Liahona (4 page)

Nothing.
 
Empty,
no one there, just the shovel and the pile of coal and the boiler throwing out
its mad red grin into the room through slitted teeth.

He quickly checked the other rooms below decks—locker,
galley, bunk room—and determined that he was alone on the
Jim Smiley
, alone on a steam-truck with no functioning
electricks.
 
He was standing,
Webley uncocked and reholstered, in the boiler room, scratching his head and
beginning to feel relieved when he saw the holes.
 
All the pipes connecting the furnace to the boiler were
smashed open.
 
No wonder the electricks
didn’t work—there was no steam to power them.

With no steam, the truck wouldn’t go anywhere either,
couldn’t budge an inch if it was pulled by ten Clydesdales.
 
Well, Sam was a dab hand with steam
machinery and electricks, he’d fix it proper in short order, he had patches
precisely to cover this sort of an occasion, right in his toolbox.
 
Still, how in hell did something like
this happen?
 
Some kind of
explosion?
 
But that couldn’t be
right, the holes in the pipes looked like they’d been smashed inwards, not
blown out.

Then Tam noticed that Sam’s well-used crate of tools was
missing.

He heard the rough Englishman’s voice in his mind.
 
They only have a few hours to catch
us
.

“Bloody hell!” he yelled, his voice gigantic and booming in
the engine room.
 
He remembered the
Pinkertons, and squeezed his voice back down to a whisper.
 
“It’s sabotage!
 
We’re holed by the English!”

He rushed back up the stairs to the deck, whipping out his
revolver again, and flung himself prone to survey the stockade yard.
 
No sign of the Pinkertons (and isn’t
that a blessed relief, after me going stupid and shouting my head off inside a
great metal drum?), but there was a fellow on his hands and knees just below
the electricks, vomiting on himself, and two men in frock coats strolled
casually across the yard, from the far shadowed corner where Tam had heard the
English voices towards the Saloon doors.

A little too casually.
 
Forced casual, like people pretending they hadn’t just been having a
quarrel.
 
Squinting, Tam saw that
the older fellow, with the big wild mustache, looked like he might bite the
head off a mountain lion any second, and the younger, who was clean-shaven and
wore a top hat, appeared on the edge of tears, like a little girl.

That’d be the bloody Etonian.

Tam lay flat and out of sight, waiting for the Englishmen to
go inside the Saloon.

*
  
*
  
*

“All ticketed passengers on the
Liahona
, Fort Bridger to Salt Lake City!
 
Attention, all ticketed passengers on
the
Liahona
!”
 
The man yelling looked to be about
fifty, with a square face, serious eyes and curly hair under a shapeless blue
cap.
 
He was dressed in white
shirtsleeves under a brass-buttoned blue vest and his accent was some kind of
English-Irish-somethingerother, Jed had seen enough of the world to know there
were different kinds of Brits, but he couldn’t really tell them apart.
 
Jed had been twenty years old when he
finally saw Little Rock for the first time, and there hadn’t been any English,
Irish or Scotch there.
 
“This is
Captain Dan Jones of the
Liahona
,
attention, all ticketed passengers!”

Captain Jones had the lungs of a professional barker, but he
didn’t rely on them alone.
 
He
bellowed through a speaking trumpet, an S-bent copper tube with an India-rubber
mouthpiece on its lower end and a broadly-flowering cone on top, like a
periscope for the mouth.
 
His voice
came out tinny, but clear, and loud enough to be heard over the rumbling
din.
 
A boy, a little dark-haired
kid in overalls, sailor’s jacket and a gray slouch hat who couldn’t be older
than five or six, but might be as young as four, knocked against Jones’s knees
and threatened constantly to be squashed underfoot, he stuck so close to the
older man.
 
He kept one hand out
and tugging at the Captain’s pant leg, as if reassuring himself that the man
wouldn’t evaporate.
 
