Timpanogos (5 page)

The child looked shocked.
 
“I had to,” he said.
 
“I didn’t want anybody to get shot.
 
I only did it because I had to.”

“You’ve been captured by a little boy, Coltrane,” the gypsy
said, apparently to the dwarf.
 
“I
hope he will condescend to parole you.”
 
Then he spoke to his unknown male comrade.
 
“Isn’t that your errant midshipman, Captain Jones?”

“Don’t think I ain’t embarrassed about it, boss,” the midget
grumbled.
 
“He got the drop on me.”

“Put the machine-gun down,” the little boy said, and he
prodded the air with his pistol for emphasis.
 
The dwarf did as he was told.
 
O’Shaughnessy stared at the strange weapon like a starving
man looks at cake, but did nothing.

“I think it’s busted, anyway,” the dwarf said.

Captain Jones stomped through the creek, righteous rage
playing across his square face.
 
“It was you, wasn’t it, boyo?” he demanded, staring hard at
O’Shaughnessy.
 
“It was you who
kidnapped little John Moses there!”

The Irishman pulled out of his gun-lustful brooding and
sneered.
 
“Taffy was a Welshman,”
he chanted, “Taffy was a thief—”

crunch!

Jones pistol-whipped O’Shaughnessy across the jaw with the
gun in his hand, sending him sprawling into the tall, dry desert grass.
 

“Taffy came to my house,” Jones finished the rhyme, “and he
kicked out all my teeth.”

“Muurrrmph,” the Irishman groaned vaguely from the ground.

“I am reluctant to criticize another man’s work,” the gypsy
called out, with a mischievous twinkle in his fatigued eye, “but you’ve spoiled
the rhyme.”

The quip snapped Sam out of his stunned reverie.
 
He grinned.
 
“True,” he agreed.
 
“Though I must say I find the
meaning
of the revised couplet reasonably congenial.”

*
  
*
  
*

Burton awoke to find the knives removed and his arm and leg
bandaged.
 
He lay on a crackling
bed of yellow grass beside his own coat, and Roxie fussed over him.

Burton’s mouth was dry and he felt weak as a newborn
babe.
 
He gazed coolly for several
moments at the woman who had so stirred his passion in the Wyoming Territory
and let strength and vitality ooze back into his limbs.
 
When she noticed him looking, she met
his gaze with something that was almost a smile.

“What’s your full name?” he asked.
 
“Your real name.”

“Eliza Roxcy Snow,” she said immediately.
 
“Roxie isn’t a pseudonym, it’s just a
nickname.”

Burton gestured at his coat with his good hand.
 
“My papers are in there,” he told her.

She looked away.
 
“Yes,” she said after a moment.
 
“I’ve read them.”

“And
wrote
,” he
suggested.

“Wrote a little,” she admitted.
 
“Just a post-script.”

“Why?”

Roxie couldn’t meet his eyes.
 
“We… Rockwell and I, and Annie… knew Lee and Hickman were
going to move against Brigham, but Brigham didn’t believe it.
 
He wouldn’t believe our evidence, and
he wouldn’t take action, so we… well, we went against his orders.
 
Rockwell tried to take out John
Lee.
 
And we tried to scare you
foreigners away, so the Danites wouldn’t have the cover they wanted to move
against Brigham.
 
When you wouldn’t
leave, I decided to try to recruit you instead.
 
I knew Brigham would need friends who were… men of action.”

Burton chuckled.
 
“I was hoist with the petard of my own vanity,” he said ruefully.
 
“You’re very good.
 
Scheherezade told me stories, and I
wanted to believe.”

“No, Dick,” she said, “yours isn’t vanity.
 
You really are a man of action.”

“
Ruffian
Dick,” he
reminded her.
 
“And you are more
than just Brigham’s agent, aren’t you?”

She hesitated.
 
