Dead Reckoning (3 page)

* * *

White Fox was startled. The
wasichu
said there were no spirits, but either this girl spoke to spirits, or she saw as truly as one of the Red Earth People. But even if she was more than she seemed, she was still alone out here.

“Perhaps you do not know there is a town up the road,” he said, politely averting his eyes from her face. “It is no more than ten miles from here. I was headed that way myself, and I would be glad to take you there. Tomorrow you can return to search for your horses. They will not wander far from water.” She said nothing, and he hesitated, not wishing to frighten her. “Not everyone in the
Llano Estacado
is friendly,” he finally said. “You’d be more comfortable in town. And safer.”

Honoria Gibbons smiled as if he’d said something amusing. “Oh, I think anyone who attempted to interfere with me would discover it to be a very bad idea.”

Her left foot moved a little as she spoke, and he froze as a slat dropped down on the side of the wagon. The muzzles of three deadly Gatling guns extended from the slot and pivoted to his position, though he was certain her wagon was unoccupied.

Perhaps she wasn’t as helpless as she appeared, he decided.

There came the same scraping sound of wood on wood he’d heard a moment before. The muzzles retracted and the slat popped back up into place. “Yes,” she said. “A very bad idea indeed.”

“I reckon you know your own mind, ma’am,” White Fox replied calmly. “Would you mind if I stayed tonight and shared your fire?”

“Not at all!” Gibbons replied cheerfully. “Coffee?”

He turned to Deerfoot, whisking the saddle-blanket free and slipping the loop of her bridle from her lower jaw so she could graze freely. The mare wandered off to the river, and he coiled the rein between his hands, the blanket tossed over one shoulder as he squatted down beside the fire and poured himself a cup of coffee.

“I should be quite glad of the company, actually,” Gibbons continued. “You seem like a gentleman who can make intelligent conversation.”

As she regarded him with utter fearlessness, White Fox realized this eccentric and possibly mad female might be the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, from her flawless skin and golden hair, to the dark eyes—blue, he thought—alight with a fierce intelligence. And he sensed she was utterly unaware of her beauty.

“Beans, Mister Fox?” Gibbons asked brightly.

* * *

“If you were to go in search of my horses, Mister Fox, I am afraid you would search in vain,” Gibbons said, handing him a plate of beans and flatbread. The night had fallen swiftly, and she’d lit the kerosene lanterns on the near side of the wagon before settling to her own meal. White Fox looked politely puzzled, but Gibbons knew enough about the Red Earth People to know he wouldn’t do anything as rude as ask a near-stranger a direct question.

“This is an Auto-Tachypode,” she said grandly, gesturing at the wagon. “Papa and I built it together. It does not require horses to provide its motive power.”

“I do not see how that is possible,” White Fox said doubtfully.

Gibbons laughed gaily. “I shall give you a demonstration in the morning, Mister Fox! Then you will see.”

“Perhaps I shall,” White Fox agreed.

Gibbons stifled a grin and applied herself to her
meal. She paid little attention to the taste—food, after all, was merely fuel for the brain, and unimportant except in that bad food was difficult to choke down—but White Fox devoured her cooking with relish, and even asked for seconds. When supper was over, he indicated his tobacco pouch and looked at her inquiringly. She nodded her permission, and he busied himself rolling a cigarette. She was grateful they were outdoors. While she wouldn’t dream of dictating someone else’s behavior, nicotine was a drug, and a pernicious one at that, and Honoria Gibbons did not ingest any mind-altering substances such as tobacco, alcohol, or opium. She prized clear thought far too much.

And besides, tobacco smoke
stank
.

By the time he’d gotten his cigarette made and lit and taken his first draw, he’d obviously decided their acquaintance had progressed enough that he might ask her some questions.

“You say you built this device with your father,” he observed, nodding toward the Auto-Tachypode. “Will he be joining you soon?”

Gibbons shook her head, pouring herself another cup of coffee. Coffee, after all, stimulated mental alertness. “I travel alone, Mister Fox.”

White Fox shook his head. “This seems unwise to me. You are certainly quite clever, but against wild beasts or outlaws, cleverness might not be enough.”

