Liahona (16 page)

“No,” Poe corrected them, carefully folding the white
cloth—which, Absalom now thought, looked rather large for a handkerchief,
and wasn’t there writing on it?—and putting it away in his coat
pocket.
 
“He’s fallen asleep.
 
The excitement was too much for him.”

“Helldammit!” shouted Hickman.
 
His nostrils flared, he bared yellow-brown teeth and his
eyes jumped back and forth between Burton and Absalom.
 

“It isn’t my first choice, but I’m willing to lower my gun
if you lower yours,” Burton suggested in a cold, gravelly tone.
 
“And I suspect that Her Majesty would
prefer that outcome, all in all.”

“You first,” said Hickman.

“Like hell.”

“I ain’t gonna lower my gun,” Hickman insisted.
 

“Sure you will,” interjected a new voice.
 
“You both will, or my Irishman here
will plug you full of holes.”

Absalom turned, and nearly jumped out of his skin.
 
It was the brush-mustachioed Brute who
spoke, chewing his words out around the stub of an unlit, partly-smoked
cigar.
 
To his side was a bony,
red-haired, beak-nosed man in a long coat and porkpie hat, who held a long
brass repeater rifle to his shoulder in shooting position, aimed straight at
Hickman.
 
Behind them, with long
Brunel rifles pointed forward, came four Shoshone braves.
 
To the side stood Chief Pocatello,
looking relaxed with his arms folded over his chest.

“We’ll all shoot you, Bill,” Pocatello said, his eyes
twinkling merrily.
 
“Put it back in
the holster.”

Burton immediately complied, his movement crisp and
salute-like.
 
The man was an ape,
but, to his credit and Absalom’s relief, he was an East India Company ape.
 
Hickman dawdled and looked sulky as he
put his gun away.
 
“It ain’t like
you to abandon a friend, Chief,” he whined.
 
“You shouldn’t ought to turn your back on a man.”

“Or a snake,” Burton added.

“I just don’t want any shooting, Bill,” Chief Pocatello
said.
 
“We’ll put Lee over his
saddle for you.
 
Why don’t you take
him back to the Fort?”

Bill Hickman whimpered like a kicked dog and he shot Absalom
a venomous glare, but he took the offered help and trudged for the gate with a
couple of Shoshone braves, dragging John Lee between them.

“That was some luck, wasn’t it?” Absalom commented to the
mysterious Poe, who only arched his eyebrows and pursed his lips in return.

“You’re Sam Clemens,” Burton said to the brush-faced Brute,
and Absalom could have kicked himself for not recognizing the man in the
Saloon.

“And you’re the skunk that punched holes in my boiler
pipes,” Clemens batted back.
 
“Name’s Burton, I understand.”

“True,” Burton acknowledged, “and yes.”

Absalom felt his throat constricting.
 
“I… I…” he stammered.

“Don’t you worry your pretty girlish Etonian head about it,
you bloody toff,” Clemens’s Henry-armed companion sneered in an Irish
brogue.
 
“We know it wasn’t you.”

“Harrovian,” Absalom murmured defensively.

“Same fookin’ thing.”
 
The Irishman spat on the ground.

“What do you want?” Burton pressed Sam Clemens, his face
hard.

Clemens sighed and looked wistful.
 
“Mostly,” he said, “I want to gloat.
 
Will it ease your feelings if I dress
my gloating up in homespun philosophy?”

“It might,” Burton allowed.

Clemens gnawed on his stub and reflected.
 
“I could tell you that
cheaters
never prosper
,” he said, “but if you know
anything about the United States Congress, you’ll know that’s a crock of
manure.”

“What goes around, comes around,” Burton offered coolly.

Clemens shook his head dismissively.
 
“Too eastern, too much symmetry, too
much yin-this-and-yang-the-other-thing.
 
What if I just leave it at
never go up against a riverboat man when
his smokestack is on the line
?
 
It isn’t exactly pithy, but it’s got a
certain sly innuendo about it, and it resonates.”

“I suppose your Shoshone friends will hold us here while you
get a head start,” Burton said grimly, and Absalom’s heart sank at the prospect
of the mission’s failure.
 
Well, he
thought, at least he could still find his sister.

“Of course,” Clemens admitted.
 
“Also, I’m going to steal all your coal.”

*
  
*
  
*

Not long after the gray pre-dawn sky over the pit
transitioned to a bright morning blue, the Shoshone raised the portcullis and
let out the crew and passengers of the
Liahona
.
 
Braves stood at the
mouth of the tunnel to meet their former prisoners as they were disgorged,
cheerfully returning weapons and making assurances that nothing on board the
truck had been disturbed.
 
Captain
Jones stormed out first, yelling “John Moses!
 
John Moses!” before he was halfway across the compound
towards his idling vehicle.

Poe let himself drift at the back of the crowd.
 
He exercised all his considerable
powers of inconspicuousness and stealth, but he knew it was wasted effort.
 
Roxie had seen him without his beard,
and surely she had recognized him as easily as he had recognized her.
 
His only hope, and it was a slim one,
was that she still believed him to be dead, and that her belief was strong
enough to trump the evidence of her own eyes.
 
She had tried to kill him in Baltimore, after
all—trickster, liar, seductress, poisoner—and, at the Army’s
instruction—at
Robert’s
instruction—he had let her believe she had succeeded.
 
She almost
had
.
 
He had
died to the world, then, had ceased to be
Edgar Allan Poe
or
Edgar
or
Ed
to almost every human being
he talked to, had assumed a series of false identities, many even nameless, in
pursuit of the various missions the Army had given him.

For many years at a stretch, the only human being who had
known he was alive and known his real name, Poe’s only source of genuine human
contact, much less kindness, had been his case officer, Robert Lee.

