looked completely surprised by the attack. With his buckskin fringes and long beard snapping in the air, Rockwell seemed half-wild animal, half Old Testament prophet and one hundred percent American.
Sam was surprised at how cheered up he felt by the other man he saw in action. Richard Burton, the Queen’s agent and sometime saboteur, knelt on Bill Hickman’s chest on the creek bank and pounded him in the face repeatedly with the basket hilt of a cavalry sword. Burton’s facial expression looked like that of a hungry cannibal in the early stages of preparing dinner, though he had a knife in his upper left arm and his punches were slow. Hickman must have been taken by surprise but he was groping for a pistol he’d dropped in the dirt and he looked like he was close to reaching it.
Sam wondered where Burton had come from but he had no time to dwell on the question.
Two men and a woman charged down the hill. They all held pistols. Sam recognized one of them as the gypsy, though his face looked a little different than Sam remembered. The others he was less sure about, though he thought he might have seen them in Chief Pocatello’s stockade, too.
The President and the Ambassador knelt together in the middle of it all. Rockwell had correctly guessed they’d get the most attention from the Danites and had left their hands tied so as not to give the game away. Orrin Porter Rockwell was something of a savage but Sam found he was coming to respect the man.
Young and Armstrong might have been praying, for the serenity with which they sat still in the middle of the fracas, heads bowed and hands behind their backs. Young bled from his ribs where he’d been shot, though—they hadn’t bound the injury inside the springhouse because it would have given away the fact that their hands were free—and he didn’t look good.
Maybe they were praying, Sam thought. In their place, he might be.
Sam drew Rockwell’s pistol, wondering where to shoot first.
The choice was made for him. Two Danites rushed around the front of the steam-truck, drawing long, straight knives from sheaths at their belts. They looked like they were rushing to join the dog pile on top of Orrin Porter Rockwell. Sam calmly pointed Rockwell’s pistol at the man in front and squeezed the trigger.
Bang!
He missed. The two Danites cringed and faltered, then saw him.
Rockwell slashed like a dervish at the men surrounding him. He was too close for them to shoot back effectively but Sam saw that they had realized that too, and some of them were stabbing and cutting at the mountain man with knives instead.
Sam tried again.
Bang! Bang!
His shots missed and the bullets whizzanged! away into space off the side of the steam-truck.
The two men charged at him now.
It wasn’t obvious to Sam that the change was an improvement. Confound it, he needed to start hitting what he aimed at.
Rockwell took a hit, a deep scratch on his hip. The bull-shouldered man staggered and kept fighting, stomping one Danite under the truck and kicking another in the belly, but Sam could see that he was bleeding and starting to slow down.
Burton had lost his grip on his sword and was punching Hickman in the face now with bare and bloody knuckles.
The gypsy and his companions were still running.
&n
bsp; Sam raised the pistol again. Point blank now, he thought, even a child couldn’t fail of this mark.
Bang!
He missed.
I’ll be the shame of the entire town of Hannibal, Missouri, he thought, raising the pistol again and hoping he could get off at least one more shot as he was being knifed to death. I’ll be the laughingstock of the American West.
Rockwell should have given the gun to someone else.
Rat-rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
The two men charging him vanished, whipped off their feet, thrown to the ground, and stilled in a fraction of a second. Sam stood with his gun still raised for an uncomprehending moment, try to absorb the sudden evaporation of his attackers. It was as if Zeus himself had looked down from Olympus, decided that the Kingdom of Deseret had two men too many, and simply erased them. They were rag dolls before a scythe.
Rat-rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-BANG!
Sparks and ricocheting bullets flew off the top of the steam-truck like a lightning storm in a bottle, and the men clawing and biting and stabbing at Rockwell faltered.
The gypsy and his companions clapped guns to the heads of Danites. The men stopped fighting and threw their weapons to the ground.
Burton smashed Hickman one more time in the face with his fist. Hickman’s hand, finally wrapped around the grip of his pistol, squeezed once.
Bang!
As a last shot, it was anticlimactic. The bullet disappeared into the deepening blue sky of the late afternoon.
