Free Liahona by D. J. Butler Page A

like,
but it wasn’t the sort of thing he looked at every day, not by choice, not if
he could help it.   In thirty
seconds, bones showed through the flesh all over; in a minute, only bones were
left; in two minutes, the bones were gone, too, and the brass swarm clicked and clattered uncertainly around the ’pot and rustled the empty clothing.
    Jed pressed the second button.   Instantly, the swarm stopped its random runabout motion and
headed his direction.   Slightly
unnerved despite his knowledge, he set the canister on the edge of the
crawlspace and edged back into the darkness, as if that would save him.   He watched uncomfortably as the scarabs
marched in orderly ranks, like they were under the spell of some bug-herding
Noah, back into the canister, made one last scuttling sound, and then were
still.
    Jed closed the lid of the canister on tight and tucked it
inside his jacket.   Creepy little
sons of bitches, but they did the job.   He dropped to the ground, washed his hands in the low trough sink, and
headed back into the Saloon.   Time
to pack their gear into the Liahona —he’d
deal with the second Pinkerton later.

 
    Chapter Three
     
    Sam sat on the deck of the Jim Smiley and scowled into the pale mountain sun of the early
morning.   He made good and sure
that every face that turned from the much bigger and much higher deck of the Liahona to look at him got a scowl in return, fierce and
wild, eyebrows on full furrow and jaw jutted out.   He could have sat in the wheelhouse and scowled, but he’d
dragged the wooden captain’s chair—one of the few things he’d bribed the
salvage teams working on the wreck of the Pennsylvania to give to him—out into the sunshine and plunked
his narrow hips into its welcoming arms to make sure he was good and visible to
all and sundry.   He positioned
himself carefully to catch the light of the rising sun on the crotch buttons of
his Levi-Strauss denim pants.
    He sipped at a mug of hot coffee for show, but he’d already
poured two down his gullet since the sun rose.   Sam Clemens hadn’t slept and sleep wasn’t on his mind
now.   He’d worked through the night,
which was hard to do in the dark of the boiler room when the electricks weren’t
cooperating, and two of the pipes were already patched, with the third on its
way.   Once the Liahona pulled out, Sam would finish the repair job and be
on her tail.   She was a fast
animal, but if old Chief Pocatello came through, and Sam felt confident that he
would, Sam thought his odds of being the first into the Great Salt Lake City
were rather good.
    The Liahona was
enormous.   Giant, rattling metal
tracks snapped and ground in an approximately rectangular polyhedron around
each of her sides, higher in front than in the back, flattening anything they
rode over under tons of steel.   Her
body was shaped like a sailing ship’s, but more square, and the sides bulked
out above the grinding tracks, making them visible before, behind and from the
side, but not from above.   She had
a wheelhouse like the Jim Smiley’s ,
but where Sam’s wheelhouse might squeeze in a fourth man in a pinch, if that
man were willing to stand, the Liahona’s could easily accommodate a platoon of marines.   Its deck, too, was vast, and though it
was all dusty and weatherstained, the surface was sprinkled with dozens of
wooden benches and parasols from the relative comfort of which its passengers
could observe the passing scenery; many of the benches and parasols were close
enough to the rail to be visible from Sam’s lower observation point.
    Fifteen miles an hour, Sam thought, Pocatello had better
come through for me.   He chewed the
stub of a cigar.   For me and the
United States taxpayer.
    During the night, one of the Pinkertons had disappeared and
the other had been found dead.   The
dead one presented a relatively minor mystery; someone had cut his face up
pretty bad, and no one the bouncers asked about it had cared to fess up