Authors: D. J. Butler
“Nothing,” John Moses reported.
“I could go down and ask the kitchen for a glass of water.”
“I’ll wager you could, you little cog-rat,” Tam
snapped.
An idea tickled his
brain, and he chewed on it for a minute.
“We’ll go down together,” he finally said.
“Only first, we’ve got to arrange a wee bit of a
distraction.”
He led John Moses around the second story of the hotel.
Thanks be to merciful Brigit, the
floors didn’t creak, and Tam opened every door he found unlocked, collecting
kerosene lanterns.
In one room, he
found a coat hanging from a wall peg and an unlocked valise.
Tam helped himself to the half-full fifth of gin he found in
the valise.
John Moses, who had
followed dutifully in his wake the entire time, said nothing and stared bullets
of reproach at the Irishman.
“Shut up, you,” Tam muttered, and dragged the boy back into
the room they’d left.
The steam-truck was still parked below them.
It was a simple matter to slosh the
kerosene from the bowls of all the lamps they’d collected over the wheelhouse
and cargo hold of the truck, on the boiler and furnace in between and on both
of its front tyres.
Then a single lucifer tossed out the window sent the whole
pile of bolts and rubber straight to hell.
“Come on, then,” Tam said to the boy.
“Let’s go downstairs and find ourselves
a horse to borrow.”
He sucked out
half the gin for emphasis, and felt a little better for it.
“Okay.”
John
Moses followed.
“Don’t forget I’m armed,” Tam reminded him.
“And I’m a hard mean Irish fook, and
Mother O’Shaughnessy taught me to hate brats.”
*
*
*
“Good heavens, is it on
fire
?” Absalom hadn’t meant to ask the question out loud, but he realized
that he had.
Captain Dan Jones had looked positively murderous when the
showman Poe had tugged at his elbow in the roiling crowds of the Tabernacle and
asked for a ride south.
He’d
raised a big-knuckled fist like he might punch the Egyptiana peddler right in
the face.
Poe hadn’t flinched, but
violence had looked imminent.
But then Dick Burton had said, “we know where the boy John
Moses is, and we’re going to get him.”
Jones had spun one hundred eighty degrees and raced his
passengers back into the steam-truck hangar.
Crew not aboard had been left behind, which seemed to leave
the
Liahona
half-manned but
functional.
The big steam-truck
had chewed its way up the ramp and out onto the streets faster than Absalom
would have thought possible.
It
helped that the entire population of the city seemed to be still inside the
Tabernacle or milling about on its grounds.
For an hour, the
Liahona
had rumbled south as the sun climbed and the day grew warmer (Absalom was no
backwoodsman, but he knew that the sun crossed the sky from east to west; once
he realized that the nearer wall of dusty blue and white mountains was to the
east of the Great Salt Lake City, it was impossible to get disoriented) on a
broad highway paved with tar macadam.
They had quickly left the urban center behind, passing into a maze of
irrigation canals and furrowed patches that had shortly given way to sage
brush, wild grasses and prairie dogs.
As they rode, Captain Jones’s truck-men had bolted the railguns to the
Liahona’s
deck again.
Absalom felt like he was living a penny dreadful.
The valley narrowed to a broad bottleneck leading south into
the next valley (“Provo,” Captain Jones had managed to mutter in response to
Absalom’s query, “nothing to write home about”).
At that point, responding to a flag from Captain Jones,
Master Sergeant Jackson and her three fellow Mexican soldiers, riding two each
to a Strider, had turned off the road.
Now as their vehicle nosed over the low, wide-shelving foothills
supporting a tall gravel ridge, Absalom and others standing around the
Liahona’s
wheelhouse could finally see the Hot Springs Hotel
and Brewery.
And the hotel was burning.
“’Tisn’t the hotel,” Abigail said at his shoulder, and for a
moment he forgot that she was as brown and cracked as any Indian, not the
milk-skinned girl he’d ridden ponies and played at conkers with as a
child.
“There’s a steam-truck
parked beside it, and the truck is on fire.
Look,” she pointed.
“There are men trying to put out the flames.”
“That’s the kidnappers’ truck,” the dwarf grumbled.
“And I reckon it’s the kidnappers as
are playing fireman.”
He continued
to hold at the ready his strange stubby rifle with the drum attached.
Burton had asked the dwarf about it en
route, and gotten a crotchety glare for his trouble.
“Stop the truck, Captain,” Abigail told him.
She touched Poe’s dwarf gently on his
arm.
“And don’t shoot.
This is my home.
We don’t know for sure that those men
are involved in the kidnapping.
And there might be guests inside.”
“Not to mention the boy,” Jones grunted assent, and under
the persuasion of his experienced fingers the
Liahona
ground to a halt, halfway down the bluff above the
hotel.
“What should I do then, do you think?” the dwarf wanted to know.
“Kiss the rotten dry gulchers?”
“We’ll parley first.
If we have to fight, we’ll try to get the drop on them.
Follow my lead.”
Absalom shuddered to hear Annie talk so
frankly and forcefully.
She looked
at Dan Jones.
“Your men are
armed.”
Jones nodded.
He left the engine idling, stayed on the deck and started passing
instructions to his crewmen.
Abigail slid down the ladder with a butterfly’s grace,
putting one hand on each side rail and apparently letting the rest of her
simply fall.
Absalom hesitated,
embarrassed to follow because he knew he would make a much more awkward
figure.
Burton pushed past him, and Poe, and the dwarf.
They all seemed completely comfortable
with the motion—the dwarf Coltrane only used one hand, since the other
never relinquished the death grip it had on his strange firearm.
