by D. J. Butler
“Well then, I reckon this is a standoff,” Hickman suggested.
“I disagree,” Burton answered in a deep deadpan.
Absently, Absalom noticed that the gypsy had stopped coughing. He now stood upright and was holding a cloth to his mouth.
“I might could shoot your boy, here,” the Deseret man pointed out.
“You do me a favor if you shoot him,” Burton snarled. “And then I shoot you, so I’ve done my duty to the Queen and am doubly happy. Not only that, but I go to the Geographical Society and regale my colleagues with tales of my adventure killing genuine Western outlaws. I take your bullet-punched skull along as an exhibit, and then I put you on my mantel. I win three times over. From my point of view, the best thing you could possibly do right now would be to shoot Abby here.”
“Abigail!” Absalom cried out indignantly, and then realized what he’d said. “I mean Absalom! My name is Absalom Fearnley-Standish, blast you all!” He was torn between feeling gratitude for Burton’s intervention and fear that Burton might mean exactly what he said.
“My friend might could shoot you, though,” Hickman continued, nodding in Lee’s direction. Lee kept his hands clearly off his pistol grips, but they were close enough, Absalom thought nervously, that he could grab them and shoot quickly. He wondered if he were about to see a real display of Western quick-draw gunfighting. He might enjoy that, he thought idiotically, if it didn’t result in his own death.
Lee, though, wasn’t focusing on the confrontation in front of him. Instead, he seemed frozen in place, his hands hovering in place, his gaze fixed on Doctor Archibald, who still held his handkerchief before his mouth with one hand and with the other seemed to be making circular gestures in front of the cloth.
Burton, in any case, paid not the slightest attention to Lee.
The explorer shrugged. “I’ll take the risk.”
Hickman squinted, his face twitching slightly.
“You got my back, ain’t you, John?” he called out.
To Absalom’s surprise, Lee didn’t answer. He swayed slightly on his feet and Absalom wondered if he’d been drinking. He still stood staring at the man called Poe and his white handkerchief.
“Lee?” Hickman risked a split-second glance in his friend’s direction.
Lee fell forward headlong, crashing full-length into the dirt.
“Lee!” Hickman shouted. The slight trembling of his pistol hand made Absalom feel very nervous.
“Your friend’s unwell,” Burton observed with a sneer.
Absalom was beginning to take heart and felt enough bravado to pile on.
“Perhaps he’s been drinking,” he suggested.
“No,” Poe corrected them, carefully folding the white cloth—which, Absalom now thought, looked rather large for a handkerchief, and wasn’t there writing on it?—and putting it away in his coat pocket. “He’s fallen asleep. The excitement was too much for him.”
“Helldammit!” shouted Hickman. His nostrils flared, he bared yellow-brown teeth, and his eyes jumped back and forth between Burton and Absalom.
“It isn’t my first choice, but I’m willing to lower my gun if you lower yours,” Burton suggested in a cold, gravelly tone. “And I suspect that Her Majesty would prefer that outcome, all in all.”
“You first,” said Hickman.
“Like hell.”
“I ain’t gonna lower my gun,” Hickman insisted.
“Sure you will,” interjected a new voice. “You both will, or my Irishman here will plug you full of holes.”
Absalom turned, and nearly jumped out of his skin. It was the brush-mustachioed Brute who spoke, chewing his words out around the stub of an unlit, partly-smoked cigar. To his side was a bony, red-haired, beak-nosed man in a long coat and porkpie hat, who held a long brass repeater rifle to his shoulder in shooting position, aimed straight at Hickman. Behind them, with long Brunel rifles pointed forward, came four Shoshone braves. To the side stood Chief Pocatello, looking relaxed with his arms folded over his chest.
“We’ll all shoot you, Bill,” Pocatello said, his eyes twinkling merrily. “Put it back in the holster.”
Burton immediately complied, his movement crisp and salute-like. The man was an ape, but to his credit and Absalom’s relief, he was an East India Company ape.
Hickman dawdled and looked sulky as he put his gun away.
“It ain’t like you to abandon a friend, Chief,” he whined. “You shouldn’t ought to turn your back on a man.”
