The Striker

32

Isaac Bell rejoined his squad in Pittsburgh. After he had filled in Wally Kisley, Mack Fulton, and Archie Abbott on events in New York, Archie parroted a favorite Weber and Fields saying:

“A poke in the snoot means you’re getting close.”

“If we were close,” said Bell, “we would know what Henry Clay is going to do next. But we don’t have a clue. Nor do we know who gives him his orders. All we know is, we have a bloody-minded provocateur serving a ruthless boss.”

Dressed like a wealthy Southern banker, in a white suit, a straw planter’s hat, and rose-tinted glasses, Henry Clay pretended to admire the launchways of the bankrupt Held & Court Shipyard of Cincinnati. Scores of rails ran side by side down a muddy slope into the Ohio River, and the owner of the yard— foppish young Mr. Court Held, who was anxious to borrow money or sell out, or both — boasted that his family had been launching side-paddle steamers and stern-wheelers down those rails for sixty years.

“Ah suppose you-all have the hang of it by now?” said Clay, laying a Deep South drawl on thick as he pleased. Not only was Court Held desperate, but repeated intermarriage among the founding families had bequeathed his generation the brainpower of a gnat.

“Yes, sir. In fact, crane your neck around that bend and you’ll see fine examples of our product.”

Henry Clay had already looked around that bend.

“I would like very much to see a large steamboat.”

Held & Court had two of the biggest paddleboats left over from the steamboat age that ended when fast, modern railroads rendered leisurely travel passé. Nimbler Cincinnati shipyards still boomed, launching by the hundreds utilitarian stern-wheelers that pushed coal barge tows. Numerous such workboats were churning the river white as Clay and the yard owner walked across the yard for a look around the bend. But Held & Court had persisted in building giant floating palaces until the last grand Mississippi riverboat companies went under.

“Behold, sir. Vulcan King and White Lady.”

They towered over their wharf. Four tall decks of painted wood, polished metal, and cut glass were heaped upon broad, flat hulls three hundred feet long. Topping their decks were glass pilothouses near the front, and soaring about the pilothouses were twin black chimneys with flaring tops. Each boat was propelled by a giant stern wheel forty feet in diameter and fifty feet wide.

“We installed the latest triple expansion engines.”

The White Lady was appropriately white.

“She’s the prettier one, don’t you think? A brag boat, sure as shootin’.”

The Vulcan King was painted a dull blue-gray color. It was this more somber of the vessels that had brought Henry Clay to Cincinnati.

“Which has the reinforced decks?”

“Where’d you hear about reinforced decks?” the owner demanded. “That’s a government secret.”

Henry Clay returned a smile much colder than his drawl. “Ah believe a United States senatah acquaintance confided War Department plans to dispatch a shallow-water gunboat to Cuba. Although it could have been my friend the admiral who told me about the cannon and the Maxim gun.”

“Well, then, you know the sad story,” said the shipyard owner. “A darn shame that the Spanish War ended too soon. We were just fixing to mount the cannon when the War Department canceled the order.”

“Which boat?”

“Vulcan King. The Navy said she couldn’t be white, so we found this gray paint.”

“How much are you asking for her?”

The young heir blinked. No one had offered to buy a steamboat from Held & Court since the aborted gunboat scheme and that was four years past. “Are you saying you want to buy her?”

“Ah’d consider it if the price is right.”

“Well, now. The Vulcan King cost the better part of four hundred thousand dollars to build.” He glanced at Clay and appeared to decide that this banker with friends in high places knew too much of her history to be fleeced.

“We would accept a rock-bottom price of seventy-five thousand.”

Clay asked, “Can you have her coaled by morning and steam up?”

“I could certainly try.”

“Try?” Clay asked with a wintry scowl.

“Yes, sir! I’m sure I can do that. Coaled and steam up tomorrow morning.”

“Throw in the cannon and the Maxim, and you’ve got a deal.”

“What do you want her guns for?”

“Scrap steel,” said Henry Clay with a straight face. “Defray the cost of a paint job.”

“Mighty fine idea. She’ll look her best in white.”

Black, thought Henry Clay. Her gigantic stern wheel would thrash the river white. But while she steamed up the Ohio River to Pittsburgh, his crew would paint the Vulcan King black as the coal that fired her boilers.

The strikers who marched down the Monongahela River had cursed the cruel and heartless owners for abusing them with Clay’s Cyclops. Terror bred anger. Hotheads shouted down the moderates, and the miners’ Defense Committee had armed themselves, spending their meager treasury on repeating rifles. How rabidly would they rage at the grim sight of an evil-looking Vulcan King steaming up their river? How angrily would they seize the gauntlet thrown in their faces? How violently would they defend their tent city?

So violently — Henry Clay had promised Judge James Congdon, who had balked initially at buying a steamboat — so rabidly, that law-abiding Americans would offer grateful prayers in their church pews: God bless the mineowners for mounting Maxim guns and cannon to protect them from the mob. And newspapers would thunder, commanding the defenders of property to pull out all stops to crush the socialists before labor tore the nation asunder with a second civil war.

Court Held cleared his throat.

“As ‘steam up’ implies, you intend to leave Cincinnati tomorrow. May I ask how do you intend to pay for her?”

Other than having satchels bulging with cash, it was always difficult to pony up an enormous sum of money in a distant city. It was even harder to do it quickly and anonymously. But there was a way. “Obviously, I don’t expect you to accept a check that would not clear until after I steam away. I can offer railroad bearer bonds in denominations of twenty-five thousand dollars.”

The shipbuilder looked uncomfortable. Bearer bonds were, in theory, negotiable as ready cash and a lot less cumbersome, but the holder had to hope that they were neither forgeries nor issued by an entity no longer in business.

“Would the issuing agent happen to have a branch office here in Cincinnati?”

Clay would prefer not to appear in that office, but he had no choice. “Thibodeau & Marzen have a branch in Cincinnati. Why don’t we go there now? They’ll guarantee the good faith of the issuer, and you can get the bonds locked up safely in your bank.”

“Would Thibodeau & Marzen redeem them immediately?”

“I don’t see why not. If you prefer to cash in, they will accommodate you.”

33

Mary Higgins walked fast from her Ross Street rooming house, down Fourth Avenue and across Smithfield, toward the waterfront. She was easy to track in the red scarf Isaac Bell had seen her buy from a peddler in New York. Even without it, how could he miss her erect carriage and determined stride?

In a factory town like Pittsburgh, workingman’s clothing was the simplest disguise, and Wish Clarke always said, Keep it simple. To shadow Mary, Bell donned overcoat, overalls, and boots, and covered his distinctive blond hair with a knitted watch cap.

Archie Abbott trailed Bell, alternately hanging behind and sprinting to catch up when he signaled. The streets were crowded with men and women pouring out of offices and banks and hurrying home from work, and Bell was teaching Archie what Wish Clarke had taught him: Alternating their profile between one figure and two made them less conspicuous when Mary peered over her shoulder, which she did repeatedly as they neared the river.

She crossed First Avenue into a district of small factories and machine shops.

“So far, she’s headed for the same place,” said Archie.

The soot-blacked trusses of the Smithfield Street Bridge spread graceful curves against the grimy sky. Instead of boarding a trolley to cross the Monongahela on the bridge or walking the footpath, Mary Higgins followed a street that circled alongside its stone piers and down to the riverbank.

“Just like yesterday,” Archie whispered in his ear. “Now, watch.”

Barges were rafted ten deep into the channel and appeared to extend down the shore as far as the bridge at the Point — the tip of Pittsburgh where the Mon joined the Allegheny. They were empty, riding high on the water. Across the river, all but the lowest reaches of Mount Washington and the Duquesne Heights were lost in smoke. The sun had disappeared, and night was settling in quickly.

Mary Higgins took another look around.

“Down,” said Bell, and they ducked behind a wooden staircase that ran up the side of a building. When they raised their heads, Mary had climbed a ladder onto a barge and was walking on planks laid barge to barge toward the middle of the river.

“She has amazing balance,” said Archie.

“Her father was a tug captain. They lived on the boat.”

“I thought it was those long, long legs.”

Bell gave his friend a cold, dark look, and Archie shut up.

Mary crossed ten rows of barges and stepped down onto a workboat moored at the edge of the fleet. “Was that boat there yesterday?” Bell asked.

“Right there. That’s where she went.”

“How long did she stay on it?”

“An hour and four minutes.”

Bell nodded approvingly. Mack and Wally were teaching Archie to be precise in observation and report.

“Were these same barges here?”

“Yes.”

“How can you be sure? They all look alike.”

“You see the barge right smack in the middle with the white cookhouse sitting on it?” The apprentice detective indicated a painted shack with a stovepipe poking through the roof. “Exactly where it was yesterday.”

Bell thought it strange that on such a busy river the empty barges had not been moved. He would expect them to be swarming with deckhands preparing for towboats to push them back up the Monongahela to move the coal being mined by scab labor. Even as he watched, a tow of empties bustled up the river from the harbor pool between the Point and Davis Island Dam, and an oversize towboat was pushing a loaded fleet of Amalgamated Coal’s big Ohio River barges downstream.

“I tried to get closer,” said Archie. “A watchman spotted me halfway across, and I thought I better run for it.”

“I’ll take a shot at it,” Bell said. “Give me a whistle if you see the watchman.”

He crossed the barges several rows down from the route Mary had taken, loping gunnel to gunnel as his eyes adjusted to the failing light. At the outside row, he drew close to the workboat, keeping an eye peeled for Mary and its crew. Its decks were empty. A thin wisp of smoke curled from its stack, indicating that steam was being kept up, but the boat wasn’t going anywhere immediately. He smelled coffee.

Bell stayed on the barge and worked his way alongside the boat. A round port was open, spilling light from the cabin, and he could hear voices. He eased closer silently until he was perched beside the cabin. Mary was talking. She sounded angry.

“How much longer are we going to just sit here?”

“Until he gets back.”

“We should at least move the barges upstream. They’re too far downriver to sink here. There’s only one bridge below us.”

“Like I said, miss,” a man answered, “we’re not going anywhere without the boss’s say-so.”

“Where is Mr. Claggart?”

“Didn’t say.”

“Did he say when he would return?”

“Nope.”

“Then I think we should begin on our own.”

“Sister,” another man interrupted with a smirk in his voice, “we ain’t beginning nothing without the boss.”

“But there’s more rain forecast. The water’s rising. Soon it will be too deep. We can’t just sit here doing nothing.”

“Nothing?” said the smirker. “I’m not doing nothing. I might have a drink. In fact, maybe I’ll have one right now.”

Bell heard the pop of a cork pulled from a bottle.

Mary said, “You wouldn’t dare in front of Mr. Claggart.”

“Like you say, Mr. Claggart ain’t here— Hey!”

Bell heard a bottle smash.

“What the hell do you—” the smirker roared angrily.

Bell started to go to Mary’s defense, then ducked as the cabin door flew open and she stalked out and climbed onto the nearest barge. Inside, he heard the first man shouting, “Are you nuts? Let her go! If you touch her, Claggart’ll kill you… Miss! Miss!”

A head popped out the door. Bell glimpsed the slick hair and pinchback vest worn by a cardsharper or a racetrack tout. “He’ll be back in two or three days. I wasn’t supposed to tell you, but come back then. Don’t you worry, we’ll start sinking them the second he’s here.”

Mary threw an icy “After you move them upriver” over her shoulder and kept going.

Bell pressed his face to the porthole. The second man, the smirker, was staring morosely at the broken bottle at his feet. He looked like a saloon bouncer who had seen better days. The gambler stepped back inside and shut the door. “That is one angry woman.”

“I wouldn’t want to be in Claggart’s shoes when he gets back.”

“He can handle her.”

“Not if he changes his mind about sinking them barges.”

“You can bet your bottom dollar he won’t change his mind.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“He’s got a big plan. The barges are just a small piece of it.”

“Does she know that?”

“No.”

Mack and Wally set up shop in separate waterfront saloons near the Smithfield Bridge. Nowhere near as drunk as they looked, the detectives quickly made names for themselves as exceedingly generous, treating Monongahela towboat pilots and captains to round after round. Archie Abbott acted as runner, shuttling between them to exchange information and passing it on to Isaac Bell, who was glued to the front door of Mary Higgins’s rooming house.

Bell weighed the value of confronting her to find out what exactly the talk of sinking barges meant. What did “too far downriver” mean? And “only one bridge”? Or would he learn more by waiting until “Mr. Claggart” returned? Waiting meant he would have to move in a flash to stop whatever they were up to. In the meantime, as he watched and waited, he tried to imagine what they thought they would accomplish by sinking barges.

Mack Fulton spelled him so he could catch some sleep.

Back in four hours, he found Wally Kisley there, too. Wally had just come from the Allegheny County sheriff’s office. He had bad news about Jim Higgins.

Isaac Bell went looking for the union man.

The Van Dorn Protective Services agents reported that Higgins had gone missing.

34

We’re real sorry, Mr. Bell. We turned our backs for one second, and he lit out like a rocket.”

Mike Flannery and Terry Fein had promoted him to “Mr. Bell,” he noted wryly, now that they had bungled the job of protecting a client being stalked by the Pinkertons, the Coal and Iron Police, and possibly an assassin hired by the Coal Trust to keep Higgins from testifying for the attorney general. Flattery would come next.

“Where did you see him last?”

“Amalgamated Coal Terminal.”

“What the heck was he doing up there?”

The Amalgamated transfer operation was three miles upriver from the Golden Triangle, Pittsburgh’s business district, where Higgins and the Strike Committee had rented their union hall in a storefront under an old warehouse. It was fully seven miles downriver from the tent city where the Monongahela march had ground to a halt in a trolley park, shuttered since summer ended, on the outskirts of McKeesport.

“We don’t know, Mr. Bell. We went with him twice yesterday. He just stands and stares at it.”

“Why don’t you look for him there?”

“He’ll dodge us if he sees us coming,” said Mike.

Terry explained, “When the march ran into trouble, he blamed us for getting in his way.”

“When all we’re trying do is make sure no one shoots the poor devil or shoves a knife in his ribs.”

“But he’s always rattling on about what a fine fellow you are, Mr. Bell, and we thought maybe if he saw you coming, he wouldn’t run.”

Well-rehearsed flattery. “O.K., Mike, you watch his room. Terry, you watch the union hall. I’ll go out and look for him.”

“Try the toast rack.”

The toast-rack trolley — an open-sided electric streetcar that Bell rode out from the Golden Triangle — ran on tracks that paralleled those of the Amalgamated Coal trains. Passing Amalgamated from the inland side, the trolley offered views of locomotives pushing empties under the tipple and snaking them out full, and occasional distant glimpses of the barge wharves that ringed the Point. The operation seemed to Bell to be mechanically perfect, as if each barge and railroad was a minute cog in an immense and smooth-running wheel. He jumped down when he saw Jim Higgins standing at a trolley stop with his hands in his pockets.

“How you getting on, pardner?”

“Not good, Isaac. Not good at all.”

“What’s wrong?”

“The mineowners armed every bum with a gun. Then they let the jailbirds out and gave them ax handles. They’re blocking the march, and the hotheads are yelling, ‘Let the working people take guns and shoot down the dogs who shoot them!’”

Bell said, “If they do, the governor will call up militia with rifles and Gatling guns.”

“I know that. In fact, he’s already put them on alert. But the hotheads are talking each other out of the good sense to be afraid.”

“Mike and Terry told me you gave ’em the slip.”

“I need solitude to think.”

“They also told me you find something attractive about this Amalgamated operation.”

“It’s about as up-to-date as can be,” Higgins answered vaguely. He glanced away from the tall detective’s probing gaze and changed the subject. “Somehow, I’ve got to convince the Strike Committee to stand up to the hotheads.”

“I’m afraid I’ve got bad news on that score,” said Bell.

“Now what?”

“The Strike Committee was just rousted onto a special train headed for Morgantown, West Virginia.”

“What?”

“The Allegheny County sheriff extradited them to stand trial for the murder of Black Jack Gleason.”

Jim Higgins’s shoulders sagged. “They didn’t blow up Gleason’s yacht.”

“I’m sure they didn’t,” said Bell, “since they were in Chicago at the time. But proving that will take months.”

Higgins looked around for a place to sit, saw none, and stared helplessly at Isaac Bell. “Now it’s all on me,” he said. “But they’ve got me blocked at every turn.”

“Maybe Mary can help.”

Higgins shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Do you know what she’s up to?” Bell asked bluntly.

“She’s gone her own way.”

Bell asked, “Is she in danger?”

“If I believed in God, I’d say, God knows.” Jim Higgins lifted his eyes to the giant tipple. Suddenly, to Bell’s astonishment, he straightened his shoulders and stood tall. A thin smile crossed his face, expressing, Isaac Bell thought, a sad farewell to hope or a final good-bye to illusions.

“Whoever built this tipple knows his business. He’s got himself the center of coal distribution, east, west, north, and south.”

“It’s efficient,” said Bell. “I hear he’s putting the smaller coal yards out of business.”

“This point of land would have made a beautiful park.”

“I beg pardon, Jim?”

“Water on three sides, the way the river snakes around it. Just a short trolley ride from town. Imagine a great big Ferris wheel where the tipple is. Picnic grounds. Swimming pool. Carousel. Baseball diamonds. A racecourse. You could hold revival meetings. And Chautauqua assemblies.”

Isaac Bell looked up at the coal smoke matting the sky. “You would need a lot of imagination.”

“But imagine our tent city here instead of down in McKeesport. Winter’s coming. If we could occupy this place, we could shut it down. Industry’s furnaces will starve for fuel, and city dwellers freeze in their homes.”

“You sound like your sister,” said Bell.

