Timpanogos (11 page)

Burton hit the ground behind him, saber clinking against the
gravel (and didn’t he strut like that bit of steel made him all important and
fancy?).
 
“Wait until we’re sure he
can do this,” the Englishman called over his shoulder to Poe.

Tam saw that Poe had conveniently stopped beside a door and
he walked over to it.
 
The door was
a very ordinary-looking affair, solid, with a brass doorknob and a small, very
modern-looking keyhole to its lock.

Burton followed him.
 
“Aren’t you too drunk to do this?” he asked gruffly.

“I’m not drunk,” Tam objected, drawing one of the Maxim
Hushers.
 
“I’m Irish.”
 
He pointed the gun at the lock and
emptied the cylinder at it.

Zing!
 
Zing!
 
Zing!
 
Zing!
 
Zing!
 
Zing!

Bullets whined through the tunnel and into the darkness, but
Tam paid them no attention and the explorer was unfazed.

Clang!

The doorknob hit the gravel.
 
Burton stepped forward, hooked a finger into the ragged hole
that the mutilated lock had left behind, and jerked the door open.
 

“We’re in!” he called to Poe and Roxie.
 
He drew his long Colt pistol with one
hand and his rapier with the other and disappeared into the open doorway.

“Sure, and who gets the credit?” Tam muttered.
 
He thumbed open the compartment
surrounding the Husher’s cylinder and stumbled after Burton, doing his best to
reload while on the move.
 
And a
little bit tipsy.

*
  
*
  
*

Absalom Fearnley-Standish staggered into the grove of
trees.
 
His arms and chest looked
strangely blotched in the moonlight, and it was only when he got close enough
for Sam to smell the iron-loamy stink of blood that he realized why.

“I’ve killed a man,” Fearnley-Standish murmured.
 
He seemed distracted.

“I hope it wasn’t the dwarf,” Sam said.
 
“I was beginning to feel fond of him.”

The Stridermen kept their watch in their big, clanking beasts,
but everyone else rushed around the Englishman.
 
The Mormon girl Annie pushed harder than the rest, elbowing
aside even Brigham Young to get to his side, where she pushed her shoulder
under his arm as if to keep him on his feet.
 
He didn’t resist.

In his place, Sam wouldn’t have resisted, either.

“Coltrane was alive, last I saw him,” Fearnley-Standish
protested mildly.
 
“He gave me this
knife.”
 
He held up an empty hand,
fingers smeared with blood.

“I see,” Sam said.
 
“What happened?”

They stood in the grove of cottonwoods, trees tall enough to
more or less mask the presence of the Striders, but also tall enough to block
out most of the moonlight.
 
Sam
would have liked to use Pratt’s Fireless Darklantern, but he was afraid it
would be visible from the farmhouse.

The Englishman shook himself and snapped to a sort of
attention.
 
Sam couldn’t be sure in
the darkness, but he thought the fellow was squeezing Annie Webb’s shoulders
rather more tightly than was strictly necessary to avoid falling down.
 
“There are Danites in the farmhouse,”
he informed them.
 
“And the
outbuildings.
 
They have Heber
Kimball and his family tied up, and Jedediah Coltrane as well.
 
They sent me out to bring you in.
 
I was not to let you think anything
suspicious was happening.”

“Is that your blood, Mr. Fearnley-Standish?” Brigham Young
asked.
 
Sam found his voice
surprisingly tender.

The Foreign Office man shook his head.
 
“They sent one of their men to watch me
and make certain I did as they asked.
 
I, ah…” he gestured with his empty fingers, making a vague motion that
might have been meant as a stab or a slash.
 
“I killed him.”

“What was the man’s name, do you know?” Young inquired.

Fearnley-Standish cleared his throat.
 
“Ah, Wells, I think.”

“Son of a bitch!” Orrin Porter Rockwell snapped.

“Poor Wells,” Young said thoughtfully.
 
“So they got to you, too.”

“They got to a lot of folks,” Annie Webb said.
 
