by D. J. Butler
Behind the Irishman and the midget stood a little boy. He held a pistol—the same unknown gun Sam had first seen on the Pinkerton’s hip, and then in O’Shaughnessy’s hands—pointed at the backs of the two men. It was a day for strange guns. No wonder the two men looked so shy, Sam thought. What kind of self-respecting thug lets a little kid throw down on him?
The child looked shocked. “I had to,” he said. “I didn’t want anybody to get shot. I only did it because I had to.”
“You’ve been captured by a little boy, Coltrane,” the gypsy said, apparently to the dwarf. “I hope he will condescend to parole you.” Then he spoke to his unknown male comrade. “Isn’t that your errant midshipman, Captain Jones?”
“Don’t think I ain’t embarrassed about it, boss,” the midget grumbled. “He got the drop on me.”
“Put the machine-gun down,” the little boy said, and he prodded the air with his pistol for emphasis. The dwarf did as he was told. O’Shaughnessy stared at the strange weapon like a starving man looks at cake, but did nothing.
“I think it’s busted, anyway,” the dwarf said.
Captain Jones stomped through the creek, righteous rage playing across his square face. “It was you, wasn’t it, boyo?” he demanded, staring hard at O’Shaughnessy. “It was you who kidnapped little John Moses there!”
The Irishman pulled out of his gun-lustful brooding and sneered. “Taffy was a Welshman,” he chanted, “Taffy was a thief—”
crunch!
Jones pistol-whipped O’Shaughnessy across the jaw with the gun in his hand, sending him sprawling into the tall, dry desert grass.
“Taffy came to my house,” Jones finished the rhyme, “and he kicked out all my teeth.”
“Muurrrmph,” the Irishman groaned vaguely from the ground.
“I am reluctant to criticize another man’s work,” the gypsy called out, with a mischievous twinkle in his fatigued eye, “but you’ve spoiled the rhyme.”
The quip snapped Sam out of his stunned reverie. He grinned. “True,” he agreed. “Though I must say I find the meaning of the revised couplet reasonably congenial.”
* * *
Burton awoke to find the knives removed and his arm and leg bandaged. He lay on a crackling bed of yellow grass beside his own coat, and Roxie fussed over him.
Burton’s mouth was dry and he felt weak as a newborn babe. He gazed coolly for several moments at the woman who had so stirred his passion in the Wyoming Territory and let strength and vitality ooze back into his limbs. When she noticed him looking, she met his gaze with something that was almost a smile.
“What’s your full name?” he asked. “Your real name.”
“Eliza Roxcy Snow,” she said immediately. “Roxie isn’t a pseudonym, it’s just a nickname.”
Burton gestured at his coat with his good hand. “My papers are in there,” he told her.
She looked away. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “I’ve read them.”
“And wrote,” he suggested.
“Wrote a little,” she admitted. “Just a post-script.”
“Why?”
Roxie couldn’t meet his eyes. “We… Rockwell and I, and Annie… knew Lee and Hickman were going to move against Brigham, but Brigham didn’t believe it. He wouldn’t believe our evidence, and he wouldn’t take action, so we… well, we went against his orders. Rockwell tried to take out John Lee. And we tried to scare you foreigners away, so the Danites wouldn’t have the cover they wanted to move against Brigham. When you wouldn’t leave, I decided to try to recruit you instead. I knew Brigham would need friends who were… men of action.”
Burton chuckled. “I was hoist with the petard of my own vanity,” he said ruefully. “You’re very good. Scheherezade told me stories, and I wanted to believe.”
“No, Dick,” she said, “yours isn’t vanity. You really are a man of action.”
“Ruffian Dick,” he reminded her. “And you are more than just Brigham’s agent, aren’t you?”
She hesitated. Her dress was dirtied and disheveled and she smelled of gunsmoke, but he thought her beautiful then, with the fine bones of her face framed against the blue sky above him. “I’m his wife,” she admitted.
“Eliza Roxcy Snow Young,” he chewed on the name. “One of… fifty?” he hazarded a guess.
“It isn’t a perfect arrangement,” she admitted.
“No arrangement is.”
“You’re hard to shock.”
“There are stranger things in life than sharing a man,” Burton said. He prided himself on being hard to shock. “You forget that I’ve spent time in the Horn. In much of Africa, polygamy is the norm. In places like Somaliland, where children are essential to a family’s wealth, it’s positively essential. Marriage customs are as often a function of economics as—”
“He doesn’t know,” she cut him off. “Brigham, I mean. He doesn’t know I... seduced you. He certainly didn’t ask me to do it.”
“Hmmn.” Burton kept his reaction muted, but he was vaguely relieved to hear that their liaison had been Roxie’s own idea.
“When did you puzzle it out?”
Burton sighed. “At the Tabernacle,” he said. “You showed far too much emotion for a mere paid agent, especially a jaded and worldly spy. I thought you must either be Brigham’s wife…” he watched her closely, while trying not to look at her directly, “or else perhaps Poe’s lover.”
Roxie covered her reaction well, but lines appeared around her mouth as she tightened her lips.
Of course. He should have seen it before. Burton threw his head back and laughed, loud and long.
“I don’t consider myself a comic figure,” Roxie sniffed.
“You’re not, Roxie,” he agreed. “You’re an adventure. You’re epic. You’re the Chanson de Roland, the Odyssey and the Mahabharata all rolled into one razor-sharp poem and bound in crinoline.”
“You of all men, Richard Burton,” she said to him, “must find that adventure stories become tedious.”
He laughed again. “Yes, I do, Eliza Snow,” he agreed. “As a matter of fact, I believe I do.”
* * *
Poe carefully dug out one scarab beetle and dropped it into a glass fruit jar, the only jar in the Liahona’s galley that had survived its wreck.
“Observe carefully,” he said to Bill Hickman. He suppressed a powerful urge to cough. “The details are of utmost importance.”
Hickman had no choice but to observe. He was tied to a hotel timber, arms apart and legs staked wide open into the dirt. Orrin Porter Rockwell held his bruised and puffy eyelids peeled back and his head fixed in place with one arm. In the other hand he held his Bowie knife, the blade of which he occasionally tapped against Hickman’s cheek as a reminder of its existence and sharpness.
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 imag
ined 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.”
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 must a 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?”