“Maybe they’ll listen to us then…” He turned eagerly to Bell. “We wouldn’t have to shut it down. Once we were here and could shut it down, they would see our position and have to bargain. If we could threaten that shutdown, we’d settle a fair agreement and all go back to work.”

“That could happen,” Bell said neutrally. An Army general might see a certain raw genius to Higgins’s idea: Surrounded by water on three sides, the Amalgamated Coal Terminal’s point of land would be easier than most encampments to defend. A Navy admiral would see a trap, sitting ducks exposed to gunfire on three sides.

“But how do I move ten thousand miners from McKeesport to here with strikebreakers, company cops, and militia blocking the way?”

Bell was mindful of his orders not to take sides but concerned that Jim Higgins was turning a blind eye to the danger. He asked, “Would the men leave their families behind?”

Jim Higgins shook his head. “No… But, Isaac, this must be done. I have to find a way to move them here.”

“The risks are enormous. Women. Children.”

“It’s more risky leaving them where they are. The camp is a shambles at McKeesport. It’s just a trolley park. A bunch of picnic tables, a swimming hole, and some shuttered-up amusement rides. You know, for working people to ride out on Sunday and have fun in good weather.”

Bell nodded. All around the country, trolley companies were building parks at the ends of their lines to get paying passengers on their day off. “But how did the marchers get in?”

“McKeesport cops looked the other way. They were glad to keep us out of the city. But now the trolley company is threatening to shut off the water and electricity. It’s a mess — too many people, more and more every day, no sanitation and no way to care for the sick. But here, we would be inside Pittsburgh’s city limits. There are hospitals and doctors and food and clean water nearby. Churches and charities to help and newspaper reporters to witness. Wouldn’t they temper the actions of the strikebreakers?”

“But to get here, you have to run the gauntlet of militia and those ‘bums’ and ‘jailbirds.’ You could set off a massacre.”

“That’s a chance we’ll have to take,” Higgins fired back. His jaw set, his spine stiffened, and Isaac Bell saw that the mild-mannered union man had made up his mind to fight a fight he shouldn’t — a pitched battle with strikebreaking thugs and company police backed up by state militia.

Overriding his own better judgment and ignoring Joseph Van Dorn’s direct orders, the young detective said, “I know a better way.”

“What way?”

“Black Jack Gleason’s way.”

35

Me and Mack is too old for the boss to fire,” said Wally Kisley. “Even for backing you in a stunt like you’re proposing. And Joe Van Dorn won’t fire Archie, he’s just a dumb apprentice— No offense, Archie.”

“None taken. My classics professor at Princeton expressed a similar opinion in heroic hexameter.”

“But you, Isaac, you’re just starting out. You can’t afford to be fired— I know you’re rich, and you know I’m not talking about money. If you want to continue working as a private detective, there ain’t a better outfit for a young fellow to learn his business than Van Dorn. But, make no mistake: If he catches you in the middle of this, he’ll fire you.”

Isaac Bell rose to his full height, bumping his hat on the low wooden ceiling of the workboat cabin. The others were hunched over a galley table that was covered with oilcloth. A cookstove smelled of grease and coffee. It was dark outside. The porthole was open to the pungent odors of the river and coal smoke.

“I appreciate the thought, Wally. And you, Mack. But this ‘stunt’ is the right thing to do. I can only hope Mr. Van Dorn will see it’s right, too.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that.”

“I’m not betting on it. I’m taking my chances.”

Archie ventured a sunnier scenario. “Maybe Mr. Van Dorn will regard moving all those families into the safety of the city as a humanitarian act.”

“Maybe President Roosevelt will give the coal mines to the miners,” Mack Fulton said.

“And while he’s at it,” Wally added, “declare the United States Socialist Republic of the Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

“We’re agreed,” said Bell. “Jim, how many towboat pilots did you round up?”

“I’ve got five committed.”

Bell multiplied boats and barges in his head. He had hoped for more boats so the barges would not be too big and unwieldy. Five towboats pushing twenty barges apiece, one hundred people in each barge, crammed in tighter than sardines. Ten thousand people, if they all made it aboard before the Pinkertons noticed. God help them if any sank. “What about engineers?”

“Towboat engineers are like hermit crabs. They never leave the boat.”

“Deckhands?”

“A few, plus as many miners as we slip out of the camp.”

“Pretending to be deckhands,” growled Mack Fulton.

“They’re no strangers to hard work,” said Jim Higgins. “And they’ve spent their lives wrestling things heavier than they are.”

“They’ll do,” said Bell, knowing they would have to.

Wally and Mack exhaled loud stage sighs. “O.K., Isaac,” said Mack. “When do we do it?”

Isaac Bell looked at Jim Higgins.

Jim Higgins said, “The pilots predict another black fog tonight.”

“Tonight,” said Isaac Bell. “We move them tonight.”

“Cheese it!” hissed Wally Kisley. “The cops.”

It was not, of course, the Pittsburgh police, or even the Coal and Iron Police, but Mary Higgins, who the Protective Services boys had warned was heading their way. She stormed into the workboat’s cabin with color high in her cheeks. She glared at her brother, the others, and Bell.

“Where are the men who were here?”

“They left town for their health,” said Mack Fulton.

“Taking the waters at the Greenbrier,” said Wally.

“What are you doing here?” she shouted, turning all her fury on Bell.

“We are borrowing your barges,” he said. “And you’re lucky we found out instead of the police or the Pinkertons or the militia.”

“Are you asking me to be grateful?”

“You can thank us by staying out of our way.”

She whirled on her brother. “Did you tell him?”

“I only confirmed what they figured out on their own.”

“Why?”

“So you don’t get killed or thrown in prison.”

“Go to hell, brother. You, too, Isaac Bell.”

Isaac Bell followed Mary out on deck. She was staring at the fogbound river, blinking back tears. “You ruined it.”

“Mary?”

“Leave me be.”

“Good will come of what you did. These barges will save the miners’ march and save lives.”

“How?”

“Your brother has the idea to move their tents to the Amalgamated Coal Terminal. The hope is, we can transport the miners and their families in these barges. Once there, he thinks, they will hold a safer and stronger position.”

“Do you believe that?” she asked.

“I believe that at this moment their position could not be worse.”

Mary nodded and said quietly, “I saw the trolley park this afternoon. They can’t stay there… Was it true what my brother said?”

“Jim did not betray you. He only confirmed what I guessed.”

“You’re quite the clever guesser, Isaac Bell.”

“It was quite guessable,” Bell replied. “There’s no reason to sink a hundred barges in the channel other than to block the shipment of coal.”

“But how did you know I intended to sink them?”

“I shadowed you, Mary. I followed you here. To this boat. I listened to you argue with those men.”

“But I looked behind me. I made sure I wasn’t followed. The Pinkertons are everywhere.”

Bell smiled and said gently, “I told you Van Dorns are different.”

“Sneakier?” she asked with the faintest of smiles back.

Bell took her hands, and when she did not resist he said, “Mary, you once told me that knowing what is right is not enough. If you know what’s right, you have to do right.”

“Who are you to judge what’s right?”

“I have eyes and I have ears. The marchers are stranded. Your brother was so discouraged that he was willing to fight their way out of McKeesport. It would be a bloodbath. These barges — your barges — can save them. We couldn’t even try this if you hadn’t gathered them all here.” He pointed out in the dark where the barges carpeted the river. “But I have to tell you that this is a far, far better use than what you intended.”

Mary Higgins turned to Bell again. “I hate to give it up. Hate to lose it. It was a good scheme, wasn’t it?”

“Good,” said Bell, “is not the first word that comes to mind. But it was very clever.”

“Let’s hope your scheme is as clever,” she replied.

“I am praying it is,” said Bell. “There are so many people.”

“I wish them luck.”

“Who is Mr. Claggart?”

The instant the words were out of Bell’s mouth, he knew he should have waited.

Mary stiffened. “Once a detective, always a detective?”

“I’m afraid I’m not ‘sneaky’ enough to be a good one.”

“You’ll get better at it very soon at the rate you’re practicing.” She pulled away from him.

There was no getting out of it now. Bell had to know if Claggart was Henry Clay, and there was one very quick way to find out. “Does he have yellow eyes?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because if he does, he is using you.”

“Go to hell.”

That answered that, thought Bell. “Do you know that he happens to be a detective?”

“Good-bye, Isaac.” She stepped onto the ladder to the barge.

“His real name is Henry Clay,” said Bell. “He is a provocateur. He is instigating violence, setting labor against owners and owners against labor. And he is using you for his game. If you sank those barges, Clay would get exactly what he wants. Workers will be blamed.”

“It’s not his game.”

“What?”

Mary shook her head violently. “Nothing.”

Bell grabbed her arm. “What did you mean it’s not his game?”

“Let go of me.”

“Who’s game is it? Is someone else giving orders?”

“I have no idea.”

“But you do know that Clay answers to someone, don’t you?” She shook her head. It was too dark to see her eyes, much less read her expression. He tried again to force an honest answer. “Who paid for a hundred barges?”

“That was the first thing I asked,” she said.

“Did he answer?”

“Bank robberies. They raised the money with bank robberies.”

“Where?”

“Chicago.”

“What would you say if I told you that those robberies were committed by several different gangs, half of whom have been caught this week?”

“I’d say you’re practicing again.”

Mack stepped out of the cabin, calling urgently. “Isaac! If you insist on trying this tonight, there isn’t a moment to lose.”

A towboat loomed out of the fog, paddles thrashing, and banged against the barges. Miners clambered onto them with ropes and looked around uncertainly, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

“Now or never, Isaac.”

“Mary, I will talk to you tomorrow.”

She climbed the ladder onto the barge and started toward the shore.

“Where are you going?”

“You’re not the only one who has ‘right’ to do, Isaac.”

“Will you be careful?” Bell called after her.

“Why should I be careful? You’ll be following me.”

“Not tonight. I can’t tonight.” He gestured helplessly at the steamboat and the barges.

“Then tonight I’ll take my chances.”

“Clay is deadly.”

Mary Higgins stopped, turned around, and looked back at him. Spark and flame erupted from the towboat’s stacks, illuminating her pale skin. Eyes aglow, chin high, she looked, Bell thought, utterly beautiful and supremely confident. He wondered how she could be so sure of herself in the face of her disappointment. The answer came like an icicle in his heart.

“He is not deadly to me.”

36

Pittsburgh’s infamous “black fog” was a grimy mix of the natural fog that rose from the rivers and the coal smoke and soot that tumbled out of mills, foundries, powerhouses, locomotives, and steamboats. Black fog was dense and oily, painful to breathe, and nearly impossible to see through. When the pilot of the lead tow shined his electric carbon arc searchlight ahead to inspect the empty barges he was pushing, the beam bounced back into the pilothouse as if reflected by a mirror.

“The barges are up there somewhere,” the pilot joked to Isaac Bell, who was standing at his shoulder. He was Captain Jennings, an old-timer with a tobacco-stained swallow-tailed beard. His boat was the Camilla, a low-slung, two-deck ninety-footer with a stern paddle wheel as wide as she was. The glass pilothouse, which reminded Bell of a New England sea captain’s widow’s walk, was perched on the second deck behind the chimneys and let them view the murk ahead, behind, and to both sides.

“You can feel it different in the wheel if the tow breaks up and you and the boat are out all by your lonesome while they’re drifting every which way. We’re doing fine, don’t you worry none. I don’t have to see what I know.” He spit tobacco juice into a box filled with sawdust. “Heck, most of what I can’t see I can feel in the floor or whether the paddle wheel turns sluggish. Feeling the river shoals tells me where I am. What I can’t see or feel, I have stashed in my memory machine.”

Bell wondered how the pilot saw other tows on a collision course with his. Jennings’s white beard suggested he had survived decades on the river, but it seemed worth asking.

“If in doubt, I ring the stopping bell,” came the laconic reply.

Bell looked back and saw a dim light that might be the barge fleet behind them. Jennings’s son was driving it. The three tows behind it were invisible. Bell had stationed the levelheaded Archie Abbott, who like he had grown up around sailboats and steam yachts, on the rearmost. He put Wally Kisley on the next, then Mack Fulton. And if there was anything to be grateful for, it was the blinding black fog.

Ahead, an eerie reddish luminescence began to spread in the dark. It grew steadily in size and intensity. “What’s that red light?”

“Jones & Laughlin blast furnaces… Watch close, you’ll see something you’ll never forget. There!”

A procession of red balls appeared to float in the air as they moved across the river, high above the water. Bell was mystified at first until his keen eyes distinguished the girders of trusswork. “Is that a bridge?”

“The Hot Metal Bridge.”

As the forward barges in their tow pushed under it, Bell could see a locomotive pulling flatcars through the trusses. On each car was a glowing red mass of fire.

“What are those railcars carrying?”

“J & L crucibles of molten steel from the furnaces across to the rolling mill. Ain’t that something?”

After clearing the bridge, the pilot nudged his big wooden wheel, which was as tall as he was, and coaxed the tow into a broad turn. There was a white glow to the left. A gust of wind shredded the fog momentarily, and Bell glimpsed the point of the Amalgamated Coal Terminal. It was ablaze in electric work lights as the conveyors lifted coal from barges to the tipple. Seven miles of dark river to go. At least an hour. Load the people, and seven miles back. The black fog thickened.

Suddenly, Bell sensed movement alongside. Camilla’s searchlight played on a masonry bridge pier. They passed close enough to see the cement between the stones. “Brown’s Bridge,” said the pilot. “We’re on our way.”

Below the Homestead Works, as the smoke thinned, the black fog dissipated slightly, just in time to see a fully laden twenty-barge tow coming downriver straight at them — a fast-moving two-acre island of coal.

“Shoot!” growled Bell’s pilot. “That’s Captain Andy. Of all the boats to run into tonight.”

“What’s the matter?”

Jennings spat at the box of sawdust. “Captain Andy owns three steamers, inclining him toward the capitalist camp. Allowing what we’re up to for our friends in labor would be like dipping an oar in a nest of water moccasins.”

He blew his whistle. The oncoming tow’s whistle answered. As they passed, the pilots played their searchlights on each other’s tow and stepped out of their houses to exchange hellos.

“Where you headed?” the downriver-bound Captain Andy shouted.

“Gleasonburg!” Bell’s pilot bawled back.

“Look out for that pack of strikers at McKeesport. I heard they’re getting a cannon to shoot at our tows.”

“Where they going to get a cannon, Captain Andy?”

“Steal it. They’s strikers, ain’t they?”

Jennings waved good-bye and said to Bell, “Just hope the boys behind us tell him the same.”

They passed beneath another hot metal bridge, over which ran the fiery juices of the Carrie Furnace and, soon after, a trolley bridge. A streetcar with gaily lighted windows thundered the wooden deck as the tow steamed under it.

“West Braddock Bridge,” said the pilot. “Smooth sailing from here to McKeesport. Just some railroad bridges with real wide spans. And a bunch of dredges crowding the channel.” His searchlight flashed on a big white diamond board on the bank that marked another bend in the river.

The black fog continued to thin. Bell could see the tow behind theirs and the lights of two behind it. “Hope nobody’s looking for us,” said Captain Jennings. “We’re becoming mighty apparent.”

Bell was not that worried about being seen. As long as they kept moving, who ashore would take notice? They had peeled the tows loose from the riverbank under cover of the fog. Now they were indistinguishable from the other river traffic. Nor did Bell fear, even for a moment, that Mary Higgins would betray them. His main worry was that “Claggart” had returned in time to see the last tow leave the Smithfield Bridge. But, so far, there was no pursuit.

He left the pilothouse and went down a flight of stairs to the galley where a grizzled deckhand was telling a dozen coal miners about the alligators that swarmed when novice deckhands fell overboard. “And I reckon you boys noticed how low the main deck is to the water. Sometimes them critters just walk on. Prowl about, looking for something to eat.”

“Been in West Virginia my whole life. Never seen no alligators in the Mon.”

“They congregate at Pittsburgh.” He winked at Bell.

Bell addressed the miners. “We’re almost at the trolley park. There’ll be a lot of folks milling around when we land. I’m hoping you boys can help keep order while we get them into the barges. You’ll see your own people and—”

“Ah wouldn’t bother your head too much about that,” drawled the West Virginian. “The Strike Committee organized committees for everything from Drinking Water Committee to the Cooking Committee to the No Cusswords Committee to the Defense Committee. You can bet by now there’s a Barge Gittin’ On Committee and a Barge Gittin’ Off Committee.”

Camilla’s tall-tale-telling deckhand stood up. “Right now, I’m organizing a Mooring Line Committee. The captain’ll do most the work driving us alongside, but I want every man of you ready to jump with a rope.”

Twenty minutes later, steaming at nearly eight knots against the current, Camilla squeezed her tow past a string of dredges that Captain Jennings said were building locks and a dam at Braddock. “About damned time, too. Above here, in a dry spell, the Mon drops so low you can plow it.”

The dredges were working through the night. A lucky break, thought Bell, as their lights might provide cover for the towboats’ lights.

“There’s the park,” said Jennings.

Bell had already spotted the tall circle of the Ferris wheel. It was silhouetted against the electric-light glow of the outskirts of McKeesport. If he had any doubts about the wisdom of this “stunt,” they evaporated when he saw the mass of men, women, and children crowding the riverbank with their bundles in their hands.

“Where’s the Defense Committee?” Isaac Bell called down from Camilla’s top deck as Captain Jennings flanked his barges back against the riverbank.

“At the gates.”

“Holding off the Pinkertons.”

Jennings’s searchlight swept inland, and Bell saw a sight he would never forget. Mary Higgins had estimated that ten thousand had joined the ranks since the march began at Gleasonburg. It was a number hard to imagine until the light swept over the rippling mass of people — men and women, and children sitting on their shoulders — all with their faces turned to the river.

