“I heard he was a drunk.”
“He is,” Kuruk said. “Smells it, anyhow. But still, he’s got steel in his spirit.”
“Colonel Cuttrell told me to never let him back in the fort.”
“All the more reason to trust him, seems like.”
“You could be right.”
“Is this thing ready?” Kuruk asked.
“It look ready to you?” one of the Buffalo Soldiers countered. “We’re makin’ progress, but we ain’t there yet.”
“We might need it,” Kuruk said.
“What do you mean? Need it for what? And who is ‘we’?”
Kuruk indicated Tuck and Cale and himself. “Us. To save Little Wing.”
“Little Wing?” the soldier asked. Concern was evident in his change of tone, and the sudden gravity of his expression. He was heavily muscled, shirtless, his torso gleaming from sweat in the heat of the furnace. “What happened?”
“Somebody took her. Hit Cale in the head and snatched her right out of town.”
“Who?”
“The real question might be ‘what?’” Tuck said. “I don’t know what you’ve built here, but I have an idea what we’ve got to go up against. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be dangerous as all hell. People are going to die, most likely. If this is something that could help, then—”
“You hear what the man said, boys?” the soldier asked. “Dangerous. Maybe we are ready.”
“You think?” another one of the Buffalo Soldiers asked.
“We could keep workin’ on it. We could work on it forever. But we can’t really test it out unless we got somethin’ that’s right to test it on. We been workin’ for months and months, without knowin’ that we’d ever find the right use for it. Just wanted to know we had it, could bring it out if need be. Well, maybe now it’s need be.”
“I expect you’re right, Sarge,” the third one said. “Let’s find out what it can really do!”
* * *
Kuruk introduced Tuck and Cale to the soldiers. Sergeant Clinton Delahunt, the highest ranking of the Buffalo Soldiers at the fort, was, McKenna said, the mad genius who had conceived what he called the “battlewagon.” The other troopers, Willie Johnson and Riley Taylor, were skilled in blacksmithing and the other crafts necessary to put the whole thing together.
Once those introductions had been made, Delahunt showed off his invention. The battlewagon had, he said, started out as a standard-issue army chuck wagon. Delahunt had stripped out the parts he didn’t want, and had a wagon maker in Tucson build a new bed with the chuck wagon’s dimensions but with the thickness, depth, and solidity of an ore wagon. Delahunt replaced the gears, axles, and brake with massive steel ones of his own manufacture. The wheels were iron, with double spokes. Delahunt had waterproofed the bed and otherwise toughened it up at every conceivable failure point, because he would be adding a lot of weight to it. Then he had clad the exterior in two layers of steel and bolted iron fittings over every joint. He’d attached huge lanterns facing off in almost every direction. Wherever they had used wood, it looked like highly polished oak, pine, even some red Manzanita from the nearby mountains. The brass gleamed, the steel was burnished until it shone, and every bit of glass was highly polished.
With that as a base, he had started to build onto it. First he’d added the steam engine, dead center, to power the rest of it. Brass coils snaked from there to the various devices mounted around the wagon, and a couple of brass tubes served as chimneys. The steam engine also turned the wheels, he said, eliminating the need for horses. On either side of the engine were tall steel boxes holding ghost rock, to keep the fire fed.
“Now we get to the best parts,” Delahunt continued. He gestured toward one of the twin, raised compartments, which he called cupolas. Each was outfitted with one of the guns that made Tuck think of Gatling guns. Delahunt gave the barrel of one a shove, and the cupola spun around in a smooth, easy circle. “These here are mounted on swivels that allow them to be turned in any direction,” he said. He opened a door and showed them a seat on the inside, with controls for the gun, and small windows, some of which were actually magnifying lenses, for sighting over long distances. “Each one only needs one operator, to aim it and feed in the ammunition belts,” Delahunt said. “The guns are automatically cranked, twice as fast as a man could hand-crank it. Air-cooled. The man inside can swivel the cupola three hundred and sixty degrees.”
“Impressive,” Tuck said.
