City of the Saints

by D. J. Butler

  “Sometimes with poppa. Or with Captain Jones.” The little boy seemed to be relaxing a bit. “It’s a good place to stop on a trip down to Provo or Nephi or St. George.”

  Tam brushed back one of the curtains and scanned the landscape around the hotel. “There’s nothing around here for miles and miles but buffalo chips, lad,” he disagreed. “This looks like a good place to get scalped by wild Indians.”

  “That, too,” John Moses agreed. “But you can do that just about any place in the Kingdom, or in the Wyoming Territory.”

  “Smart aleck,” Tam snorted, and restrained himself from cuffing the brat. “Look around and see if you can find anything in here to drink.”

  He settled in to squint out the window and think while John Moses opened and shut drawers and dug around under the bed. He could see a stable across the yard, with at least a couple of horses in it. Hanging offense or not, Tam didn’t object to stealing a horse when he needed it; of course, Sam would probably insist on paying for the beasts and paying too much, if it was at all possible. Either way, once he got Clemens out of his cell, the horses would give them a way back to the Great Salt Lake City.

  The springhouse was not quite out of sight at the bottom of the hill from where he watched. The two men in front of it stood alert, like they were used to standing watch or being bodyguards. He didn’t think he could sneak up on them, and he’d rather not attempt a direct frontal assault when the odds were two to one against him.

  “Nothing,” John Moses reported. “I could go down and ask the kitchen for a glass of water.”

  “I’ll wager you could, you little cog-rat,” Tam snapped. An idea tickled his brain, and he chewed on it for a minute. “We’ll go down together,” he finally said. “Only first, we’ve got to arrange a wee bit of a distraction.”

  He led John Moses around the second story of the hotel. Thanks be to merciful Brigit, the floors didn’t creak and Tam opened every door he found unlocked, collecting kerosene lanterns. In one room, he found a coat hanging from a wall peg and an unlocked valise.

  Tam helped himself to the half-full fifth of gin he found in the valise. John Moses, who had followed dutifully in his wake the entire time, said nothing and stared bullets of reproach at the Irishman.

  “Shut up, you,” Tam muttered, and dragged the boy back into the room they’d left.

  The steam-truck was still parked below them. It was a simple matter to slosh the kerosene from the bowls of all the lamps they’d collected over the wheelhouse and cargo hold of the truck, on the boiler and furnace in between and on both of its front tyres.

  Then a single lucifer tossed out the window sent the whole pile of bolts and rubber straight to hell.

  “Come on, then,” Tam said to the boy. “Let’s go downstairs and find ourselves a horse to borrow.” He sucked out half the gin for emphasis and felt a little better for it.

  “Okay.” John Moses followed.

  “Don’t forget I’m armed,” Tam reminded him. “And I’m a hard mean Irish fook, and Mother O’Shaughnessy taught me to hate brats.”

  “Good heavens, is it on fire?” Absalom hadn’t meant to ask the question out loud, but he realized that he had.

  Captain Dan Jones had looked positively murderous when the showman Poe had tugged at his elbow in the roiling crowds of the Tabernacle and asked for a ride south. He’d raised a big-knuckled fist like he might punch the Egyptiana peddler right in the face. Poe hadn’t flinched, but violence had looked imminent.

  But then Dick Burton had said, “We know where the boy John Moses is and we’re going to get him.”

  Jones had spun one hundred eighty degrees and raced his passengers back into the steam-truck hangar. Crew not already aboard had been left behind, which seemed to leave the Liahona half-manned but functional. The big steam-truck had chewed its way up the ramp and out onto the streets faster than Absalom would have thought possible. It helped that the entire population of the city seemed to be still inside the Tabernacle or milling about on its grounds.

  For an hour, the Liahona had rumbled south as the sun climbed and the day grew warmer (Absalom was no backwoodsman, but he knew that the sun crossed the sky from east to west; once he realized that the nearer wall of dusty blue and white mountains was to the east of the Great Salt Lake City, it was impossible to get disoriented) on a broad highway paved with tar macadam. They had quickly left the urban center behind, passing into a maze of irrigation canals and furrowed patches that had shortly given way to sagebrush, wild grasses, and prairie dogs. As they rode, Captain Jones’s truck-men had bolted the railguns to the Liahona’s deck again.

