The Striker

  Congdon read it again.

  “Shall I take down your reply, sir?”

  “No reply.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “To be resolved by whom?”

  “It is still in probate court.”

  “Perfect. Resolve it for them.”

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

  “Is there anything else, Judge Congdon?”

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

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

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

  15

  HOLD ON, ISAAC,” SAID WISH. “ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO be taking sides in this dustup?”

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

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

  “Couldn’t have put it better myself.”

  “Here comes the boy.”

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

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

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

  “What’s that, boy?”

  “The cops said the scabs are coming.”

  “What scabs? From where?”

  “Italians and Poles.”

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

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

  “That’s not possible.”

  “That’s what they said.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “But—”

  “No buts.”

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

  “I hope that’s not true.”

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

  “Sounds like music.”

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

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

  Bell picked up the tune and sang softly.

  “You can hear them sigh and wish to die,

  You can see them wink the other eye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Who the heck barges coal up the river?”

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

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

  Luke said, “Oh, Pa, I’m powerful sorry.”

  Zeke stood there, shoulders bowed, and felt blindly for his son’s hand.

  The Monongahela stationed herself in the middle of the river. The steamboat pushed the
barges against the dock, and soon Bell saw lanterns bobbing as the Gleason police began herding the men off the barges and up Dock Street.

  “What—”

  A white flash in the middle of the river lit the water from shore to shore and etched the surrounding hills as stark as snow. It cast a diamond brilliance on the tipple that towered over the shantytown, on a tow of laden coal barges moored to the tipple pier, and on the scabs shuffling ashore—a thousand workmen clutching bundles—their startled faces whipped to the sudden burst of light.

  Isaac Bell fixed on its source and saw the Monongahela’s superstructure jump straight up in the air. Cabins, navigation bridge, and smokestack parted from the steam yacht’s sleek hull. For half a second, they appeared to float.

  16

  A THUNDEROUS DOUBLE SALVO ROARED LIKE BATTLESHIP guns.

  Isaac Bell, high above the river, felt the heat of the explosion on his face.

  Then silence and darkness settled on the water, the town, and the hills. The music had stopped. Jagged flames pierced the dark. The yacht’s hull was burning.

  “What happened?” cried Luke.

  “Her boiler blew,” said Zeke. “The Good Lord has intervened! He has struck that Satan dead.”

  Isaac Bell exchanged dubious glances with Wish Clarke.

  The younger detective spoke first. “That one-two punch sounded like someone lent the Good Lord a hand with a hundred pounds of dynamite. First the dynamite, then the boiler.”

  “Isaac, old son,” said Aloysius Clarke. “I do believe you’re getting the hang of your line.”

  “We better get down there and lend a hand.”

  • • •

  BELL DISCOVERED as he and Wish pushed their way onto the dock that the Polish and Italian scabs had not been imported from their home countries. Nor had the numerous black men come directly from the South. They had been rounded up from the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, where an anthracite strike had shut down the hard-coal mines. Those he talked to were stunned by the explosion, bewildered, and afraid.

  “They didn’t tell us nothing about the union.”

  “They just said there was jobs.”

  In the middle of the river, the steamboat that had brought the scab tow was circling the burning remains of the Monongahela, playing lights on the water, looking for survivors. Suddenly, her whistle shrieked an alarm.

  “Now what?” asked Wish.

  Bell pointed upstream where the tipple loomed darkly against the night sky. “Coal barges adrift.”

  The entire tow that had been moored to the tipple pier—a fleet of twenty loaded barges lashed together—wheeled ponderously into the river and picked up speed as the powerful current dragged it downstream.

  “How in heck did they break loose?”

  “First thing I’ll ask, come morning,” said Isaac Bell.

  Wish said, “Amazing how many things went wrong at once.”

  Isaac Bell’s eyes shot from the drifting tow to the burning yacht to the bewildered scabs milling on the dock to the steamboat, whose captain had stopped his engine to let the current sweep him away from the wreck.

  “Too many things. And I have a bad hunch it isn’t over.”

  When the boat was a safe distance from any possible survivors still in the water, her big stern wheel churned, and she raced to capture the drifting coal barges. Deckhands scrambled with lines and the steamboat tied on. Stern wheel thrashing the water, she swung the lead barges into the current to master the tow.

  “He’s got her,” said Wish. “Captain’s a man to ride the river with.”

  Just as he spoke, the big steamboat exploded with a colossal double roar that toppled her chimneys and wheelhouse into the river. To Bell’s ear, the double roar echoed the one-two that destroyed the Monongahela.

  But unlike the yacht, which was still drifting and on fire, the big steamboat sank straight to the bottom, leaving the wreckage of her upper decks exposed. The current slammed the coal barges against her, ripping their wooden hulls. Within minutes, twenty had sunk, blocking the channel to Pittsburgh.

  “My provocateur,” said Isaac Bell, “is getting the hang of his line, too.”

  17

  A PIPE ORGAN DOMINATED THE FRONT ROOM OF BLOOM House, the finest mansion in Pittsburgh. The dining room, ablaze in candle- and electric light, seated thirty-six comfortably. Livery servants glided in with silver trays from a distant kitchen. But R. Kenneth Bloom, the father of Isaac Bell’s school friend Kenny, did not look happy. Nor, Bell observed, did his dinner guests, Bloom’s fellow coal barons, railroad magnates, and steel tycoons, whose evening clothes glittered with diamond studs and cuff links.

