Dead Man’s Hand (55 page)

I was completely ridiculous. The madness had me completely in its grip.

I was uneasy about the Condor. When we moored the boat for the night, I tried to keep
it away from tall trees. A few weeks went by without my hearing that
Ky-yeee
ringing in the air, but I was no easier.
He’s up to something
, I thought.

What I didn’t know was that the Condor was busy dealing with a couple other filibusters,
the Haunt and the Highwayman, each of whom was robbing in the vicinity of Sutter’s
Fort. It was only when he’d had them locked up in the jail that he came looking for
me.

And he didn’t come gliding down from the trees. He crept up on the moored
Chrysopolis
on a tiny raft made up of inflated seal skins, a hand crank, and a screw propeller.

He knocked out a pair of sentries and set a fire in the steamboat’s grand salon. Then
he climbed to the Texas deck with a grapnel and a line, entered the captain’s cabin
where I was sleeping, and knocked me unconscious before I even came awake. When I
woke, I was back in the Sacramento City jail, my boat had burned to the waterline,
my fortune had for the most part been lost, and my crew were stranded on Sutter’s
Island.

The Haunt, I discovered, had already escaped—being a conquistador who had been dead
for a hundred years or more, he could supposedly walk through walls. (At least at
night: he’s more vulnerable in the daytime.) There was still no law—no judges, no
juries, no sheriffs or deputies, which had not stopped the Condor from filling the
jail with a host of other offenders, most of whom professed themselves willing to
join my crew, and the Cavalier—a Frenchman who was dressed in the black leather outfit
of the French king’s musketeers of the seventeenth century—offered his aid, though
he was not willing to join our gang.

The jail had been improved, so it took us all of three days to break out. We went
straight to the wharfs and aboard the
New World
, which had just arrived from New York. It was a floating palace, with red plush benches,
marble tables, and crystal chandeliers, and the fastest boat on the river besides.
It was easy enough to overpower the crew and set forth. We dropped off the Cavalier
below Sacramento, then headed for Sutter’s Island, where I found my old crew staring
at the snag-filled waters of Steamboat Slough and waiting for rescue.

Those were the glory days. Every day brought adventure: a whiff of powder or a clash
of blades or the clinking of glasses. Either we were plundering the gold traffic moving
to and from the Sierras, or we were enjoying ourselves at our secret forts in the
Sacramento Delta. The delta featured hundreds of miles of waterway and dozens of islands.
And, because we had gold, we suddenly had friends. People would bring barges of fine
things up from San Francisco, and we’d pay them well.

We had champagne and brandy. Linen. Fine weapons. Women.

In Alta California, the men still outnumbered the women five or six to one, but many
of the ladies had come entirely for the gold. Gold we had aplenty, and the ladies
found both the gold and us. It was a splendid time we had together. We had to be the
envy of all those poor, frozen miners on the American River, who could go a whole
year without seeing a female.

I even had a sort of wife for a while, Pirate Sally, who wore a kerchief over her
red-gold hair and wielded matching cutlasses. We plundered together till I caught
her one night sneaking off with my personal stash of gold. Turns out she’d fallen
for the Cavalier, that frog bastard, so I heaved her into the river and let her swim
for it. For revenge the vindictive bitch led the Condor to us, and I got to spend
another few days in the Sacramento City jail before escaping.

By then a regular circus parade of colorful madmen had come to the diggings for their
piece of the proceeds. Quiet, black-clad Doctor Tolliver, with his bottles of explosives.
The Mad Emperor, who set up his kingdom by Lake Tahoe and demanded we worship him.
Captain Hypnos, with his legion of mesmerized followers. The Bowery B’hoy, a New Yorker
with a red shirt, plug hat, lead-weighted cane, and soap-locks like a Jew.

Nor were they all robbers or poachers. Aero Lad raced through the skies on his Mechanical
Dragonfly. San Francisco produced the Regulator and the Hangman, both of whom pretended
to uphold the law as they went about bashing people and stringing them up. They were
no more law-abiding than I was, though for some reason they were thought to be great
heroes and I was not.

