by D. J. Butler
“On what charges?” Roxie chimed in.
“Who in blazes are you?” asked Captain Jones.
“Authority be damned,” the Corporal drawled, “charges go to hell and I, you shiftless truck-gypsy, am the government. Haven’t you heard?”
“We’re armed,” Poe called out. He very deliberately didn’t raise his pistol—he didn’t want to provoke an actual shooting match, outnumbered eight to one as he and his allies (if they really were allies) were—but it felt heavy and conspicuous in his hand. “You may not find us so easy to govern, Corporal.”
The Corporal rode his horse-machine down the slope, and half his men followed his example. The rest stayed up on the slope, looking down on the Liahona, guns ready. The dozen cavalrymen stopped below the steam-truck’s ladder and the Corporal looked up at the passengers and crew.
“Everyone is armed in this godforsaken country. But truthfully, sir,” he said, “I care neither for you nor about you, so long as you stay where you are and do not interfere with the execution of my appointed tasks. I am looking for a Mr. William Hickman, who may go by the name Bill. He has been described to me in such terms that, homely though I find you to be, you are not nearly ugly enough to be the man I seek.”
“I’m not Bill Hickman,” Poe agreed. He was grateful for his smoked glasses, which let him survey the scene a little more than was obvious. The men who had ridden down to the hotel could be surprised and taken, he thought. The men still on the bluff, on the other hand, had a commanding vantage point. There would be no sneaking up on them, unless someone managed to creep around the Liahona itself.
He wondered where his allies were.
Hissssss!
An engine started with a loud squealing sound, somewhere inside or just on the other side of the hotel. Poe would never have heard it, except the house had been reduced to a tiny, shattered shadow of its former self.
“We came here looking for Hickman ourselves,” Roxie added.
Gears whined, and a steam-truck suddenly spun into view around the ruined hulk of the Hot Springs Hotel & Brewery. It was a medium-sized cargo vehicle, and it turned away as it emerged, rolling down the yard. Men in black coats with rifles, wet and bedraggled and not very cheerful, hung off the back.
“That might be him,” Poe suggested. He was perfectly happy for the Virginian to capture or even kill Hickman. He wanted to rescue Brigham Young—he wanted to help Roxie—and that meant getting out from under the heel of these soldiers.
Pffffffft-ankkkh!
The sound was slightly muffled. He wondered what it could be. Maybe some part of the water tank was still grinding away at its usual task, or finally breaking down.
“This way, gentlemen,” the Corporal ordered his complement of a dozen, and they trotted down the slope. The others remained behind, holding their high ground advantage.
Pffffffft-ankkkh!
“What’s that sound, Captain?” Poe asked. “Please reassure me that the Liahona is not on the verge of exploding.”
“No, boyo, she’s solid,” the Welshman ground his teeth. “But I’m pretty close to exploding myself, if I can’t get off her back and find out what happened to the child.”
He grabbed the top of the ladder.
Bang!
A single bullet ricocheted off the Liahona’s deck in a trail of sparks. Poe looked up to the cavalrymen on the bluff. One of them held a smoking carbine and smiled down calmly at the people stranded on the steam-truck. It was a Sharps Model 1853, Poe thought idly. A big gun, and one that would leave a big hole in a man.
Brrrrrr-rap-ap-ap-ap-ap-ap!
A racket that sounded a little like thunder, a little like a belching giant and a lot like Jedediah Coltrane’s machine-gun erupted behind the hotel. Poe jerked his head around to find the source of the sound and saw a Mexican Strider lurch into view. It had crept up slowly out of the trees and been hiding behind the hotel. Its guns now tore up the dry earth and grass around the cavalrymen in a surprise flank attack. The twelve Virginians broke formation, scattering out of the yard.
Bang! Bang!
The cavalrymen at the top of the hill fired, and broke into a ragged charge down the bluff, rushing to the aid of their Corporal and comrades.
Pffffffft-ankkkh!
Over Poe’s right shoulder, catching him completely by surprise, appeared the second Strider. It rose straight up, standing out of what must have been a carefully maintained crouch, in which it had crept up alongside the Liahona, staying out of view of the Third Virginia as well as of Poe.
