Timpanogos (4 page)

“Everyone is armed in this godforsaken country.
 
But truthfully, sir,” he said, “I care
neither for you nor about you, so long as you stay where you are and do not
interfere with the execution of my appointed tasks.
 
I am looking for a Mr. William Hickman, who may go by the
name Bill.
 
He has been described
to me in such terms that, homely though I find you to be, you are not nearly
ugly enough to be the man I seek.”

“I’m not Bill Hickman,” Poe agreed.
 
He was grateful for his smoked glasses,
which let him survey the scene a little more than was obvious.
 
The men who had ridden down to the
hotel could be surprised and taken, he thought.
 
The men still on the bluff, on the other hand, had a
commanding vantage point.
 
There
would be no sneaking up on them, unless someone managed to creep around the
Liahona
itself.

He wondered where his allies were.

Hissssss!

An engine started with a loud squealing sound, somewhere
inside or just on the other side of the hotel.
 
Poe would never have heard it, except the house had been
reduced to a tiny, shattered shadow of its former self.

“We came here looking for Hickman ourselves,” Roxie added.

Gears whined, and a steam-truck suddenly spun into view
around the ruined hulk of the Hot Springs Hotel & Brewery.
 
It was a medium-sized cargo vehicle,
and it turned away as it emerged, rolling down the yard.
 
Men in black coats with rifles, wet and
bedraggled and not very cheerful, hung off the back.

“That might be him,” Poe suggested.
 
He was perfectly happy for the
Virginian to capture or even kill Hickman.
 
He wanted to rescue Brigham Young—he wanted to help
Roxie—and that meant getting out from under the heel of these soldiers.

Pffffffft-ankkkh!

The sound was slightly muffled.
 
He wondered what it could be.
 
Maybe some part of the water tank was still grinding away at
its usual task, or finally breaking down.

“This way, gentlemen,” the Corporal ordered his complement
of a dozen, and they trotted down the slope.
 
The others remained behind, holding their high ground
advantage.

Pffffffft-ankkkh!

“What’s that sound, Captain?” Poe asked.
 
“Please reassure me that the
Liahona
is not on the verge of exploding.”

“No, boyo, she’s solid,” the Welshman ground his teeth.
 
“But I’m pretty close to exploding
myself, if I can’t get off her back and find out what happened to the child.”

He grabbed the top of the ladder.

Bang!

A single bullet ricocheted off the
Liahona’s
deck in a trail of sparks.
 
Poe looked up to the cavalrymen on the bluff.
 
One of them held a smoking carbine and
smiled down calmly at the people stranded on the steam-truck.
 
It was a Sharps Model 1853, Poe thought
idly.
 
A big gun, and one that
would leave a big hole in a man.

Brrrrrr-rap-ap-ap-ap-ap-ap!

A racket that sounded a little like thunder, a little like a
belching giant and a lot like Jedediah Coltrane’s machine-gun erupted behind
the hotel.
 
Poe jerked his head
around to find the source of the sound and saw a Mexican Strider lurch into
view.
 
It had crept up slowly out
of the trees and been hiding behind the hotel.
 
Its guns now tore up the dry earth and grass around the
cavalrymen in a surprise flank attack.
 
The twelve Virginians broke formation, scattering out of the yard.

Bang!
 
Bang!

The cavalrymen at the top of the hill fired, and broke into
a ragged charge down the bluff, rushing to the aid of their Corporal and
comrades.

Pffffffft-ankkkh!

Over Poe’s right shoulder, catching him completely by
surprise, appeared the second Strider.
 
It rose straight up, standing out of what must have been a carefully
maintained
crouch
, in which it had crept
up alongside the
Liahona
, staying
out of view of the Third Virginia as well as of Poe.

Brrrrrr-rap-ap-ap-ap-ap-ap!

The second Strider fired its guns at the flank of the
cavalry coming down the bluff, catching them by surprise as well.
 
Two horses went down, holed by the big
Mexican guns, throwing their riders into the trees.
 
Return fire was sporadic and half-hearted, and the small
arms bullets mostly
pinged!
harmlessly
off the armored carriage of the Strider.
 
Sitting behind the pilot and gunner in the second Strider, Poe saw
Absalom Fearnley-Standish, his sister, and young Annie Web.

“Hurrah!” Fearnley-Standing shouted, as if he were cheering
on target-shooters or a fox hunt.
 
