Of the steamboats that chugged by that day, I chose mine carefully—I wanted a fast, rugged craft, a sidewheeler able to spin on the water like a crab, with a flat bottom drawing only a couple feet of water, and I found one in the Chrysopolis. So we stood on the bank and waved a flag—actually a looted Masonic apron lashed to a stick—and Chrysopolis obligingly came near the bank to pick up passengers. That was how things were done in America—you stood on the riverbank and waved, and the boats were happy to take your money and let you and your animals on board.
As soon as we got on the steamboat, we produced our weapons and robbed all the passengers. They were heading from San Francisco to Sutter’s Fort, so they’d spent the money on good times or on mining equipment and didn’t have much cash on them. We set the passengers and crew ashore, then took our new prize upriver. It took us a few days to learn her ways—I knew nothing of steam engines, but some of my crew did—and then we began our career of piracy.
I’d reckoned that there was no point in robbing individual mining claims when we could simply take our pick of everything traveling along the river—gold, steamboats, fancy clothing, furniture, and all. We’d come charging out from a half-hidden slough, or from behind an island, and swoop down on a boat coming down from the diggings, our rail crowded with men waving weapons, while I stood by the wheelhouse in my uniform and commanded our victims to surrender through a brass speaking trumpet.
There was a lot of gold coming down that river. Some of it in strongboxes, some in the miners’ pockets or their dunnage. They’d try to hide it, of course, but we got more than our share. And then we’d let our victims go, along with their boat, to go upriver and dig more gold for us.
By this point I was quite the swell. I’d got myself more bits of uniform from the captains and officers of the steamboats, and I had a couple pistols in my belt and my fancy Masonic sword. I shaved my beard except for a proper set of whiskers; very dashing, I thought. I started dipping into looted gold snuffboxes instead of chewing tobacco, and using words I’d heard from educated people. I stopped dropping my aitches. I wore lace and knee breeches and silk stockings, and I had a bullion epaulet on each shoulder.
I was completely ridiculous. The madness had me completely in its grip.
I was uneasy about the Condor. When we moored the boat for the night, I tried to keep it away from tall trees. A few weeks went by without my hearing that Ky-yeee ringing in the air, but I was no easier. He’s up to something, I thought.
What I didn’t know was that the Condor was busy dealing with a couple other filibusters, the Haunt and the Highwayman, each of whom was robbing in the vicinity of Sutter’s Fort. It was only when he’d had them locked up in the jail that he came looking for me.
And he didn’t come gliding down from the trees. He crept up on the moored Chrysopolis on a tiny raft made up of inflated seal skins, a hand crank, and a screw propeller.
He knocked out a pair of sentries and set a fire in the steamboat’s grand salon. Then he climbed to the Texas deck with a grapnel and a line, entered the captain’s cabin where I was sleeping, and knocked me unconscious before I even came awake. When I woke, I was back in the Sacramento City jail, my boat had burned to the waterline, my fortune had for the most part been lost, and my crew were stranded on Sutter’s Island.
The Haunt, I discovered, had already escaped—being a conquistador who had been dead for a hundred years or more, he could supposedly walk through walls. (At least at night: he’s more vulnerable in the daytime.) There was still no law—no judges, no juries, no sheriffs or deputies, which had not stopped the Condor from filling the jail with a host of other offenders, most of whom professed themselves willing to join my crew, and the Cavalier—a Frenchman who was dressed in the black leather outfit of the French king’s musketeers of the seventeenth century—offered his aid, though he was not willing to join our gang.
The jail had been improved, so it took us all of three days to break out. We went straight to the wharfs and aboard the New World, which had just arrived from New York. It was a floating palace, with red plush benches, marble tables, and crystal chandeliers, and the fastest boat on the river besides. It was easy enough to overpower the crew and set forth. We dropped off the Cavalier below Sacramento, then headed for Sutter’s Island, where I found my old crew staring at the snag-filled waters of Steamboat Slough and waiting for rescue.