Brrrrrr-rap-ap-ap-ap-ap-ap!
The second Strider fired its guns at the flank of the cavalry coming down the bluff, catching them by surprise as well. Two horses went down, holed by the big Mexican guns, throwing their riders into the trees. Return fire was sporadic and half-hearted, and the small arms bullets mostly pinged! harmlessly off the armored carriage of the Strider. Sitting behind the pilot and gunner in the second Strider, Poe saw Absalom Fearnley-Standish, his sister, and young Annie Web.
“Hurrah!” Fearnley-Standing shouted, as if he were cheering on target-shooters or a fox hunt. He looked for all the world like he was enjoying a lovely summer picnic, though he did fire sporadic shots at the horsemen.
His sister Abigail leaned over the side of the Strider’s carriage and poured hot lead out of a long-barreled pistol upon the scattering men of the Third Virginia.
Both halves of the cavalry unit were in disarray, falling back under fire from the Mexican guns. Poe turned back to Captain Jones to suggest that now would be a good time to continue the search for young John Moses Browning, and discovered that the Captain was gone.
He was already down the ladder and racing to the bottom of the yard.
Poe followed, his lungs straining as he ran, and Roxie with him. Behind them, he heard bangs! erupt as the crewmen of the Liahona opened fire on the already beleaguered Virginians.
He kept his eye fixed on the foot of the field, trying to ignore the very real possibility that a stray bullet might cut him down at any second. He saw the steam-truck stop by a springhouse straddling a creek at the bottom of the hill and its riders pile off. He saw them throw the door open, rush inside in numbers and drag out four prisoners with sacks over his head and hands behind their backs.
Poe’s lungs gave out, and he nearly fell over in a paroxysm of violent coughing. His running pace faltered and stopped.
Then Bill Hickman saw him, and Jones and Roxie, and the Striders.
The sour-faced, hunch-shouldered Danite drew a long-barreled pistol and clapped it to the temple of one of his prisoners. “Stop right there, helldammit!” he squealed, and yanked the sack away to reveal the threatened person.
His hostage was President Young. The man was bleeding, looked like he had been shot, but he was alive and held at gunpoint.
Poe hacked up blood and phlegm onto the grass.
“Stop right there!” Bill Hickman yelled again. “Stop or I’ll blow out his prophetic brains!”
Chapter Twelve
Sam smelled apples and heard ruckus, and he wondered how he would know when to make his move. Probably, he thought, the first thing he’d hear clearly would be the Danites shooting Orrin Porter Rockwell full of holes, and then it would be too late. It was enough to make even a cheerful man despondent, and Sam knew himself well enough to know that he was not a naturally cheerful man.
He was a joking man precisely because he wasn’t cheerful. All humor, Sam thought, was gallows humor, because every man spent his whole life waiting for the drop. At that moment, the drop seemed imminent to Sam.
And then what?
“I’ll kill your precious Ambassador, too!” Hickman shouted, and Sam heard the click of a gun’s hammer. The man’s porker-squeal of a voice was, if it were possible, even more unpleasant when strained through burlap. “Now drop your guns, helldammit!”
Focus, Clemens, he told himself.
Sam heard the thud of weapons being thrown to the ground. Had he already wa
ited too long?
“We’ve disarmed ourselves,” Sam heard a man say, and the voice sounded familiar. The words ended in a lengthy fit of coughing. Sam racked his brains for a moment until he realized that it sounded like the gypsy at Bridger’s Saloon, who had tried to warn him off his mission. He vaguely thought he’d seen the man again, at the Shoshone stockade.
Hadn’t he been part of that face-off against Hickman?
Sam managed not to chuckle out loud. He should have known. And the swindler had had the impertinence to ask if Sam took him for a huckster!
“Let them go, Hick.” This was a woman’s voice, unfamiliar to Sam. He considered making his move right then—Hickman might be distracted by a pretty face. He held back, telling himself that it was because he didn’t know the woman, and couldn’t be sure she had a pretty face.
She might be homely, and then her presence wouldn’t be all that helpful to Sam.