He looked for all the world like he was enjoying a lovely summer picnic,
though he did fire sporadic shots at the horsemen.

His sister Abigail leaned over the side of the Strider’s
carriage and poured hot lead out of a long-barreled pistol upon the scattering
men of the Third Virginia.

Both halves of the cavalry unit were in disarray, falling
back under fire from the Mexican guns.
 
Poe turned back to Captain Jones to suggest that now would be a good
time to continue the search for young John Moses Browning, and discovered that
the Captain was gone.

He was already down the ladder and racing to the bottom of
the yard.

Poe followed, his lungs straining as he ran, and Roxie with
him.
 
Behind them, he heard
bangs!
erupt as the crewmen of the
Liahona
opened fire on the already beleaguered
Virginians.
 

He kept his eye fixed on the foot of the field, trying to
ignore the very real possibility that a stray bullet might cut him down at any
second.
 
He saw the steam-truck
stop by a springhouse straddling a creek at the bottom of the hill and its
riders pile off.
 
He saw them throw
the door open, rush inside in numbers and drag out four prisoners with sacks
over his head and hands behind their backs.

Poe’s lungs gave out, and he nearly fell over in a paroxysm
of violent coughing.
 
His running
pace faltered and stopped.

Then Bill Hickman saw him, and Jones and Roxie, and the
Striders.

The sour-faced, hunch-shouldered Danite drew a long-barreled
pistol and clapped it to the temple of one of his prisoners.
 
“Stop right there, helldammit!” he
squealed, and yanked the sack away to reveal the threatened person.

His hostage was President Young.
 
The man was bleeding, looked like he had been shot, but he
was alive and held at gunpoint.

Poe hacked up blood and phlegm onto the grass.

“Stop right there!” Bill Hickman yelled again.
 
“Stop or I’ll blow out his prophetic
brains!”

Chapter Twelve

Sam smelled apples and heard ruckus, and he wondered how he
would know when to make his move.
 
Probably, he thought, the first thing he’d hear clearly would be the
Danites shooting Orrin Porter Rockwell full of holes, and then it would be too
late.
 
It was enough to make even a
cheerful man despondent, and Sam knew himself well enough to know that he was
not a naturally cheerful man.

He was a joking man precisely because he wasn’t
cheerful.
 
All humor, Sam thought,
was gallows humor, because every man spent his whole life waiting for the
drop.
 
At that moment, the drop
seemed imminent to Sam.

And then what?

“I’ll kill your precious Ambassador, too!” Hickman shouted,
and Sam heard the
click
of a gun’s
hammer.
 
The man’s porker-squeal of
a voice was, if it were possible, even more unpleasant when strained through
burlap.
 
“Now drop your guns,
helldammit!”

Focus, Clemens, he told himself.

Sam heard the
thud
of
weapons being thrown to the ground.
 
Had he already waited too long?

“We’ve disarmed ourselves,” Sam heard a man say, and the
voice sounded familiar.
 
The words
ended in a lengthy fit of coughing.
 
Sam racked his brains for a moment until he realized that it sounded
like the gypsy at Bridger’s Saloon, who had tried to warn him off his
mission.
 
He vaguely thought he’d
seen the man again, at the Shoshone stockade.
 

Hadn’t he been part of that face-off against Hickman?

Sam managed not to chuckle out loud.
 
He should have known.
 
And the swindler had had the
impertinence to ask if Sam took him for a huckster!

“Let them go, Hick.”
 
This was a woman’s voice, unfamiliar to Sam.
 
He considered making his move right then—Hickman might
be distracted by a pretty face.
 
He
held back, telling himself that it was because he didn’t know the woman, and
couldn’t be sure she
had
a pretty
face.
 

She might be homely, and then her presence wouldn’t be all
that helpful to Sam.
 

She wasn’t done talking, though.
 
“You can tell Lee you were overpowered by the Mexicans,” she
suggested, “or you can just light out right now for California.
 
Lee will never know.”

Sam wondered if O’Shaughnessy was in California by now.
 
He’d heard yelling outside the
springhouse door that had sounded something like O’Shaughnessy’s voice, but the
words were indistinct through the chinked logs and all the gunfire, and Sam had
convinced himself that the voice belonged to some Irish Danite.
 
At least, surely, O’Shaughnessy would
be on the road westbound, heading for the Pacific.
 
Sam couldn’t imagine the Irishman sticking around to
complete their mission with Sam out of the picture.
 