Gibbons stifled a tiny sigh of exasperation at hearing the familiar sentiment. In her experience, there was no obstacle that did not fall before the power of the mind. Far be it from her to point out yet again that the majority of the lady pioneers here in the West spent the greater part of their lives either alone while their husbands were out hunting or trapping or tilling the soil—or performing those tasks themselves when one of the perils White Fox had listed carried that husband off. Both men and women had lectured Gibbons on the unsuitability of her chosen vocation, and when she marshaled her arguments, said, “But that’s different!” (
How
it was different, no one was ever quite able to explain to her satisfaction.)

“I am afraid I cannot share your opinion, Mister Fox,” Gibbons said tactfully, wiping her tin plate clean with the last of her bread and setting it aside. “And Papa needs … a certain amount of protection from himself,” she added carefully. “America is full of charlatans, and he is forever hearing from people who want him to invest in all manner of idiotic schemes. That is why I am here.”

This was oversimplifying things to the extreme, for to say Jacob Saltinstall Gibbons was a genius was rather like saying Leonardo da Vinci had been a passable painter, and with such genius came a certain amount of eccentricity. Those eccentricities had moved the
wealthy Gibbons family to provide their youngest son with all the money he wanted so long as he stayed far, far away from Boston, but soon their remuneration had been overtaken by events. The gold fever of 1849 had drawn her then-widowed parent and his infant daughter westward—for Jacob Gibbons had eagerly sought the opportunity to test some theories he’d formed regarding mining equipment—and very much to his surprise, he’d gained a more-than-respectable fortune from his engineering patents.

But his newfound wealth brought problems of its own. In San Francisco his dear friend Doctor Rupert Arthur Gordon kept him from being taken by charlatans, but soon the con men began to cast their nets from afar.

“Idiotic schemes?” White Fox asked.

“As many as there are leaves on this cottonwood tree,” Gibbons said, sighing. “Finding the Lost City of Atlantis, creating the Philosopher’s Stone, building a mediumistic telegraph to communicate with the dead … I was just in Kansas City, exposing a gentleman who claimed to be able to summon twisters at will.” She snorted inelegantly. “I assure you, such was not the case! I soon discovered he had confederates further west, who would telegraph to him when the right sorts of storms were on the way.”

The charlatan’s “spotters” had possessed clever rigs they could use to tap into telegraph lines wherever they could shinny up a pole. What had gotten him slapped into jail was not the fraud—for her father was to have been the first paying victim—but the purloining of the messaging service without paying for it.

“And before that, I was in the Arizona Territory, looking for some bizarre creature called a ‘chupacabra.’ Its would-be captor had sent photographs of it to Papa, wishing to be compensated for the expense of tracking the beast down and shipping it to San Francisco. The photographs were faked, of course, and though the Mexican farmers assured me the creature truly existed, their ‘chupacabra’ turned out to be merely a wild boar.”

“I have heard of the chupacabra,” White Fox said doubtfully. “I have never seen one, nor did the tracks shown to me belong to anything but beasts I already knew well.”

“So you see.” She shrugged. “It is my job, self-appointed though it may be, to track such villains down, uncover them as frauds, and send Papa the proof. At least sending me keeps Papa from sending money instead. And I confess, I do enjoy this far more than I would going to operas and plays and other such nonsense.”

“And what are you pursuing now?” White Fox asked boldly. Apparently he’d forgotten she was a female, in his interest in her tales—momentarily at least.

“Mysterious disappearances,” she told him. “Papa believes great phantom airships sail the skies, contraptions like aerial clipper ships. The crews of the phantom airships are said to have abducted individuals and even entire communities … and of course there is a man who swears he can put Papa into communication with the captain of one such airship—for a modest fee.” She shrugged. “It is true there have been many unexplained disappearances here of late, but I have yet to see a sign of anything even remotely like a clipper ship in the sky.”

“Nor have I,” White Fox answered. He tried to keep his tone light, but Gibbons realized his interest had sharpened the moment she’d begun to speak of disappearances. “And you do not believe in these … airships?” he asked.

“I am keeping my mind open to the possibility,” she admitted. “After all, Papa and I built this”—she patted the side of her wagon fondly—“so others might have built airships. But I am a Scientist and a Skeptic—all I know for certain is there have been enough unexplained disappearances of late to engender stories in the newspapers. Most of them came from this area.”

