Liahona (7 page)

He watched O’Shaughnessy slink back out the front door of
the Saloon.
 
The man had some
nerve, demanding that Sam thank him after Sam had saved his bacon by hiding him
from the Pinkertons.
 
Well, that
might not be such a bad thing; nerve, after all, was one of the principal
things Sam needed the Irishman for.

He considered his situation.
 
The Englishmen were riding on the
Liahona
, which meant they were going to the Great Salt Lake
City.
 
They had poked holes in the
Jim
Smiley
, which meant that they wanted to be
sure they got there before Sam.
 
That made them rivals, competitors of some sort.
 
Likely an English mission to old
Brigham Young, and Sam thought he could predict what they wanted.
 
There’s a war coming, Mr.
Young
, they’d say,
and England
wants you in it on her side, with your air-ships and with your phlogiston guns
too, if those are real and not the product of Rocky Mountain moonshine, thank
you, very much
.

England’s would be the side of the South, with all her
cotton exports that fed England’s many mills.
 
Not that Sam hated the South, not at all.
 
He was from Hannibal, Missouri, and if
you drew the Mason-Dixon line straight out west all the way to his native
state, you’d find Hannibal on the same side of it as Georgia, if only by a
hair.
 
Sam loved the South, but he
loved the Union more.
 
The United
States of America, that was old Ben Franklin’s dream, that’s what makes us
great, he thought.

And Sam hated war.
 
War killed young men, young men like Henry.
 
If the English got the Kingdom of Deseret into the game on
the side of the secessionists, then the so-called Confederate States would be
emboldened.
 
They might think they
could actually win.
 
That would
make war more likely.
 
The
Confederate States would stop being a dream that fools like Robert E. Lee and
Jefferson Davis talked about in salon society and would start being something
that killed young men.

Maybe a lot of young men.

Sam had to get to Salt Lake City first.
 

He lit a cigar and pondered.

Repairing the
Jim Smiley
was one thing; Sam could do that in a few hours, if it was only a matter of
patching some holes.
 
Sam had seen
the
Liahona
arrive at Fort
Bridger earlier in the day, and she had come in fast, growling up the road west
like some giant wild animal, chewing up the hard earth and throwing out a cloud
behind her that settled for miles.
 
That thing probably went fifteen miles an hour on a straightaway, and if
he didn’t do something to slow it up, she would drop the Englishmen off on
Brigham’s doorstep while Sam was still cranking away with a wrench in Fort
Bridger.

One of the Shoshone apparently won the hopscotch game they’d
all been playing and erupted into a yelp of victory.
 
The yelper collected winnings from his friends, barking and
hooting all the while, and then broke into some kind of spinning, ecstatic
dance.
 
All in all, the Shoshone
reminded Sam of the drunk white boys he had seen every weekend growing up in
Hannibal, Missouri.

The bouncers might have viewed the matter differently.
 
They moved in steadily, beady eyes
squinting in faces like smoked hams.
 
“You’re gonna have to keep it down,” one of them directed the Shoshone.

Other patrons of the Saloon were staring.
 
The dancer didn’t slow down or quiet
his voice; if anything, he became more frenetic.
 
Sam took a puff on his Cohiba.

Both bouncers raised their fists to show that they were
wrapped in brass knuckledusters, studded with low, ugly little spikes.
 
“I said quit your caterwauling,” the
bouncer repeated himself.
 
“You
wanna get noisy, get noisy in the yard.”

The dancer’s friends gave the big white men hard stares of
rejection and did nothing else.
 
The dancer kept right on whirling.
 
Sam sensed impending violence and wondered idly if he ought to start wearing
a gun.
 
He scooted his chair back a
step so as to be able to stand up quickly without getting tangled in the table.