Every race or nation had its own champion. The Indians of this area had never organized
above the village level, and they never had a Sagamore till the Sagamore showed up
to lead them in trying to drive the white men from the diggings. The Masked Hidalgo
fought for the Mexicans. And then there was Shanghai Susie, who defended the Chinese
miners with some kind of strange fighting magic called “cong foo.” I
hated
her, for she attacked with a host of strange weapons and was better with a sword
than me.

It was hard to say just what side these last were on. They fought to defend their
own people, but they also fought each other, and they fought to defend law-breakers
against the Condor or anyone set to catch them. I fought all of them at one time or
another, and fought alongside them as well.

Those of us on the far side of the law didn’t just fight the law-men, we fought each
other. With both the Condor and the likes of the Mad Emperor likely to turn up at
any time, slavering for my freedom or my gold, you can bet I took care for my safety.
Our forts in the Delta were defended by cannons, sentries, and elaborate pits and
traps that would drop the unwary into nests of snakes or incinerate them in a flaming
blast of coal oil. (That’s how the Hangman went, and good riddance to him.) And I
wasn’t about to have another boat burned out from under me—we covered the
New World
in nets, set cannons to cover every approach, and set even more elaborate traps.
(We failed to catch Aero Lad in one, but we did get his Dragonfly, which kept him
off our necks till he built a new one.)

Still, it was the Condor who was my truest companion. We battled almost continually,
with the honors about even. He dragged me to the hoosegow more than once, and I captured
him as well. I was still reluctant to kill him directly, so I’d suspend him over a
pit of sharpened stakes or send him down the river tied on a flaming raft, or throw
him into a cage with a captured mountain lion. Damned if he didn’t make his escape
every time.

Once, when he’d captured me and was marching me to jail trussed up like a turkey-bird,
he prosed on the way he did when he had a captive audience, and he told me that he
found me “worthy of his steel.” Not that he
had
any steel—he always fought with his fists—but I have to admit that a part of me was
pleased to have earned his respect.

I told him that I’d never have become a pirate if he hadn’t clouted me that first
time on the Middle Fork when I was trying to defend my claim against poachers.

“You follow your nature,” says he, “and your nature was bound to lead you to folly
sooner or later.”

“Folly, perhaps,” says I. “But where was it written that I was destined to become
a river pirate until you made me one?”

“Do not attempt to shift the blame for your actions to me,” says he. “Your very anatomy
proclaims your depravity.” He prodded me on the back of the head in an unpleasant,
over-familiar way. “Your skull shows that your adhesiveness is deficient, whereas
your destructiveness and combativeness are overdeveloped. Science itself condemns
you.”

I was annoyed at being poked in this phrenological manner and shook the hand off.
“And what about
your
nature?” says I. “Is it the bumps on your head that led you to become the Condor?
Why do you swoop down from the trees to whip offenders off the trail?”

He gave no answer, simply shoved me along ahead of him.

“Whatever happened must have been a great blow,” says I, “to force you to do something
as barmy as this.”

By this time, there were all sorts of stories about the Condor and who might be behind
the mask. It was claimed that he was a belted earl from England, or the son of a New
York shipping nabob—someone rich, anyway, who had pelf enough to indulge himself in
the eccentric hobby of floating from tree to tree and thrashing the wicked. There
was another story that he was a Mexican caballero whose activities were supported
by a secret gold mine (and I believe the Mad Emperor spent a lot of time searching
for that mine). I heard yet another story that the Condor was an army officer whose
wife had been murdered by bandits, and who had sworn vengeance on the whole criminal
tribe.

All the stories were ridiculous, of course. Yet none were more absurd than the Condor
himself, who marched behind me on yet another trek to the jail in Sacramento City.

As we walked along, I probed further still. “What compels you to dress up as a great
carrion bird?” says I. “Attack perfect strangers and haul them to the calabozo? How
does this benefit you in any way?”

“I benefit as any citizen benefits,” says he, “when order is maintained in society.”