“Soon as your barges are full, head back down,” he told Captain Jennings. “If I’m not back, leave without me.”

Bell hurried down the two flights to the main deck, jumped onto the muddy riverbank. Miners were dismantling a shuttered cold-drinks stand and spreading the boards across the mud. Bell walked inland, through acres of people carrying their belongings and loads of canvas wrapped around tent poles. He walked under the Ferris wheel and circled a swimming lake. A carousel stood still, with canvas tied over the horses. A freak show was boarded up for the winter. When at last the crowd thinned, he arrived at the fence that separated the park from the trolley barns.

Miners with lever-action rifles guarded the gates, which they had barricaded with planks, crossties, and lengths of track pried up from the station. The riflemen had their backs toward the retreating crowd and the towboat searchlights piercing the sky, concentrating on what was outside the gate.

“Where’s Fortis?”

The miner in charge of the detail, a hard-eyed man in his forties, was in the ticket booth. He looked like he had not slept in a long time.

“Mr. Fortis? I’m Bell. Jim Higgins said you were covering the retreat.”

“Not a minute too soon. Look at those boys.”

Bell peered through a crack between the planks. The lights were on in the trolley barns and the huge doors open. Inside, scores of strikebreakers armed with pick handles had sheltered from the rain. A streetcar parked outside the barn drew his eye. Twenty men with Winchesters sat inside it.

“Pinkertons?”

“In that one. Coal and Iron cops in another behind the barn.”

“Where’s the militia?”

“So far, the government’s holding them in reserve in McKeesport. But one of our spies says those jailbirds are waiting to attack about four in the morning. I’m worried they’ll jump the gun when they cotton to your barges.”

“They must have spies, too.”

“We caught three tonight. A triple play. They won’t be telling nobody.”

“What did you do to them?”

“Bought us some time,” came the opaque reply.

Bell said, “I want to be sure you boys make the last boat.”

“We’re loaded and ready to run.”

Bell had already noticed the wheelbarrows lined up and covered with canvas.

“What’s in those barrows?”

“Rifles, ammunition, and dynamite.”

Wondering whether he had led the Van Dorn Detective Agency into a shooting war, Bell asked, “Sure you need explosives?”

“Sure we won’t get caught short.”

“I’ll come for you when we’ve got the last of your people loaded.”

Back at the river Bell found the loading going slowly. When Camilla finally swung her barges away from the bank and started down the Monongahela, and Captain Jennings’s son maneuvered the second fleet alongside, the tall detective opened his pocket watch. At the rate this was going, they would be lucky to land the last tow at Amalgamated before the morning fog lifted ten hours from then.

37

Henry Clay spotted a junior stockbroker waiting under a light where the Vulcan King landed for coal in Wheeling, West Virginia. He recognized the type employed by Midwestern branch offices of the brokerage that Judge Congdon controlled with his secret interest. Hair short and combed, suit pressed, collar freshly starched despite the late hour, smile hopeful, the young man was hungry to please anyone from New York headquarters.

“Mr. Claggart?” he asked, his eyes wide at the spectacle of the biggest steamboat he had ever seen hulking over the wharf, broad as a steel mill and twice as black.

“You from the office?”

Gone was Clay’s Southern banker costume and his drawl. He was brusque — his dark frock coat as severe as the freshly painted Vulcan King, his costly homburg fixed at a sober angle — a valuable man obliged to journey from the great city to direct enterprises too lofty to be trusted to ordinary mortals.

“Telegram for you, sir. On the private wire.”

The young fellow handed him an envelope and emphasized its importance with a breathless, “It’s in cipher.”

“Cipher means private,” snapped Clay. “Private means don’t shout about it in a public place.”

It was nearly midnight. The wharf was remote, chosen for its distance from the public wharf, and deserted except for Vulcan King’s firemen wheeling fresh coal up the steamboat’s landing stage. The junior broker stammered apologies.

“Lesson learned,” was Clay’s magnanimous reply. “Wait over there until I give you an answer to wire back.”

He sent the broker scurrying with a cold nod and moved under the light, slit open the envelope, and immediately began grinding his teeth. Inside the envelope was the standard printed company message blank:

In the space after The following message received at Time: they had written “8:48 pm.”

After By telegraph from: they had written “New York.”

And, incredibly, after To: they had written “John Claggart” in letters big enough to advertise a circus.

“Young man!”

“Sir?”

He beckoned him close and muttered grimly, “Inform your office that if fate ever drags me back to Wheeling not to use your standard form for my private wires but enter the cipher on a blank sheet with no names attached.”

He had gone through this at every branch office, even Chicago, where they should know better. The only reason none of the morons had written “Judge James Congdon” after from was that no one knew that Congdon owned Thibodeau & Marzen.

The message itself, written by hand, contained several strings of four-digit numbers. He read quickly, deciphering the figures in his head. Then he balled the paper in his fist.

“Cast off!”

He bolted up the boarding stage.

“Any reply, sir?” called the junior broker.

“Send immediately in cipher. ‘The Point. Nine hours.’”

Judge Congdon was in a rage. His spies in Pittsburgh had seen the miners moving camp from the McKeesport trolley park. About to hurl the crumpled telegram into the water, Clay remembered the lesson he had just taught about privacy, smoothed the paper, folded it repeatedly, and slid it deep in an inside pocket reserved for business cards.

“Cast off, I said! Take in the stage!”

The firemen raced aboard. Deckhands threw off lines. The steam winch lifted the boarding stage from the wharf and swung it inboard, and the Vulcan King backed slowly into the river.

Clay ran up the four flights of stairs to the pilothouse.

“Go! What are you waiting for? Full speed!”

The pilot was dithering with the engine room telegram. “Where?”

“Pittsburgh!”

“I don’t know if we took on enough fuel.”

Clay crossed the lavish pilothouse in three strides and slammed both engine levers to Ahead Full.

“Burn the furniture if you have to. Get us there.”

It had taken a full day and a half to steam three hundred and eighty miles from Cincinnati. Ninety more to Pittsburgh. “What speed can you make?”

The pilot wrestled the brass-bound wheel, and the steamboat surged from the bank. “River’s running hard, all this rain,” he said. “Nine knots.”

Clay smoothed out the telegram and read it again. Foolishness. It hadn’t changed. How could it? He stuffed it back in his pocket.

Ninety miles to Pittsburgh would take ten hours at nine knots. “Make it ten knots.”

“I don’t know—”

“Lower the water in your boilers. Jump your pressure. You’ll get hot steam easier with little water.”

“Blow up easier, too.”

“Hot steam! Do what it takes. Ten knots!”

Congdon had every right to rage. The strikers were moving in barges. Clay’s barges. God knows where they were going next, but it couldn’t be good. Had Mary Higgins changed her mind? Not likely. Not at all. No, this reeked of Isaac Bell.

The steamboat had modern voice pipes. Clay shouted down for the boat’s carpenter, who came quickly, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“Mount the cannon.”

“Now?”

“And the Gatling.”

Mary Higgins knew that Isaac Bell was right. John Claggart — the man Isaac called Henry Clay — was no friend. Not to the strikers betrayed by slogans they had wanted to hear—Bum government and bloodsucking capitalists. Not to her, fooled so cunningly. What could be more seductive to a woman determined to build a new world than to hear anarchy dubbed a joke?

But Claggart was not the enemy.

Mary felt no comfort that she had suspected correctly from early on that another man was paying for the barges. She had not been surprised when Isaac told her that bank robbers were not stealing for the workers’ cause. She had never fully believed Claggart’s story. But she had hoped and acted like a drunkard — drunk on the cause, drunk on hope, drunk on passionate belief. Like any drunkard, blind to truth.

She swore that she would never let hope and belief blind her again.

Anger at Claggart was useless, worse than useless. Anger would derail her hunt for the man who paid Claggart. He was the enemy. He was the provocateur sowing violence to give the owners and the government the excuse to destroy the union. He was the enemy of justice served by equality.

The furtive Claggart was not the enemy. A detective no less, and a shrewd one at that. Deadly, as Isaac said? No doubt deadly. She had seen what he was capable of. But never deadly to her. That she knew in her heart. He would never hurt her. He was not the enemy. He wanted to be her friend. She would let him be. A helpful friend who would lead her to the enemy.

38

When the fourth barge fleet steamed into the dark with two thousand striking miners, their wives, and their children, Isaac Bell stepped into the beam of towboat Sadie’s searchlight and signaled to Archie to land. Captain Jennings had claimed that Sadie was the oldest of the riverboats, a Civil War relic that had run the Confederate gauntlet at Vicksburg, and Archie reported, as he stepped from her low hull onto the planks the miners had laid to stabilize the bank, her pumps were running full blast to keep up with leaks in her bottom.

“Don’t let anyone on that barge,” Bell told him, indicating the lead barge touching the shore farthest from the towboat. “I’m reserving it for the Defense Committee’s dynamite.”

Bell ran through the dark and now deserted trolley park to the gates.

Fortis, the head of the Defense Committee, was reeling with exhaustion. “I hope you’re ready for us. The jailbirds are fixing to bust in.”

Bell looked through a crack in the gate. Twenty strikebreakers were carrying a battering ram fashioned from lengths of trolley track. Fifty, at least, were arrayed behind them, each with a pick handle. And the Pinkertons were dismounting from their streetcar and spreading out, taking up positions with their rifles.

“Where are the Coal and Iron Police?”

“Look at the roof.”

Now Bell spotted them, dimly silhouetted against the McKeesport glow. They were crouching behind the ridgeline of the trolley barn roofs, rifle barrels leveled at the gates. “We,” he said, realizing as he spoke how totally he had cast his lot with the striking miners, “have to do something better than a running gun battle to cover our retreat.”

Fortis’s answer was a stark reminder that Bell had entered a war that was already well under way. “We’ve arranged a reception for the battering ram that’ll buy us some time— Wait! Now what are they up to?”

A trolley car glided from the mouth of one of the barns and stopped where a curve in the rails pointed it straight at the gate. If the rails continued to the gate, the car would have been an electrified battering ram, but the rails turned away. Puzzled, Bell looked more closely and suddenly realized that the front windows of the car had been removed. In their place, the strikebreakers had jury-rigged headlamps cannibalized from other cars.

Bell turned his back on the gate just as all the headlamps lighted at once. The men who had their faces pressed to the cracks in the gate cried out, temporarily blinded. Bell snatched a rifle from the nearest miner, shut his left eye, slitted his right, scrambled to the top of the barricade, and fired repeatedly into the blazing-white glare. The rifle magazine held five bullets. When it was empty, two headlamps still glared. He whipped out his Colt Army, steadied the barrel on the top of the gate, and squeezed the trigger twice.

The trolley yard was dark again. Shadows rose from the ground, and the strikebreakers who had dropped their battering ram when they ducked for cover picked it up again.

“Run!” Isaac Bell shouted. “Run!”

They started toward the barges, twenty miners trundling wheelbarrows, ten firing wild shots behind them, as the strikebreakers charged the gate. Bell, taking up the rear, gun in hand, heard the battering ram thunder against the gate. Once. Twice. Running backwards, he waited for the third blow to burst the gate open.

An orange flash lit the dark, followed by a loud explosion and the shouts of dismayed strikebreakers. When the fleeing miners cheered, Bell realized that the Defense Committee had mined the gate with dynamite, set off when the battering ram smashed into a detonator.

“That’ll fix the sons of bitches!” Fortis yelled.

And give the militia the excuse to attack, thought Bell.

The towboat Sadie blew her whistle as the running men drew near. The Defense Committee fought to shove their wheelbarrows through the mud to the barges, from which came shouts of encouragement.

Isaac ran ahead of them. “Stow all your dynamite in that lead barge, away from these people.”

The wheels were sticking in the muddy bank, and that barge was distant.

“Here’s fine,” yelled Fortis. “There’s room in this one. Dump it here, boys!”

“Dynamite deteriorates in damp and becomes volatile,” Bell protested. “You’ve been carrying it in the rain.”

“Are you telling a coal miner how to handle explosives?”

Bell seized the older man’s arm in an iron grip. “Volatile means boom, it goes off by itself. Get it away from these people.”

“I won’t abide some whippersnapper—”

Isaac Bell held his Army high. “I’ll blow the head off the first man who puts dynamite anywhere but that front barge.”

Isaac Bell stood watch outside the pilothouse on towboat Sadie’s hurricane deck, wishing that the river fog was thicker. Sadie wheezed slowly past the Homestead Works, and the Amalgamated tipple rose against a sky that was turning bright.

He heard shouts.

Pursuit, he thought, looking for a fast police launch packed with riflemen. But the shouts were coming from the lead barge, where some miners had elected to ride with the dynamite, and it sounded like a drunken fight. Bell ran down to the main deck and onto the barges, intending to run to the front of the tow to break it up before they accidentally set off an explosion.

A muffled boom told him he was too late.

Smoke pillared from the lead barge. A geyser of water shot into the sky. It sounded to Bell as if a single stick of dynamite had blown a hole in her hull. Would the rest blow before the water rushing in smothered the detonators?

The dynamite barge was sinking. Three men clambered off drunkenly onto the barge behind it. As the stricken dynamite barge sunk deeper, it pulled hard against the lines holding it to the other barges in the tow. All at once, they snapped, parting with a loud bang. The dynamite barge broke from the pack. The tow pushed it ahead as it sank, dashing it to pieces. The next barges ran over planks, timbers, and crates of dynamite. Bell waited, heart in his throat, for the rest of the dynamite to explode under the barges loaded with people. As each barge rumbled over the debris, bottom planks were staved, water rushed in, and the people in them tried frantically to plug the holes.

Bell felt it crunch under the barge he was on. Then the towboat ran over it. Bell saw the pilot turning his wheel to force the tow out of the deep channel.

“She’s sinking!” a deckhand howled. “Ripped her bottom out.”

For a second, Bell stood frozen. I led these people into this, he thought. All their lives are in mortal danger. This was why Joseph Van Dorn had warned not to take sides. Two thousand were about to drown in the bitter-cold river, and what in the name of God could he do to save them?

Bell ran back and leaped to the towboat’s main deck. Archie was peering down into the engine room. The water was knee-deep and rising. When it drowned the engine, the current would sweep the people past Amalgamated while the damaged barges sank.

Bell jumped into the hold and waded toward a surge of current that marked the breach in the planks. The water clamped around his legs like ice. Archie peeled off his coat and threw it to Bell and ran, shouting he would get blankets. Bell waded to the breach, stomped Archie’s coat in it, pulled off his own and stuffed it in. His shirt went next. Archie returned with blankets, towels, and people’s precious coats.

Isaac Bell stuffed garments and blankets into the broken seam.

The leak slowed, but not enough. The water kept rising. He heard steam roar. The rising water had reached the furnace and was beginning to drench the fire. Steam pressure was dropping. The engine slowed. Just as the stern wheel stopped turning, Bell felt the hull grounding in the mud.

Boots pounded on deck as men ran with ropes.

“O.K., she’s on the bottom. She can’t sink any more. Save the blankets.”

“You’ll need one more,” said Archie, throwing it to him. “The ladies have suffered enough. Spare them their hero in his altogether.”

Bell slung the blanket around himself and climbed out of the hold. To his astonishment, in the time he was belowdecks, the sun had burned through the fog and was shining bright. Ashore, the gentle upward slope of the Amalgamated Terminal was dotted with white tents pitched by the people who had arrived on the first tows. He smelled bacon frying and coffee brewing. In the shadow of the coal tipple, small boys had started a pickup game of baseball.

“Happy sight, Isaac. A safer place, and no one drowned.”

“It would be a lot happier if they weren’t tearing up that rail line.”

A thousand miners were uprooting track on which the coal trains entered the terminal. A thousand more were tumbling cars on their sides, blocking the trolley lines from the Golden Triangle.

“They’re digging in,” said Archie. “You can’t blame them for keeping the Pinkertons out.”

“And the cops,” said Bell, directing Archie’s attention to the downtown side of Amalgamated’s spit of land.

A contingent of uniformed Pittsburgh police dismounted from a toast-rack trolley that had been stopped by a heap of crossties and a gap in the tracks. A second contingent was milling around blocked tracks on the Homestead side. Neither formed a line nor charged. On the river, a police steam launch flitted about agitatedly like a bird helpless to stop its nest from being invaded. The cops on land climbed back on their trolleys and rode away.

As Isaac Bell watched the miners fortify the point, he had to concede Archie was right. This place they had retreated to was vulnerable until they barricaded the approaches. But it had the grim face of war.

“At least,” he said, “the hotheads lost their dynamite. Maybe now both sides can settle down and horse-trade.”

“What in heck is that?” said Archie. The tall redhead was staring at the river behind Bell, his expression a mix of puzzlement and awe. Bell turned to see.

Chimneys billowing smoke, stern wheel pounding foam, an enormous steamboat rounded the point. It was immensely long, and tall, and black as coal.

39

“Is that a cannon on the foredeck?” asked Archie.

Bell shielded his eyes with cupped hands and focused on the gun. “Two-inch Hotchkiss,” he said. “The Navy had them on a gunboat Wish and I boarded in New Orleans.”

“Where the heck did they get it?”

“More to the point,” said Bell, “who are they and what do they want?”

“I can’t quite make out her nameboard.”

“Vulcan King.”

The black giant came closer.

One after another, then by the hundreds, the women pitching tents and the men building barricades stopped what they were doing. Ten thousand stood stock-still, waiting for the black apparition to turn midriver and point its cannon at them. It steamed very slowly, its giant wheel barely stirring the river, closer and closer, at a pace no less menacing for its majesty.