Those were the glory days. Every day brought adventure: a whiff of powder or a clash of blades or the clinking of glasses. Either we were plundering the gold traffic moving to and from the Sierras, or we were enjoying ourselves at our secret forts in the Sacramento Delta. The delta featured hundreds of miles of waterway and dozens of islands. And, because we had gold, we suddenly had friends. People would bring barges of fine things up from San Francisco, and we’d pay them well.
We had champagne and brandy. Linen. Fine weapons. Women.
In Alta California, the men still outnumbered the women five or six to one, but many of the ladies had come entirely for the gold. Gold we had aplenty, and the ladies found both the gold and us. It was a splendid time we had together. We had to be the envy of all those poor, frozen miners on the American River, who could go a whole year without seeing a female.
I even had a sort of wife for a while, Pirate Sally, who wore a kerchief over her red-gold hair and wielded matching cutlasses. We plundered together till I caught her one night sneaking off with my personal stash of gold. Turns out she’d fallen for the Cavalier, that frog bastard, so I heaved her into the river and let her swim for it. For revenge the vindictive bitch led the Condor to us, and I got to spend another few days in the Sacramento City jail before escaping.
By then a regular circus parade of colorful madmen had come to the diggings for their piece of the proceeds. Quiet, black-clad Doctor Tolliver, with his bottles of explosives. The Mad Emperor, who set up his kingdom by Lake Tahoe and demanded we worship him. Captain Hypnos, with his legion of mesmerized followers. The Bowery B’hoy, a New Yorker with a red shirt, plug hat, lead-weighted cane, and soap-locks like a Jew.
Nor were they all robbers or poachers. Aero Lad raced through the skies on his Mechanical Dragonfly. San Francisco produced the Regulator and the Hangman, both of whom pretended to uphold the law as they went about bashing people and stringing them up. They were no more law-abiding than I was, though for some reason they were thought to be great heroes and I was not.
Every race or nation had its own champion. The Indians of this area had never organized above the village level, and they never had a Sagamore till the Sagamore showed up to lead them in trying to drive the white men from the diggings. The Masked Hidalgo fought for the Mexicans. And then there was Shanghai Susie, who defended the Chinese miners with some kind of strange fighting magic called “cong foo.” I hated her, for she attacked with a host of strange weapons and was better with a sword than me.
It was hard to say just what side these last were on. They fought to defend their own people, but they also fought each other, and they fought to defend law-breakers against the Condor or anyone set to catch them. I fought all of them at one time or another, and fought alongside them as well.
Those of us on the far side of the law didn’t just fight the law-men, we fought each other. With both the Condor and the likes of the Mad Emperor likely to turn up at any time, slavering for my freedom or my gold, you can bet I took care for my safety. Our forts in the Delta were defended by cannons, sentries, and elaborate pits and traps that would drop the unwary into nests of snakes or incinerate them in a flaming blast of coal oil. (That’s how the Hangman went, and good riddance to him.) And I wasn’t about to have another boat burned out from under me—we covered the New World in nets, set cannons to cover every approach, and set even more elaborate traps. (We failed to catch Aero Lad in one, but we did get his Dragonfly, which kept him off our necks till he built a new one.)
Still, it was the Condor who was my truest companion. We battled almost continually, with the hono
rs about even. He dragged me to the hoosegow more than once, and I captured him as well. I was still reluctant to kill him directly, so I’d suspend him over a pit of sharpened stakes or send him down the river tied on a flaming raft, or throw him into a cage with a captured mountain lion. Damned if he didn’t make his escape every time.
Once, when he’d captured me and was marching me to jail trussed up like a turkey-bird, he prosed on the way he did when he had a captive audience, and he told me that he found me “worthy of his steel.” Not that he had any steel—he always fought with his fists—but I have to admit that a part of me was pleased to have earned his respect.
I told him that I’d never have become a pirate if he hadn’t clouted me that first time on the Middle Fork when I was trying to defend my claim against poachers.
“You follow your nature,” says he, “and your nature was bound to lead you to folly sooner or later.”
“Folly, perhaps,” says I. “But where was it written that I was destined to become a river pirate until you made me one?”