I lost my patience. “Tell that to Mrs. Siddons!” says I scornfully. “You’re not in
this for some abstract pleasure in establishing order.” I glared at him. “You’re cracked!
You’re completely cracked! What I can’t work out is what cracked you!”

He gave me a steely look from either side of his ridiculous costume beak. “Could a
madman do what I do?” he asked. “Could a madman fight so well or so long?”

It occurred to me afterwards that there was a bit of pleading in his voice. That he
was hoping for understanding, that I would somehow comprehend the necessity and rightness
and perfect sanity of his mission. But I’d lost my temper, and I was having none of
it.

“Damn you,” says I, “you
started
this! If it weren’t for you, I’d never have become the Commodore! Doctor Tolliver
would be selling quack medicines in Pittsburgh, and Captain Hypnos would be performing
in a music hall! We’re all inmates of your private madhouse—none of this would exist
without you! This is all part of your demented fantasy, you glibbering moon-calf!”

Whereupon his blue eyes flashed, and he landed a right hook to my jaw that laid me
out on the trail.

He apologized afterward for losing his temper. But by that point I wasn’t interested
in his explanations, and as soon as I could manage it, I lurched to my feet and stalked
off in the direction of Sacramento City and its jail. Nor could I resist the Parthian
shot that I hurled over my shoulder.

“And that war cry of yours?” says I. “That
ky-yeeee
! That’s a hawk, you know, not a condor! Condors only
grumble
, as if they’re mouthing some ridiculous, impotent complaint against the state of
the universe.”

If he had any reply to this, he had no chance to utter it, because at that point the
Gentlemen of Leisure sprang their ambush, firing their muskets and pistols. I threw
myself headlong on the ground, as I knew from long experience that the fire of my
crew was marked both by its enthusiasm and its general lack of accuracy. By the time
the fire ended and I rose again to my feet, the Condor had fled, and I was surrounded
by my jubilant crew of freebooters.

After my capture, you see, the Gentlemen had taken the
New World
upriver by way of obscure sloughs and passages, and sent a party ashore to hide in
the trees and bushes and wait for the Condor to march me into their ambush. Once they’d
liberated me, we paraded in triumph to our steamboat, where we raised bumpers of champagne
as we made our way back to one of our hidden forts.

Little did I know it, but that was the last of the carefree time, the joyful cut-and-thrust
of the freebooting life. It was less than a week later that I heard a strange throbbing
in the air, and looked up from the pilothouse of the
New World
to see Professor Mitternacht’s great black airship as it floated over the Sacramento
Delta, the sinister outline of a cruising shark black against the sun, the great fore-and-aft
screw propellers whirling. I felt a shiver run up my spine as I saw the machine, and
I began to feel a suspicion that for the first time my steamboat had been thoroughly
outclassed.

Mitternacht and his
Schrecken
had crossed half the world and the entirety of the United States, and he was on his
way to San Francisco, where he opened his campaign by dropping fluorine bombs of poison
gas that killed a third of the population—after which the
Schrecken
came to a landing, discharged troops, seized the town, and raised the black-and-gold
flag of the Austrian Empire.

The airship was large, but it couldn’t hold a vast number of soldiers, only half a
battalion or so of Croatian Grenzers. But it was still half a battalion more than
anyone else had in Alta California, and Mitternacht made up for his lack of numbers
by ruling through terror: there were executions and violations, and the survivors
were enslaved and put to work building camps, fortifications, and a landing field
for the airship.

Mitternacht and his fluorine bombs came as a literal bolt from the blue. While I had
been in Alta California, prospecting and breaking out of jails and fighting back and
forth with the Condor and the Bowery B’hoy and Shanghai Susie and so on, there had
been revolutions all over Europe. Hungary had tried to break free of the Austrians
and been defeated; and their hero, Kossuth, had come to the United States in order
to raise funds for another rebellion.

Professor Mitternacht was outraged that Uncle Sam was sheltering the rebel instead
of hanging him outright; and so he flew from his secret base in the Tyrol all the
way across the ocean to punish the United States and annex Alta California to the
empire of the Habsburgs.