by D. J. Butler
“Dammit!” The attacker dropped his pistol and yanked his hand back inside. Burton was sure he’d broken at least two fingers, and hopefully more.
Burton heard footsteps on the porch roof overhead. He stooped, picked up the abandoned pistol, and emptied it into the roof. Yells of surprise and pain and the thud of a body hitting the shingles rewarded his efforts. Burton threw aside the empty pistol and retreated back around the porch, away from the parlor.
Once he had his back against some solid wood and a moment in which no one was shooting specifically at him, Burton began reloading his 1851 Navy. As his fingers went through the practiced motions of pouring in the powder and then thumbing in bullets and the little copper percussion caps, he looked for Captain Jones.
He spotted the man’s blue hat on the Liahona’s deck. Jones and his truck-men lay on their bellies with rifles aimed and firing at the hotel. They were shielded from the Danites’ return fire by the body of the big steam-truck and their elevated position made their shots devastating. Even the Danite sharpshooters in the second story windows had to fire upward to get at Jones and his men.
No wonder they’d had a hard time mounting an effective counterattack to Burton’s charge. They were under serious pressure on other fronts.
“Jones!” Burton yelled.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Captain Jones!”
He wanted to tell Jones about the boy but he couldn’t make himself heard over the gunfire. Burton considered briefly the possibility of running over to the steam-truck, but only briefly.
In the crossfire, he’d be cut to pieces.
Best to win the gunfight first.
Burton snapped in the final cap, holstered the 1851 Navy again and took a closer look at the Volcano. He thought the bullets were loaded into a magazine that was built into the gun’s muzzle, somehow, but he wasn’t sure and he didn’t want to fiddle with it now. He’d just shoot until the rifle was empty, then switch weapons.
He slid the saber into his belt. It was awkward, but it would do.
Then Burton moved around the back of the hotel, looking for another window to jump through.
“There’s your Irishman,” Poe said.
“Where?” Coltrane peered out the open stable door, keeping his head low to the ground. Clemens’s Irish thug trotted down the slope on the far side of the hotel, dragging the little boy behind him. They didn’t look like they were being pursued—the Danites in the hotel had all their attention focused on their attackers.
Coltrane lunged forward, like an involuntary reflex, and Poe caught him.
“He’s got the kid,” Coltrane objected.
The two of them crouched low in the stable, firing occasionally out the door with pistols they’d borrowed from Captain Jones. Coltrane hadn’t yet fired his strange machine-gun, he’d said because it wasn’t very accurate and he wanted to wait until he had a close shot. Elsewhere in the stable, the three women fired pistols at the big house into which Richard Burton had disappeared.
“You’ll be diced,” Poe told him, “puréed.”
Coltrane squinted through the buzzing hail of bullets. “Yeah, it looks dicey, alright,” he agreed. “What’s the pure-aid you’re talking about?”
“I mean you’ll be mowed down instantly.”
Bullets buzzed and snapped and whined about them, kicking up straw and dust and wood splinters where they hit.
Coltrane flared his nostrils and looked frustrated. “But the whole damn reason I came here was to save that kid.”
“Also, we have a mission,” Poe reminded him.
“Yeah?” Coltrane asked, squinting at Poe. “What’s the mission now, boss? Far as I can tell, we’re here to rescue the enemy, Sam Clemens.”
“Brigham Young isn’t the enemy,” Poe pointed out, but he knew it was weak. “I’m not persuaded that Sam Clemens is necessarily the enemy, either. War may yet be avoided, and that is in everyone’s interest.”
“Jebus.” Coltrane shook his head. “War’s here, boss. Duck, before it gets you.”
“Something nefarious is happening in the Kingdom,” Poe agreed, “but the Union may yet be saved.”
“How about Eliza Snow over there?” Coltrane jerked a shoulder in her direction. “Are you thinking that she’s the enemy?”
Poe looked at Roxie. She leaned her beautiful body against a heavy timber and poured fire across the open yard at the Danites.
Bullets sang in a cloud all about them.