“Best part is, they fire explosive rounds. Not much bigger than a .44-40 cartridge, and we’ve adapted magazines to hold three hundred rounds each. Six barrels, six magazines, six hundred rounds a minute. The operator can reload any one while any other’s in use.” Delahunt moved toward the wagon’s center, and indicated a contraption that seemed to be mostly pulleys and gears and foot-long steel poles. Delahunt fingered what looked like a sling, made of some sort of steel netting, at one end. “This here’s a catapult,” he said. He tapped a steel box beside it. “It’ll throw these black powder-and-ghost-rock bombs for a hundred feet. More, if the wind’s right.”
“Do you use a lot of ghost rock?” Cale asked. His eyes were full of excitement and wonder, like a child at Christmastime.
“Every bit we can get our hands on,” Delahunt said. “That mule train’s supply helps a lot. Used a little in the outer layer of armor, to help repel bullets. On the wheels.” He tapped a steel tube jutting from the wagon’s front end, a little more than an inch in diameter. “More in this.”
“What is it?” Tuck asked.
“I call it a fire-spitter,” Delahunt said. “We need to, we can divert some of the fire from the steam engine through this. The ghost rock magnifies the effect. It’ll shoot a burst of fire fifteen or twenty feet.”
“For how long?”
“Not too long,” Delahunt admitted. “We divert the fire for long, the water stops boiling. No hot water, no steam. No steam, no power.”
“I’ve never seen a steam wagon like this one, Sergeant. I was a military officer once, a long time ago. Seems like a different life. But something like this—well, it would have made an enormous difference. Changed the course of the war, I think.”
“That’s what we had in mind, Mr. Bringloe,” Delahunt said. “War is awful, any old way you look at it. With this thing, I was hoping to make it a little less awful for my side, and a little more so for the other, no matter who the enemy is.”
“Who or what,” Tuck said.
“You said not human. I got no problem with that. This world is a strange place, Mr. Bringloe. Stranger than most of us allow. Way I see it, only way to deny that is to live with your eyes closed.”
“Could be you’ve seen more than me, then. But mine are starting to open, and I reckon I won’t be able to shut them again now.”
“It’s hard to go back,” Kuruk said. “Anytime, anyhow. Once you get somewhere, what’s behind you isn’t what you thought it was.”
“Is that some old Apache saying?” Tuck asked.
Kuruk laughed. “Naw. Something I read in a book once. I don’t remember who wrote it, though. Some white man who’s dead.”
Taylor rapped on the brass chimney. “Steam’s goin’,” he said. “She’s ready to roll.”
“We waiting for anything else?” Delahunt asked.
“Can we get some horses? And guns?”
“Mister, this is an army fort, and it’s mostly empty. Troopers we don’t have many of. Horses and guns, we got.”
Chapter Forty-six
The battlewagon, Tuck thought, was a monstrosity. A steaming, spitting, roaring monstrosity.
And it might be just what they needed.
Once the steam was going, Johnson, youngest and smallest of the Buffalo Soldiers, climbed into the front cupola. There, Delahunt explained, he had the controls to select the thing’s direction, to make it go forward or back, and to brake it. The young soldier left the door open for the moment.
Tuck, Kuruk, Cale, and the other soldiers
were mounted on cavalry horses. They had army rifles in scabbards and pistols on gun belts. The rain had slackened, and the wagon’s iron wheels cut deep grooves in the mud but weren’t slowed by it. On the way out of the fort, they had to pass Colonel Cuttrell’s place again, and as they did, he came out the front door. He wore a gray officer’s coat over his uniform, his boots were polished, and his hat was perched at a jaunty but militarily acceptable angle.
His face was another story. It was the face of a man in mourning, or suffering soul-deep hardship of some kind. He looked stricken. His flesh had an unhealthy pallor, setting off the gray bags under his eyes. The lines around eyes and mouth were more pronounced than Tuck remembered them, as if years, not just hours, had passed since their last meeting.
Cuttrell stared at the battlewagon in blank incomprehension. “Mr. McKenna,” he said, almost shouting to be heard over the thing’s racket. “What in the hell is that contraption?”
McKenna waved, and inside the cupola, Johnson applied the brakes. With a hiss of steam, the wagon slowed, quieting as it did.
