The Striker

1

He was a fresh-faced youth with golden hair. But something about him looked suspicious. A coal cop watching the miners troop down the rails into the mouth of Gleason Mine No. 1 pointed him out to his boss, a Pinkerton detective.

The young miner towered over the foreigners the company imported from Italy and Slovenia, and was even taller than the homegrown West Virginia boys. But it was not his height that looked out of place. Nor was his whipcord frame unusual. The work was hard, and it cost plenty to ship food to remote coalfields. There was no free lunch in the saloons that lined the muddy Main Street.

A miner clomping along on a wooden peg tripped on a crosstie and stumbled into another miner on crutches. The golden-haired youth glided to steady both, moving so effortlessly he seemed to float. Many were maimed digging coal. He stood straight on both legs and still possessed all his fingers.

“Don’t look like no poor worker to me,” the coal cop ventured with a contemptuous smirk.

“Watching like a cat, anything that moves,” said the Pinkerton, who wore a bowler hat, a six-gun in his coat, and a blackjack strapped to his wrist.

“You reckon he’s a striker?”

“He’ll wish he ain’t.”

“Gangway!”

An electric winch jerked the slack out of a wire between the rails. Miners, laborers, and doorboys jumped aside. The wire dragged a train of coal cars out of the mine and up a steep slope to the tipple, where the coal was sorted and dumped into river barges that towboats pushed down the Monongahela to Pittsburgh.

The tall young miner exchanged greetings with the derailer-switch operator. If the wire, which was shackled to a chain bridle on the front car, broke, Jim Higgins was supposed to throw the switch to make the train jump the tracks before the hundred-ton runaway plummeted back down into the works.

“The cops are watching you,” Higgins warned.

“I’m no striker.”

“All we’re asking,” Higgins answered mildly, “is to live like human beings, feed our families, and send our kids to school.”

“They’ll fire you.”

“They can’t fire us all. The coal business is booming and labor is scarce.”

Higgins was a brave man. He had to be to ignore the fact that the mineowners would stop at nothing to keep the union out of West Virginia. Men fired for talking up the union — much less calling a strike — saw their wives and children kicked out of the shanties they rented from the Gleason Consolidated Coal & Coke Company. And when Gleason smoked out labor organizers, the Pinkertons rousted them back to Pennsylvania, beaten bloody.

“Higgins!” shouted a foreman. “I told you to oil that winch.”

“I’m supposed to watch the derailer when the cars are coming up.”

“Do like I tell you. Oil that winch every hour.”

“Who’s going to stop a runaway if the wire breaks?”

“Get up there and oil that winch, damn you!”

Jim Higgins abandoned his post and ran two hundred yards up the steep incline to the winch engine, past the cars of coal climbing heavily to the tipple.

The tall young miner ducked his head to enter the mouth of the mine — a timber-braced portal in the side of the mountain — and descended down a sloping tunnel. He had boned up on mine engineering to prepare for the job. Strictly speaking, this tracked haulageway was not a tunnel, which by definition had to pass completely through a mountain, but an adit. Aditus, he recalled from his boarding school Latin, meant “access.” Once in, there was no way out but to turn around and go back.

Where he entered a gallery that intersected and split off from the haulageway, he hailed the small boy, who opened a wooden door to channel the air from the ventilators.

“Hey, Sammy. Feller from the telegraph office told me your Pirates beat Brooklyn yesterday. Eight-to-five.”

“Wow! Thanks for telling me, mister.”

Sammy had never been near a major-league ballpark — never been farther than ten miles from this hollow where the Gleason Company struck a rich bed of the Pittsburgh Seam that underlay Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. But his father had been a brakeman on the B & O, until he died in a wreck, and used to bring home stories of big-city games that he would illustrate with cigarette baseball cards of famous players.

The young man slipped Sammy a colorful chromolithograph of Rochester first baseman Harry O’Hagan. In August, O’Hagan had accomplished a miracle, still on the lips of every man and boy in America — a one-man triple play.

“Bet New York’s kicking themselves for trading Harry,” he said, then asked in a lower voice, “Have you seen Roscoe?”

Roscoe was a Gleason spy disguised as a laborer.

The boy nodded in the same direction the young man was headed.

He followed the gallery, which sloped deeper into the mountain for hundreds of yards, until it stopped at the face of the seam. There he went to work as a helper, shoveling the chunks of coal picked, drilled, and dynamited from the seam by the skilled miners. He was paid forty cents for every five-ton car he loaded during twelve-hour shifts six days a week.

The air was thick with coal dust. Swirling black clouds of it dimmed the light cast by electric bulbs. The low ceiling was timbered by props and crosspieces every few feet to support the mountain of rock and soil that pressed down on the coal. The seam creaked ominously, squeezed above and below by pressure from roof and floor.

Here in the side tunnel, off the main rail track, the coal cars were pulled by mules that wore leather bonnets to protect their heads. One of the mules, a mare with the small feet and long ears that the miners believed indicated a stronger animal, suddenly stopped. Eustace McCoy, a big West Virginian who had been groaning about his red-eye hangover, cursed her and jerked her bridle. But she planted her legs and refused to budge, ears flickering at the creaking sound.

Eustace whipped off his belt and swung it to beat her with the buckle end.

The tall blond youth caught it before it traveled six inches.

“Sonny, get out of my way!” Eustace warned him.

“I’ll get her moving. It’s just something spooked her.”

Eustace, who was nearly as tall and considerably broader, balled his fist and threw a haymaker at the young man’s face.

The blow was blocked before it could connect. Eustace cursed and swung again. Two punches sprang back at him. They landed in elegant combination, too quick to follow with the eye and packed with concentrated power. Eustace fell down on the rails, the fight and anger knocked out of him.

The miners exchanged astonished glances.

“Did you see that?”

“Nope.”

“Neither did Eustace McCoy.”

The young man spoke gently to the mule and she pulled the car away. Then he helped the fallen laborer to his feet and offered his hand when Eustace acknowledged with a lopsided grin, “Ain’t been hit that hard since I borrowed my old man’s bottle. Whar’d you larn to throw that one-two?”

“Oregon,” the young man lied.

His name was Isaac Bell.

Bell was a Van Dorn Agency private detective under orders to ferret out union saboteurs. This was his first solo case, and he was supposed to be operating in deep disguise. To ensure secrecy, the mineowner hadn’t even told the company cops about his investigation. But the awe on the miners’ faces told Bell he had just made a bad mistake.

The year was 1902. Van Dorn detectives were earning a reputation as valuable men who knew their business, and the agency motto — We never give up! Never! — had begun to be muttered, remorsefully, inside the nation’s penitentiaries. Which meant that young Isaac Bell had to admit that he was very likely the only Van Dorn in the entire outfit so puddingheaded that he would ruin his disguise by showing off fancy boxing tricks.

Roscoe, the Gleason spy, was eyeing him thoughtfully. That might not matter too much. Bell reckoned he could fix that somehow. But any saboteur who caught wind of him championing a poor, dumb mule with a Yale man’s mastery of the manly art of self-defense would not stay fooled for long.

“Gangway!”

The exhausted men climbing out of the mine at the end of their shift shuffled off the tracks. The winch jerked the slack out of the wire, and twenty coal cars emerged behind them and trundled up the steep incline to the tipple. The train was almost to the top when the chain bridle that attached the wire to the front car broke with a bang as loud and sharp as a gunshot.

The train stopped abruptly.

One hundred tons of coal hung motionless for a heartbeat.

Then it started rolling backwards toward the mouth of the mine.

Jim Higgins, who was hurrying from the winch engine to his post at the derailer switch, dropped his oilcan and ran as fast as he could. But the train was gathering speed. It rolled ahead of him, and before he could reach the switch, twenty cars hurtled through it straight down the main line.

Isaac Bell charged after it. He spotted a brake lever on the last car and forged alongside, looking for handholds to jump to. The coal train accelerated and pulled ahead of him. As the last car whipped past, he leaped onto its rear coupler and caught his balance by clapping both hands around the brake lever. He threw his weight against the steel bar, slamming curved brake shoes against the spinning wheels.

Metal screeched. The lever bucked in his hands. Sparks fountained skyward. Bell pushed the brake with every sinew in his body. Swift and purposeful action and determined muscle and bone appeared to slow the runaway. Several more quick-thinking men ran alongside in hopes of leaping on the brakes of the other cars.

But the weight of the coal was too great, the momentum too strong.

Suddenly, with a bang almost as explosive as the parting bridle chain, the iron pin connecting the lever to the brake shoes snapped. The lever swung freely. Bell, shoving it with all his might, lost his balance. The rails and crossties blurred under him as the train accelerated. Only lightning reflexes and a powerful grip on the top rim of the coal car saved him from falling.

The car swayed violently as it gained speed. Being the last car, unanchored by any behind it, the same lateral forces that cracked a whip slammed it sideways against the ventilator house that stood close by the tracks. The impact sheared its pillars, and the building collapsed on the giant fan that drove fresh air into the mine. A shattered roof beam jammed its blades.

“Jump!” miners yelled.

Before Bell could choose a direction in which there was room to land, the train stormed through the mouth and into the narrow confines of the haulageway, where to jump would be to smash flesh and blood against timber, stone, steel, and coal. Bell swung his feet onto the coupler and attempted to brace for what was going to be a very sudden stop when they hit bottom.

The coal train swayed in wider and wider arcs with the ever-increasing speed of its descent. The rear car to which Bell clung slammed against shoring timbers, splintering them, and crumbled pillars of coal the miners had left standing to support the ceiling. The front end, nineteen cars ahead of Bell, bore down on a wooden air door that Sammy the doorboy had shut behind it moments earlier as it ascended.

Sammy was addled by twelve hours of work in near darkness and terrified by the roar of the juggernaut hurtling toward him. But he stood at his post, desperately trying to open the door to let it pass. Like a tycoon brushing a beggar out of his way with a haughty hand, the train flung him against the wall, smashed the air door to flinders, and gained speed.

2

The swaying coal car isaac bell clung to scraped the sides of the tunnel. The screeching, banging impact severed the wires that powered the electric lights, and the train plummeted downward in total darkness.

Bell pressed himself tight against the cold steel to minimize the distance his body would travel at the moment of impact. It could not be much farther to the coal seam at the bottom. Suddenly, the train jumped the tracks. Metal shrieked as it battered the side of the tunnel and threatened to buck him off like a maddened bronco. Instead, it saved the young detective’s life. Sideswiping the walls had the effect of slowing the train. When it finally struck the seam with a thunderclap, he was banged hard against the back of the car, but not so hard as to break bones.

The silence that followed was as deep as the darkness.

Bell leaped down and ran in the dark, back up the route the runaway had taken him, sliding his boots along the crossties to stay in the middle of the track, where he was least likely to smash into anything. He ran as fast as he could with his hands stretched ahead of his face in hopes of feeling an obstruction in time to stop.

He had seconds to get out before he died in the black and airless chaos of the wrecked gallery. For dangers far deadlier than collision lurked in the dark. Damps—poisonous carbonic acid and explosive methane — were collecting quickly as the demolished ventilator ceased to draw fresh air from the surface and expel lethal vapors. Suffocating blackdamp, thick with carbonic acid, would kill him in ten seconds. Fulminating damp, “inflammable air,” marsh gas exuded by the coal, would blow everyone in the mine to Kingdom Come. Thank God, he thought, most of the day shift was out of the mine and the night shift hadn’t entered yet. Only the doorboys were still at their posts.

All of a sudden, the dark lifted. Daylight so soon? But it wasn’t possible. He could not be that close to the mouth. Then he realized that the light was coming from behind him — orange flickering light — the sparkle of fire as gas and coal at the face of the seam ignited. The sudden light saved him from stumbling over a doorboy crawling along the tracks.

Bell yanked him to his feet.

“Stand up! Chokedamp suffocates you down low. Run!”

He shoved the boy ahead of him, and together they ran from the flames and smoke chasing them up the slope. The smoke would spread white damp, odorless carbon monoxide, which would kill them in minutes if they didn’t burn to death first.

They stopped abruptly. The haulageway was blocked. The train had sheared off the pillars of coal that the miners had left standing to brace the ceiling. Unsupported, the ceiling had fallen into the haulageway. A two-foot opening was held up by a single groaning timber.

“I can fit through, mister. I’ll get help.”

“Hold on,” said Bell. It looked like it would collapse any moment. He crawled into the narrow space, braced the groaning timber with his back, and tried to hold the mountain. “O.K., sonny,” he gasped. “Slip by.”

The boy scrambled through.

Bell gently released the pressure and slithered on his belly. Just as he pulled his feet out, the timber snapped. The ceiling collapsed with a roar as tons of coal and slate filled the space.

“Let’s go.”

But the boy was frozen in place, staring at what had almost killed them.

“Close shave,” Bell said lightly to put him at ease, and when that didn’t work he asked, “Did you see if little Sammy got out?”

“Dead,” said the boy. “The train got him.”

“Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

They ran, climbing the slope, until they were stopped by another fall. This one emitted no light from the other side even though they had to be near the mouth. But, through it, they could hear a faint tapping. Picks digging through the fall. They grabbed rocks and pounded on the fall, alerting those on the other side that they were alive.

The picking sounds doubled, and doubled again. Soon Isaac Bell saw light and heard a cheer. Ten men battered through the fall. The first face Bell saw belonged to Jim Higgins, who had led the rescue.

Cheering men pulled them through the opening and reached for more. The cheers died on their lips.

“That’s all?” asked Higgins.

“Little Sammy was killed,” said Bell. “I didn’t see any others. Give me a pick. I’ll show you the way.”

Before they could start down, an explosion rocked the mine from deep within, and the rescuers knew in their hearts that although they would dig all night for more survivors, and dig all the next day, they would never find a living soul.

They started down. Again they were stopped, not by an explosion but by a gang of club-wielding company police led by a Pinkerton, who shouted, “Jim Higgins!”

“Right here, we’re just heading down.”

“Jim Higgins, you’re under arrest.”

“For what?”

“For murdering all them poor little doorboys who died in the mine.”

“I didn’t—”

“You abandoned your post. You caused the accident by failing to throw the derailer switch that would have stopped the runaway.”

“The foreman ordered me to oil—”

“Tell it to the judge,” said the Pinkerton.

Jim Higgins squared his shoulders. “You boys set me up,” he said. “You found out I am a union organizer. You know that beating me up never worked before, so you waited for a chance to take me out of the fight. You put me on the derailer to keep me away from the workers. And now one of your bought-and-paid judges will sentence me to the penitentiary for a crime you all know damned well I never did.”

“No,” a cop snickered. “No judge is locking you in no penitentiary. You’re headed for the hangman.”

They seized his arms and started to drag him away.

Jim Higgins locked gazes with Isaac Bell.

Bell heard him say, “There’s more where I came from.”

3

“That chain bridle was brand-new,” said the winch engineer, A huge man squinting through wire-rimmed spectacles. “I installed it myself. It could not possibly have parted.”

“Like folks say, it only takes one weak link,” said Isaac Bell.

From the winch at the top of the tipple, he could see down the steep tracks to the mouth of the mine where frantic mechanicians were jury-rigging temporary ventilator fans. A hundred rescuers were waiting for them to purge Gleason Mine No. 1 of carbonic acid, inflammable air, and deadly white damp. Only then could they enter the deep galleries where the boys were trapped.

The engineer stiffened. “I don’t install weak links, sonny. I inspect every link with my own eye.”

“I wonder,” said Isaac Bell, “whether it was the wire that broke.”

“You’re doing a lot of wondering, mister.”

Bell responded with a friendly smile that tinged his blue eyes a soft shade of violet. “Since I rode that train to the bottom of the mine, I’m mighty curious what set her loose.”

“Oh, you’re the feller that tried to stop her? Let me shake your hand, son. That was a brave thing you tried to do.”

“I wish I could have stopped her,” said Bell. “But, I was wondering—”

“Nope, the wire’s fine and dandy. Here, I’ll show you.”

The engineer led Bell to the giant drum around which the inch-thick steel rope was coiled in tight and orderly rows and showed him the loop that formed the end. “See, this here thimble inside the loop protects the wire from pinching. You see how it’s held its shape? And the clamps here have their saddles on the live side of the wire like they’re supposed to, and they held tight.”

“I suppose that means a link in the chain busted even though it’s not supposed to.”

The engineer shook his head. “If they ever snake that chain out of that mess down there, I’ll bet you even money it’ll be strong as the day it was born. Molybdenum alloy steel. You know what that is, son?”

Bell did but a laborer probably would not, so he shook his head. “Heard it spoke. Can’t rightly say I know what it means.”

“Alloy cooked up by French metallurgists. Much stronger than plain steel. Ideal for lifting chain. Molybdenum steel don’t fracture.”

“Then what do you reckon broke?” asked Bell.

“Hard to believe it was the shackle.”

“What shackle?”

“The swivel shackle that connects the wire to the bridle. It’s so we can hook her up easy, and it swivels to distribute the load. No, that shackle’s the culprit. Even money.”

“Do shackles break often?”

“Never! Almost never.”

“Wonder was it too small for the job?”

“No, sir! Installed it myself. Made darn sure its working load exceeded the chain’s and the wire’s. Can’t imagine how it failed.”

Bell wondered if there was some miraculous way to ask politely enough to keep the engineer talking, whether he thought that the runaway was only a dream. Then a broad-bellied coal cop swaggered out of the tipple, eyeing Bell suspiciously. “What are you two jawing about?”

The engineer was not cowed. He was a valuable mechanician who knew his place. But Isaac Bell, a lowly laborer, was supposed to kowtow, unless he was man enough to look the cop in the face, at the risk of his job, and tell him to go to hell.

Bell turned his back on him and walked down the steep slope.

“Where the hell you going? I’m talking to you.”

“They fixed the ventilators,” Bell called over his shoulder. “I’m going down with the rescue boys. You coming?”

The cop, who had no desire to enter a coal mine filled with poisonous and explosive gases, did not reply, and Bell joined the rescuers, who were dragging new lines from the power plant and wielding picks and electric drills to clear the haulageway and galleries to search for the missing doorboys.

