by D. J. Butler
“Great thundering Ganesha!” barked another English voice, this one stronger and harsher. “You insisted on coming along, now the least you can do—and I do mean the very least—is not get in my way!” A grunt, then more rattling.
Tam thought he could tell where the sound was coming from, and a great hulking beast it was, a track-borne iron behemoth, many times larger than the Jim Smiley, hunched in the shadows. Two dark figures lurched across its deck, one straining its shoulders against a heavy load.
“Besides, they’ve only a few hours to catch us, and they can’t possibly even know what we’ve done yet.”
The figures sank into the deck of the big steam-truck, presumably climbing down some hatch or stair into its belly.
Suddenly, Tam had a bad feeling about the whole thing. First, the Pinkertons showed up on his trail, and now, suddenly, here were two English bastards up to no good. If there was only the one of them, Tam would kill him without a second thought, just to be on the safe side, but two men always made an attack a little more of a throw of the dice.
“Hell and begorra.”
Tam gave the strolling Englishmen a few seconds to get well inside their truck, then crossed the yard to the Jim Smiley. He had to skirt out of reach of the electricks’ blue light, which made his scuttling circuitous and piled additional time into his state of anxiety, but a couple of minutes later, heart beating a little faster than he would have liked, Tam stood next to the Jim Smiley and surveyed her for visible damage.
She looked fine from the outside. All six of her enormous, heavy India-rubber tyres bulked full and unscathed. The immense inflated India-rubber skirt that wrapped all around her hull was also fine. The big elephantastic wheel in back sat on its axle, unimpeached and unassailed, as far as Tam could see. Black smoke puffed, wispy and hard to spot in the blue-black gloom, from her raised exhaust pipe. Tam almost relaxed.
Almost.
He sent himself up the ladder quickly, conscious that he was visible here from the doorway to any vulture that knew where to look, and then slipped into the wheelhouse for a moment to scan the shadowed deck through its large windows.
Nothing. Bloody-damn-hell nothing.
You’re jumping at shadows, me boy.
Tam crossed the deck again and started down the stairs into the boiler room. He flicked the light switch in the iron stairwell and nothing happened. He flicked it again, still nothing. That wasn’t good. He wasn’t a mechanick like Clemens, but he knew that unless the emergency battery was engaged, the lights were powered by the electricks, which were powered by the boiler. No lights meant the boiler wasn’t on.
Tam drew his pistol, a shiny Webley Lonsgpur (not his, originally, but Bevan’s. The weaselly little Taffy didn’t need it now, did he, with him all singing away, “Bread of Heaven” in the celestial men’s choir?). Saints Brigit, Patrick, and Anthony on fire. Could be he let the coal run too low in the furnace and the fire had gone out. Sure, that was it.
No, you idjit. There’s smoke out the exhaust, means the fire is going.
Could be a burned out bulb. Didn’t they burn out? They burned out, he was sure of it.
Sure, it could, and it could be bloody leprechauns opened a valve and let out all the steam. Put your balls back on, O’Shaughnessy, and stop fooling yourself. He shook his head to clear his thoughts, then cocked the hammer of the Webley.
Gun first, he sprang noiselessly into the boiler room.
Nothing.
Empty, no one there, just the shovel and the pile of coal and the boiler throwing out its mad red grin into the room through slitted teeth.
He quickly checked the other rooms below decks—locker, galley, bunk room—and determined that he was alone on the Jim Smiley. Alone on a steam-truck with no functioning electricks.
He stood, Webley uncocked and reholstered, in the boiler room, scratching his head and beginning to feel relieved, when he saw the holes. All the pipes connecting the furnace to the boiler were smashed open. No wonder the electricks didn’t work—there was no steam to power them.
With no steam, the truck wouldn’t go anywhere either, couldn’t budge an inch if it was pulled by ten Clydesdales. Well, Sam was a dab hand with steam machinery and electricks, he’d fix it proper in short order. He had patches precisely to cover this sort of an occasion, right in his toolbox.
Still, how in hell did something like this happen? Some kind of explosion? But that couldn’t be right; the holes in the pipes looked like they’d been smashed inwards, not blown out.