  Bloom Sr., red-faced and carrying too much weight to be healthy, planted both hands on the snow-white cloth in order to stand up from his chair. He raised his glass.

  “I won’t say I liked him. But he was one of ours. Gentlemen, I give you Black Jack Gleason— Struck down by the union! May he rest in peace.”

  “Rest in peace!” thundered up and down the long table.

  “And may the unionists burn in Hell!” echoed back.

  Isaac Bell touched water to his lips.

  Kenny Bloom, in line to inherit half the anthracite coal in Pennsylvania from his mother, and control of the Reading Railroad and vast bituminous fields from his father, winked at Bell. “We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” he muttered. “But, if we did, the things we could say.” He drank deeply. “I’m so glad you came, Isaac. These dinners get mighty grim.”

  “Thank you for inviting me.”

  Kenny grinned, “Didn’t give me much choice, did you, Mr. Make-Believe Insurance Man?”

  “I do appreciate it.”

  Halfway up the table, Pennsylvania’s attorney general raised his voice. “The union will pay for this outrage. Steamboats dynamited. Innocent workingmen, attempting to travel to Gleasonburg to get an honest job, injured. River blocked. Coal traffic at a standstill.”

  “And Gleason murdered.”

  “That, too. Yes, sir, the rabid dogs will pay.”

  Kenny said to Bell, “They should, and they will, but he’s talking through his hat because West Virginia’s attorney general gets first crack, seeing as how they killed Black Jack in their state.”

  “I’m not convinced,” said Bell, “that the union had anything to do with it.”

  The military precision of back-to-back dynamitings simultaneous with the barge tow set adrift seemed to him far beyond the capability of the union organizers, who were scrambling to keep one step ahead of the Pinkertons. Inspections of the steamboat boiler rooms had increased his skepticism.

  But Kenny, who had been hitting the whiskey before dinner, didn’t hear him. He was boasting instead to everyone at their end of the table about events in the anthracite fields. “So we mounted a Gatling gun on the back of a Mercedes Simplex and welded on steel plates to protect the driver.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Did it work? I’ll say it worked,” Kenny snickered. “The strikers call it the Death Special.”

  At the top of the table, Bloom Sr. was addressing the strikers’ demands.

  “The eight-hour workday will be the ruination of the coal business.”

  “Hear! Hear!”

  “And I’ve heard more than enough nonsense about safety. The miner has only himself to blame if he doesn’t keep his workplace in safe condition.”

  Another baron agreed. “It’s not my fault if he refuses to mine his coal properly, scrape down dangerous slate, and install proper timbering.”

  “Risk is naturally attached to the trade. Fact is, with prices tumbling, we’ll be lucky to stay in business.”

  Bell noticed a perplexed expression on the face of an older mine operator, who called up table, “The iniquitous price we’re paying to ship coal isn’t helping either.”

  Bloom Sr. returned a tight smile. “The railroad’s hands are tied, Mr. Morrison.”

  “By whom, sir? Surely not the government?”
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  “Them, too, but it’s not like we don’t report to our investors.”

  “There you go blaming Wall Street again. Didn’t used to, in my day. We called our own tune. If the banks wanted to make money, they were welcome to invest with us. But they did not presume to tell us how to dig coal or how to ship it.”

  “Well, sir, these are different days.”

  Isaac Bell noticed Kenny observing his father with a thoughtful, if not troubled, expression. “Sounds like you’ll have your work cut out for you when it’s your turn to run the railroad.”

  “What makes you think I will run the railroad?”

  “You’re his son, his only son, and you’ve been working with him since you left Brown.”

  “I’d like nothing better,” said Kenny. “And I’m trying my darnedest to learn as fast as I can. But it may not be my choice.”

  “Surely your father prefers you.”

  “Of course he does. That was settled the day I graduated. But what if they don’t?”

  “They?” asked Bell, though he suspected the answer already.

  “The banks.”

  Bell glanced up the table at Mr. Bloom. Behind the boasts and the bluster, even the rich and powerful railroad president R. Kenneth Bloom, Sr., was not in command of coal.

  “Which banks?” he asked.

  “The New York banks.”

  “Which ones?”

  Kenny shrugged.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  Bell leveled a stern gaze at the railroad heir. “Not at liberty? You sound like a cautious lawyer instead of the pal who ran off to the circus with me.”

  “That almost got us killed.”

  “Did you have a good time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which banks?”

  Kenny Bloom grinned. He looked, Bell thought, drunk, embarrassed, and a little scared. “Let me answer your nosy question this way—in a question back at you. Do you believe that the formation of the U.S. Steel Corporation is an end or a beginning?”

  “End or beginning of what?”

  “We’re dodo birds out here, Isaac. The self-determined Pittsburgh operator is going extinct. So’s the independent railroad that hauls coal. Wall Street is killing us off. Black Jack Gleason was a dodo. So’s every man at this table. Some of them just don’t know it yet.”