Liahona (17 page)

“I only wanted a fresh bottle,” Tam muttered, “and Brigit
help me if there isn’t a three-year-old kid where the whisky’s supposed to be.”

“Five,” said the boy, and then his eyes flickered to the
space behind Tam.

Tam hadn’t survived his life of dedicated misbehavior by being
slow or even by mere good luck.
 
He
saw the flick of the boy’s eyes and heard a very faint creaking sound, without
consciously formulating any idea of what it might mean, he spun about and threw
himself backward, at the same time whipping from its holster the strange gun
he’d stolen from the dead Pinkerton and pointing it at whatever might be behind
his back—

and found himself staring down the barrel of an identical
pistol, aimed by a grimacing, hairy-knuckled, downright monkeylike bastard of a
dwarf (and wasn’t every midget half a monkey, really?) who hung by the strength
of one arm out of the china cupboard.

Tam saw realization dawn in the dwarf’s eyes at the same
moment that he himself understood what had happened to the second
Pinkerton.
 

“Jebus!” barked the dwarf.

“I hope you wiped your tiny little arse before you climbed
in there,” Tam sneered.
 
“Sam’s
particular about liking all of his food
without
monkey shite in it.”

They both jumped—

both fired—

zing! zing!
—

both missed.

They both kept moving.
 
Tam whirled clockwise on his good leg in the small galley and the
bloody-damn-hell monkeydwarf sprang from one cupboard to another and then onto
the covered (and therefore not unbearably hot) steam heater that served as
cooker of all meals served aboard the
Jim Smiley
, both of them firing all the while.
 
The damned little monkey moved like a butterfly, flitting
back and forth like he knew just where each bullet was going to go, and Tam
could barely see him move, much less hit him.
 
Like some surreal dream, the guns only
zinged!
demurely, but crockery burst in fountains of ceramic
splinters and bullets whined off the iron walls of the galley, chewing through
the wooden cabinets and cupboards like termites pumped full of coffee.
 

The air filled with dust.

“Brigit!” the Irishman choked as a bullet hit him in his
left arm.
 
That was the second
bullet he’d taken in forty-eight hours.
 
His booted feet slipped, scrabbled for a grip among the rubble on the
galley floor, and then brought him down with a heavy
thud!

The midget slammed his shoulder blades against a corner of
the galley, his little feet on a varnished sideboard, and raised his silenced
gun to take aim at Tam again—

“I’ll kill the boy!” Tam roared, and the dwarf stopped.
 
Tam lay on his back, bleeding and
battered, and he pointed his pistol at the little boy.
 
It was a bluff and a gamble, and the
dwarf might call it, but Tam had no other choice.
 
If the dwarf and the boy were together, and the dwarf cared
about the boy, Tam just might survive.

The midget hesitated.

“I’ll fookin’ do it!” Tam insisted, cursing and shaking the
pistol for emphasis.
 
“I killed the
Pinkerton, you know I did, and I’ll by damn kill the boy, too!”

The dwarf raised his gun, but slowly, hesitating.

The little boy burst into tears.

Saint Anthony help me, this is it, Tam thought
desperately.
 
“Drop the bloody gun,
monkey!” he shouted, trying to keep the fear out of his voice.

The dwarf gritted his teeth, looked at the sobbing child,
and tossed his pistol to the floor.
 
Tam felt a wave of relief flow through his whole body.

He stood up slowly, keeping his pistol carefully trained on
the boy as he shook dust and china chips out of his clothing.
 
He kept his eyes on the dwarf, still
perched on the countertop, as he crouched to pick up the second Pinkerton gun,
tucking it into his belt.

“Praise Judas Iscariot and all the bloody saints,” he
sighed, “you’re a reasonable little gargoyle.
 
I thought for a moment there that I’d robbed my last bank.”

Squinting down the barrel of his gun at the weeping boy, he
pulled the trigger.

Click.

“See that?” he laughed.
 
“Empty.
 
