Liahona (9 page)

Jed pressed the second button.
 
Instantly, the swarm stopped its random runabout motion and
headed his direction.
 
Slightly
unnerved despite his knowledge, he set the canister on the edge of the
crawlspace and edged back into the darkness, as if that would save him.
 
He watched uncomfortably as the scarabs
marched in orderly ranks, like they were under the spell of some bug-herding
Noah, back into the canister, made one last scuttling sound, and then were
still.

Jed closed the lid of the canister on tight and tucked it
inside his jacket.
 
Creepy little
sons of bitches, but they did the job.
 
He dropped to the ground, washed his hands in the low trough sink, and
headed back into the Saloon.
 
Time
to pack their gear into the
Liahona
—he’d
deal with the second Pinkerton later.

Chapter Three

Sam sat on the deck of the
Jim Smiley
and scowled into the pale mountain sun of the early
morning.
 
He made good and sure
that every face that turned from the much bigger and much higher deck of the
Liahona
to look at him got a scowl in return, fierce and
wild, eyebrows on full furrow and jaw jutted out.
 
He could have sat in the wheelhouse and scowled, but he’d
dragged the wooden captain’s chair—one of the few things he’d bribed the
salvage teams working on the wreck of the
Pennsylvania
to give to him—out into the sunshine and plunked
his narrow hips into its welcoming arms to make sure he was good and visible to
all and sundry.
 
He positioned
himself carefully to catch the light of the rising sun on the crotch buttons of
his Levi-Strauss denim pants.

He sipped at a mug of hot coffee for show, but he’d already
poured two down his gullet since the sun rose.
 
Sam Clemens hadn’t slept and sleep wasn’t on his mind
now.
 
He’d worked through the night,
which was hard to do in the dark of the boiler room when the electricks weren’t
cooperating, and two of the pipes were already patched, with the third on its
way.
 
Once the
Liahona
pulled out, Sam would finish the repair job and be
on her tail.
 
She was a fast
animal, but if old Chief Pocatello came through, and Sam felt confident that he
would, Sam thought his odds of being the first into the Great Salt Lake City
were rather good.

The
Liahona
was
enormous.
 
Giant, rattling metal
tracks snapped and ground in an approximately rectangular polyhedron around
each of her sides, higher in front than in the back, flattening anything they
rode over under tons of steel.
 
Her
body was shaped like a sailing ship’s, but more square, and the sides bulked
out above the grinding tracks, making them visible before, behind and from the
side, but not from above.
 
She had
a wheelhouse like the
Jim Smiley’s
,
but where Sam’s wheelhouse might squeeze in a fourth man in a pinch, if that
man were willing to stand, the
Liahona’s
could easily accommodate a platoon of marines.
 
Its deck, too, was vast, and though it
was all dusty and weatherstained, the surface was sprinkled with dozens of
wooden benches and parasols from the relative comfort of which its passengers
could observe the passing scenery; many of the benches and parasols were close
enough to the rail to be visible from Sam’s lower observation point.

Fifteen miles an hour, Sam thought, Pocatello had better
come through for me.
 
He chewed the
stub of a cigar.
 
For me and the
United States taxpayer.

During the night, one of the Pinkertons had disappeared and
the other had been found dead.
 
The
dead one presented a relatively minor mystery; someone had cut his face up
pretty bad, and no one the bouncers asked about it had cared to fess up to
anything.
 
They’d done the obvious
thing and thrown the body into the icehouse until the next U.S. Marshal
happened through and could investigate.
 
By which time, Sam had intimated wryly to the bouncers when they
inquired as to his whereabouts, the trail was likely to be cold.

O’Shaughnessy had stayed hidden in the
Jim Smiley
and the bouncers, in their role of makeshift police,
hadn’t tried to suggest that they had the authority to board and search
her.
 
Sam had been careful not to
do anything to give them the idea that they did, and they’d all gotten along
famously.

The missing Pinkerton was rather more of a mystery.
 
His clothing had been found in the
Saloon’s latrine, but no other trace of him; apparently the man had taken his
wallet and his weapon and had gone running off alone into the wilderness in the
middle of the night.
 