The sight of
the kid made Jed shake his head in irritation; he’d been that kid once, only
even smaller, and a hell of a lot less awkward.
 
You can’t afford to get underfoot when the feet belong to a
mule pulling the family plow.

“Departure time will be eight o’clock sharp, by my watch!”
Captain Jones warned his passengers, stumping a circular route among the gaming
tables and turning his head as he delivered his message.
 
The din rumbled a little louder and
hands waved here and there in acknowledgement.
 
“There is a return trip and a time table to make and we will
not be late.
 
To those of you who
are not accustomed to operating on a schedule, I say
welcome to Deseret!
 
I will
fire a ten-minute warning gun.
 
No
refunds or exchanges will be offered to passengers who sleep in and miss the
departure, but you may hold your ticket and I will honor it on a future
run.
 
Any passengers desiring to
sleep in the
Liahona
tonight may
do so for the very affordable price of ten cents, payable in American, Mexican,
Californian, New Russian or Deseret.
 
Breakfast will be provided, for an additional five cents.
 
Any passengers who have not yet
purchased their tickets may see me now, or in the morning at the
Liahona
.
 
Thank
you.”

Jed dropped off the barstool where he perched, plunking down
two bits for his drink, rectangular like all of California’s coinage.
 
He ambled in an intercepting course
into Jones’s path.
 
“Captain
Jones!” he called out.
 
He’d done a
bit of barking in his own time, and knew how to make himself heard.

“Aye,” Jones answered, and his voice was crisp and
pleasant.
 
“How may I help you?”

The little boy hid behind his legs and peered out between
them like they were prison bars.
 
Jed made an effort to smile at the kid, knowing that on his homely mug
it could only come out as a grimace.
 
Not that he cared about the kid’s feelings, but no sense pissing off the
captain if it wasn’t necessary.
 
The boy shuddered and closed his eyes tight, the ungrateful little shit.

“I’m paid for the journey tomorrow morning, party of two,”
Jed explained, and he waved their two dog-eared tickets as a sign of good
faith.
 
“I reckon I’d like to book
two berths for tonight.”
 
He shot
his winningest grin at the boy, who only cringed further away from him.
 
Good money after bad, gramma would have
said.
 
“And two breakfasts, if
you’ll vouch for your cook.”

“I’m the cook, boyo,” Jones said, “and St. David himself
will vouch for my work.”
 
He beamed
a warm, trust-inspiring smile.
 
“That’ll be thirty cents.”

“I reckon I can believe St. David,” Jed smiled back as
friendly as he knew how, “whoever he might be.”
 
He paid with six tarnished nickels, three of them American
and three rectangles stamped with the California bear.
 
The Captain dug a pencil stub out of
his vest pocket and marked both of Jed’s tickets with the initials DJ and some
obscure symbol.
 

“Bring your gear aboard whenever you want,” the Captain
invited his passenger, and then extended down a friendly hand.
 
“I’m Dan Jones.”

They shook.
 
“I’m Jed Coltrane, Captain Jones.”
 

“Just Dan will do, when we’re not aboard.
 
This is John Moses, my midshipman.” He
gestured to the boy hiding behind his knee, who heard himself talked about and
took a deep breath to swell out his chest.
 
“Your first journey to the Great Salt Lake City, is it?”

Jed snorted.
 
“Can’t be many folks as’ve been twice, can there?
 
Thirty-odd years ago, there weren’t
nothing there but dust, buffalo, and Paiutes, and old Jim Bridger paddled
around the Salt Lake in a boat sewn outta his own shirt.
 
Hell, even twelve years ago, the
Mormons was all living in tents and possum bellies.”

“Ah, but that was twelve years ago,” Dan chided the dwarf
gently, “and travel gets easier every year.”

“You find easier travel brings better passengers?” Jed
joked.

“A passenger who pays full fare is a fine passenger,” Dan
Jones said, his eyes opening up and twinkling, “and it’s a very good passenger
indeed who pays full fare but takes up only half the space.”