  Absalom felt as if he were living a penny dreadful.

  The valley narrowed to a broad bottleneck leading south into the next valley (“Provo,” Captain Jones had managed to mutter in response to Absalom’s query, “nothing to write home about.”) At that point, responding to a flag from Captain Jones, Master Sergeant Jackson and her three fellow Mexican soldiers, riding two each to a Strider, had turned off the road.

  Now as their vehicle nosed over the low, wide-shelving foothills supporting a tall gravel ridge, Absalom and others standing around the Liahona’s wheelhouse could finally see the Hot Springs Hotel and Brewery.

  And the hotel was burning.

  “’Tisn’t the hotel,” Abigail said at his shoulder, and for a moment he forgot that she was as brown and cracked as any Indian, not the milk-skinned girl he’d ridden ponies and played at conkers with as a child. “There’s a steam-truck parked beside it and the truck is on fire. Look,” she pointed. “There are men trying to put out the flames.”

  “That’s the kidnappers’ truck,” the dwarf grumbled. “And I reckon it’s the kidnappers as are playing fireman.” He continued to hold at the ready his strange stubby rifle with the drum attached. Burton had asked the dwarf about it en route, and gotten a crotchety glare for his trouble.

  “Stop the truck, Captain,” Abigail told him. She touched Poe’s dwarf gently on his arm. “And don’t shoot. This is my home. We don’t know for sure that those men are involved in the kidnapping. And there might be guests inside.”

  “Not to mention the boy,” Jones grunted assent, and under the persuasion of his experienced fingers the Liahona ground to a halt, halfway down the bluff above the hotel.

  “What should I do then, do you think?” the dwarf wanted to know. “Kiss the rotten dry gulchers?”

  “We’ll parley first. If we have to fight, we’ll try to get the drop on them. Follow my lead.” Absalom shuddered to hear Abigail talk so frankly and forcefully. She looked at Dan Jones. “Your men are armed?”

  Jones nodded. He left the engine idling, stayed on the deck and started passing instructions to his crewmen.

  Abigail slid down the ladder with a butterfly’s grace, putting one hand on each side rail and apparently letting the rest of her simply fall. Absalom hesitated, embarrassed to follow because he knew he would make a much more awkward figure.

  Burton pushed past him, and Poe, and the dwarf. They all seemed completely comfortable with the motion—the dwarf Coltrane only used one hand, since the other never relinquished the death grip it had on his strange firearm. The men all stalked across the sand towards the burning steam-truck in Abigail’s wake.

  Absalom noticed a second steam-truck parked behind the first and wondered just how many men there were at the Hot Springs Hotel and Brewery.

  Just as Absalom had mustered the will to throw himself down the ladder, Roxie Snow stepped past him. Like Abigail, she held the sides of the Liahona’s ladder and slid down with practiced grace, her crinoline skirt filling and billowing like a mushroom cap.

  Then Annie. At the top of the ladder she hesitated. “Maybe you should stay in the truck,” she suggested softly.

  Absalom’s blood boiled. “Egad,” he ground out stiffly. “What kind of man do you think I am?”

  She shrugged as she levered herself over the edge of the Liahona. “I think you’re cute.”

 
; Annie’s skirt was of a lighter fabric than Roxie’s, and it puffed up higher around her waist. If he’d already been on the ground, Absalom might have seen something scandalous. As it was, he saw the top side of a pretty pink bonnet, tied with ribbon, surrounded by the halo of a puffed-out pink skirt.

  “I’m not a coward.” Absalom gnashed his teeth, reached deep inside himself for something inspirational, and found the Harrow Song. “Follow up! Follow up! Follow up! Follow up!” he began.

  He saw Annie pull a pistol from inside her skirt.

  Singing, he grabbed the two rails of the ladder and threw himself over the edge and down, as the others had all done.

  He dropped—

  —it wasn’t so bad, air rushing around his ears—

  —his toe caught on a rung, halfway down—

  —and Absalom tumbled to the ground, hard.