“I
said
,” the bouncer
grimaced as he waded into the Shoshone youth, “shut
up!
”
 
He
swung his brass-encased fist at one of the Shoshone’s heads—

and another brave stepped in, turning aside the blow with
his long rifle, as if it were a quarterstaff—

the dancer himself leaped forward, drawing a long, ugly
knife, quick as lightning, and pointing it at the bouncer’s face—

other rifles snapped to the ready, held by Shoshone or by
other customers of the Saloon—

and the bouncers’ pistols—

two scatterguns came up over the bar—

silence fell over the Saloon.

Everyone took a slow breath.

Electricks crackled in the background.

“I
told
you, you got
to keep it down,” persisted the talking bouncer.
 
Give the man credit for taking his job seriously, Sam
thought.
 
And for guts.

One of the Shoshone, who held his rifle pointed squarely at
the bouncer’s chest, shrugged, face impassive.
 
“We’re done taking orders from white men,” he said.

More silence.
 
Sweat.

These boys would do very nicely.

Sam blew a dragon puff of blue-gray smoke out into the
already-thick air and clomped noisily to his feet, stamping the thick rubber
soles hard to get everyone’s attention.
 
“This impasse is uncomfortable for everyone,” he began.
 
He turned at the waist as he spoke,
smiled at the whole Saloon.
 
“But I
think I may have a solution.”

There was a brief pause.

“I’m listening, mister,” the bouncer said.
 

Sam counted the Shoshone braves and pulled a twenty dollar
gold double eagle from his pocket for each of them, seven in total.
 
No employer more generous with expense
money than the taxpayers.
 
He held
his hand forward as he approached, showing the gold to the Indians and damn who
else might see.
 
He’d be gone in
the morning, anyway, and if anyone was fool enough to attack him aboard the
Jim
Smiley
, he’d fry them in their boots.
 

“I have business to conduct with these fine Shoshone
gentlemen,” he explained, stretching the truth just a little.
 
“I’ve been waiting for an opportunity
to get their attention, and now seems like a fine time.”

The bouncer blinked and looked back at the Indians.
 
The Shoshone stared at Clemens with
hard eyes, and for a moment Sam thought they were just going to shoot him and
take his money.
 
Oh well, he
thought, if I’m dead I won’t care so much when war breaks out.

Plus, I’ll finally know the truth about Henry.

“Yes,” one of the Shoshone finally agreed.
 
He was a young man, tall and straight
and strong-faced.
 
“Let’s talk
business.”
 
He lowered his own
rifle first, and then his comrades, the bouncers, the bartenders and the
various armed Saloon patrons followed, in rough synchronization.

“Thank you very much,” Sam said to the Shoshone, taking
another comforting draw on his cigar.
 
“Though I will confess to a little disappointment.
 
For a moment there, I thought I was
about to get my glimpse of the much-storied afterlife, and I’d finally know
what all the fuss was about.”

*
  
*
  
*

 
“You have my
undivided attention, I assure you,” Absalom gulped.
 
He’d known as an abstract fact that dangerous frontier types
were one of the risks when he’d come after Abigail, but the Foreign Office
hadn’t trained him for this.

“Listen close,” the one-eyed, bear-hatted, grizzled man
barked.
 
“I will say this one
time—”

He cut himself off abruptly, cocked an ear in the direction
of the common room, and then whirled on his heel, jerking Absalom in his
wake.
 
Absalom stumbled after the
little bear of a man, pulled by his shirt front, past the dented brass doors
marked
Bucks
and
Does
, past an automatic boot-polishing machine that
squatted sullenly against the wall hissing softly as it waited for toes to work
on, and then out through the rear door of the Saloon, ducking as it rebounded
from his captor’s kick and nearly caught Absalom in its trap-like jaws.

“I should warn you,” Absalom squeaked, “that I’ve done my
fair share of bare-knuckle boxing.”

Bear Hat dragged him around the back of the Saloon, into the
darkest quarter of the yard, out of sight of the idling steam-trucks, out of
sight of the dormitories, lit only by an indifferent moon and distant,
dimly-twinkling stars.
 