She wasn’t done talking, though. “You can tell Lee you were overpowered by the Mexicans,” she suggested, “or you can just light out right now for California. Lee will never know.”
Sam wondered if O’Shaughnessy was in California by now. He’d heard yelling outside the springhouse door that had sounded something like O’Shaughnessy’s voice, but the words were indistinct through the chinked logs and all the gunfire, and Sam had convinced himself that the voice belonged to some Irish Danite. At least, surely, O’Shaughnessy would be on the road westbound, heading for the Pacific. Sam couldn’t imagine the Irishman sticking around to complete their mission with Sam out of the picture. The man was hired muscle and a brute, a bruiser Sam had picked up in Chicago because he needed help and his bosses in Army Intelligence couldn’t be sure that their own men were loyal.
Unless, of course, O’Shaughnessy had no idea that Sam had been kidnapped. The man could very well be lying dead drunk on the carpeted floor of the Hotel Deseret bar. Or just lying dead. Maybe he and Henry were having a drink on some heaven-sailing riverboat at that very moment.
Or maybe O’Shaughnessy was lying in the back of an eastbound steam-truck, wearing Pinkerton shackles on his wrists and ankles.
“I ain’t letting nobody go,” Hickman snarled, “and I ain’t getting overpowered by no corn-eating Mexicans. Not so long as I’ve got a gun to the head of my portly gentleman friend here.”
“Watch it!” yelled a voice Sam didn’t know.
“England!” The voice was a man’s, fierce and bellowing, and more familiar. It was hard to tell in two syllables, but it sounded English. It almost sounded like it might belong to Richard Burton.
Pow! Sam heard a sound like a heavy object falling, with a metal crack in the center of it.
“Where the hell’d he come from?!”
Bang! Bang!
“Rockwell’s loose!”
Time to act.
Sam whipped the sack off his own head. Rockwell had cut the ropes on his wrists inside the springhouse, after digging through three barrels of dried beans and finally finding his Bowie knife by touch alone. Now armed with that same knife, the man charged splashing through the stream, racing straight at six Danites dripping with pistols. His opponents, in the middle of jumping off the back of a parked steam-truck, looked completely surprised by the attack. With his buckskin fringes and long beard snapping in the air, Rockwell seemed half wild animal, half Old Testament prophet and one hundred percent American.
Sam was surprised at how cheered up he felt by the other man he saw in action. Richard Burton, the Queen’s agent and sometime saboteur, knelt on Bill Hickman’s chest on the creek bank and pounded him in the face repeatedly with the basket hilt of a cavalry sword. Burton’s facial expression looked like that of a hungry cannibal in the early stages of preparing dinner, though he had a knife in his upper left arm and his punches were slow. Hickman must have been taken by surprise, but he was groping for a pistol he’d dropped in the dirt, and he looked like he was close to reaching it.
Sam wondered where Burton had come from, but he had no time to dwell on the question.
Two men and a woman charged down the hill. They all held pistols. Sam recognized one of them as the gypsy, though his face looked a little different than Sam remembered. The others he was less sure about, though he thought he might have seen them in Chief Pocatello’s stockade, too.
The President and the Ambassador knelt together in the middle of it all. Rockwell had correctly guessed they’d get the most attention from the Danites, and had left their hands tied so as not to give the game away. Orrin Porter Rockwell was something of a savage, but Sam found he was coming to respect the man.
Young and Armstrong might have been praying, for the serenity with which they sat still in the middle of the fracas, heads bowed and hands behind their backs. Young bled from his ribs where he’d been shot, though—they hadn’t bound the injury inside the springhouse because it would have given away the fact that their hands were free—and he didn’t look good.
Maybe they were praying, Sam thought. In their place, he might be.
Sam drew Rockwell’s pistol, wondering where to shoot first.
The choice was made for him. Two Danites rushed around the front of the steam-truck, drawing long, straight knives from sheaths at their belts. They looked like they were rushing to join the dog pile on top of Orrin Porter Rockwell. Sam calmly pointed Rockwell’s pistol at the man in front and squeezed the trigger.
Bang!