Now White Fox looked genuinely startled. He opened his mouth as if to speak, and then closed it again. His cigarette had burned down nearly to his fingers; he flicked the end absently into the fire and continued to regard her closely.

“Do you have some intelligence touching on these disappearances, Mister Fox?” she asked bluntly, hoping he might be able to put her on the right track. He regarded her for a very long moment indeed, and Gibbons began to believe she might have misjudged his character. Finally—though grudgingly—he nodded.

“I, too, seek an answer to a disappearance,” he admitted. “My investigation is the fulfillment of a pledge, in a manner of speaking.”

“Was this disappearance recent?” she demanded eagerly. “Can you tell me more?”

“There was—until a few months ago—a town of freedmen in Kansas called Glory Rest,” he said reluctantly. “I do not imagine you would think its disappearance important, or even worth investigation—”

She sat up indignantly. “Mister Fox! Pray give me some credit for human feelings! These missing—a
whole town
?—were as much human beings as you and I! Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, living in freedom for the first time! Tell me the details—everything you know is relevant!”

He blinked at her fervor. “If I am to do that, I must begin at the beginning. I am a scout for the Tenth Cavalry out of Fort Riley, Kansas.”

“Ah!” she said in satisfaction at the confirmation of her earlier hunch, “Buffalo soldiers! Brave men, and true—I have read a very great deal about them!”

He blinked in surprise. “Then you already know of the ‘Negro Soldier’ units—”

She waved her hand dismissively. “Of course, of course. Pray go on.”

“I am not myself a soldier, but a civilian contractor to the Army. One of the soldiers of the Tenth, Caleb Lincoln, asked me to go to Glory Rest to discover why his mother’s letters had ceased to arrive, and his Captain gave me leave to do so. Glory Rest is perhaps a hundred miles from Fort Riley. It is a small town—its inhabitants strive—
strove
—to make their living by farming the land. When I reached it, the town was completely deserted.”

Gibbons chewed her lower lip a moment as she mentally reviewed what she knew of that region. “Not an attack by the Apache or the Cheyenne?” she asked carefully. Both tribes raided, and destroyed settlements when they could. It was understandable—their land and their freedom were being destroyed by Anglo settlement—but it was also lamentable. Innocent people bore the punishment for the Federal
policy that the first inhabitants of this land had no claim upon it.

White Fox shook his head. “The settlement was in great disarray, it is true, but I saw nothing I could not consider the work of storms or scavengers. There were a few small fires obviously caused by untended oil lamps, but I saw none of the signs that would tell me Glory Rest had been attacked by a raiding party. But every person who once lived there was gone.”

“And of course, since it was a Freedman Settlement, no one had reported it. Nor would it be mentioned in a newspaper.” She tried not to sound too disapproving, but—facts were facts, and it was better to stare them in the face.

He nodded. “Rather than return to the Fort with a greater mystery, I chose to seek answers. Roughly a week ago I was in San Antonio and heard that an entire cattle drive—riders and cattle both—had vanished. I am on the back-trail of that drive now.”

Gibbons felt the little tingle of excitement that marked a moment when she had hit a true trail. Although a few moments ago she would have waved cheerfully to White Fox’s departing back come morning, from this moment on he would have a difficult time shaking her loose from his heels. “And have you found anything yet?” she asked.

He shook his head again, clearly frustrated.
“Nothing. The drovers and the cattle simply vanished, as if—as if your ‘phantom airship’ truly exists, Gibbons. As if the earth swallowed them, or they walked into another world. I have only this—in the last letter Trooper Lincoln had from his mother—”

Suddenly he broke off, turning to stare intently into the darkness. A moment later, Gibbons heard what had summoned his attention; the sound of a horse galloping toward them, as no horse should gallop on so uncertain a road in the dark—unless the case was dire indeed.

They both jumped to their feet. White Fox laid a hand on his pistol, and Gibbons snatched up the coachgun. Either the rider was an outlaw being hotly pursued or an innocent being pursued by outlaws.

And in either case, I want to get off the first shot, not the second
, Gibbons thought.