Timpanogos (10 page)

“What do you think, lads?” the Irishman asked in a sliding,
imprecise voice, stabbing one finger into the calotype on his chest.
 
“Doesn’t look like me at all, I
reckon.
 
Besides, what kind of
idjit detectives are you, if you haven’t figured out yet that my name isn’t
bloody-damn-hell McNamara?”

Henry and Scattergun both raised their weapons and stepped
forward.
 

Burton slid out from hiding, a little behind Henry, and
pointed the Colt at his man.
 
He
watched Poe do the same, ridiculously holding up his wadded-up
handkerchief.
 
What was the man
going to do, suffocate the Pinkerton?

Roxie followed in his wake, holding the canister with both
hands.

“It’s that Mick Samuelson was looking for,” Henry said.

“Philadelphia warrant, isn’t it?” asked Scattergun.
 
“I think there’s a reward.”

Poe and Burton nodded at each other.

“Good evening,” they said together.

The plan was that one man would turn to Burton and one to
Poe, and both would be neatly captured.
 

Instead, both Pinkertons wheeled and pointed their guns at
Burton.
 
It was the curse of his
deep voice; they hadn’t even
heard
Poe.

Burton squeezed the trigger.

Bang!

Henry fell back bleeding, losing his grip on his rifle as it
went off—

bang!—

harmlessly, the bullet winging away into the night.

Burton saw Roxie leap into action, tossing the brass scarabs
all through the office door and slamming it shut.
 
Poe grabbed for Scattergun’s shoulder, and Burton swiveled
to aim at the man with his 1851 Navy, but they were both late—

Boom!
the scattergun
went off.

Poe jerked the man back, dragging him to the ground in some
sort of combat maneuver that might be kung fu or karate.

Burton sank to the ground, a searing pain in his side.

Boom!
 
Bang!

Burton and Scattergun both fired pointlessly into the night
sky.

Then the screaming started inside the offices of the Dream
Mine.

*
  
*
  
*

Absalom opened his eyes to the upside-down sight of the
Danites taking away several big knives from the dwarf.
 
There was a long straight one, like a
short sword, that he thought was an Arkansas Toothpick.
 
There was a Bowie knife, with the notch
out of its tip so that the point hung below the hilt, and another knife in
Coltrane’s boot.
 
Then the
black-coated men walked to the other corner of the room and conferred.
 
Absalom thought he saw half a dozen of
them now, though his vision still swam and he knew he might be miscounting.

The midget saw Absalom’s eyes open.
 
To Absalom’s surprise, Coltrane popped
free another knife, out of the back of his belt apparently, and held it out to
Absalom.
 
It was a small, sharp,
one-edged affair, with a wooden hilt and no cross-piece.
 
It might have been a kitchen knife for
paring potatoes.

Absalom shook his head, which was hard, since he was
basically resting on his head, upside down on the wooden floor.
 
He had a gun, and he didn’t really know
how to fight with a knife.

Coltrane mouthed some words silently that Absalom couldn’t
make out, and Absalom gave in.
 
He
took the knife and slipped it into his pocket.

Just as he finished, Lee and his men came back.

“Good to see you awake, milord,” Lee cracked.

“I’m not a lord,” Absalom objected.
 
“My family has a little land, and less
money, and technically my uncle is a Baronet.”

“Isn’t that what the French call you all, though?” Lee
smirked.
 
“Milords?”

“I thought they called us
rosbifs
,” Absalom said.
 
“They protest, but obviously they envy us our robust
diet.
 
We sometimes call them
frogs
.
 
Mostly
we call them
prisoners
.”

Lee guffawed and slapped his knee.
 
“You’re funny, milord.
 
I’m going to call you
milord
,
anyway.
 
I like it.”

“As you please.”

“What’s the contingency plan if you two don’t come out of
this place?”

Absalom wondered if there were some tactic he could adopt,
some ruse he could pursue to confound the Danite thug.
 