Sam was as
surprised as everyone else, and as little able to explain it.
 
All in all, it was the sort of behavior
he associated not with the Wyoming Territory but more with, say, Canada.

When the sun had cracked over the horizon, the last few
passengers had loaded into the
Liahona
.
 
Sam had stopped working on the boiler
pipes to watch; he loved mighty moving machines, and the
Liahona
, though she wasn’t handsome, was as mighty as they
came.
 
Her Captain, the Welshman
Jones, had lowered a cargo door in back to march up a few crates and suitcases,
and the passengers had come up the side by ladder.
 
For those without the heart to make such a climb unaided,
the crew had hung a pulley from a metal arm above the rungs and dropped a
steel-and-leather harness.
 
Several
ladies and one man had come up that way, the ladies flashing various
expressions of delight, relief and disgruntlement at the heavy-armed truck-men
who hoisted them.
 
The fellow who
had availed himself of the crew’s assistance was the younger, whiter, and
fussier of the two Englishmen.
 
Probably, Sam thought, watching him flap his arms like a turkey and
cringe from contact with the side of the great steam-truck, it had been the
other Englishman who had punched the holes in the
Jim Smiley
.

After the big steam-truck was loaded, some of the Fort’s men
climbed up onto the ramparts and walked the full circuit, scanning the horizon
for threats with their spyglasses.
 
The enclosure was designed to look like an old wooden stockade, with a
jagged top like the shoulder-to-shoulder points of sharpened logs, but the wall
was made of thick slabs of plascrete just like Bridger’s Saloon, and all its
points were made of iron, and iron was the walkway that ran around the inside,
giving the Fort’s defenders a platform from which to watch and defend.
 
The Fort sat squarely astride the road,
with one huge tower-shouldered gate looking east, to the Platte and the
Mississippi and beyond, and another gazing resolutely west, to New Russia, to
California and to the Kingdom of Deseret.
 

Once they had confirmed that the horizon was clear of
hostiles, the Fort’s people threw levers inside one of the west towers, and
with a rush of steam into the center of the gate from both towers, the huge,
interlocking steel fingers that comprised the gate itself groaned and withdrew
into their plascrete housing, opening the way for outbound traffic.

Even idling, the
Liahona
coughed significant fumes into the air, and when Jones blasted the signal from
the tin-peaked whistle at the corner of his wheelhouse and engaged the
throttle, the black cloud that belched out of the rear of the stream-truck
could have entirely covered any two Missouri counties, or the entire state of
Rhode Island.
 
Steam hissed out, too,
through various chinks in the beast’s body,
pfffting
out past the gears that worked the tracks, from
cracks in the hull and from a pipe that rose out the machine’s back end,
alongside the exhaust pipe, for the purpose.

Twenty-odd passengers on the
Liahona’s
deck waved hands, hats and scarves at the Fort’s
staff lingering in the yard (none stupid enough to linger too close to the
truck).
 
The staff waved back, some
with polite hats and some with less-polite single fingers and sneers.
 
This was the edge of the United States
of America, Sam was reminded; once the
Liahona
left Fort Bridger she entered the Kingdom of
Deseret, and relations between the U.S. and the Kingdom were not always
completely friendly.

Sam looked for the Englishmen and found them sitting by the
rail and enjoying the sun.
 
The
dark one met his bold gaze, mustache for mustache, and when the Englishman
raised his glass in salute, Sam toasted him right back.
 
The pale one looked away.

Sam pulled his goggles down over his eyes and a scarf up
over his mouth and nose.

To his surprise, as the
Liahona
thundered by and just before its cloud of dust
enveloped him, he thought he saw the gypsy palm reader.
 
So the vagabond showman was going to
the Great Salt Lake City, was he?
 
What had he said he was doing, something about a display of mummies?
 
Sam hadn’t really been paying attention,
he’d been thinking about death.
 
Death and Henry.

Well, fine, he’d have a good conversation with Mr. Brigham
Young and then he’d go see the mummies.
 
Maybe have his palm read again.
 