When the last small body had been carried out and the exhausted searchers shambled up to the surface, Bell extinguished his headlamp and hid in a gallery. He watched their lights fade up the haulageway. Then he relighted his own lamp and headed deep into the empty mine on the trail of an enigma.

At no point in his investigation had he seen or heard a hint of union sabotage and now he thought he knew the reason why. Having worked weeks underground, and having just survived the mining disaster set off by the runaway, he had to question the very existence of the union saboteurs that the company had hired Van Dorn to arrest.

He did not doubt the existence of sabotage in labor disputes. Violent incidents abounded in a war between workers and owners that stretched back as far as anyone could remember. Miners had shot it out with the Coal and Iron Police before the oldest man in the mine had worked as a doorboy. Many a railroad workers’ strike had escalated from fistfights, clubbings, and shoot-outs to derailed locomotives and dynamited bridges. Many a steel mill strike had seen furnaces blown up or had their fires drawn, destroying the works when the molten metal turned solid inside the pots and ladles. Towboats and barges were set adrift, factories put to fire, telegraph wires cut, and owners’ mansions burned to the ground. Mounted police had charged like cavalry on the battlefield. Gatling guns had raked strikers’ tent cities.

But deep under the ground in a coal mine, sabotage was tantamount to suicide. Deep underground, the unionists themselves would be crushed when roofs fell. Suffocated when damps displaced air. Burned alive when gases exploded.

But before he could report that there were no union saboteurs to the Boss — Mr. Joseph Van Dorn, founder of the detective agency that bore his name — a young detective on his first case had better make absolutely sure that the runaway had been an accident. That demanded evidence.

Trust what you see, not what you’re supposed to see—the first lesson of his long apprenticeship drilled into him by veteran Van Dorns like Wish Clarke, and Mack Fulton and Walter Kisley. And repeated often, very often, by Joseph Van Dorn himself.

Bell walked down the slope to the bottom of the haulageway and passed his light over the twisted wreckage of the coal train that had smashed into the yet-to-be-dug seam at the end of the line. The car at the rear, the bucking, swaying last one he had ridden down in, had been the front car on the way up, the one to which the winch wire’s chain bridle had been attached. He found the links at either end of the chain bridle fixed to massive rings fastened to the left and right side of the frame. But the bridle, a length of chain twice as long as the width of the car, had parted right in the middle. He found no shackle. And only half of the link that would have been the middle one remained, jammed into its neighbor. When he tried to pull it out, it sliced his finger.

Sucking the blood, he inspected the sharp edge that had cut him. The fracture was in the barrel, one of the long straight sides of the link. He expected a ragged edge. What he saw was a surprise, and a mystery. Where the steel link had fractured was smooth and flat and sharp as a razor.

It looked like a piece had been cut out with a chisel. Using other links to tap it loose, he worked the broken link out of the one it had jammed in and put it in his pocket. Then he searched for the missing shackle. It must have fallen in the crosstie-lined trough between the steel rails of the coal train tracks.

He looked until his light began to run out of oil, but he never found the shackle. Another mystery. Obviously, the shackle had slipped out of the broken link. But how had the shackle separated from the thimble that formed the wire loop he had seen at the winch?

As he continued up the rails, out of the mine, he recalled the cops who’d been watching him. Rather than get caught with the broken link if they made him turn out his pockets, he slipped it into a crack between a prop and the coal seam and noted the spot carefully in his memory — four support props above the lowest side gallery.

He started up. Or was it three? He went back, counted again, touching each. Four. The hairs prickled on the back of his neck. He had a photographic memory. How could he forget a picture so simple as these four ceiling props standing in a row? He noticed a strange silence. Something had changed in the narrow passages. The ventilators had stopped blowing fresh air.

The damps were gathering again. No wonder he felt light-headed. Bell turned and stumbled upward, toward the distant mouth. If it was blackdamp, he hadn’t a prayer. The carbonic acid would stop him within seconds. White damp from the extinguished fire? Minutes. Less than ten.

He broke into a shambling run. His head was pounding and his heart hammered in his chest. He imagined the poison gases chasing after him, breaking like a tidal wave, cresting, splashing, clutching his boots, his knees, tugging at his legs, suction pulling him under. He ran harder, his fading light bouncing low shadows from the crossties. Two ties for each step. He made himself stretch for three longer strides, flowing over the floor of the mine faster than the wave crashing after him.

He was pulling ahead when he saw something gleam in his light. It was tucked against the right rail, half obscured by a wooden tie. He slowed, stopped, stared down at it, desperately trying to mine thoughts from a heavy head. The shackle? Did he imagine it? Or did he see a piece of it directly under his feet? Should he try to pick it up? He had the feeling that if he knelt to pick it up, he might never stand again. His head was spinning. But it was important. The saboteur… He gathered his strength and dropped to one knee. Before he could reach it, it disappeared in a shadow that moved over it.

Isaac Bell turned his head to see what caused the shadow.

He sensed motion and found himself looking into golden eyes as simultaneously remote and intent as those of a wolf that had fixed on its prey. The jaws between the eyes formed a fist. The white damp had rattled his mind. He had to stand up. He had to run. The fist traveled at his face with the speed and power of a locomotive. Bell’s own fists leaped automatically to block and counterpunch. Then he heard an explosion, deep in his head, and then he saw nothing.

Isaac Bell awakened to a current of cool air fanning his face.

He was flat on his back on the ties between two rails. An electric bulb blazed down from the rough-hewn ceiling of coal. His head ached, his jaw was sore, and as he sat up and looked around he recalled the ventilators stopping and him running from the damp. The fans were running again, the air just fresh enough to revive him. He climbed to his feet and started up the sloping haulageway, his mind shambling through dreamlike memories.

He had found the broken link of the bridle chain. He had hidden it in a crack between the tunnel wall and a roof prop. Fourth prop above the deepest gallery. He had looked for the missing shackle. He hadn’t found it. Or had he? Thoughts cascaded. He had seen it. He hadn’t seen it. He saw amber eyes. He saw a shadow. He saw a ghostly fist. His head ached. So did his jaw. He had fallen hard. And the only thing he knew for sure was that he was very lucky that the fans had started up again before the damps suffocated him.

Ahead, he saw the light of the mouth. He quickened his pace.

“Where the heck did you come from?”

Some miners rigging new electrical wires were staring at him.

Bell jerked a thumb in the general direction of the depths of the mountain and said, “Tell the mechanician boys who fixed them ventilators I’m going to buy ’em a drink.”

Hundreds of men were waiting to enter the mine and go back to work. Bell melted into the crowd, avoiding the company cops, slipped out the gates, and hurried toward the telegraph office. Dodging the goats that roamed Gleasonburg’s Main Street, a shanty-lined dirt road rutted by wagon wheels and reeking of sewage, he pondered the telegram that he would send to Joseph Van Dorn.

Who would sabotage a mine? No union man in his right mind would murder his own people. Certainly not the mild-mannered Jim Higgins who preached moderation. But if not the union saboteurs he had been ordered to hunt — criminals who he was now firmly convinced did not exist — then who? Could they be the owners of the mine? But the owners had everything to lose if they couldn’t dig coal. This disaster could have been much worse. Hundreds could have died. The mine could have been blocked for months instead of days.

But if not the union and not the owners, who?

With that unanswered, Bell turned his thoughts to a stranger mystery. It certainly appeared that a saboteur had chiseled the chain apart. But at the moment when the chain had fractured, the coal train had been climbing to the tipple in plain sight of hundreds of miners. Not one of them, Isaac Bell himself included, had seen a blacksmith riding the lead coal car, attacking the bridle chain with hammer and chisel.

4

Isaac Bell took two baths upon arriving in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the first at the five-cent lodging house where he had left his bags and scrubbed off enough coal dust to gain admittance to the city’s exclusive Duquesne Club — an ornate Romanesque Revival building that dominated the Golden Triangle where the Monongahela joined the Allegheny to form the Ohio River — the second bath at the Duquesne Club before donning an immaculate white suit.

He asked the front-hall porter to escort his lunch guest, Mr. Van Dorn, to the bar when he arrived. Then the young detective shouldered into the favorite watering hole of the industrial barons and railroad tycoons who ruled the capital of America’s coal and steel empire. Having researched the coal industry meticulously, he recognized many in the enormous room. But the man who captured his attention right off was holding court under an acanthus-leaf-carved mantel topped by life-size mahogany satyrs — John “Black Jack” Gleason, ruthless owner of the Gleason Consolidated Coal & Coke Company.

If the day before yesterday’s runaway train, explosion, and deaths of six doorboys in Mine No. 1 troubled Gleason at all, it did not show. Instead, he was taunting his fellow barons, with a grin like the satyrs’: “When I drive the union out of West Virginia, my mines will sell coal cheaper than every man in this room. I’ll take your customers.”

A patrician turned red in the face. “My grandfather was a founding member of this club, sir, and I do not hesitate to tell you that you are a vulture!”

“Proud of it,” Gleason fired back. “If you don’t stick with me against the union, I’ll buy your bones at bankrupts’ auction.”

The founder’s grandson stormed out. But the others, Bell noticed, murmured compromisingly, and looked relieved when one of their number steered the conversation toward the Pirates’ winning streak.

“There you are, Isaac.”

Joseph Van Dorn enveloped Bell’s big hand in a manicured ham-size paw and shook it firmly. He was tall, broad in the chest, broader in the belly, and light on his feet, a balding man in his forties who might have passed for a sea captain who had prospered in the China Trade or a blacksmith who had invented a tool that made him rich. He appeared convivial, with a ready smile that could brighten his hooded eyes. Red burnsides cascading to an even redder beard gave the impression of a man more hail-fellow-well-met than the scourge of the underworld, and many a confined criminal was still wondering how he got confused.

The founder and chief investigator of the Van Dorn Detective Agency was not impressed by much, nor easily nonplussed, but, taking in the lavish club and the wealthy members, he asked in a low voice that carried no farther than Isaac Bell’s ears, “How’d you wangle your way in here?”

“My school friend Kenny Bloom’s father put in a word.”

“Do they know you’re a detective?”

“No, sir. I’m using the Dagget front.”

“Well done. You can learn a lot in a place like this. Now, what’s all this ‘urgent report’ about?”

Bell had spoken with the dining room captain and reserved a table in a quiet corner. He hurried Van Dorn to it. But before he could say a word about the unlikely nature of union sabotage, Van Dorn said, “You won’t believe this, Isaac. I just met the President.”

“Black Jack?”

“Not Gleason. The President!”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“Of the United States! TR himself. Big as life. Shook my hand— Littler fellow than you’d think. But full of fire. Shook my hand, big as life.”

“Well, that’s wonderful, sir. Now, what I found in the mine—”

“The Van Dorn Detective Agency has snagged a plum job. Prince Henry’s coming. German Prince Henry of Prussia. Coming to visit America. And we’re one of the outfits the Secret Service is hiring to help protect him. That’s why Teddy asked me to the White House. I’ll tell you this, Isaac, long as the Van Dorns keep Prince Henry unscathed by anarchist assassins, we’ll be in the catbird seat.”

Bell said, “Congratulations, sir. That is wonderful news.”

He was fully aware of Van Dorn’s dream of expanding the Van Dorn Detective Agency from its Chicago base into a crack transcontinental outfit with field offices in every city and even, one day, the capitals of Europe. The Prince Henry job had come from working at it “eight days in the week, thirteen months in the year,” and the Boss was understandably excited.

“Report quickly, Isaac. I’m meeting with Pittsburgh’s police chief in an hour. They’ll be giving Prince Henry a big testimonial dinner right here in this club.”

Bell had to shift Van Dorn’s attention to get permission to investigate the accident for the sake of justice even though the agency was originally hired by the coal company. He said, “The proud Van Dorn motto — We never give up! Never! — is based on principles.”

“Of course it is. We never ignore crime. We never abandon innocents.”

“The first thing you taught me, sir. We were in Chicago, in Jimmy Armstrong’s Saloon, and you said, ‘The innocent are sacred and…’”

The younger man paused expectantly.

Joseph Van Dorn was obliged to complete the creed he drilled into his detectives: “… and it is the duty of the strong to protect them.”

“The boys killed in the mining accident were innocent, sir. The union man Jim Higgins is innocent of the murder charge. And the runaway train was not an accident.”

Van Dorn’s eyes gleamed, and Bell knew he had his attention. “Can you pinpoint the saboteurs who caused it?”

“It was not a saboteur.”

“What?”

“Not in the sense you mean. It was not union sabotage.”

“Then who?”

“Not a saboteur. A provocateur.”

“What the devil are you talking about? Are you mincing words? Sabotage is sabotage.”

“No it isn’t, sir. Not in the way you mean.”

“Stop telling me what I mean and tell me what you mean.”

“The broken chain that caused the accident was deliberately fractured, a fracture very likely caused, I believe, by a provocateur.”

“To what purpose?” Van Dorn demanded.

“To perpetrate a larger crime.”

“What larger crime?”

“I don’t know,” Bell admitted. “Although there have been incidents in labor disputes when provocateurs were employed by owners to fabricate excuses to arrest unionists. But I don’t think it is that.”

Van Dorn sat back and crossed his arms over his mighty chest. “I’m relieved to hear your logic. Wrecking his own coal mine is a mighty expensive method for Black Jack Gleason to arrest unionists.”

“I know. Which is why I wonder—”

“Where were you when he sabotaged the mine train? Didn’t I send you there to prevent such attacks?”

Isaac Bell said, “I’m sorry I let you down, sir.”

Van Dorn stared hard at him for a full twenty seconds. Finally, he spoke. “We’ll get to that later. What did you see?”

Bell reported what stoked his suspicions: the suicidal effect of underground sabotage; the mysterious chisel mark he found on the broken link; and the fact that by arresting Higgins, the coal company had undercut the union effort.

Joseph Van Dorn stared at Isaac Bell.

Bell met his gaze coolly. The Boss was a very ambitious man, but he was an honest man and a responsible man.

“Against my better judgment,” Van Dorn said at last, “I will give you permission to investigate this vague idea for one week. One week only.”

“Thank you, sir. May I draw on men to help me?”

“I can’t spare anyone to help you. This Prince Henry tour requires every hand. You’re on your own.”

There was a sudden ruckus on the far side of the richly decorated dining room. Black Jack Gleason’s party were swaggering in and sitting down for lunch. Gleason pounded his fist on the table and vowed in a loud voice, “I will destroy the mining unions once and for all.”

The older mineowners counseled caution, noting that in Pennsylvania the union was strong: Winter is coming, we can’t afford a strike.

“The nation won’t put up with millions freezing in their homes.”

“It’s already cost the anthracite operators two million to pay, feed, lodge, and arm five thousand Coal and Iron Police with revolvers and breech-loading-magazine rifles. Heck, if we increase the miners’ pay ten cents a day, it would cost less than five thousand armed policemen.”

Gleason hit the tablecloth again. Silver jumped. Waiters sprang to rescue crystal. “Gentlemen, I will say it again. I will destroy the mining unions once and for all.”

“But mightn’t we do better to give the miners a small raise and nip it in the bud?” asked an owner.

“Before that damned dictator President Roosevelt horns in,” warned another. “He’ll demand we recognize the union.”

Van Dorn said to Bell, “The fellows around TR told me that he would love nothing more than to settle a strike.”

Black Jack Gleason laughed at compromise. “If they strike, I’ll break their strike like I broke every strike before,” he boasted.

Bell said to Van Dorn, “I heard him in the bar. He wants a strike if it will hurt his competitors.”

“Hard man,” said Van Dorn. “But very capable.” His manner toward Bell softened slightly. He himself was a hard man, but not the sort to hide his warm feelings for a young employee he admired. Isaac Bell had been his personal apprentice after graduating from Yale and was the immigrant Irishman’s favorite protégé.

“Be careful, Isaac. You heard Gleason. Labor and owners are scheming for every advantage in a high-stakes war. They’re digging in to fight to the death. Look out you don’t get caught between them.”

“I won’t, sir.”

“And whatever you do, don’t end up choosing sides.”

“I’ll be careful, sir. I promise.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The young man stiffened. “Sir, I’ve given you my word.”

“No,” said Van Dorn. “You will break that promise and do something reckless the moment you let your better instincts take command.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ve watched you operate. You have an eye for the downtrodden. Unlike most of your privileged class, you notice that they exist. That sets you miles apart, which is commendable probably. But don’t get yourself killed trying to upend the natural order of things.”

5

Isaac Bell changed into miner garb in his five-cent lodging house, paid the landlady to store his bags, and hurried back to the coalfields, traveling to Morgantown, West Virginia, in a B & O day coach and the final eight miles up a narrowing valley on the newly laid interurban Gleasonburg line. The trolley’s last stop was near the courthouse, a slapped-together wood-frame affair wedged between a steep hillside and the Monongahela River. It stood next to the bigger, more substantial yellow-brick Gleason company store and housed a justice of the peace, who was the highest legal authority in the coal-mining town, his courtroom, and, in a cellar under the building, the Gleasonburg jail.

Bell headed for the jail.

With only a week to prove his theory, or at least make enough of a case to keep the Boss interested, he had decided on the train that his most productive first step would be to persuade the jailers to let him visit Jim Higgins. The union man knew his business. He had laid the groundwork for a strike by learning who to trust among the miners, who to look out for among the police, who to cultivate among the bosses. Bell was anxious to test his theory on the labor organizer and pick his brain as to who the provocateur might be and what he wanted.

A crowd of miners and their wives and children were gathering around the entrance to the jail, a separate doorway beneath the courthouse steps. Bell glided through them, politely touching his cap to the ladies and sidestepping small fry. They were a somber crowd. Some of the women were red-eyed from weeping. They were the mothers, Bell realized, of the doorboys. How many, he wondered, were widowed like Sammy’s mother? How many of the boys had been their family’s sole breadwinner?

They spoke in low tones, like a congregation waiting for the service to begin, and as Bell passed among them he heard whispers that seemed to blame Jim Higgins more than the Gleason Company for the doorboys’ deaths.

The jail was guarded by company police. They were fat, older men and Bell feared if the mood turned ugly and the crowd swelled into an angry mob, as grieving crowds were wont to do, they were not up to protecting the accused unionist. A Pinkerton usually commanded the company squads, but he saw no detectives there. At the moment, however, the crowd was peaceful, the company police were firmly in charge. They saw him coming and blocked the door.

