"Please proceed, Mr. Rymer," she said to Rymer. "Do not attempt to leave the road. When you reach The New City, someone will meet you with further instructions."
"We are most grateful, madam," said Rymer.
With sweat covering his body, Bendigo congratulated himself on the unflappable coolness of his performance—authority figures outside the theater paralyzed him, particularly when heavily armed—but the woman hadn't noticed even the slightest uneasiness. What an actor he was! He urged his mules through the gate. The other wagons quickly followed.
"Have a glorious day!" said the woman at the gate, smiling and waving at each passing wagon.
"Thank you," said Jacob, returning her wave. "You, too!"
Eileen peeked out of the back as the log gate closed behind them; the guards on the pillars watched them roll away, rifles still in hand, while the others disappeared back to their hiding places.
"What do you make of that?" asked Eileen.
"I detect the fine hand of religious fanaticism," said Jacob from the front seat.
As he joined her to look through the flap, Eileen noticed a profound change in Kanazuchi; he looked revitalized by their encounter at the gate—focused, senses keenly attuned, his movements regaining their catlike precision and alertness. Although she felt no threat to herself, for the first time she felt a reason to fear him: He seemed more animal than man.
"Strange, weren't they?" she asked.
"Serious people," said Kanazuchi.
"Seriously happy."
"No," he said, shaking his head slightly. "Not happy."
From the checkpoint forward, the road improved dramatically; hard packed dirt graded and leveled on top of the sand, nearly eliminating the rocking of the wagons. Across the dry flatlands to the rear, a distant rhythmic pounding faintly reached their ears. Eileen shielded her eyes and peered out in that direction but could see nothing on the heat-distorted horizon.
"What is that?"
"They are putting up fences," said Kanazuchi. "Barbed wire."
"Who is?"
"The people in white."
"You can see that from here?"
He didn't respond; Kanazuchi discarded Jacob's round hat, removed the long black coat, and began to strip off the motley patchwork beard.
They were getting close.
Time to reassume his own identity.
By nine o'clock that morning, the Chicago Western Union office had received a flurry of responses to their late-night barrage of telegrams. Attaching the name Arthur Conan Doyle to the inquiries greatly increased the alacrity and density of detail in the returns, particularly from newspaper editors, most of whom confessed they couldn't help with the requested information but were unable to resist firing off a question or two about the uncertain fictional fate of you-know-who.
As they had suspected, the most promising results came back in a lengthy reply from the Arizona Republican in Phoenix, the Arizona Territory's first newspaper.
The editor wrote that local attention was growing in the direction of a recently found religious settlement a hundred miles to the northwest. Called itself The New City, built on private property; its founders had bought over fifty square miles of surrounding undeveloped land. Clearly they had a lot of money to throw around; speculation about The New City's wealth centered on the possible striking of some fabulous silver lode.
Every one of the paper's repeated attempts to research a story on the place had been politely but firmly rebuffed; folks wanted to hang on to their privacy out there for some reason. That attitude didn't raise a sea of red flags in this sparsely populated corner of the world; a lot of people came west in search of that same commodity.
One of the reporters the Republican sent out that way had found the The New City so much to his liking he decided to stay on. They hadn't heard a single word from the man after a telegram announced his resignation—in which he described the place only as a "kind of Utopia"—but that didn't surprise folks at the paper much: He was a bachelor fellow from Indiana, an odd duck who'd never quite fit in.
Neither were Utopian social experiments that great a rarity in the development of the American character, noted Doyle. Over a hundred had sprung up all over the country since the Civil War, the most noteworthy being the Oneida Community of Perfectionists in upstate New York; known for the fine silverware they produced but even more for their bold rejection of marital monogamy. At the opposite end of the sexual spectrum were Mother Ann Lee's Shakers of the Millennial Church, strict celibate abstainers who had set up shop in more than thirty different locations from Massachusetts to Ohio. How they planned to perpetuate themselves without benefit of biological reproduction didn't seem to worry them since Mother Lee had prophesied the end of civilization within their lifetimes; chastity ensured them that theirs would be the only souls allowed through the Gates of Heaven. Why the Shakers then devoted themselves to building such sturdy, built-to-last crafts and furniture when there wouldn't be anyone left to appreciate them was a question they never got around to asking.
Arizona's attitude toward The New City could best be described as "live and let live," wrote the editor. A number of Mormon settlements had established themselves in that same northwest quarter of the territory over the last few years, and they kept to themselves as their creed dictated without raising any eyebrows; why, the entire state of Utah had sprung up around the Mormons and the fortunes they'd made in their ranching and mining enterprises. Far be it from the politicians of Arizona to turn their back on such rich potential revenue out of small-minded religious prejudice.
So: Economically self-sustaining and socially self-governing, what business was it of anybody's if these people of The New City wanted to live according to their own beliefs, whatever they might be? (No one seemed to know a thing about that.) And if any financial benefits trickled down to the surrounding area in which they chose to establish their community, as they so obviously had to the non-Mormons of Utah, so much the better. Absolutely consistent with the American guarantee of religious freedom, that was the Republican's editorial position on the subject.
Hustling to a local bookstore and returning with a detailed map of the Arizona Territory, Innes charted The New City's location as described by the editor directly in the heart of the eastern Mojave Desert.
So far so good. The issue of what they should do in response was definitively settled by one last nugget from the Republican. Rumor had it the citizens of The New City were building a tabernacle to rival the one the Mormons had recently completed in Salt Lake City. No one at the paper had actually laid eyes on the place, but it was going up fast and was supposedly being fashioned from black stones drawn from quarries in northern Mexico.
The black church.
After leaving the telegraph office, Doyle returned to the Palmer House and delivered a promissory note of $2,500 to Major Rolando Pepperman, guaranteeing Doyle's participation in the remainder of his tour after a two-week delay. Needed, he told the Major, for the resolution of unspecified personal difficulties. Confined to his bed, hung over and glum, Pepperman accepted Doyle's offer without question, fully expecting never to see the man again, and with a resigned feeling of relief. The Major had already made up his mind; if they would have him, he was going back to the circus.
Because no connection to The New City had been established, the editor of the Republican did not mention in his telegram the story dominating their local headlines, that of the decapitating fugitive Chinaman, Chop-Chop—he'd coined the nickname personally; one of his finer editorial hours.