“Oregon,” the young man lied.
His name was Isaac Bell.
Bell was a Van Dorn Agency private detective under orders to ferret out union saboteurs. This was his first solo case, and he was supposed to be operating in deep disguise. To ensure secrecy, the mineowner hadn’t even told the company cops about his investigation. But the awe on the miners’ faces told Bell he had just made a bad mistake.
The year was 1902. Van Dorn detectives were earning a reputation as valuable men who knew their business, and the agency motto—We never give up! Never!—had begun to be muttered, remorsefully, inside the nation’s penitentiaries. Which meant that young Isaac Bell had to admit that he was very likely the only Van Dorn in the entire outfit so puddingheaded that he would ruin his disguise by showing off fancy boxing tricks.
Roscoe, the Gleason spy, was eyeing him thoughtfully. That might not matter too much. Bell reckoned he could fix that somehow. But any saboteur who caught wind of him championing a poor, dumb mule with a Yale man’s mastery of the manly art of self-defense would not stay fooled for long.
• • •
“GANGWAY!”
The exhausted men climbing out of the mine at the end of their shift shuffled off the tracks. The winch jerked the slack out of the wire, and twenty coal cars emerged behind them and trundled up the steep incline to the tipple. The train was almost to the top when the chain bridle that attached the wire to the front car broke with a bang as loud and sharp as a gunshot.
The train stopped abruptly.
One hundred tons of coal hung motionless for a heartbeat.
Then it started rolling backwards toward the mouth of the mine.
Jim Higgins, who was hurrying from the winch engine to his post at the derailer switch, dropped his oilcan and ran as fast as he could. But the train was gathering speed. It rolled ahead of him, and before he could reach the switch, twenty cars hurtled through it straight down the main line.
Isaac Bell charged after it. He spotted a brake lever on the last car and forged alongside, looking for handholds to jump to. The coal train accelerated and pulled ahead of him. As the last car whipped past, he leaped onto its rear coupler and caught his balance by clapping both hands around the brake lever. He threw his weight against the steel bar, slamming curved brake shoes against the spinning wheels.
Metal screeched. The lever bucked in his hands. Sparks fountained skyward. Bell pushed the brake with every sinew in his body. Swift and purposeful action and determined muscle and bone appeared to slow the runaway. Several more quick-thinking men ran alongside in hopes of leaping on the brakes of the other cars.
But the weight of the coal was too great, the momentum too strong.
Suddenly, with a bang almost as explosive as the parting bridle chain, the iron pin connecting the lever to the brake shoes snapped. The lever swung freely. Bell, shoving it with all his might, lost his balance. The rails and crossties blurred under him as the train accelerated. Only lightning reflexes and a powerful grip on the top rim of the coal car saved him from falling.
The car swayed violently as it gained speed. Being the last car, unanchored by any behind it, the same lateral forces that cracked a whip slammed it sideways against the ventilator house that stood close by the tracks. The impact sheared its pillars, and the building collapsed on the giant fan that drove fresh air into the mine. A shattered roof beam jammed its blades.
“Jump!” miners yelled.
Before Bell could choose a direction in which there was room to land, the train stormed through the mouth and into the narrow confines of the haulageway, where to jump would be to smash flesh and blood against timber, stone, steel, and coal. Bell swung his feet onto the coupler and attempted to brace for what was going to be a very sudden stop when they hit bottom.
The coal train swayed in wider and wider arcs with the ever-increasing speed of its descent. The rear car to which Bell clung slammed against shoring timbers, splintering them, and crumbled pillars of coal the miners had left standing to support the ceiling. The front end, nineteen cars ahead of Bell, bore down on a wooden air door that Sammy the doorboy had shut behind it moments earlier as it ascended.
Sammy was addled by twelve hours of work in near darkness and terrified by the roar of the juggernaut hurtling toward him. But he stood at his post, desperately trying to open the door to let it pass. Like a tycoon brushing a beggar out of his way with a haughty hand, the train flung him against the wall, smashed the air door to flinders, and gained speed.
