Free Liahona by D. J. Butler Page B

to
anything.   They’d done the obvious
thing and thrown the body into the icehouse until the next U.S. Marshal
happened through and could investigate.   By which time, Sam had intimated wryly to the bouncers when they
inquired as to his whereabouts, the trail was likely to be cold.
    O’Shaughnessy had stayed hidden in the Jim Smiley and the bouncers, in their role of makeshift police,
hadn’t tried to suggest that they had the authority to board and search
her.   Sam had been careful not to
do anything to give them the idea that they did, and they’d all gotten along
famously.
    The missing Pinkerton was rather more of a mystery.   His clothing had been found in the
Saloon’s latrine, but no other trace of him; apparently the man had taken his
wallet and his weapon and had gone running off alone into the wilderness in the
middle of the night.   Sam was as
surprised as everyone else, and as little able to explain it.   All in all, it was the sort of behavior
he associated not with the Wyoming Territory but more with, say, Canada.
    When the sun had cracked over the horizon, the last few
passengers had loaded into the Liahona .   Sam had stopped working on the boiler
pipes to watch; he loved mighty moving machines, and the Liahona , though she wasn’t handsome, was as mighty as they
came.   Her Captain, the Welshman
Jones, had lowered a cargo door in back to march up a few crates and suitcases,
and the passengers had come up the side by ladder.   For those without the heart to make such a climb unaided,
the crew had hung a pulley from a metal arm above the rungs and dropped a
steel-and-leather harness.   Several
ladies and one man had come up that way, the ladies flashing various
expressions of delight, relief and disgruntlement at the heavy-armed truck-men
who hoisted them.   The fellow who
had availed himself of the crew’s assistance was the younger, whiter, and
fussier of the two Englishmen.   Probably, Sam thought, watching him flap his arms like a turkey and
cringe from contact with the side of the great steam-truck, it had been the
other Englishman who had punched the holes in the Jim Smiley .
    After the big steam-truck was loaded, some of the Fort’s men
climbed up onto the ramparts and walked the full circuit, scanning the horizon
for threats with their spyglasses.   The enclosure was designed to look like an old wooden stockade, with a
jagged top like the shoulder-to-shoulder points of sharpened logs, but the wall
was made of thick slabs of plascrete just like Bridger’s Saloon, and all its
points were made of iron, and iron was the walkway that ran around the inside,
giving the Fort’s defenders a platform from which to watch and defend.   The Fort sat squarely astride the road,
with one huge tower-shouldered gate looking east, to the Platte and the
Mississippi and beyond, and another gazing resolutely west, to New Russia, to
California and to the Kingdom of Deseret.  
    Once they had confirmed that the horizon was clear of
hostiles, the Fort’s people threw levers inside one of the west towers, and
with a rush of steam into the center of the gate from both towers, the huge,
interlocking steel fingers that comprised the gate itself groaned and withdrew
into their plascrete housing, opening the way for outbound traffic.
    Even idling, the Liahona coughed significant fumes into the air, and when Jones blasted the signal from
the tin-peaked whistle at the corner of his wheelhouse and engaged the
throttle, the black cloud that belched out of the rear of the stream-truck
could have entirely covered any two Missouri counties, or the entire state of
Rhode Island.   Steam hissed out, too,
through various chinks in the beast’s body, pfffting out past the gears that worked the tracks, from
cracks in the hull and from a pipe that rose out the machine’s back end,
alongside the exhaust pipe, for the purpose.
    Twenty-odd passengers on the Liahona’s deck waved hands, hats and scarves at the