He missed. The two Danites cringed and faltered, then saw him.
Rockwell slashed like a dervish at the men surrounding him. He was too close for them to shoot back effectively, but Sam saw that they had realized that, too, and some of them were stabbing and cutting at the mountain man with knives instead.
Sam tried again.
Bang! Bang!
His shots missed, and the bullets whizzanged! away into space off the side of the steam-truck.
The two men charged at him now.
It wasn’t obvious to Sam that the change was an improvement. Confound it, he needed to start hitting what he aimed at.
Rockwell took a hit, a deep scratch on his hip. The bull-shouldered man staggered and kept fighting, stomping one Danite under the truck and kicking another in the belly, but Sam could see that he was bleeding, and starting to slow down.
Burton had lost his grip on his sword, and was punching Hickman in the face now with bare and bloody knuckles.
The gypsy and his companions were still running.
Sam raised the pistol again. Point blank now, he thought, even a child couldn’t fail of this mark.
Bang!
He missed.
I’ll be the shame of the entire town of Hannibal, Missouri, he thought, raising the pistol again and hoping he could get off at least one more shot as he was being knifed to death. I’ll be the laughingstock of the American West.
Rockwell should have given the gun to someone else.
Rat-rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
The two men charging him vanished, whipped off their feet, thrown to the ground and stilled in a fraction of a second. Sam stood with his gun still raised for an uncomprehending moment, try to absorb the sudden evaporation of his attackers. It was as if Zeus himself had looked down from Olympus, decided that the Kingdom of Deseret had two men too many, and simply erased them. They were rag dolls before a scythe.
Rat-rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-BANG!
Sparks and ricocheting bullets flew off the top of the steam-truck like a lightning storm in a bottle, and the men clawing and biting and stabbing at Rockwell faltered.
The gypsy and his companions clapped guns to the heads of Danites. The men stopped fighting and threw their weapons to the ground.
Burton smashed Hickman one more time in the face with his fist. Hickman’s hand, finally wrapped around the grip of his pistol, squeezed once.
Bang!
As a last shot, it was anticlimactic. The bullet disappeared into the deepening blue sky of the late afternoon.
> Hickman collapsed and lay still.
Burton swayed, pale and drawn, and he glared at Sam with a reproachful eye. “You’re the worst shot I’ve ever seen,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’ve seen an ninety-year-old Armenian crone who shot straighter than you do.”
“Sorry,” Sam said, chastened. He had the presence of mind not to drop his gun, though only barely.
“She was missing half her fingers,” the explorer added. “And she was blind in both eyes.”
“Next you’ll tell me she had a better mustache than I do, too,” Sam guessed wearily.
“Agni’s second head,” Burton grunted. He swayed on his knees like a drunk man. “This country and its people are not what I was led to believe.”
Then he collapsed on top of Hickman.
“You all right, Rockwell?” Sam called. His own voice sounded far away and muffled to him. “It looked like you took a few body blows.”
“No bullet or blade!” Rockwell cackled, and kicked one of the downed Danites in the face.
Sam noticed that away, up the long hillside, two Mexican Striders were clanking in his direction. No one else seemed exercised about their arrival, so he ignored them and turned to look for the source of the bullet-storm that had saved his life.
It was a midget. He was rumpled and dirty and unshaved and Sam thought he kind of looked familiar too, though he didn’t remember where he’d seen the man. He stood holding a stubby-looking little rifle the like of which Sam had definitely never seen before, which had a bulky drum attached to its stock. Presumably to hold the cascade of bullets the gun was obviously capable of shooting. Sam was not a gun man, but this little storm maker intrigued him.
The dwarf’s face looked chagrined. He was examining the gun, and Sam now saw that its barrel was shredded and splayed open on one side, like a steel flower was sprouting from the weapon. “Jebus,” the little man said.
A step behind and to the side of the dwarf stood Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy. The Irishman looked embarrassed too.
“It’s a nice day,” O’Shaughnessy shot Sam a rueful half-grin.
Sam nodded. He felt numb, and a little bit humiliated, himself. So it had been O’Shaughnessy outside the springhouse.