No, he could hope she thought he was dead, but he knew
better.
 
He had seen the surprise
register on her face when that thug Hickman had pierced his disguise, and he
had noted how thoroughly she had avoided him thereafter.
 
She was too good to ever give the
appearance
of avoiding him, but the fact remained that Hickman
had shouted his name and she hadn’t met his eyes or stood close to him
since.
 
Perhaps she didn’t trust
herself not to reveal her knowledge, or perhaps she was simply afraid that Poe
might seek an opportunity to take his well-deserved revenge.

Either way, she knew, and that put him and all his
objectives at risk.

For that matter, Hickman and Lee knew.
 
Who were they and where did they get
their information?

As he let Roxie and other passengers flush out through the
tunnel ahead of him, he pondered again the questions that had been running
through his head for hours.
 
What
did Brigham Young want?
 
What did
Orson Pratt want?
 
What did
Roxie
want?
 
Did her presence on the
Liahona
indicate that Young knew of Poe’s mission and wanted it thwarted?
 
Or did it mean that Roxie knew Poe was
alive, and was after him again?
 
Or
was it mere coincidence?
 
Was she
still Young’s agent?
 
Was she
Pratt’s?

And where was Coltrane?
 
Obviously, the dwarf had failed in his errand, since Roxie
was alive and well.
 
Had she killed
or disabled him somehow?
 
But she
had been at the show, and then on the
Liahona’s
deck.
 
Was the young
high-kicking woman a professional associate of Roxie’s—might
she
have defeated Poe’s dwarf?

He watched the young woman now, careful not to drift too
close to her.
 
The English
diplomat, Fearnley-Standish, was chattering to her frantically, spewing out a
torrent of words.
 
She tolerated
his walking beside her, and when he reached out to hold her hand, she squeezed
his fingers once, briefly, before letting them go.
 
Her face was the iron visage of a nymph and she looked very
much in command of the conversation, and strong, and Poe could imagine her
possessing undisclosed and dangerous skills.
 
She might very well have done Coltrane in.

Poe could carry out his mission without the dwarf, assuming
Hunley’s devices were all still intact, and in particular the ones he had to
consign to the Madman.
 
He patted
the whistle around his neck to be sure he still had that, at least.
 
He couldn’t be so conspicuous as to
rush out to the
Liahona
first, but he
did need to assure himself that he still had his other tools.

And he had to get to the Great Salt Lake City as fast as
possible.

Damn Samuel Clemens.

When Poe reached the
Liahona
, he could see its Captain and crew on board, on the deck and through
the few portholes, searching furiously for their missing midshipman.
 
“John Moses!” Poe heard the Welshman
shout, over and over but to no avail.

A crowd of the truck’s passengers mobbed beside one of its
enormous tracks, facing off against the old Shoshone chief.
 
Pocatello stood to face their irate
stares with his arms crossed over his chest in casual unconcern.
 
The mob carried weapons, and if
Pocatello had been a lone man, he might have had to fear for his life, but half
a dozen braves stood about him, all armed to the teeth, and of course the rocky
bluff above the compound was a glowering hedgehog of snipers.
 
Roxie was not in sight—likely she
had slipped aboard the
Liahona
, to avoid
Poe’s presence yet again, and now her young companion followed her.

“Did you leave us enough coal to get to the Great Salt Lake
City?” cried out a long-faced Swede, despair in his voice.

Pocatello shrugged.
 
“I gave Sam Clemens a free run at the truck’s coal room.
 
I don’t know how much he took, but he
seemed anxious to be sure he got there ahead of you, so my guess is that he
didn’t leave you nearly enough.”

“Have you no shame, sir?” demanded one of the spinsters to
whom Poe had paid special attention during the previous night’s show.

“No, ma’am,” Pocatello acknowledged, “I do not.
 
I have a people to lead and feed and
protect, and this was purely a business transaction in my people’s
interest.
 
Don’t worry, ma’am, your
Captain Jones is a resourceful man, and I expect you’ll make it down into the
Valley soon enough.
 
In the
meantime, if you’re hungry, we have food we can share… for a reasonable
price.”
 
He grinned.

Poe thought he saw where this conversation was going, and
wanted to cut it short.
 
He had
seen the
Jim Smiley
and he doubted that
it was large enough to carry away all the
Liahona’s
coal, even if it had stuffed its every compartment
full to overflowing.
 
With another
quick glance around to be sure he saw neither Roxie nor the young woman he
suspected of being her assistant, he raised his voice to pose a question to the
Shoshone chief.
 
“I see that you’re
a commercially sophisticated man, Chief,” he said.
 
“Is there anything else you might condescend to let us have
for a price?
 
Anything necessary
for the operation of a steam-truck, say?”

The Chief batted his eyes innocently and Poe knew he had
guessed correctly.
 
“I suppose I
might,” he conceded.
 
“Did you have
anything specific in mind?”

“Coal, for instance?”

Chief Pocatello’s grin broadened.
 
“Why yes,” he said, “I believe I do have some coal I might
be able to sell to you.
 
And I’m no
expert, but I guess it’s probably just the right kind for the
Liahona’s
boiler.”

*
  
*
  
*

 
“Hell and
begorra,” Tam exclaimed under his breath, inaudible over the rumble of the
steam-truck’s operation and the faint rattle of the strapped-down dishes in
their various shelves and cupboards, “there’s a kid aboard.”

He stared at the child, a round-faced little boy overwhelmed
by a man’s large pea coat, spilling out of the pots and pans cabinet beneath
the galley counter.
 
The boy stared
back, with big eyes (and didn’t every one of Mother O’Shaughnessy’s children
have big eyes, didn’t all kids have big eyes? don’t get all sentimental, me
boy).