He screwed up his brows but none came
to him, and Lee began to look impatient.

“I said—”

“There is none,” Absalom said.
 
“Sorry, bump to the head, I’m a little groggy.
 
How long have I been out?
 
There is no contingency plan.
 
If the farmhouse was clear, we were to
come out and tell our comrades.”

“Brigham Young and Sam Clemens.”

“Yes.
 
And if
your men were here, we were to feign innocence and ignorance and sneak out at
the first opportunity.”

“Shit,” observed one of Lee’s men.

“How long was I unconscious?” Absalom asked.

“Not long,” whined one of the black-coated men.

“Shut up!” Lee snapped to his subordinate.
 
He turned back to Absalom, his face in
a growl.
 
“Here’s what you’re going
to do… milord.
 
The dwarf stays
here.
 
Any misbehavior, the dwarf
is the first one to get it, understood?
 
The dwarf and the good people who own this farm.”
 
Lee gestured into a corner and Absalom
saw the man named Heber, who had tried to warn him, gagged and tied hand and
foot.

“Understood,” Absalom agreed.
 
He tried to seem calm, like Burton would.
 
Well, maybe not exactly like
Burton.
 
Burton would be roaring
and charging up and down the floorboards like a bull with a saber, killing
men.
 
But Burton wouldn’t be
afraid, at least, and in that, Absalom tried to emulate him.

“Wells here’ll go with you,” Lee continued.
 
Wells stepped forward.
 
He was a tall man, dressed in black
from head to foot, with thin dark hair sweeping back from a high forehead.
 
He carried a long rifle.
 
“You’ll go back to your friends, and
you’ll tell them all’s clear and they’re to come in, got it?”

“I’ve got it.”

“Meanwhile, the rest of us will arrange a little welcoming party.”
 
Lee twisted his face into an ugly
leer.
 
“Any tricks, Wells shoots
you, and then the dwarf and the farmer get closely acquainted with the
handiwork of Mr. Jim Bowie.”
 
He
brandished the fighting knife he’d taken from Jed Coltrane.

“Understood.”
 
The wheels of Absalom’s brain spun wildly, trying to generate a plan
that didn’t involve leading his sister and Annie into the farmhouse, or getting
himself shot.

The Danites cut Absalom loose and marched him out the door,
Wells on his heels.
 
He avoided making
eye contact with either the midget or the farmer, for fear he’d give away
either his hopeful reflection on rescue schemes or his gut-wrenching fear.

Exiting the farmhouse, the temperature dropped.
 
After weeks on the road, it still
impressed him how cold the desert got at night.
 
The sudden cooling of sweat on his forehead made Absalom
realize how hot and stuffy the inside of the house had been.

“This way,” he said politely, and marched out along the
irrigation ditch.

Wells walked behind him, which put Coltrane’s knife and the
pocket it was tucked into conveniently out of the Danite’s line of sight.

Absalom slipped the knife into his hand.

He kept spinning the wheels.
 
They kept failing to catch on anything clever or insightful.

Absalom stopped walking.
 
“Those are my companions over there,” he told Wells.
 
He could see the Striders, silhouettes
jutting out around a stand of trees where three fields met.
 
“Will you wait here for me?”
 
He doffed his hat politely with his
left hand.

Be brave, he told himself.
 
Be a fighter, like Burton.

Wells spat on the ground.
 
“I reckon not.
 
I reckon I’ll follow you on up closer, so I can hear what you and your
companions say to each other.
 
And
make sure you talk good and loud, hear?”

Be fearless.
 
Be
a bull with a saber.

“Of course.”

Be the warrior Annie wants.

Absalom stabbed with Coltrane’s knife, aiming for the
Danite’s jugular.

Chapter Fourteen

“Lie back, Captain,” Roxie instructed him, “and think of
England.”

Burton struggled to sit up in the office chair.
 