Directly opposite the point, it stopped, holding against the current. Not a living figure showed on deck, not a deckhand, not a fireman. The boiler deck and engine doors were shut, the pilot invisible behind sun-glared glass. Ten thousand people held their breath. What, Isaac Bell asked himself again, have I led these people into?

It blasted its whistle. Everyone jumped.

Then it moved forward, slicing the current, up the river, swung around the bend of the Homestead Works, and disappeared.

“Where’s it going?” asked Archie.

“My guess is, to collect the Pinkertons,” said Bell. “We’ll have to find out. But if I’m right, then the miners hold this point of land, and the owners hold the river. And if that isn’t the beginning of a war, I don’t know what is.”

Dried off and clothes changed, Bell went looking for Camilla’s pilot.

He found Captain Jennings and his son in a Smithfield Street saloon up the slope from where their boats were docked. The two pilots congratulated him on the strikers’ safe passage.

“Did you see the Vulcan King?” Bell asked.

“Hard to miss,” said the younger Jennings, and his father declared, “Who in hell would paint a steamboat black?”

“Who owns her?”

Both pilots shrugged. “Never seen her before. We was just asking ourselves, was we thrown off by the black? But even imagining her white, she does not look familiar.”

“Where do you suppose it came from?”

“She weren’t built in Pittsburgh or we’d know her for sure. That leaves Louisville or Cincinnati.”

“Nowhere else?”

“It took a heck of a yard to build a boat that size. Like I say, Louisville or Cincinnati. I’d say Cincinnati, wouldn’t you, Pa?”

The older Jennings agreed. “One of the big old yards like Held & Court.”

“They still in business, Pa?”

“They’re the last that make ’em like that anymore.”

“What do you think of that cannon?” asked Bell.

“Not much,” said the senior Jennings.

His son explained, “Riverboats are made of spit-and-sawdust. The recoil will shake her to pieces.”

“Could they reinforce it to stand the recoil?”

Both Jenningses spit tobacco. “They’d have to.”

“Insurrection,” said Judge James Congdon, casting a stony gaze about the Duquesne Club’s paneled dining room. “When first offered the privilege of addressing the august membership, I intended to call my speech ‘New Economies in the Coal, Iron, Coking, and Steelmaking Industries.’ But for reasons apparent to anyone in your besieged city, my topic is changed to ‘Insurrection.’”

He raised a glass of mineral water to his wrinkled lips, threw back his head, and drained it.

“By coincidence, I happen to be your guest speaker on the very day that the criminal forces of radicalism and mindless anarchy seized a modern enterprise in which I hold an interest, the Amalgamated Coal Terminal. Amalgamated is a center of coal distribution, east, west, north, and south. Winter looms. City dwellers will freeze in their homes, locomotives will come to a standstill, and industry’s furnaces will be starved for fuel. Insurrection, you will agree, is a subject if not dear to my heart, extremely close by.”

The members laughed nervously.

“Were this attack to occur in New York City, where I conduct business, I have no doubt that government would respond with force and alacrity. Not blessed with residency in Pittsburgh, I can only guess your city fathers’ answer to this challenge. For the moment, I will leave that to them, trusting in their Americanism, their decency, their principles, and their courage to stand up to labor, which wields far too much influence in the state of Pennsylvania.

“But to you — those who have built this great city by transforming the minerals that God deposited in Pennsylvania’s mountains into the mightiest industry the world has ever seen, producing more iron and steel and coal than Great Britain and Germany could dream of — to you titans I say, labor must be brought to heel.

“Labor must be brought to heel or they will destroy everything you have worked to build. If we fail to master labor, future enlightened civilizations will look back on us in pity. ‘What did they fail to do?’ The answer will be, ‘They failed to fight. Good men failed to fight evil!’”

Judge Congdon slammed his fist down on the podium, glared one by one at every face gaping back at him, then turned his back and stalked off the stage.

Stunned silence ensued. It was followed by a roar of applause.

“Come back!” they shouted, pounding their palms together. “Come back! Come back!”

Congdon returned to the podium with a wintry smile.

“I hope,” he said, “that the men of Pittsburgh know who the enemy is and have the courage to face him. To those who don’t, to those who would appease, to those who would restrain the forces of order, I say, Get out of the way and let us do our job.”

James Congdon’s special was waiting for him at a Union Station platform reserved for private trains. His Atlantic 4-4-2 locomotive, which had just rolled, gleaming, from the roundhouse, had steam up, and his conductor was arranging to clear tracks with a Pennsylvania Railroad division boss. The cook was shucking oysters from Delaware Bay, a steward was chilling champagne, and the actress who had come along for the ride to New York was luxuriating in a hot bath.

Congdon himself raised a brandy in the paneled library that served as his mobile office and said, “Nothing becomes Pittsburgh like the leaving of it.”

“You seem mighty cheerful for a man whose business has been seized by radicals,” answered Henry Clay.

“Bless them!” Congdon laughed. “They’ve outdone themselves. And outdone you, for that matter, Clay. You could not have planned it better.”

“They exceeded my expectations,” Clay admitted. “Even my imagination. But I will take full credit for creating the atmosphere that stimulated them.”

“Credit granted. What’s next?”

“Exploding steamboats and burning union halls.”

“In that order?”

“Simultaneous.”

Congdon eyed the younger man closely. “I don’t mind telling you that you’re doing an excellent job.”

“I was hoping you would say that.”

Of course you were, thought Congdon, saying only, “You deserve it.”

He checked the gilded clock on the wall and opened the louvers of the rosewood shutters. The railcar’s window overlooked the train yard and the sidings that snaked into the private platforms.

“Is there any more archetypical symbol of rampant capitalism than the special train?” he asked.

“None. Yachts pale by them.”

“Have you considered having the vicious strikers wreck a special?”

Clay sat straighter, alert as a terrier.

Congdon said, “The governor would have no choice but to call out the militia and hang strikers from lampposts.”

“Do you have a particular one in mind?”

“You see through me as if I were made of glass.” Congdon smiled, thinking, as Clay lit up like limelight, My oh my, does that make you preen. “Any special would do.”

As he spoke a locomotive glided into view, drawing a beautiful train of four cars painted in Reading Railroad green livery, with the yellow trim done in gold as befitted the president of the line.

“Look! Here comes one now.”

“That looks like R. Kenneth Bloom’s,” said Clay.

“I believe it is.”

“Two birds with one stone?”

“What do you mean by that?” Congdon demanded.

“President Bloom has been resisting your takeover of his Reading Line.”

“You presume too much, Clay. Be careful.”

“Forgive me,” Clay said contritely. “I’ve been up several days. I’m not thinking clearly.”

“Get some sleep,” said Congdon. And then, to put Clay deeper in his thrall, he warmed up a friendly smile and said, “Three birds, actually.”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Congdon?”

“It so happens that young Bloom, who’s been goading his father to fight back and has given him spine where there was only jelly, is making a quick round-trip to Cincinnati. Four hours out, a secret meeting at the Queen City Club with some bankers, and four hours back. He’ll have a guest on board. A friend of the family asked to ride along. His name is Isaac Bell.”

Henry Clay was both delighted and astonished. “How do you know that?”

“Bloom’s resistance forced me to employ spies.”

Clay surged to his feet, sleep forgotten. “Three birds. A triple play.”

40

Isaac Bell could not find Mary Higgins. A new renter had moved into her room, and the landlady had no forwarding address.

He went next to the tent city, riding the Second Avenue trolley to the end of the line where the strikers had torn up the tracks. The expressions on the sullen Pittsburgh cops observing from a block away told Bell that they feared the obvious: The coal miners defending the tent city included Army veterans of the Spanish and Philippines wars, military men who knew their business.

They had installed an iron gate that was only wide enough to admit one man at time. Bell showed a pass signed by Jim Higgins. Only then was he allowed through. And while approaching and entering, he was under the watchful gaze of strategically posted riflemen. Lookouts were stationed on top of the coal tipple with views of the city in three directions. Any movement of cops or militia would be spotted a mile away before they reached the gates. And in the shallows beside the riverbank, the strikers had sunk the barges that had floated them there, creating a crude breakwater like a crenellated castle wall, which would make it difficult to land police launches.

Two thousand tents pitched in neat rows with straight walks between them further conveyed the atmosphere of a military camp. By contrast, well-dressed women of means from Pittsburgh’s churches and charities swept by in long skirts, directing the placement of kitchen tents and water taps. The ladies’ presence, Bell thought, must be constraining the cops as much as the miners’ riflemen. Not to mention the city fathers who were their husbands, and it was amusing to imagine how many Pittsburgh bigwigs were sleeping at their clubs until the strike was settled. But despite strong defenses and capable administration and charity, the coal miners’ tent city had a precariousness, which was expressed by one stern matron whom Bell overheard:

“This is all well and good until it snows.”

He found a harried Jim Higgins directing the operation from under a tent’s open canvas fly. Mary’s brother said he had not seen her since the night they took her barges. He had no idea where she was. He admitted that he was worried, and he asked Bell to pass on the message, if he found her, that he could use her help desperately.

As Bell was leaving to head back downtown, he looked up and suddenly had to smile. A painter with a sense of humor was changing one word of the Amalgamated Coal Terminal sign on top of the tipple to read

AMALGAMATED COAL MINERS

The downtown union hall was deserted but for an elderly functionary left in charge. He had not seen Mary Higgins nor had he heard anything about her.

Bell found Mike and Terry in the back, sitting around a cookstove, drinking coffee.

“I’ll give you a choice, boys. Now that Jim Higgins is holed up in Amalgamated, you can go back to Chicago as Protective Services, agents or you can work for my squad.”

“Is it O.K. with Mr. Hancock and Mr. Van Dorn?”

“I’ll clear it with them,” said Bell. He would pay them out of his own pocket if he had to. He could use the manpower.

“What do you want us to do?”

“Find out where that big black boat went. I have a feeling you should start looking at McKeesport. But wherever it went, I want to know who they are and where they are going next because I do not believe that thing arrived here by coincidence.”

Bell waited for them to put down their coffee cups and stand up. But they just sat there. “Is something the matter, gents?”

“Not really, Isaac.”

“Then get going.”

“Sure.” They exchanged heavy looks and portentous headshakes. “There’s just one thing.”

“What?”

“We heard you asking about Miss Mary.”

“Have you seen her?”

“Yes. That is, well…”

“When? Where?”

“Saloons. By the river.”

“Who was she with?”

“Talking with a whole bunch of fellows.”

“If you see her again, follow her. Meantime, find that black boat. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Where you headed?”

“Cincinnati. If you need me for any emergency, wire me care of R. Kenneth Bloom, Jr., Reading Railroad. His train has a grasshopper key.”

“How do you happen to know a fellow with his own train, Isaac?”

“We ran away to the circus together.”

Henry Clay unlocked the door of his apartment. The drapes were drawn, and it was dark. He was halfway in and reaching for the wall switch beside the door when he sensed a presence. Wrong-footed, too late to back out, he hurled himself sideways along the wall, pushing the light switch with his left hand and drawing his Bisley with his right. When the light flared on, he had the gun pointed at the figure sitting in the armchair.

“I am not armed,” said Mary Higgins, raising her hands to show they were empty.

“How did you find me?”

“When I learned that you were a detective,” she said calmly, “I wondered how I would ever track you down on my own, much less shadow you, without you seeing me. I thought of hiring another professional to find you.”

“Bell!”

“Not Bell. Don’t be ridiculous. Although I did consider my brother’s bodyguards. The Van Dorn Protective Services pride themselves in being more than bodyguards.”

“Stumblebums. They couldn’t find me.”

“That’s what I thought. Besides, they might run straight home to tell Bell.”

“Then how did you find me?”

“I remembered that the old fellows in Bell’s squad told me that those flash men you put in charge of the barges had fled the city. But that didn’t seem likely. Why would they let a couple of Van Dorns chase them out of their hometown? So I went looking for familiar faces.”

“Where?”

“Casinos and concert saloons by the river.”

“My God, Mary, you could have been killed, or worse.”

“Not killed,” she said. “Not even compromised.”

“You were lucky. People in those places would not hesitate to slip chloral powder into an innocent girl’s drink.”

“I would recognize the odor of knockout drops in my tea,” she said drily.

“It is not as easily detected as people think. There are ways of compounding it that mask taste and smell.”

“You would know more about that than I,” she replied pointedly. “But, in actual fact, I met more gentlemanly sorts — including one of your flash men. He directed me to the man I suspected had not fled Pittsburgh. He recommended I look for you in this street of apartment buildings. I smiled at many janitors.”

“But I am not known to the landlord as Claggart.”

“Oh, I didn’t give them your name. I wouldn’t betray you that way. I only described you.”

“How did you unlock my door?”

“I didn’t. I climbed the fire escape.”

Clay holstered the Bisley, greatly relieved. It was one thing for an intelligent girl to make inquiries — particularly with a winsome smile. But the extremely rare ability to pick locks would make her far less innocent than he thought she was. He was still troubled, however, that she had been alone in his apartment. He was vigilant about not leaving evidence behind, but even the most careful man could give himself away with a small mistake.

“How long were you waiting for me?”

“Long enough to look around. You live well. It’s an expensive apartment.”

“Who told you I was a detective? Bell?”

She nodded.

Clay said, “Bell bent the truth. I was a detective once. I’m not any longer.”

“What are you now?”

“I am John Claggart.”

“Isaac called you Clay. Henry Clay.”

“Henry Clay no longer exists.”

“And what are you, John Claggart?”

“I am a revolutionary.”

“I found that easier to swallow when you wore workman’s duds. A smart frock coat and homburg hat make you look like a Morgan or Vanderbilt.”

“If you find it hard to swallow, then hopefully the enemy will, too.”

“Who paid for the barges?”

He was ready for this one. “Bank robberies.”

“The bank robbers were caught.”

“Bell told you that?”

She nodded.

Clay said, “Bell does not know as much as he thinks. They didn’t catch them all. The one who wasn’t caught stole the most money by far. And when he needs more, he can steal more in some other city. He walks into the bank president’s office, wearing his frock coat and his costly hat, remains with the president after hours, and leaves quietly with a full satchel.”

“I want to believe you,” she said.

“It touches me deeply to hear you say that.” It was quite remarkable, he thought, but she did believe him. “You honor me.”

“But nothing we did has amounted to a hill of beans. Our whole plan is destroyed now that the barges are lost.”

“May I ask,” said Clay, “do you hate Isaac Bell for taking the barges?”

“Of course I hate him. He ruined everything.”

“Would you kill him?” Clay asked.

“Never,” she said fiercely.

“Why not? Revenge can be sweet.”

“I would never kill a soul. Not for any reason.”

“Do you want me to kill him?”

She did not answer immediately. He watched her gray eyes rove the room and its costly furniture. They settled back on him. “No. It would be a waste of your energy.”

“What do you want?”

“What I have always wanted. I want to bring down the capitalist class. I want to stop them dead. And I still believe that the way to do that is stop coal.”

“The strike is doing a good job of that already.”

“No. Scab labor is digging more than half a million tons a week. The operators are regaining control of production. And now that the miners have a base at Amalgamated, they will negotiate, and the strike will be settled with a pittance for the miners and no recognition of the union. We must do something to shake all that loose.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I hope you might.”

Henry Clay said, “I have disruptions in the works. All sorts of turmoil.”

“What turmoil?”

Clay took off his hat and sank into an armchair. “Excuse me,” he said. “I haven’t shut my eyes or changed my clothes in three days. I need to sleep before I can think straight.”

“I’ll come back later.”

“You don’t have to leave. I’ll just close my eyes in this chair.”

“It would be better if I left,” she said primly.

Clay said, “Of course.”

He walked her to the door and shook her hand. Was it trembling? he wondered. Or was his?

A productive first step, thought Mary Higgins.

But she needed more. A search of his apartment, constrained by fear of it being noticed, had produced no clue to the identity of the man Claggart-Clay served, nothing that would bring her even one inch closer to the enemy.

She said, “I hope you understand that I will demand more from someone with whom I join forces.”

“More what?”

“More than vague promises of ‘turmoil.’”

Claggart surprised her. “I need to sleep. When I wake, you will have your ‘more.’”

“Promises?”

“Do you recall Harry O’Hagan’s triple play?”

“Who doesn’t?” Mary nodded impatiently. There was more in the newspapers about the first baseman’s miracle than the strike.

“I’ll give you results,” he said. “A bigger triple play than O’Hagan’s.”

41

Even after a celebrative bender that went on days too long, Court Held still could not believe his luck in selling the Vulcan King. So it seemed beyond conception when another man dressed in white, though taller and younger, walked into his office to inquire whether he had any large steamboats on the property.

“How large were you considering, sir?”

“Floating palace size.”

“I’ve got one left.”

“I was told you had two.”

“I did. I just sold one.”

“To whom, may I ask?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. I am obliged to respect the buyer’s privacy.”

To Held’s surprise, the tall young fellow, who was about his own age, laughed out loud.

“Well, that proves that.”

“Proves what, sir? I don’t know that I follow you.”

“A certain well-fixed gentleman and I engage in friendly competitions. We started in business, buying outfits out from under each other — factories, railroads, banks — and we’ve since moved into more pleasurable contests. We had a yacht race across the Atlantic Ocean. He won. By a nose. We had a train race from San Francisco to Chicago. I won. By fifty lengths. Now he’s gone and challenged me to a steamboat race. Pittsburgh to New Orleans and back.”

“That sounds like a fine idea.”

“Yes, except he obviously planned ahead and bought the only available boat. So now you say you have one that is as good.”

Court Held winked. “I’ll tell you this, sir, he didn’t buy the fastest.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Nope. Though it is the stronger, the Vulcan King is not as fast as White Lady.”