Then Tam noticed that Sam’s well-used crate of tools was missing. He heard the rough Englishman’s voice in his mind. They only have a few hours to catch us.
“Bloody hell!” he yelled, his voice gigantic and booming in the engine room. He remembered the Pinkertons, and squeezed his voice back down to a whisper. “It’s sabotage! We’re holed by the English!”
He rushed back up the stairs to the deck, whipping out his revolver again, and flung himself prone to survey the stockade yard. No sign of the Pinkertons. And isn’t that a blessed relief, after me going stupid and shouting my head off inside a great metal drum?
But there was a fellow on his hands and knees just below the electricks, vomiting on himself, and two men in frock coats strolled casually across the yard, from the far shadowed corner where Tam had heard the English voices, near the saloon doors.
A little too casually. Forced casual, like people pretending they hadn’t just been having a quarrel. Squinting, Tam saw that the older fellow, with the big wild mustache, looked like he might bite the head off a mountain lion any second, and the younger, who was clean-shaven and wore a top hat, appeared on the edge of tears, like a little girl.
That’d be the bloody Etonian.
Tam lay flat and out of sight, waiting for the Englishmen to go inside the saloon.
“All ticketed passengers on the Liahona, Fort Bridger to Salt Lake City! Attention, all ticketed passengers on the Liahona!”
The man yelling looked to be about fifty, with a square face, serious eyes, and curly hair under a shapeless blue cap. He was dressed in white shirtsleeves under a brass-buttoned blue vest, and his accent was some kind of English-Irish-something-er-other. Jed had seen enough of the world to know there were different kinds of Brits, but he couldn’t really tell them apart. Jed had been twenty years old when he finally saw Little Rock for the first time, and there hadn’t been any English, Irish, or Scots there.
“This is Captain Dan Jones of the Liahona, attention, all ticketed passengers!”
Captain Jones had the lungs of a professional barker but he didn’t rely on them alone. He bellowed through a speaking trumpet, an S-bent copper tube with an India-rubber mouthpiece on its lower end and a broadly flowering cone on top, like a periscope for the mouth. His voice came out tinny but clear, and loud enough to be heard over the rumbling din.
A boy, a little dark-haired kid in overalls, sailor’s jacket and a gray slouch hat who couldn’t be older than five or six but might be as young as four, knocked against Jones’s knees and threatened constantly to be squashed underfoot, he stuck so close to the older man. He kept one hand out and tugging at the Captain’s pant leg, as if reassuring himself that the man wouldn’t evaporate.
The sight of the kid made Jed shake his head in irritation; he’d been that kid once, only even smaller, and a hell of a lot less awkward. You can’t afford to get underfoot when the feet belong to a mule pulling the family plow.
“Departure time will be eight o’clock sharp, by my watch!” Captain Jones warned his passengers, stumping a circular route among the gaming tables and turning his head as he delivered his message. The din rumbled a little louder and hands waved here and there in acknowledgement. “There is a return trip and a time table to make, and we will not be late. To those of you who are not accustomed to operating on a schedule, I say, Welcome to Deseret! I will fire a ten-minute warning gun. No refunds or exchanges will be offered to passengers who sleep in and miss the departure, but
you may hold your ticket, and I will honor it on a future run.
“Any passengers desiring to sleep in the Liahona tonight may do so for the very affordable price of ten cents, payable in American, Mexican, Californian, New Russian, or Deseret. Breakfast will be provided for an additional five cents. Any passengers who have not yet purchased their tickets may see me now or in the morning at the Liahona.
“Thank you.”
Jed dropped off the barstool where he perched, plunking down two bits for his drink, rectangular like all of California’s coinage. He ambled in an intercepting course into Jones’s path.
“Captain Jones!” he called out. He’d done a bit of barking in his own time and knew how to make himself heard.
“Aye,” Jones answered, and his voice was crisp and pleasant. “How may I help you?”