Her dress was dirtied and disheveled and she smelled of gunsmoke, but he
thought her beautiful then, with the fine bones of her face framed against the
blue sky above him.
 
“I’m his
wife,” she admitted.

“Eliza Roxcy Snow Young,” he chewed on the name.
 
“One of… fifty?” he hazarded a guess.

“It isn’t a perfect arrangement,” she admitted.

“No arrangement is.”

“You’re hard to shock.”

“There are stranger things in life than sharing a man,”
Burton said.
 
He prided himself on
being hard to shock.
 
“You forget
that I’ve spent time in the Horn.
 
In much of Africa, polygamy is the norm.
 
In places like Somaliland, where children are essential to a
family’s wealth, it’s positively essential.
 
Marriage customs are as often a function of economics
as—”

“He doesn’t know,” she cut him off.
 
“Brigham, I mean.
 
He doesn’t know I... seduced you.
 
He certainly didn’t ask me to do it.”

“Hmmn.”
 
Burton
kept his reaction muted, but he was vaguely relieved to hear that their liaison
had been Roxie’s own idea.
 

“When did you puzzle it out?”

Burton sighed.
 
“At the Tabernacle,” he said.
 
“You showed far too much emotion for a mere paid agent, especially a
jaded and worldly spy.
 
I thought
you must either be Brigham’s wife…” he watched her closely, while trying not to
look at her directly, “or else perhaps Poe’s lover.”

Roxie covered her reaction well, but lines appeared around
her mouth as she tightened her lips.

Of course.
 
He
should have seen it before.
 
Burton
threw his head back and laughed, loud and long.

“I don’t consider myself a comic figure,” Roxie sniffed.

“You’re not, Roxie,” he agreed.
 
“You’re an adventure.
 
You’re epic.
 
You’re the
Chanson
de Roland
, the
Odyssey
and the
Mahabharata
all rolled into one razor-sharp poem and bound in
crinoline.”

“You of all men, Richard Burton,” she said to him, “must
find that adventure stories become tedious.”

He laughed again.
 
“Yes, I do, Eliza Snow,” he agreed.
 
“As a matter of fact, I believe I do.”

*
  
*
  
*

Poe carefully dug out one scarab beetle and dropped it into
a glass fruit jar, the only jar in the
Liahona’s
galley that had survived its wreck.

“Observe carefully,” he said to Bill Hickman.
 
He suppressed a powerful urge to
cough.
 
“The details are of utmost
importance.”

Hickman had no choice but to observe.
 
He was tied to a hotel timber, arms
apart and legs staked wide open into the dirt.
 
Orrin Porter Rockwell held his bruised and puffy eyelids
peeled back and his head fixed in place with one arm.
 
In the other hand he held his Bowie knife, the blade of
which he occasionally tapped against Hickman’s cheek as a reminder of its
existence and sharpness.

The rest of the audience, though, was more distracted.
 

The Danites other than Hickman had survived suggestions that
they be drowned ignominiously and instead had all been tied up in a patch of
scrub oak well out of sight of the highway; Young, Armstrong, the
Liahona’s
people and three of the Mexican Stridermen stood
watch or tended to each other’s wounds, hunger and thirst in the wreckage of
the hotel’s kitchens.
 
Casual
passersby on the highway were told that an accident had happened with the
waterworks, all was under control and to keep moving—as of yet, there had
been no passersby that weren’t casual.

Everyone else stood in a semi-circle around Hickman.
 
They were there to watch Poe’s
performance.

“Are you sure we have time for this?” Absalom
Fearnley-Standish asked Ann Webb, Roxie’s young protégée.
 
“The cavalrymen might regroup, after
all, or send reinforcements.”

“We have to know everything he can tell us, whether or not
we have the time,” she answered.
 
She held something in her hand that she had introduced as a Fireless
Darklantern, which was a sort of glass globe that sparked full of blue
electricity to light the night.
 
The sun had set, so Poe worked by artificial light.
 