Jed was caught off guard by the jest and found himself
laughing hard.
 
“You’ll think
better of it, Dan, don’t you worry,” he roared, “when you find out I
eat
three
times
my share!”

Dan Jones joined in the laughter.
 
“Is that what brings you to the Kingdom, then, boyo?
 
You’ve come to enter all our pie-eating
contests?”

“No, I’ve come to bring you high culture,” Jed tried to say
with a straight face, but instead had to wipe tears from his eyes.
 

“Oh, aye?”

Jed took a deep breath and managed to still his riotous
laughter.
 
“Yeah, as a matter of
fact, I have.
 
I’m with a traveling
showman, feller name of Doctor Jamison Archibald.
 
He’s a scholar of anquiquities… anquit…”

“Antiquities,” Jones suggested, his own laughter subsiding.

“Really old shit,” Jed finished.
 
“Egyptian, mostly.
 
We heard as there might could be some interest in it in the Great Salt
Lake City.”

“Mummies?” whispered John Moses.
 
He had inched around Jones’s leg and stood trembling, eyes
wide open and round, both hands gripping Dan Jones by the knee.
 
His voice was so soft that a man of
normal height wouldn’t have heard it.

Jed nodded, then let his arms fall suddenly slack, held
half-up at a forty-five degree angle in front of him, fingers drooping.
 
Reaching deep into his bag of medicine
show skills, he rolled his eyes back in their sockets until he could see
nothing and he knew the lad could only see the yellowish whites of the dwarf’s
eyeballs.
 
“Muuuuummmmmieees…” he
groaned, and lurched forward half a step.

John Moses yelped and jerked back behind Captain Jones,
trembling.
 
Both men laughed,
though Jed thought that Jones’s laughter was more forced this time, for his
benefit rather than out of real amusement.
 
“Maybe you’ll show us these mummies aboard the
Liahona
,” he suggested politely.
 
“It’s not a long ride from Fort Bridger to Salt Lake, but
there’s time enough to spread the word among the passengers in the morning and
put on an exhibition in the afternoon.”
 
He smiled, and Jed found it a shrewd and calculating expression.
 
“If you were to charge, say, a nickel a
head, I could take two cents of that and let you use the
Liahona’s
stateroom.”

Jed nodded as if he thought that were a good idea, and
maybe, he reasoned with himself, maybe it
was
a good idea, from the point of view of maintaining their cover
story.
 
Of course, Poe would
overthink the thing six ways to Sunday before agreeing to anything, so odds
were it could never happen anyway.
 
“I’ll pass on the suggestion to Doctor Archibald,” he told Dan Jones,
and the Captain nodded.
 
“We’ll
load in tonight, then, and I reckon I’ll most likely see you again at
breakfast.”

They shook hands again.

“Boo!” Jed hissed at John Moses before he turned to go, and
the boy looked like he might cry.

*
  
*
  
*

Absalom Fearnley-Standish hunched over the bar and wrote
furiously in his Patent Metallic Note-Paper-Book, racing to record all of Dick
Burton’s offenses of the evening before he forgot them.
 
The morning, of course, had already
filled a page.
 
Now he had to add
to it.
 
A lesser man might have
surrendered, deciding that Burton had already seen through him and it was no
longer worth continuing to write down the misdemeanors and felonies of the
famous explorer.
 
Absalom carried
on, because he hoped Burton might yet come to believe in Absalom’s authority,
because it was proper to make a record of material infractions, that was just
good Foreign Office procedure, and also out of sheer bloody-minded pride.

That at least, he thought, we have in common.

Evening of 22 July 1859
.
 
Persists in calling me by woman’s name.
 
Will not use correct form of
address.
 
Accuses me of cowardice,
stupidity.
 
Repeatedly disobeys
direct orders.
 
Questions my
authority, accuses me of forgery.
 
Commits likely crime (check Wyoming Territory statutes—burglary?
trespass to chattels?).