The man was hired muscle and a brute, a bruiser Sam had
picked up in Chicago because he needed help and his bosses in Army Intelligence
couldn’t be sure that their own men were loyal.

Unless, of course, O’Shaughnessy had no idea that Sam had
been kidnapped.
 
The man could very
well be lying dead drunk on the carpeted floor of the Hotel Deseret bar.
 
Or just lying dead.
 
Maybe he and Henry were having a drink
on some heaven-sailing riverboat at that very moment.

Or maybe O’Shaughnessy was lying in the back of an eastbound
steam-truck, wearing Pinkerton shackles on his wrists and ankles.

“I ain’t letting nobody go,” Hickman snarled, “and I ain’t
getting overpowered by no corn-eating Mexicans.
 
Not so long as I’ve got a gun to the head of my portly
gentleman friend here.”

“Watch it!” yelled a voice Sam didn’t know.

“England!”
 
The
voice was a man’s, fierce and bellowing, and more familiar.
 
It was hard to tell in two syllables,
but it sounded English.
 
It almost
sounded like it might belong to Richard Burton.

Pow!
 
Sam heard a sound like a heavy object
falling, with a metal crack in the center of it.

“Where the hell’d
he
come from?!”

Bang!
 
Bang!

“Rockwell’s loose!”

Time to act.

Sam whipped the sack off his own head.
 
Rockwell had cut the ropes on his
wrists inside the springhouse, after digging through three barrels of dried
beans and finally finding his Bowie knife by touch alone.
 
Now armed with that same knife, the man
charged splashing through the stream, racing straight at six Danites dripping
with pistols.
 
His opponents, in
the middle of jumping off the back of a parked steam-truck, looked completely
surprised by the attack.
 
With his
buckskin fringes and long beard snapping in the air, Rockwell seemed half wild
animal, half Old Testament prophet and one hundred percent American.

Sam was surprised at how cheered up he felt by the other man
he saw in action.
 
Richard Burton,
the Queen’s agent and sometime saboteur, knelt on Bill Hickman’s chest on the
creek bank and pounded him in the face repeatedly with the basket hilt of a
cavalry sword.
 
Burton’s facial
expression looked like that of a hungry cannibal in the early stages of
preparing dinner, though he had a knife in his upper left arm and his punches
were slow.
 
Hickman must have been
taken by surprise, but he was groping for a pistol he’d dropped in the dirt,
and he looked like he was close to reaching it.

Sam wondered where Burton had come from, but he had no time
to dwell on the question.

Two men and a woman charged down the hill.
 
They all held pistols.
 
Sam recognized one of them as the
gypsy, though his face looked a little different than Sam remembered.
 
The others he was less sure about,
though he thought he might have seen them in Chief Pocatello’s stockade,
too.
 

The President and the Ambassador knelt together in the
middle of it all.
 
Rockwell had
correctly guessed they’d get the most attention from the Danites, and had left
their hands tied so as not to give the game away.
 
Orrin Porter Rockwell was something of a savage, but Sam
found he was coming to respect the man.

Young and Armstrong might have been praying, for the
serenity with which they sat still in the middle of the fracas, heads bowed and
hands behind their backs.
 
Young
bled from his ribs where he’d been shot, though—they hadn’t bound the
injury inside the springhouse because it would have given away the fact that
their hands were free—and he didn’t look good.

Maybe they
were
praying, Sam thought.
 
In their
place, he might be.

Sam drew Rockwell’s pistol, wondering where to shoot first.

The choice was made for him.
 
Two Danites rushed around the front of the steam-truck, drawing
long, straight knives from sheaths at their belts.
 
They looked like they were rushing to join the dog pile on
top of Orrin Porter Rockwell.
 
Sam
calmly pointed Rockwell’s pistol at the man in front and squeezed the trigger.

Bang!

He missed.
 
The
two Danites cringed and faltered, then saw him.

Rockwell slashed like a dervish at the men surrounding
him.
 
He was too close for them to
shoot back effectively, but Sam saw that they had realized that, too, and some
of them were stabbing and cutting at the mountain man with knives instead.

Sam tried again.

Bang!
 
Bang!

His shots missed, and the bullets
whizzanged!
away into space off the side of the steam-truck.

The two men charged at
him
now.
 

It wasn’t obvious to Sam that the change was an
improvement.
 