  “Unnh,” he groaned.

  Bang!

  A shot. Absalom rolled to his feet and pulled his own gun from inside his frock coat, not the little four-shot derringer in his waistband, but the big revolver Abigail had given him at the Tabernacle. He heard Annie laughing and he resolved not to look at her. The action had begun, a fight was breaking out, his sister was in the thick of it, and he was going to save her. And show anyone who happened to be watching that he wasn’t a coward.

  He hoped Annie, in particular, was watching.

  Absalom charged. Around the track of the Liahona, past its nose and toward the hotel.

  “’Til the field ring again and again!” he sang.

  “Thank you for your attention!” he heard Abigail yelling as she drifted into view. “Now kindly tell me what in hell are you snakes … you gentlemen … doing on my property?”

  Absalom saw that she held her pistol overhead, pointed at the sky. He saw that there was no fighting, only Abigail yelling at the men in her home. But he saw those things just a moment too late, as he rushed past her and charged at the flaming steam-truck. He was already leveling his borrowed pistol at the nearest putative Danite, a heavy man in a wool jacket and shapeless felt hat, and he found he couldn’t stop himself.

  “And whose idea was it to light a truck on fire?” Annie demanded.

  Bang!

  Absalom had squeezed the trigger.

  The nincompoop Fearnley-Standish missed, of course. The heavy man he’d aimed at ducked, Fearnley-Standish didn’t adjust his aim in the slightest, and his bullet shattered the windscreen of the flaming steam-truck.

  Burton would have liked to have the luxury of time in which to throttle the whiny little weasel, but he didn’t, as the Danite with the shapeless hat who’d just been shot at took objection to his treatment. He grabbed the hilt of a knife tied to his thigh and Burton had to step in to protect the resources—however impoverished, dysfunctional and unworthy—of Her Majesty’s Foreign Office.

  He punched the Danite right across the jaw, dropping him like a sack of grain.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Guns went off all around Burton. Thank Krishna most people, even professional killers, were terrible shots. He drew his 1851 Navy and looked for an efficient target.

  The Danites fired and withdrew into the house. Burton saw a lean, bent, lazy-eyed rogue who appeared to be shouting orders at the others and took aim at him. Hickman, wasn’t that his name? Burton had already faced him down once, in the Shoshone stockade.

  Bang! Bang!

  “Helldammit!” The Danite grabbed at his arm where Burton had hit him and ducked out of sight into a doorway.

  “Burton, get down!” Poe shouted.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Burton saw that he was alone. Fearnley-Standish had flat-out turned and run, sprinting away into the desert. His other companions had retreated more modestly, into the hotel’s stable. Poe was waving an arm to summon him.

  “Like hell!” Burton shouted, and charged the porch. He knew it looked like recklessness but he didn’t want to give the Danites a chance to settle in and get comfortable. If Fearnley-Standish’s idiotic and premature assault had any virtue, it was that it had taken the enemy by surprise. To surrender that advantage now would be a foolish waste.

  A Danite ran across the porch to meet him, raising a thick-knotted club. Burton ducked under the man’s swing and pistol-whipped him across the face, sending him crashing onto the smooth boards.

  He really wished he had his sword with him.

  A man loomed into view through a window beside Burton, pumping a rifle in both hands. “Follow up!” Burton shouted. “I mean, follow me!”

  He jumped into the window.

  Crash!

  A cloud of flying glass shards came with Burton into a small sitting room and together they pounded into the rifleman, banging his head against the hardwood back of a sofa and then knocking him to the floor.

  “Get that animal!” Hickman yelled in a high-pitched, nasal voice, but his troops were in disarray. As Burton had hoped, surprise and initiative were still with him.

  The downed rifleman grunted and tried to raise his weapon to shoot at Burton. Burton pinned his wrist to the floor with a sharp stab of his heel, happy to be wearing heavy boots. He felt the wrist shatter, but didn’t hear it in the din.

  Bang!

  Burton spared a bullet for the Danite leader, forcing him to duck back again, out of the small parlor in which they stood. Three shots. Accounting for the empty chamber as well, Burton had two left. He’d be hard pressed to re-load under this fire.