The men all stalked across the sand
towards the burning steam-truck in Abigail’s wake.
Absalom noticed a second steam-truck parked behind the
first, and wondered just how many men there were at the Hot Springs Hotel and
Brewery.
Just as Absalom had mustered the will to throw himself down
the ladder, Roxie Snow stepped past him.
Like Abigail, she held the sides of the
Liahona’s
ladder and slid down with practiced grace, her
crinoline skirt filling and billowing like a mushroom cap.
Then Annie.
At
the top of the ladder she hesitated.
“Maybe you should stay in the truck,” she suggested softly.
Absalom’s blood boiled.
“Egad,” he ground out stiffly.
“What kind of man do you think I am?”
She shrugged as she levered herself over the edge of the
Liahona
.
“I
think you’re cute.”
Annie’s skirt was of a lighter fabric than Roxie’s, and it
puffed up higher around her waist.
If he’d already been on the ground, Absalom might have seen something
scandalous.
As it was, he saw the
top side of a pretty pink bonnet, tied with ribbon, surrounded by the halo of a
puffed-out pink skirt.
“I’m not a coward,” Absalom gnashed his teeth, reached deep
inside himself for something inspirational, and found the Harrow Song.
“Follow up!
Follow up!
Follow up!
Follow up!” he
began.
He saw Annie pull a pistol from inside her skirt.
Singing, he grabbed the two rails of the ladder and threw
himself over the edge and down, as the others had all done.
He dropped—
it wasn’t so bad, air rushing around his ears—
his toe caught on a rung, halfway down—
and Absalom tumbled to the ground, hard.
“Unnh,” he groaned.
Bang!
A shot.
Absalom
rolled to his feet and pulled his own gun from inside his frock coat, not the
little four-shot derringer in his waistband, but the big revolver Abigail had
given him at the Tabernacle.
He
heard Annie laughing, and he resolved not to look at her.
The action had begun, a fight was
breaking out, his sister was in the thick of it, and he was going to save her.
And
show anyone who happened to be watching that he wasn’t a coward.
He hoped Annie, in particular, was watching.
Absalom charged.
Around the track of the
Liahona
, past its nose and at the hotel.
“’Til the field ring again and again!” he sang.
“Thank you for your attention!” he heard Abigail yelling as
she drifted into view.
“Now kindly
tell me what in hell are you snakes… you
gentlemen
… doing on my property?”
Absalom saw that she held her pistol overhead, pointed at
the sky.
He saw that there was no
fighting, only Abigail yelling at the men in her home.
But he saw those things just a moment
too late, as he rushed past her and charged at the flaming steam-truck.
He was already leveling his borrowed
pistol at the nearest putative Danite, a heavy man in a wool jacket and
shapeless felt hat, and he found he couldn’t stop himself.
“And whose idea was it to light a truck on fire?” Annie
demanded.
Bang!
Absalom squeezed the trigger.
*
*
*
The nincompoop Fearnley-Standish missed, of course.
The heavy man he’d aimed at ducked,
Fearnley-Standish didn’t adjust his aim in the slightest, and his bullet
shattered the windscreen of the flaming steam-truck.
Burton would have liked to have the luxury of time in which
to throttle the whiny little weasel, but he didn’t, as the Danite with the
shapeless hat who’d just been shot at took objection to his treatment.
He grabbed the hilt of a knife tied to
his thigh, and Burton had to step in to protect the resources—however
impoverished, dysfunctional and unworthy—of Her Majesty’s Foreign Office.
He punched the Danite right across the jaw, dropping him
like a sack of grain.
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Guns went off all around Burton.
Thank Krishna most people, even professional killers, were
terrible shots.
He drew his 1851 Navy
and looked for an efficient target.
The Danites fired and withdrew into the house.
Burton saw a lean, bent, lazy-eyed
rogue who appeared to be shouting orders at the others and took aim at
him.
Hickman, wasn’t that his
name?
Burton had already faced him
down once, in the Shoshone stockade.
Bang!
Bang!
“Helldammit!”
The Danite grabbed at his arm where Burton had hit him and ducked out of
sight into a doorway.
“Burton, get down!” Poe shouted.
Out of the corner of his eye, Burton saw that he was alone.
Fearnley-Standish had flat-out turned
and run, sprinting away into the desert.
His other companions had retreated more modestly, into the hotel’s
stable.
Poe was waving an arm to
summon him.
“Like hell!” Burton shouted, and charged the porch.
He knew it looked like recklessness,
but he didn’t want to give the Danites a chance to settle in and get
comfortable.
If
Fearnley-Standish’s idiotic and premature assault had any virtue, it was that
it had taken the enemy by surprise.
To surrender that advantage now would be a foolish waste.
A Danite ran across the porch to meet him, raising a thick
knotted club.
Burton ducked under
the man’s swing and pistol-whipped him across the face, sending him crashing
onto the smooth boards.
He really wished he had his sword with him.
A man loomed into view through a window beside Burton,
pumping a rifle in both hands.
“Follow up!” Burton shouted.
“I mean, follow
me
!”
He jumped into the window.
Crash!
A cloud of flying glass shards came with Burton into a small
sitting room, and together they pounded into the rifleman, banging his head
against the hardwood back of a sofa and then knocking him to the floor.
“Get that animal!” Hickman yelled in a high-pitched, nasal
voice, but his troops were in disarray.
As Burton had hoped, surprise and initiative were still with him.
The downed rifleman grunted and tried to raise his weapon to
shoot at Burton.
Burton pinned his
wrist to the floor with a sharp stab of his heel, happy to be wearing heavy
boots.
He felt the wrist shatter,
but didn’t hear it in the din.