Deseret (9 page)

“Hickman!” the mountain man snarled.
 
He tensed and strained like he wanted
to jump to the attack, but two of the big bodyguards held him firm.

“Orrin Porter Rockwell,” Hickman acknowledged in a nasal
drawl.
 
“More fool me, wasting all
that time looking for you in Injun territory, and I coulda just sat right here
and waited.”

He raised his pistol, pointed it at Rockwell’s chest and fired.

Chapter Eight

“Sweet Hildegard, that’s a lot of guns,” Tamerlane
O’Shaughnessy whispered to himself.
 

Another man might have been tempted by the store of
weapons.
 
They were shiny and new
and some of them looked downright powerful.
 
Tam, though, was already carrying two Maxim Hushers (and
what better weapon could there be for a man with a need for discretion and
privacy than a gun that killed with a whisper?
 
and to have two of them?
 
an embarrassment of riches, me boy) as well as the box of
little brass murder beetles.
 
Tam
was not a man who collected toys; he was a man who picked up a tool when he
needed it to get the job done.
 
Mostly the job was killing someone that bloody deserved it, and Tam at
the moment found himself well stocked with tools.

He watched the dwarf leave, heading back down the hill to
the train station.
 
He might have
killed the man then, only the little bastard was carrying that thing the boy
called a
machine-gun
.
 
Besides, once lead started to fly,
other armed men on the scene inevitably felt it was their business to get
involved, so Tam didn’t want to start a gunfight right next to a gun
shop
with a gun
smith
in it.
 

He was looking for an attack situation with a little less
risk.
 
He scanned the area around
the gunshop and its neighboring farms, noticing the gigantastic looming
mountains above, each one the bloody-damn-hell size of Ireland herself, it
seemed, and empty as a whore’s heart.
 
That’s where he needed to get the dwarf, out of town and into the
wilderness, or else back into the city and in a blind alley.

He was about to turn to follow the wee circus monkey back
down the hill when the gunsmith left his shop and went back into his brick
cottage.
 
That left the little boy,
sitting all alone in the workshop.

“Curious fellow,” Tam muttered, and he stopped to
watch.
 
The little boy in the
slouch hat pushed a stool over to a work bench and climbed up onto it.
 
There was a vise at the corner of the
bench with a long brass gun barrel in it and a magnifying lens poised over it
on a mechanical clamping arm.
 
The
boy stood on the stool so that he could get a good view down through the lens,
and crouched there, examining the barrel.

“Weird little freak,” Tam muttered.
 
“Think he’s a fookin’ gunsmith, he
does.”
 
He didn’t know why the midget
was so in love with the kid.

But he was.
 
And
that thought gave Tam an idea.

Some shite about Mohammed and mountains, but he couldn’t
remember what, exactly.

He pulled one of the Hushers from its holster and checked
the bungalow to be sure no one was looking out the windows.

*
  
*
  
*

Bang!

A red flower of blood spouted from the mountain man’s
shoulder and he rocked back in the grip of the big bodyguards.

“Hickman!” President Young shouted, his voice taut with
command and anger.
 
“Porter was
restrained.”

“Yeah, I reckon so,” Hickman agreed.
 
“And so are you.”
 
He gestured with his pistol at Young,
Armstrong and Clemens and instructed the other thugs.
 
“Tie ’em all up, and get ’em on the truck.”

“What are joo doing?” demanded the Ambassador.
 
He drew himself up to his full
impressive height, like a cat arching its back to hiss or a cobra flaring its
hood.
 
Sam thought he would have
been intimidated in Hickman’s place, and envied the Ambassador his charisma.

But Hickman was unimpressed.
 
“I’m takin’ you prisoner, fat man,” he drawled.
 
“Don’t bother threatenin’ me with the
wounded sentiments of President Tubman.
 
She’s far away, and the only troops you got local are a couple of them
shitbucket Striders, and they ain’t even in town.”