He recognized the Darklantern as the
device he had imagined to be full of poison.

“Don’t joo worry,” said the Mexican gunner Consuelo
Jackson.
 
“I took especial care to
be sure that cada uno de esos caballeros left here on foot.”
 
She held a more traditional kerosene
lamp.
 
Depending upon where one
stood in the competing circles of illumination, one looked shimmering-blue or
greasy-yellow.
 
“If he left at all,
por supuesto.”

“Pass me the mouse,” Poe said to Jed Coltrane.
 
The little man handed over his
shapeless hat, which squeaked and twitched with the frantic motions of the
doomed creature trapped inside.
 
Coltrane and the Irishman O’Shaughnessy stood conspicuously apart and
didn’t look at each other.

“I suppose I have learned that what goes around comes around
after all,” Poe heard Sam Clemens say.

“Do not trifle with a man,” Burton growled, “whose empire is
in danger.”

“You’re a good fellow, Mr. Burton.”

Poe shook the mouse into the jar.
 
It squeaked, rushed around the sides looking for a way out,
and then sniffed suspiciously at the brass beetle.

“I don’t believe in the existence of
good fellows
, Mr. Clemens.”

Sam Clemens laughed.
 
“See?
 
I knew we’d get along
famously.”

Richard Burton growled again.
 
“Don’t let the mustachios fool you.
 
I am not an amiable man.”

Poe set the jar on the ground, inches from Bill Hickman’s
crotch.
 
“Quiet, everyone,” he
urged the others.
 
“Mr. Hickman
needs to be able to concentrate.”

“What’s that?” Hickman struggled not to look nervous.

Poe smiled.
 
“It’s a mouse.”
 
This was a
performance, a show like any other.
 
He needed to build a little tension in his audience.

Hickman frowned.
 
“I know it’s a mouse, helldammit!”
 
His forehead was sweating, though the sun had dropped below the horizon
and the cool evening was rapidly sinking into what promised to be a cold
night.
 
“I mean the other thing.”

The mouse squeaked.

“What does it look like, Mr. Hickman?” Poe asked.
 
He held the jar up so the Danite could
see it closely.

He squinted.
 
“Shit, it’s a…”
 
Hickman
screwed his face up in the effort of trying to guess.
 
“It’s a bug.”

“Not quite.”
 
Poe set the jar back down, far enough from Hickman’s crotch to leave his
view unobscured.
 
“It looks like an
insect, but really it’s a device for consuming.
 
It’s an eating machine.
 
Would you like to see how it works?”
 
He stood and picked up the open
canister.

“What’s it gonna eat?” Hickman wanted to know.

“First, the mouse,” Poe told him.
 
The others were all silent and he knew he had everyone’s
attention.

Hickman hesitated, then writhed in what might have been an
attempt to shrug.
 
Expressive body
language was hard for the man, with Orrin Porter Rockwell gripping him tightly
by the head.
 
“I reckon I don’t
care one way or the other,” he said.
 
“You can show me if you want.”

Poe smiled.
 
“I
do
want to.”
 
He scanned the ground one more time to be sure he hadn’t accidentally
dropped a stray beetle somewhere, then pressed the
attack
button inside the canister lid.

The mouse squeaked once, sharply, and died under the
murderous onslaught of a single set of brass mandibles.
 
Poe heard a sharp gasp, he thought from
Absalom Fearnley-Standish.
 
Moments
later, nothing was left of the mouse but the skull, a handful of the larger
bones and a stray bloody whisker.

The beetle continued to bite and tear at the bones for a few
seconds, scurried in a circle once around the jar, and then shut down.

Poe shook the contents of the fruit jar out into his
hand.
 
He carefully laid the mouse
skull on Bill Hickman’s chest.

Hickman swallowed.
 
“Pretty,” he drawled, “but nothing you can’t do with a knife and a
little bit of free time.”

Rockwell pricked his cheek with the tip of his blade.