“Do not attempt to shift the blame for your actions to me,” says he. “Your very anatomy proclaims your depravity.” He prodded me on the back of the head in an unpleasant, over-familiar way. “Your skull shows that your adhesiveness is deficient, whereas your destructiveness and combativeness are overdeveloped. Science itself condemns you.”
I was annoyed at being poked in this phrenological manner and shook the hand off. “And what about your nature?” says I. “Is it the bumps on your head that led you to become the Condor? Why do you swoop down from the trees to whip offenders off the trail?”
He gave no answer, simply shoved me along ahead of him.
“Whatever happened must have been a great blow,” says I, “to force you to do something as barmy as this.”
By this time, there were all sorts of stories about the Condor and who might be behind the mask. It was claimed that he was a belted earl from England, or the son of a New York shipping nabob—someone rich, anyway, who had pelf enough to indulge himself in the eccentric hobby of floating from tree to tree and thrashing the wicked. There was another story that he was a Mexican caballero whose activities were supported by a secret gold mine (and I believe the Mad Emperor spent a lot of time searching for that mine). I heard yet another story that the Condor was an army officer whose wife had been murdered by bandits, and who had sworn vengeance on the whole criminal tribe.
All the stories were ridiculous, of course. Yet none were more absurd than the Condor himself, who marched behind me on yet another trek to the jail in Sacramento City.
As we walked along, I probed further still. “What compels you to dress up as a great carrion bird?” says I. “Attack perfect strangers and haul them to the calabozo? How does this benefit you in any way?”
“I benefit as any citizen benefits,” says he, “when order is maintained in society.”
I lost my patience. “Tell that to Mrs. Siddons!” says I scornfully. “You’re not in this for some abstract pleasure in establishing order.” I glared at him. “You’re cracked! You’re completely cracked! What I can’t work out is what cracked you!”
He gave me a steely look from either side of his ridiculous costume beak. “Could a madman do what I do?” he asked. “Could a madman fight so well or so long?”
It occurred to me afterwards that there was a bit of pleading in his voice. That he was hoping for understanding, that I would somehow comprehend the necessity and rightness and perfect sanity of his mission. But I’d lost my temper, and I was having none of it.
“Damn you,” says I, “you started this! If it weren’t for you, I’d never have become the Commodore! Doctor Tolliver would be selling quack medicines in Pittsburgh, and Captain Hypnos would be performing in a music hall! We’re all inmates of your private madhouse—none of this would exist without you! This is all part of your demented fantasy, you glibbering moon-calf!”
Whereupon his blue eyes flashed, and he landed a right hook to my jaw that laid me out on the trail.
He apologized afterward for losing his temper. But by that point I wasn’t interested in his explanations, and as soon as I could manage it, I lurched to my feet and stalked off in the direction of Sacramento City and its jail. Nor could I resist the Parthian shot that I hurled over my shoulder.
“And that war cry of yours?” says I. “That ky-yeeee! That’s a hawk, you know, not a condor! Condors only grumble, as if they’re mouthing some ridiculous, impotent complaint against the state of the universe.”
If he had any reply to this, he had no chance to utter it, because at that point the Gentlemen of Leisure sprang their ambush, firing their muskets and pistols. I threw myself headlong on the ground, as I knew from long experience that the fire of my crew was marked both by its enthusiasm and its general lack of accuracy. By the time the fire ended and I rose again to my feet, the Condor had fled, and I was surrounded by my jubilant crew of freebooters.
After my capture, you see, the Gentlemen had taken the New World upriver by way of obscure sloughs and passages, and sent a party ashore to hide in the trees and bushes and wait for the Condor to march me into their ambush. Once they’d liberated me, we paraded in triumph to our steamboat, where we raised bumpers of champagne as we made our way back to one of our hidden forts.
Little did I know it, but that was the last of the carefree time, the joyful cut-and-thrust of the freebooting life. It was less than a week later that I heard a strange throbbing in the air, and looked up from the pilothouse of the New World to see Professor Mitternacht’s great black airship as it floated over the Sacramento Delta, the sinister outline of a cruising shark black against the sun, the great fore-and-aft screw propellers whirling. I felt a shiver run up my spine as I saw the machine, and I began to feel a suspicion that for the first time my steamboat had been thoroughly outclassed.
