by D. J. Butler
“There ain’t no medals,” the Danite grumbled.
“Or maybe you were aiming for a more sordid sort of traffic, a simple dirty bargain. You could simply offer to betray Lee and free President Young, in exchange for whatever it is you hope to get out of all this.”
Hickman sulked.
“So what is it that you’re playing for, Hickman? How much of the pie do you want? Are you tired of being looked down on because you’re the Jim Bridger type, and not the Daniel Webster sort, not a fancy Englishman?” Poe jerked his head at Absalom Fearnley-Standish, with his scalloped-brim hat. He coughed again, and choked himself quickly before the coughs turned into a prolonged fit.
“I say,” Fearnley-Standish objected mildly. He pulled a small metallic notebook from his pocket, then seemed to think better of whatever his intention had been and put the notebook back. “You make us sound like a nation of snuff-pinchers. We did stop Napoleon, you know. And settle America, if that’s worth anything.”
“Joo English weren’t the first people to come to the Nuevo Mundo,” Master Sergeant Jackson reminded him, with a grin that was both fierce and affectionate.
Hickman kept his mouth shut.
Poe waited, letting the Danite stew. He bent over to tidy the line of beetles, then straightened up and sighed.
“I’m not sure that it matters,” he said, “but I admit to curiosity. Does Lee answer to Orson Pratt, or do you answer to the Madman?”
Hickman’s face surprised Poe with a look of pure astonishment. Even more surprising was the expression of complete discombobulation that passed over Sam Clemens’s face before he recovered, sweeping it under his mustache.
So Hickman knew nothing about Orson Pratt’s machinations, and Sam Clemens… maybe Clemens did.
Poe decided to probe a little harder.
“Come, Mr. Hickman,” he continued. “Aren’t you the Boatman?”
“I don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about,” Hickman whined.
Sam Clemens jerked a cigar from out of his inside jacket pocket and bit into it, hard.
“We’ll leave that for the moment.” Poe shook the open canister of scarab beetles like a maraca as he paced around Hickman and thought. “What if Lee’s plan had gone as he’d intended?” he asked. “What would he have done next?”
“It did go as he intended,” Hickman insisted.
“The Third Virginia Cavalry is here to support Lee in power. There is no United States target worth striking within their range. What is Lee’s plan for supporting his fellow-conspirators in the South? Will Mormons invade the Wyoming Territory?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“But what I see here doesn’t look like a standing army to me, so much as a militia. Or even just an armed citizenry. Effective, maybe, for deterring invasion or oppression, but not the sort of force that invades its neighbor.”
“There you have it,” Hickman agreed.
“So I think the attack will be aerial.”
Hickman’s evasive look was confirmation enough.
“Perhaps an attack upon Chicago.” Poe considered. “Though of course, one advantage of an airborne military force would be the ability to attack behind enemy lines. Pittsburgh? New York City? Perhaps the war will commence with an assault upon Boston, to remind the overweening Yankees of the celebrated Tea Party?”
Hickman shrugged. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I ain’t never been much for tea.”
“The delivery of a team of Danite assassins to President Buchanan’s White House?” Poe proposed. “I’d hate to give you any good ideas, but of course, you are clever men, and you know your own weapon’s capabilities much better than I ever could. All I can hope to do is second-guess you.”
“That ain’t my part in it,” Hickman grumped. “I ain’t much of a planner.”
“No…? I suppose not. What about…” Poe let a little suspense build. “What about the phlogiston guns? Why rely on assassins at all, when you could just burn the White House to the ground?”
“What, just the one gun?” Hickman snorted. “It ain’t all that impressive, not all by itself.”
“Why just one gun?” Poe asked, and then guessed at another connection. “Why one gun, when there are four ships?”
Four ships, Poe thought. He knew that Orson Pratt had built four ships because Captain Jones had told him so. It didn’t seem to be uncommon knowledge. But now the number stuck in the back of his mind like a morsel of food he could not swallow. What was there about the number four that bothered him so?
“Hell if I know.”
