Liahona (18 page)

The dwarf grunted again.
 
“I might be someone that can tell you something useful.”

“Oh, yeah?” Sam asked.
 
“Like what?”

The dwarf had a sullen, calculating look on his face.
 
“Like who punched holes in your boiler
pipes night before last.”

Sam grinned.
 
“Now, that might have been a poor tactical move on your part, my
friend.
 
If I didn’t know better,
that offer might make me suspect that you yourself were the culprit, and that
would put you squarely in the
malefactors needing to walk the plank
category.
 
At near ten miles an hour, I suppose you’d survive, but I don’t think
you’d enjoy the experience.”

“Don’t care who done it, huh?”

“Of course I care.”
 
Sam gestured expansively at the wheelhouse and the deck of the
Jim
Smiley
.
 
“I love this old girl.
 
That’s why I had that rascal Dick Burton imprisoned by the Shoshone and
then went out of my way to meet him and laugh in his face at his failure.”
 
Sam pulled a cigar from his jacket
pocket and shoved it into the corner of his mouth.
 
Even unlit, he could taste the victory puff.
 
“Got anything else to trade?”

The dwarf glowered and hunched down in his chair.

“His name is Coltrane,” the little boy suddenly offered
around a mouthful of biscuit.

“The hell?” the dwarf snarled, taken by surprise.

“Don’t hurt him,” the boy added.
 
“He’s nice.”

“Well, well,” Sam almost laughed.
 
“Is he now?
 
Do
you know who Mr. Coltrane works for, John Moses?”

The little boy screwed up his eyes in concentration.
 
“Arbishaw,” he said, and Sam saw that
it was a guess or a half-recollected name at best.
 
“Archibarch.”

The gypsy?
 
Well, that was interesting.
 
“Thank you, John Moses.”

Coltrane glared at Sam.

“I suppose to be on the safe side, and as a matter of
policy, I should toss you overboard now,” Sam told the dwarf.

“He saved me,” John Moses objected.

Sam turned a sharp eye on the little boy, who seemed to melt
beneath his gaze, shrinking to mouse-sized in the wooden chair.
 
“Did he?”

John Moses nodded timidly.

“Stay out of this, John Moses,” Coltrane urged the little
boy.
 
There was an incongruously
gentle note in his voice.

“Tell me about that,” Sam urged the boy.

“Coltrane is a scary boy, but he saved me from the Injuns,”
John Moses averred.
 
“Also the ugly
skinny-faced man with the red hair.”

That would be O’Shaughnessy; Sam laughed out loud.

“Just for that, John Moses,” he told the boy, “I won’t throw
Coltrane overboard.”

He was still laughing when he looked again behind and saw,
dark and small against the yellow grasses of the horizon, a blocky smudge.
 
It was coming his direction, and it was
big enough that it could only be one thing.

The
Liahona
was
overtaking them.

Sam pulled the funnel-tipped speaking tube from the
dashboard and held it to his mouth.
 
“Pack her as tight as she’ll take it and get up here, O’Shaughnessy!” he
barked.
 
“We have company, and they
won’t be happy to see us!”

He slammed the tube back into its slot, pawed at his charts
and stared at the road ahead.
 
Where, oh where, was that Bear River?

*
  
*
  
*

The Welshman Jones was angry and Burton didn’t blame
him.
 
Roxie seemed perturbed, too.

Not only had Sam Clemens stolen all the
Liahona’s
coal, he had apparently kidnapped its mascot, a
little boy named John Moses.
 
The
Shoshone, at least, denied any knowledge of the boy’s whereabouts, and there
was no sign of him on the truck, which had been turned inside out twice.
 

As long as he thought the little boy might be in the Shoshone
camp, Jones had been impossible to pry away from the place, no matter how much
Burton and others had cajoled.
 
The
passengers and crew had bought Pocatello’s coal and reloaded the bins of the
boiler room without their Captain.
 
The moment Chief Pocatello persuaded him that John Moses must be with
Sam Clemens, however, like some capricious storm god, he performed a complete
volte
face
and was impossible to restrain.
 
Within minutes, the
Liahona
was underway and Jones in his wheelhouse, shouting
into speaking tubes.
 
As soon as
they’d reached the main track and turned south-west, Jones left the big spoked
wheel in the hands of one of his men and attached himself by the eye to a
roving spyglass.

The steam-truck roared through the high mountain country at
a shockingly fast clip, and Burton realized that Jones had been sparing the
engines earlier.
 
“Rama’s teeth, we
must be going twenty miles an hour!” he exclaimed to Roxie, who stood at his
side at the railing, her hair snapping like a banner in the breeze.

“Out the way, pal!” shouted a burly crewman as he pushed
them both aside.
 
He and two mates
dragged a length of reinforced pipe of some kind, complete with bolt-fittings,
and, with hex-wrenches the size of Burton’s arm, began fastening it to the
deck.
 
Burton stepped back, keeping
Roxie on his arm, where he could keep an eye on her, and stared in awe.

The thing was clearly a gun, and a railgun at that.
 
He’d seen similar weapons on ships many
times and years before; they were the large-scale prototype of which the Brunel
rifle was the small-scale second generation.
 

He’d never seen one mounted on a steam-truck, though.

“What is it?” he asked Roxie, and watched her face from the
corner of his eye as she answered.

“Mr. Clemens is about to find out that in the Rocky
Mountains we know how to play the game,” she said darkly, her eyes glued to the
road ahead.
 
“And we play for
keeps.”
 
Her guard was down, Burton
thought, she was emotional.
 
He
considered confronting her right then and there, demanding to know who she was
and what was her scheme, but decided against it.
 
She was
too
wound up;
who knew what she might be capable of when this angry?