Poe sighed. He didn’t know whether she was the enemy or not.
“I have an idea,” he said. The whistle hanging around his neck felt like a saving crucifix.
“To end the firefight?” the dwarf asked. “Or to avoid the war?”
“To end the shooting and rescue the boy,” Poe elaborated, ignoring the dwarf’s pointed quip. “But I need to get to the Liahona. Can you lay down suppressing fire for me with that invention?”
Jed Coltrane laid aside his borrowed pistol and picked up Mr. Browning’s machine-gun. “You want some impressive fire? I reckon I got the means to lay down some fire as impressive as anyone’s ever seen in the Kingdom.” He grinned.
“I’ll count down from three,” Poe instructed him. “On zero, you shoot.” He tucked his own pistol into his coat pocket, shifted his posture a bit, and sighted out another door. The run to the Liahona wasn’t far, maybe only a hundred feet, but it was a hundred feet of absolutely exposed bare earth and Poe didn’t want to die at the hands of some vitamin-deficient desert-dwelling cretin for the sake of that stretch.
Fortunately, the Liahona was turned so that its ladder faced ever-so-slightly away from the hotel.
“Three,” he said calmly. He said it a little louder than he’d meant to and the women’s heads all turned in his direction. He breathed in deeply but gently, trying to fill his lungs with as much air as he could without setting off a coughing fit.
Coltrane checked the ammunition drum of his gun.
“What are you fools planning over there?” Roxie asked.
“Two.”
Coltrane planted the gun’s stock firmly under his arm and stood, ready to go. Bullets whined and snarled through the doors of the stable.
“Poe?” Roxie’s voice sounded concerned. Damn her for the ambiguity, for the unsoundable, immeasurable, inextricably tangled mess she had made of his heart.
“One.”
Coltrane spat on the floor. “Kidnapping sons of bitches,” he muttered.
“Poe, I love you,” Roxie said.
“Zero.”
Poe hesitated a moment, deliberately.
Coltrane stepped into the open door and squeezed the trigger on his gun. Roxie’s words and the sudden explosion of noise almost stunned Poe into immobility—
—rat-rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!—
—but not quite.
Poe sprinted.
He didn’t waste time or effort looking to see what was happening to the hotel, but he heard Danites yelling, and their shooting ceased, and the air was shredded by the sound of every window in the big house shattering at the same moment. Coltrane’s borrowed gun sounded like an army of roaring beavers chewing the hotel to pieces.
“Take that, you whoreson kid-stealers!” Coltrane shouted, and then Poe was safe, behind the Liahona.
The more normal gunfire resumed as he dragged his body up the ladder and threw himself onto his belly on its deck. Poe coughed deeply, almost choking on the thick ball of blood and phlegm that came up and that he spat over the side. He wiped his mouth on his coat sleeve like any barbarian and when he looked up he found himself staring into the face of Captain Dan Jones.
“Welcome aboard!” Jones shouted. “That’s an impressive weapon your friend has, boyo, but I can’t say I know what you’re up to!”
Poe pointed to where he could just see the Irishman and the boy, disappearing into the weeds at the bottom of the hotel’s long yard. “I’ve got something in the hold,” he explained. “Something to put an end to
the fight, so we can get the boy.”
Captain Jones’s face lit up into a snarl as he saw the child. “To hell with the hold, Mr. Jamison! I’ve got something in the wheelhouse.” He gripped Poe’s shoulder in solidarity. “Hold on!”
Jones scrambled on hands and knees into the Liahona’s wheelhouse, under the chest-high scythe of whizzing Danite bullets. Poe wondered if he was about to fire the railguns at the Danites, but they didn’t seem to be very accurate, especially at short range. All he would do is punch holes in the hotel, which was already in bad shape.
Then Poe realized what Jones was up to, and wrapped his arms around the base of the nearest Franklin Pole.
The Liahona groaned as she shifted into gear, steam and coal smoke exploded out her tailpipes, and she lurched into forward motion—
—Poe held on—
—he heard a ragged cheer from the stable—
—then the Liahona plowed into the Hot Springs Hotel and Brewery.
