Tom Derringer and the Aluminum Airship by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Author:Lawrence Watt-Evans
Format: epub

Chapter Seven

The Reverend Hezekiah McKee, and

Professor Aloysius Vanderhart

Iwas at the door of the Pierce Archive at a quarter to eight the next day, waiting eagerly until Dr. Pierce opened for business, shortly before the hour. I had two topics to research – airships and Hezekiah McKee. Allow me to tell you what I learned separately, and beginning with the latter.

The Reverend Hezekiah McKee had been born and raised in South Carolina, the son of a dealer in slaves. Upon his home state’s secession in 1861 he had enlisted in the Confederate Army, and he had fought bravely for the South, distinguishing himself in several battles, and rising to the rank of captain shortly before General Lee’s surrender.

He had accepted the South’s defeat and had gone into the Baptist ministry, but had then been involved briefly with the Ku Klux Klan – the exact nature of his involvement was unclear, the accounts in the archive vague and contradictory, but by 1872 the result had been the loss of his congregation, and his exile from South Carolina. He had gone West, but as neither settler nor preacher; instead he had been a hired gun and sometime adventurer.

That last, of course, was why some of his biographical details were included in the archives. He had been reasonably successful in his new career, and by 1879 he was the leader of a small band of mercenaries, men from a variety of backgrounds – one was even said to be a Scottish laird.

Then in 1880 the Lost City had appeared outside Flagstaff, and the Reverend McKee had joined in the rush to loot it. He had survived the city’s disappearance, according to several witnesses, but had then vanished, along with his men. They were not dead; every so often one of them would turn up in Flagstaff to re-provision. Except for these supply runs, though, they were never seen again. No one had gone looking for McKee, so far as the records in the archives could tell me – and why should anyone do so? McKee was not a particularly pleasant fellow and was not wanted for any serious crimes. To the best of my knowledge, no one had any compelling reason to seek him out.

As for airships, I knew, of course, about Thaddeus Lowe and the other aeronauts who had ventured upward during the Civil War, providing reconnaissance and signaling capability, but those were tethered balloons, not dirigibles.

The first truly practical dirigibles were built by the French, beginning with Monsieur Henri Giffard’s 1852 steam-driven ascent from the Hippodrome, and the only serious challengers to French dominance in the field were the Germans. Both nations had experimented with various forms of motive power, but to date only steam engines seemed practical. There were rumors that Gaston and Albert Tissandier were developing an electrically driven dirigible, but it had yet to fly.

Americans, it seemed, had been surprisingly slow to take to the air; one Solomon Andrews of Perth Amboy, New Jersey had reportedly demonstrated a series

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