“There he is!” Jones roared, and Burton felt Roxie’s grip on
his arm tighten.
 
He looked ahead
and saw, across an open stretch of yellow grass, a silver-blue ribbon of water
cutting across the far end of a long meadow.
 
A flat, wide, heavy wood bridge with a staunch toll-gate in
the middle carried the trail over the river, and, just this side of the bridge,
Burton spotted the
Jim Smiley
.
 
He saw it first by the plume of dirt
that it kicked up, but once he’d noticed it, there was no mistaking it for any
other steam-truck on the road, not with all that black India rubber wrapped
around it and the big riverboat-like paddlewheel on the back.
 

There seemed to be a light on the small truck, the orange
light of a fire, and it wasn’t making for the bridge—it had turned off to
the side, and was rolling directly at the river.

“What’s he doing?” Burton wondered.

“Gun ready, sir!” shouted one of the crew.

“Load!” came the Captain’s answer.
 
Jones pried himself away from the telescope to rush out and
check the lay of the long gun, squinting along its barrel and then scuttling
back and forth between it and the wheelhouse to compare lines of sight.
 

The
Jim Smiley
hit
the river and, amazingly, kept going.
 
Burton snatched the Captain’s telescope, momentarily forgotten in his
enthusiasm for the gun, and took a closer look.
 
The big rear paddlewheel of Clemens’s truck churned up a
white foam, pushing it through the river water like a steam ship.
 
Through the spyglass he saw that the
orange light was fire, the fire of a brazier of some sort, on the deck of the
Jim
Smiley
, and a man stood beside it to tend
it.
 
He was holding something in
the fire—

something that suddenly burst into flame itself—

and the man hurled it at the bridge, where a gout of flame
burst up at the point of contact.

Then he did it again.
 
And again.

“He’s burning the bridge!” Burton shouted.
 
The tollhouse crew, two white-bearded
men in overalls, made the realization at the same moment, and Burton saw them
hurl themselves into the river to escape.

Then the
Jim Smiley
was across the river, its heavy wheels dragging it up the bank on the far side
and towards the line of pines at the end of the meadow.
 
Fire licked hungrily from multiple
spots along the wooden bridge.

“Full speed!
 
More coal!” Jones shouted into a speaking tube, shouldering his pilot
aside and seizing the wheel.
 
“Load
and prepare to fire!”
 
The
Liahona
roared straight at the flaming bridge, its Captain
squinting past its bow, through the flames at his disappearing competitor.
 
The truck rattled from side to side and
the bitter taste of smoke began to stain the breeze whipping past Burton’s
face.
 
Crewmen snapped open a
compartment at the base of the gun and laid in a long steel shell,
pointy-tipped and the length of Burton’s forearm.

“Hold on!” he shouted, and dragged Roxie, half-resisting, to
one of the deck’s benches.
 
He
whipped off his own belt and, over an inarticulate mewl of objection, strapped
her to the seat.
 
She twisted at
the waist and looked ahead to see what was going on, and Burton rushed into the
wheelhouse.
 
Jones squinted through
the window at the fast-approaching inferno of the bridge and Burton grabbed his
shoulder.

“Don’t shoot!” he yelled.
 
“The child may be on that truck!”

Jones shrugged him off.
 
“Do you think I’m an idiot, boyo?” he snarled, and pushed
the explorer away.
 
He squinted
again, hunching down over the wheel and scrutinizing the long meadow.
 
“Fire!” he yelled.

With a great
whoosh
and a sharp humming whine, the gun fired.

Some fifty feet to the side of the
Jim Smiley
, a small stand of trees, the hillock of earth
beneath them and the gray boulders in their midst all exploded into a mist of
dust and splinters.
 

“Load!” Jones shouted again, and the
Liahona’s
nose plunged onto the burning bridge.
 
The strained timbers groaned ominously;
at the best of times, Burton thought, it must struggle to bear the weight of
this monstrous Behemoth.
 
Would it
be able to do so while it burned?

The tollhouse sprinted at them, full-tilt.

Burton whipped the borrowed spyglass to his eye again and
found the
Jim Smiley
.
 
Clemens’s man must be steering her now,
because Clemens himself stood at the back of the truck, to the side of the
paddlewheel, watching the
Liahona
with a cigar clenched in his teeth.
 
At this distance it had to be his imagination, but Burton would have
sworn that Clemens was grinning at him.

“Fire!” Jones bellowed again, and the earth to the other
side of the
Jim Smiley
erupted in a
volcano of dirt.

The bridge sagged, fire whipping all about the fringes of
the
Liahona’s
deck.

“Load!” Jones yelled again.

“Captain Jones, we’re not going to make it!” Burton snapped
uselessly, then wedged his body into the corner of the wheelhouse, behind a
chair bolted to the floor, preparing for impact.
 
He took a last glance at the
Jim Smiley
just in time to see it disappear into the trees.

This river can’t be that deep, he told himself.
 
The bridge will collapse and the
steam-truck will be delayed, but we’ll be able to drive out directly.
 
He told himself these things as
persuasively as he could, but in his heart he doubted and prepared for the
worst.

The prow of the
Liahona
shattered the wooden toll-gate like matchsticks.
 

“Hold on!” Burton yelled, to no one and to everyone.

Then the bridge snapped and the
Liahona
fell into the river below.

Here ends
Liahona

Part the First of
City of the Saints

Part the Second is
Deseret

###

About D.J. Butler

D.J. Butler (Dave) is a novelist living in the Rocky
Mountain northwest. His training is in law, and he worked as a securities
lawyer at a major international firm and inhouse at two multinational
semiconductor manufacturers before taking up writing fiction. He is a lover of
language and languages, a guitarist and self-recorder, and a serious reader. He
is married to a powerful and clever woman and together they have three devious
children.