Deseret by D. J. Butler

bag down over Sam’s head.   It smelled like apples and burlap, but he could breathe
through it well enough.   The same
man started pushing him—in the direction of the steam-truck, he guessed.
    “I guess Lee gave you the dirty work, didn’t he?” Rockwell
taunted Hickman.   “Watch out,
Hick.   He might have to kill you
when it’s over, make sure you can’t cause him trouble later.”
    “Shut up, Port,” Hickman retorted.
    “Porter,” Young rumbled.
    Sam tripped up some sort of ramp and was thrown to the
ground.   More apple smell.
    “Or what?” Rockwell pressed, ignoring both his captor and
his President.   “You gonna kill me?   You think I care?   I suppose it was Lee that had the balls to try to pull this off.   I just can’t figure out where the two of you got the brains .   Pooled
together, you might just have enough smarts to play noughts and crosses against
a mule.   Play , mind you.   I ain’t sure you could win .”
    “Porter!”
    Sam heard footsteps and scuffling on the gangplank behind
him.
    “No, I don’t reckon you care if you live or die, Port,”
Hickman admitted.   “That’s always
been your charm.   But you’ll care
if I shoot Brigham .   Hell, that was my instructions when I
come here, and I got half a mind to do it anyway.”
    Rockwell said nothing.   Sam heard thuds and grunts around
him as other men were tossed into the steam-truck with him, and then the clank of the truck’s gate being shut again.
    *    *    *
    Absalom Fearnley-Standish sat on a bench on the deck of the Liahona , sipping a lemonade alone.  
    He wasn’t moping, no, he was made of stronger stuff than
that, he tried to tell himself, but he was in a reflective mood.   He’d felt reflective since Annie had
rejected him.
    He knew her name was Annie because he’d asked her.   He’d been a little out of sorts since
he’d met the Mexican Striderman… Striderwoman… Master Sergeant Jackson , and he’d thought he could use some pleasant
diversion.   He’d found her below
decks, standing outside a cabin door and listening at it.   That didn’t seem like very ladylike
behavior, he told himself in retrospect, but it was cardinal that a gentleman
didn’t dwell on the unladylike or ungentlemanly behaviors of others, and
frankly, at the time he hadn’t even noticed it.   At the time he’d just been happy to see her.
    “I wonder if you would enjoy another lemonade, Annie,” he’d
said, and then, to avoid any misunderstanding, he’d added, “I mean, with me, on
the deck, and perhaps together with a little conversation.   I’m not just a man of action, you
know.”   That should have reminded
her of his courage in standing up to Lee and Hickman.   Then he’d given her his best Harrovian smile.   “I think you’ll find I can be quite
charming.”
    She had looked him in the eye in the sputtering light of the
hallway electricks and said, without missing a beat, “if you don’t get out of
here right now, Absalom Fearnley-Standish, I’ll stick my boot so far up your
backside you’ll be picking leather out from between your teeth for a week.”
    He liked to think he had reacted decisively.  
    It was not a situation his father had prepared him for, nor
the Foreign Office.   Competing
norms milled about in his head and collided.   A real lady doesn’t talk like a sailor , he remembered his mother saying to him, preparing
him to meet a female second cousin who was decidedly not an acceptable
match.   A gentleman
doesn’t strike a lady , he’d heard from a
schoolteacher when as a young man he’d been badly beaten by a larger, older
girl, and was silently congratulating himself on landing at least one good blow
to her nose.   A man never
backs down from a fight , they’d told him at
Harrow.   More than once.   His professional training won out over
the lessons of his childhood traumas, and, though it seemed to him that a
stuttering eternity might have passed, he was reasonably