  Another Danite charged at Burton, this man waving a cavalry saber. Burton preferred a lighter sword for fencing, frankly, an épée or a rapier, but better a saber than nothing.

  Bang!

  The swordsman went down in a gush of blood and a cloud of gunpowder smoke. Thank you, Mr. Sam Colt, Burton thought.

  Under his feet, the rifleman wiggled. Burton looked down in time to see the man swing with a short, ugly boot knife for Burton’s pelvis. He twisted and stepped aside—

  —and winced as the knife bit into his thigh.

  Damned Danite.

  The man lost his grip on the knife, stuck fast in Burton’s leg, and moved to bring his rifle up again.

  Bang!

  The thirty-six caliber bullet from the 1851 Navy left a neat round hole in the man’s forehead and a quickly spreading pool of blood under his skull.

  Last bullet, Burton thought. Just in time.

  He holstered his Colt and scooped up the rifle in one hand. It was a lever action rifle, a so-called Volcano, and an innovative weapon with which Burton was not very familiar. He knew it fired exotic bullets called Rocket Balls, each bullet with its own gunpowder charge built right in, which it chambered by the action of its famous lever. He had no idea how many shots it held, or how many he had left. Burton was a pistoleer and a swordsman and not much for rifles, other than for hunting game.

  He heard shouting as he bent to pick up the saber. He was alone with two dead men in the little parlor, but two different hallways led out of the room and he heard boots and saw the shadowy shapes of men down both of them.

  For a second, in a lit space at the far end of one of the hallways, he saw two faces he knew.

  A less observant man might have missed them, but Burton had sharp eyes and a mind for detail. It came, he knew, from memorizing so many grammatical tables in so many different languages. He knew the man’s face from the calotype that the Pinkerton detectives had been flashing around Bridger’s Saloon, and also from the Shoshone stockade. He recognized the little boy, of course, from the Liahona.

  They were Seamus McNamara, the wanted man, Sam Clemens’s aide, and Captain Jones’s little midshipman, John Moses.

  In the split second in which Burton saw them, they disappeared from view. They were beyond the Danite mob, not part of the Danites, and they looked like they were headed outside. McNamara dragged the boy by the scruff of his neck.

  “Kill that son of a bitch!” Burton heard Hickman squeal, and men charged into the room.

  He didn’t wait
for their attack. He turned and threw himself out another window and back onto the porch. Glass fell around him and with him and he rolled to one side to get away from the window.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Bullets flew out of the hotel in his direction, but the air was full of gunfire from all sides. Burton saw gunpowder plumes in the open doors of the stable and from the deck of the Liahona and here and there from behind trees and rocks.

  Rama’s teeth, his leg hurt, but Burton had no time for it. He set the sword beside him on the porch, pumped the Volcano, satisfied to hear the snicker-snack of a shell sliding into the chamber, and pointed it back the way he’d come.

  The first Danite jumped out the window—

  —Bang!

  Burton shot him in the chest. As he flailed and staggered back, Burton pumped the lever and shot him again.

  Bang!

  Charming weapon, Burton thought. He could get used to a lever-action rifle.

  Shoot to kill, that was the secret. Not to injure, or frighten. Don’t imagine your enemy being hit or scared and surrendering because you shot at him—imagine him taking your bullet in his body and dying an instant death.

  Most men were useless in a firefight because secretly they didn’t want to kill the other fellow. In a war, most soldiers secretly fired over their enemies’ heads for the same reason. In their heart of hearts, they objected to the killing. They weren’t sissies or cowards, they were just civilized men.

  Richard Burton was not really a civilized man and he had no such compunction. He’d survived a spear to the head and had himself circumcised as a grown man. He’d been in great pain and close to his own death so many times that the fear, pain, and death of other men were nothing extraordinary to him, or even troublesome.

  He dragged himself to his feet.

  An arm protruded out the window to shoot at him blind.

  Bang!

  Standing, he was easily able to step out of the way of the bullet and then smash the fingers of the gun hand with the butt of his stolen rifle.