A Stab At Writing One Of Those Retro-Futuristic SteamPunky Adventures, Part 1

                   You Always Want To Start With A Clean Sheet Of Bond Paper

Memory does not always serve me correctly. However, I am fairly certain that Thompson had been a level-headed, intelligent man with little or no patience for the gullible. I had known his father rather well and I can state with certainty that those were family traits, along with that unmistakable and unfortunate weak chin that appeared to recede into his neck before it was fully formed.


So it was with a considerable degree of amazement that I read the paper he had pushed across my desk. The tale was too fantastic, too ludicrous to be based in fact. I looked up into his cold grey eyes expecting them to be as fogged and glassy as those of the opium addicts that slept on the wharfs. I saw only the resolute steely gaze that had challenged charlatans, swindlers, schemers and quacks of every stripe since he had disembarked from the HMS Tenerife nearly five years ago.


His father and I had served in the Russian War together, shoulder to shoulder for three full years and more, first on the Crimean Peninsula then later in the Baltic. My fortunes being considerably less than those of the family Taggert, I had made my way to the Americas after the Congress of Paris had ratified the treaty and I had managed to establish a successful business of supplying foodstuffs for those hardy souls following the Emigrant Trails west. When I had received the electrical telegraph announcing the imminent arrival of young Thompson my spirits soared; It had been nearly a decade since I had seen the lad and now that the war of secession had drawn to a bitter close my adopted home would need young men of his ability and character.


The words on that sheaf of paper nearly assaulted my sensibilities. I stood up slowly, my jaw slack as if the muscles had suddenly atrophied. My hand trembled slightly as I digested the import of what my eyes beheld. If there was but a modicum of truth to the outlandish story then the world was about to discover that there are horrors and cruelties beyond those perpetrated by men on battlefields, and clearly beyond the imagination of even the most Laudanum dependent Transcendentalist.