“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.