Hickman collapsed and lay still.
Burton swayed, pale and drawn, and he glared at Sam with a reproachful eye. “You’re the worst shot I’ve ever seen,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’ve seen a ninety-year-old Armenian crone who shot straighter than you do.”
“Sorry,” Sam said, chastened. He had the presence of mind not to drop his gun, though only barely.
“She was missing half her fingers,” the explorer added. “And she was blind in both eyes.”
“Next you’ll tell me she had a better mustache than I do, too,” Sam guessed wearily.
“Agni’s second head,” Burton grunted. He swayed on his knees like a drunk man. “This country and its people are not what I was led to believe.”
Then he collapsed on top of Hickman.
“You all right, Rockwell?” Sam called. His own voice sounded far away and muffled to him. “It looked like you took a few body blows.”
“No bullet or blade!” Rockwell cackled, and kicked one of the downed Danites in the face.
Sam noticed that away, up the long hillside, two Mexican Striders were clanking in his direction. No one else seemed excited about their arrival, so he ignored them and turned to look for the source of the bullet-storm that had saved his life.
It was a midget. He was rumpled and dirty and unshaved, and Sam thought he kind of looked familiar, too, though he didn’t remember where he’d seen the man. He stood holding a stubby-looking little rifle, the likes of which Sam had definitely never seen before, that had a bulky drum attached to its stock. Presumably to hold the cascade of bullets the gun was obviously capable of shooting. Sam was not a gun man but this little storm maker intrigued him.
The dwarf’s face looked chagrined. He was examining the gun, and Sam now saw that its barrel was shredded and splayed open on one side, like a steel flower was sprouting from the weapon. “Jebus,” the little man said.
A step behind and to the side of the dwarf stood Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy. The Irishman looked embarrassed too.
“It’s a nice day.” O’Shaughnessy shot Sam a rueful half-grin.
Sam nodded. He felt numb, and a little bit humiliated, himself. So it had been O’Shaughnessy outside the springhouse.
Behind the Irishman and the midget stood a little boy. He held a pistol—the same unknown gun Sam had first seen on the Pinkerton’s hip and then in O’Shaughnessy’s hands—pointed at the backs of the two men. It was a day for strange guns. No wonder the two men looked so shy, Sam thought. What kind of self-respecting thug lets a little kid throw down on him?
The child looked shocked. “I had to,” he said. “I didn’t want anybody to get shot. I only did it because I had to.”
“You’ve been captured by a little boy, Coltrane,” the gypsy said, apparently to the dwarf. “I hope he will condescend to parole you.” Then he spoke to his unknown male comrade. “Isn’t that your errant midshipman, Captain Jones?”
“Don’t think I ain’t embarrassed about it, boss,” the midget grumbled. “He got the drop on me.”
“Put the machine-gun down,” the little boy said. He prodded the air with his pistol for emphasis. The dwarf did as he was told. O’Shaughnessy stared at the strange weapon like a starving man looks at cake but did nothing.
“I think it’s busted, anyway,” the dwarf said.
Captain Jones stomped through the creek, righteous rage playing across his square face. “It was you, wasn’t it, boyo?” he demanded, staring hard at O’Shaughnessy. “It was you who kidnapped little John Moses there!”
The Irishman pulled out of his gun-lustful brooding and sneered. “Taffy was a Welshman,” he chanted, “Taffy was a thief—”
Crunch!
Jones pistol-whipped O’Shaughnessy across the jaw with the gun in his hand, sending him sprawling into the tall, dry desert grass.
“Taffy came to my house,” Jones finished the rhyme, “and he kicked out all my teeth.”
“Muurrrmph,” the Irishman groaned vaguely from the ground.
“I am reluctant to criticize another man’s work,” the gypsy called out, with a mischievous twinkle in his fatigued eye, “but you’ve spoiled the rhyme.”
The quip snapped Sam out of his stunned reverie. He grinned. “True,” he agreed. “Though I must say I find the meaning of the revised couplet reasonably congenial.”
Burton awoke to find the knives removed and his arm and leg bandaged. He lay on a crackling bed of yellow grass beside his own coat and Roxie fussed over him.
