Authors: D. J. Butler
Bang!
Burton spared a bullet for the Danite leader, forcing him to
duck back again, out of the small parlor in which they stood.
Three shots.
Accounting for the empty chamber as well, Burton had two
left.
He’d be hard pressed to
re-load under this fire.
Another Danite charged at Burton, this man waving a cavalry
saber.
Burton preferred a lighter
sword for fencing, frankly, an épée or a rapier, but better a saber than
nothing.
Bang!
The swordsman went down in a gush of blood and a cloud of
gunpowder smoke.
Thank you, Mr.
Sam Colt, Burton thought.
Under his feet, the rifleman wiggled.
Burton looked down in time to see the
man swing with a short, ugly boot knife for Burton’s pelvis.
He twisted and stepped aside—
and winced as the knife bit into his thigh.
Damned Danite.
The man lost his grip on the knife, still sticking in
Burton’s leg, and moved to bring his rifle up again.
Bang!
The thirty-six caliber bullet from the 1851 Navy left a neat
round hole in the man’s forehead and a quickly spreading pool of blood under
his skull.
Last bullet, Burton thought.
Just in time.
He holstered his Colt and scooped up the rifle in one
hand.
It was a lever action rifle,
a so-called Volcano, and an innovative weapon with which Burton was not very
familiar.
He knew it fired exotic
bullets called Rocket Balls, each bullet with its own gunpowder charge built
right in, which it chambered by the action of its famous lever.
He had no idea how many shots it held,
or how many he had left.
Burton
was a pistoleer and a swordsman, and not much for rifles, other than for
hunting game.
He heard shouting as he bent to pick up the saber.
He was alone with two dead men in the
little parlor, but two different hallways led out of the room, and he heard
boots and saw the shadowy shapes of men down both of them.
For a second, in a lit space at the far end of one of the
hallways, he saw two faces he knew.
A less observant man might have missed them, but Burton had
sharp eyes and a mind for detail.
It came, he knew, from memorizing so many grammatical tables in so many
different languages.
He knew the
man’s face from the calotype that the Pinkerton detectives had been flashing
around Bridger’s Saloon, and also from the Shoshone stockade.
He recognized the little boy, of
course, from the
Liahona
.
It was Seamus McNamara the wanted man, Sam Clemens’s aide,
and Captain Jones’s little midshipman, John Moses.
In the split second in which Burton saw them, they
disappeared from view.
They were
beyond the Danite mob, not part of the Danites, and they looked like they were
headed outside.
McNamara dragged
the boy by the scruff of his neck.
“Kill that son of a bitch!” Burton heard Hickman squeal, and
men charged into the room.
He didn’t wait for their attack.
He turned and threw himself out another window and back onto
the porch.
Glass fell around him
and with him and he rolled to one side to get away from the window.
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bullets flew out of the hotel in his direction, but the air
was full of gunfire from all sides.
Burton saw gunpowder plumes in the open doors of the stable, and from
the deck of the
Liahona
, and here and
there from behind trees and rocks.
Rama’s teeth, his leg hurt, but Burton had no time for
it.
He set the sword beside him on
the porch, pumped the Volcano, satisfied to hear the
snicker-snack
of a shell sliding into the chamber, and pointed it
back the way he’d come.
The first Danite jumped out the window—
bang!
Burton shot him in the chest.
As he flailed and staggered back, Burton pumped the lever
and shot him again.
Bang!
Charming weapon, Burton thought.
He could get used to a lever-action rifle.
Shoot to kill, that was the secret.
Not to injure, or frighten.
Don’t imagine your enemy being hit or
scared and surrendering because you shot at him—imagine him taking your
bullet in his body and dying an instant death.
Most men were useless in a firefight because secretly they
didn’t want to kill the other fellow.
In a war, most soldiers secretly fired over their enemies’ heads for the
same reason.
In their heart of
hearts, they objected to the killing.
They weren’t sissies or cowards, they were just civilized men.
Richard Burton was not really a civilized man, and he had no
such compunction.
He’d survived a
spear to the head and had himself circumcised as a grown man.
He’d been in great pain and close to
his own death so many times that the fear, pain and death of other men were
nothing extraordinary to him, or even troublesome.
He dragged himself to his feet.
An arm protruded out the window to shoot at him blind.
Bang!
Standing, he was easily able to step out of the way of the
bullet, and then smash the fingers of the gun hand with the butt of his stolen
rifle.
“Dammit!”
The
attacker dropped his pistol and yanked his hand back inside.
Burton was sure he’d broken at least
two fingers, and hopefully more.
Burton heard footsteps on the porch roof overhead.
He stooped, picked up the abandoned
pistol, and emptied it into the roof.
Yells of surprise and pain and the thud of a body hitting the shingles
rewarded his efforts.
Burton threw
aside the empty pistol and retreated back around the porch, away from the
parlor.
Once he had his back against some solid wood and a moment in
which no one was shooting specifically at him, Burton began reloading his 1851
Navy.
As his fingers went through
the practiced motions of pouring in the powder and then thumbing in bullets and
the little copper percussion caps, he looked for Captain Jones.
He spotted the man’s blue hat on the
Liahona’s
deck.
Jones and his truck-men lay on their bellies with rifles aimed and
firing at the hotel.
They were
shielded from the Danites’ return fire by the body of the big steam-truck, and
their elevated position made their shots devastating.