“Why’s that?”

Court Held lowered his voice and looked around the empty shipyard as if to ensure they were alone. “She’s packing a lot of extra weight, seeing as how the government wanted her reinforced to carry cannon.”

“So the Vulcan King is much stronger?”

“Her decks are.” Court lowered his voice to a whisper. “Between you and me, any steamboat is more an idea of boat than a solid boat. They have short lives. Ours are the best you could buy, but none of them lasted that long.”

Bell recalled Captain Jennings’s spit-and-sawdust.

“Before I buy it, I’d like to be sure that he’s already bought his. You understand, we also compete at leg-pulling. I got him good recently. He’s out for revenge. So I want to be darned sure he hasn’t set me up buying a steamboat I don’t need.”

“You could always use her to travel.”

“How long does it take to steam from here to Pittsburgh?”

“I told you, sir, she’s a fast boat. She’ll make Cincinnati to Pittsburgh in two days.”

“My special just took me here in four hours. So I’m not planning any steamboat traveling, but I do intend to be in this race if it is a race. I’m asking you again, who bought your other boat?”

“His name was Smith.”

“Smith?”

“Smith. I know. I worried, too.”

“I don’t think I’d take a check from an out-of-town fellow named Smith.”

“Nor would I, sir. Cash on the barrelhead from any man who calls himself Smith.”

“That’s a lot of cash for an out-of-town fellow to pack with him.”

“He paid with bearer bonds.”

“Bearer bonds?” the gent in white echoed. “They’re a risky proposition. How’d he guarantee they were still good?”

“A New York broker was the issuing agent. Thibodeau & Marzen. He marched me straight to their Cincinnati branch office on East Seventh and I walked out with the cash.”

“What did he look like?”

“Not quite so tall as you. A bit wider. Dark hair, what I could see of it under his hat.”

“Beard?”

“Clean-shaven.”

Bell shook his head. “Maybe he shaved… I always kidded him it made him look old. Say, what color were his eyes?”

“Strange-colored. Like copper, like a snake’s. I found ’em off-putting.”

“I’ll be,” said Bell. “It’s not him.”

“What do you mean?”

“His are blue.”

Bell stood up. “I’m sorry, Mr. Held. The louse tried to trick me into buying a boat I don’t need.”

“But maybe he bought his down in Louisville or New Orleans.”

“Well, if I find out he did, I’ll be back.”

Bell put on his hat and started out the door, feeling a mite guilty for the disappointed look on Held’s face. A funny idea struck him — a scheme that could upend the situation in Pittsburgh and, with any luck, defuse it.

“Mr. Held, I do know some fellows who might like a steamboat.”

“Well, send them to me and I’ll cut you in with a finder’s fee.”

“I couldn’t take a fee among friends. But the trouble is, these fellows don’t have much money.”

“I have a lot sunk into this one.”

“I understand. Would you consider renting it?”

“I might.”

“I’ll tell these fellows about her. Meantime, let me pay you to coal her and get steam up by tomorrow.”

“By tomorrow?”

North Pole light flickered in Isaac Bell’s eyes.

“I’m sure I could, now that I think about it,” said Held. “She’ll be raring to go in the morning.”

Bell paid Court Held for the coal and labor and hopped a trolley back to the business district. He got off at a Western Union office and sent a long telegram to Jim Higgins about the White Lady, recommending that he round up men who had worked on steamboats. Next, he went to East Seventh Street and found the Cincinnati branch office for Thibodeau & Marzen on the ground floor of a first-class building.

He stood outside, reading the gold leaf on the window, while he thought about how Wish Clarke, or Joseph Van Dorn, would pry information about “Smith” from prominent brokers — the leading New York — based broker in Cincinnati, judging by the look of the office — who had every reason not to give it.

He started by presenting a business card from Dagget, Staples & Hitchcock, an old-line New England insurance company. Joseph Van Dorn had made a deal to allow select agents a business disguise in return for discreet investigations of underwriting opportunities and losses incurred. Thibodeau & Marzen’s manager himself was summoned. Behind the broker’s friendly salesman’s smile, Bell detected a serious, no-nonsense executive, a tough nut to crack.

“Dagget, Staples & Hitchcock? Delighted to meet you, Mr. Bell. What brings you all the way from Hartford, Connecticut?”

“The principals have sent me on a scouting expedition.”

“Well, as stockbrokers and insurance firms are potential partners rather than adversaries, I do believe you started scouting in the right place. May I offer a libation in my office?”

They felt each other out over bourbon whiskey, the manager probing for Bell’s status at the venerable Hartford firm, Bell dropping names of school friends’ fathers he had met and men he had read about in Grady Forrer’s newspaper files. Turning down a hospitable refill, he said, “I’ve been asked to look into some bearer bonds that went missing in Chicago.”

“Missing bearer bonds are never a happy story, as whoever possesses them can cash them and whoever lost them can’t. Which, of course, I don’t have to tell a man in the insurance line.”

“Dagget, Staples & Hitchcock would not dream of trying to recover them, or the losses, which as you point out would be impossible. However, we do have a strong interest in the man in whose hands they ended up.”

“If missing bearer bonds have ended up repeatedly in this man’s hands as you are implying,” the branch manager said drily, “I am not surprised you do.”

So far, thought Bell, the branch manager was holding him off adroitly, as if he had been in business long enough to guess what was coming next from this seemingly casual visitor. The young detective said, “I would not be surprised if you have an inkling about the sort of question I am going to ask next.”

“Not one bit surprised,” the manager answered with a cool smile.

“The latest that went missing were railroad bonds. In twenty-five-thousand-dollar denominations.”

“May I ask which railroad?”

“It could have been one of many. The owner — previous owner, I guess we should say — had an affection for railroad bonds and owned a broad range, with various maturity dates and coupon rates of course.”

“Of course.”

“Of those stolen from his safe, we are particularly interested in three that were cashed within the week in a branch office of the issuing agent.”

“My branch office?” said the manager.

“Let me assure you that we are suggesting no impropriety on your part, and certainly not on the part of Mr. Court Held.”

“I should think not.”

“Surely not, in your case. But we do find, rarely but occasionally, that businessmen facing hard times will do very foolish things, so I am extremely happy to say that this has nothing to do with Mr. Held beyond the fact that the man who gave him the bonds in the course of a legitimate transaction might — and I emphasize might—be the man we have been investigating.”

The manager said nothing.

Bell said, “His name is John Claggart.”

“That’s not the man.”

“Sometimes he calls himself Henry Clay.”

“Not this time.”

“May I describe him to you?”

“Go ahead.”

Isaac described Henry Clay, ending with the eyes.

The branch manager of Thibodeau & Marzen said, “He called himself Smith. The bonds were on the New Haven Railroad, maturing in 1908, with a coupon rate of five percent.”

“Thank you,” said Bell, but he was disappointed. He had been half hoping that the manager would try to protect Claggart. With branches throughout the Midwest, Thibodeau & Marzen would make a good front for a private detective, or a provocateur on the run.

“I wonder if there is anything else I should report back about Mr. Smith. Is there anything he did that might help us track him down? I do hope I’ve made it clear that the firm regards him as a determined thief who will strike again.”

“You finally worked your way around to that, young man.”

“Anything. Anything odd?”

The manager stood up abruptly. “No, sir. Nothing I can recall.”

Bell stood up, too. He did not believe him. He had touched a nerve. And he had probably put him in the position he didn’t want to be. He said, “A man I’ve worked with who taught me my trade once told me that the hardest thing in the world is to get a man to do the right thing for the wrong reason.”

“What trade is that, Mr. Bell?”

“I’m actually a private detective.”

“I hope you don’t think I’m shocked by your admission. What agency?”

“Van Dorn.”

“Ah. A reputable outfit… Well, you’ve been honest at last. I’ll take a chance and be honest with you. Smith made me uncomfortable. For one thing, who in blazes buys a floating palace steamboat in this day and age? For another… Well, for another, my instincts were aroused. On the other hand, there was no legitimate reason not to cash the bonds — and, in fact, an obligation — since our firm was the issuing agent.”

“If the legitimacy of the bonds was not in doubt, what was odd?”

“While he was here, a message came in for him on our private wire.”

Isaac Bell felt an electric jolt. Pay dirt!

42

“Did you see the wire?”

Bell tried to sound casual but doubted he was fooling the manager.

“It was in cipher. Just numbers.”

“Does that imply he works for your firm?”

“No. And I’m quite sure he doesn’t. If he happened to work for the firm, wouldn’t he have introduced himself as such when he arrived?”

“Then how did he gain the use of your private telegraph?”

“The firm extends certain courtesies to good customers — as does any broker. Perhaps sometimes more than we should. By law, outsiders are forbidden to use leased wires. But everyone does it.”

“As I understand it,” said Bell, hoping to encourage his candor, “it’s a matter of business.” He was no stranger to private wires. The Van Dorn Detective Agency leased one. But he wanted the manager’s version untarnished by his preconceptions. Something was troubling the man.

“Yes, a matter of business. To send a message on an existing private wire is less costly than the usual commercial message, quicker, and certainly more convenient.”

“And more private,” said Bell.

“Yes, the advantages of a private closed wire include economy, quickness of dispatch, and privacy.”

“Did he send a reply?”

“It was brief. An acknowledgment, I presume, but it, too, was in cipher.”

Bell asked another question to which he knew the answer. “Are ciphers unusual?”

“Not among brokers. It’s only sensible to conceal buy and sell orders just in case the telegrapher violates his oath of privacy.”

“What do you make of it?”

“He is a friend of the firm, shall I put it? A special customer. Of the New York firm, I mean. I don’t know him from Adam. But he knows someone in New York.”

Isaac Bell stood up and offered his hand. “I appreciate your candor.” What was it the manager had said earlier? The firm extends certain courtesies… Perhaps sometimes more than we should. “May I ask you one more thing?”

“Go ahead.”

“I am curious why.”

“Why what?”

“What made you candid?”

The manager straightened his shoulders. “Mark Twain says that he intends to move back to Cincinnati on Judgment Day because we’re twenty years behind the times. Fine with me. I’m old-fashioned. I don’t like stock traders who can afford private wires getting a jump on the fellow who has to use the public wire. And Thibodeau & Marzen didn’t used to be the sort of outfit that liked them either.”

Bell stopped at Western Union on his way to meet Kenny Bloom at the Queen City Club and wired a telegram to Grady Forrer:

He doubted very much that Henry Clay was communicating on private wires to get a jump on a stock sale as the Cincinnati branch manager suspected. Instead of fraudulent profits, a business with branches scattered around the continent could offer direct private communication with someone in their New York office. In the case of Smith, Claggart, and Henry Clay, Isaac Bell bet that someone was the man who gave the provocateur his orders.

He found Court Held at the Queen City Club bar. The shipyard heir greeted him like an old friend and invited him and Kenny to stay for dinner. Kenny, who was on his fourth whiskey, looked like he thought that was a good idea, but Bell reminded the coal-and-railroad heir that having raced to Cincinnati to meet with his Ohio bankers, he should be racing home, which was why he had taken his father’s special in the first place.

“We better eat on the train.”

“Pittsburgh in one hour,” announced the Bloom Special’s conductor as they neared the Ohio border for the run across West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle.

“Why so long?” Kenny demanded. He had fallen asleep on the couch in the office — sitting room car and sat up, rubbing his temples.

“Sorry, Mr. Bloom, we have to stop for water outside Steubenville.”

“Why outside? Jeez, my head is aching. Can’t we just go straight?”

“As I mentioned earlier, the dispatcher had to shunt us around Steubenville for a mail train. We didn’t lose more than ten minutes.”

“But now we have to stop for water.”

“Or don’t stop and blow up the locomotive,” said Bell, and Kenny laughed. “All right, all right. Just get us there.”

The train slowed and stopped by a dark water siding.

The conductor, who was doubling as brakeman, jumped down to the tracks to throw the switch. His name was Bill Kux, and he’d been hankering after a job on the New York Central’s 20th Century Limited — or, better yet, way out west on the Overland Limited — and this Cincinnati trip with Old Man Bloom’s spoiled brat had pretty much made up his mind.

Kux threw the switch. The engineer backed the special onto the water siding. The fireman climbed up on the locomotive and jerked a chain that pulled the waterspout down to the engine. The engineer climbed down from the cab to stretch his legs. Kux said, “You’ll make all our lives easier if you can make up some time.”

The engineer swore he would do his damnedest. The fireman climbed down. Kux turned to run back to the switch and found himself staring into the twin maws of a twelve-gauge double-barreled shotgun. Gasps behind Kux told him that the engineer and fireman were peering down gun barrels, too.

“This way, boys, right behind the water tower.” There were three of them with bandannas pulled over their noses. They had brought iron manacles, which they clamped around the train crew’s wrists and ankles. The fireman got the big idea to resist, which earned him a gun-butt to the head.

Conductor Kux was not entirely displeased to imagine Bloom Jr. being relieved of his watch, cuff links, stickpin, and billfold. But from what he had seen of Bloom’s friend Isaac Bell, the robbery would likely turn into a bloody shoot-out, so he tried to dissuade them.

“If you’re fixing to rob my passengers, there’s only two of ’em, you damned fools. You stopped a special.”

“We ain’t robbing your passengers. We’re robbing your train.”

“Kenny?” asked Isaac Bell as the train started rolling again. “Do you know Thibodeau & Marzen in New York?”

“The brokers.”

“Right. What do you know about them?”

“I think Dad used them once or—”

The train jerked, and he spilled whiskey over his shirt. “Dammit to hell. I will fire that engineer.”

“He’s displayed a fine smooth hand up to now,” said Bell. “I wonder what’s got into him?”

Kenny Bloom dabbed his shirt with a napkin. “Overpaid son of a bitch has probably been drinking.” The train picked up speed.

“What do you know about Thibodeau & Marzen?” Bell asked again.

“Old-fashioned old codgers.”

“Are they honest?”

Kenny dabbed his shirt some more, then poured another glass. He gestured with the bottle. Bell shook his head.

“Are they honest?”

“Honest as the day is long. Frankly, I don’t know how they survive on Wall Street.”

Bell looked at their reflections in the night-blackened glass. Lights in a farmhouse raced by. Old and honest? Had Clay and his boss somehow tapped secretly into Thibodeau & Marzen’s private system?

“We’re making time at last,” said Kenny. “Running fast and hitting the curves hard. Maybe I won’t fire him after all.”

“What? Oh yes.”

The train was highballing through the night, although the rate of speed was not that apparent. Their car was coupled between a stateroom car, which rode directly behind the tender, and the diner car at the back of the train. Thus anchored, it did not sway much, while thick insulating felt between the paneling and the outer walls muffled wind and track noise. Bell was surprised, as they passed a small-town train depot, how fast its lights whipped by.

A sudden chatter broke the silence.

Kenny darted to the telegraph key. They had picked up a message by grasshopper telegraphy, the signal relayed to the speeding train from the telegraph wires that paralleled the tracks through an Edison-patented electrostatic induction system. Fluent since boyhood in the Morse alphabet, Kenny cocked his ear and wrote furiously, then carried what he had written to Bell, his expression grave. Bell, who had listened intently, knew why.

“For you,” said Kenny.

“I told the boys I’d be on your train.”

He read it, his brow furrowing.

“Looks bad,” said Kenny.

“Hellish,” said Isaac Bell.

43

“Enjoy your ride?’” asked Kenny Bloom. “What the hell kind of joke is that supposed to be?”

“A vicious joke,” said Bell, mourning Captain Jennings, murdered for helping the marchers, and Mike Flannery and Terry Fein, whom he had sent into action over their heads.

“And what does ‘triple play’ mean?”

The floor shook and the windows reverberated as the train thundered across an iron trestle bridge. “Where’s the conductor?”

“I don’t know. Back in the diner.”

“Are you sure?”

Bell strode quickly to the back of the car and threw open the door into the enclosed vestibule. The wheels were thundering on the track, and the wind was roaring past the canvas diaphragm. Bell opened the diner door and stepped into the car. It was swaying violently.

“Kux! Conductor Kux! Are you there?”

The cook stuck his head out of the kitchen. “We’re going mighty fast, Mr. Bell. In fact, we’re going faster than I’ve ever seen this train go.”

“Where’s Mr. Kux?”

“I haven’t see him since we stopped for water.”

Bell ran forward. Kenny was pouring a fresh drink. “We’re bouncing around like a yawl in a storm. What the hell is going on?”

“First thing I’m going to ask your engineer.” Bell pushed into the front vestibule, heading for the locomotive. The door to the stateroom car was bolted shut. It was a steel express car door. There was no budging it short of dynamite.

“Locked,” he told Kenny.

“Something’s nuts,” said Kenny Bloom. “We’re doing ninety miles an hour.”

The train hit a curve hard. Wheel flanges screeched on the rails.

“‘Triple play,’” said Isaac Bell, “means we’re next. He shanghaied our crew and tied down the throttle.”

“I’m stopping us!” Kenny lunged for the red handle of the emergency brake on the wall at the front of the car.

Bell beat him to it and blocked his hand. “If we slam on the air brakes at this speed we’ll derail her.”

“We’ve got to stop her. Feel that? She’s still accelerating.” Kenny, who had carried his glass with him, put it down. “Isaac, we’re heading for Pittsburgh at a hundred miles an hour.”

“How drunk are you?” Bell asked.

“I’m too scared to be drunk.”

“Good. Help me out the window.”

“Where you going?”

“Locomotive.”

Bell dropped the sash. A hundred-mile-an-hour wind blasted through the opening and sent everything not nailed down flying about the car in a tornado of cloth and paper. Bell tugged off his coat and thrust his head out the window. The rushing air hit him like a river in a flood. He wormed his torso out, sat on the sash, and attempted to stand. The wind nearly knocked him off the train.