Confound it, he
needed to start hitting what he aimed at.

Rockwell took a hit, a deep scratch on his hip.
 
The bull-shouldered man staggered and
kept fighting, stomping one Danite under the truck and kicking another in the
belly, but Sam could see that he was bleeding, and starting to slow down.

Burton had lost his grip on his sword, and was punching
Hickman in the face now with bare and bloody knuckles.

The gypsy and his companions were still running.

Sam raised the pistol again.
 
Point blank now, he thought, even a child couldn’t fail of
this
mark.

Bang!

He missed.
 

I’ll be the shame of the entire town of Hannibal, Missouri,
he thought, raising the pistol again and hoping he could get off at least one
more shot as he was being knifed to death.
 
I’ll be the laughingstock of the American West.
 

Rockwell should have given the gun to someone else.

Rat-rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

The two men charging him vanished, whipped off their feet,
thrown to the ground and stilled in a fraction of a second.
 
Sam stood with his gun still raised for
an uncomprehending moment, try to absorb the sudden evaporation of his
attackers.
 
It was as if Zeus
himself had looked down from Olympus, decided that the Kingdom of Deseret had
two men too many, and simply erased them.
 
They were rag dolls before a scythe.

Rat-rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-BANG!

Sparks and ricocheting bullets flew off the top of the
steam-truck like a lightning storm in a bottle, and the men clawing and biting
and stabbing at Rockwell faltered.

The gypsy and his companions clapped guns to the heads of
Danites.
 
The men stopped fighting
and threw their weapons to the ground.

Burton smashed Hickman one more time in the face with his
fist.
 
Hickman’s hand, finally
wrapped around the grip of his pistol, squeezed once.

Bang!

As a last shot, it was anticlimactic.
 
The bullet disappeared into the
deepening blue sky of the late afternoon.

Hickman collapsed and lay still.

Burton swayed, pale and drawn, and he glared at Sam with a
reproachful eye.
 
“You’re the worst
shot I’ve ever seen,” he said through gritted teeth.
 
“I’ve seen an ninety-year-old Armenian crone who shot
straighter than you do.”

“Sorry,” Sam said, chastened.
 
He had the presence of mind not to drop his gun, though only
barely.
 

“She was missing half her fingers,” the explorer added.
 
“And she was blind in both eyes.”

“Next you’ll tell me she had a better mustache than I do,
too,” Sam guessed wearily.

“Agni’s second head,” Burton grunted.
 
He swayed on his knees like a drunk
man.
 
“This country and its people
are not what I was led to believe.”

Then he collapsed on top of Hickman.

“You all right, Rockwell?” Sam called.
 
His own voice sounded far away and
muffled to him.
 
“It looked like
you took a few body blows.”

“No bullet or blade!” Rockwell cackled, and kicked one of
the downed Danites in the face.

Sam noticed that away, up the long hillside, two Mexican
Striders were clanking in his direction.
 
No one else seemed exercised about their arrival, so he ignored them and
turned to look for the source of the bullet-storm that had saved his life.

It was a midget.
 
He was rumpled and dirty and unshaved and Sam thought he kind of looked
familiar too, though he didn’t remember where he’d seen the man.
 
He stood holding a stubby-looking
little rifle the like of which Sam had definitely never seen before, which had
a bulky drum attached to its stock.
 
Presumably to hold the cascade of bullets the gun was obviously capable
of shooting.
 
Sam was not a gun
man, but this little storm maker intrigued him.

The dwarf’s face looked chagrined.
 
He was examining the gun, and Sam now saw that its barrel
was shredded and splayed open on one side, like a steel flower was sprouting
from the weapon.
 
“Jebus,” the
little man said.

A step behind and to the side of the dwarf stood Tamerlane
O’Shaughnessy.
 
The Irishman looked
embarrassed too.
 

“It’s a nice day,” O’Shaughnessy shot Sam a rueful
half-grin.

Sam nodded.
 
He
felt numb, and a little bit humiliated, himself.
 
So it had been O’Shaughnessy outside the springhouse.

Behind the Irishman and the midget stood a little boy.
 
He held a pistol—the same unknown
gun Sam had first seen on the Pinkerton’s hip, and then in O’Shaughnessy’s
hands—pointed at the backs of the two men.
 
It was a day for strange guns.
 
No wonder the two men looked so shy, Sam thought.
 
What kind of self-respecting thug lets
a little kid throw down on him?