For that matter, Young had something of a supernatural reputation.
 
Sam tossed aside the last of his cigar
and considered what questions he might ask the famous Prophet of the Rockies,
if given the chance.
 
Is there
an afterlife, Mr. President, and if so, where in its various parts is my
brother Henry?
 
That about cut to the heart of the matter.

When the dust settled, Sam tugged his scarf down, shaking
out the red-brown sand it had collected.
 
“O’Shaughnessy!” he roared, and then he saw the man waiting on the
gravel at the foot of the ladder.

“What do you want, Sam Clemens, you bloody slave driver,
you?” O’Shaughnessy roared back, stomping up out the stairwell, but when he saw
Sam frozen, staring down at the ground, he shut up.
 
From ten feet away, Sam could smell the liquor on the Irishman.

“Good morning,” Sam called to the stranger.
 
“Can I help you?”

The man wasn’t tall, but he was stocky and he gave the
impression of physical power.
 
His
hair and beard were long and streaked with gray, and his body, the body of the
horse he rode and the body of the packhorse he led all bristled with guns and
knives.
 
He wore buckskins and furs
and so did the animals.
 
Sam peeled
away his goggles for a more unobstructed view of this genuine western
curiosity.

“You’re headed into Deseret!” the man growled.

O’Shaughnessy crept across the deck, avian head low, and
pulled out a gun.
 
Sam glanced, not
meaning to, and noticed that the pistol was unfamiliar and odd-looking, with a
big metal bulb on the end of its muzzle and another where the cylinder should
be.
 
Did it shoot gas? Sam
wondered.
 
He prided himself on
being a man who knew mechanicks, but guns were not his strong suit.
 
Where did O’Shaughnessy get such a
thing?

Sam took another sip of coffee out of habit and then spat
the red mud out onto the deck.
 
“Mercy!”
he snapped, and poured the rest out to avoid repeating the mistake.
 
“Is that some business of yours,
mister?”

“Will it make you feel better about my intentions if I let
your friend get the drop on me?” the mountain man called.
 
“Hell, if I’d wanted you dead, you
gotta figger, I’d a killed you in the night.”

“I suppose I should count my lucky stars you’re such a
gentleman, then,” Sam countered, but he nodded to O’Shaughnessy and the
Irishman stood upright and showed his head.
 
He kept the strange gun at his side, though, Sam noticed,
and therefore out of sight.

“You aren’t a Pinkerton, are you?” O’Shaughnessy asked.

“No!” The grizzled stranger barked a noise that might have
been a laugh.
 
“I’m a Deseret
Marshal, though, if you’re looking for a lawman.
 
Name’s Rockwell.”

“Mostly, Mr. Deseret Marshal,” the Irishman said, smirking
at Sam, “it’s the
lawmen
that come
looking for
me
.”

Idiot didn’t know when to shut his mouth.
 
“What can we do for you, Mr. Rockwell?”
Sam asked.

The mountain man hawked up a gob of phlegm and spat it into
the dust settling around his horse’s hocks.
 
“You can turn this pretty little steam-truck of yours around
and go home,” he said gruffly.
 
“It
ain’t safe for you in the Kingdom.”

Sam ruminated on this communication for several long
moments, but couldn’t figure out what the fellow was up to.
 
“This is a strange way to deliver a
threat, sir,” he finally countered.
 
“We outnumber you and we have the higher ground.”

“That’s ’cause it ain’t a threat,” Rockwell objected.
 
“I’m just stating a fact.
 
I’m telling you that I am the law in
the Great Salt Lake City, and I can’t guarantee your safety.”

Sam scratched his head, a gesture that turned into a
vigorous brushing off of dust.
 
“Well, Mr. Rockwell,” he finally said.
 
“We haven’t broken any laws of the Kingdom of Deseret, nor
do we intend to.
 
We have lawful
business there, official business even, and as far as I can see, there’s no
reason we can’t carry it out.
 
Your
dark intimations are very dramatic, and I think you yourself would cut a fine
buccaneerish figure on the stage, but I have things to do, and I estimate that
the curtain is about to close upon our conversation here.”