“I’ll block,” yelled Kenny. He yanked down the next window and squirmed his bulky chest and belly out the opening. Bell tried again. With Kenny blocking the wind with his body, he managed to plant his feet on the windowsill. But when he stood up, it took all his strength to hold on. If he let go either hand to pull himself onto the roof of the car, he would be blown away. Kenny Bloom, hanging on for dear life, saw that and shouted, “Wait!” Then he struggled to stand on his windowsill to shield Bell’s upper body so he could reach for the roof.

“Don’t!” shouted Bell. “You’ll fall.”

“I was just as good an acrobat as you,” Kenny yelled back. “Almost.”

With a herculean effort that made his eyes roll into the back of his head, the rotund Bloom stood up. “Go!”

Isaac Bell wasted no time pulling himself onto the roof. Kenny had been a pretty good acrobat in the circus, but that was back when they were kids and since then he had lifted nothing heavier than a glass to build his strength. The wind was even stronger on the roof. Bell slithered flat on his belly to the front of the car, over the canvas-covered frame of the vestibules and onto the stateroom car, and crawled forward into a blizzard of smoke, steam, and hot cinders spewing from the engine. Reaching the front of the car at last, he found a six-foot space between its roof and the tender. Coal was heaped in the front of the tender. The back, the steel water tank, was flat, and lower than the roof of the stateroom.

The wind of their passage at one hundred miles per hour made it impossible to jump the space. Bell put his hands together and extended his arms, narrowing his body as if diving off a high board, and plunged. He cleared the back of the tender, and when his hands hit the steel tank, he tried to curl into a tight ball. He tumbled forward, skidded on the slick surface, and reached frantically for a handhold.

He found one wrapping the edge, dragged himself forward, dropped onto the coal pile, scrambled across it, and found himself peering into an empty locomotive cab lit by the roaring flames of the firebox that gleamed through a crack in the door. He climbed down a ladder on the front of the tender and jumped into the cab, a hot, dark labyrinth of levers, valves, gauges, and piping.

He was generally conversant with locomotives from avid reading as a child, schoolboy engine tours hosted by Kenny’s father, and leading a Yale Glee Club midnight excursion to Miss Porter’s School on an Atlantic 4-4-0 “borrowed” from the New Haven Railroad train yards. He left the Johnson bar reverser in the center notch and searched for the throttle.

The throttle would not budge. He looked closely. The train wreckers had screwed a clamp on to hold it in the wide-open position. He unscrewed the clamp and notched the throttle forward to stop the flow of steam into the cylinders. Tens of thousands of pounds of steel, iron, coal, and water just kept rolling. Gently, he applied the automatic air brakes on the cars behind him, reducing about eight pounds of pressure, which also set the locomotive’s brakes. Screeching steel and a violent bucking told him, Too much. He put on more air pressure, easing the brake shoes on the wheels, and tried a softer touch. At last the train began to slow until there came a point at about fifty miles an hour when Isaac Bell realized to his huge relief that he, more than momentum, was in command.

Just in time. He had reduced the train’s speed to a crawl when he saw a red lantern ahead. A brakeman was standing on the tracks, swinging the Stop signal. A passenger train had stopped for a dispatcher’s signal and was blocking the tracks. “Ran back as fast as I could,” shouted the brakeman. “Good thing you saw me. Bumping into us at ten miles an hour, somebody might get hurt.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Bell.

While he waited for the train ahead to get moving again, he checked his gauges for boiler pressure and water level and injected more water into the firebox and scooped coal into the fire. Then he followed the passenger train into Pittsburgh, tight on its tail to squeeze through the same switches. Crossing the Allegheny River, he saw a fire at the Point — the still-burning wreckage of the stern-wheeler Camilla. A bigger fire was shooting flames into the sky from the edge of the Golden Triangle. It looked as if the union hall fire had spread to surrounding buildings.

Wally and Mack were waiting at the specials’ platform. One look at Bell’s face and Wally said, “I see you already heard what happened.”

“Henry Clay wired the news himself. Couldn’t resist bragging. And I just saw the fires from the bridge. Did the boys burn to death?”

“Firemen I talked to think they had their heads bashed in first.”

“I should have sent you two. You’d have seen it coming.”

“Don’t start blaming yourself,” said Mack. “Terry and Mike were grown-ups.”

“Just so you know, Isaac, they found another body, apparently the guy who set the fire. Papers in his wallet said he was on the Strike Committee.”

“How come his wallet didn’t burn up?”

“Smoke poisoning killed him, apparently,” said Wally. “Or so the cops say.”

Mack said, “Whatever happened, the strikers will catch hell for it. The newspapers are putting on extra editions, howling for blood.”

“What about Jennings’s steamboat?”

“Similar situation,” Wally said. “Sheriff’s men shot a striker in a rowboat. It was nearby.”

Mack said, “With all this in mind, we sent Archie to keep an eye on Jim Higgins.”

Bell said, “But Jim Higgins is protected by armed strikers.”

“So they’ll protect Archie, too.”

Bell nodded. “Of course. You’re right. Thank you for looking after Archie.”

“Now what?” asked Wally.

“Any word from Research?”

“Dead end.”

Mack handed him a telegram from Grady Forrer.

Bell had been counting heavily on the broker leading him to Henry Clay’s boss. He crumpled the telegram in his fist and flung it from him. Mack caught it on the fly, smoothed the paper, and handed it back. “Put it away for later. Sometimes dead ends turn around.”

“Now what?” Wally asked again.

“Where’s that black steamboat?”

“Terry and Mike saw it tied up behind a mill at McKeesport.”

“Which is probably what got them killed.”

A bell clanged. A gleaming locomotive pulled a New York-to-Chicago limited into the train shed. Bell looked around the train platforms, which were deserted at this late hour. He wondered where Mary was. But he asked, “Where’s Jim Higgins?”

“Forted up at Amalgamated,” said Mack. “He’s got trains blocked, trolleys blocked, and streets blocked. But the black boat is making them nervous.”

Wally said, “The cops are gnashing their teeth.”

“So’s the sheriff,” said Mack. “At least, according to my sources. Rarin’ to roust the strikers out of their tents.”

“That would be a bloodbath.”

Wally said, “The operators, and the Coal and Iron cops, and the Pinkertons, and the state militia wouldn’t mind a bloodbath one bit.”

“But the mayor and some of Pittsburgh’s powers that be are afraid of a bloodbath,” said Mack, “account of all the women and kids. And with church ladies and progressives breathing down their necks. They’re hinting they’ll negotiate.”

“At least ’til after the ball,” said Wally.

“What ball?”

“Pittsburgh Society ball. Big annual la-di-da. Industrialists looking for gentility. Swells steaming in on specials. The mayor knows the newspapers would have the real ball — tycoons dancing on workmen’s graves — so he’s trying to sit on the hotheads for a couple of days more. Meaning we have two days before this blows sky-high.”

Bleeding steam, the limited from New York rolled beside a platform, and a big man in a voluminous coat bounded down before it stopped.

Wally Kisley said, “Look out, Isaac! If you think you have problems now, here comes the Boss.”

Joseph Van Dorn spotted Bell’s wave from across the tracks, strode into the station building, and doubled back to the private platform where his detectives were conferring. On the way he had bought an extra edition the newsboys were hawking inside. He waved it in their faces.

“Couldn’t help but notice that the city’s on fire. Says here, we lost two men.”

“Terry Fein and Mike Flannery,” said Bell. “And a steamboat captain who went out on a limb for us.”

“Us?” Van Dorn demanded. “Who are ‘us’? Detectives or strikers?”

“Both,” said Isaac Bell. “We ended up on the same side.”

Instead of remonstrating with Bell, Joseph Van Dorn asked, “Driven there by Henry Clay?”

“Explosives and arson are Clay’s hallmarks,” answered Bell. “Captain Jennings’s towboat was a dependable workhorse. Highly unlikely it would blow up without help. And even the cops say the union hall was arson.”

“But conveniently blame a dead striker,” said Wally Kisley.

Joseph Van Dorn looked Bell in the eye. “What’s your next move, Isaac?”

Wally Kisley blurted, “Isaac’s next move? Aren’t you taking over?”

Joseph Van Dorn’s hard gaze never left Bell’s face. He answered in a tone that invited no questions. “Isaac got us into this mess. I’m counting on him getting us out of it. What’s your next step, Detective Bell?”

Now Mack Fulton protested, exercising the privilege of the Van Dorn Agency’s oldest employee. “It’s too much to put all on him, Joe.”

And Wally chimed in, “It needs an experienced man with a bird’s-eye view.”

Van Dorn asked, “What do you say to that, Isaac?”

Van Dorn, Kisley, and Fulton were staring expectantly at him, and if Isaac Bell had any doubts left about his “bird’s-eye view” of the Striker Case, they were demolished once and for all when Kenny Bloom staggered off his train arm in arm with the cook.

Both men were clutching highball glasses. Kenny raised his in salute.

“The man of the hour. Gentlemen, I give you Isaac Bell, the hero engineer who saved the lives of a worthless plutocrat and his worthy cook. Whatever you want shall be yours.”

Bell said, “It’s not all on me, I’ve got you gents. Here’s what I want— Wally, Mack, I want you two to keep trying to track down Henry Clay.”

“I’ll track Clay,” growled Joseph Van Dorn.

“No,” said Isaac Bell, “you can do better than track Clay.”

“Clay is my fault. He’s my monster. I created him. I’ll kill him.”

“No. If you fail — if Clay eludes you even for a moment — ten thousand people’s lives are at risk. You have to do more— You met the President.”

“TR. What about him?”

“Can you meet him again?”

“Not easily. I’d have to go to Washington. It could take a week. What for?”

“Go to Washington. We have to keep the strikers and the strikebreakers from killing each other until someone persuades cooler heads to negotiate. If we can’t stop Henry Clay, the President will be the only one who can even try.”

“You want me to organize a fallback?”

“If all else fails.”

Before Van Dorn could formulate an answer, Bell whirled on Kenny and his cook.

“Cook! I want a big breakfast laid on for twenty men. Kenny! I want a fresh locomotive and train crew.”

“What for?”

“I’m highballing your special back to Cincinnati.”

“Why?”

“We have only two days. There isn’t a moment to lose.”

44

Mary Higgins tipped a nickle-plated flask to her lips and tossed her head back. Her glossy black hair rippled in the thin sun that penetrated the smoke.

“I was not aware you drank,” said Henry Clay.

She was amazed how a man who could be so brutal was so prim. “My father had a saloon. I learned how when I was young.”

“At his knee?” Clay smiled. She looked lovely, he thought, wearing a long coat she had borrowed from her new landlady and a wide-brimmed feathered hat that he had persuaded her to accept after most of her belongings had burned in the union hall. They had ridden the cable-powered incline up Mount Washington and were sitting in a little park with a murky view of the Golden Triangle and the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio rivers. He was in business attire: frock coat, homburg, and a walking stick that concealed a sword.

“Father always said a girl should learn to hold her whiskey.”

“Didn’t you say he had a tugboat?”

“The saloon was another time, in another city. He was always changing jobs.”

“A jack-of-all-trades?”

“He could master anything. Except people. Just like my brother, Jim. It broke his heart that evil people exist.” She touched the flask to her lips again. “He also said, ‘Never drink alone.’ Would you like some?”

“It’s barely noon.”

“Don’t put off ’til tonight what you can do today. Here.”

She handed it to him with a smile. Henry Clay weighed the flask tentatively in his hand. “Pass it back if you’re not going to use it,” said Mary, her gray eyes warming as she teased him.

Clay tilted it toward her in a toast, “Don’t put off ’til tonight…” and raised it to his lips. He handed it back.

Mary said, “See you on the other side,” and drank deeply.

When the flask was empty, Henry Clay said, “I’ll run and get us a refill.”

Mary Higgins pressed her fingers to her temples. “Oh, my poor head. This was a terrible idea.”

“What do you mean?”

“I need coffee. I need gallons of coffee.” She sprang to her feet, swayed a little, and said, “Come on, I’ll make some at my place.”

They rode down on the incline and then took a horse cab across the Smithfield Bridge to her latest temporary digs. It was a small furnished apartment, more expensive than a rooming house but worth it for the extra privacy. She had begged the rent from her brother’s strike fund. She brewed strong coffee in the tiny kitchen and brought it to Clay in the sitting room. She was betting that the combination of the whiskey she had persuaded him to drink and the strong, heavily sugared coffee would mask the taste of the chloral hydrate.

Not only did Clay not notice the knockout drops, he asked for a second cup, half of which he spilled on his trousers when he suddenly passed out with a mildly incredulous expression on his face.

She searched his billfold and his pockets but found absolutely no clue about the man who paid him to provoke violence so the owners and the government could destroy the union. In disappointment and disbelief, she went through everything again. Again, nothing. She riffled through his business cards, thinking maybe he had slipped one he had been given among his own.

She found a sheet of paper that had been folded over and over until it fit between the cards. She unfolded it. It was a private-wire telegram to his John Claggart alias from a New York broker. She slammed it down on the couch. Every word of it was in cipher. Useless.

She could go to New York to the broker. But then what? Persuade them to decipher it for her? If they knew who he was, they would not tell.

Clay’s hand closed around her boot.

She looked down. He had awakened and was watching her through slitted eyes.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Searching your pockets,” she said. What could she say, with his billfold sitting in her lap and his private wire next to her?

“Why?”

“Because you still won’t tell me who is paying for everything. Did he send you this telegram?”

“Why do you care so much?”

“Because he is trying to destroy us.”

Clay mumbled, “Oh, Mary, for God’s sake,” and that was when she realized that the knockout drops had put him in a half-delirious state.

She sat on the floor beside him and took his hand in both of hers.

“What is his name?”

“You don’t understand.”

“I’m trying to.”

She looked into his strange eyes. The chloral had turned him inside out. The pharmacist had warned her. Reactions varied. The drug could put a man to sleep, or make him delirious, or writhing in agony. Did Clay know he was awake? Did he know his own name? He knew her. He stared, his mouth working. “Mary, when I’m done, perhaps you and I… I would fund progressive impulses.”

“What do you mean?”

“Important men, men of means, do that for their wives…” His voice drifted.

Mary said, “What for their wives?” She had to keep him talking.

“Reformers’ husbands pay the bills. When I am done, I will do that.”

“Done with what?”

“Mary. I’m doing something very important.”

“Yes, yes, I know.”

“I want you to understand that.”

“I’m trying to… I do.”

“I will be a made man.”

“Of course.”

“I will have so much to offer you.”

“You do already,” she said. “You are quite remarkable.”

For once, he ignored praise, saying, “But I couldn’t do this without him.”

In a flash of insight into his strange mind, she said, “But he couldn’t do it without you.”

“That’s right. That’s right. You know. As powerful as he is — the most powerful man in the country — he could not do it without me.”

“Does he know that?” she asked.

“He doesn’t want to know it,” Clay said bitterly. “He thinks he doesn’t need me.”

“But he does!”

“Yes. Even he needs me. The most important man in the world. Mary, it’s James Congdon. The most powerful man in Wall Street. The most powerful man in steel and coal and railroads. But he needs me.”

My God, she thought, Clay had gone straight to the top. Or bottom. Judge James Congdon made Frick look like a company store butcher overcharging for fatback.

He was watching her, waiting. She said, “James Congdon is lucky to have you.”

“Thank you,” Clay whispered. “Thank you for saying that.”

When Henry Clay fell asleep, again, Mary stuffed his Bisley revolver in her bag and left, shaking.

He could have killed me, she thought. But he didn’t.

She went straight to Union Station and bought the cheapest coach ticket on a slow train to New York with the last of her money. On the train, she wrote a letter to her brother, and another to Isaac Bell, and posted both when the train stopped at a station in the middle of Pennsylvania and changed engines to climb the Allegheny Mountains.

The train was crowded. The seat was hard. Her reflection in the night-blackened window revealed her father’s features. His favorite saying had always been, The only thing you’ll ever regret is the thing you didn’t do.

45

Henry Clay drove a narrow, closed wagon with two high wheels in back and two shorter wheels in front. The wagon was much heavier than it looked, particularly as the words Hazelwood Bakery painted on the sides and the loaves of bread heaped in the left-hand front corner behind glass implied a bulky but light load. It took the combined effort of two strong mules to pull it up the hills.

Clay walked alongside with the reins in his hands. On the driver’s seat beside the loaves sat a kindly-looking middle-aged woman clutching a Bible. Her cheeks were round and pink, her hair pulled back in a modest bun, her eyes alert.

“Cops,” she said.

“Just do as I told you and everything will be fine.” He was not worried. She was levelheaded and had weathered many strikes in the coalfields.

The cops, shivering in dirty blue Pittsburgh Police Department uniforms, were manning the outside of a barricade the strikers had made of toppled streetcars to protect their tent city. They were cold and wet from the rain squalls that kept sweeping the Amalgamated point, they were bored, and they were hungry. The pink-cheeked, gray-haired woman tossed them loaves of bread that were still warm.

The cops tore off chunks and chewed on them. “Can’t let you go in, lady.”

“It’s from our church. There’s children in that camp and they’re hungry.”

“Can’t you give ’em a break?” said Henry Clay.

“We got our orders. No guns, no food.”

Clay tied his reins to the wagon, nodded for the cop in charge to step aside, and passed an almost full bottle of whiskey from his coat. He whispered, “Don’t let her see this, but I figure you guys must be cold.”

The cop took a slug of it.