“Or a snake,” Burton added.
“I just don’t want any shooting, Bill,” Chief Pocatello said. “We’ll put Lee over his saddle for you. Why don’t you take him back to the Fort?”
Bill Hickman whimpered like a kicked dog and he shot Absalom a venomous glare, but he took the offered help and trudged for the gate with a couple of Shoshone braves, dragging John Lee between them.
“That was some luck, wasn’t it?” Absalom commented to the mysterious Poe, who only arched his eyebrows and pursed his lips in return.
“You’re Sam Clemens,” Burton said to the brush-faced Brute. Absalom could have kicked himself for not recognizing the man in the Saloon.
“And you’re the skunk that punched holes in my boiler pipes,” Clemens batted back. “Name’s Burton, I understand.”
“True,” Burton acknowledged, “and yes.”
Absalom felt his throat constricting. “I … I …” he stammered.
“Don’t you worry your pretty girlish Etonian head about it, you bloody toff.” Clemens’s Henry-armed companion spoke in an Irish brogue. “We know it wasn’t you.”
“Harrovian,” Absalom murmured defensively.
“Same fookin’ thing.” The Irishman spat on the ground.
“What do you want?” Burton pressed Sam Clemens, his face hard.
Clemens sighed and looked wistful. “Mostly,” he said, “I want to gloat. Will it ease your feelings if I dress my gloating up in homespun philosophy?”
“It might,” Burton allowed.
Clemens gnawed on his stub and reflected. “I could tell you that cheaters never prosper,” he said, “but if you know anything about the United States Congress, you’ll know that’s a crock of manure.”
“What goes around, comes around,” Burton offered coolly.
Clemens shook his head dismissively. “Too Eastern, too much symmetry, too much yin-this-and-yang-the-other-thing. What if I just leave it at never go up against a riverboat man when his smokestack is on the line? It isn’t exactly pithy, but it’s got a certain sly innuendo about it and it resonates.”
“I suppose your Shoshone friends will hold us here while you get a head start,” Burton said grimly, and Absalom’s heart sank at the prospect of the mission’s failure. Well, he thought, at least he could still find his sister.
“Of course,” Clemens admitted. “Also, I’m going to steal all your coal.”
Not long after the gray pre-dawn sky over the pit transitioned to a bright morning blue, the Shoshone raised the portcullis and let out the crew and passengers of the Liahona. Braves stood at the mouth of the tunnel to meet their former prisoners as they were disgorged, cheerfully returning weapons and making assurances that nothing on board the truck had been disturbed. Captain Jones stormed out first, yelling “John Moses! John Moses!” before he was halfway across the compound towards his idling vehicle.
Poe let himself drift at the back of the crowd. He exercised all his considerable powers of inconspicuousness and stealth, but he knew it was wasted effort. Roxie had seen him without his beard and surely she had recognized him as easily as he had recognized her. His only hope, and it was a slim one, was that she still believed him to be dead and that her belief was strong enough to trump the evidence of her own eyes. She had tried to kill him in Baltimore, after all—trickster, liar, seductress, poisoner—and, at the Army’s instruction—at Robert’s instruction—he had let her believe she had succeeded. She almost had. He had died to the world, then, had ceased to
be Edgar Allan Poe or Edgar or Ed to almost every human being he talked to, had assumed a series of false identities, many even nameless, in pursuit of the various missions the Army had given him.
For many years at a stretch, the only human being who had known he was alive and known his real name, Poe’s only source of genuine human contact, much less kindness, had been his case officer, Robert Lee.
No, he could hope she thought he was dead, but he knew better. He had seen the surprise register on her face when that thug Hickman had pierced his disguise and he had noted how thoroughly she had avoided him thereafter. She was too good to ever give the appearance of avoiding him, but the fact remained that Hickman had shouted his name and she hadn’t met his eyes or stood close to him since. Perhaps she didn’t trust herself not to reveal her knowledge or perhaps she was simply afraid that Poe might seek an opportunity to take his well-deserved revenge.
Either way, she knew, and that put him and all his objectives at risk.
For that matter, Hickman and Lee knew. Who were they and where did they get their information?