“Rubies,” Roxie said.
Sam Clemens looked like he’d bit off and swallowed part of his cigar. It might have been the result of his standing right between the blue and the yellow lanterns, but he looked positively green.
“What about rubies?” Poe asked her.
She shook her head impatiently. “I don’t know the details. The phlogiston gun works on rubies, but Deseret doesn’t have any.”
Poe examined Hickman’s face. He didn’t think the kidnapper had any idea what they were talking about, and he had a sudden and terrible insight into why the number four tickled his memory so. He started coughing, tried to stop and found that he couldn’t. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket.
“Let’s step away for a moment and discuss.”
“Shall I kill him?” Rockwell seemed eager, and Poe wondered if it was an act.
“Not yet,” Poe directed, between hard, violent coughs. “But lets leave the scarabs on his belly as a reminder.” He held the handkerchief carefully in front of his face to catch the sputum. There would be blood in it, he knew.
Not yet, he thought. Let me see this through first, and then take me, but just not yet.
* * *
“You didn’t have to poke fun at me,” Tam muttered to Sam Clemens as they all moved away from Bill Hickman and huddled around the back of the Danites’ steam-truck. “Not with all of them watching.”
“Not now, O’Shaughnessy.” Clemens didn’t look irritated, but he looked distracted and uncomfortable. The poor idjit had chewed through three of his fancy cigars in as many minutes. Jesus and Brigit, though, who wouldn’t be uncomfortable, with all the talk of phlogiston guns and flying ships?
Tam was uncomfortable himself. He’d nearly been blown to bits twice in one day by something called a machine-gun, first at the hands of an overstuffed circus midget with an unholy affection for someone else’s little boy, and then by the wee tyke himself. He’d just about had enough of the Kingdom of Deseret.
It made him think of the Molly Malones and the Pinkertons with something approaching nostalgia.
“Yeah, Sam,” he agreed, “only I was coming to rescue you, don’t you see?”
Clemens ignored him and turned to join the circle with the others.
“So it wasn’t right to mock me, is all I’m saying.” Tam sighed. He shuffled in close to listen, too, careful that he wasn’t leaning over the head of the louse-sized midget. The little bastard had armed himself with every knife he could find.
“It’s time for reciprocal revelation,” the man everyone called Poe was saying. He was saying it to Sam, and he was wiping blood off the corner of his mouth with a white handkerchief. The man looked like a walking corpse. “You’re the Boatman, and you brought a delivery of rubies to Orson Pratt. How many were there?”
Sam Clemens might not always be nice to his associate, but he knew how to keep his cool. “I’m not saying it’s true, Mr. Poe, and I’m not saying it isn’t. But I would like to understand your reasoning a little better.”
“I took Pratt a delivery, too,” Poe explained. “My codename was to be the Egyptian, but he accidentally called me the Boatman. I’ve seen your amphibious craft, and I think the Boatman must have been you. You looked uncomfortable when I mentioned rubies to Hickman. How many did you bring him?” The bony-faced Mormon woman looked fascinated by Poe’s every word, and Tam wondered what her gam
e was.
“How many did you bring him?” Sam asked belligerently.
“What I gave Pratt wasn’t rubies,” Poe said.
“What was it?” This question came from the more manly of the two Englishmen. Tam thought his name was Burton. He looked a little offended, like all this was new information, and he wasn’t happy that people had been keeping secrets from him. “In the spirit of reciprocal revelation, I brought Pratt nothing.”
“I don’t know what it was,” Poe said.
“Your profession of ignorance doesn’t exactly inspire trust,” Sam joked.
“They were some kind of clocksprung devices,” Poe explained. “I don’t know what the devices were designed to do, but there were four of them, and they were built into canopic jars, little Egyptian-looking jars with animal heads.”
“We know what canopic jars are,” harrumphed Burton.
Poe ignored him. “They might be ether-wave devices of some sort,” he said, “but that’s almost pure conjecture on my part. How many rubies?”