Mitternacht and his Schrecken had crossed half the world and the entirety of the United States, and he was on his way to San Francisco, where he opened his campaign by dropping fluorine bombs of poison gas that killed a third of the population—after which the Schrecken came to a landing, discharged troops, seized the town, and raised the black-and-gold flag of the Austrian Empire.
The airship was large, but it couldn’t hold a vast number of soldiers, only half a battalion or so of Croatian Grenzers. But it was still half a battalion more than anyone else had in Alta California, and Mitternacht made up for his lack of numbers by ruling through terror: there were executions and violations, and the survivors were enslaved and put to work building camps, fortifications, and a landing field for the airship.
Mitternacht and his fluorine bombs came as a literal bolt from the blue. While I had been in Alta California, prospecting and breaking out of jails and fighting back and forth with the Condor and the Bowery B’hoy and Shanghai Susie and so on, there had been revolutions all over Europe. Hungary had tried to break free of the Austrians and been defeated; and their hero, Kossuth, had come to the United States in order to raise funds for another rebellion.
Professor Mitternacht was outraged that Uncle Sam was sheltering the rebel instead of hanging him outright; and so he flew from his secret base in the Tyrol all the way across the ocean to punish the United States and annex Alta California to the empire of the Habsburgs.
The Austrian government, when they heard about all this months later, denied they’d had any part in it; but for all those of us on the Sacramento knew, young Franz-Joseph had actually declared war. Swarms of refugees fled San Francisco on every boat and raft they could find, and they spread stories that were even more fantastic than the reality.
It was then that I realized that the game had changed. Instead of carefree freebooters trying to outwit each other in plundering the wealth of the diggings, there was a homicidal madman in the sky raining death on helpless civilians.
Nor was there any more plunder to be had. No miner had any reason to carry his gold to San Francisco when Professor Mitternacht would on
ly confiscate the gold and enslave the miner. Perhaps worse, the flow of supplies coming up the river from the city was interrupted. Not only were there no more immigrants, no picks and shovels, no mules or canvas or line, no wine or whiskey or champagne, there was no food. No flour, no bacon, no corn meal. Some victuals were trekked in from Monterrey, but not nearly enough. The miners at the diggings were all in danger of starvation unless they somehow turned themselves into farmers overnight—and with autumn coming on, there was no time to get a crop in the ground.
Professor Mitternacht offered to feed anyone willing to become one of his slave laborers. I believe that a few desperate people accepted that offer.
My own folk were all right. We had food and drink in plenty, and—with no piracy to contemplate—little to do but enjoy ourselves. Though I tried to savor our celebrations, I wasn’t really inclined to pleasure. Instead, I worried that our hidden bases and forts were all visible from the air, and I occupied myself with schemes to hide ourselves from the Schrecken, and ways to bring the craft down. I experimented with cannon rigged to fire on a great incline, like a mortar, but the tests were not a great success.
There seemed to be a truce among the various forces in California while we worked out what to do about the invader. The Condor was active in trying to liberate Mitternacht’s slaves. The Bowery B’hoy made a raid on San Francisco just for the devilment of it and rescued a young woman who became his Bowery G’hal. Aero Lad tried to board the Schrecken from his Mechanical Dragonfly, but was captured and thrown overboard to a long fall and death. The Regulator was captured, broken on the wheel, and killed.
Aye, Professor Mitternacht was a glorious bundle of fun, all right.
That was where things stood when the Mad Emperor, from his castle fortress on Lake Tahoe, declared war on the Austrian—and sent a courier to deliver a message calling Mitternacht a slimy, jumped-up, demented foreigner. The message was so successful, in fact, that Professor Mitternacht lopped the head off the courier and took the Schrecken up the Sacramento to bomb the Mad Emperor’s fortress.
Dead Man’s Hand Page 42