“Who’s bringing up the
steam-truck?
 
Tell me it isn’t
O’Shaughnessy.”

Roxie plucked another pellet from Burton’s side and tossed
it to the plascrete floor, where it hit with a gentle
plink
.
 
“You
object to giving the wheel of a steam-truck to a man who’s been drinking?”

Burton snarled against the pain and spat on the floor to
clear his head.
 
“I object to
giving it to
him
.”

“Not to worry, then,” she told him, wrapping a bandage
around his chest.
 
“Poe’s driving.”

“Ekwensu’s slippery shell!” Burton cursed.
 
“Let’s hope the wretch lives long
enough to get back here.”

“Captain Burton,” Roxie looked at him reproachfully.
 
“Don’t be a sore loser.”
 
She wrapped some sort of cloth around
him as a bandage.
 
It had the sting
of alcohol.

Burton growled and grumbled wordlessly, but nodded.
 
“It’s my nature, Mrs. Snow… Mrs. Young…
I was never cut out for the soft conversation of the civilized.”

“You can still call me Roxie,” she said, and tied the
bandage off.

He shrugged back into his coat and limped with her across
the veranda.
 
At the top of the
stairs, they gathered up O’Shaughnessy, who was droning on and on about the
pipes that were calling him.
 
Burton didn’t dislike the Irish, not any more than he disliked any other
race of men, and he decided that, on balance, he almost
liked
O’Shaughnessy’s singing voice.
 
He helped the other man up and they
staggered together down the stairs, to stand in front of the bay doors that now
gaped open.

Blue lights jostling up the road showed that Poe had
survived the hike down to the steam-truck and was on his way back.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said to Roxie, pointing
to the row of squiggles over the top of the bay door.
 
“What language is that?
 
It’s everywhere in this Kingdom, but I haven’t heard a
language spoken other than English and Spanish.”

She chuckled slyly.
 
“Why, Dick,” she said, “I’m surprised to see you so easily stumped.
 
That’s perfectly good English.
 
It says
Koyle Mining Corporation
.”

Burton squinted at the letters.
 
“It’s a cipher, then,” he guessed.
 
“You’ve taken as a nation to writing in code.
 
It’s like the tangled streets of a
medieval city, a deliberate device to keep outsiders out.”

“On the contrary,” she told him, “it’s a system to make
writing the English language simpler.”

“Simpler!” he snorted.
 
“Some of us find the Latin characters simple enough.”

“Yes?” she asked innocently.
 
“How do you write the sound
fffff
?”

“Eff,” he retorted, then caught himself.
 
“Or pee-aitch.”

“Or?”

He thought, feeling that he was being baited.
 
“Double-eff.”

“And what sound does gee-aitch make?” she pressed him.

“Dammit, woman,” he rumbled, “what’s your point?”

“The point,” she explained, gesturing at the row of
characters that allegedly identified the owners of the mine, “is that those
characters are the Deseret Alphabet.
 
They are used to write English, in a manner that is simple,
logical and consistent.”

“Once you know the damned code,” Burton growled.

“Yes,” she agreed, “once you know the alphabet.”

“I did not know you Mormons went in for Websterism,” Burton
complained.

The steam-truck rumbled up out of the trees and clattered to
a puffing halt in front of the big door.

“Oh, we are reformers, all right,” she told him.
 
“But that is the least of our
surprises.”

“You people,” O’Shaughnessy belched, “are so fookin’
boring
!”
 
He
staggered to the side of the steam-truck and started trying to climb up one of
its big India rubber tyres.

Burton examined the letters.
 
“Your kay resembles the Egyptian hieroglyph of a woman’s
breasts,” he said.
 
“What is that
lightning-bolt-and-cross pictogram that follows it?”

“Sound it out, Dick,” she suggested.
 
“That’s the
oi
in
Koyle
.”

Burton shook his head.
 