As he let Roxie and other passengers flush out through the tunnel ahead of him, he pondered again the questions that had been running through his head for hours. What did Brigham Young want? What did Orson Pratt want? What did Roxie want? Did her presence on the Liahona indicate that Young knew of Poe’s mission and wanted it thwarted? Or did it mean that Roxie knew Poe was alive and was after him again? Or was it mere coincidence? Was she still Young’s agent? Was she Pratt’s?
And where was Coltrane? Obviously, the dwarf had failed in his errand, since Roxie was alive and well. Had she killed or disabled him somehow? But she had been at the show, and then on the Liahona’s deck. Was the young high-kicking woman a professional associate of Roxie’s—might she have defeated Poe’s dwarf?
He watched the young woman now, careful not to drift too close to her. The English diplomat, Fearnley-Standish, was chattering to her frantically, spewing out a torrent of words. She tolerated his walking beside her and when he reached out to hold her hand, she squeezed his fingers once, briefly, before letting them go. Her face was the iron visage of a nymph and she looked very much in command of the conversation and strong, and Poe could imagine her possessing undisclosed and dangerous skills. She might very well have done Coltrane in.
Poe could carry out his mission without the dwarf, assuming Hunley’s devices were all still intact, and in particular the ones he had to consign to the Madman. He patted the whistle around his neck to be sure he still had that, at least. He couldn’t be so conspicuous as to rush out to the Liahona first, but he did need to assure himself that he still had his other tools.
And he had to get to the Great Salt Lake City as fast as possible.
Damn Samuel Clemens.
When Poe reached the Liahona he could see its Captain and crew on board, on the deck, and through the few portholes, searching furiously for their missing midshipman. “John Moses!” Poe heard the Welshman shout, over and over but to no avail.
A crowd of the truck’s passengers mobbed beside one of its enormous tracks, facing off against the old Shoshone chief. Pocatello stood to face their irate stares with his arms crossed over his chest in casual unconcern. The mob carried weapons and if Pocatello had been a lone man he might have had to fear for his life, but half a dozen braves stood about him, all armed to the teeth, and of course the rocky bluff above the compound was a glowering hedgehog of snipers. Roxie was not in sight—likely she had slipped aboard the Liahona, to avoid Poe’s presence yet again, and now her young companion followed her.
“Did you leave us enough coal to get to the Great Salt Lake City?” cried out a long-faced Swede, despair in his voice.
Pocatello shrugged. “I gave Sam Clemens a free run at the truck’s coal room. I don’t know how much he took, but he seemed anxious to be sure he got there ahead of you, so my guess is that he didn’t leave you nearly enough.”
“Have you no shame, sir?” demanded one of the spinsters to whom Poe had paid special attention during the previous night’s show.
“No, ma’am,” Pocatello acknowledged, “I do not. I have a people to lead and feed and protect and this was purely a business transaction in my people’s interest. Don’t worry, ma’am, your Captain Jones is a resourceful man and I expect you’ll make it down into the Valley soon enough. In the meantime, if you’re hungry, we have food we can share … for a reasonable price.”
He grinned.
Poe thought he saw where this conversation was going, and wanted to cut it short. He had seen the Jim Smiley and he doubted that it was large enough to carry away all the Liahona’s coal, even if it had stuffed its every compartment full to overflowing.
With another quick glance around to be sure he saw neither Roxie nor the young woman he suspected of being her assistant, he raised his voice to pose a question to the Shoshone chief. “I see that you’re a commercially sophisticated man, Chief,” he said. “Is there anything else you might condescend to let us have for a price? Anything necessary for the operation of a steam-truck, say?”
The Chief batted his eyes innocently and Poe knew he had guessed correctly. “I suppose I might,” he conceded. “Did you have anything specific in mind?”
“Coal, for instance?”
Chief Pocatello’s grin broadened. “Why yes,” he said, “I believe I do have some coal I might be able to sell to you. And I’m no expert, but I guess it’s probably just the right kind for the Liahona’s boiler.”
“Hell and begorra,” Tam exclaimed under his breath, inaudible over the rumble of the steam-truck’s operation and the faint rattle of the strapped-down dishes in their various shelves and cupboards, “there’s a kid aboard.”