“Sir,” McKenna said. “This is a special project I’ve been working on with Sergeant Delahunt and some of his men.”
“We call it a battlewagon, sir,” Delahunt added.
“Is there a battle on of which I am unaware?” He looked at Tuck and Cale as if noticing them for the first time. “You? I thought I told you not to come back here. And aren’t you the beef boy?”
“Was, sir. You switched the contract to Mr. Montclair.”
A cloud seemed to pass over Cuttrell’s face at the mention of the name. “Him. Yes.”
“That’s where we’re headed, sir. We think Montclair has taken the girl. Little Wing.”
“The crazy laundre—” He spotted Kuruk with the party, and caught himself. “Yes, of course. And Montclair has her? Jasper Montclair? Whatever for?”
“I can’t really say, sir,” McKenna replied.
“So you’re going there? To get her back?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’re taking this thing with you. This battlewagon.”
“That’s correct, sir.”
Cuttrell whipped off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. “To Montclair’s.”
“That’s right, sir.”
Tuck knew what the colonel was thinking about. His wife, going off with Montclair. He had denied it, but it was the truth. By this point, Cuttrell had to know.
“I’ll join you.”
“Sir?”
“I’m going with you. To Montclair’s ranch.”
“Sir, we don’t know what we’ll be dealing with. Bringloe says it’s dangerous, that we’ll be up against some sort of, I don’t know, supernatural forces, or something. Inhuman. And we don’t know how well the battlewagon will work.”
“If you’re trying to dissuade me, Lieutenant, you’re going about it all wrong.”
“It’s just that—”
“Damn it, man, Montclair has Sadie! She’s a mess, I know. She’s a laudanum addict, she’s probably unfaithful, she’s temperamental, rude, and dismissive. Nothing but trouble, really. But she’s my wife, and I want her back.”
“Yes, sir.” McKenna’s tone had changed, and his gaze shifted away from the colonel and landed somewhere on the ground between them. Tuck wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that. But it wasn’t his concern. If they rescued Sadie Cuttrell, that was fine and dandy. But his interest was Little Wing. And he wanted to know, once and for all, what those night-black creatures were, and what connection they had to Jasper Montclair.
The safety of Carmichael was no longer his professional concern. But he felt a certain responsibility just the same. Not because he was being paid, but because he was a human being. And human beings, he was convinced, had a responsibility to other humans. He had not known that for a long time. Most of his life, really. Between the horrible example of his mother, his time as a drunkard, even his time in the Union Army, to some extent—he had enlisted with high ideals, but had become nothing but a paid, uniformed killer of men—that lesson had been lost. But recently, it had been taught to him, by Hank Turville’s trust and kindness, by that of Missy Haynes, by Little Wing and Kuruk. Even, in a way, by his failure to recognize the desperation of Jed Tibbetts in time to help him.
He had tried to live a life on his own, disconnected from others. That hadn’t worked out so well. Drink had cut the bonds that linked him to the world, but even in drunkenness he had depended on others to pay him for work done or to give him money when he begged for it. Riding with the posse, he had remembered his army days and earlier times, when he had been part of something bigger than himself. And he had, once again, accepted that as the natural state of man. Like it or not, he was part of a community, part of a nation, and with the benefits of that came certain duties. Those included a responsibility to step in if he could, to protect those who couldn’t defend themselves, to ease suffering where possible, to try to give aid and comfort to those in need.
So he found himself on a borrowed CSA horse—a lovely, powerful chestnut mare—with a slotted cavalry saddle, armed with borrowed CSA weapons, riding in the company of men he barely knew: Kuruk, McKenna, Cuttrell, Cale, Delahunt, Taylor, and Johnson. They had a shared goal, a mission of as yet uncertain focus.
And they had a clanging, spewing, self-propelled battlewagon that was as terrifying as it was fascinating.
He hoped it would be enough.
* * *
Mo Kanouse stood on the corner near Maier’s store, watching the town come back to life as the rain let up. It would most likely return; the sky was thick with clouds, layer upon layer, with only small patches of sky showing through. More rain by sunset, he reckoned, and then off and on through the night.
