“Atherealgram for you,” he said.
Boots took it. “Thank you,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a coin, he flipped it to the man.
“Oh, thank you, sir,” the clerk said as he caught it, then fumbled it and watched it drop to the counter.
The two, still arm in arm, ascended the stairs to their room. Stepping inside, Persi untied a small dark violet bowler, the brim decorated with even smaller white periwinkles. She tossed it onto the bed and Boots followed by tossing his own bowler, which landed beside it.
“Please help me out of my dress, dear. I would loosen this new corset and breathe deeper for a bit.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, I know dear, but perhaps we can wait until later. I would like to focus on the mission for a tad longer.”
“Elizabeth Persimmon,” Boots said, pulling her lavender dress over her head and draping it atop the dressing screen. “When can we stop pretending to be single? I want to proudly declare I caught and married the amazing Persi Shuttleworth!” He planted a kiss softly on her lips.
She turned her back to him, allowing him access to her corset. He removed his black kid gloves and tossed them on the bed beside the hats. A quiet hiss escaped from the incredible piece of machinery that was his right hand. He made a fist, each metal finger curling. He relaxed it, listening again to the comforting hiss of steam.
Turning to Persi, Boots plucked the corset ties like a harp and several seconds later, she sighed as the pressure against her abdomen eased. “Much better.”
She turned toward him and placed her hands on his chest, “We can announce our marital bliss to the world once we retire from the agency and you know this. Agents are not allowed to marry, and especially not to each other.”
He bent his head down and kissed her lightly again. She began to melt against him then jerked back suddenly. “Oh, no, none of that, we need to focus.”
Boots smiled, “Yes, let’s focus.”
“On the case, Boots, on the case.” She stepped away and sat on the bed. Boots removed his cravat, and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. He slumped in the chair across from her and rubbed his right hand, then twisted an adjustment screw to ease the pressure. “Is your hand bothering you, my love?” Persi asked gently.
Boots looked at the metal fingers, a reminder of the war. “Nothing, my dear. Only the little aches suggesting the weather will be turning bad within the next 24 hours.” Sitting up, he rallied for another attack. “Persi, we’ve only been married a month and ...” He looked at his socked feet.
She smiled sardonically, “Yes, I know, later my heart, focus now. We have a large section of town demolished, many dead and many hundreds of others displaced. All this from multiple lightning strikes ...”
“From a cloudless sky,” Boots cut in, raising his index finger, seemingly now to redirect his energies to their investigation.
She smiled, “Yes, from a cloudless sky.”
They sat looking at each other. “I have nothing, “Persi said finally, shaking her head.
“Neither do I.” He clapped his hands together. “Well, with that cleared up, on to more important things.” He began to rise, a feral smile spreading across his face.
“Easy boy,” Persi said, dropping her finishing school eloquence and opening the aethergram they had received.
Boots smile fell, then he tilted his head as he watched Persi’s face change from joyful to concerned as she read the paper. “What is it?” he asked.
“There’s been another event, like this one, though not quite as wide spread,” she said looking up.
“Where?” Boots asked.
“In central Florida, a small town called, Orlando.”
He shrugged. “I think we can catch the train east at noon. Let’s pack.”
Chapter 2 – Train Robbery Aboard the Journey
Boots stood on the rich red carpet covering the vibrating floor of the Journey. The warm sunlight washed his face as he watched the fertile Midwestern countryside fly by at close to 120 miles per hour. The huge triple boiler locomotive designed by Peter Cooper’s company, now racing down the double set of steel tracks, was a triumph of technology, proving Cooper had come quite a long way from his first small engine, Tom Thumb in 1830.
Where Tom Thumb’s boiler was not as large as the boiler on the kitchen stove of Boots’ ancestral home in Boston, the Journey’s boilers were large enough for a small man to stand up in, and there were three of them. Cooper designed an engine thirty-one feet wide and ninety-seven feet in length to pull a set of freight cars a half-mile long, or half as many multi-tiered passenger cars. The latter configuration was in what Boots and Persi now travelled.
As the premier cross-continent land liner in the US, it had both coach and first class accommodations. Seating and berths on the lower deck were used by those of lesser means, or for short-term travel, since the train made many stops along its route, in both large cities and small towns. The upper deck was set aside for the wealthy traveler, but in truth, both accommodations were maintained to a high standard and the stratification was purely economics and not social. If a Nebraska farmer could finance his stay on the upper levels, the Conductor was more than willing to punch his ticket and help move his bags to his berth.
The three dining cars served foods ranging from bread and cheese, to a four-course dinner cooked by world famous chefs. There was a casino, as well as small personal rooms for private poker games. On transcontinental trips, like from New York to San Francisco, an orchestra was hired and the ballroom put to good use.
Persi sent Boots to dispatch a message to headquarters, which is why he now stood at a door labeled, “Communications Office.” He took a card and pencil from the stationary box at the door. The top third of the card indicated the target station. Boots wrote, “Annapolis, Maryland, Station 1, Substation 3.” The bottom third of the card was used to write the message. He carefully printed, “Received your instructions concerning OFL - In transit south aboard Journey - Contact Grimm for Daedalus - Meet in OFL in 3 days - P&B.”