2
THE SWAYING COAL CAR ISAAC BELL CLUNG TO SCRAPED the sides of the tunnel. The screeching, banging impact severed the wires that powered the electric lights, and the train plummeted downward in total darkness.
Bell pressed himself tight against the cold steel to minimize the distance his body would travel at the moment of impact. It could not be much farther to the coal seam at the bottom. Suddenly, the train jumped the tracks. Metal shrieked as it battered the side of the tunnel and threatened to buck him off like a maddened bronco. Instead, it saved the young detective’s life. Sideswiping the walls had the effect of slowing the train. When it finally struck the seam with a thunderclap, he was banged hard against the back of the car, but not so hard as to break bones.
The silence that followed was as deep as the darkness.
Bell leaped down and ran in the dark, back up the route the runaway had taken him, sliding his boots along the crossties to stay in the middle of the track, where he was least likely to smash into anything. He ran as fast as he could with his hands stretched ahead of his face in hopes of feeling an obstruction in time to stop.
He had seconds to get out before he died in the black and airless chaos of the wrecked gallery. For dangers far deadlier than collision lurked in the dark. Damps—poisonous carbonic acid and explosive methane—were collecting quickly as the demolished ventilator ceased to draw fresh air from the surface and expel lethal vapors. Suffocating blackdamp, thick with carbonic acid, would kill him in ten seconds. Fulminating damp, “inflammable air,” marsh gas exuded by the coal, would blow everyone in the mine to Kingdom Come. Thank God, he thought, most of the day shift was out of the mine and the night shift hadn’t entered yet. Only the doorboys were still at their posts.
All of a sudden, the dark lifted. Daylight so soon? But it wasn’t possible. He could not be that close to the mouth. Then he realized that the light was coming from behind him—orange flickering light—the sparkle of fire as gas and coal at the face of the seam ignited. The sudden light saved him from stumbling over a doorboy crawling along the tracks.
Bell yanked him to his feet.
“Stand up! Chokedamp suffocates you down low. Run!”
He shoved the boy ahead of him, and together they ran from the flames and smoke chasing them up the slope. The smoke would spread white damp, odorless carbon monoxide, which would kill them in minutes if they didn’t burn to death first.
They stopped abruptly. The haulageway was blocked. The train had sheared off the pillars of coal that the miners had left standing to brace the ceiling. Unsupported, the ceiling had fallen into the haulageway. A two-foot opening was held up by a single groaning timber.
“I can fit through, mister. I’ll get help.”
“Hold on,” said Bell. It looked like it would collapse any moment. He crawled into the narrow space, braced the groaning timber with his back, and tried to hold the mountain. “O.K., sonny,” he gasped. “Slip by.”
The boy scrambled through.
Bell gently released the pressure and slithered on his belly. Just as he pulled his feet out, the timber snapped. The ceiling collapsed with a roar as tons of coal and slate filled the space.
“Let’s go.”
But the boy was frozen in place, staring at what had almost killed them.
“Close shave,” Bell said lightly to put him at ease, and when that didn’t work he asked, “Did you see if little Sammy got out?”
“Dead,” said the boy. “The train got h
im.”
“Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
They ran, climbing the slope, until they were stopped by another fall. This one emitted no light from the other side even though they had to be near the mouth. But, through it, they could hear a faint tapping. Picks digging through the fall. They grabbed rocks and pounded on the fall, alerting those on the other side that they were alive.
The picking sounds doubled, and doubled again. Soon Isaac Bell saw light and heard a cheer. Ten men battered through the fall. The first face Bell saw belonged to Jim Higgins, who had led the rescue.
Cheering men pulled them through the opening and reached for more. The cheers died on their lips.
“That’s all?” asked Higgins.
“Little Sammy was killed,” said Bell. “I didn’t see any others. Give me a pick. I’ll show you the way.”