Mostly, he was letting the town watch him. Every now and then someone would mention the star on his coat, and he would explain that he was the new marshal, that Bringloe had simply not been up to the job. He had his arms folded over his chest, with the scattergun in his right hand. He wanted people to know that he was the law, and that he wouldn’t be trifled with.
The other reason he wanted to be seen was that the town was full of soldiers from the fort, dismissed, at least for the moment, by the colonel. That had never happened before. Some of the troopers were already in the saloons and brothels, and Kanouse expected a raucous night. If the soldiers saw that he was the marshal, they might be easier to corral when they got out of hand.
As he stood there, a commotion up the street drew his attention toward the fort. A small procession had emerged from the main gate. It was turning onto the southbound road, rather than cutting through town, but it was attracting notice because, in addition to men on horses, it included a noisy, horseless, steel-clad steam wagon that appeared, from this distance, to be full of junk. A few of the troopers ran over to see what was going on. The army’s business wasn’t his, so Kanouse stayed put. A few minutes later, the soldiers came back, chattering among themselves. “What was that thing?” Kanouse asked.
“Some kind of war wagon,” one of the men said. He was a young private with an open face. When he spoke, Kanouse saw that he was missing at least half his bottom teeth. “They wouldn’t say much. Looked like a strange deal to me.”
“They say where they’re headed?”
“Colonel said somethin’ ’bout gettin’ his wife back. That’s all I heard.”
“Thanks,” Kanouse said. He twitched his head toward the saloon the trooper’s friends had already entered. “You’re fallin’ behind.”
The trooper nodded and trailed his companions inside. As soon as the young man was out of sight, Kanouse hurried to Mayor Chaffee’s office. He told the mayor what he’d seen, and what the trooper had said.
Chaffee’s brow knitted when he heard the news. “Montclair’s got Sadie Cuttrell,” he said. “I didn’t like the idea, but how do you say no to that man?”
“Do you think they’re headin’ to Montclair’s spread?”
&nbs
p; “How would I know?” Chaffee said. “You’re the one who saw them leave.”
“Bringloe was with them. And that Apache scout. I don’t like the whole thing.”
“I don’t either, Mo. You better let Montclair know what’s going on.”
“Me?”
“You’re on the payroll now. Time you started earning your keep.”
Chaffee turned his attention to some papers on his desk. Kanouse didn’t appreciate being made to feel like an errand boy. But Chaffee was right—he was taking their money, so his place was to do as he was told. He left the office without saying good-bye and went to fetch his horse. All he had to do was get to Montclair’s before they did, and give him the word. Montclair would have to handle it from there.
Chapter Forty-seven
Cloud cover had turned day into dusk. The sun was behind there, somewhere, no doubt sinking toward the Huachuca Mountains. The battlewagon couldn’t keep pace with horses at a full gallop, but it maintained a steady clip, rolling over uneven trails and rocks and through swiftly running washes without difficulty.
As they neared the Broken M, the sky turned darker still. The air cooled, too, as if the ranch harbored its own secret winter.
When they crossed the ranch’s farthest-flung boundary, things got worse.
The road became clogged with low, spindly mesquites, almost invisible in the gloom, but hardy and thorny enough to snarl and slice up the horses’ legs. After a few minutes of that, the mounted men pulled back and let the wagon go first. Its steel-clad wheels pushed through the tangle, flattening the plants as they went.
Shortly beyond that, the road was choked off altogether by a mass of larger mesquites, packed close together—closer than Tuck had ever seen them. “This is not natural,” Kuruk said, giving voice to Tuck’s concerns.
“Not hardly,” McKenna agreed.
“Let Johnson handle it,” Delahunt said. He banged on the cupola. “Willie, you know what to do.”
Johnson’s reply was swift and eager. “Yes, sir!”
The wagon stopped. Delahunt dismounted and fed more ghost rock into the furnace. Thumping noises came from within, followed by a whooshing sound. Moments later, a jet of flame issued from the front tube, what Delahunt had called the fire-spitter. It went for about twenty seconds before giving one last, more powerful burst, then tapering off.
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