Bell said, “I’d like to visit Jim Higgins.”

“No visitors.”

“His priest in Chicago sent me a telegram, asking me to look in on him.”

“Ah don’t care if the damned Pope telegraphed. No visitors.”

“Jim’s priest wired some money, thinking a little cash might help keep him comfortable until his lawyers get here.”

The company cop wet his lips. He wanted the bribe. Bell reached in his pocket. But the old man shook his head. “I got orders. No lawyer, no priest, no visitors.”

“I already tried,” said a woman who had come up behind Bell. “If they won’t let his sister see him, they won’t let his priest.”

Isaac Bell turned to her musical voice. When he saw her, a certainty steamed through his mind like a runaway locomotive: If the cops refused admittance to this gray-eyed, raven-haired beauty, then God Almighty Himself would be cooling His heels. He swept his cap off his head and extended his hand. “Isaac Bell,” he introduced himself. “I was not aware that Jim had a sister.”

“Mary Higgins,” she replied, regarding his hand with a skeptical gaze. “I was not aware that Jim had a priest.”

“From his parish in Chicago,” Bell said for the benefit of the cop, who was listening with a suspicious expression.

“Jim is an atheist,” she said and walked away.

Bell followed her through the crowd and caught up at the trolley stop.

“Are you an atheist, too?”

“Not yet,” she said. “And who in hell are you?”

“I met Jim in the mine. He was trying to talk me into joining the union.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Bell shrugged. “Honestly, I was afraid of getting fired.”

“So why are you visiting him in jail?”

“I thought he got a bad deal.”

“Visiting him in jail will get you fired just as fast as joining the union. What’s up with you, Mr. Bell?”

Bell had an ear for expressions and recognized “What’s up?” as English or Australian. Perhaps she had lived abroad. Perhaps she read novels. “While I explain ‘what’s up,’” he answered with a smile, “would you do me the honor of joining me for tea? I believe they serve it in the company store.”

“I would not spend one penny in a Gleason company store. Or any other company store.”

“I don’t know of any other establishment where I could offer you tea.”

“That is the point, Mr. Bell, isn’t it? The company store has a monopoly. The workers have no choice but to pay the owners’ exorbitant prices or do without. They’re paid in scrip instead of real money, which they can spend only at the company store. They’re no better off than serfs.”

“Or sharecroppers,” said Bell.

“Slaves.”

“It sounds as if your brother is not the only unionist in your family.”

“You’re right about that.” The faintest hint of a smile warmed her eyes as they roamed over the features of the handsome young man before her. “Except that Jim’s beliefs are too mild for my taste.”

“Are you sure you won’t make a company store exception for one cup of tea?”

“Positively sure,” Mary Higgins fired back. She glanced up and down the row of shabby barracks, lodging houses, and shanties that lined the dirt street and fixed on a saloon with a lantern in its one small window. “There are other ways. Come with me.”

Bell appraised the crowd around the jail, which was growing larger, then followed her across the street. She walked fast. She was tall and her skirts swayed, he noticed, as if her legs were long. As she stepped up to the wooden sidewalk, her skirt parted, revealing low boots laced around shapely ankles. A dance hall gal’s figure, he thought, with a schoolmarm’s stern gaze.

As she led Bell in the door the owner rushed up, crying, “No ladies allowed in here.”

Mary Higgins unleashed another faint smile, looked the barkeep straight in the eye, and said, “Somewhere behind your bar is your office and in it a pot of hot coffee. I wonder if this gentleman and I might buy a cup we could drink at your desk.”

The barkeep’s mouth popped open. “How did you know?”

“My father owned such an establishment once. He always said if you drink what you sell you’ll end up in the poorhouse.”

“He knew his business,” said the owner. “Come this way.”

Mary Higgins swept ahead, skirts swirling the sawdust strewn upon the floor. In his office, the barkeep apologized, “I have no milk.”

“Not necessary,” she said with a glance at Isaac Bell, who concurred with a silent nod that black coffee would be perfectly fine.

“I’ll leave you two… alone. Presuming,” he added gruffly, “we all understand that my office is not a trysting place.”

He saw a sudden dangerous glint in the young coal miner’s eye and quickly apologized, “I did not mean to imply—”

“Thank you,” Mary Higgins dismissed him.

She sat behind the rough-plank desk and indicated Bell should pull up the barrel that served as a side chair. “Mr. Bell, you are a mystery.”

“How is that, Miss Higgins?”

“You’re dressed like a coal miner. You speak like a Fifth Avenue swell trying to sound like a coal miner. And you are failing, woefully, to hide the mannerisms of the privileged. Who are you and what do you want?”

Bell hung his head, the picture of embarrassment, if not guilt. She was sharp-eyed and sharp-eared, so he was not exactly astonished that she had picked out flaws in his disguise. She would make a canny detective. But having noticed her probing gaze, he had already prepared a defense, determined to stay in disguise as long as he could. Stick to your story, Wish Clarke had taught him, illustrating the lesson with a sip from his flask. Show folks you’re a harmless drunkard. Polish the edges, but keep the frame. Nearer the truth, the less to defend.

Bell said, “I’ll start with who I am. Yes, I was born to privilege. You’re absolutely right. But my father lost everything in the Panic of ’93. My mother died. My father shot himself — out of shame or grief, I know not which. All I’ve known since are hard times. But I am proud to say that I have made my way, on my own, by the labor of my own hands.”

Mary Higgins cast a sharp look at his hands, and the young detective was glad of the shovel blisters that had hardened to callus.

“Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade?” she quoted Goldsmith with an eyebrow raised inquiringly.

“A breath can make them, as a breath has made,” Bell quoted back.

“You would have me believe that you were visiting my brother out of the kindness of your heart?”

“That’s about all I have to offer him.”

“Something is agley with your story, Mr. Bell. Don’t try to fool a workman’s daughter.”

“I thought he owned a saloon.”

“That was for the benefit of an honest cup of coffee,” she said, revealing an ability equal to Bell’s to bend the truth for a good cause. “Maybe you’ve lost your mansions, but your environment and your whole life keep you from even seeing, much less understanding, the conflict of the capitalist class and the working class.”

“Not quite my whole life.”

“The war for justice is simply expressed: There can be no peace without justice — no justice without equality.”

“That is eloquently put,” said Bell. “I never quite thought of it in such terms.”

“I don’t intend to be ‘eloquent,’ Mr. Bell. Eloquence is folderol. Like the gimcrackery that decorated your mansion.”

“Your brother’s hopes are more modest. He told me, ‘All we’re asking is to live like human beings, feed our families, and send our kids to school.’”

“My brother is a gentle dreamer. He needs to understand that we won’t win the war for justice until the working class and the capitalist class become one, and the worker owns the capital he produces.”

“He needs a lawyer first. A smart one who can convince the judge that Jim cannot be blamed for failing to throw the derailer switch. The company assigned him to a second job, oiling the winch engine, which took him too far from his post at the switch to derail the runaway. When they arrested him, he said it was because they learned he was a union organizer and trumped up the charges to sideline him.”

“I’m not surprised. Nor am I surprised my brother couldn’t see their scheme. As I say, he’s a dreamer.”

The barkeep burst into the office with panic in his eyes. “You have to leave. I’m shutting down early. All hell’s busting loose.”

Outside, the sun had slid behind the mountain, and night was closing in on the hollow. A cold wind blew down from the higher elevations. Damp air and tendrils of fog rose from the river. The courthouse was deep in shadow.

The crowd around it had tripled in size. Where, earlier, people had whispered, now they were calling out loud, and some were shouting. Bell saw mothers dragging children away, as if they had gauged the mood and found it dangerous. Men came running up Main Street, carrying baseball bats and pick handles.

“What are they shouting?” asked Mary, though surely she heard but could not believe.

“Murderer!” said Bell. “Stay here. Let me see what I can do.”

Henry Clay drifted through the crowd on a route seemingly aimless. He was a broad-shouldered man of thirty-five who moved with effortless grace. Though not markedly tall, he was powerfully built, an asset that he concealed with expensive tailoring when in his Wall Street office in New York City and with a loosely fitted coat and overalls when pretending to be a coal miner. The red bandanna tied at his throat did not necessarily shout from the rooftops that he was a union man, but it could be construed as a sign of where he stood in the conflict between the working class and the capitalist class. The slouch hat that shadowed his face kept the fading daylight from reflecting the golden yellow hue of his amber eyes.

Face-to-face for an instant with a grim-visaged miner, Henry Clay muttered, “The son of a bitch might as well have taken up a pistol and shot those boys.” As he moved along, the miner shouted “Murderer!” at the jail, where the Gleason police were looking nervous.

Clay whispered as he passed another man, “Those poor boys, I just can’t bear thinking on them.”

“Murderer!” erupted behind him. It was like pushing an electric doorbell. “Poor boys”—“Murderer!”

Clay stopped in front of two men who were looking dubious. Smart ones, the sort who would be tempted to take a flier on the union. “Bunch of fellers told me Higgins is a company spy.”

“The hell you say. Who are you? What’s your name?”

“Claggart,” Clay replied, extending his hand and reeling them in with a drummer’s smile. “John Claggart.”

“What’s this about Higgins being a spy, Claggart? I heard he’s a union man.”

“So did I,” said the other.

“That’s what the company wants you to believe. Those fellers told me that the minute their pal said yes to the snake, the Pinkertons were all over him like paint. Blackjacked him something awful, bloodied his face, busted his hand.”

“Spy!”

“Murderer!”

“Spy!”

Clay continued toward the back of the mob, casting aspersions calculated to inflame, and stepped up on a horse trough for a better view. Lo and behold, there was Joseph Van Dorn’s favorite — young Isaac Bell — springing up the courthouse steps to try to reason with the mob.

6

“Hang him!”

Isaac Bell had vaulted up the steps just as the grieving crowd of the victims’ friends and families exploded into a savage lynch mob howling for Jim Higgins’s blood.

“Hang him high!”

“Murderer!”

“Spy!”

“Hold it!”

Bell had a big voice, and when he filled his chest and let it thunder, it carried to the farthest man in the mob and echoed off the mountain. He raised both hands high above his head and it seemed to double his height. He spoke slowly, clearly, and loudly.

“Jim Higgins is no spy. Jim Higgins is an honest workingman just like every one of us.”

“Spy!”

Bell pointed a big hand at the miner who had shouted.

“Who told you Jim’s a spy? Come on, man, tell us. Was it anyone you know? Any man you trust? Who?”

The miners looked at one another and back at Bell.

“Jim Higgins is no more a company man than you or me.”

The men in front were looking confused. But from far in the back, Bell heard shouting. “Murderer! Murderer!”

He could not see who was shouting in the failing light. A shadowy figure in a slouch hat flitted behind the mob. A dozen throats picked up the cry “Murderer! Murderer!” and from where Bell stood on the steps he could see a wavelike ripple of motion, and hundreds began to surge closer.

The company police guarding the jailhouse door edged aside.

“Stand fast, you men!” Bell shouted down from the steps.

“Murderer!”

The cops broke and ran. Some fled straight into the crowd, some around it, and when they had gone nothing stood between the lynch mob and the union organizer but a young Van Dorn detective on his first case.

Isaac Bell drew a single-action Colt Army from his coat and leveled it at the crowd. Then he delivered a cold promise.

“I will shoot the first man who steps near.”

Those in the front row, close enough to see his eyes, believed him.

They hesitated and started to fall back.

Joe, you self-righteous son of a bitch! Henry Clay shouted in the confines of his mind, taunting Joseph Van Dorn as if the great detective was glaring across his desk. Or down a gunsight. Goodness fetches goodness. Fools fetch fools.

He reached inside his voluminous coat.

Fool or not, young Bell cut a brave figure. The mob, teetering moments before on the cusp of violence, had been sidetracked by his commanding voice. Clay had fired up the back ranks again. But now the young detective had a gun in his hand and it was time to stop Bell before he ruined everything.

The marksman’s weapon in Clay’s shoulder holster was a top-notch Colt Bisley .45 single-action revolver smithed to a fare-thee-well. In the right hands, at this range, it was as deadly as a rifle. And Henry Clay, who had been trained by a master gunfighter and had drilled with the Bisley as religiously as he had with shotgun, rifle, knife, and fists, had no doubt that his were the right hands.

Isaac Bell saw someone come pushing through the mob even as the front ranks hesitated.

It was Mary Higgins, shoving through them and racing up the steps to stand shoulder to shoulder with him.

“If you brought a gun,” said Bell, “give it to me and get out of here while the getting is good.”

“I don’t need a gun.”

“If you believe that, you’re dreaming worse than your brother— Down!” He saw the blur of a gun barrel swinging their way. He kicked Mary’s skirts out from under her and swept her off her feet. A shot pealed from the back of the mob. The bullet stormed so close to Bell’s head it knocked his cap off. He could not see who had fired or whether he was leveling a second shot. He was. The shot came with no warning, slamming Bell sideways as it ripped through his coat and burned a bloody track across his ribs.

Bell caught his footing and aimed his Army. He raked the crowd, trying to locate the man who shot him. He still could not see him. He was somewhere behind them. Then he saw that the second shot emboldened the angry miners. Pushed by those behind, the men in front surged straight at him.

Isaac Bell triggered his weapon, held it firmly at his waist, and fanned the revolver’s hammer spur repeatedly with his left hand. Four shots roared out of the barrel so fast that the individual reports combined into one long, loud explosion.

The rapid fire sent a blizzard of bullets inches above the mob. Heads ducked, men scattered for cover. Spanish War veterans familiar with field cannon flung themselves face-first in the mud. Their mad scramble lasted just long enough for Bell and Mary to dive down the steps and into the jailhouse — a small, low-ceilinged cellar that smelled of river dampness and the kerosene lamps that lighted it. It was furnished with a crude wooden desk, a gun rack, two cells, and a dark hall that Bell hoped led to a back way out. He bolted the door.

Jim Higgins was watching from his cell, gripping the bars. Bell spotted keys on the rack and a double-barreled shotgun. He unlocked the cell and shoved the shotgun into Higgins’s hands. Higgins stared at the weapon as if Bell had passed him a snake.

“Don’t worry about hitting anything. The noise’ll scatter them.”

“Are you all right, Isaac? There’s blood all over your coat.”

“Tip-top,” said Bell. His ribs felt like he had just fought ten rounds with a strong man who specialized in body blows. But he could breathe, a good sign that no ribs had splintered.

“Here they come!” cried Mary. She grabbed a lantern off the desk and looked down the hall.

The mob was beating at the door. Bell took back the shotgun. Mary returned. “There’s a door and a ladder down to the riverbank.”

“How many are out there?”

“No one. It’s too steep. It’s right on the bank.”

“Take your brother.”

Mary grabbed Jim’s arm and lighted the way. Bell took up the rear. The mob battered at the door. Bell fired the right barrel. The shotgun bellowed. The pounding stopped, but only for an instant. Jim Higgins lowered the ladder. “Go,” said Bell. “I’ll cover.” He had one cartridge left in the shotgun and one in his revolver. Jim Higgins started down the ladder. The front door splintered as the fence post they were using for a battering ram thrust through a panel.

Bell loosed the second barrel of the shotgun, and the fence post fell into the room as if the men wielding it had let go and run for their lives. “Go,” he said to Mary. “That made believers out of them.”

But instead of starting down the ladder, Mary ran to the front room and threw the lamp. It landed on the jailer’s desk. Glass shattered and kerosene oil caught fire, spreading flame across the desk and igniting the second lamp. She paused in the hallway, and Bell saw her profiled by the leaping orange firelight. She looked startlingly beautiful, with a smile of satisfaction shining on her face.

The burning jailhouse, which should have distracted the mob, proved Bell’s, Jim’s, and Mary’s undoing. No sooner had they climbed down the ladder and begun picking their way along the steep riverbank than the fire rose to the courthouse above it. The wood burned fiercely. Flames leaped to the sky and dissolved the darkness of night.

“There they are!”

“Git ’em!”

The mob raced among the shanties along the top of the bank. Bell, Mary, and Jim Higgins slid to the bottom and splashed along the water’s edge. Bell saw ahead of them the barge dock where empties were parked overnight, waiting for steam tugs to push them to the tipple. The street above connected with Dock Street, which sloped down to it. At that point, he realized, the mob would stream down Dock Street and intercept them at the barge dock.

“We’re done for,” said Jim Higgins. “I’m the one they want. I’ll stop here. You two get in the water. Try and swim for it.”

The current was swift, the river over five hundred feet wide and pitch-dark beyond the firelight. Bell was a strong swimmer, he could make it across with a little luck. The expression on Mary’s face was brave but doubtful that she could swim that far.

“Both of you, stop here,” he commanded in a voice that allowed no argument. He found them a hiding place behind a stone breakwater. “I’ll be right back.”

He ran, leaping obstacles lit by the fire, and climbed up on the dock. At the end of the string of barges was a little yard tug that would do the shuttling. Bell jumped onto the first barge and ran along its gunnel, fighting to keep his footing on the narrow timber shelf. Slip to the right, he would fall in the water; slip to his left, break his neck in the empty hold.

“There he is!”

Bell leaped the space between the first and second barge and ran faster. He barely heard the howls behind him, his eyes fixed on the next barge, and the next, and the single light burning on the steam tug. He jumped from the last barge onto the tug and cast off its lines. The current took it immediately and dragged it downriver swiftly into the dark, beyond the mob, but away from the breakwater where Jim and Mary were hiding.

7

“Mister, what in tarnation are you up to?”

The little tug was a simple flatboat with its boiler and smokestack standing on deck between the helm and a coal bin. Isaac Bell had just grabbed a fireman’s scoop and was reaching to open the furnace door when an elderly night watchman with a long white Civil War beard rose, yawning, from a sleeping nest of coiled rope and canvas.

He saw the dark silhouette of the tall detective loom against the burning courthouse, and he pawed a six-gun from his waistband.

Bell snatched it away.

“Sir, I’m only going to borrow your boat for a short ride. Can you let me do that?”

“No, sir. She’s not your boat. She belongs to the Gleason Coal Company. I cain’t let you steal her.”