Clay almost gagged from the smell. The chloral Mary had drugged him with had left him with a heaving stomach, a splitting headache, and weird dreams. But he could not for the life of him remember what had transpired between them at her apartment. All he knew for certain was that she was gone and had stolen his Colt Bisley. What she had wanted he could not guess. Had she drugged him for Bell? But she hated Bell. Besides, if she had done it for Bell, the Van Dorns would have slapped the cuffs on him while he was passed out. The cop was talking to him.

“This is the good stuff.”

“Keep it.”

“You must really love them strikers.”

Clay nodded in the direction of the woman on the driver’s seat. “She’s my big sister. Took care of me when I was a kid. What am I going to do? She wants to bring ’em bread.”

“O.K. O.K. I don’t want to starve kids, either. Go on in. But don’t come back this way. Go out another side in case the sergeant comes.”

“Thanks, pal.”

The cops walked away. Henry Clay rapped on the barricade. Twenty men dragged a car aside, and the mules dug in their shoes to pull the weight over the hump in the road and through the opening. As soon as the car was pushed back, the head of the Defense Committee, Jack Fortis, greeted Henry Clay by the name John Claggart, and led the wagon into the tent city. The woman on the driver’s seat threw bread to the people crouched in their tents but quickly ran out. She climbed down without a word and plodded away in the rain. The wagon continued on, through the tents and up a muddy hill to the masonry base of the coal tipple.

“Put it there,” said Fortis.

Henry Clay nodded his approval. The strikers had chosen well. The site commanded the entire bend in the river.

The mules were unhitched and led away. Carpenters and a blacksmith gathered with crowbars, hammers, wrenches, and chisels and quickly dismantled the bakery wagon. Sides, roof, driver’s seat, dashboard, shafts, and an improvised coupler were carried off. The front wheels were detached and rolled away.

Henry Clay watched the carpenters, the smith, and especially Fortis’s picked men from the Defense Committee, all Spanish War veterans, gaze with great satisfaction at what was left — a four-foot-long cannon capable of firing an explosive shell two miles. It was a Hotchkiss Mountain Gun mounted on its own carriage, which had served as the fake bakery wagon’s high back wheels. The tube and its steel wheels and ammunition weighed seven hundred pounds. Portable and accurate, the type had proved its worth for a generation, slaughtering savages in the Indian Wars and Spaniards on San Juan Hill and currently blasting Philippine insurgents with jagged shell fragments.

Fortis raised his voice. “Thank you, John Claggart. This will even things up. You are a true friend to labor.”

Henry Clay replied, “I wish I could have brought you more ammunition. Only thirty rounds. But once you get the Vulcan King’s range, you ought to blow enough holes in her to sink her before they get off too many shots. Better yet, blow up a boiler. Remember, her boilers are directly underneath her wheelhouse. If you manage to hit a boiler, the explosion will sweep away the whole forward part of the boat, from the wheelhouse down to the waterline, and bury their guns.”

“And the state militia,” said Fortis.

“And the Pinkertons,” said Clay. “And the Coal and Iron Police. Good luck, boys. God go with all of you.”

A U.S. Marshal boarded the railroad ferry from Jersey City to Cortlandt Street with a prisoner in handcuffs and leg irons who recognized Mary Higgins from the union. He looked away so as not to cause her trouble. She had just bought a sandwich in the terminal. She carried it over and asked the marshal, “May I give this to your prisoner?”

A smile got him to allow it.

It was a short walk from the ferry terminal to Wall Street. She paused in Trinity Church cemetery, and paused again to stare in the tall windows of Thibodeau & Marzen. It looked like a bank.

Nearby, she found the Congdon Building, the tallest on the block. The doorman eyed her borrowed coat and the hat Henry Clay had bought her and asked politely who she had come to see. Her voice failed her. She had lost her nerve. Stammering something unintelligible, she hurried away. She rode a streetcar uptown, clutching Clay’s revolver in her bag, walked a bit, and came back down on the Third Avenue El. The doormen had changed shifts. The new man was polite, too, equally impressed by her coat and hat.

“Mr. James Congdon, please.”

“Top floor,” he said, indicating the elevator.

The elevator runner, a gawky kid who in a better world would still be in school, asked her what floor, and when she told him he asked, “What’s your name, please, miss? I have to call ahead to Mr. Congdon’s floor.”

So much for surprising the great man in his lair. “Mary Higgins.”

He called on the intercom, spoke her name, and listened.

“He wants to know who you are.”

“A friend of Mr. Clay.”

“He says bring you up.”

The elevator delivered her to a small foyer with a reception desk. A middle-aged woman at the desk pointed toward a series of rooms that spilled one into another. “Through there. Close each door behind you, please.”

Mary Higgins went through the first door, closed it, and in through a second. Each room was quieter than the last. In the third she found a closed door and knocked.

A strong male voice shouted, “Enter!”

She pushed through the door, closed it behind her, and gasped.

“My sculpture is Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss. Do you like it?”

“It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

She tore her eyes from the white marble to look across the room at Congdon, who was standing at his desk. He looked older than in the newspaper sketches but more vigorous. He was very tall and stood well.

“Go on. You can look at it. Touch it. It feels wonderful.”

She approached reverentially. The confident way the woman’s left arm pulled her lover toward her was the most erotic sight she had ever seen.

“What do you want?”

“I want a world where everyone can see this beautiful statue.”

“Not in this life,” Congdon said coldly.

His office had double windows. No sound from the street penetrated. The walls were hung with paintings, most of thinly veiled naked women in the French Academy style. On his desk Mary saw a bronze statuette, another naked woman.

“My wife,” said Congdon, stroking it. “Go on, you can touch it, if you like. I find the marble draws me close.”

Mary laid her hand on the woman’s arm.

“What else do you want?” Congdon asked. “What did you come for?”

“I want you to stand aside and let the coal miners organize, and I want you to pay them a fair wage.”

“Higgins? Yes, of course. You’re Jim Higgins’s sister, aren’t you? The unionist.”

Mary nodded.

Congdon said, “Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, you’re talking to the wrong man. I don’t own coal mines.”

“You control them by the prices you pay for the coal the miners dig and for what your railroads charge to ship it. And please don’t insult my intelligence. If you don’t ‘officially’ own those railroads, you control them by their purse strings. If there is only one person in the country who can allow a union and pay the miners a fair wage, it is you.”

“Assume, for a moment, I could. What would I get out of it?”

“The well-being gained when equality spawns justice.”

“Equality spawns mediocrity at best, the mob at worst.”

“If you refuse, I will expose your scheme to foment violence in the coalfields.”

“And how will you do that?”

“I will persuade Henry Clay to confess everything you two have done and everything you plan to do next.”

James Congdon regarded her with a thoughtful smile. At last, he said, “I’ll be damned… You know, I have no doubt you could do that. I suspect you are an extraordinary young woman. I would not be at all surprised if you’ve established insights into Clay that would allow you to command his frail emotions.”

“You and I are similar,” said Mary Higgins.

“In what way?”

“Clear-eyed and quick.”

“I take that as a compliment. But we are dissimilar in more important ways. I would build — you would tear down. You love mankind — I can’t abide it. I am old — you are young. And very, very beautiful.” He roved his eyes over her. “Have I insulted you by observing that?”

Mary let her own eyes rove around his paintings again. They settled on the statuette. He was rubbing its breasts with his thumb.

“Well? Have I?”

Mary draped her arms around the marble couple. “Considering your penchant for women in the altogether, I’d have been insulted if you hadn’t at least noticed me.”

“Good! Let’s get right to it. I will make you an offer, young lady. I won’t ask you to even pretend that you find a man three times your age attractive. I don’t care about being ‘attractive’ to you or anyone. I care about possession. And I have no objection to paying for possession. It is the most tangible reward for success. In return, you will live lavishly in comparison to the vast, vast majority of other women. Whether I decide to keep you or not. If not, you will receive a generous pension, based, of course, on how long I’ve kept you.”

“How large a pension compared to your regular employees?”

“There’s no comparison. Few receive pensions. The handful who do do not discover themselves rolling in wealth they didn’t earn.”

“If you decided to keep me, how much?”

“You’ll want for nothing.”

“An automobile?”

“Of course.”

“An apartment on Fifth Avenue?”

“For as long as I have the only key.”

“Could I come and see this statue?”

“Every night.”

“Could I have a yacht?”

“A yacht would require extra effort on your part.”

“I hoped you would say that.”

A broad smile uncreased Congdon’s face. “That suggests we understand each other perfectly. And let me put your mind to ease on one score. I can pretty much guarantee that when you find yourself on silk sheets, an older man might surprise you more than you imagine.”

“I’ve been surprised only once in my life and it wasn’t on silk sheets.”

“Where was that?”

“On a freight train. Go to hell, Congdon.”

Congdon, visibly surprised, fumbled around his desk and laid a hand on the bronze statuette of his naked wife. “But you just said you were hoping—”

“I was hoping you would say something that would give me enough courage, or enough hatred, to shoot you. And you did, thank you.” She took Henry Clay’s revolver from her bag and braced it on The Kiss.

The veins in the back of Congdon’s hand bulged as he gripped his statuette with sudden intensity. “Did the yacht do it?”

She tried to answer but couldn’t. Finally, she whispered, “I guess we all have our limits.”

“What do you mean?”

“I cannot kill another human being, even the worst one in the world.” She lowered the gun. “I can’t do it.”

“I can,” he said, and slammed the statuette down and jumped back — just in case a twenty-foot separation was not enough — and watched from afar.

Steam roared. Hot, needle-sharp jets spewed down from the ceiling and up from the floor and enveloped Mary Higgins in a scalding white cloud. She screamed only once. Congdon was surprised. He had expected it to take longer with a strong young woman. But she had died in a flash. So much for pain, he thought. She had died in the space of a single breath. Probably never knew what hit her.

He edged back to his desk and lifted the lever gingerly. It was actually cool to the touch, so tightly focused were the jets. The steam stopped gushing. The windows were fogged, and he felt dampness on his cheeks and saw a layer of dew on his polished desk. But the cloud that had enveloped Mary and The Kiss had already dissipated. Congdon wished he had planned ahead. He usually did; he could usually imagine consequences. But he had not thought to keep a sheet nearby — something, anything, to throw over the corpse.

46

The White Lady careened through a sharp bend in the river at mile marker 25 and pounded toward Pittsburgh belching black columns from her chimneys and churning a white wake behind her.

“She smells the barn!” said the Ohio River pilot — one of two Isaac Bell had hired in Cincinnati — along with a chief engineer famously reckless in the pursuit of hotter steam.

“Faster,” said Bell, and the pilot rang the engine room.

Forced draft furnace fans roared. Jim Higgins’s miners shoveled on the coal. And the engineer played fast and loose with his boiler levels, tempting eternal oblivion by pumping water on red-hot plates to jump the pressure.

At mile marker 10, Bell saw the horizon grow dark with city smoke. Thunderheads loomed. Bolts of lightning pierced them. Rain sizzled down and flattened the seething currents of the river in flood.

Soon the hills of Pittsburgh hunched into the dismal sky. Tall buildings emerged from the smoke. The White Lady steamed out of the Ohio River and up the Monongahela, past the Point and under the bridges of the Golden Triangle. Fifty-five minutes after mile marker 10, by Isaac Bell’s watch, forty-four hours from Cincinnati, the immense steamboat backed her paddle blades.

Escape pipes blew off excess steam with a roar that drowned out the ringing of her bell, and she nosed to a landing at the foot of the Amalgamated coal miners’ tent city. Miners recruited as deckhands hoisted her boarding stage onto a temporary wharf that the strikers had improvised by raising one of the barges that the Defense Committee had sunk to fortify the point with a crenellated breakwater.

Coal miners, their wives and children, church ladies, reformers, and scribbling newspaper reporters stared. Isaac Bell stared back, as amazed. The last person he expected to walk up the stage lugging his long carpetbag was Aloysius Clarke, decked out in top hat and tails.

“Pretty steamboat, Isaac.”

“What are you doing out of the hospital?”

Wish dropped his bag with a clank and caught his breath. “Couldn’t miss the Duquesne Cotillion.”

“You came all the way to Pittsburgh for the ball?”

“Quite a shindig. Everybody who was anybody was there. I even met Colonel J. Philip Swigert of the Pennsylvania state militia. Talkative gent, particularly when he’s had a few.”

“Well done!” Bell reached to slap Wish on the shoulder in congratulations. Wish stayed him with a gesture. “Don’t tear the stitches.”

Bell pulled up short. “Are you O.K.?”

“Tip-top.”

“You don’t look tip-top— What did the colonel say?”

“You got here just in time,” Wish answered gravely. “State militia, and the Pinkertons, and the Coal and Iron Police, are marching aboard the Vulcan King this morning. They’ll head downstream lickety-split. Reckon to round the Homestead Works two or three hours from now, depending how fast they load up. Then their cannon’ll blast an opening in these barges, and their whole gang will storm ashore.”

Bell called down to the miners tending the White Lady’s furnaces. “Get her coaled up and the boys fed. We’re going back to work.”

The appearance of Captain Jennings, master of the exploded Camilla, was even more unexpected, and Isaac Bell thought for an instant he was seeing a ghost. But the old pilot was no ghost, only a grieving father. “We swapped boats that night. They murdered my boy.”

“I am so sorry, Captain.”

“I’ll run your boat. I know this stretch of the Mon better than your fellers from Cincinnati.”

“She’s a lot bigger than Camilla.”

Jennings started up the stairs to the wheelhouse. “Boats are the same. Rivers ain’t.”

“Letter came for you,” said Wish, pulling an envelope from his vest. “Lady’s handwriting.”

He stepped aside to give Bell privacy to read it.

Bell tore it open. It was from Mary. But it contained only four lines.

My Dearest Isaac,

What I am going to do, I must do.

I hope with all my heart that we’ll be together one day in a better world.

He read it over and over. At length, Wish stepped closer to him. “You’re looking mighty low for a fellow about to fight a naval battle.”

Bell showed him Mary’s letter.

“Write her back.”

“I don’t know what to say. I don’t know where to send it.”

“Write it anyway. If you don’t, you’ll wish you had. You’ve got a moment right now before all hell breaks loose.”

Bell stood aside while the firemen wheelbarrowed coal and tried to pen an answer in his notebook. The words would not come. He stared at the crowded tent city. They’d flown a defiant red flag from the top of the tipple. But people were staring at the river, bracing for attack. He saw Archie Abbott, running down the slope, waving to get his attention, and, in that instant, he suddenly knew what to write.

Dear Mary,

When you hope we’ll be together in a better world, I hope you mean a changed world on Earth so we don’t have to wait until Heaven, which your words had the sound of. Wherever it is, it will be for me a better world with you by my side. If that’s not enough for you, then why don’t we do something here and now to fix it, together?

He paused, still grasping for clarity. Archie was almost to the stage and calling him. Bell touched his pen to the paper again.

What I’m trying to say is, come back.

All my love

“Isaac!” Archie bounded up the stage, out of breath. He spoke in a low and urgent voice. “The miners got a cannon.”

“What?”

“I heard that someone — presumably, our friend Mr. Clay — gave the strikers a cannon. I found it. They told me it’s a 1.65 Hotchkiss Mountain Gun. Fast-firing and accurate. Look up, right at the foot of the tipple. They just pulled the canvas off it.”

Bell focused his eyes on the distant emplacement. It was a wheel-mounted gun, and largely hidden behind stacked gunnysacks of coal and thick masonry at the base of the tipple.

He said, “The first shot the miners fire at the Vulcan King will give the militia all the excuse they need to pounce ashore shooting — unless the miners get lucky and sink her with their first shot, which is highly unlikely. Even if they did, it would just prolong the inevitable and make it worse.”

“What are you going to do, Isaac?”

Bell called, “Hey, Wish, do you have a cigar?”

“Of course,” said Wish, tugging a Havana from his tailcoat. “What dapper bon vivant attends a ball without cigars?”

Bell clamped it between his teeth.

“Want a light?”

“Not yet. You got a sawed-off in your bag for Archie?”

Wish beckoned Archie and handed him the weapon. “Try and make sure no innocents are downwind.”

Archie said, “I thought apprentices aren’t allowed—”

“You’re temporarily promoted. Stick it under your coat. Don’t get close to me unless I yell for you.”

Bell strode down the boarding stage and hurried across the point to the powder shed the miners had erected far from the tents to store the fresh dynamite they’d managed to smuggle in at night. They were guarding it closely, recalling, no doubt, the accidental explosion that nearly sank the Sadie and half her barges. The Powder Committee remembered, too, the tall detective, who had recommended — at gunpoint — that the dynamite ride in its own barge apart from the people, and greeted him warmly.

“That’s a handsome steamboat you brought us, Mr. Bell. What can we do for you?”

“I need,” said Bell, “one stick of dynamite, a blasting cap, and a short safety fuse.”

“Want me to assemble it?”

“Appreciate it.”

He watched as the miner worked quickly but meticulously.

“How short a fuse do you want?”

“Give me ten seconds.”

The miner looked at him. “I hope you can run fast.”

“Fast enough.” Bell slipped the greasy red stick in his coat and gestured with his cigar. “Got a light?”

“Let’s move away from the powder shed.” The miner struck a match and shielded the flame from the wind and rain until Bell got the cigar lit and glowing.

“Thank you.”

“I’d recommend keeping the business end away from that fuse.”

Puffing on the cigar, trailing aromatic smoke, Isaac Bell walked up the slope to the gun emplacement. The Hotchkiss was oiled and well cared for, not a speck of rust on the wheels or the tube, and the men serving looked like they knew their business. They had seen White Lady arrive and echoed the gratitude of the men at the powder shed.