“Was this scheme dreamed up by your Madman Pratt, too?” he asked.
 
He dragged the Irishman over to the
ladder and shouldered him up it by main strength.
 
His injured arm, leg and side all hurt, though none of it,
he reminded himself, hurt half so much as having a spear thrust through his
head.

Roxie climbed the ladder nimbly.
 
“Actually, it was his brother Parley.
 
With some others.”

Burton followed.
 
“And Parley Pratt is at present doing what?
 
Rendering the contents of the Library of Congress into this
efficient alphabet of his?”

Roxie sat on the front bench inside the wheelhouse.
 
Burton kicked O’Shaughnessy into a
crumpled pile on the second bench and dropped beside him.

“Parley’s dead,” she said quietly.
 
“He was killed two years ago.”

Poe started coughing.
 
He didn’t look well, and Burton did him the courtesy of pretending not
to notice.

“Thoth knows it’d be easy enough to get killed in this wild
place,” he said.
 
“If the
rattlesnakes, bears or coyotes don’t get you, the Shoshone or the Pinkertons or
the Danites will.”

“Parley was killed in Arkansas,” she said.
 
“Orson has never been the same since.”

Poe was still coughing.
 
Roxie patted him gently on the back.

“I hope the guilty man was brought to justice,” Burton
expressed his sympathy a little roughly, but he meant it.

“I’m not sure about justice,” Roxie said, “but there was
certainly revenge.”

“Sometimes the distinction between the two is fine.”

Roxie nodded.
 
She looked sad.
 
“And
sometimes there is a huge gulf between them.
 
Some of the rough men, Danites and others, of our
Dixie—that’s the southern part of the Kingdom, where Brother Brigham is
trying to grow cotton and wine grapes—ambushed a wagon train passing
through from Arkansas.
 
Parley’s
killer, a bitter old man named McLean, was with the wagons.”

“Your men killed McLean, I take it?”

Poe hacked violently into his handkerchief.
 
Burton could smell the blood and mucus.

“They killed every last person in the wagon train aged eight
and older.
 
Over one hundred
people, men, women and children.”

“Great God of Heaven,” Burton murmured.

“The Danites who ambushed that poor wagon train,” Roxie
said, her voice barely above a whisper, “were led by John D. Lee.”

Burton’s heart ached.
 
He wanted to say something, but tears stung his eyes and he didn’t trust
himself to formulate words.
 
He was
astonished at his own reaction, and more than a little embarrassed.

Poe straightened up, his breath rasping in his lungs.
 
He hurled his handkerchief out the
wheelhouse window, took the wheel, and without saying a word put the
steam-truck into gear.

The truck rattled forward, under the big letters in the
Deseret Alphabet and into the dark-gaping maw of the Dream Mine.

*
  
*
  
*

Absalom plunged the knife into the Danite Wells’s
throat.
 
The resistance the blade
met sickened him; it felt crunchy and elastic, like he was cutting through the
joints of a chicken.

He shuddered, and let go of the knife handle.

Wells staggered back.
 
His face was pale under the moon and washed with dark, deep shadows, but
Absalom clearly saw the look of surprise, anger and fear in the man’s
eyes.
 
Blood poured down his
chest.
 
Absalom felt a burning
mixture of shame and pride, knowing that the man was doomed, and it was Absalom
who had killed him.

Richard Burton couldn’t have done it any better.

Wells stumbled, but kept his footing—

his breath came in wet gasps—

he slowly raised his rifle—

Absalom ducked, reflexively and started to scuttle sideways,
but then realized that he couldn’t let the rifle go off; Lee would kill Heber
Kimball, not to mention the dwarf Coltrane—

Absalom lunged and jerked the rifle out of Wells’s hands.

Wells windmilled his arms and stared.
 
He clawed at his thigh, and Absalom saw
that he wore a pistol holstered there.
 
Absalom couldn’t let that be fired, either.