Clemens didn’t resist as a big man roped his hands tightly
together behind his back.
 

“
I
have forces in
town,” Young’s voice was a rattling lid of calm over a well of fury, but the
veins on his neck and temple were thick as ropes and his skin had gone the
color of a beet.
 

Hickman grinned.
 
“Only they ain’t
your
forces no
more, Brigham.”

“You’re yellow, Hick,” Orrin Porter Rockwell coughed.
 
He looked surprisingly vital for a man
who had just been shot, but he wasn’t struggling against the two men who held
him.
 
“You’re lily-livered.
 
You’re chicken.
 
You shoot me when I can’t fight back
and then you walk around tall like you done something impressive.”

“Helldammit, yes,” Hickman agreed with a yellow-toothed
leer.
 
“I’d shoot you again right
now, blow out your dirty damn brains, only I ain’t sure I want you dead quite
just yet.
 
I might need you alive
for trading.
 
Or for a threat.
 
Or maybe I’ll just shoot off your
fingers one at a time when I’m bored.”

“Traitor!” Young shouted.

“Shut your mouth,” Hickman tittered.

Sam heard the rumble of an engine outside, and then twin
jets of coal exhaust and steam plumed into the room through the shattered
window, announcing the arrival of the back end of a smallish steam-truck.
 
It was a boxy cargo vehicle, and its
tin back gate clattered into the Beehive House’s flower beds, unloading two
more large, grim-looking men.
 

“Hoods on the prisoners,” Hickman ordered, and one of his
captors jammed a bag down over Sam’s head.
 
It smelled like apples and burlap, but he could breathe
through it well enough.
 
The same
man started pushing him—in the direction of the steam-truck, he guessed.

“I guess Lee gave you the dirty work, didn’t he?” Rockwell
taunted Hickman.
 
“Watch out,
Hick.
 
He might have to kill you
when it’s over, make sure you can’t cause him trouble later.”

“Shut up, Port,” Hickman retorted.

“Porter,” Young rumbled.

Sam tripped up some sort of ramp and was thrown to the
ground.
 
More apple smell.

“Or what?” Rockwell pressed, ignoring both his captor and
his President.
 
“You gonna kill me?
 
You think I care?
 
I suppose it was Lee that had the
balls
to try to pull this off.
 
I just can’t figure out where the two of you got the
brains
.
 
Pooled
together, you might just have enough smarts to play noughts and crosses against
a mule.
 
Play
, mind you.
 
I ain’t sure you could
win
.”

“Porter!”

Sam heard footsteps and scuffling on the gangplank behind
him.

“No, I don’t reckon you care if you live or die, Port,”
Hickman admitted.
 
“That’s always
been your charm.
 
But you’ll care
if I shoot
Brigham
.
 
Hell, that was my instructions when I
come here, and I got half a mind to do it anyway.”

Rockwell said nothing.
 
Sam heard
thuds
and grunts around
him as other men were tossed into the steam-truck with him, and then the
clank
of the truck’s gate being shut again.

*
  
*
  
*

Absalom Fearnley-Standish sat on a bench on the deck of the
Liahona
, sipping a lemonade alone.
 

He wasn’t moping, no, he was made of stronger stuff than
that, he tried to tell himself, but he was in a reflective mood.
 
He’d felt reflective since Annie had
rejected him.

He knew her name was Annie because he’d asked her.
 
He’d been a little out of sorts since
he’d met the Mexican Striderman… Striderwoman…
Master Sergeant Jackson
, and he’d thought he could use some pleasant
diversion.
 
He’d found her below
decks, standing outside a cabin door and listening at it.
 
That didn’t seem like very ladylike
behavior, he told himself in retrospect, but it was cardinal that a gentleman
didn’t dwell on the unladylike or ungentlemanly behaviors of others, and
frankly, at the time he hadn’t even noticed it.
 
At the time he’d just been happy to see her.

