Looking on the bright side, as Detective WC is wont to say, the renegade Cossacks, or Social Democrat revolutionaries, appear to have been thoroughly routed. Though whether that is true, we don’t really know, as the night had turned dark as a coal mine by the time the boulders stopped hurtling and the shooting had stopped. I am absolutely certain that this reporter is not the first from the civilized world to say, ‘Thank God for the Maxim gun.’
Additional credit goes to IB, WC, and sister Nellie, who had refused to return Envoy Stone’s pistol. As we prepared to get under way in our remaining two autos, IB read over my shoulder and demanded edits. He asked me to write the following, which embarrasses me in its immodesty. He demanded I write that EMH was a dependable belt feeder who allowed him to employ our Maxim gun to great advantage.
IB then demanded I change the word ‘dependable’ to ‘superlative.’ Everyone’s an editor. But to be fair, poor Isaac is reeling on his feet.
My sister Nellie has fallen in love with him.
Edna Matters stared at the page.
Who had written that? If a typewriter could blurt, the machine had blurted it out.
She glanced over her shoulder. Isaac had started up the slope. Suddenly he stopped. Something up the road had caught his attention. She raised her fingers to the keys and typed slowly.
Nellie is not the easiest person to read. In fact, she is often a cipher, a blank slate behind her smile. But in this case, I can see that she has fallen hard for IB.
Which creates quite a quandary as I have, too. Starting the night in New York he helped me through my other quandary. Which I believe means I fell first… However, being first on line won’t help me one bit. My dear Isaac is falling for her. He doesn’t know it yet. But I can tell. I wouldn’t call it love. But he is fascinated and, being a man, probably doesn’t know the difference—
She stopped typing and cocked her ear to listen. Someone was shouting down the slope in broken English.
“They’re waving a white flag,” Isaac Bell called down to Wish Clarke.
It looked like a dirty shirt tied by its sleeve to a rifle. The man waving stepped warily into view and Isaac Bell immediately recognized the black, wavy pompadour hair. It was Josef the Georgian chauffeur he had befriended in Baku. The one that the other chauffeurs claimed was an informer for the secret police.
“What’s he yelling?” asked Wish.
Isaac Bell strained his keen hearing to its utmost and heard, “You give gun. We let go.”
He ran down the slope and joined Wish in the lead auto. “They want our Maxim.”
“I would, too, in their position,” said Wish.
“They’re welcome to it,” said Bell.
“What?”
“We’ll trade it for a cease-fire and directions to Tiflis.”
“They’ll kill us,” said Rockefeller.
“That thought occurred to me,” said Bell. He looked at Wish.
Wish said, “Isaac, why don’t you talk to him? I’ll get the gun ready to travel.”
Bell cupped his hands and shouted very slowly and clearly, “Tell your friends to come out where we can see them. All of them.”
Josef shouted over his shoulder.
Twelve men started down the slope. They were dressed in workmen’s clothes and they looked very sure of themselves. Bell counted only three rifles. The rest carried pistols. They descended to the road and started toward the autos, fanning out and covering one another with military discipline.
“That’s close enough,” Bell called, stopping them at fifty feet.
“You act suspicious,” said Josef.
“I don’t like people who roll boulders at me.”
“Not us. Cossacks. We chase them.”
“So did we,” said Bell. From what he had seen, heavily armed Cossacks were not easily chased. If what the chauffeurs in the Hotel de L’Europe’s stables told him was true, then an Okhrana informer could arrange for the Cossacks to be called off or driven off by loyal troops if they were renegades. How had Josef found them here in the middle of nowhere? How had he known about the machine gun?
“Who are you, Josef? Who are these men?”
“Social Democrats.”
“Aren’t they illegal?”
Josef flashed his cheerful smile. “Reason we are wanting gun.”
“Are you their leader?”
“No, no, no. They ask me translating.”
“But you just said ‘we.’”
“Mistaking translating.”
“Translate this: Guide us to a road to Tiflis. When we see the town, the gun is yours.”
“Tiflis no safe. Much unrest.”
“Pogromy?”
“Politicals. General Prince Amilakhvari dead. Hateful Russian. Oppressing all Caucasia. Russians bringing for priests to pray on. People protest. Social Democrats protest. Police shooting Social Democrats.”
“You want our gun to fight the police.”
Josef’s smile disappeared. “Not your business.”
“If he’s a translator,” muttered John D. Rockefeller, “I’m my old maid aunt Olymphia.”
The Social Democrat fighters led the way on foot. Wish Clarke covered them with the Maxim gun. Bell drove his Peerless. Rockefeller, Edna, and Nellie trailed in the second car. The wind continued high, buffeting them and blowing dust, and the sun grew hot.
They climbed a steep road up a mountain. When they finally reached a broad plateau — an open brown steppe bare of vegetation and baked brown by the sun — their guides met up with a pair of horse-drawn phaetons. The men squeezed into the wagons and started across the flatter ground on a dusty track. After about four miles there were signs of recent roadwork, surveyors’ stakes, and the cutting of streets as if the area was to be developed.
Quite suddenly the plateau ended at the rim of a cliff.
Tiflis lay below them, one thousand feet straight down.
Bell saw it was an ancient city growing large in modern times. An old town of church steeples, cathedral domes, and twisted streets hugged the curves of a river. A ruined fortress of jagged rock, abandoned walls, and ramshackle outbuildings crouched on a lower cliff. In the river floated what looked like mills, each with its waterwheel.
A new city spread out from the center on a square grid of streets. Smoke drew Bell’s eye a mile or so from a big open square at the center of the old city. It was the railroad station where two weeks ago they had holed up for the night on their way to Baku.
Beyond the station sprawled vast railyards with many rows of sidings. On every siding stood a train of black tank cars. Bell raked it with his field glasses. He saw no wreckage, none of the destruction they had encountered on the eastern stretches of the line. Switch engines and locomotives were expending the smoke that hung over the yard.
“Trains are running.”
“How are we getting down that cliff?”
“Good question.”
Just as suddenly as they had come upon the cliff, they saw the answer. Nellie was delighted by a perspective she would see normally only from a balloon. Her pretty face aglow, she erupted in a happy cry.
“Funicular!”
Two counterbalanced carriages, large enough to hold fifty people each and linked by a strong cable, rolled up and down a steep railroad between the top of the mountain that Bell and his people had just crossed and the city below. There was a bulge in the line halfway down the mountain, a way station where the tracks doubled to allow the two carriages to pass each other.