The dusty blue sky above and around Poe exploded into timber fragments and shattered furniture. There was ceiling above him, and then there wasn’t, and then there was again. Startled Danites on the second story of the hotel turned to shoot at the Liahona as it moved through them.
Poe drew his pistol and gamely returned fire, along with several of the truck-men, but the gun battle was brief. The Danites disappeared, flying away into oblivion as the hotel fell asunder under their feet. Poe felt tired and rattled and his lung felt like a stinking swamp of death. He struggled up the Franklin Pole to his feet, peering through the exploding and collapsing walls around him to try to see the Irishman and the boy.
Or Roxie.
Had she said “I love you” to him?
CLANG-NG-NG-NG!
The Liahona crashed to a stop and Poe fell to the deck, hard, and skidded.
His head spun. Steam billowed up around him. Had the Liahona ruptured its boiler? he wondered. But it seemed like there was too much steam for that.
Screaming.
Poe reeled to his feet, vision still swimming.
Half the hotel was gone, reduced to a pile of crushed matchsticks beneath the immense treads of Captain Dan Jones’s steam-truck. The portion that still stood wobbled like a drunkard about to finish his evening badly. Jones and his sailors lay about on the deck of the vehicle, groaning, nursing injuries, and helping each other to their feet.
The Liahona puffed out steam and smoke, but it wasn’t moving. Poe risked a look over the side, and saw that the treads were still. He looked at the ladder to make sure there weren’t Danites coming up the side, then made his way forward to the wheelhouse.
“What happened?” he asked the truck’s Captain.
Jones shook his head and staggered to his feet. He carefully armed himself with a long pistol from a rack above the inside of the wheelhouse door before answering. “I don’t know, boyo. I’m pretty sure I was aimed straight when we hit the hotel, but once we were inside, the wheel jumped and everything got muddled.”
Poe walked with Captain Jones to the front of the steam-truck. They moved carefully, watching for attackers, but the only living Danites they saw were running down, out, and away from the hotel. Around the front of the Liahona rose a veil of steam.
“The water tank,” Jones realized. “I hit the water tank.”
“I think your steam-truck may be in grave need of a little maintenance,” Poe advised him.
Poe heard feet on the ladder and braced himself with his pistol. It was Roxie and he put his pistol away.
“Have you seen Burton?” he asked.
She wrapped her arms around him.
“I haven’t seen him since he went into the hotel,” he finished lamely.
“Burton will be fine,” she assured him.
“He could be dead.”
“Then Old Scratch and his minions have their hands full right now. Annie and the English girl are looking for the other Englishman now. And your dwarf is running down the hill after the little boy.”
“I’d better go help him,” Poe suggested, but he didn’t move.
“Yes, you’d better,” she agreed. She didn’t move, either. She smiled elegantly, with poise and grace.
“Trouble,” Poe heard Dan Jones mutter in his ear.
“Aren’t they always?” Poe asked. He felt warm and calm and blissful. Somewhere in this bouquet of roses, he thought, there must be a thorn that would draw his blood. For the moment, he was content to smell the flowers.
“I don’t mean her,” Jones snorted. “I mean them.”
Poe disengaged and looked up to see what Jones was pointing at.
Behind the Liahona, on the highway above the Hot Springs Hotel and Brewery, stood perhaps twenty-five dusty brass clocksprung horses. Their riders wore gray uniforms now and had pistols drawn.
They looked very serious.
The Third Virginia Cavalry.
“Dammit,” Poe cursed. “The cavalry’s here.”
***
Part the Third
Timpanogos
***
Chapter Eleven
“Shoulda got a knife,” Jed Coltrane grunted to himself as he sprinted.
A throwing knife in particular would have been perfect but anything with a blade would have been enough to kill Sam Clemens’s thug. Even a pistol would have done nicely, or a carbine with decent aim. But the aim on the machine-gun wasn’t good enough to hit the wiry Irishman. Not without hitting the boy, too.
