The Striker

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

  “There they are!”

  “Git ’em!”

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

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

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

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

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

  “There he is!”

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

  7

  MISTER, WHAT IN TARNATION ARE YOU UP TO?”

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

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

  Bell snatched it away.

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

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

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

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

  “Does she have steam up?”

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

  “Throw some more on.”

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

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

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

  “No, sir.”

  “Looks like you run steamers before.”

  “Only yachts.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Jump!”

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

  • • •

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

  “Yes, I am. Do you favor the union?”

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

  “Would you back a strike?”

  “Might. Or might not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Ahead, Bell saw a yellow glow.

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

  • • •

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

  “Name it.”

  “Would you escort my sister to safety?”

  “Of course.”

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

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

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

  “Where?”

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

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

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

  “Did you get a ride?” Mary asked.

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

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

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

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

  “I’m pretending it’s a carousel.”

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

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

  “You first. I’m right behind you.”

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

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

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

  “No, no, no. Only creased me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Good idea,” said Isaac Bell.

  8

  BELL AWAKENED TO A BLOOD-RED DAWN GLINTING THROUGH splits in the boxcar walls. He thought it was the pain in his side that disturbed his sleep, but it was Mary whimpering in hers. Suddenly, she screamed. Bell held her tighter and gently shook her awake.

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

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

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

  “Yes.”

  “What did you dream?”

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

  She fell silent.

  Bell asked, “What happened?”

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

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

  “Less than at first.”

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

  “Of course.”

  “Was it harder?”

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

  “You used to think Pennsylvania was the worst?”

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

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

  “Where in Boston?”

  “The Back Bay,” he lied.

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

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

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

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

  The nearer the truth, the less to defend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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