“Didn’t you say that Mr. Pratt has built four of his air-ships?” the Etonian bastard asked. Since the fight ended, he’d been followed around by two women, the Mexican gunner and the young Mormon morsel. Tam would happily have instructed either girl in the secret beauties of the Irish avian population, but they stuck to the effete little prat with his maimed headgear like blight stuck to a potato. Just the sight of the three of them made Tam want to spit.
The aristo weasel had two women slobbering over him. Poe had the bony Mormon lady making eyes. Sam Clemens and Burton yukked it up like they’d been hatched from the same egg and known each other all their lives. Even the dwarf had the little kid. Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy was the odd man out.
He felt alone. It surprised him how much the feeling bothered him. Stop moping, you stupid bastard, he told himself. Mother O’Shaughnessy’d die of embarrassment over your womanish ways.
Of course, on top of being lonesome, good old Missouri Sam Clemens had as much as blamed him for kidnapping the child. Sure, Tam had had the child in his possession at one point, but for that matter, so had Sam.
It had been the dwarf who committed the kidnapping.
It just wasn’t fair.
“So what?” he interjected himself into the conversation. “Four ships and four jars, so-bloody-damn-hell-what? Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Four cardinal directions, by Brigit. Four arms and legs on a man, four fingers to a hand if you don’t count the thumb. How many fookin’ rubies, is this a game?” He also felt slightly put out that Sam hadn’t mentioned he was carrying around a bunch of precious stones, apparently for some kind of secret trade with the Madman Pratt.
It was like Sam didn’t trust him.
But then, maybe he was right not to.
“I don’t know how many,” Sam Clemens told them. “A small bag full of them. I thought I was best off not knowing the exact scale of the temptation.”
“Lee’s arming the air-ships,” Burton grunted.
“As far as I know,” the older woman said, “Brother Orson’s only ever built one working phlogiston gun, and it wasn’t mounted on one of his ships.”
“Consider the facts,” Poe said. “Pratt arranged secret meetings in which he took delivery of some number of rubies, and four mysterious devices, equal in number to the number of his aerial fleet. Pratt took delivery, I say, not Brigham Young and not John Lee. Our Mr. Hickman there clearly knows nothing about these transactions, so I think we have to infer that there is at least a strong possibility that Orson Pratt is acting on his own in this matter. He has good as said so to my… to colleagues of mine in Army Intelligence. Perhaps he is building additional phlogiston guns to arm all the ships. Perhaps the canopic jars facilitate the arming in some fashion; perhaps they are targeting devices, or… who know what they could be?”
“Bombs,” Tam guessed.
“Bombs,” sneered the dwarf. “Like Hunley and his boys ever made anything so simple as a bomb.”
“I don’t think you can make an ether-wave bomb…” Roxie said hesitantly.
“I fear Pratt’s action may be imminent,” Poe continued. “He was very anxious as to timing when I delivered him the canopic jars. He commented that he was almost out of time. Did he give you any instructions about tomorrow morning, Mr. Clemens?”
Sam Clemens hooked his thumbs into his belt and furrowed his brow. “He wanted me by the Tabernacle at eight in the morning. North side. And the reciprocal revelation?”
“Same place, same time. Something’s happening tomorrow morning at eight, and he wants us to witness it.”
“Or he wants to make sure we’re involved,” Clemens suggested.
“Or standing on a convenient target,” Poe finished.
“We have to get President Young back to the city,” the younger, prettier Mormon woman said. “We can’t let Lee win. And if we don’t stop tomorrow morning’s meeting, the Twelve and the Seventy will have chosen a new President.”
“We also have to move to intercept Pratt,” Sam Clemens said. “What if he really does plan to launch an attack first thing in the morning?”
“Any attack might be imminent,” Poe agreed. “We may already be too late.”
“We split up,” Burton announced. “I’m going after the air-ships. Who’s with me?”
Chapter Thirteen
“So I expect you’re one cog that’s happy to be returning to its ordinary slot in the good Lord’s cosmic wonder-machine,” Sam suggested. He chewed on a cheap cigar he’d commandeered from one of the vanquished Danites; he’d chewed his way through the entire supply he kept on his person.