He tossed
Absalom against the Saloon wall—the plascrete hurt as Absalom crashed
into it, and his vision spun.
 
The
wild man spat in the gravel.

“Like I give a shit,” he said.

Absalom felt like begging, but wouldn’t let himself.
 
He had to keep his dignity.
 
“I’m a representative of Her Britannic
Majesty Queen Victoria,” he pointed out.

The wild man laughed and brought the knife up, its glinting
blade flashing dangerously close to Absalom’s eyes.
 
“I ain’t afraid to borrow trouble,” he grunted.
 
“I’m a representative of His Rocky
Mountain Majesty Orrin Porter Rockwell, the notorious Danite!
 
How does that sit with your liver?”

Rockwell!
 
“Your, er, master is a dangerous man…” Absalom’s mind cranked away, gears
spinning.
 
How could he get this
fellow to take him to Rockwell?

The bear-hatted man turned up his eyepatch, revealing that
he had two perfectly good eyes.
 
“By representative, what I really mean to say is that I
am
Porter Rockwell.”

“Rockwell!” Absalom gasped.
 
Abigail… “But you’re… you’re just the man…”

“I didn’t kill Boggs,” Rockwell grunted sourly.

Boggs?
 
“No,
what I mean to say is—”

“Nor none of them others, neither.”

“No?
 
Well,
I—”

“Leastways, not all of ’em.
 
Now, look here, Absalom—”

Absalom gasped.
 
“You know my name!”

“You must think I’m stupider’n a fence post.
 
I married your sister, dumbass.
 
Just ’cause I ain’t never seen you
before don’t mean I don’t know your name!”

Absalom tried to take this information in stride.
 
“So… you know why I’m here, then?” The
little four-shot derringer tucked into his waistband, the pistol that Ruffian
Dick had mocked as a lady’s gun, had never seemed so inadequate as it did in
this moment.

“Everybody knows why you’re here, you numbskull!” Rockwell
barked, and then, as if startled by the loudness of his own voice, he peered
both directions into the darkness.
 
When he spoke again, it was in a hoarse whisper.
 
“That’s the problem!
 
You’re here with that other Englishman,
the Nile explorer, ’cause you want to talk Brother Brigham into lending you
air-ships to bomb the hell outta the Yankees, yeah?”

Absalom breathed a sigh of relief.
 
“Yeah,” he agreed, the word foreign in his mouth.
 
“Well, more or less.”

As if this admission gave him renewed purpose, Rockwell hoisted
Absalom up by his shirtfront again and waved his knife in his face.
 
“I ain’t gonna say this twice!”

“You said that before,” Absalom noted reflexively, then
cringed at the sound of his own words.
 
“I mean… I meant…”

“Shut up!” Rockwell snarled.
 
“Go back!
 
Go
back to London, tell your Queen that the passes were all snowed in, you
couldn’t make it through, you were tortured by Injuns, you were robbed by
bandits, you lost your money at the faro tables, your boat sank in the
Mississippi, you were eaten by the damn bears, tell her whatever the hell you
gotta tell her, but
go! back!
 
Don’t go to Salt Lake, if your life
depended on it!”
 
He scowled
ferociously, but the eyepatch chose that precise moment to
snap
back into place, ruining the effect.
 
“Ow!”

“I… I can’t…”
 
Should he tell Rockwell?
 
Should he have it out with the man now?

“Mind you,” Rockwell cut him off again, “your life
does
depend on it.”
 
With a simple twist of his wrist, Rockwell turned his big, sharp knife
and it carved a large crescent out of the stiff brim of Absalom’s hat.
 
The discarded snippet fell to the
ground, forlorn.
 
No, Absalom
decided, best to say nothing to the man now.
 
Best not to say anything ever.
 
Best to simply get Abigail and leave, and never see Porter
Rockwell again.