by D. J. Butler
The rest of the audience, though, was more distracted.
The Danites, other than Hickman, had survived suggestions that they be drowned ignominiously and instead had all been tied up in a patch of scrub oak well out of sight of the highway; Young, Armstrong, the Liahona’s people, and three of the Mexican Stridermen stood watch or tended to each other’s wounds, hunger, and thirst in the wreckage of the hotel’s kitchens. Casual passersby on the highway were told that an accident had happened with the waterworks, all was under control and to keep moving—as of yet, there had been no passersby that weren’t casual.
Everyone else stood in a semi-circle around Hickman. They were there to watch Poe’s performance.
“Are you sure we have time for this?” Absalom Fearnley-Standish asked Ann Webb, Roxie’s young protégée. “The cavalrymen might regroup, after all, or send reinforcements.”
“We have to know everything he can tell us, whether or not we have the time,” she answered. She held something in her hand that she had introduced as a Fireless Darklantern, which was a sort of glass globe that sparked full of blue electricity to light the night. The sun had set, so Poe worked by artificial light. He recognized the Darklantern as the device he had imagined to be full of poison.
“Don’t joo worry,” said the Mexican gunner Consuelo Jackson. “I took especial care to be sure that cada uno de esos caballeros left here on foot.” She held a more traditional kerosene lamp. Depending upon where one stood in the competing circles of illumination, one looked shimmering-blue or greasy-yellow. “If he left at all, por supuesto.”
“Pass me the mouse,” Poe said to Jed Coltrane. The little man handed over his shapeless hat, which squeaked and twitched with the frantic motions of the doomed creature trapped inside. Coltrane and the Irishman O’Shaughnessy stood conspicuously apart and didn’t look at each other.
“I suppose I have learned that what goes around comes around after all,” Poe heard Sam Clemens say.
“Do not trifle with a man,” Burton growled, “whose empire is in danger.”
“You’re a good fellow, Mr. Burton.”
Poe shook the mouse into the jar. It squeaked, rushed around the sides looking for a way out, and then sniffed suspiciously at the brass beetle.
“I don’t believe in the existence of good fellows, Mr. Clemens.”
Sam Clemens laughed. “See? I knew we’d get along famously.”
Richard Burton growled again. “Don’t let the mustachios fool you. I am not an amiable man.”
Poe set the jar on the ground, inches from Bill Hickman’s crotch. “Quiet, everyone,” he urged the others. “Mr. Hickman needs to be able to concentrate.”
“What’s that?” Hickman struggled not to look nervous.
Poe smiled. “It’s a mouse.”
This was a performance, a show like any other. He needed to build a little tension in his audience.
Hickman frowned. “I know it’s a mouse, helldammit!” His forehead was sweating, though the sun had dropped below the horizon and the cool evening was rapidly sinking into what promised to be a cold night. “I mean the other thing.”
The mouse squeaked.
“What does it look like, Mr. Hickman?” Poe asked. He held the jar up so the Danite could see it closely.
He squinted. “Shit, it’s a …” Hickman screwed his face up in the effort of trying to guess. “It’s a bug.”
“Not quite.” Poe set the jar back down, far enough from Hickman’s crotch to leave his view unobscured. “It looks like an insect, but really it’s a device for consuming. It’s an eating machine. Would you like to see how it works?” He stood and picked up the open canister.
“What’s it gonna eat?” Hickman wanted to know.
“First, the mouse,” Poe told him. The others were all silent and he knew he had everyone’s attention.
Hickman hesitated, then writhed in what might have been an attempt to shrug. Expressive body language was hard for the man, with Orrin Porter Rockwell gripping him tightly by the head. “I reckon I don’t care one way or the other,” he said. “You can show me if you want.”
Poe smiled. “I do want to.” He scanned the ground one more time to be sure he hadn’t accidentally dropped a stray beetle somewhere, then pressed the attack button inside the canister lid.
The mouse squeaked once, sharply, and died under the murderous onslaught of a single set of brass mandibles. Poe heard a sharp gasp, he thought from Absalom Fearnley-Standish. Moments later, nothing was left of the mouse but the skull, a handful of the larger bones, and a stray bloody whisker.
The beetle continued to bite and tear at the bones for a few seconds, scurried in a circle once around the jar, and then shut down.
Poe shook the contents of the fruit jar out into his hand. He carefully laid the mouse skull on Bill Hickman’s chest.
Hickman swallowed. “Pretty,” he drawled, “but nothing you can’t do with a knife and a little bit of free time.”
Rockwell pricked his cheek with the tip of his blade.
“Ouch!”
“True,” Poe admitted. He set the mouse’s bones on the Danite’s chest too, one by one, in a circle around the tiny skull. “It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that the solution with the most engineering incorporated into it is the best one. Sometimes, what is most effective is the simplest solution. The knife, the poisoned cup, the wire around the throat.”
Hickman looked down at the bones. Uneasiness showed in his face, so Poe knew he was getting into the man’s head. “So … what do you want?”
Poe placed the brass beetle on Hickman’s sternum. “Who says I want anything?” he asked.
Hickman grinned. “I know all kinds of good shit,” he said. “I got information.”
“How delightful for you,” Poe told him. He dug a second beetle out of the canister and laid it on Hickman below the first.