I’se
just about shitting my trousers that you were going to shoot me again.”

The dwarf jumped.

He flew straight at Tam, knobby, hairy fists extended over
his head like clubs, like the flailing orangutanish mitts of a charging ape.

“Shite!” Tam ducked and the dwarf crashed into his
shoulders, bowling him down and hurling both of them out into the
Jim
Smiley’s
short hall.
 
Ape fists pulled Tam’s porkpie hat down
over his face to blind him and an ape thumb gouged into the tender bloody
bullet wound in his arm.

Tam screamed in pain and pulled the trigger of his pistol
twice before he remembered that the gun was now empty.
 
He felt little feet pad past him, but
he could pay them no attention for the little fists, little fingers and little
teeth that assailed him.

The gun was empty, but it wasn’t useless.
 
He clubbed the dwarf, rolled, and got
his knees between the two of them.
 
Just as he felt little teeth sink into his ear, he kicked his legs—

hurling the dwarf against the iron wall—

and ripping off his own ear.

“Aaagh!” he screamed.
 
He slapped the hat from his face and clapped one hand over his bleeding
ear.
 
“You fookin’
animal!
” he roared at the midget, who was bouncing to his
feet again, like the little bastard was cast out of India rubber, and then Tam
saw the gun lying on the floor of the hallway between them.

The
loaded
Pinkerton
pistol.

“Shite!”

The dwarf jumped for the gun, but Tam kicked faster, hitting
the pistol and sending it skittering away down the hall and out of reach of
both men.
 
Missing the pistol, the
dwarf landed instead on Tam’s leg, and he brought his elbow down like a hammer
on the Irishman’s knee.
 
The pain
almost blinded him.

“Bloody
mite!
” Tam
shouted, and dug the fingers of his good arm into the dwarf’s hair.
 
The dwarf resisted, but by throwing his
own body weight to the side and heaving with all his might, Tam managed to
twist his assailant aside, pin him against the wall with one hand and scramble
again in the direction of the lost weapon.

But the little boy had picked it up and was pointing it at
the Irishman.

Tam paused, lying on his belly, looking up past the bulbous
muzzle of the pistol at the five-year-old holding it.
 
“Nice lad, good lad,” he panted.
 
“Give your uncle Tam his gun back now.”

The dwarf struggled, clawing at Tam’s wounded arm—

Tam gritted his teeth against the pain—

“John Moses!” the dwarf shouted, and Tam closed his fist
down over the dwarf’s mouth, silencing him—

the little boy raised the pistol doubtfully—

“Easy, son,” said a man’s voice.
 
Through the pain and adrenalin it took Tam a moment to
recognize Sam Clemens, but there he was, standing behind the boy with his queer
rubber-soled shoes and his crotchful of rivets, talking to him nice and gentle
like he was the kid’s own dad.
 
“Easy, son.
 
Let me have the
pistol and I’ll make them both stop fighting.
 
How does that sound to you?
 
Isn’t that what you want?”

Tam squinted up and through the sweat and blood in his eyes
he saw that Sam was unarmed and smiling.
 
The boy hesitated only a moment, and then handed the Pinkerton’s pistol
over to Sam Clemens.

“Thanks, son,” Sam said to the boy.
 
“You did the right thing.”
 
Then he pointed the gun at the two men
struggling on the floor.

“I’m no expert in these things,” he said, flapping his bushy
eyebrows at them, “but I believe I know which end bites.
 
The next one of you to strike the
other, move towards me or do anything other than just lie still, I’ll shoot
him.”

Tam collapsed, exhausted, and felt the dwarf do the
same.
 
Good old Sam Clemens, he
thought.
 
Good old Missouri Sam.

*
  
*
  
*

 
“I regret the
barbarism,” Sam Clemens said, nearly shouting to be heard over the rumble of
the
Jim Smiley
and the wind that ruffled
his hair and tried to rip all his words away.
 