Even the Danite sharpshooters in the second storey windows
had to fire up to get at Jones and his men.
No wonder they’d had a hard time mounting an effective
counterattack to Burton’s charge.
They were under serious pressure on other fronts.
“Jones!” Burton yelled.
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
“Captain Jones!”
He wanted to tell Jones about the boy, but he couldn’t make
himself heard over the gunfire.
Burton considered briefly the possibility of running over to the
steam-truck, but only briefly.
In the crossfire, he’d be cut to pieces.
Best to win the gunfight first.
Burton snapped in the final cap, holstered the 1851 Navy
again and took a closer look at the Volcano.
He thought the bullets were loaded into a magazine that was
built into the gun’s muzzle, somehow, but he wasn’t sure and he didn’t want to
fiddle with it now.
He’d just
shoot until the rifle was empty, then switch weapons.
He slid the saber into his belt.
It was awkward, but it would do.
Then Burton moved around the back of the hotel, looking for
another window to jump through.
*
*
*
“There’s your Irishman,” Poe said.
“Where?” Coltrane peered out the open stable door, keeping
his head low to the ground.
Clemens’s Irish thug trotted down the slope on the far side of the
hotel, dragging the little boy behind him.
They didn’t look like they were being pursued—the
Danites in the hotel had all their attention focused on their attackers.
Coltrane lunged forward, like an involuntary reflex, and Poe
caught him.
“He’s got the kid,” Coltrane objected.
The two of them crouched low in the stable, firing
occasionally out the door with pistols they’d borrowed from Captain Jones.
Coltrane hadn’t yet fired his strange
machine-gun
, it wasn’t very accurate and he wanted to wait until
he had a close shot.
Elsewhere in
the stable, the three women fired pistols at the big house into which Richard
Burton had disappeared.
“You’ll be diced,” Poe told him, “puréed.”
Coltrane squinted through the buzzing hail of bullets.
“Yeah, it looks dicey, alright,” he
agreed.
“What’s the
pure aid
you’re talking about?”
“I mean you’ll be mowed down instantly.”
Bullets buzzed and snapped and whined about them, kicking up
straw and dust and wood splinters where they hit.
Coltrane flared his nostrils and looked frustrated.
“But the whole damn reason I came here
was to save that kid.”
“Also, we have a mission,” Poe reminded him.
“Yeah?” Coltrane asked, squinting at Poe.
“What’s the mission now, boss?
Far as I can tell, we’re here to rescue
the enemy, Sam Clemens.”
“Brigham Young isn’t the enemy,” Poe pointed out, but he
knew it was weak.
“I’m not
persuaded that Sam Clemens is necessarily the enemy, either.
War may yet be avoided, and that is in
everyone’s interest.”
“Jebus.”
Coltrane shook his head.
“War’s here, boss.
Duck,
before it gets you.”
“Something nefarious is happening in the Kingdom,” Poe
agreed, “but the Union may yet be saved.”
“How about Eliza Snow over there?” Coltrane jerked a
shoulder in her direction.
“Are
you thinking that she’s the enemy?”
Poe looked at Roxie.
She leaned her beautiful body against a heavy timber and poured fire
across the open yard at the Danites.
Bullets sang in a cloud all about them.
Poe sighed.
He
didn’t know whether she was the enemy or not.
“I have an idea,” he said.
The whistle hanging around his neck felt like a saving
crucifix.
“To end the firefight?” the dwarf asked.
“Or to avoid the war?”
“To end the shooting and rescue the boy,” Poe elaborated,
ignoring the dwarf’s pointed quip.
“But I need to get to the
Liahona
.
Can you lay down suppressing fire for
me with that invention?”
Jed Coltrane laid aside his borrowed pistol and picked up
Mr. Browning’s machine-gun.
“You
want
some impressive fire
?
I reckon I got the means to lay down
some fire as impressive as anyone’s every seen in the Kingdom,” he grinned.
“I’ll count down from three,” Poe instructed him.
“On zero, you shoot.”
He tucked his own pistol into his coat
pocket, shifted his posture a bit, and sighted out another door.
The run to the
Liahona
wasn’t far, maybe only a hundred feet, but it was a
hundred feet of absolutely exposed bare earth, and Poe didn’t want to die at
the hands of some vitamin-deficient desert-dwelling cretin for the sake of that
stretch.
Fortunately, the
Liahona
was turned so that its ladder faced ever-so-slightly away from the hotel.
“Three,” he said calmly.
He said it a little louder than he’d meant to, and the
women’s heads all turned in his direction.
He breathed in deeply but gently, trying to fill his lungs
with as much air as he could without setting off a coughing fit.
Coltrane checked the ammunition drum of his gun.
“What are you fools planning over there?” Roxie asked.
“Two.”
Coltrane planted the gun’s stock firmly under his arm and
stood, ready to go.
Bullets whined
and snarled through the doors of the stable.
“Poe?” Roxie’s voice sounded concerned.
Damn her for the ambiguity, for the
unsoundable, immeasurable, inextricably tangled mess she had made of his heart.
“One.”
Coltrane spat on the floor.
“Kidnapping sons of bitches,” he muttered.
“Poe, I love you,” Roxie said.
“Zero.”
Poe hesitated a moment, deliberately.
Coltrane stepped into the open door and squeezed the trigger
on his gun.
Roxie’s words and the
sudden explosion of noise almost stunned Poe into immobility—
rat-rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
—
but not quite.
Poe sprinted.