The little boy hid behind his legs and peered out between them like they were prison bars. Jed made an effort to smile at the kid, knowing that on his homely mug, it could only come out as a grimace. Not that he cared about the kid’s feelings, but no sense pissing off the captain if it wasn’t necessary. The boy shuddered and closed his eyes tight, the ungrateful little shit.
“I’m paid up for the journey tomorrow morning, party of two,” Jed explained, and he waved their two dog-eared tickets as a sign of good faith. “I reckon I’d like to book two berths for tonight.” He shot his winningest grin at the boy, who only cringed further away from him. Good money after bad, Gramma would have said. “And two breakfasts, if you’ll vouch for your cook.”
“I’m the cook, boyo,” Jones said, “and St. David himself will vouch for my work.” He beamed a warm, trust-inspiring smile. “That’ll be thirty cents.”
“I reckon I can believe St. David,” Jed smiled back as friendly as he knew how, “whoever he might be.” He paid with six tarnished nickels, three of them American and three rectangles stamped with the California bear. The Captain dug a pencil stub out of his vest pocket and marked both of Jed’s tickets with the initials DJ and some obscure symbol.
“Bring your gear aboard whenever you want,” the Captain invited his passenger, and then extended down a friendly hand. “I’m Dan Jones.”
They shook. “I’m Jed Coltrane, Captain Jones.”
“Just Dan will do, when we’re not aboard. This is John Moses, my midshipman.” He gestured to the boy hiding behind his knee, who heard himself talked about and took a deep breath to swell out his chest. “Your first journey to the Great Salt Lake City, is it?”
Jed snorted. “Can’t be many folks as’ve been twice, can there? Thirty-odd years ago there weren’t nothing there but dust, buffalo, and Paiutes, and old Jim Bridger paddled around the Salt Lake in a boat sewn outta his own shirt. Hell, even twelve years ago, the Mormons was all living in tents and possum bellies.”
“Ah, but that was twelve years ago,” Dan chided the dwarf gently, “and travel gets easier every year.”
“You find easier travel brings better passengers?” Jed joked.
“A passenger who pays full fare is a fine passenger,” Dan Jones said, his eyes opening up and twinkling, “and it’s a very good passenger indeed who pays full fare but takes up only half the space.”
Jed was caught off guard by the jest and found himself laughing hard. “You’ll think better of it, Dan, don’t you worry,” he roared, “when you find out I eat three times my share!”
Dan Jones joined in the laughter. “Is that what brings you to the Kingdom, then, boyo? You’ve come to enter all our pie-eating contests?”
“No, I’ve come to bring you high culture,” Jed tried to say with a straight face, but instead had to wipe tears from his eyes.
“Oh, aye?”
Jed took a deep breath and managed to still his riotous laughter. “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I have. I’m with a traveling showman, feller name of Doctor Jamison Archibald. He’s a scholar of anquiquities … anquit …”
“Antiquities,” Jones suggested, his own laughter subsiding.
“Really old shit,” Jed finished. “Egyptian, mostly. We heard as there might could be some interest in it in the Great Salt Lake City.”
“Mummies?” whispered John Moses. He had inched around Jones’s leg and stood trembling, eyes wide open and round, both hands gripping Dan Jones by the knee. His voice was so soft that a man of normal height wouldn’t have heard it.
Jed nodded, then let his arms fall suddenly slack, held half-up at a forty-five degree angle in front of him, fingers drooping. Reaching deep into his bag of medicine show skills, he rolled his eyes back in their sockets until he could see nothing, and he knew the lad could only see the yellowish whites of the dwarf’s eyeballs.
“Muuuuummmmmieees …” he groaned, and lurched forward half a step.
John Moses yelped and jerked back behind Captain Jones, trembling. Both men laughed, though Jed thought that Jones’s laughter was more forced this time, for his benefit rather than out of real amusement.
“Maybe you’ll show us these mummies aboard the Liahona,” he suggested politely. “It’s not a long ride from Fort Bridger to Salt Lake, but there’s time enough to spread the word among the passengers in the morning and put on an exhibition in the afternoon.” He smiled, and Jed found it a shrewd and calculating expression. “If you were to charge, say, a nickel a head, I could take two cents of that and let you use the Liahona’s stateroom.”