The aetherealgraph technician, a brown-skinned young man of no more than sixteen, took the note, looked it over, then up at Boots and smiled. “A dollar thirty-four, sir,” he said, with a slight accent.
Mexican, Boots guessed, as he looked at him sideways. “Is this the way you make your saloon money, young man, cheating your customers?” Boots reached in to his wallet and removed a few coins. “As if I didn’t know how to count to one-hundred and ten. One hundred and ten words not one hundred and thirty-four. At a penny a word that’s one dollar and ten cents.”
“Spaces, sir,” the young man said, smirking.
“Spaces?” Boots repeated, one eye opening wide.
“Yes, sir, spaces. We have to add a space character. The machine don’t know there’s a space unless we tell it.”
It was Boots turn to smile as he handed over the $1.34 he already had in his hand. “Good man, just keeping you on your toes. When will the message be transmitted?”
“As soon as I get to the machine and type this in,” he said, holding up the card. “’Course it will sit in the queue until we pass a transmitter, then the message will shoot out of the aethergraph, into the transmitter then up into the aether, or so I’ve been told. It’ll probably take another twenty or thirty minutes for the receiver in Maryland to pick it up, then a couple minutes to get it copied onto paper, then it depends on how fast the messenger can deliver it. So it will be in your party’s hands within the hour I reckon.”
Boots tipped his hat, “Thank you.”
He headed back towards his berth and some long awaited marital activities when train’s emergency brakes locked and Boots flew forward, hitting the deck and sliding several feet down the aisle until he was stopped by a table leg. As he lay there, rubbing his head, a man moving to the rear of the car, tripped over Boots and landed a knee to his crotch.
“Holy hell, man, watch your knee!” Boots yelled.
“What is the problem, sir,” Boots asked, “are we under aboriginal attack?”
“Not hardly Mister, not since Rothschild paid off the Injuns for permission to run tracks across their land. It’s train robbers,” the man grunted and headed further back.
Boots rolled onto his feet and pulled a small caliber pistol from a side holster under his jacket. Looking through the windows to the next car, he saw no bandits and took the opportunity to move forward. As he opened the door, he heard the quiet sobs of children. A woman and three toddlers huddled down in their seat.
“Take heart, ma’am, you will be safe.” Boots said, trying to project confidence.
He straightened and took a single step forward. Suddenly, the door banged open at the other end of the car and a man dressed in rough clothing, the type common to cattle drivers, entered brandishing a six-shooter and yelling through a neckerchief tied across his mouth. “All right, you all, keep it quiet and listen up. Nobody will be hurt if’n you give up your valuables when I asks for’m.”
Boots dropped into an empty seat, keeping his own gun out of sight.
Several women cried, their volume increased when the word, “valuables” was said.
A shot rang out and wood chips flew from a new hole in the side of the car. “Shut that up now! Give me what I want and we’ll be on our way, no one needs to get hurt. Damn rich got all the doors to the upper level blocked so you’ll have to pay for them.”
Boots heard the word, “we” and wondered about the total count of bandits. If this weren’t a bluff and there were others, they were probably several cars back gaining access to the mail car and the strong box, though he wasn’t sure how it was done on the huge landliners.
The man pulled the worn hat from his head and held it out like a beggar, if the beggar also held a .40 caliber pistol in the other hand.
Boots feigned fear and cowered in the back corner of the seat when the bandit approached, giving the impression he was nothing more than a city dandy. In the next instant, Boots launched himself at the man, knocking the robber’s gun away with his free hand and bringing his pistol into contact with the bandit’s head. Boots rode the man down as he fell, following his first hit with a second. He pulled the unconscious robbers belt from his pants, tied his hands behind his back, and stepped through the back door, checking the right side of the train. Up near the engine a rider less horse stood, tied to the train, while behind him, in the distance, another three horses stood, one harnessed to a wagon. In the wagon was a man who stood behind what Boots recognized as large Burlington gas-powered revolving slug thrower. He pointed it into the open doorway of the mail car.
Boots surmised the riders of the other two horses must be engaged in liberating the strong box. He stepped back into the compartment, grabbed the unconscious man and pulled him outside and to the other side of the car. He took a quick look up and down the track and found no bandits, then heaved the man over the rail and watched him land heavily on the ground. He climbed on top of the car, and keeping low, crept back until he was above the open door and the man in the wagon.
“Come on, Mel, it’s taking too long and I’m getting a bad feeling. You know, sometimes these landliners carry their own security people,” the man said in a heavy southern accent.
Perhaps Mississippi? Boots thought.
“Shut the hell up, Sam. Billy’s trying to concentrate on this safe, ‘Besides, they only hire security when they do them long hitches between coasts,” a man said from inside, whose accent placed him in New England.
“Yeah, about that safe.”
“Yeah, what about it?” Mel said.
“There was not supposed to be a safe,” Sam yelled. “You said the package would be separate and we’d just grab’n go!”
“Well, our information was wrong, now shut up, and let the man work or I’ll ...” Mel yelled before something interrupted him.