“Don’t make me throw you overboard,” Bell snapped, praying the old fellow would believe he meant it because, if he didn’t believe him, Isaac Bell had no idea what he would do next.

The old man blinked, looked down at the black water, and said, “Don’t hanker to go swimming, just now.”

“Does she have steam up?”

“A mite. I threw some coal on a while back.”

“Throw some more on.”

“Well, all right. It’s not like I’m helping you steal her, is it? I mean, I cain’t just let her drift into the rocks. Which she’s about to do.”

Bell opened the quadrant, sluicing steam into the piston, felt the propeller engage, and spun the spoked wheel. The little tug stopped drifting and headed upstream into the current. He steered for the now distant breakwater and tried to coax more power out of her. The steam gauge showed that with her furnace banked for the night, she had barely enough pressure to make headway.

The old man scooped some coal into the firebox and banged the door shut. “Son, you a river pilot?”

“No, sir.”

“Looks like you run steamers before.”

“Only yachts.”

“Yachts? Mr. Gleason’s got a yacht. Named Monongahela, after the river— See that courthouse burn? I declare, it will ignite the company store next.”

Mary Higgins, thought Bell, was probably cheering from the bank.

He steered past the barges and the dock to the breakwater where he had left them. They were gone. Searching the bank, he spotted them, running back toward the courthouse. Three men were hot on their trail. Bell swung the tug toward them.

One of the pursuers pulled ahead of the pack, waving a baseball bat. Two yards behind Mary, he raised the bat high in the air. Bell let go the wheel, drew his Colt, took careful aim, and fired his last bullet. The man dropped his bat and fell. His friends tumbled over him.

“Fine shooting,” said the old man. “That’ll larn him.”

Bell rammed the tug’s nose into the soft mudbank.

“Jump!”

Mary scrambled on and reached back for her brother. Jim swung aboard. Bell reversed his quadrant, backed into the current, spun the helm in a blur of spokes, and steamed for the far shore.

Isaac Bell drove the tug across the Monongahela River and slowly downstream, looking for a place to land. The old man recognized Jim Higgins. “You’re that union fellow, ain’t you?”

“Yes, I am. Do you favor the union?”

“Cain’t say I do. Cain’t say I favor the company neither. They treat folks mighty hard.”

“Would you back a strike?”

“Might. Or might not.”

“I feel the same way,” Higgins said, settling into a conversation that Bell would not have expected to hear in the midst of the night on a stolen tugboat. “We don’t necessarily have to strike. A fair settlement of the miners’ and owners’ demands could ensure a generation of no strikes and steady work. Cool heads on both sides know that the nation needs coal. It will be to everyone’s benefit that we can earn a decent living digging it. Unless the hotheads inflame the miners’ imaginations, we can settle this for the good of all, miner and owner.”

Mary Higgins laughed in disbelief. “Cool heads threw you in jail and sent a lynch mob to hang you.”

“Peace for twenty years,” Higgins replied mildly, “if cool heads bargain. Massacres if they don’t.”

“Brother, if it weren’t for Mr. Bell, you’d be dancing on air.”

Isaac Bell listened admiringly as Jim Higgins stood firmly by his beliefs, addressing his sister and the old man as if he was trying to coax them into a union hall. “If hotheads won’t give an inch, labor and owner will go to war. Innocents die in labor wars. Innocents were massacred at Haymarket, and Homestead, and Pullman. Innocents will be massacred again.”

Steering along in the dark, eyes peeled for a landing, Bell decided that Jim Higgins was not a dreamer — and certainly no fool — but a thinker with an overarching strategy to end the labor wars and a healthy fear of the violence the wars would spawn.

Ahead, Bell saw a yellow glow.

The old watchman nudged him. “Sonny, if you intend to keep running — and I reckon, based on events I’ve observed tonight, you ought to — you might be interested to know that ’round the next bend is the Baltimore & Ohio train yard where you might just discover the opportunity to hop a freight and git the hell out of West Virginia.”

“Isaac, I would be dancing on air, like Mary said. But may I ask you one more favor?”

“Name it.”

“Would you escort my sister to safety?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t need an escort,” said Mary. “And I don’t want one.”

Jim Higgins said, “Sister, listen for once in your life. I’m the only fugitive from the law. They’ll charge me with breaking out of jail. All you and Isaac did was run from a lynch mob, and even the owners can’t call that a crime. If you can get past the Gleason company cops, you’ll both be safe.”

“What about you?” asked Bell, and Mary said, “Where are you going?”

“I’m hoping my friends in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen will smuggle me out in a coal tender.”

“Where?”

“Denver, Colorado,” said Jim Higgins. “The Western Miners are helping the fellows striking the smelting companies. It’s an opportunity to all pull together. If we can threaten an enormous general strike that spans the continent, that’ll make the owners listen.”

Alongside the rail yard were the trolley barn and last station stop of a branch of the Fairmont & Clarksburg Traction inter-urban railroad. But when they ventured close, they saw coal cops patrolling the platform. They retreated toward the rail yard. Bell and Mary hid in the woods. Jim returned in an hour and pointed out a string of boxcars on a siding. A freight engine was backing up to it.

“The boys said that empty freight is headed back to Pittsburgh. They put a word in with the brakeman. But look out for the yard bulls. Grab that middle car with the open door. Wait ’til she’s rolling and run aboard. Good luck.”

“Did you get a ride?” Mary asked.

“The boys’ll get me out of here, somehow, don’t you worry. Take care, Isaac. Thank you for looking out for her.”

They shook hands. Mary hugged her brother fiercely, and when she wheeled away Bell saw her eyes were bright with tears. Keeping to the shadows, they walked out of the freight yard and along the main line and waited, shivering, in a cold wind blowing off the river. An hour later they heard a locomotive whistle blow the double Ahead signal and then the heavy chug of steam as it pulled the slack out of its train’s couplers and hauled it toward the main line.

Bell and Mary ducked from the blaze of its headlamp and, when the locomotive passed, started running along the railbed.

“Ever hopped a freight before?” he asked her.

“I’m pretending it’s a carousel.”

“Careful you don’t trip on your skirts.”

“I never trip on my skirts. I hem them four inches short.”

“You first. I’m right behind you.”

They scrambled up the rock-ballast embankment of the railbed, ran alongside the moving train, and jumped into the boxcar.

Bell watched behind the train until he was sure the yard bulls had not spotted them. Then he slid the door shut against the cold, which had little effect on the temperature as the freight picked up speed and an icy wind began whistling through cracks in the walls. His ribs were throbbing and he felt suddenly too weary to stand. The train lurched and, the next thing he knew, he was sprawled on the wooden floor, flat on his back, and Mary was speaking to him as if from across a room.

“I saw your face in the headlight. White as a ghost. Is the bullet inside?”

“No, no, no. Only creased me.”

He closed his eyes and heard cloth ripping. She was tearing a petticoat into strips. “Let’s get your coat off,” she said, peeling it and his shirt away from the wound.

Bell heard the clink of a flask being opened and smelled whiskey. “What are you doing?”

“Dressing your wound,” she said. “This will sting, unless you prefer septicemia.”

“Dress away— Ahh!” Bell caught his breath. “You’re right, it does sting, just a mite. Where’d you learn to dress wounds?”

“When the strikebreakers retreat and the thugs are done with their pick handles, there’s nursing to be done.”

It occurred to Isaac Bell that Mary Higgins spoke sentences as if they were written on posters. But he loved the sound of her voice. Here, in the dark, the beat of iron wheels clattering on steel tracks rang like music. He was dead tired and he ached all over, but at this moment he could not think of anywhere else in the world he would rather be than riding the rails with this girl Mary Higgins.

“You’re shivering,” she said. “Are you in shock?”

“Just a little. But I’m cold. Aren’t you?”

“Freezing. I’m concerned that your wound is worse than you think.”

Bell had been shot before — winged once in Wyoming, and rather more seriously in Chicago — and had a very clear concept of the difference between a penetrating wound and a graze. “No,” he assured her, “it’s just the shock of the impact. I had heard that a heavy slug like that will really floor you just passing by. Seems it’s true. But it’s cold in here. Maybe you’re right, maybe it’s shock making me cold. I wish we had blankets to keep warm.”

“Lay close to me,” she said. “We’ll keep each other warm.”

“Good idea,” said Isaac Bell.

8

Bell awakened to a blood-red dawn glinting through splits in the boxcar walls. He thought it was the pain in his side that disturbed his sleep, but it was Mary whimpering in hers. Suddenly, she screamed. Bell held her tighter and gently shook her awake.

“You’re O.K. You’re safe. You’re here with me.”

She looked around the boxcar, rubbed her eyes, and laid her head back on his chest. “I had a nightmare. I’m sorry. Sorry I woke you.”

“No, I was awake.” He felt her trembling. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“What did you dream?”

“Five years ago, when I was eighteen, I marched with thousands of women. We were seeking bread for their children. We marched all night to Pittsburgh. Before we could enter the city, Coal and Iron Police stopped us with bayonets fixed to their rifles. They had orders from the governor to shoot to kill.”

She fell silent.

Bell asked, “What happened?”

“We had no choice but to back down. I could see their orders in their eyes. They would do it, Mr. Bell. They would pull their triggers. They would shoot us, as they shot us at Haymarket, at the Pullman strike, at Homestead, at Lattimer.”

Bell had never heard of Lattimer. “Do you dream it often?”

“Less than at first.”

“Was it harder to march the next time— I presume you did march again.”

“Of course.”

“Was it harder?”

Mary did not answer. Bell listened to the wheels. He could feel her heart beating against his chest, speeding up with remembered fear. “I used to think Pennsylvania was the worst,” she whispered. “The richest railroads, coal mines, coke plants, steel mills are all in Pennsylvania. The state legislature wrote laws founding the Coal and Iron Police to protect them from the workers. The companies own the legislature. They can do anything they want and the law is on their side.”

“You used to think Pennsylvania was the worst?”

“West Virginia is worse. Gleason and his bunch don’t even pretend that murder isn’t a weapon in their arsenal. They don’t bother with legal niceties. The union hasn’t a friend in the state… Where was your father’s mansion?”

“Boston.” Stick to your story. Polish the edges, keep the frame.

“Where in Boston?”

“The Back Bay,” he lied.

If she was at all familiar with Boston, she would know that the Bells of Louisburg Square founded the American States Bank, which had a long history of flourishing through financial panics like that of 1893. The Back Bay that he named instead — a neighborhood of mansions erected on filled land by newly wealthy likely to lose their money as fast as they made it — would lend credence to his riches-to-rags Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade disguise.

“Where did you learn that trick with the gun?”

“Fan shooting?” he asked, buying time to think his way out of this one.

“You fired four bullets as if they were one. Were you in the Spanish War?”

The nearer the truth, the less to defend.

“I ran off with the circus when I was a boy.”

Mary propped herself up on one elbow and looked into his eyes, and Isaac Bell was convinced that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. “Were you a reckless little boy or a brave little boy?”

“I was an adventurous little boy, and circus folk are very, very kind. The acrobats and the lady shootist became my particular friends. They taught me all sorts of wonderful things.”

The locomotive was blowing its whistle more and more frequently as the train steamed through grade crossings, indicating they were nearing a city. Bell shot a look out the door. The smoke of Pittsburgh rose heavily on the horizon, and soon they were trundling between mills and plants. Endless rows of chimney stacks, tall and straight as blackened forests, lined both sides of the Monongahela River, which was twice as wide as where they crossed it at Gleasonburg and crowded with tall stern-wheeled steamboats pushing long tows of coal barges. The coal was heaped everywhere Bell looked, black mountains to burn in glass factories, blast furnaces, open-hearth smelters, coking plants, and gashouses, and in hundreds of locomotives pulling thousands of railcars on broadways that were eight, ten, twelve tracks wide.

“How many men own it all?” Mary had joined him at the door. “Two? Three? How many workers? A hundred thousand? Five hundred thousand? Millions?”

They passed banks of gigantic blast furnaces, the heart of the Homestead Steel Works, which spread over hundreds of acres on both sides of a bend in the river.

“Fort Frick,” Mary said, bitterly. “That’s what the workers called it. Frick built a fence around it to shield his Pinkerton gunmen. We shot it out with the detectives. Dozens were killed. The governor sent militia with Gatling guns. They arrested the entire Strike Committee. Thank God, juries refused to convict. But they broke the union.”

Isaac Bell did know of the Homestead Battle. The whole nation did. Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie’s manager of the Homestead Steel Works, had fought the strikers to a standstill in a long-ago war when Bell was a schoolboy. Mary must have been in school then, too. But she told it as if she had witnessed it yesterday.

“Since then, they’ve kicked the union out of every steel mill in Pennsylvania.”

They rolled past the Homestead Works. The yards would be coming up soon. Bell said, “We’ve got to jump before the yard to avoid the rail dicks. Soon as the engineer slows down. Stick close. They won’t go easy on you just because you’re a woman.”

Mary didn’t hear him. “Look at that,” she said, gesturing at a huge white sign so new it was not yet stained by soot.

AMALGAMATED COAL TERMINAL

From his research, Bell recognized the giant tipple that loomed over a combined train yard and barge wharf on a point of land that jutted into the river. It was the latest innovation in the transport of coal to market. Mechanical conveyers lifted coal from wooden Monongahela barges up to the tipple. The tipple rained it down in two directions, filling hundred-car trains, headed east to the seaboard cities, and big, modern barges that were steel-reinforced against the western-river rigors of the Ohio and the Mississippi.

Mary was exasperated by its name. “‘Amalgamated’? Why can’t they just call a combine a combine?”

Bell grinned. “Would you settle for ‘united’?”

She did not return his grin. But he saw some smile in her eyes when she fired back, “If you’ll settle for ‘monopoly.’”

“Shake on it?” They touched fingertips and stood looking at each other, balanced against the motion of the train, until Bell swept Mary into his arms and kissed her on the mouth.

At length, Mary asked, “Weren’t we supposed to jump?”

They were still rolling too fast to jump, and Bell finally realized that since it was running empty, the freight did not have to slow until shortly before it stopped.

When the air brakes finally hissed, they were in the yard, an enormous sprawl of track in every direction. It was securely fenced. Bell spotted a break in the palings down by the river twenty tracks away.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

Bell jumped first and landed with a jolt that seared his ribs. He kept his feet and reached for Mary and caught her as she tripped.

“Let’s go. We’ll get out of here fast as we can.”

They almost made it. They had crossed twenty pairs of rails and were running the last few yards when from behind a derelict caboose pounced a club-wielding railroad dick in a wrinkled sack suit and a dented bowler hat.

“Stop right there, you two!”

“Give us a break,” said Bell. “We’re just leaving.”

“You’re leaving all right — straight to the jailhouse. So’s your floozy.”

The rail dick reached for Mary’s arm.

Bell stepped between them and, when the yard bull raised his club, hit him with a left-right combination similar to the one that floored Eustace McCoy in the mine. The bull went down, holding his jaw. But the attack had been seen. Three more railroad police come running, pawing blackjacks from their coats. If they got past him, Bell knew, Mary would be next. He knelt beside the man he had knocked down and muttered urgently.

Railroad police were at the bottom of the peace-officer heap, despised as dregs, a bare step above brutal criminals. Few would refuse a Van Dorn detective a favor, dreaming that it might one day be returned with an invitation to join the outfit.

“Van Dorn. Pittsburgh field office. Call ’em off before I hurt somebody.”

“Hell, mister. Why didn’t you say you was a Van Dorn!” the rail cop blurted. “Almost broke my jaw.”

“Keep it quiet!”

“Hold on, boys,” the rail dick shouted. “He’s O.K. He’s a Van Dorn private detective.”

Mary Higgins rounded on Bell. “What?”

Her eyes flashed. Her cheeks flushed scarlet.

“A Pinkerton!” she yelled, her voice not at all musical, and slapped Bell’s face so hard she knocked the tall detective sideways. “You’re a Pinkerton?”

His disguise in shreds, Isaac Bell tried to explain, “No, Mary, I’m not a Pinkerton. I’m a Van Dorn.”

“What in hell is the difference? You’re all the same strikebreakers to me!”

She slapped him again and stalked toward the hole in the fence.

“You want we should stop her?”

“There aren’t enough of you,” said Bell. “Let her go.”

“What line are you in, son?”

“Insurance. Dagget, Staples & Hitchcock.”

Bell had cleaned up at his lodging house and run with his bags to the train station, which was under construction and surrounded by an obstacle course of cursing carriage drivers and maddened horses, and had bought an extra-fare ticket on the Pennsylvania Special just as the express train pulled in from Chicago. Now, as the special’s locomotive accelerated smoothly out of Pittsburgh, he was sipping an excellent cup of coffee in the dining car, sharing a table with three well-dressed commission salesmen, and wondering what Mary Higgins was finding for breakfast.

“Where you headed?”

“New York.”

Mr. Van Dorn was there, and Bell was determined to convince the Boss that the gunman he had glimpsed inflaming the lynch mob and then shooting off his hat and holing his coat proved that a provocateur was intent on starting a war in the coalfields. Somehow, he had to persuade Mr. Van Dorn to give him more time to pursue the case. More important, he knew he could not pursue it alone. He needed help, a lot of help. Somehow, he had to convince the Boss to assign to him, for the first time, his own squad of detectives.

9

“Welcome back, Mr. Clay.”

The provocateur who shot at Isaac Bell from the back of the lynch mob marched into his elegant Wall Street office, where he was received with great deference, and no little fear, as the proprietor and chief investigator of the exclusive Henry Clay Investigations Agency of New York City. Clay’s manager, and secretary, and researcher, and telegrapher all stood respectfully at their desks, while the thugs ready to do his strong-arm work lined up in the back hall. Clay was a cultured man — his clothing exquisite, his taste sublime. The famous author Henry James had been known to converse with him companionably, utterly unaware — deserted, curiously, by his customary sound judgment — that Clay was also as ferociously ambitious as a hungry anaconda.

He had been raised in bohemian poverty by his mother, a struggling portrait painter who had named him after the man she claimed was his father — the ruthless coal, steel, and railroad baron Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie’s man of all work.