Jed nodded as if he thought that were a good idea, and maybe, he reasoned with himself, maybe it was a good idea, from the point of view of maintaining their cover story. Of course, Poe would overthink the thing six ways to Sunday before agreeing to anything, so odds were it could never happen anyway.
“I’ll pass on the suggestion to Doctor Archibald,” he told Dan Jones, and the Captain nodded. “We’ll load in tonight, then, and I reckon I’ll most likely see you again at breakfast.”
They shook hands again.
“Boo!” Jed hissed at John Moses before he turned to go, and the boy looked like he might cry.
Absalom Fearnley-Standish hunched over the bar and wrote furiously in his Patent Metallic Note-Paper-Book, racing to record all of Dick Burton’s offenses of the evening before he forgot them. The morning, of course, had already filled a page. Now he had to add to it.
A lesser man might have surrendered, deciding that Burton had already seen through him and it was no longer worth continuing to write down the misdemeanors and felonies of the famous explorer. Absalom carried on, because he hoped Burton might yet come to believe in Absalom’s authority, because it was proper to make a record of material infractions, that was just good Foreign Office procedure, and also out of sheer bloody-minded pride.
That at least, he thought, we have in common.
Evening of 22 July 1859. Persists in calling me by woman’s name. Will not use correct form of address. Accuses me of cowardice, stupidity. Repeatedly disobeys direct orders. Questions my authority, accuses me of forgery. Commits likely crime (check Wyoming Territory statutes—burglary? trespass to chattels?).
He fortified himself with a sip of whisky from the shot glass in front of him.
Upon consideration, he scratched out the last item and sighed. Any crime Burton had committed, he’d committed, too, as an accomplice.
What are you doing here, Absalom? he asked himself. You’re thousands of miles from home, on a fool’s errand, and shackled to a baboon.
There is a war to avert, he reminded himself. Or if it cannot be averted, then the Empire’s interests must be protected. England, as everyone knows, expects that every man will do his duty.
And, of course, there is Abigail.
He looked up from his Note-Paper-Book and his eye fell on an Angel. She sat one-quarter-turn pivoted away from him, as did the man graced with her presence, so Absalom could see them both clearly.
He—he was nothing; another brute American, a surly-looking thug whose brushy mustache and gorilla eyebrows would have suited some redcoat in India but here looked overstated, an exagge
ration, a false and overly masculine swagger. Something in the back of his mind told him he should recognize the man, but he had no patience, either for the man’s face or for the nagging thought. He was focused entirely on … her—she was grace and refinement and elegance and beauty, all bound in the delightful package of perfect, freckle-kissed feminine charms under a crest of curly brown hair. Absalom thought he could smell her perfume, over all the human stinks of the saloon, from where he sat, twenty feet away.
“Why no,” the Angel was saying to the Brute, “I know shockingly little of the Mississippi River, really. I was carried across it as a small child and have not been back since. Please, tell me all about it.”
“Your first problem with the Mississippi, Miss Annie,” the Brute began to spout back in answer, “is distinguishing fact from fiction.”
“Does that make it different from any other place, really?” she asked.
“Some would say not,” the Brute admitted with a chuckle. “But when a man’s riding a river that’s so wide he can’t see either bank, I find that he becomes particularly susceptible to the pernicious influence of fable.”
“Tell me more,” the Angel urged him on.
“Consider the case of the famous Mike Fink,” the Brute mused. “You’ll have heard of Mike Fink, I take it?” He stubbed out his cigar. The cigar, anyhow, smelled sweetly civilized to Absalom, and he regretted its disappearance but the Brute immediately fumbled in the inner pocket of his coat for another.
“He was a boatman of some sort, was he not?” Clearly, distinctly, unmistakably … the Angel looked Absalom in the face and winked at him.
Absalom’s heart froze, and he was dimly aware of his Patent Metallic Note-Paper-Book falling to the saloon floor from nerveless hands. Some time passed, and some conversation between the Angel and her Brute, and all Absalom could hear was the rushing of his own blood and the outrageous hammering of his own heart.