She was snuggled as close into Absalom
Fearnley-Standish’s side as a person could be without actually being in the
same set of clothes.
 
Sam snorted
at the silliness of his own envy.

“It’s like I was trying to tell you, Brigham,” Rockwell
grumbled.
 
He sounded like a hungry
bear.

“Hush now, Port,” his wife urged him, and the frontiersman
fell quiet.

“We need a plan,” Young announced, sounding ebullient and
determined in the darkness.
 
“Port,
have you ever been to Heber’s farm?”

“Begging your pardon, Mr. President,” Sam intervened.
 
“But it seems to me that your enemies
have made our lives easier.
 
We
were looking for a quiet place to stash some of the more egregiously civilian
members of our party.
 
John D. Lee
has tipped his hand and shown us where he’s lying in wait, which makes the
whole rest of the valley safe and fair game for us.
 
Our plan now is the same as our plan was before, only now we
go to a different friend’s house of yours.
 
Or a wife’s, whatever is comfortable for you.”

“Aye,” puffed Dan Jones.
 
“Or better still, pick a farm that doesn’t belong to someone
in your family, or anyone else close to you.
 
The minute he sees you’re alive, any loyal man would be
happy to hide John Moses and the Ambassador for you in his shed.”

“To open the blind eyes,” Young recited gently, “to bring
out the prisoners from the prison.
 
I’m not leaving Heber Kimball and his family in there.
 
Or Mr. Coltrane.
 
Who sees human beings as mere cogs now,
Mr. Clemens?”

Sam was astounded.
 
“That dwarf came out to your Kingdom planning to spy on you, steal from
you and if necessary commit acts of sabotage!”

Brigham Young looked at Sam.
 
His eyes were in shadow, and Sam felt like he was looking
into infinitely deep wells, rich with the knowledge of human folly.
 
“Is he the only one that came to
Deseret with such plans, Mr. Clemens?” Young asked.

Sam hung his head.
 
“No, sir,” he admitted.
 
“But I believe I had good motive for my actions.”

“Most men believe they do,” Young agreed.

Sam chuckled wryly.
 
“I think you’ve stolen my line, Mr. President.”
 
He really wished he had a Cohiba to
chomp on.

“In any case, Coltrane is my ally now, and I won’t abandon
him.
 
Also, he came to the rescue
of young John Moses Browning, more than once, and for that he deserves to be
rescued himself.”

“Amen,” Dan Jones added.

“If joo are worried about your friend Heber, I suppose that
rules out simply blowing the farm to esmithereens with my Estriders,”
Ambassador Armstrong observed.
 
“But I wish joo to understand that my bodyguards are estill at your
disposition.
 
As am I, of course.”

Fearnley-Standish cleared his throat again.
 
“I believe we’re all at your
disposition now, Mr. President,” he said, “whatever our prior political
positions may have been.
 
I think
one of the tactical difficulties with any plan we adopt at this juncture is
that if I don’t return up that irrigation ditch shortly, with at least you by
my side, and maybe even without Ambassador Armstrong, Mr. Clemens and Mr.
Rockwell, the Danites hiding in the goat shed will tell Lee and he’ll kill all
his prisoners.”

Brigham Young smiled.
 
“Oh, that’s no problem,” he said.
 
“That’s no problem at all.”

*
  
*
  
*

Burton strode purposefully, shoulders back to keep him at
his full height and pistol raised and ready.
 
Fitzz
ing blue
electricks globes lit the passage, embedded into the ceiling at intervals of
twenty feet.
 
It was enough light
to see by, but he worried that shooting would be difficult, especially against
moving targets that shot back.
 
He
kept his gaze nailed to the end of the passageway ahead; at least in this
plascrete tunnel he didn’t need his peripheral vision for anything.

His whole body hurt.
 
He kept going.

“You’re a brave man,” the Irish thug whined behind him.
 
When he wasn’t actually singing, Burton
decided, he didn’t like the Irishman’s voice.
 
“And you’re a fast walker, aren’t you?”