Henry Clay was thirty-five. He was well educated thanks to his mother’s gentlemen friends and clients who had staked him to excellent boarding schools in his youth. But the stints at school were as brief as his mother’s friendships, and he remained always the outsider — the day student at Choate, Phillips Andover, Exeter, Deerfield Academy, and St. Paul’s — brushing shoulders, fleetingly, with heirs to the great American fortunes that he hungered to possess himself.

At fifteen, Clay ran away from home and became a Pinkerton spy in the labor unions. At eighteen, in Chicago, he lied about his Pinkerton service and hired on as the first employee of the great detective of the age, Joseph Van Dorn. Van Dorn had recognized Clay’s extraordinary natural aptitude — his striking wit, his astonishing physical strength — and had held high hopes that his first apprentice would help him build his detective agency.

Van Dorn, a child of the Irish revolutions, which he had turned his back on when he saw them descend into criminality, had personally honed the boxing skills Henry Clay learned in school and trained him to fight with guns and knives. And while making Clay deadly, Van Dorn had taught him the fine art of investigation.

Clay still mourned the day they parted company.

Van Dorn had refused to make him a partner on the grounds that Clay was more interested in currying favor with industrialists than imprisoning criminals. Van Dorn, as bitterly disappointed in his choice of protégé as any man could be with this first failure, had also suspected — but could never prove — that the brilliant Henry Clay had thrown the bomb that set off the deadly Haymarket Riot.

Clay had not seen Van Dorn in many years. But he was aware, and he knew Van Dorn was, too, of the other’s presence in the detective line: Van Dorn, chief of an outfit extending its reach from regional to national; the younger Clay yet to make a bigger mark than a lucrative one-man outfit courting a clientele of rich and powerful financiers.

Back from the coalfields, Henry Clay locked the door to his private office. He kept a brass telescope in the window, a powerful instrument made for a harbormaster, which he swept across the fronts of the office-building headquarters of Wall Street tycoons. An expert lip-reader, he fleshed out their conversations with information he had acquired by bribing the engineers and mechanicians who installed their voice tubes, telephones, and private telegraph lines to reroute them through his.

This morning he focused his spyglass on a one-hundred-thousand-dollar, life-size white marble sculpture — Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss—which decorated the private office of a steel magnate that Wall Street men rated more cold-blooded than robber baron Frick at his worst. He was the financial titan who forged the old empires of Carnegie and Frick into the United States Steel Corporation — Judge James Congdon.

Judge Congdon was unyielding in his opposition to union labor. As Clay focused on the old man’s lips, Congdon was haranguing a visitor, a rich owner of coal mines, who was listening attentively.

“Labor’s victory will be not to labor when modern machines work for them. Until then, they’ll accept their place in God’s estate, if I have anything to do with it. And I do. After machines replace them, God knows how they’ll spend their time.” He whirled abruptly to his desk, moving with startling speed for a man his age, and wrote a note in a flowing hand:

There will be great profit in providing them games.

Congdon’s visitor nodded obsequiously.

Clay focused his spyglass on the mineowner’s face and took pleasure in watching him squirm. “Black Jack Gleason,” he whispered. “Not such a big man here in Wall Street, are you?”

Gleason was standing in Congdon’s office, literally hat in hand, worrying the brim of his homburg with anxious fingers, while James Congdon bullied him. Even lip-reading only parts of their conversation, as Congdon occasionally turned his face from the window, it was clear to Clay that the financier was calling the tune. The biggest coal baron in West Virginia was no match for a Wall Street titan hell-bent on consolidating the industry. Congdon’s money controlled the steel mills, and the coking plants that bought coal, and the railroads that not only burned it in their locomotives but also set the rates to ship it.

“Have you read Darwin?” Congdon asked contemptuously.

“I don’t believe so, Mr. Congdon.”

“The weak perish, the fittest survive.”

“Oh yes, sir. I know who you mean.”

“Mr. Darwin knows his business. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes. The weak die — perish. We’ll always have the poor. It’s the way of the world.”

“The way of the world,” said Congdon, “brings us to the business of digging coal less expensively than the next man. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Henry Clay, a painter like his mother though not as gifted, likened Congdon’s craggy face to a sunless, cold north slope gullied by storm water. It was no surprise, looking at that face, that Judge Congdon was the most powerful man in Wall Street, and Henry Clay’s chest filled with hope in the knowledge that he was about to hitch his wagon to an element as mighty as fire.

Judge James Congdon listened with a cold smile as the now thoroughly cowed Black Jack Gleason turned to flattery to try to shift the subject from the price of coal.

“Some members of the Duquesne Club were wondering out loud at lunch the other day whether you would consider a run at public office?”

“The ‘people’ won’t elect a banker president,” Congdon replied.

“I’ll bet you could change their minds.”

“No, they won’t vote for a Wall Street man. I know. I ran for governor and I lost. They beat the pants off me.”

“There’s always a next time.”

Congdon shrugged his broad and bony shoulders. “Who knows what the future holds?” he asked modestly while thinking to himself, I do. Next time, I know how to win.

“First thing you ought to do,” said Gleason, “is get the damned newspapers to stop complaining about your senators.”

“If only it were that simple, Gleason. The papers can howl their heads off about bribing congressmen and buying senators. People don’t give a hang. Oh no. People expect it. People admire a president who controls Congress.”

“So you would consider running for president?”

“Who knows what the future holds?” Congdon repeated. “Other than that in the immediate future, starting this afternoon, my mills will pay twenty cents a ton less than you’ve gotten used to, and my roads and barges will increase our shipping rates by five percent.”

Gleason turned pale.

“How am I to make a profit?”

“Rob Peter to pay Paul.”

“How do you mean?”

“You may think of me as Paul. Labor is Peter. After you meet my terms and get your coal on the market, you can keep whatever you can hold on to. In other words, pay labor less.”

“I’m doing everything I can, but, I warn you, labor is fighting back.”

Judge James Congdon stood to his full height. “I warn you: I will not subsidize any mine operator’s failure to bring labor to heel.”

10

Heading out to meet Isaac Bell, Joseph Van Dorn swaggered proudly from the high-class Cadillac Hotel on Broadway, where he had just signed the lease on a suite of rooms for his brand-new New York field office. He was not one to throw money around, but a client clapping eyes on its fine limestone façade would not be inclined to quibble over fees. And having passed through its marble lobby — under the watchful eye of top-notch house detectives supplied by Van Dorn in exchange for a break on the rent — and been wafted upstairs in its gilded elevator, the client would count himself lucky that the Van Dorn Detective Agency agreed to take his case.

At Forty-fourth Street, a redheaded gentleman stopped dead in his tracks and stared at him. Van Dorn stared back. Faint scars on the man’s brow indicated some experience with fisticuffs, though hardly in the professional prize ring, for the fellow looked prosperous, in a tasteful tweed suit and a bowler and with a heavy gold watch chain. Van Dorn saw anguish in his expression and a tear forming in his eye.

“Are you quite all right, sir?”

The answer came in a lilting Irish brogue, “Och, aye, forgive me, sir. I could not help but notice…” He swallowed hard.

“What is it, young fellow?” The accent of Van Dorn’s Dublin childhood was almost too faint to be heard over the harder layers of his Chicago years.

“Begod, sir, if you’re not the spitting image of me old dad.”

“Your father?”

“Is it not as if he rose from his grave to parade big as life down Broadway?” He caught himself. “Oye, I mean no harm.”

“No, no, no. Not to worry, young fellow.”

“The splendid whiskers — scarlet as new dawn — the piercing eyes, the high brow.” He shook his head in amazement and in sorrow.

“When did he leave us?” Van Dorn asked gently.

“Only at Easter. I thought I had reckoned with it, and there you were. You’re kind to stop, sir. Don’t be putting yourself out a moment longer.” The young man bowed, his expression still troubled, and turned away.

Joseph Van Dorn was a sharp detective and a shrewd businessman, but he was a kindly soul and he called after him, “I experienced the like when mine passed. I’ll not promise it gets easier, but gradually, you won’t dwell every day.”

“I will cherish that thought… You’ve been very kind— Sir, it would give me great pleasure to stand you to a wee dram.”

Van Dorn hesitated. He was already late to meet Isaac Bell, but the young fellow looked to be in desperate need, and a brother Irishman in need was not to be ignored. “Of course.”

“There’s a friendly snug just around the corner,” said the redhead, extending his hand. “Finnerty. Jack Finnerty.”

They shook hands and found the bar. The bartender greeted Finnerty with a warm “Welcome back” and poured Bushmills.

Van Dorn waited a decent interval to let Finnerty speak about his father before, in hopes of changing the subject to one less morbid, he asked, “What line are you in, Mr. Finnerty?”

“Coal,” said Finnerty. “Or, I should say, supercoal.”

“What is supercoal?”

“Something of a modern miracle. Scientists have developed a means of releasing the excess power hidden inside coal — burning a bucket of supercoal produces the heat of a carload. Imagine a locomotive crossing the continent on one full tender, or the city dweller snug in his apartment with his entire winter supply in a single cupboard.”

“I have never heard of it.”

“You’ll be hearing of it soon—”

All of a sudden, Finnerty jerked his watch chain and looked at the time. “Begor! I must run. I promised the investors I’d attend their board meeting. I’ve not ten minutes to get to Wall Street. Thanks be to God for the El — though they’ll not finish digging the Rapid Transit Subway soon enough for me. What good fortune to meet you, Mr. Van Dorn! You were kind when kindnesses made a difference.”

Van Dorn shook his hand and held tight a moment to ask, “At what stage of development is this invention?”

Finnerty glanced around and lowered his voice. “I would not be surprised to see customers lined up for supercoal next winter. Particularly if the miners strike.”

“How are you making out with investors?”

“Near fully subscribed— I must run, but here’s my card. Perhaps, we’ll meet, again.”

Finnerty handed Van Dorn his card and was out the door.

Isaac Bell was pacing in the front hall when Van Dorn bustled into the Yale Club at Forty-fourth Street. Even impatiently pacing, Van Dorn thought, the young detective glided like a panther — precision-cocked to spring.

“Sorry, Isaac. Tied up in a meeting.”

Bell led the way to a pair of wing chairs in a quiet corner of the lounge. He related in detail what had happened at the Gleason jail and laid out his suspicions. Van Dorn listened attentively, intrigued again by Bell’s speculation about a provocateur but still dubious about the evidence.

“I’m hoping you can spare me some men to get to the bottom of this, sir.”

“Your own squad?”

“It’s too big for one detective.”

“Not possible,” said Van Dorn. “We are stretched to the breaking. Prince Henry is dragging us around the country like the tail of a kite and now he’s threatening to extend his visit. They love him everywhere he goes and he’s having a ball.”

Bell spoke urgently. “Before I went down in the mine, I did as you suggested and learned everything I could about the coal business. The mines employ half a million men. Hundreds of thousands more work on the railroads and barge tows that transport it. In a nutshell, coal is the most important business in America.”

“That nutshell does not alter the fact that the Van Dorn Detective Agency has other fish to fry,” Van Dorn growled back.

Isaac Bell did not appear to hear him. “Coal is indispensable for heat, for coke to make steel, for smelting ore, for electricity generation for lights, pumps, elevators, and agriculture wells, and for fuel where wood is scarce. Coal powers ocean liners, battleships, and railroad trains.”

Van Dorn nodded impatiently, thinking, All the more reason to invest some part of my savings in Jack Finnerty’s supercoal. He said, “I am aware that the wealth coal underpins is unimaginably immense, and the benefit to the entire nation is incalculable, as is ensuring a steady supply.”

“But such wealth has the potential to stir the worst in men of all stripes,” Bell persisted, “be they labor, owner, or financier.” He took a deep breath. “I could begin my investigation with Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton, and Wish Clarke.”

Van Dorn could not conceal his surprise. “Only them?”

“Kisley is expert in explosives. Fulton’s been working labor cases since the Haymarket Riot. And the boys all say that Wish Clarke is the toughest fighting man in the agency, which I observed to be true when you let me work with him in Wyoming and again in New Orleans.”

“You would be the youngest squad leader in the history of the agency.”

“No, sir. You were younger when you led your first squad.”

“Times were simpler back then…”

“Coincidentally,” said Isaac Bell, “your first squad consisted of Kisley and Fulton and an apprentice named Wish, for ‘Aloysius,’ Clarke.”

It was Van Dorn’s turn to take a deep breath.

“O.K., you can have Weber and Fields,” he said, using the agency nickname for Kisley and Fulton whose jokes reminded everyone of the vaudeville comics. “They’re in Chicago. God knows where Wish Clarke is.”

“I can find him.”

“If you can find him, you can have him.”

“Could I also have Mr. Bronson?”

Joseph Van Dorn’s bushy eyebrows would have shot no higher if Isaac Bell had demanded the combined services of heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries, President Roosevelt and half his Rough Riders.

“Horace Bronson,” the Boss answered coldly, “is engaged in San Francisco.”

Bell was not surprised, but it had been worth a try. He asked, “Is there anyone else currently at large you could spare, sir?”

“You’ll have to make do with what I’ve given you,” Van Dorn said sternly. “You’ll be thin on the ground, so don’t get cocky. Weber and Fields are old hands but no longer spry, to put it mildly. They’re of the years when men age quickly. And Wish… well, enough said.”

“You’ve always said he’s a crack sleuth.”

“When sober,” Van Dorn shot back.

Bell said, “You are right, sir. I will be thin on the ground. Would you consider hiring a particular friend of mine as an apprentice? He’s a handy fellow with his fists — when I met him, he was captain of Princeton’s boxing team.”

“That will stand him in good stead against college men who’ve taken up crime.”

“He’s a whiz at disguises. He wanted to be an actor.”

“If he wanted to be, why isn’t he?”

“His mother forbade it.”

“Obedience to mothers,” Van Dorn responded drily, “is an admirable trait, but not the sort that spawns detectives with the requisite moxie.”

“He’s got plenty of moxie, and Kisley and Fulton will show him what to do with it. Sir, I could really use the extra hand.”

Van Dorn looked dubious. “I’d have to speak with him, size him up.”

“But you already have spoken with him.”

“What? When?”

“I believe you have his card in your vest pocket.”

Van Dorn reached into his vest. “Jack Finnerty?”

Isaac Bell kept a straight face. “Based on all I’ve learned about coal for this case, Mr. Van Dorn, I wouldn’t bet the farm on supercoal.”

Van Dorn flushed red as his whiskers. His eyes narrowed to pinpricks of blue flame, and his mighty chest filled like a bull’s. Isaac Bell braced for the explosion. But, at last, the Boss laughed.

“Flimflammed! You flimflammed me.”

“I had to demonstrate his moxie.”

“You did that, all right. Really had me going there— Well, at least I was flimflammed by a brother Irishman.”

Bell could no longer hide his smile.

“Now what are you smirking about?”

“Sorry to disillusion you, sir, but your ‘Irish brother’ is a direct descendant of the English and Dutch founders of New York — Archibald Angel Abbott IV, listed first in Society’s Four Hundred.”

The Congdon Building was more secure than most in Wall Street, tight as a bank.

Henry Clay entered by the basement service entrance, dressed in steamfitter’s overalls and carrying a ball-peen hammer, a pipe wrench, a measuring tape, and an inspection gauge with its thin metal gap gauges modified to pick locks. He knew the guards’ routine and eluded them easily. He picked open a lock, bounded up twelve flights of stairs without sweating or breathing hard, removed his overalls, picked two more locks in utter silence, and stepped suddenly through the back door of Judge James Congdon’s private office.

Clay saw immediate confirmation of the wisdom of his plan. The tough old bird glanced up from his desk startled but not one bit frightened. He had chosen well.

11

James Congdon was intrigued by the intruder.

He could summon help in an instant with a shout into the speaking tube or one of several candlestick telephones on his desk. Better yet, simply shoot him with a revolver from his desk. Or, best of all, he could activate his “lunatic stopper.” But for the moment, Congdon was curious. Why would such an elegant, well-dressed gentleman break in his back door?

As if to prove that he was as cultured as he looked, the intruder complimented the marble sculpture that dominated Congdon’s office with a connoisseur’s appreciation. “I commend your knowledge of antiquities.”

Judge Congdon uncapped the speaking tube. “Antiquities? You’re showing off your ignorance. Auguste Rodin carved that statue two years ago.”

“But unlike the prudish original, this superior copy of Le Baiser that you commissioned depicts the male form complete — in the classical Greek style — rather than draped, as it were, under a modest limb.”

Congdon snorted, “That’s a big-sounding way of saying he’s showing his tackle.”

The intruder flushed and lost his composure for an instant. “In the presence of such beauty,” he said stiffly, “I would consider an expression less crude.”

Congdon pulled a gun from his desk. “While I consider whether to have you beaten to a pulp or shoot you myself.”

“That is a privilege of wealth,” said Henry Clay. “But you would miss the greatest opportunity of your life. I will make an offer you will find irresistible.”

“I am rarely tempted.”

“But when you are, sir, you seize the opportunity.”

Clay cast a significant glance at Rodin’s passionate lovers. Then he nodded appreciatively at the bronze statuette on Congdon’s desk, which depicted the most recent of Congdon’s shapely young wives au naturel.

“My name is Henry Clay. I am a painter’s son by birth and a private detective by profession. I offer no threat, only promise. And I do it at great risk because you could have me beaten or killed.”

“So you’re a betting man?”

“Yes, sir. I am betting my life that you’ll see this opportunity for what it is.”

“What opportunity?”

“The opportunity to destroy the miners’ unions: the United Mine Workers in the east and the Western Federation of Miners in the west. Stop them dead, once and for all. It will be twenty years before another miner dares start a union, much less call a strike, anywhere on the continent. And here’s a sugarplum bonus for you. You will profit mightily knowing ahead of time to invest in businesses that will flourish when you destroy the unions.”

“By what means?”

“Every means. No holds barred.”

Congdon shook his head. “No. I risk everything if you are caught and turn blab-mouthed.”

“What would the word of a lowly detective be against the great Judge Congdon?”

Congdon fixed him with a gimlet eye. “‘The great Judge Congdon’ intends to be president of the United States. Unfortunately, that means convincing the ignorant people that he is above suspicion.”

“What could I blab? You can seal our deal with a nod. No signature, no contract. There is no way to record a nod.”

“Without a contract, you are betting on the groundless hope that I will reward you. What if I don’t?”