That was one more compelling reason to get back to the Jim Smiley as soon as he could.
“My people need me in my place,” Brigham Young agreed, glaring at Sam like a bear facing down a mastiff. “If you mean something more than that, I suggest you say it plainer. You’ll ruin Missouri’s reputation for producing straight-talking men.”
They rode horses taken from the Hot Springs Hotel & Brewery stable. Ahead of them, pffft-ankkkhing across fields of sugar beets and corn, went one of the Mexican Striders; the second brought up the rear of the procession. It was full night, and they moved by the light of the half-moon slowly falling towards the western hills, not wanting to attract any more attention than they were already at risk of doing, just by the size of their party and the presence of the two big, clanking fighting machines. Someone’s crop was getting trampled, Sam thought. At least it was in a good cause. Or maybe it was okay because it all belonged to Brigham Young. Wasn’t this a kingdom, after all?
“You’ve got us wrong, Mr. President,” Sam said. “Missouri doesn’t produce straight-talking men, it produces skeptics. And what I mean to say is, I can see how our rescue might tempt you into thinking the hand of Providence was upon you, but I would suggest that there are other explanations.”
“You mean luck,” Young guessed.
Young and Sam rode at the head of the horse-mounted middle of the procession, together with Ambassador Armstrong. Immediately behind them came Orrin Porter Rockwell, slouched over his horse like he was a naturally inborn part of the animal, and then Captain Dan Jones, with the boy John Moses in front of him on his saddle. The midget Coltrane banged along on a horse far too big for him, and behind him came Absalom Fearnley-Standish, his sister Abigail and Brigham Young’s fetching vixen-agent, Annie Web, mixing in more or less among the crewmen of the Liahona.
“Luck,” Sam agreed. “The diligence of my associate and the persistence of your own loyal people, despite, I would like to point out, your apparent orders to them to stand down. Your own cogs saved you by jumping out of place. I also wouldn’t discount the incompetence of our kidnappers, or fail to mention our own manful efforts at overcoming our captors and escaping. Porter Rockwell deserves some kind of medal.”
“You don’t believe that God acts in the affairs of man,” Young asserted. When he wasn’t snapping his teeth in anger, he had a kind of dig
nity that Sam found attractive and also a little unsettling. Young rode easily and upright even with his chest wrapped in a bandage, like he expected people to look at him and respect him.
He made Sam want to knock him off his pole, just a little. Not hurt him, but maybe get him a little dirty.
“I find that the victors in any contest are generally persuaded that God is on their side,” Sam answered. “The trodden down and beaten upon are not often so optimistic.”
Young was silent for a moment. Sam listened to the creaking of saddle leather and the soft jingling of stirrups and felt the cool night air on his face. Having spent much of the day in darkness and suffocated by the smell of apples, he experienced this as freedom, pure and undefiled.
“The best friend I ever had in this world,” Young finally said, speaking slowly, “was Joseph Smith, Jr.”
“The King of Nauvoo.”
“Brother Joseph was the President, Mr. Clemens. Jesus Christ was the King.”
“No offense intended. I only meant to identify Smith by his common nickname, so you know that I’m paying attention and know the man to whom you refer.”
“If you have heard of him, then you know that he was executed by an illegal firing squad in Carthage, Illinois.”
“I have heard various views on the legality of the action,” Sam acknowledged that he knew of Smith’s murder. “No offense. Your kidnapping is not the first piece of mischief to be perpetrated by men calling themselves Danites.”
“Nauvoo was a kingdom dredged from the mud of the Mississippi River, Mr. Clemens. No one wanted it when we went there, except for the mosquitoes, and without the aid of Heaven, the blood-suckers would surely have driven us out.”
“I’ve seen Nauvoo,” Sam said. “It’s a pretty town.”
“We made it so. And once they had murdered our Brother Joseph, our enemies came for our land. They killed us, they stole all our worldly goods, and they drove us across the Mississippi River into the howling Lamanite wilderness.”