He’d like to have lit a Cohiba to celebrate his impending
victory, or at least his manifest lead over the gargantuan
Liahona
, but that would have required him to shut the
wheelhouse windows, and he liked the breeze too much.
 
“Which is not quite the same thing as an apology, because
I’d do the same thing again if I had to.”

The dwarf grunted an acknowledgement that made no
concessions.
 
He was tied into the
second of the wheelhouse’s chairs, bound hand and foot but left with his mouth
free.
 
If Sam had been smoking,
he’d have given the little man his own cigar.
 
Or at least, Sam thought, considering how low his store of
good Cohibas was dwindling, a few puffs off Sam’s.
 
The boy John Moses sat in the third chair, free and munching
on a flat square of ship’s biscuit.
 
Crumbs from the biscuit fell and spotted the black rubber matting that
covered the floor of the wheelhouse, matching the rubber that encased the wheel
itself, and the soles of Sam’s shoes, and the head of each control.

“You gonna kill me, Clemens?” the midget growled.

Sam considered the question as he drove, goggle-protected
eyes drinking in the glorious mountains, pine woods and tall grasses
surrounding the trail ahead.
 
Off
to one side, a great swath of trees had been burnt into spent matchsticks,
utterly consumed along with the grasses around them, leaving nothing but a
long, straight streak of blackened earth and stone.
 
Sam wondered if that might be the result of a phlogiston gun
being fired from the air, and then shook off the thought.
 
Speculation was pointless; he had a
mission.
 
Besides, the burning was
almost certainly the result of some perfectly natural cause, like a lightning
strike.

The road from Fort Bridger down into the Great Salt Lake
City was a wide track, hammered flat by the passage of many horses, wagons,
steam-trucks and, if the tales were to be believed, even handcarts, back in the
old days.
 
Some day in the
not-too-distant future, the railroad would reach from the Atlantic to the
Pacific.
 
That railroad might belong
to American companies or it might, if he wanted it, belong to Brigham Young and
the Kingdom of Deseret.
 
Either
way, when it did connect, it would no doubt absorb a lot of the traffic to and
from the Kingdom of Deseret.

That would be fine by Sam, he estimated.
 
Less traffic meant higher speeds and
faster winds and fewer people to mar the scenery.
 
Not that he wasn’t going full speed now, with his steam
valves opened all the way and O’Shaughnessy down below, swearing and shoveling
coal into the furnace as fast as the old girl would take it.

Old girl
, my skinny
white Mississippi backside, he smiled at his own affectation.
 
As if the
Jim Smiley
weren’t state of the art, built new this year by the
United States Army to the specifications of its own agent, Samuel Clemens.
 
She was reasonably fast, not as fast as
the
Liahona
, but faster than most
trucks, and her big knobbly wheels sent her flying over obstructions that would
completely stymie lesser craft.
 
That made her perfect for the whole great wide territory west of the
Mississippi, or, for that matter, just about any territory in the world.
 
Except for outright tropical forest,
Sam guessed, and if it came to that, he’d fix a blade on the front of her and
slice right through any jungle he came to.

And, of course, she could float, and that was Sam’s ace in
the hole, should the
Liahona
look likely
to overtake them.
 
He glanced down
at his charts and guessed that he might be within a quarter of an hour of the
Bear River.

He wished no one aboard the
Liahona
any harm, naturally.
 
He just wished them abject failure, confusion and
ignominious defeat.
 
Turning to
look over his shoulder, he quickly scanned the wide road behind, and still saw
nothing of the Welshman’s hulking land-ship with its hieroglyphic name on the
bow.

“Well, mister,” he finally said to the dwarf.
 
“I can’t say just yet.
 
You won’t tell me who you are or what
you were doing playing hide-and-go-seek in my saucers.
 
You might be someone I ought to shoot,
you might be someone I ought to trade for pemmican to the next Shoshone I meet
and you might be someone who needs to pay me for a ticket, but I have no way of
knowing until you explain yourself.”