Before they could start down, an explosion rocked the mine from deep within, and the rescuers knew in their hearts that although they would dig all night for more survivors, and dig all the next day, they would never find a living soul.
They started down. Again they were stopped, not by an explosion but by a gang of club-wielding company police led by a Pinkerton, who shouted, “Jim Higgins!”
“Right here, we’re just heading down.”
“Jim Higgins, you’re under arrest.”
“For what?”
“For murdering all them poor little doorboys who died in the mine.”
“I didn’t—”
“You abandoned your post. You caused the accident by failing to throw the derailer switch that would have stopped the runaway.”
“The foreman ordered me to oil—”
“Tell it to the judge,” said the Pinkerton.
Jim Higgins squared his shoulders. “You boys set me up,” he said. “You found out I am a union organizer. You know that beating me up never worked before, so you waited for a chance to take me out of the fight. You put me on the derailer to keep me away from the workers. And now one of your bought-and-paid judges will sentence me to the penitentiary for a crime you all know damned well I never did.”
“No,” a cop snickered. “No judge is locking you in no penitentiary. You’re headed for the hangman.”
They seized his arms and started to drag him away.
Jim Higgins locked gazes with Isaac Bell.
Bell heard him say, “There’s more where I came from.”
3
THAT CHAIN BRIDLE WAS BRAND-NEW,” SAID THE WINCH engineer, A huge man squinting through wire-rimmed spectacles. “I installed it myself. It could not possibly have parted.”
“Like folks say, it only takes one weak link,” said Isaac Bell.
From the winch at the top of the tipple, he could see down the steep tracks to the mouth of the mine where frantic mechanicians were jury-rigging temporary ventilator fans. A hundred rescuers were waiting for them to purge Gleason Mine No. 1 of carbonic acid, inflammable air, and deadly white damp. Only then could they enter the deep galleries where the boys were trapped.
The engineer stiffened. “I don’t install weak links, sonny. I inspect every link with my own eye.”
“I wonder,” said Isaac Bell, “whether it was the wire that broke.”
“You’re doing a lot of wondering, mister.”
Bell responded with a friendly smile that tinged his blue eyes a soft shade of violet. “Since I rode that train to the bottom of the mine, I’m mighty curious what set her loose.”
“Oh, you’re the feller that tried to stop her? Let me shake your hand, son. That was a brave thing you tried to do.”
“I wish I could have stopped her,” said Bell. “But, I was wondering—”
“Nope, the wire’s fine and dandy. Here, I’ll show you.”
The engineer led Bell to the giant drum around which the inch-thick steel rope was coiled in tight and orderly rows and showed him the loop that formed the end. “See, this here thimble inside the loop protects the wire from pinching. You see how it’s held its shape? And the clamps here have their saddles on the live side of the wire like they’re supposed to, and they held tight.”
“I suppose that means a link in the chain busted even though it’s not supposed to.”
The engineer shook his head. “If they ever snake that chain out of that mess down there, I’ll bet you even money it’ll be strong as the day it was born. Molybdenum alloy steel. You know what that is, son?”
Bell did but a laborer probably would not, so he shook his head. “Heard it spoke. Can’t rightly say I know what it means.”
“Alloy cooked up by French metallurgists. Much stronger than plain steel. Ideal for lifting chain. Molybdenum steel don’t fracture.”
“Then what do you reckon broke?” asked Bell.
“Hard to believe it was the shackle.”
“What shackle?”
“The swivel shackle that connects the wire to the bridle. It’s so we can hook her up easy, and it swivels to distribute the load. No, that shackle’s the culprit. Even money.”
“Do shackles break often?”
“Never! Almost never.”
“Wonder was it too small for the job?”
“No, sir! Installed it myself. Made darn sure its working load exceeded the chain’s and the wire’s. Can’t imagine how it failed.”
Bell wondered if there was some miraculous way to ask politely enough to keep the engineer talking, whether he thought that the runaway was only a dream. Then a broad-bellied coal cop swaggered out of the tipple, eyeing Bell suspiciously. “What are you two jawing about?”