He stared at the child, a round-faced little boy overwhelmed by a man’s large pea coat, spilling out of the pots and pans cabinet beneath the galley counter. The boy stared back, with big eyes—and didn’t every one of Mother O’Shaughnessy’s children have big eyes, didn’t all kids have big eyes? Don’t get all sentimental, me boy.
“I only wanted a fresh bottle,” Tam muttered, “and Brigit help me if there isn’t a three-year-old kid where the whisky’s supposed to be.”
“Four,” said the boy, and then his eyes flickered to the space behind Tam.
Tam hadn’t survived his life of dedicated misbehavior by being slow or even by mere good luck. He saw the flick of the boy’s eyes and heard a very faint creaking sound, without consciously formulating any idea of what it might mean, he spun about and threw himself backward, at the same time whipping from its holster, the strange gun he’d stolen from the dead Pinkerton and pointing it at whatever might be behind his back—and found himself staring down the barrel of an identical pistol, aimed by a grimacing, hairy-knuckled, downright monkeylike bastard of a dwarf (and isn’t every midget half a monkey, really?) who hung by the strength of one arm out of the china cupboard.
Tam saw realization dawn in the dwarf’s eyes at the same moment that he himself understood what had happened to the second Pinkerton.
“Jebus!” barked the dwarf.
“I hope you wiped your tiny little arse before you climbed in there,” Tam sneered. “Sam’s particular about liking all of his food without monkey shite in it.”
They both jumped—
—both fired—
—zing! zing!—
—both missed.
They both kept moving. Tam whirled clockwise on his good leg in the small galley and the bloody-damn-hell monkeydwarf sprang from one cupboard to another and then onto the covered (and therefore not unbearably hot) steam heater that served as cooker of all meals served aboard the Jim Smiley, both of them firing all the while.
The damned little monkey moved like a butterfly, flitting back and forth like he knew just where each bullet was going to go, and Tam could barely see him move, much less hit him. Like some surreal dream, the guns only zinged! demurely, but crockery burst in fountains of ceramic splinters and bullets whin
ed off the iron walls of the galley, chewing through the wooden cabinets and cupboards like termites pumped full of coffee.
The air filled with dust.
“Brigit!” The Irishman choked as a bullet hit him in his left arm. That was the second bullet he’d taken in forty-eight hours. His booted feet slipped, scrabbled for a grip among the rubble on the galley floor, and then brought him down with a heavy thud!
The midget slammed his shoulder blades against a corner of the galley, his little feet on a varnished sideboard, and raised his silenced gun to take aim at Tam again.
“I’ll kill the boy!” Tam roared, and the dwarf stopped. Tam lay on his back, bleeding and battered, and he pointed his pistol at the little boy. It was a bluff and a gamble and the dwarf might call it, but Tam had no other choice. If the dwarf and the boy were together and the dwarf cared about the boy, Tam just might survive.
The midget hesitated.
“I’ll fookin’ do it!” Tam insisted, cursing and shaking the pistol for emphasis. “I killed the Pinkerton, you know I did, and I’ll by damn kill the boy, too!”
The dwarf raised his gun, but slowly, hesitating.
The little boy burst into tears.
Saint Anthony help me, this is it, Tam thought desperately. “Drop the bloody gun, monkey!” he shouted, trying to keep the fear out of his voice.
The dwarf gritted his teeth, looked at the sobbing child, and tossed his pistol to the floor.
Tam felt a wave of relief flow through his whole body.
He stood up slowly, keeping his pistol carefully trained on the boy as he shook dust and china chips out of his clothing. He kept his eyes on the dwarf, still perched on the countertop, as he crouched to pick up the second Pinkerton gun, tucking it into his belt.
“Praise Judas Iscariot and all the bloody saints,” he sighed, “you’re a reasonable little gargoyle. I thought for a moment there that I’d robbed my last bank.”
Squinting down the barrel of his gun at the weeping boy, he pulled the trigger.
Click.
“See that?” he laughed. “Empty. I’se just about shitting my trousers that you were going to shoot me again.”