Burton’s mouth was dry and he felt weak as a newborn babe. He gazed coolly for several moments at the woman who had so stirred his passion in the Wyoming Territory and let strength and vitality ooze back into his limbs. When she noticed him looking, she met his gaze with something that was almost a smile.
“What’s your full name?” he asked. “Your real name.”
“Eliza Roxcy Snow,” she said immediately. “Roxie isn’t a pseudonym; it’s just a nickname.”
Burton gestured at his coat with his good hand. “My papers are in there,” he told her.
She looked away. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “I’ve read them.”
“And wrote,” he suggested.
“Wrote a little,” she admitted. “Just a post-script.”
“Why?”
Roxie couldn’t meet his eyes. “We … Rockwell and I, and Annie … knew Lee and Hickman were going to move against Brigham, but Brigham didn’t believe it. He wouldn’t believe our evidence, and he wouldn’t take action, so we … well, we went against his orders. Rockwell tried to take out John Lee. And we tried to scare you foreigners away so the Danites wouldn’t have the cover they wanted to move against Brigham. When you wouldn’t leave I decided to try to recruit you instead. I knew Brigham would need friends who were … men of action.”
Burton chuckled. “I was hoist with the petard of my own vanity,” he said ruefully. “You’re very good. Scheherezade told me stories and I wanted to believe.”
“No, Dick,” she said, “yours isn’t vanity. You really are a man of action.”
“Ruffian Dick,” he reminded her. “And you are more than just Brigham’s agent, aren’t you?”
She hesitated. Her dress was dirtied and disheveled and she smelled of gun smoke, but he thought her beautiful then, with the fine bones of her face framed against the blue sky above him. “I’m his wife,” she admitted.
“Eliza Roxcy Snow Young,” he chewed on the name. “One of … fifty
?” he hazarded a guess.
“It isn’t a perfect arrangement,” she admitted.
“No arrangement is.”
“You’re hard to shock.”
“There are stranger things in life than sharing a man,” Burton said. He prided himself on being hard to shock. “You forget that I’ve spent time in the Horn. In much of Africa polygamy is the norm. In places like Somaliland, where children are essential to a family’s wealth, it’s positively essential. Marriage customs are as often a function of economics as—”
“He doesn’t know,” she cut him off. “Brigham, I mean. He doesn’t know I … seduced you. He certainly didn’t ask me to do it.”
“Hmmn.” Burton kept his reaction muted, but he was vaguely relieved to hear that their liaison had been Roxie’s own idea.
“When did you puzzle it out?”
Burton sighed. “At the Tabernacle,” he said. “You showed far too much emotion for a mere paid agent, especially a jaded and worldly spy. I thought you must either be Brigham’s wife …” he watched her closely, while trying not to look at her directly, “or else perhaps Poe’s lover.”
Roxie covered her reaction well, but lines appeared around her mouth as she tightened her lips.
Of course. He should have seen it before. Burton threw his head back and laughed, loud and long.
“I don’t consider myself a comic figure,” Roxie sniffed.
“You’re not, Roxie,” he agreed. “You’re an adventure. You’re epic. You’re the Chanson de Roland, the Odyssey, and the Mahabharata all rolled into one razor-sharp poem and bound in crinoline.”
“You of all men, Richard Burton,” she said to him, “must find that adventure stories become tedious.”
He laughed again. “Yes, I do, Eliza Snow,” he agreed. “As a matter of fact, I believe I do.”
Poe carefully dug out one scarab beetle and dropped it into a glass fruit jar, the only jar in the Liahona’s galley that had survived its wreck.
“Observe carefully,” he said to Bill Hickman. He suppressed a powerful urge to cough. “The details are of utmost importance.”
Hickman had no choice but to observe. He was tied to a hotel timber, arms apart and legs staked wide open into the dirt. Orrin Porter Rockwell held his bruised and puffy eyelids peeled back and his head fixed in place with one arm. In the other hand he held his Bowie knife, the blade of which he occasionally tapped against Hickman’s cheek as a reminder of its existence and sharpness.