“I don’t need your reward.”

“Then why—”

“Here is all I need from you,” said Clay, and ticked items off on fastidiously manicured fingers. “Unlimited operating funds to do the job. Certain information that only you possess. Rail passes on all lines, and special trains to help me travel quickly about the continent. Permission to send and receive messages over the private closed telegraph wires leased by your brokers.”

Congdon interrupted with a sarcastic comment that the Interstate Commerce Commission forbid outsiders sending messages over leased wires.

Clay laughed. Brokers of stocks, bonds, and commodities bent that law day and night. “Speed and privacy are a matter of business.” He knew that he did not have to remind Congdon that owners and lessees of private wires got a jump on competitors who had to rely on Western Union’s slower public wires.

“In every city I operate, we will communicate swiftly and secretly through your branch offices.”

“Branch offices untraceable to me,” Congdon said sharply.

“Doesn’t a financier of your stature hold secret controlling interests in firms that lease private wires?”

Congdon ignored the flattery and demanded, “But what do you get out of this scheme?”

“Reputation. By rights, you will pay me handsomely when I succeed. But if you don’t — if you cheat me — it will not matter. I will be a made man.”

“How?”

“Henry Clay Investigations will become the detective agency to presidents and kings when the men who run this country learn who smashed the unions. When you are president, I, too, will be very big in Washington.”

Congdon mulled over Clay’s proposal. He was a famous judge of character. The detective, a robust physical specimen, possessed the steady gaze of a valuable man capable of finishing what he started. “What makes you so sure that this would appeal to me?”

“I have studied you, Judge Congdon. I understand you. I am a very good detective. I am the best.”

“You think you know me, do you? Have another look at my statue. Look close at The Kiss. Do you see anything unusual?”

Henry Clay did as Congdon ordered. He leaned close to the marble and let his eyes roam over the man and woman in passionate embrace. “I see a magnificent statue.”

“It draws you closer, doesn’t it?”

“It does. I am actually standing closer to it than I was a moment ago. But what is it you want me to see?”

“Look up.”

The skylight that illuminated the marble was ringed by a plaster frieze studded with tiny holes one-tenth the diameter of a dime.

“I see holes in the frieze. They’re barely visible.”

“Now look down.”

“I don’t understand, sir.”

“Look down.”

In the pattern of the marble circle on which he was standing were dozens of similar holes. “I still don’t understand.”

“I will teach you two things about wealth, Mr. Best Detective. Wealth attracts lunatics. My old enemy Frick was shot and nearly killed in his own office by a lunatic ten years ago, which set me to thinking of my own safety. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“You said two things about wealth.”

“Common wisdom holds that coal is the source of all wealth. Like most common wisdom, that’s dead wrong. Coal is only fuel. It happens to be the best fuel at the moment, but it will be replaced by a better fuel. Oil is the coming fuel until the scientists come up with something even better, which they will. The real source of wealth for the past hundred years, and hundreds more to follow, is steam — hot steam made by boiling water with the cheapest and most efficient fuel available — wood, coal, oil, and whatever science dreams up next. Steam pushes pistons that drive locomotives. Steam whirls turbines to spin electricity. Steam storms through pipes under city streets to heat modern buildings like mine.”

Congdon reached for the bronze statuette of his current wife. He stroked it with his gnarled fingers.

“Steam scalds flesh. Steam from a mere teakettle will sear your hand with the most painful burn imaginable. Shortly after the attack on Frick, a six-inch steam riser in a building like this one ruptured. Escaping steam blasted through the walls as if they were made of paper. Every man and woman in the office died in an instant. They were found still seated at their desks, scalded head to toe, horribly disfigured, cooked to death inside and out. That set me to thinking about the lunatic attack on Mr. Frick. What he should have installed in his office — and what I have installed in mine — is a steam-powered lunatic stopper.”

Congdon tightened his grip on the bronze statuette.

“Do you notice anything peculiar about this statue of my new wife?”

Clay looked more closely and saw what he had missed earlier. The bronze was hinged to the top of the desk. “I see a hinge.”

“The hinge makes it a lever. When I move this lever, it will open a valve that will deliver a scalding hot three-hundred-and-fifty-degree blast of steam straight from the central boiler plant on Cortlandt Street to your skin, Best Detective Clay.”

Henry Clay eyed the holes in the floor and the ceiling.

“Scalding jets of high-pressure steam will cook you to death in seconds. The longest and worst, most painful seconds of your life.”

“It will kill you, too.”

“I’ll be unscathed. The jet holes are calculated to deliver just enough for you.”

“O.K.,” said Clay, “you caught me flat-footed. If you throw that lever, I’m dead.”

“Painfully dead.”

“Painfully dead.”

Hand firmly on the lever, James Congdon recognized a certain unique quality in Henry Clay: If the fellow felt fear, Congdon could not see it. In fact, it appeared that if Clay had one strength above all others, it was the strength to recognize the inevitable and accept it without complaint. A controlling interest in such a man could be a solid investment.

“If I were to give you unlimited operating funds, private information, rail passes, and specials, how would you use them?”

“The details are mine alone to know.”

Congdon frowned. “You’re a brave man to stand your ground in your precarious situation. Or a fool.”

“A determined man,” Clay shot back. “The only thing you can count on in this world is determination. I’m offering determination. I repeat: The details are mine alone to know.”

“Assume, for the moment, that tactics are up to you,” Congdon conceded. “What is your strategy?”

“You need a story to destroy the unions. The newspapers are already on your side. They will tell your story. I will give you your story.”

“What story?”

“The owners upon whom God has seen fit to bestow property will protect property and liberty from murderous agitators.”

“How will you tell it?”

“By starting a war in the coalfields.”

“How?”

“Are you familiar with the accident at Gleason Mine No. 1?”

“Runaway coal train, some hands killed, and production interrupted for four days. Are you telling me you started that?”

“And finished it. Before the miners returned to work, they burned down Gleason’s jail and the courthouse. I’d call that a war.”

“I’d call it a good beginning,” Congdon conceded. “A veritable Harry O’Hagan one-man triple play.”

“A quadruple play, counting the fire.”

“Yes indeed you outdid O’Hagan. But I am deeply disappointed.”

“Why, sir?”

James Congdon answered with a wistful sigh. “My lunatic stopper will have to wait for another lunatic.”

He let go the steam lever and gestured for Henry Clay to take a seat beside him.

12

Crackerjack army Mr. Van Dorn gave you, kid: two spavined geezers and an amiable drunk.”

Isaac Bell defended his friend. “Wish goes long stretches when he never touches a drop.”

Wally Kisley, who looked less like a private detective than an aging harness salesman in a sack suit patterned bright as a checkerboard, grinned at his old partner, ice-eyed Mack Fulton. Fulton, somber in gray and black, looked the deadly sort that no sensible man would inquire about his business.

“Say, Mack, what is the difference between a drinking man and a drowning man?”

“Beats me, Wally. Didn’t know there was a difference between a drinking man and a drowning man.”

“The drowning man sinks in water. The drinking man sinks in whiskey.”

“Say, Wally,” asked Mack, “here comes a passerby, strolling by the sea, what does the drowning man yell?”

“Throw me a rope.”

“What does the drinking man yell?”

“Throw me a bottle.”

They looked to Bell for a laugh.

Stone-faced, Isaac Bell said, “I worked with Wish Clarke in Wyoming and New Orleans. He’s sharp as they come.”

“So’s a busted bottle.”

“I also remember when you ‘spavined geezers’ took over my apprenticeship from Mr. Van Dorn, you taught me plenty. And you weren’t so spavined that you couldn’t clear a saloon of Harry Frost’s boys.”

“Your recent apprenticeship,” Kisley and Fulton chorused.

Bell saw that the old detectives were not joking but deadly serious and with a purpose. Kisley stared hard at him. Mack Fulton got down to brass tacks.

“Who’s ramrodding this outfit?”

“It’s my case,” said Isaac Bell. “I am.”

Kisley said, “It was not long ago we was changing your diapers in Chicago.”

“I’ve got the hang of it since.”

The partners shot back obstinate glowers and Mack said, flatly, “The man bossing an outfit has to change everyone’s diapers and still stay on top of the case.”

“You’re looking at him.”

“I’m looking at a kid who started shaving yesterday,” Fulton shot back.

“Spouting highfalutin French,” Kisley piled on. “Provocateur? Whatever happened to good old agitator?”

“Or provoker?”

“Or instigator?”

Isaac Bell was constitutionally incapable of punching a man twice his age, but he was getting tempted.

Suddenly, Aloysius Clarke was standing in the doorway.

He was a big, red-faced fellow who moved quietly.

Bell said, “Hello, Wish.”

Clarke nodded. “Kid.”

“We was just discussin’ who ramrods this outfit,” said Mack Fulton.

Wish Clarke stood silent. He had small blue eyes buried so deeply in drink-swollen, purple-veined cheeks that observers who associated whiskey with dulled wits and melancholy would miss the glow of intelligence and laughter. He smiled unexpectedly and answered the question on all minds. How long had Wish Clarke been standing there and how much had he overheard?

“It’s Isaac’s case. The kid’s the boss.”

Wally Kisley shook his head. “Them coal miners ain’t the only ones who need a union.”

“And to close another subject,” said Wish Clarke, a self-educated man who revered the English language, “Provoker is too general a word, agitator is a misspelling of adjutator, which means ‘a representative,’ and instigator is vague. But provocateur, short for agent provocateur, describes exactly what Isaac suspects we’re up against — a smart fellow who’s hoodwinking not-so-smart fellows into committing crimes that will discredit them.”

“For what reason?”

“For reasons,” said Wish Clarke, “we have not yet detected, Detective Kisley.”

Isaac Bell raised his voice. “Saddle up, gents!”

He pulled tickets from his vest and passed them out.

“Train’s leaving for West Virginia. All aboard!”

Locomotive headlamp blazing through the night, a train of sixty ore cars steamed from the Cripple Creek gold mines on Pikes Peak down the Colorado Front Range into the smoke-shrouded city of Denver. Pinkerton detectives boarded the locomotive in the Auraria rail yard.

Three thousand smelter workers had walked off the job — the opening gun in a united strike led by the Western Federation of Miners to win an eight-hour workday for every union with which it was affiliated. The Pinkertons posted riflemen on the engine pilot and took command of the heavily laden train to escort it to the Nyren Smelter.

Jim Higgins stood arm in arm with a thousand strikers blocking the tracks. In his opinion — not that the hotheads were asking for it — ruining the Nyren furnaces had been a mistake, and the strike, which could have blossomed into a general strike the breadth of the continent, was going nowhere, stuck in Denver, mired in bitterness.

Old Man Nyren — a cantankerous bully detested equally by labor and the Rocky Mountain smelter owners he had driven out of business with his giant plant fired by cheap coal — was in no mood to bargain. The strikers had drawn the fires from under his furnaces. The molten ore had frozen into a solid mass from the charge hoppers on top to the crucible drains below, rendering them useless until the hardened mass of ore, slag, and gold could be cut out. Nyren ordered the ore train parked in the smelter’s elevated yard, ready to tip its load into his furnaces the instant that cutting was done by scab labor.

The Pinkertons ordered the train to run the strikers off the tracks.

“Go to hell!” said the locomotive engineer. “I ain’t killing those fellers.”

“Me neither,” said the fireman, crossing his massive arms.

The detectives clubbed both men to the floor of the cab. A hard-bitten engineer they had brought with them took the controls. “Can’t see what’s behind the bastards,” he said. “For all we know, they could have pried up the rails.”

“Clear ’em,” ordered the detective in charge.

They tied down the whistle. Blowing an unbroken, ungodly shriek, the train accelerated, and the riflemen on front opened fire.

Union men scattered, dragging their wounded with them.

The riflemen kept firing until the track ahead was empty but for fallen bodies. The train increased speed. Unable to stop it, the outraged, frightened strikers roared their anger. Stones scooped up from the ballast clanged against the sides of the locomotive, shattered the headlamp, and knocked one of the shooters off the engine pilot.

“Don’t slow down ’til we’re inside the gates or they’ll mob us.”

The gates were just beyond an iron girder bridge that carried the rails above the workers’ slum that encircled the smelter, and it looked to the Pinkertons as if they would make it. Suddenly, from the helplessly raging, stone-throwing mob of strikers, a hero darted — a slight figure, no bigger than a boy — dragging a heavy ore rake.

“Where the hell— Stop him! Don’t let him move that switch!”

No one had to tell the remaining gunman riding on front of the danger to the locomotive. His Winchester leaped to his shoulder and he snapped a shot at the running figure. The bullet missed but slammed the rake out of the boy’s hands. The boy picked it up and kept running toward the switch. The rifleman took careful aim. He squeezed the trigger slowly and gently. Three stones struck at once, hitting his shoulder, hand, and knee. He dropped his rifle, fell off the engine pilot, and rolled, screaming, under the wheels.

His bullet missed the boy, ricocheted off the girdered overpass, and pierced a window in the Nyren Smelter gate tower.

The boy ran in front of the train and jammed the rake into the switch.

One hundred yards from the safety of the smelter gates, the locomotive’s pilot wheels were derailed by the rake. The massive drivers right behind them sliced the steel rake like a length of sausage. But the forces squeezing that extra piece of steel crammed between the movable switch point and the fixed rail spread the rail a single inch out of line. With nothing for their flanges to grip, the drive wheels slipped off the rails.

The locomotive jumped the track and tumbled off the overpass into the slum streets below, dragging its coal-laden tender and ten full ore cars onto the roof of the building that housed the Nyren company store.

“What’s troubling you, Jim? We did all right today.”

Jim Higgins looked up bleakly from his desk in the union hall. The local’s secretary and vice president had returned with celebrants’ beers under their belts. “Not counting eight in the hospital and two men dead?” he asked, although the victims were not his only source of concern.

“They died like heroes.”

“Speaking of heroes, wasn’t that little guy something?”

“Has anyone seen him since?” asked Higgins.

“Neither hide nor hair. Too bad. He deserves a medal.”

“He’s smart to lay low — better yet, light the heck out of Denver.”

“Halfway to San Francisco, if he’s got a brain in his head,” agreed Higgins, hoping against hope. From the first instant he had seen the slight figure with the rake he had an awful feeling that the “little guy” was neither a man nor a boy but instead a slim young woman in trousers named Mary Higgins.

He had sent telegrams to friends in Chicago and Pittsburgh, where she should have gone after West Virginia. So far, no one reported seeing her. Times like this, he wished he wasn’t an atheist. Times like this when there was nothing left to do but pray.

“Brother!”

In she walked, not in trousers and cap, thank God, but in a bedraggled skirt and a lady’s hat with a perfunctory feather decorating it.

“Mary,” he said, rising, “how wonderful to see you. When did you get into town?”

Mary took note of the red-faced vice president and secretary and replied, “I just got off the train. I had a feeling I’d find you here. How is it going?”

“Gentlemen, my sister Mary.”

The secretary and vice president nearly broke their arms whipping off their hats, reminding Jim Higgins how attractive men found his sister. They told her that the strike was going wonderfully and that they would surely win. Higgins waited until he and Mary were alone in his rented room before he told her the truth. “It’s not working,” he said. “The strike is stuck in Denver. It won’t spread far.”

“I saw Mother Jones in Chicago,” said Mary, referring to a brave old labor leader who was an inspiration to them both. “She was hoping you would convince the Western Federation to join with eastern miners back in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.”

“So was I.”

“She said that since all the mines are owned by Wall Street operators, the unions should strike simultaneously. The operators are national. We should be national.”

“Did you say you just got into Denver this evening?”

Mary looked him straight in the face. “What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say that wasn’t you who derailed the ore train.”

“Why?”

“You could have been killed.”

“You could have been killed in Gleasonburg.”

“I would have been if that young miner hadn’t come to my rescue, but that is not the point.”

“Miner hell!” said Mary. “Isaac Bell is a Pinkerton.”

Jim Higgins could not believe his ears. “He can’t be. That’s not possible.”

“I saw with my own eyes.”

“Did he say he’s a Pinkerton?”

“Well, not in so many words. He claimed to be a Van Dorn.”

“There’s a big difference,” Jim argued. “Pinkertons provide strikebreakers to break unionist heads and protect scabs. I’ve never seen Van Dorns doing that. They are a cut above.”

“Have you ever heard of a Van Dorn working for the union?” Mary fired back.

“Bell helped you get out of West Virginia, didn’t he?”

“Bell was spying, brother. Bell tricked us. He’s no better than the rest of them.”

13

“Last stop, gents,” said Isaac Bell as the trolley from Morgantown bounced into Gleasonburg. “Round up what you can before dark. Meet back here. Mr. Van Dorn will buy us supper in that saloon,” he added, indicating Reilly’s, where Mary had wangled coffee.

“What I most enjoy about detecting work is the opportunity to travel,” said Mack Fulton, gazing upon Main Street’s unpainted company houses, goats chewing bark from dying trees, piles of broken rock and coal dust, and muddy hillsides logged to ragged stumps for propping timber.

“To see new sights,” said Wally Kisley.

“Broadening our horizons— Get the bags, Archie.”

Wish Clarke passed their bags to the redheaded apprentice but held on to the heaviest, an usually long, reinforced carpetbag that made a muted clank when he set it on the ground.

“Looks like they burned down the jail.” He winked at Isaac Bell. “Most of the courthouse, too. Is that how you cut loose of the lynch mob?”

“I had some help from a lady— O.K., gents, let’s get moving.”

Mack Fulton asked, “Who gets Archie?”

“You two,” answered Bell, and said to Archie, “Help them up stairs and crossing streets.”

Wish Clarke headed for the company store.

Isaac Bell went to the mouth of Gleason Mine No. 1. No longer disguised as a miner, he presented the Pinkerton in charge of the guards a letter of introduction he had not yet used that identified him as a Van Dorn Agency detective working for Gleason.

“What the hell is this supposed to mean? We don’t need no detectives. We’re the detectives.”

“It’s signed by Black Jack himself, and it means you’re ordered to give any Van Dorn who asks for one a safety light and get out of his way. I’m asking for one.”

They brought him the light. They were edgy, he thought, less cock of the walk, less inclined to bully. “Where you going with this?”