“What the hell are you doing here? Get back to the ...” Boots heard Mel say but his words were cut off by a gunshot. Boots peeked over the edge, prepared to jump onto Sam and disable the Burlington, when Sam tilted the gun at someone in the car and yelled, “Stop!”
A second shot rang out and Sam stumbled back, but with his finger already on the trigger, the gun hissed and boomed as several rounds blew holes in the walls before he fell from the wagon.
Boots barely had time to flatten himself on the roof of the mail car before the .55 caliber rounds sprayed wooden shrapnel into the air.
Chapter 3 – Persi Saves the Day
Persi stood in the mail car, her pair of smoking six shooters sweeping the room for additional targets. Satisfied, she shoved each pistol into its holster, part of the harness she had pulled on over her dressing gown before leaving her berth. She moved to the mail clerk, sprawled on the floor, and the young aboriginal American boy she suspected was his assistant, curled up in the corner.
She felt the man’s wrist and glanced at the kid. “You okay?”
The young man nodded.
She tipped her head toward the clerk. “He’ll be okay,” she said, feeling a strong pulse.
A scratch on the roof above the door behind Persi triggered her training and she rolled to the side while pulling her guns again, no small feat dressed as she was. She came out of the roll into a crouch, pistols drawn, just as the silhouetted man swung through the open door and landed next to the dead body of the robber named, Mel.
Her finger applied pressure to the trigger but just before the point of no return, she released it. “Boots, what the hell are you doing. I almost put a bullet in you.”
“Possibly, but I know just how good you are?” Boots said it as a question, with a sly raising of an eyebrow and half a smile.
“Hmm,” Persi said, forehead furrowed. “If you continue those shenanigans, I shall be a widow before we pass the honeymoon stage.” She holstered her guns.
He knelt beside her. “Oh my, there are stages?”
She smiled wryly. “Of course there are stages, silly man.”
Boots lifted the one side of the man’s dust covered coat with the barrel of his gun. The coat fell open revealing a large wallet. “May I know what these stages are?”
Persi removed the wallet and looked at looked at it with a trained eye. “Pff, of course not.” She held it out and pointed to a stamped symbol in the bottom corner. “Morgan & Riley, Limited. Rather a nice wallet for a common train robber to be carrying don’t you think?”
Boots took the wallet, opened it and looked through its contents. “Perhaps,” he said.
Persi stood and walked to the other man they had called, Billy. “Look at his boots, my love. A silver dollar says they are special ordered from Mayfair Boots in Kansas City. I have an account with Mrs. Mayfair myself and I recognize her work.” She looked both dead men over, “In fact, both of these men are very well dressed for common bandits, as is the man formerly in the wagon, I’ll guess.”
“I believe you are right, dear heart,” Boots said, as a banging began at the door. He grinned. “I believe the reinforcements have come to save us.”
“It would be better if we were not found here,” Persi said.
“Agreed,” Boots said, reaching down and slipping the side arm from Mel’s holster. He stepped over to the teenager and helped him to his feet. “Time to be a hero, young man. Take this gun,” Boots handed the pistol to the boy, then reached into his trouser pocket, “and this silver dollar, and when you let them in – after we have gone -- tell them this man,” he pointed at Mel’s body, “laid his gun down for a second, you picked it up and made some lucky shots, okay?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy whispered.
“We were never here, understand?”
The boy nodded.
“Good man,” Boots said, tousling the boy’s hair.
The pounding
had stopped, opting for shoulders instead. A loud crack sprung the door.
“Persi?” Boots asked, holding out his hand.
“Yes, dear,” she said taking it as she stepped over the bodies.
At the door, he turned looked her up and down, then and pecked her on the cheek. “You have the most wonderful fashion sense.” He grabbed onto the top of the open door and smoothly swung onto the roof. An arm appeared, one finger hooked, motioning her to follow. She grabbed onto his hand threw herself out the door.
Another loud crack and the door to the mailroom broke inward. Two men followed swinging their snub-nosed pistols around the room. The boy dropped the gun as the men noticed him. “Holy shi ...,” one began then stopped. D’you do all this?”
The boy gave only the slightest nods.
“Got another one out here, Clarence,” a third man said from outside the open doors.
“Holy shi ...,” the man started again. “My friend,” he stepped to the teenager and handed him a card. “My name is Robert Pinkerton, the president of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency at your service.”
****
Persi and Boots ran across the train car roofs silently, or as silently as they could both carrying their footwear, and with Persi in her sleeping gown. Persi dropped to her knees and leaned over the side looking for the window, which she had left open after climbing through. “Here,” she said, and without another word, grabbed the edge of the car and swung down and through it into their berth. Boots followed and minutes later they sat at their table, both in their sleeping garments as if they had been there all evening. He smiled and leaned across the table to kiss her when someone knocked at the door.
“Who is it?” Boots asked.
“Your nightcap, sir. I believe the Missus ordered it,” a man’s voice said.
Persi smiled. “While you were washing up.”
He smiled back, “Yes, just a minute,” he said as he rose and donned his robe. He was impressed that not even a train robbery hindered the staff from effective service.
The Lightning Lord Page 2