“I … hey! … don’t you want to know what’s going on here? What, with the … kidnapping and everything?”
Poe placed a third scarab over Hickman’s belly button, and a fourth just below it. “Should I want to know?” he asked.
“Yeah!” Hickman struggled against his bonds and against Rockwell’s iron grasp but he was pinned fast. “Hell yeah, you should!”
Poe placed a fifth and final scarab, balancing it carefully right on the crotch of Hickman’s denim trousers. He stood, and held one finger conspicuously close to the attack button inside the canister’s lid.
“You’ve almost found the man’s chakras,” Burton gruffed. “Not quite, but you’re close.”
“I can find his chakras easy enough, need be,” Rockwell growled. “They hang the same place on a man as on a bear, more or less.”
“So tell me,” Poe said. “Tell me what you think I want to know so badly.”
“Lee did it!”
“You mean John Lee,” Poe prompted the Danite. “Brigham Young’s adopted son, the Danite leader.”
“Yeah. He’s behind the kidnapping.”
“That’s interesting,” Poe mused.
“Yeah? What’s interesting about it?”
“What’s interesting is that I happened to be in the Tabernacle when Mr. George Cannon introduced Lee to the congregation.” Poe spoke slowly and deliberately and kept his eye fixed on Hickman. He let his words hang when he’d finished, to see what they would flush out of the prisoner’s guilty conscience.
They flushed out nothing. “Yeah, that’s him.”
Poe kept a straight face. Was Hickman too clever to be baited, or too stupid? “As I recall, they both gave the distinct impression that President Young was dead.”
Hickman’s splayed eyes quivered. “I guess they was mistook,” he suggested weakly.
“Perhaps,” Poe agreed, “but I can think of other hypotheses.”
Hickman sulked.
“Boss,” Coltrane whispered loudly. “He may not know what high posse trees are. Just tell him you’re going to hang him, if that’s the point.”<
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Poe nodded calmly, resisting both the Scylla of laughter and the Charybdis of irritation. “Let me propose this explanation,” he said, watching Hickman closely. “Lee had you kidnap the President but then announced his death to all of Deseret. He is holding Brigham Young in reserve in case affairs go awry and then, if need be, he can resurrect the man at his convenience.”
“Yeah, that sounds right.” Hickman’s answer was quick. Too quick.
“But then Lee has hung you out to dry,” Poe probed.
Hickman shrugged.
“If he brings Brigham Young back to life,” Poe continued, “someone will have to take the fall for the kidnapping. That can only be you, Mr. Hickman.”
Hickman shrugged. He didn’t seem very concerned, which must mean Poe was on the wrong track.
“There could be other explanations, of course,” Poe thought out loud.
“The explanation is that John D. Lee figures it’s about time he was made king over everybody,” Hickman insisted. “I guess he musta been sick of everybody lording it over him all the time, just ’cause he was a frontier man and not some fancy English feller.” He shot a look of resentment at Richard Burton. “And I reckon he’s got the right idea.”
“You’re not a stupid man, Mr. Hickman,” Poe lied. He coughed and the force of it in his lungs took him by surprise. The consumption was getting worse, he thought. He wondered how long he had. He spat into the dust at his feet.
“No, I ain’t.”
“You wouldn’t let yourself be set up to take the fall for John Lee.”
“I wouldn’t,” Hickman agreed. “And I ain’t.”
“You’ve got John Lee right where you want him.”
“Yeah, I … what? No, I’m Lee’s man. He sent me to kidnap Brigham Young, and I done it.”
“He sent you to kill Brigham Young, and you double-crossed him.” Poe saw truth-induced hesitation in the other man’s face, so he kept going. “You were supposed to kill Clemens, too, or at least capture him, but finding Rockwell and the Ambassador as well was entirely serendipitous.”
Hickman stared sullenly at the line of scarabs.
“He means catching Rockwell and Armstrong was just plain dumb luck,” Sam Clemens interpreted.
“Thank you, Mr. Clemens,” Poe said.
“I was raised in Missouri.” Clemens grinned. “I speak idiot.”
“Of course, as long as you kept them all alive, you could release them later and minimize the damage. President Tubman might be angry but you calculated that if her Ambassador were alive, she couldn’t be too angry.” Hickman wouldn’t meet Poe’s gaze. “Maybe you could even take cover behind Lee, or get him blamed for it and say you were only taking orders. And in the meantime, you could hold them over Lee’s head.”
Hickman said nothing.
Rockwell held the blade of his knife against Hickman’s belly, careful not to disturb the beetles. “’Fess up, you filthy little gutworm, or lose your chakras.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The words, and the shifty expression that accompanied them, were as good as a confession for Poe.
“And of course,” Poe pressed on, “you kept the opportunity to play it the other way. You could free President Young. Maybe you could convince him that you had been acting under threat of violence when you kidnapped him, and that freeing him was a risky and heroic act. He’d reward you for your courage and sacrifice. Or you could convince him you’d been playing a double game all along, to flush Lee out. What kind of medals do the Danites give out for personal heroism, Mr. Hickman?”
“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 knowle
dge. 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 whether it was an act.
“Not yet,” Poe directed, between hard, violent coughs. “But let’s 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.
