Dreadnought

by Cherie Priest

Page 34

 

  Then he tipped his hat to the passengers and moved on to the next car.

  Mrs. Butterfield was delighted, and even Theodora Clay seemed pleased. “I’m forced to admit, I like the sound of a proper bed. These folding jobbies are hard on the neck, don’t you think?” she asked no one in particular.

  Her aunt made murmuring noises of assent.

  “Absolutely. And to think, it’s only been a week. Maybe we’ll get lucky and something else will break along the way,” Mercy suggested as she gathered her satchel and slipped her head through the strap, so it would hang across her chest.

  “I don’t know if we should hope for that,” Miss Clay said. “We were fortunate to see the coupler fail so close to town. I don’t know about you, but I’d be immensely nervous if the train were to limp much farther. We were only going a quarter of our usual speed, these last few miles. Unless, of course, you aren’t particularly worried about meeting any southern raiders. ”

  Mercy pretended not to hear the implication and said primly, “I’m certainly not looking forward to any such thing. ” Then, upon seeing Pierce Tankersly helping the widower and his children find their way to the door, she added a bit more loudly, “Though we’ve got plenty of good company on this train, and I’m pretty confident that the boys on board will hold ’em off just fine, if they do come sniffing back around. Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she said to her seatmates. She stepped out into the aisle behind the two little boys, who were thrilled silly at the prospect of getting off the train, even if only for the night.

  She made her way to the exit with baby steps, halting occasionally to allow others to slip in front of her, and finally descended the short iron stairs onto terra firma once more. She bounced on her heels to stretch her legs, and turned her head hard left to right, which resulted in a satisfying crack.

  Upon locating the conductor, she collected an envelope that contained an address and some Union bills to cover the afternoon and evening. A porter from the West Bottoms Station pointed her and a few of the other passengers to a nearby street, and they found their way to an unornamented brick establishment in the city’s heart as a small herd. The smell of stockyards wafted on every breeze, accompanied by the scent of oil, burning coal, and the hot stink of steel being soldered and pounded.

  Mercy looked around and did not see Mrs. Butterfield or Miss Clay, but she smirked to imagine their reaction to the lowbrow quarters they’d be directed to. While she was taking visual stock of her fellow travelers, she spied the back end of Horatio Korman slinking away from the crowd and into a side street. Her eyes followed him around a corner until they could track him no farther.

  Wondering what he was up to, she decided to follow him.

  The neighborhood smelled no worse than the hospital, and this was only the stench of animals, after all: sheep, cattle, and hogs being shuffled about between markets before they headed for plates. Mercy had grown up around these smells, and could effortlessly ignore them. She walked past the Kansas City Live Stock Exchange with its immense gates and ranch-?style signs, back around the station, and then past another stockyard she’d somehow missed on the first pass. Much like Fort Chattanooga, most of the people she saw on the street were men, but here and there she saw station passengers or debarkers like herself—mostly in working-?class clothing, and mostly white. In fact, that was one of the first things she noticed about the passersby: She didn’t see half so many colored people as she did back East.

  She spotted one or two, dressed in standard cowboy style with canvas pants, linen shirts, and boots; and she saw one porter on some sort of break from the train station; but that amounted to the whole of the population within her range of vision.

  And where had the ranger gone, anyway? Suddenly, she didn’t see him.

  A hand settled on the small of her back and pushed her forward firmly, but without any violence. “A word with you, ma’am. ”

  “Oh. Mr. Korman, there you are. This is getting downright unseemly,” she complained as he led her off the main walkway, away from the road, and toward a small sign advertising barbecue that was supplemented by the aroma halo of roast pork and beef.

  “It’s nothing of the kind. This is just two passengers getting acquainted over supper,” he said as he urged her up the step and inside the clapboard structure called the Bar None Saloon and Grill. Just then his hand brushed her waist and found something hard. He paused and looked her in the eye, and for a moment Mercy could’ve sworn that he almost smiled. “Nice guns,” he said, even though he couldn’t see them.

  She allowed herself to be ushered inside the grill, which was dark and smoky, but so thickly packed with the sweet and sharp aura of simmering food that the stockyards might have been a hundred miles away. They took a seat toward the rear, and Korman positioned himself so his back was to the kitchen wall and he faced the front door. Mercy sat in front of him, and as she adjusted herself on the bench, she realized how cold she’d become as she’d walked the West Bottoms. She peeled off her gloves and felt for her nearly numb ears, then blew into her hands.