“I wonder if you would enjoy another lemonade, Annie,” he’d
said, and then, to avoid any misunderstanding, he’d added, “I mean, with me, on
the deck, and perhaps together with a little conversation.
 
I’m not just a man of action, you
know.”
 
That should have reminded
her of his courage in standing up to Lee and Hickman.
 
Then he’d given her his best Harrovian smile.
 
“I think you’ll find I can be quite
charming.”

She had looked him in the eye in the sputtering light of the
hallway electricks and said, without missing a beat, “if you don’t get out of
here right now, Absalom Fearnley-Standish, I’ll stick my boot so far up your
backside you’ll be picking leather out from between your teeth for a week.”

He liked to think he had reacted decisively.
 

It was not a situation his father had prepared him for, nor
the Foreign Office.
 
Competing
norms milled about in his head and collided.
 
A real lady doesn’t talk like a sailor
, he remembered his mother saying to him, preparing
him to meet a female second cousin who was decidedly not an acceptable
match.
 
A gentleman
doesn’t strike a lady
, he’d heard from a
schoolteacher when as a young man he’d been badly beaten by a larger, older
girl, and was silently congratulating himself on landing at least one good blow
to her nose.
 
A man never
backs down from a fight
, they’d told him at
Harrow.
 
More than once.
 
His professional training won out over
the lessons of his childhood traumas, and, though it seemed to him that a
stuttering eternity might have passed, he was reasonably certain that it had
only been a moment or two.
 
A
Foreign Office man always practices discretion
.
 
He knew when he wasn’t wanted.

He’d turned on his heel and left her to her eavesdropping in
the corridor.

Rotten little tease, he reflected, nursing his solitary
lemonade in the afternoon sunshine.
 
Well, this was the Great Salt Lake City, anyway, and really, he had no
time for women.
 
They could only
distract him from his mission.
 
From his two missions, he reminded himself.

A cavalcade of American soldiers overtook them and continued
on ahead.
 
Their horses were
clocksprung, which in itself was fascinating; clockwork was still a relatively
new technology, and very exciting.
 
Absalom had seen clocksprung curiosities in London—a clocksprung
rector and church choir at a fair in the little London borough of Wetwick, and
a clocksprung violinist in a private salon exhibition one evening—but it
was in the American South that the technology had flowered.
 
First under Eli Whitney, and then
driven by Horace Hunley and his team, southern inventors and engineers had
revolutionized their agriculture on its basis.

Absalom had a desire to see the horses.
 
He wondered for a moment whether he
should care about their presence from a professional point of view or observe
it very carefully, but he let it drop when he saw Dick Burton glued to the
rail, staring at the cavalrymen.
 
On the one hand, he knew Burton would properly observe and note anything
that mattered to the success of their joint diplomatic mission—Burton’s
mission, really, though Absalom would never tell
him
that.
 
On the other hand, he resented Burton’s overbearing manner and his
presence generally and he didn’t want to be seen paying attention to anything
Burton was interested in.

He let the horses pass and sipped his lemonade.

Burton turned away from his observation and saw him.
 
“Be careful of the sun, Abigail,” he
growled.
 
“You may get wrinkles.”

“Ambassador Fearnley-Standish, blast you!” Absalom
snapped.
 
He dug into his jacket
pocket to pull out his Patent Metallic Note-Paper-Book, and then felt a little
foolish for it.
 
His notes for
future memoranda of reprimand seemed petty in light of all the drawn guns and
knives he’d seen in the last twenty-four hours.
 
“Look, if you must know, I have a sister.
 
Her name is Abigail, as it
happens.
 
Last night I… I was
excited…”

Burton sneered at him.
 
The scars running up both sides of his face looked like horns, giving
his face a devilish aspect to it that frightened Absalom—just a
bit—even in the noonday sun.
 
“Yes,” he said, “I saw just how
excited
you were, Abby!”