Not without getting a lot closer.
When the hotel had collapsed, O’Shaughnessy had looked back, once. Jed had watched him assess the situation from his perch inside the stable door, then turn and shuffle quicker down the hill. Jed couldn’t see where the Irishman was headed, other than toward the weeds and scrub oak at the bottom of the long yard. For once, he wished he were a taller man, with a taller man’s vantage point on the situation.
No amount of wishing would make him grow an inch, though.
So he sprinted down the hill, trying his best not to be heard.
He knew there was a perfectly good question that was dying to be asked, which went something like, Jed Coltrane, are you out of your damned mind? What are you doing risking your life for this kid, and he ain’t even yours?
He didn’t ask the question, though. Once he started asking questions like that, it seemed to him that there wouldn’t be any point to any of it. If he couldn’t save an innocent little kid, what was the point of trying to stop wars anyway? Or win them, for that matter.
So he just ran.
Jed crested the slope of the yard enough to see the little two-roomed springhouse at the bottom of the hill just as the Irishman reached it. Two men in black coats stood before the building, holding rifles in front of their chests and looking nervous.
O’Shaughnessy looked up the hill and pointed at the hotel.
I’m spotted, Jed thought, but he kept running.
The two men looked up, saw Jed and raised their rifles. The dwarf threw himself onto his belly, fumbling to raise the machine-gun into attack position—
—but the Irishman drew his weapon first, the silent gun of the Pinkertons—
—and shot both the springhouse guards in the backs of their heads, zip! zip!, as neat as you please. They fell, pink clouds drifting around their faces.
Jed fired, aiming high.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
A cloud of black smoke from the gun swallowed Jed, filling his nostrils with the brimstone reek of hell and death.
The bird-headed thug ducked, crouched, and picked up John Moses.
Jed stopped firing. “Damn!” he cursed, and scrambled forward down the hill, half crawling, half tumbling, fighting not to lose his grip on Jonathan Browning’s gun.
The Irishman raised his firearm again and shot at the springhouse door.
Zip! Clang!
A shattered padlock fell to the ground.
O’Shaughnessy stepped around behind the corner of the springhouse, still holding
John Moses in front of him like a shield. “Stay inside, Sam!” he shouted, and fired again at Jed.
Bullets whipped through the tall yellow grass around the dwarf. So that’s the way of it, he thought. Well, if the Irishman was concerned about Sam Clemens, that gave Jed Coltrane a little lever to pull on.
He pointed the machine-gun at the springhouse and squeezed the trigger until the drum was empty and the hammer clicked on an empty chamber.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-click!
Smoke enveloped him as he fired. Wood chips and sawdust sprang off the rough log exterior of the springhouse like it was the inside of a sawmill.
“Die, Yankee!” Jed hollered. There, he thought smugly. That ought to flush the ugly Irishman out.
“No!” O’Shaughnessy screamed, and charged forward, knocking the boy John Moses aside as he did so.
Jed and O’Shaughnessy were ten yards apart and Jed realized his miscalculation—
—the Irish thug pointed his gun at the dwarf and squeezed the trigger—
—click.
Both men froze.
Jed’s gun was empty, but O’Shaughnessy might not know it. He raised it to his chest, meaning to bluff—
—the Irishman dropped his pistol and slapped his hand down at his thigh—
—on an empty holster.
“Fookin’ hell!” he shouted, and whirled around to face the boy John Moses.
John Moses stood calmly, holding the silenced pistol in both hands, pointing it at the Irishman.
“Good job, kid!” Jed shouted. “Give it up, you stupid Mick!”
O’Shaughnessy bolted.
He sprang across the stream, coat flapping out behind him like a peacock’s tail, and crashed into a thicket of scrub oak trees.
“Shit,” Jed grumbled. He sprinted to the springhouse. “Give me the gun, John Moses.”
John Moses shook his head and pointed the Maxim at Jed.
“The hell? He might a got you killed, boy!”
“I don’t want you to kill him,” John Moses said stubbornly. “He’s running away.”