Wells slipped the string off his pistol—

Absalom closed in, grabbing the Danite by the lapel of his
coat and reaching for the hilt of the knife that still protruded from the other
man’s neck—

Wells jerked the gun from its holster—

and Absalom gripped the hilt of the knife and drew it across
the Danite’s throat in a single swift motion.

Snick!

Blood gushed from Wells’s throat and poured over Absalom’s
shoes.
 
It smelled of salt, and
meat, and iron, and death.
 

The Danite dropped his pistol from nerveless fingers—

then collapsed to the earth.

Absalom let the knife slip from his hand.
 
Then he fell to his knees and began to
vomit.

*
  
*
  
*

“We need a plan,” Roxie pointed out.

“Recover the canopic jars,” Poe suggested.

“Sequester the rubies,” Burton added.

“Burn the fookin’ place to the ground,” Tam threw in,
focusing to keep his words from slurring.
 
Best not to
sound
too drunk, me
boy.
 
“Excuse me, I meant conflagrate
it to the… terrestrium.”
 
He looked
out the window of the steam-truck at the tunnel walls.
 
They were rough and rocky, and propped
up with heavy timbers, but the tunnel was surprisingly large, for a mine.
 
Well, it wasn’t really a mine, was
it?
 
But it looked like it had been
bored by an enormous drill, rather than cut by picks.
 
And of course, it was huge, so big the steam-truck rattled
up it at top speed.
 
“Terrarium?”

“Any of the three would do,” Poe noted, and coughed
once.
 
He and the woman Roxie sat
on the front bench together.
 
He
drove, and she kept a hand on his shoulder, stroking him like a
bloody-damn-hell lapdog.
 
“Or
anything else that would prevent the launch of his ships come sunrise.”

“We should split into two parties,” Burton suggested.
 
“At least.”

“Agreed,” Poe said.
 
“I propose to drive the steam-truck into the facility and try to bluff
my way through to achieving any of our objectives.
 
Perhaps Roxie can join me, and corroborate my Pinkerton
disguise.”

“You don’t look like a fookin’ Pinkerton,” Tam
complained.
 
“You look too clever
to be a Pinkerton.”

“I could follow on foot,” Burton suggested.
 
The Englishman sounded like someone had
pissed in his tea, but then, he’s been stabbed twice, so Tam had compassion for
the man.
 
“Or is there another way
in?
 
The coal fumes from the trucks
must get out of the tunnel somehow, mustn’t they?”

“Ventilation shafts,” Roxie explained.
 
“But they go straight up.”

“There’s doors,” Tam pointed out, jabbing his finger at one
in the wall as they passed it.
 
Mother O’Shaughnessy hadn’t birthed any blind pups, and Tam’s drinking
hadn’t yet gone that far.

“Those are doors to let emergency maintenance workers in,”
Roxie said.
 
“They’re there in case
the main tunnel is blocked, and something needs to be dragged out or
extinguished.
 
They open
automatically in case of fire in the tunnel, but otherwise they’re locked.”

“And now we’re back to my plan of burning the place down,”
Tam pointed out.

“Can anyone pick the lock?” Burton asked.
 
He looked pointedly at Roxie and at
Poe.

She shook her head.
 
“Annie’s good with mechanical things.
 
I’m more of a people person, and a woman of words.”

“Seduction, forgery and narcotics, in other words,” Burton
said with a brutish leer, “but nothing useful.”

“Stop the Brigit-blessed truck,” Tam grumbled.
 
He felt sick from all the motion
anyway.
 
“
I’ll
open the lock.”

Poe braked the steam-truck and Tam stumbled out.
 
He took a moment once his feet touched
the gravel floor of the tunnel to fill his lungs with air and let the walls
stop spinning around him.
 
Outside
the truck, he could now see that the steam and coal smoke jetting out the back
did indeed flow directly up into shafts overhead.
 
The air filling the main tunnel itself was cool and very
breathable.