“A walk,” said Bell. “Come along if you like,” knowing the Pinkerton would never enter the mine.

“The miners are talking strike.”

“When did that start?” Bell asked, recalling Jim Higgins’s promise There’s more where I came from.

“Damned fools are takin’ the bit in their teeth. Whole town’s about to blow sky-high. Wouldn’t be surprised if some of them took a swing at you.”

“I’ll run the risk,” said Bell. He carried the light through the timbered portal and hurried straight down the haulageway.

The ventilators were running, and he could hear the clatter of hundreds of miners picking in the galleries, the muffled screech of electric drills, and the occasional heavy crump of dynamite tearing open the seam. He recognized the doorboy he had helped out after the wreck and waved. The child did not know Bell in his sack suit and fedora and looked frightened that he had drawn the attention of a detective.

Bell stopped and pressed a small gold piece into the boy’s grimy hand. He stared at it with a combination of disbelief and terror. “It’s O.K.,” Bell assured him. “My grandfather left me a few bucks. You can keep it or give it to your mother and father.”

“I don’t got no father.”

“Give it to your mother.”

He started down. The boy called after him, “Are you a Pinkerton, mister?”

“No. I’m a Van Dorn.”

“Wow,” said the boy, willing, Bell noted ruefully, to accept a distinction that Mary Higgins had not.

He continued down the sloping passage to the end. The wrecked train had been removed and the tunnel dug deeper into the seam. Bell worked his way back up to the lowest gallery, then counted up four props and felt behind the fourth for the crack where he had hidden the broken bridle link.

Wally Kisley was deep in conversation with a miner for whom he had bought a schooner of beer in the dirtiest saloon he could recall when the man suddenly clammed up. Young Archie, who was doing a good job of standing around not appearing to be on lookout, rapped a warning on the bar, and Kisley looked up to see a pair of Gleason company cops sashay in like they owned the place.

They walked straight up to him, said “Get out of here” to the miner, who scooted away without finishing his beer. Then one said to Kisley, “That’s the ugliest suit of clothes I ever seen on a man.”

Wally Kisley studied his checkerboard coat sleeve as if seeing it for the first time.

The second cop said, “Looks like a clown suit.”

Wally Kisley remained silent. The first cop noticed Archie Abbott and said, “What the hell are you looking at?”

The tall, young redhead answered slowly and distinctly, “I am looking at absolutely nothing.”

“What did you say to me?”

“Let me revise that, if I may,” said Archie, staring back. “If it were possible to look at less than nothing, then you would provide the opportunity to look at less than nothing.”

Wally Kisley laughed. “Kid, you’re a blessing in disguise.”

“What?” said the cop.

The barkeep, who had been listening anxiously, left the room.

Wally replied conversationally, “My young redheaded friend sees the joke in the fact that a man who is so ugly his face would stop a clock would criticize the appearance of my garb.”

The cop pulled a blackjack, and his partner pulled his.

“Enough,” said Mack Fulton, materializing from a chair in a dark corner with a Smith & Wesson rock-steady in his hand. “Vamoose!”

Four Gleason cops and two Pinkerton detectives caught up with the Van Dorns in Reilly’s Saloon.

Kisley and Fulton and Wish Clarke and Archie Abbott were sharing a bottle while waiting for Isaac Bell. Archie was playing the piano, a dusty upright not too badly out of tune, and Mack and Wally were harmonizing in full-blown Weber-and-Fields style on the new Chicago hit, “If Money Talks, It Ain’t On Speaking Terms With Me.”

The cops and detectives walked in with pistols drawn.

Reilly vanished into his back office. The miners at the plank-and-barrel bar, who had been talking boldly about rumors of a strike, tossed back their whiskeys and hurried out the door.

Wally and Mack kept singing: “If money talks, it ain’t on speaking terms with me…”

Wish Clarke said, “If you boys are waving those firearms at us, you seem to be forgetting that the Van Dorn Agency is working for the Gleason Consolidated Coal & Coke Company, hired personally by Black Jack Gleason, who feared, with ample evidence to back him, that you boys were not up to detecting saboteurs.”

“Not for long,” a beefy West Virginia company cop drawled back. “Word is, company’s fixing to fire you all soon as Mr. Gleason returns from New York City.”

Kisley sipped whiskey and glanced at Fulton.

Fulton sipped whiskey and glanced at Wish Clarke.

Wish Clarke drained his glass, refilled it, and said, “When and if Mr. Gleason decides to terminate our employment, we may go home. Or, we may continue to enjoy the pleasures of fair Gleasonburg like the free citizens of America we are. In the meantime, we’re girding our loins for what this establishment claims will be supper. So if you boys care to gird with us, pull up a chair. If not, trundle on, and we’ll commence to eating.”

“You’re all under arrest.”

Wish Clarke said, “You can’t arrest us.”

“Why not?”

“Your jail burned down.”

Archie Abbott spewed a mouthful of whiskey in the sawdust.

The Pinkerton said, “We got temporary hoosegows lined up on a siding in case the miners take it in their damned fool heads to strike — old reefer cars for refrigerating meat. There’s one reserved for you boys ’til the judge gets around to filling out the papers. If you’re packing firearms, drop them while you can.”

Kisley, Fulton, and Clarke spread apart slightly, which neither the Pinkertons nor the Gleasons appeared to notice.

“You, too, Red. On your feet.”

Kisley said, “Do what he says, Archie.”

Archie rose from the piano stool, looking confused by the turn of events.

“Guns, Red. Drop ’em.”

“He doesn’t have any,” said Kisley. “He’s an apprentice. Van Dorns are not allowed to carry guns when they apprentice.”

The company cops snickered. “I bet none of you have guns, seeing as how you’re all looking like apprentices.”

14

“I have a gun.”

Isaac Bell glided out of the night with a double-barreled, sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun cocked in each hand. “In fact, I have two. Elevate, boys. Paws in the air.”

The Pinkerton said, “Fire those twelve-gauges one-handed, sonny, and you’ll make a comic sight kicked tail over teakettle.”

“You,” said Isaac Bell, “will be waiting in Hell for the next batch to come down and tell you who was laughing. Drop ’em and elevate!”

The wiser Pinkertons observed winter in the young detective’s eyes. They dropped their pistols and raised their hands. The Gleasons glowered and shrugged their shoulders.

“Drop ’em,” snapped a Pinkerton.

They obeyed reluctantly, and all six shuffled out of the saloon.

Mack Fulton gestured for Archie to pick up their guns. “Here’s your first lesson, Apprentice Archie. You know you’re close to something when they threaten to poke you in the snoot.”

“Close to what?” asked Wish Clarke. “Every miner I talked to — twenty at least — thinks that chain bridle broke of natural causes. They also indicated that if that poor union fellow walked in, they would hang him from the rafters. On the other hand, I noted a certain electricity in the air.”

“Fired up to strike?” asked Bell.

“Fired up for something, just not sure what. I think your courthouse conflagration strengthened their self-esteem.”

Fulton said, “They hate Gleason — taking particular umbrage at his steam yacht — and hate the cops, but they don’t blame either for the runaway. My impression is, they’ll strike only when they find someone to lead them.”

Wally Kisley said, “Pretty much what I heard, too. They think the wreck was an accident. Though a few men told me they blamed the company for double-jobbing what’s his name, Higgins. But Wish is right, Isaac burning down the courthouse seemed to give ’em guts.”

“I didn’t really burn it down,” said Bell.

“Well, you held the lady’s coat.”

Archie Abbott said, “A mechanician told me those chain bridles never break.”

“Probably the same feller who rigged it up,” said Mack Fulton, and the others laughed.

Isaac Bell tossed the broken bridle link on the table. It landed with a heavy thunk and did not bounce far. “What do you say, Wally? What do you think broke that?”

Wally inspected it carefully. He ran his finger along the edge. “I’ll be.”

“What?”

“Looks like someone smacked it with a cold chisel. You see where the blade cut half through it?”

Isaac Bell said, “I thought it was chiseled, too.”

“O.K. Now what?”

“It broke in plain sight of a hundred men who would have noticed a guy whacking it with a chisel.”

“I recall you saying that back in Pittsburgh. But look. It looks like it was cut with a chisel.”

“How?”

Kisley sat back and stroked his chin as if he were grooming a beard. “Several ways to drive a cold chisel through steel spring to mind. Whack it with a hammer.”

“Which didn’t happen,” said Mack Fulton.

“Persuade an eagle to drop the chisel from a hundred feet in the air.”

“Which didn’t happen.”

“Drive it with an explosive charge.”

Isaac watched a rare smile cross Mack Fulton’s grim face. “Which could have happened.”

“Isaac,” said Wish Clarke. “Do you recall hearing a charge explode?”

“I heard a heck of a bang. But how would you detonate it?”

“Fulminate of mercury blasting cap.”

“How would you attach the cap?”

Wally Kisley poked the link. Then he picked it up and smelled it. “Could have stuck it on with tar, I suppose.”

“Maybe just a short length of chisel.”

“Molded in a ball of tar— Mighty cumbersome, though. Mighty cumbersome…”

Wally Kisley stared silently out the saloon door into the dark street. Isaac Bell observed that the explosives expert was falling less and less in love with the concept of a dynamite-driven chisel.

Archie Abbott glanced at Bell and raised an eyebrow to ask what was going on. Bell motioned for Archie to join him at the bar. He explained quietly, “They’ve seen it all. They’re just trying to remember which applies.”

“How the heck old are they?”

“Who knows? Wally was already a top agent when he investigated the bomb that set off the Haymarket Riot. They’ve got to be over fifty.”

“Amazing,” Archie marveled.

Finally, slowly, like a newly lighted oil lamp gathering kerosene up into its wick, Wally’s face began to glow. He turned to Mack Fulton. “Mack, you know what’s on my mind?”

“Dynamite.”

“A great improvement over black powder, patented in 1867 by Alfred Nobel.”

“From which Alfred Nobel made so much dough — and felt so guilty for making it easier to kill people — that last year he handed out prizes of money to the best physicist, the best pacifist, the best poet, even the guy who invented X-rays.”

“You know who else should have won a prize last year?”

“Rosania,” said Fulton.

“Laurence Rosania.”

Isaac Bell and Wish Clarke exchanged a look.

Archie asked, “Who’s that?”

“Chicago safecracker,” answered Bell. “Jewel man.”

“Best dynamite man in the business,” said Kisley, his smile growing.

“Aces across the continent, too,” said Fulton, “since he’s taken up travel. If those other guys deserved that Nobel Prize and all that dough, so does he.”

Bell called from the bar, “What about Rosania? Do you see his hand in this?”

“No, no, no. He’s a jewel thief. Too fastidious a dude to muck around coal mines even if he was sabotage-minded, which he ain’t. But I am thinking about a job he pulled last year. Remember, Mack?”

“Shaped charge.”

“Sometimes called hollow charge.”

Bell and Archie rejoined the others at the table.

Mack said, “This politician bought himself a big safe with six-inch walls made of plates of iron and steel.”

“In the event,” Wally explained to Archie, “that a city contractor or a police chief or a sporting house proprietor had a sudden need to safeguard some cash and it was after banking hours, this politician would help out by holding it for them in his safe.”

Archie nodded.

“Performing a public service.”

“Some safecracker,” Mack continued, “tried to blow it. Seeing six-inch walls, the yegg applied enough dynamite to blast the roof off the politician’s house. Which it did, but only dented the safe. Barely scratched it. A while later, along comes Rosania. He’s caught wind that the politician purchased diamonds for his girl. Rosania blows a hole in the six-inch walls big enough to stick his hand in. Like it was made of cardboard. And no one even heard the explosion.”

“How’d he do it?” asked Bell.

“Rosania’s one of those fellows who’s always got his nose in a book,” said Fulton.

Kisley said, “He read about this scientist at the Naval Torpedo Station up in Newport, Rhode Island, who came up with this big idea called a hollow charge. Sometimes they call it a shaped charge ’cause where you make it hollow, the direction its hollow points is the direction where the explosion goes. Instead of blowing off the politician’s new roof, Rosania drove all that dynamite in the exact direction he wanted, straight through the wall of the safe. Quiet little poof. Four-inch hole.”

“Did he get the diamonds?” asked Archie Abbott.

Mack Fulton looked at the apprentice incredulously. “What? No, he got diamond dust and diamond flakes.”

“I thought diamonds were indestructible.”

“So did Rosania,” said Mack Fulton.

Wally Kisley laughed. “Clearly, the safecracking classes have some experimenting still to do. But, Isaac, if your saboteur found a way to stick a hollow charge to the chain bridle, he wouldn’t need a big bunch of sticks of dynamite you’d spot a mile off. Fact is, I don’t think he used a cold chisel at all. I think that hollow charge did the job all by itself. What you heard, Isaac, was a small charge of dynamite blowing all in one direction straight at this link — so concentrated that it sheared the chain like a chisel.”

“But how long would the charge stick to the chain? Jerking around like it does.”

Kisley shrugged. “Not long. Maybe he wired it on. You said you never found that shackle. I bet he packed the entire charge inside the shackle.”

Mack Fulton said, “Maybe you couldn’t find the shackle because all that was left was shackle chips and shackle dust.”

Bell stared at Fulton. For a second he felt the floor shift under him. Like a dream remembered days later, he could almost see a pair of golden eyes, wolf eyes, from which exploded a fist. The white-damp dream in which he thought he had seen the shackle he never found. He shook his head, wondering how to unscramble tangled memory, and pressed on. “It doesn’t take much shaking to explode fulminate of mercury. How long before the winch jerking the wire set off the detonator?”

“Minutes at most.”

“Which meant the saboteur was in the mine when he attached the explosive.”

“Had to be. Slapped it on with a wad of tar last minute as the train went by.”

“A cool customer, knowing the train might come crashing back at him before he could get out.”

“Mighty cool,” Wish Clarke agreed. “Knowing it was coming gave him a certain leg up to get out of the way. Still, you gotta hand it to him. A cool customer.”

“Who knows his business,” said Wally Kisley.

“All of which supports young Isaac’s contention,” said Wish Clarke. “With the timing of the explosion unpredictable, what union man would perpetrate such an act knowing it could kill his brother miners?”

“It does make you wonder what he’ll think of next time.”

“This calls for a drink,” said Wish Clarke, emptying the bottle into his glass. “Wally’s right, we are onto something.”

“Until Gleason fires us.”

“When Gleason fires us,” said Bell, “I’ll try and talk Mr. Van Dorn into letting us stay on.”

“I wouldn’t count on that.”

The food arrived, and Isaac Bell’s squad began debating what it had been before the cook got ahold of it. Wish Clarke took his glass to the bar. He motioned for Bell to join him.

“If you want us to keep looking for your provocateur, steer clear of the telegraph office.”

“Why?”

“And if you see a boy coming your way with a telegram, run like hell. The Boss can’t order you to stop if he can’t find you.”

Bell grinned. “Thanks, Wish. Good advice.”

“Want some more?”

“What?”

“Next time you shave, why not leave off the region encompassed by your lip and nose?”

“Grow a mustache?”

“You’ll look a mite older with a mustache. Make the opposition take you seriously.”

Bell grinned again proudly. “Those Pinkertons took me seriously. They dropped their guns like they were red-hot.”

“Indeed they did,” said Wish, draining his glass. “Although it could be argued that what they took seriously was a brace of double-barreled twelve-gauges.”

“You always told me, the sure way to win a knife fight is bring a gun. They had so many pistols, I reckoned I needed scatterguns.”

“You reckoned correctly, no doubt about it, Isaac. But speaking for the group, I can assure you that we’re all mightily pleased we didn’t end up with hides full of buckshot, which is always a possibility with so much firepower on the property… Mr. Reilly probably feels the same about his piano… At any rate, it’s worth considering whether a thick old mustache might obviate the need for brandishing artillery in the first place.”

He signaled the barkeep for another bottle.

“Thirsty today?” asked Bell.

Wish Clarke smiled, amiably. “How observant you are, Isaac. You’d make a good detective.”

“Hey, mister? Mister?”

A boy was whispering from the door.

“Get out of here!” bellowed Reilly. “No kids in my saloon.”

Isaac Bell recognized the doorboy he’d given a coin to. “It’s O.K., Reilly. I’ll look out for him. Come in, son. What’s going on?”

The boy glanced fearfully behind him and slunk inside. He had a cloth sack clutched to his chest. The sight of four Van Dorns glowering at their supper plates stopped him in his tracks. Bell shepherded him to a corner table. “Reilly, would you have a sarsaparilla back there?”

“The only thing I got that ain’t booze is coffee.”

“Do you like coffee?”

The boy nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“O.K., we’ll take coffee. Lots of sugar. Make it two. What’s your name, son?”

“Luke.”

“I’m Isaac, Luke.” He offered his hand and the boy took it politely. “What can I do for you?”

“Are you really a Van Dorn?”

“Yes, I am. So are those gents at the table.”

“All of ’em?”

“Any particular reason you ask, Luke?”

The boy nodded. “I didn’t tell you the truth about my father.”

“You said you don’t have a father.”

“I do have a father.”

“Good. Where is he?”

Luke looked around and whispered, “Hiding from the cops.”

“Why’s that?”

“The union sent more organizers from Pennsylvania.”

Bell nodded, recalling, again, Jim Higgins’s promise that union men would replace him.

“The cops caught one and beat names out of him.” Luke’s lips started trembling, and Bell saw him stare at the table as if imagining his father smashed to his knees in a hail of fists and blackjacks.

“Whose names, Luke? Your father’s?”

“Somebody warned him. He got away.”

“What’s that smell?” called Wally Kisley.

“That’s your supper,” said Mack Fulton.

“Not these buffalo chips. I smell something good. Hey, boy, what’s in that sack?”

Luke clutched his bag tighter.

Bell whispered, “Is that for your dad?”

“Yes, sir,” Luke whispered back. “From my mother.”

“Why’d you come here?”

“I thought if you’re private detectives, maybe…”

His voice trailed off.

“Maybe what, Luke?”

“Maybe I could hire you to protect him from the cops. Or at least help him get away?”

“Detectives cost a lot of money,” Bell said gently.

“I don’t have any money — excepting what you gave me. But I’m wondering if maybe I could trade something.”

“Like what?”