The engineer was not cowed. He was a valuable mechanician who knew his place. But Isaac Bell, a lowly laborer, was supposed to kowtow, unless he was man enough to look the cop in the face, at the risk of his job, and tell him to go to hell.
Bell turned his back on him and walked down the steep slope.
“Where the hell you going? I’m talking to you.”
“They fixed the ventilators,” Bell called over his shoulder. “I’m going down with the rescue boys. You coming?”
The cop, who had no desire to enter a coal mine filled with poisonous and explosive gases, did not reply, and Bell joined the rescuers, who were dragging new lines from the power plant and wielding picks and electric drills to clear the haulageway and galleries to search for the missing doorboys.
• • •
WHEN THE LAST small body had been carried out and the exhausted searchers shambled up to the surface, Bell extinguished his headlamp and hid in a gallery. He watched their lights fade up the haulageway. Then he relighted his own lamp and headed deep into the empty mine on the trail of an enigma.
At no point in his investigation had he seen or heard a hint of union sabotage and now he thought he knew the reason why. Having worked weeks underground, and having just survived the mining disaster set off by the runaway, he had to question the very existence of the union saboteurs that the company had hired Van Dorn to arrest.
He did not doubt the existence of sabotage in labor disputes. Violent incidents abounded in a war between workers and owners that stretched back as far as anyone could remember. Miners had shot it out with the Coal and Iron Police before the oldest man in the mine had worked as a doorboy. Many a railroad workers’ strike had escalated from fistfights, clubbings, and shoot-outs to derailed locomotives and dynamited bridges. Many a steel mill strike had seen furnaces blown up or had their fires drawn, destroying the works when the molten metal turned solid inside the pots and ladles. Towboats and barges were set adrift, factories put to fire, telegraph wires cut, and owners’ mansions burned to the ground. Mounted police had charged like cavalry on the battlefield. Gatling guns had raked strikers’ tent cities.
But deep under the ground in a coal mine, sabotage was tantamount to suicide. Deep underground, the unionists themselves would be crushed when roofs fell. Suffocated when damps displaced air. Burned alive when gases exploded.
But before he could report that there were no uni
on saboteurs to the Boss—Mr. Joseph Van Dorn, founder of the detective agency that bore his name—a young detective on his first case had better make absolutely sure that the runaway had been an accident. That demanded evidence.
Trust what you see, not what you’re supposed to see—the first lesson of his long apprenticeship drilled into him by veteran Van Dorns like Wish Clarke, and Mack Fulton and Walter Kisley. And repeated often, very often, by Joseph Van Dorn himself.
Bell walked down the slope to the bottom of the haulageway and passed his light over the twisted wreckage of the coal train that had smashed into the yet-to-be-dug seam at the end of the line. The car at the rear, the bucking, swaying last one he had ridden down in, had been the front car on the way up, the one to which the winch wire’s chain bridle had been attached. He found the links at either end of the chain bridle fixed to massive rings fastened to the left and right side of the frame. But the bridle, a length of chain twice as long as the width of the car, had parted right in the middle. He found no shackle. And only half of the link that would have been the middle one remained, jammed into its neighbor. When he tried to pull it out, it sliced his finger.
Sucking the blood, he inspected the sharp edge that had cut him. The fracture was in the barrel, one of the long straight sides of the link. He expected a ragged edge. What he saw was a surprise, and a mystery. Where the steel link had fractured was smooth and flat and sharp as a razor.
It looked like a piece had been cut out with a chisel. Using other links to tap it loose, he worked the broken link out of the one it had jammed in and put it in his pocket. Then he searched for the missing shackle. It must have fallen in the crosstie-lined trough between the steel rails of the coal train tracks.
He looked until his light began to run out of oil, but he never found the shackle. Another mystery. Obviously, the shackle had slipped out of the broken link. But how had the shackle separated from the thimble that formed the wire loop he had seen at the winch?