  “Cold out there,” she said, more for the act of saying something than to tell him what he already knew.

  “Yup,” he agreed, and extracted himself from his overcoat, which he slapped over the back of an unoccupied chair. “You’re not lost, are you? You got yourself checked into the Prairie Dog?”

  “Not yet. I wanted to stretch my legs. ”

  “You could pick a nicer part of town to do it in. ”

  “This is the only part of town with which I’m acquainted, and nobody’s bothered me yet except for you. ”

  “Yeah, and I’m about to bother you some more. ”

  “How’s that?”

  He might’ve answered, but someone came over and took their order for a pair of sandwiches and home fries, so the conversation stalled briefly, then came back to life. He continued, “A few days ago—that incident with the Rebs. ”

  “The raiders?”

  “Raiders,” he snorted. “They weren’t raiding shit. ” He drawled out the word until it sounded like sheet.

  She said, “That one man—on the horse, right before they left. I thought he was looking at me, through the window. But he wasn’t, was he? He was looking at you, behind me. Do you know him? Did you know about the raid?”

  The ranger sniffed, a gesture that lifted and tilted one wing of his mustache. “I was pretty sure from the start that they must be some of Bloody Bill’s old boys; and when I set eyes on Jesse, that just about cinched it. ”

  “But he was wearing a bandanna over his face. ”

  “Aw, I’d know him anyplace. ”

  Mercy wasn’t sure what to make of this information, so she said, “But Bill’s dead, ain’t he? He’s been dead for years. ”

  “And it’s never stopped his bushwhackers from chasing blue all over Missouri, has it? That was his old band. And though I called ’em boys, Jesse’s a little older than me. The rest of them, though. They’re probably just backwoods kids with nothing better to do, and no intention of wearing a uniform or following orders. ”

  “Sounds like you think real highly of them. ”

  “The James brothers aren’t too bad, if you get to know them. But that’s beside the point. It wasn’t a raid, because Jesse and Frank are too damn smart to run up against something like the Dreadnought with a handful of horses, a hoot, and a holler. They’re looking for something. ”

  Mercy shook her head. “Lord knows what. Ain’t it enough that the thing’s a big ol’ Union machine? Can’t blame them if they want to take it down. ”

  “They can’t take it down,” he insisted. “They aren’t dogs chasing a wagon, though they wouldn’t know what to do if they caught it. ”

  “But if you know some of them raiders, can’t you ask them?”

  He let go of the tiny waxed point of his mustache and asked, “How exactly would you recommend I go about d
oing that? I can’t just hold up the train for a few days and wait on ’em to catch up, now, can I?”

  “I don’t know. If you were determined enough . . . ”

  “Oh, don’t go on like that. I need to get west of here, still—it’s my duty and my job to find out what’s going on for my own country. That doesn’t leave me a fat lot of time to be dickering around in Kansas, just to see what your grays think they require of a Union engine. All I can figure,” he continued, “is that there must be something on board that’s sparked their interest. ”

  “Like what?”

  He shrugged and leaned back against the wall. “I was hoping maybe you had some idea. What do you know about what they’re carrying in those extra cars?”

  “The one behind the caboose, you mean?”

  “That one, sure. And the two behind the engine. Can’t be plain old fuel in those two; even a juggernaut like that damn engine don’t need half so much to propel it. No, I’m thinking they’re bringing something else along. ”

  A pair of sandwiches on hammered metal plates were slapped down in front of them, delaying Mercy’s response a few moments more. But when she spoke, after swallowing a mouthful of a very fine barbecue sandwich that was almost too spicy for her taste, she said, “Bodies. ”

  “What?”

  “They’re carrying bodies—in that back car, anyhow. ”

  Horatio Korman licked his upper lip, which did not remove the full spectrum of sauce that was accumulating on the underside of his facial hair. “Well, sure,” he told her. “That’s the official story. ”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “No, I don’t believe it. And I don’t think your Rebs believe it, either—and I wonder what they know that makes them think chasing the Dreadnought’s worth their time and trouble. ”

  “Can’t help you there,” she told him, and took another bite.