Bell turned around as if to admire the steamer, which gleamed in the Pittsburgh murk as tall and long and white as the finest seaside resort. He puffed the red-hot coal at the front of his cigar, took the dynamite from his pocket, touched the cigar to the fuse, and puffed up a cloud of smoke to distract the gun crew as he faced the cannon and slid the cylinder of dynamite down the four-foot barrel.

“What did you—”

Hurrying down the hill at a fast lope, Bell called over his shoulder in a commanding voice, “Run for it! It’s dynamite. Archie!”

Fifty yards down, he looked back. The dynamite went off with a muffled peal. The gun jumped off its wheels, and the breech peeled open as if made of paper. The crew gathered around the shattered weapon. Angry men ran after Bell, shouting:

“What did you do to us?”

Bell kept walking fast, signaling Archie not to pull the shotgun until they really needed it.

“Why?”

“What did you do to us?”

“I’m hoping I saved your damned fool lives,” Bell said.

“How can we beat ’em? How can we win?”

The shouts died on their lips. All eyes flew to the top of the tipple. A lookout was bellowing through cupped hands:

“They’re coming! The black boat is coming.”

47

“Cast off!” Isaac Bell ordered.

He and Archie raced up the boarding stage. Bell gathered Mack and Wally on the wheelhouse stairs. “Somehow we have to keep them apart.”

The wheelhouse stood five decks above the river, and from it Bell could see much of the tent city sprawled on the Amalgamated point. On the other side of the barricades of heaped trolley cars, a rippling blue mass marked Pittsburgh police pacing in the rain.

“Itching for an opening,” muttered Mack Fulton. “Can’t wait to break heads.”

Captain Jennings stood with both hands on the six-foot-high brass-trimmed wheel, grim-faced and intent. At Bell’s command, he rang the engine room for Astern, turned his wheel slightly to swing the stern into the stream, and flanked the three-hundred-foot hull off the improvised wharf.

A Defense Committee detail, wielding axes, surged onto the barge they had raised to make a wharf and chopped holes in the bottom, resinking it into a protective wall of barges half sunken in the mud.

Bell said, “Put us between them and the point.”

Jennings angled the boat into the river and turned upstream. A tall Homestead Works blast furnace blocked the view beyond the next bend. For moments that seemed endless, they had the rain-spattered water to themselves.

“Did you write Mary?” Wish asked.

“I should have said it to her face— Here they come!”

Vulcan King’s tall chimneys showed first, swinging around the somber obstruction of the Homestead furnace. She was moving fast, flying with the current, and upon them before the White Lady was halfway into the river. Suddenly, with no warning, the cannon on her bow boomed.

A shell screamed, skimming the river, and exploded on one of the barges blocking the bank. Timbers flew in the air.

Isaac Bell moved closer to Captain Jennings. “He’s got a cannon and we don’t. Can you ram him?”

“Saddlebag the murdering devils? You bet. Tell your boys down there to put on the blowers.”

Bell shouted the order into the engine room voice pipe.

Forced draft blowers roared in the chimneys, fanning the furnaces white-hot.

The Vulcan King fired again, and a second barge exploded. A third shot went high. It tore a swath through a line of tents, and the hillside seemed to quiver as hundreds of people ran, screaming.

“How can I help?” Bell asked Jennings.

“Tell me if he’s got himself a Mon pilot or a Cincinnati pilot.”

“I don’t know.”

“If he’s from Cincinnati, when he comes around that bend he just might put himself in the wrong place. There’s a crosscurrent when the river floods this high that’ll kick his stern and crowd him to the bank.”

The cannon boomed. A fourth shell blasted the barges. And Isaac Bell thought, I’m supposed to be stopping a war, not losing it.

Henry Clay was beside himself. Why weren’t the miners shooting back?

The Hotchkiss he gave them should be raking Vulcan King’s decks by now. Instead, militiamen were standing in the open, cheering each shot. And the company police and Pinkertons were clapping one another on the back like it was a baseball game.

A grinning Coal and Iron cop slapped Clay’s shoulder. “We’re winning.”

But Clay’s plan was to start a war — a shooting war on both sides — and keep it going, not win it. He grabbed an officer’s field glasses, ignoring his protests, and focused on the Hotchkiss. The cannon was there, shielded by coal bags at the foot of the tipple, but no one was manning it. And when he looked more closely, he saw the tube was perched at an odd angle. Something had happened to it, and that something was very likely named Isaac Bell.

“Give that back or I’ll have you up on charges,” shouted the officer. Clay, disguised in a private’s uniform, pushed through the cheering fools and headed for the main deck where the furnaces fired the boilers. His disguise included a khaki knapsack — a U.S. Army — issue Merriam Pack with an external frame supported by a belt. In it, he carried what at first glance appeared to be jagged chunks of coal but were actually dynamite sticks with detonators and one-inch fuses bundled in chamois leather dyed with lampblack.

Vulcan King was a ten-boiler boat, and firemen were scrambling from one to the next, shoveling coal into wide-open furnaces. Someone saw Clay’s uniform and shouted, “How’s it going up there?”

“We’re winning!” said Clay, and when the fireman turned to scoop more coal, Clay lobbed one of his bombs into the furnace and ran as fast as he could to the back of the boat.

The Monongahela crosscurrent that Captain Jennings had hoped for caught the Vulcan King’s Cincinnati pilot unawares. Generated by the Amalgamated point of land deflecting extraordinarily high water, the current grabbed the steamboat’s stern and overwhelmed her thrashing paddles. Before her pilot could recover, the black boat’s bow was crowding the bank. Her hull thrust across the channel directly in the path of White Lady, which Isaac Bell had churning Full Ahead to ram.

Vulcan King’s cannon boomed.

It sounded immensely louder this time, thought Bell. Did they have a second cannon? Or had they finally unleashed the Gatling? But even as a wild shell soared over the barges and exploded in a kitchen tent, he saw it was the last shot the steamboat would ever fire at the strikers’ camp.

“Her boiler burst,” Captain Jennings shouted.

The steamboat’s chimneys leaned forward, tumbled off her hurricane deck, and crashed on her bow. Timbers followed. Glass and planking rained down. From her wheelhouse forward, her upper works were demolished.

“The murdering devils’ boiler burst!”

“It had help,” said Isaac Bell, who had seen it happen twice at Gleasonburg. “That was no accident.” But why would Henry Clay blow up his own boat?

“They got what they deserved!”

Captain Jennings rang for more steam.

The blowers roared.

“I’ll finish the sons of bitches.”

The shock of the explosion scattered burning furnace coal. The Vulcan King’s forward decks took fire from the shattered wheelhouse to the waterline. Militiamen in khaki stampeded from the flames. A man in the dark uniform of the Coal and Iron Police threw himself into the river. Strikebreakers dropped their pick handles and splashed in after him, calling for help.

“Stop!” said Isaac Bell. “Back your engines.”

48

“What are you doing, Isaac?” Wish, Wally, and Mack were at his side.

“Coming alongside to get those people off. Back your engines, Captain Jennings. Wheel hard over.”

“Not ’til I saddlebag the murderers.”

“Back them!”

“You can’t let ’em win.”

“Henry Clay doesn’t want to win. He wants mayhem. I won’t give it to him.”

Mack Fulton cocked his Smith & Wesson, told the pilot, “Boss man says back your engines.”

A single lever in the engine room engaged the reversing gears on both engines at once. Coupled to the same shaft as the stern wheel, when the engines stopped, the wheel stopped.

Escape pipes roared behind the wheelhouse.

Bell threw an arm around the grieving pilot’s shoulders. “Right now, they’re nothing more than scared fools. Like us— Hard over with your wheel, Captain. Bring us alongside. Let’s get those people off.”

Bell turned to his squad.

“Shoot anyone who tries to bring a weapon. Rifle, pistol, blackjack, or brass knuckles, shoot ’em. And watch for Clay. There’s more militia than anyone else, so he’ll probably be wearing a uniform.”

He led them down to the main deck. Captain Jennings circled to a position upstream from the Vulcan King, where he could use his paddles, rudders, and the hard-running Monongahela to maneuver beside the burning steamer.

Bell stationed Wally, Mack, and Archie where the boats would touch. Wish Clarke passed out shotguns and insisted on staying in the thick of it, claiming he would protect his hospital stitches with his sawed-off. Bell climbed one level to the boiler deck, where he could watch from above.

The fire was spreading, fed by dry wood and fresh paint, marching back from the Vulcan King’s bow, driving men toward the stern. In their chaotic, writhing mass, Bell saw that most wore khaki uniforms — short, four-button mud-colored sack coats, foraged caps on their heads, and cartridge boxes belted in back at the waist. Their weapons were a typically motley state militia collection of Spanish-American War black powder, single-shot .45–70 trapdoor rifles, improved Krag-Jørgensen magazine rifles, and even some 1895 Lee Navys — all with bayonets fixed. The Coal and Iron Police, easily identified by dark uniforms and shiny badges, had pistols and clubs. Known for brutality, they looked terrified, and many of the hard-eyed Pinkerton detectives had lost their bowlers in their panic.

The gap of water separating the boats narrowed.

The ex-prisoners drafted as strikebreakers clawed frantically to the rail.

Isaac Bell cupped his hands to shout, “Drop your weapons!”

Rifles and pick handles clattered to the deck.

Wish Clarke tipped his shotgun skyward and triggered a thunderous round.

“Drop ’em!”

Pistols and blackjacks carpeted the deck.

A Pinkerton scooped up a fallen Colt automatic and slipped it in his coat. Mack Fulton shot him without hesitating. As he fell, men turned out pockets to show they were empty.

The two hulls neared. Men poised to jump.

“Reach for the sky!” the Van Dorns bellowed. “Hands in the air.”

The flames bent toward them suddenly, driven by a shift in wind.

The hulls came together with a crash that nearly threw Bell from his perch on the boiler deck. Hundreds jumped, kicking and fighting to safety. Bell leaped onto a railing to see better. The Coal and Iron cops, the prisoners, and even the Pinkertons, had dissolved into a mob with a single mind — to get off the burning boat — and it was nearly impossible to distinguish individual features. Only the trained militia still held their hands in the air, trusting that if they followed orders, they would not be shot.

Henry Clay, Bell knew, was expert at melting into his surroundings, which was why Bell was positive Clay had disguised himself as a militiaman. But even they were so densely packed, as they crossed over, that every soldier in khaki looked the same. Desperate, Bell tried to concentrate on the bigger soldiers, those built more like Clay.

Here came one now, hands up to show they are empty, jumping onto White Lady, face inclined downward as he watched his footing. He was aboard in a flash, crowding into those ahead of him, stumbling forward when another behind him shoved his pack.

His pack. Instead of a cartridge box, he was wearing a khaki Merriam Pack big enough to hold a bomb.

“Stop that man!”

49

Wally Kisley lunged after Henry Clay.

Three men leaping madly from the flames trampled him.

Bell saw his checkerboard suit disappear in the scrum. He jumped from the rail to the deck and swung down to the main deck, landing on fallen men, kicking to his feet and running after Clay, who was racing toward the stern, straight-arming men out of his way. Suddenly, he cut across the open freight deck.

Bell veered after him.

Clay yanked a gun and fired three shots without breaking stride. Two fanned Bell’s face, the third drilled the brim of his hat, whirling it from his head. Bell stopped running and took careful aim with his Colt Army and triggered it just as Clay turned to fire again. He cried out as Bell’s shot, intended for his head, creased his hand instead when he raised his gun. The gun went flying. But the wound did not slow him as he leaped up the boiler deck stairs, slinging the Merriam Pack off his shoulders and clutching it by the straps.

Bell knew he was heading for the furnaces, intending to bomb a boiler.

He spotted him from the top of the stairs and again took careful aim.

The Colt roared. The shot staggered Clay. His arm dropped straight to his side, and the pack slipped from his hand. But he kept moving, ever swift and indestructible. He scooped up the fallen bag with his other hand and darted toward the nearest furnace. Bell took aim again. Firemen, panicked by gunshots and ricocheting lead, scattered for cover, blocking Bell’s shot. Henry Clay ran past the open furnace and tossed the pack underhand with a softball pitcher’s smooth delivery.

Bell saw a cloud of sparks as it landed in the shimmering bed of cherry red coals. In the half second he took to reach the firebox door, the canvas was burning brightly. He had to pull it out before the fire burned though the canvas and ignited the fuse.

Bell grabbed a fireman’s rake, reached into the blaze, caught the strap, and yanked. The strap burned through, and it broke. He thrust the rake again, caught the wooden frame, which was drenched in flame, and pulled it out. The pack fell, smoldering, at his feet. “Pull the fuse,” he shouted to the nearest coal miner and tore after Henry Clay, who was racing sternward on the freight deck.

Clay ran out of space where the boiler deck overlooked the White Lady’s fifty-foot stern wheel. Bell caught up. The wheel was throwing spray as paddle blade after paddle blade climbed out of the water behind the boat, circled through the air, and plunged down to push again. Henry Clay turned with a smile on his face and a derringer in his unwounded hand and fired. The bullet seared the heel of Bell’s hand. His thumb and fingers convulsed. His gun fell to the deck and bounced into the narrow slot between the back of the boat and the stern wheel.

Clay’s smile broadened in triumph. “I’ve waited a long time for this.”

He squeezed the trigger. Isaac Bell was already swinging, hoping that the only thing that would slow down the rogue detective would be talking too much. Before the slug had emerged from the barrel, Isaac Bell’s left fist smashed Clay’s jaw.

The shot missed.

Bell feinted with his wounded right hand, punched Clay with another powerful left. It staggered Clay, and he reeled backwards to the edge of the stern.

“Give it up,” said Bell. “It’s over.”

Clay looked at him incredulously. “It’s never over.”

He flew at Bell, cocking his left hand in a powerful fist. He tried to raise the right Bell had wounded and could not. An angry light filled his amber eyes, and he glared at his arm as if it were a traitor.

“I’m taking you in,” said Bell. “We’ll recommend mercy if you reveal who paid for this. Who’s the boss?”

“It’s never over,” Henry Clay repeated. He swung his good arm. Bell took the punch, rolled with it, and counterpunched, rocking Clay back on his heels.

“You can’t fight me with one arm. Give it up.”

“It’s never over,” Clay said again. But even as he spoke, he turned away.

Bell suddenly realized that Clay was so desperate to escape that he would risk certain death by trying to dive into the narrow strait of water between the White Lady’s stern and her churning wheel. Without Henry Clay, he had no case against the man backing him, no way to discover the identity of the true murderer, the real provocateur.

Bell lunged for him, and as fast as Henry Clay was, Isaac Bell was faster. He seized Clay’s militia tunic in his right hand and started to drag him from the edge. But this time, the young detective was the fighter betrayed by a wound. The bullet that had disarmed him had robbed his hand of too much strength. Thumb and fingers feathered apart. Clay tore loose and dived into the seething water.

Isaac Bell watched the wheel wash spewed by the slashing paddle blades. But Henry Clay’s body never broke the surface of that endless rolling wave behind the boat.

50

I wish I’d been there to watch him drown,” Joseph Van Dorn said heavily. “I taught that man every trick I knew. It never occurred to me until it was too late that I created a monster.” He shook his head, rubbed his red whiskers, and looked probingly at Isaac Bell. “It makes a man wonder, will he create another?”

“Relax, Joe,” said Mack Fulton. “Isaac’s just a detective.”

“And a pretty good one,” said Wally Kisley, “once he masters the art of bringing criminals in alive.”

“Or at least a corpse.”

The Van Dorns were waiting for a train in a saloon close to Union Station. Prince Henry of Prussia was sailing home on the Deutschland, and the Boss was taking them all to New York for what threatened to be a wild scramble.

“How wide was the space between the wheel and the boat?” asked Archie.

“Three feet,” Bell answered. “But to survive without me seeing him, he would have had to dive under the blades and then stay underwater and swim a long ways off before he surfaced.” Bell had relived Clay’s dive over and over in his mind, bitterly aware that if he had captured him alive, he would be much closer to identifying the real provocateur behind Henry Clay.

“We’ll get him one of these days,” Van Dorn said magnanimously. “There’s no statute of limitations on murder. At least the strike is over. The miners aren’t all that happy, but they’re heading back to work, and their families will be living in houses instead of tents.”

“Company houses,” said Bell.

“Yes, of course. Did your young lady show up yet?”

“Not yet.” Bell had no idea where Mary was.

Wish Clarke walked in with his carpetbag.

“Wish looks like he lost his best friend.”

“Or dropped a bottle,” said Mack.

Wish did not sit. “Son, do you have a moment?” he asked and walked to a table in a far corner. Bell followed.

“Sit down, Isaac.”

“What’s the matter?”

“While they were dismantling the wreck of the Vulcan King, they found—”

“Clay’s body? It drifted—”

“I’m so sorry, Isaac. They found your girl.”

“What?”

“Scalded to death when the boiler burst. Looks like she was engaged in sabotage.”

“But that can’t be,” Bell gasped.

“Maybe not, son. But you showed me her letter. She might have done what she thought she had to do.”

“Where is— Where do they have her?”

“Remember Mary as she was, Isaac.”

“I have to see her.”

“No, Isaac. She doesn’t exist anymore. Not the girl you know. Let her be the girl you remember.”

Bell turned toward the door. Wish blocked him. Bell said, “It’s all right. I just have to tell her brother.”

“Jim knows.”

“How did he take it?”

“He refuses to believe it. He swears she wrote him that she was going to New York to confront the man staking Henry Clay.”

“Who?”

“She didn’t put it in the letter.”

Bell said, “I will find him if it takes every minute of my life.”

Wish Clarke laid a comforting hand on Isaac Bell’s shoulder. “Keep in mind, son, when you never give up, time’s on your side.”