“Like things I heard.”

“Things you heard where?”

“Jake’s Saloon, where the cops hang out…”

“Does Jake allow boys in his saloon?”

“We climb up from the river, under the cellar, and we can hear ’em yelling upstairs.”

Wally called, “What do you have in that sack, boy?”

“Fatback and biscuits and baked taters, sir.”

The Van Dorns looked at their plates, then at Luke’s sack.

“I have an idea,” said Wally Kisley.

“No,” said Isaac Bell. “Luke’s got a job to do, delivering supper. And we’re going to help him.”

Truculent expressions on the faces of his men told Bell that he had a rebellion on his hands if he didn’t think quick. “Gents: Wally and Mack and Archie are going to the company store to buy fatback and flour and lard and coffee and sugar and milk and butter and potatoes, which they will carry to Luke’s mother and pay her five dollars to rustle up a couple of days’ worth of fatback, biscuits, and baked taters.”

“What are you and Wish doing while all that shopping and cooking and waiting is going on? Eating the kid’s?”

“Wish and I will provide Luke with an escort.”

James Congdon’s secretary carried a single sheet of paper into his office and laid it on his desk. “I’m sorry for the delay, sir. Detective Clay’s code is complicated.”

Congdon read it, twice.

“Are you sure you deciphered it correctly?”

“Absolutely, sir. It is complicated but consistent.”

Congdon read it again.

“Shall I take down your reply, sir?”

“No reply.”

“Yes, Judge Congdon. Is there anything else?”

“Yes.” Congdon named three stockbrokers who regularly bid for him in secret. “Tell them to buy up every share of Gleason Consolidated as they become available.”

The secretary, a sly co-conspirator with an encyclopedic knowledge of Wall Street, had been privy to Judge Congdon’s schemes long before the financier hammered together U.S. Steel. “I was not aware that Black Jack is selling.”

“His heirs are building mansions and buying yachts and private cars. They’re deep in debt, greedy, and impatient.”

“But are they in a position to sell? Gleason keeps a tight rein on his stock.”

Congdon read Henry Clay’s wire, again to be absolutely sure what the private detective was promising in veiled language. He said, “His heirs will be in a position to sell. What do we know about Gleason’s lawyers?”

As they were discussing heirs and inheritance, Congdon’s secretary said, “There was the incident concerning the probate engrossment of the Widow O’Leary’s supposed will — yet to be resolved — which weighs heavily on their firm.”

“To be resolved by whom?”

“It is still in probate court.”

“Perfect. Resolve it for them.”

“That should make the lawyers grateful,” said Congdon’s secretary — understanding in a flash that they were discussing the expeditious execution of Black Jack Gleason’s will when he finally shuffled off to that heavenly coalfield in the sky. Understanding, too, that that voyage to the other side might commence sooner than Gleason expected, the secretary calculated to the penny the bribe that the probate judge would accept.

“Is there anything else, Judge Congdon?”

“Transfer all Gleason stock to a holding company with no traceable connection to my interests.”

“What do you want done with Gleason’s managers?”

“They can keep their jobs so long as every last bushel of Gleason coal is barged to my Amalgamated Coal Terminal.”

15

“Hold on, Isaac,” said Wish. “Are you sure you want to be taking sides in this dustup?”

The cave where Luke’s father was hiding in the woods up the mountain had been chosen for its view of the approach up the logged slopes, and when Bell asked whether his father was armed, Luke said he had a squirrel rifle, so he had sent the boy ahead to alert him that they were coming.

“We’re not taking sides,” he told Wish. “Mr. Van Dorn stressed that point when we spoke. But he also warned me not to get caught in the middle, and the best way to do that is stay ahead of both sides. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Couldn’t have put it better myself.”

“Here comes the boy.”

Luke led them the final hundred yards up the logged slope and into the cave, which Bell surmised, by its timber propping, was actually an old mining hole cut into the side of the hill by backwoodsmen digging for fuel to heat their cabins long before the Gleason Consolidated Coal & Coke Company commenced its commercial venture. Zeke, Luke’s father, could not risk lighting a fire. He had a thin blanket for the cold, and he tore hungrily into the biscuits, after first asking whether Bell and Wish had eaten and they answered that they had. Between bites he explained that union men were coming from Pennsylvania and that he and scores of others were going to join them and call a strike.

Sounds drifted faintly up the mountain — the chug of a locomotive across the river, a steamboat whistle, bursts of raucous laughter from the saloons, and, once, the clang of the trolley. The ill-lit Gleasonburg itself appeared as a distant glow, softer than the thin moonlight filtered by river mists.

Bell said, “Luke, maybe you ought to tell your father what you told me you overheard.”

“What’s that, boy?”

“The cops said the scabs are coming.”

“What scabs? From where?”

“Italians and Poles.”

“Then we’ll block the trolley. Maybe even get the Brotherhoods to stop the trains.”

“I’m afraid it won’t be that easy,” said Bell. “What Luke heard suggests that the company will barge them up the river from Pittsburgh.”

“That’s not possible.”

“That’s what they said.”

“Well, that just plain ain’t possible. We haven’t even begun to strike. What would give them the idea to bring scabs? How could they know our plans? We just made ’em. Now, what are you Van Dorn fellows doing here?”

Isaac Bell said, “Do you need our help?”

“What kind of help? Fighting strikebreakers? We can barely feed ourselves. How we gonna pay your fees?”

Luke said, “Pa, I asked them to help you get away.”

“I can’t go away, son. I gotta stay here. The fight is here.”

“But—”

“No buts.”

“But the Pinkertons said they’re calling up militia if you strike.”

“I hope that’s not true.”

Isaac Bell cocked his ear. He heard a strange sound and stepped out of the cave to hear better. Wish followed. “What the heck is that?”

“Sounds like music.”

It grew slightly louder, as if climbing on the vapors from far below.

“I’ll be,” said Wish. “Recognize that?”

Bell picked up the tune and sang softly.

“You can hear them sigh and wish to die,

You can see them wink the other eye

At the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.”

The source was a mystery. None of the plank-and-barrel saloons had the means to hire orchestras. It certainly was not Reilly’s upright. Bell heard violins and horns, in addition to a piano, clarinets, and a double bass. And while there was no denying there were brothels in Gleasonburg, no one had the money to support a dance hall.

“There,” he said. “Look on the water.”

A steam yacht rounded a bend in the river. It was lighted end to end by electricity, its windows and portholes casting more light than the town and the moon combined. Bell recognized the clean and graceful lines of a Herreshoff, a magnificent boat built in Rhode Island. He was too far away to see the orchestra, but he could hear the musicians finish playing “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” and then jump smoothly into Joplin’s “Easy Winners.”

“I’ll bet that’s Gleason’s steam yacht. The Monongahela.”

“I wouldn’t mind being at that party,” said Wish.

“What’s that following it?” asked Bell.

A dark form, much longer than the steam yacht and four times as wide, crept after it. Only when it had completely rounded the bend could they see the lights of a towboat pushing a score of barges lashed together.

The orchestra bounced to the new hit “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?”

A loud steam whistle drowned out the music. The tow turned ponderously across the current and headed toward the barge dock.

Luke and his father had followed them out of the cave. “Barge tow,” said Zeke. “Empties coming back from Pittsburgh.”

Bell focused his keen eyes on the tow as it neared the barge dock. It was difficult to see for sure, but he sensed curious ripples of motion within the barges, like cattle boats landing for slaughter. “They’re not empty.”

“Who the heck barges coal up the river?”

“They’re not carrying coal… They’re full of men.”

Bell looked at Wish and the two detectives shook their heads in amazement. The strikers would have their hands full. While they were still getting organized, Black Jack Gleason’s yacht had escorted scab labor straight to their back door.

Luke said, “Oh, Pa, I’m powerful sorry.”

Zeke stood there, shoulders bowed, and felt blindly for his son’s hand.

The Monongahela stationed herself in the middle of the river. The steamboat pushed the barges against the dock, and soon Bell saw lanterns bobbing as the Gleason police began herding the men off the barges and up Dock Street.

“What—”

A white flash in the middle of the river lit the water from shore to shore and etched the surrounding hills as stark as snow. It cast a diamond brilliance on the tipple that towered over the shantytown, on a tow of laden coal barges moored to the tipple pier, and on the scabs shuffling ashore — a thousand workmen clutching bundles — their startled faces whipped to the sudden burst of light.

Isaac Bell fixed on its source and saw the Monongahela’s superstructure jump straight up in the air. Cabins, navigation bridge, and smokestack parted from the steam yacht’s sleek hull. For half a second, they appeared to float.

16

A thunderous double salvo roared like battleship guns.

Isaac Bell, high above the river, felt the heat of the explosion on his face.

Then silence and darkness settled on the water, the town, and the hills. The music had stopped. Jagged flames pierced the dark. The yacht’s hull was burning.

“What happened?” cried Luke.

“Her boiler blew,” said Zeke. “The Good Lord has intervened! He has struck that Satan dead.”

Isaac Bell exchanged dubious glances with Wish Clarke.

The younger detective spoke first. “That one-two punch sounded like someone lent the Good Lord a hand with a hundred pounds of dynamite. First the dynamite, then the boiler.”

“Isaac, old son,” said Aloysius Clarke. “I do believe you’re getting the hang of your line.”

“We better get down there and lend a hand.”

Bell discovered as he and Wish pushed their way onto the dock that the Polish and Italian scabs had not been imported from their home countries. Nor had the numerous black men come directly from the South. They had been rounded up from the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, where an anthracite strike had shut down the hard-coal mines. Those he talked to were stunned by the explosion, bewildered, and afraid.

“They didn’t tell us nothing about the union.”

“They just said there was jobs.”

In the middle of the river, the steamboat that had brought the scab tow was circling the burning remains of the Monongahela, playing lights on the water, looking for survivors. Suddenly, her whistle shrieked an alarm.

“Now what?” asked Wish.

Bell pointed upstream where the tipple loomed darkly against the night sky. “Coal barges adrift.”

The entire tow that had been moored to the tipple pier — a fleet of twenty loaded barges lashed together — wheeled ponderously into the river and picked up speed as the powerful current dragged it downstream.

“How in heck did they break loose?”

“First thing I’ll ask, come morning,” said Isaac Bell.

Wish said, “Amazing how many things went wrong at once.”

Isaac Bell’s eyes shot from the drifting tow to the burning yacht to the bewildered scabs milling on the dock to the steamboat, whose captain had stopped his engine to let the current sweep him away from the wreck.

“Too many things. And I have a bad hunch it isn’t over.”

When the boat was a safe distance from any possible survivors still in the water, her big stern wheel churned, and she raced to capture the drifting coal barges. Deckhands scrambled with lines and the steamboat tied on. Stern wheel thrashing the water, she swung the lead barges into the current to master the tow.

“He’s got her,” said Wish. “Captain’s a man to ride the river with.”

Just as he spoke, the big steamboat exploded with a colossal double roar that toppled her chimneys and wheelhouse into the river. To Bell’s ear, the double roar echoed the one-two that destroyed the Monongahela.

But unlike the yacht, which was still drifting and on fire, the big steamboat sank straight to the bottom, leaving the wreckage of her upper decks exposed. The current slammed the coal barges against her, ripping their wooden hulls. Within minutes, twenty had sunk, blocking the channel to Pittsburgh.

“My provocateur,” said Isaac Bell, “is getting the hang of his line, too.”

17

A pipe organ dominated the front room of bloom House, the finest mansion in Pittsburgh. The dining room, ablaze in candle- and electric light, seated thirty-six comfortably. Livery servants glided in with silver trays from a distant kitchen. But R. Kenneth Bloom, the father of Isaac Bell’s school friend Kenny, did not look happy. Nor, Bell observed, did his dinner guests, Bloom’s fellow coal barons, railroad magnates, and steel tycoons, whose evening clothes glittered with diamond studs and cuff links.

Bloom Sr., red-faced and carrying too much weight to be healthy, planted both hands on the snow-white cloth in order to stand up from his chair. He raised his glass.

“I won’t say I liked him. But he was one of ours. Gentlemen, I give you Black Jack Gleason— Struck down by the union! May he rest in peace.”

“Rest in peace!” thundered up and down the long table.

“And may the unionists burn in Hell!” echoed back.

Isaac Bell touched water to his lips.

Kenny Bloom, in line to inherit half the anthracite coal in Pennsylvania from his mother, and control of the Reading Railroad and vast bituminous fields from his father, winked at Bell. “We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” he muttered. “But, if we did, the things we could say.” He drank deeply. “I’m so glad you came, Isaac. These dinners get mighty grim.”

“Thank you for inviting me.”

Kenny grinned, “Didn’t give me much choice, did you, Mr. Make-Believe Insurance Man?”

“I do appreciate it.”

Halfway up the table, Pennsylvania’s attorney general raised his voice. “The union will pay for this outrage. Steamboats dynamited. Innocent workingmen, attempting to travel to Gleasonburg to get an honest job, injured. River blocked. Coal traffic at a standstill.”

“And Gleason murdered.”

“That, too. Yes, sir, the rabid dogs will pay.”

Kenny said to Bell, “They should, and they will, but he’s talking through his hat because West Virginia’s attorney general gets first crack, seeing as how they killed Black Jack in their state.”

“I’m not convinced,” said Bell, “that the union had anything to do with it.”

The military precision of back-to-back dynamitings simultaneous with the barge tow set adrift seemed to him far beyond the capability of the union organizers, who were scrambling to keep one step ahead of the Pinkertons. Inspections of the steamboat boiler rooms had increased his skepticism.

But Kenny, who had been hitting the whiskey before dinner, didn’t hear him. He was boasting instead to everyone at their end of the table about events in the anthracite fields. “So we mounted a Gatling gun on the back of a Mercedes Simplex and welded on steel plates to protect the driver.”

“Did it work?”

“Did it work? I’ll say it worked,” Kenny snickered. “The strikers call it the Death Special.”

At the top of the table, Bloom Sr. was addressing the strikers’ demands.

“The eight-hour workday will be the ruination of the coal business.”

“Hear! Hear!”

“And I’ve heard more than enough nonsense about safety. The miner has only himself to blame if he doesn’t keep his workplace in safe condition.”

Another baron agreed. “It’s not my fault if he refuses to mine his coal properly, scrape down dangerous slate, and install proper timbering.”

“Risk is naturally attached to the trade. Fact is, with prices tumbling, we’ll be lucky to stay in business.”

Bell noticed a perplexed expression on the face of an older mine operator, who called up table, “The iniquitous price we’re paying to ship coal isn’t helping either.”

Bloom Sr. returned a tight smile. “The railroad’s hands are tied, Mr. Morrison.”

“By whom, sir? Surely not the government?”

“Them, too, but it’s not like we don’t report to our investors.”

“There you go blaming Wall Street again. Didn’t used to, in my day. We called our own tune. If the banks wanted to make money, they were welcome to invest with us. But they did not presume to tell us how to dig coal or how to ship it.”

“Well, sir, these are different days.”

Isaac Bell noticed Kenny observing his father with a thoughtful, if not troubled, expression. “Sounds like you’ll have your work cut out for you when it’s your turn to run the railroad.”

“What makes you think I will run the railroad?”

“You’re his son, his only son, and you’ve been working with him since you left Brown.”

“I’d like nothing better,” said Kenny. “And I’m trying my darnedest to learn as fast as I can. But it may not be my choice.”

“Surely your father prefers you.”

“Of course he does. That was settled the day I graduated. But what if they don’t?”

“They?” asked Bell, though he suspected the answer already.

“The banks.”

Bell glanced up the table at Mr. Bloom. Behind the boasts and the bluster, even the rich and powerful railroad president R. Kenneth Bloom, Sr., was not in command of coal.

“Which banks?” he asked.

“The New York banks.”

“Which ones?”

Kenny shrugged.

“You don’t know?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

Bell leveled a stern gaze at the railroad heir. “Not at liberty? You sound like a cautious lawyer instead of the pal who ran off to the circus with me.”

“That almost got us killed.”

“Did you have a good time?”

“Yes.”

“Which banks?”

Kenny Bloom grinned. He looked, Bell thought, drunk, embarrassed, and a little scared. “Let me answer your nosy question this way — in a question back at you. Do you believe that the formation of the U.S. Steel Corporation is an end or a beginning?”

“End or beginning of what?”

“We’re dodo birds out here, Isaac. The self-determined Pittsburgh operator is going extinct. So’s the independent railroad that hauls coal. Wall Street is killing us off. Black Jack Gleason was a dodo. So’s every man at this table. Some of them just don’t know it yet.”

“Not you. You’re young. You’re like me. It’s 1902. We’re just starting out.”

Kenny Bloom stuck out his hand. “Shake hands with the son of a dodo.”

Bell formed a grin as lopsided as Kenny’s and shook his hand.

Kenny said, “If you’re so fired up to know which banks, look in the newspapers who made Carnegie and Frick into U.S. Steel.”

Bell’s father was a banker, a Boston banker. Boston was a long way from New York, and the two cities banked differently. But some things were the same. And if there was one thing Isaac Bell had learned from his father, and his grandfather, about banks, it was those who called the tune lay low.

He said, “It won’t be in the newspapers. Those who ran the show stayed backstage.”

Kenny pulled an embossed card from his pocket and pressed it into Bell’s hand. “Here’s a rail pass, good anywhere in the country. Go to Boston. Ask your father which banks.”

“We are not on speaking terms,” said Bell.

“Because you’re a detective?”

“He wants me in the bank.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Be a detective.”

“That is too bad. He is a good fellow.”

“I know,” said Bell. “He is the best.” He held up the pass. “O.K. if I keep this?”

“Your grandfather left you plenty. You can afford to buy a ticket.”

“I would like to keep it,” said Bell. “Money talks. But a railroad pass from the son of a dodo shouts.”

The servants removed the oyster shells and the soup bowls and brought caviar, herring, and pâté. Bell switched from champagne to a sauterne. Kenny stayed with his whiskey.

“Are you going to buy Gleason’s mines?” Bell asked him.

“Somebody beat us to it. Snapped up the entire Gleason Consolidated Coal & Coke Company, lock, stock, and barrel.”

“Who?”

“I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

“But not a Pittsburgh dodo,” said Isaac Bell.