“Jamshid’s crook!
 
I’ve been stabbed twice and shot with a scattergun today,” Burton
reminded the other man.
 
“What’s
slowing
you
down?”

“I’ve been shot twice and had my bloody-damn-hell ear bit
off, is what I’ve done!”

“Unless the missing ear is somehow slowing your pace,”
Burton growled, “I think that still means I’ve had the worst of it.”
 

“Do you hate me because I’m Irish?” Tam wheedled.
 

“A man serves his own country and cause without hating the
countries and causes of other men,” Burton snorted.
 
“Even the Irish.”

“Mother O’Shaughnessy taught me better than that,” Tam said,
and his words slurred grossly.
 
“She taught me that every man serves himself, and himself only.”

The passage ended at a staircase, steps leading up to the
left and down to the right.
 
Burton
stopped to let O’Shaughnessy catch up.

“Milton puts that doctrine in Satan’s mouth.”

“Brigit love you,” the Irishman grunted.

“Is your pistol loaded?” Burton asked him.

“It is.”
 
O’Shaughnessy brandished his strange, silent gun.
 
“Just finished, and the second is still
full, all six chambers.”

“I’m glad you can count,” Burton snarled softly, “because
when I get to three, you and I are both going to step out onto the stairs,
pistols first.
 
You will turn and
look down the stairs, and I will look up.”

“Why’s that, then?”

“We killed the Pinkertons at the bottom of the mountain,”
Burton reminded him.
 
“I expect
that if we are to see more of them, it’s likely that they will be coming down
at us from above.”

“What’s that mean, you reckon you’re the better shot?”

“I know I’m the better shot,” Burton hissed.
 
“I would have taken out the lock with
one bullet, not an entire cylinder.”

“Ah, that’s just a question of style,” the Irishman grunted.

“One,” Burton riposted.
 
“Two.”

On
three
they stepped
onto the stairs.
 
Nothing.
 
Burton began briskly marching up,
O’Shaughnessy trailing behind.

“Are we going to walk to the top of the bloody mountain,
then?”

“We’ll take the first lift we find,” Burton promised.
 
He felt like he was talking to a
child.
 
Was this what being a
father was like? he wondered.
 
Maybe he didn’t want to get married after all.

“There might have been a lift if we’d gone down, too,” the
Irishman wheezed.

“There might have,” Burton agreed.
 
“But if there’s no lift at all, we need to be going up.
 
Besides,” he took a deep breath
himself, “you clearly need the exercise.”

“I’m not a weakling,” O’Shaughnessy protested, “I’m just a
bit drunk.”

“Keep your pistols aimed down the stairs, then,” Burton
urged him.
 
“But you told me before
you weren’t drunk.
 
Just Irish, you
said.”

“I’ll let you in on a secret, Dick,” the Irishman said.
 
“It’s the same fookin’ thing.”

They climbed past several more passages, all leading off to
the left.
 
Burton could see that
each ended in a dark doorway, and he guessed they were further maintenance
access tunnels and didn’t waste his time exploring them.
 
He was feeling winded and lightheaded
himself when he stepped onto a longer stretch of flat corridor, wider and
taller and better lit by two miniature, man-height Franklin Poles against the
right wall.

Between them was a glass door beyond which lay a dark
shaft.
 
The glass was bound and
surrounded by brass and a brass control panel to one side framed a lever in a
vertical slot with three positions:
UP, NO CALL
and
DOWN
.
 
Burton thumbed the lever from
NO
CALL
into the
UP
position with a loud
click!
and checked the percussion caps on his 1851 Navy
while he waited for the tipsy Irish thug to catch up to him.
 

Hishhhhhhhhh…

The lift descended into view from above.
 
It was small, fit to hold maybe four
men, with three walls paneled in wood and brass and a brass accordion gate
replacing the fourth wall and meeting the lift door.
 
It all gleamed of shine and polish and only Burton’s close
watch and sharp eyes caught the furled edge of a coat on one side of the lift,
betraying at least one passenger.