The Striker

  “The drowning man sinks in water. The drinking man sinks in whiskey.”

  “Say, Wally,” asked Mack, “here comes a passerby, strolling by the sea, what does the drowning man yell?”

  “Throw me a rope.”

  “What does the drinking man yell?”

  “Throw me a bottle.”

  They looked to Bell for a laugh.

  Stone-faced, Isaac Bell said, “I worked with Wish Clarke in Wyoming and New Orleans. He’s sharp as they come.”

  “So’s a busted bottle.”

  “I also remember when you ‘spavined geezers’ took over my apprenticeship from Mr. Van Dorn, you taught me plenty. And you weren’t so spavined that you couldn’t clear a saloon of Harry Frost’s boys.”

  “Your recent apprenticeship,” Kisley and Fulton chorused.

  Bell saw that the old detectives were not joking but deadly serious and with a purpose. Kisley stared hard at him. Mack Fulton got down to brass tacks.

  “Who’s ramrodding this outfit?”

  “It’s my case,” said Isaac Bell. “I am.”

  Kisley said, “It was not long ago we was changing your diapers in Chicago.”

  “I’ve got the hang of it since.”

  The partners shot back obstinate glowers and Mack said, flatly, “The man bossing an outfit has to change everyone’s diapers and still stay on top of the case.”

  “You’re looking at him.”

  “I’m looking at a kid who started shaving yesterday,” Fulton shot back.

  “Spouting highfalutin French,” Kisley piled on. “Provocateur? Whatever happened to good old agitator?”

  “Or provoker?”

  “Or instigator?”

  Isaac Bell was constitutionally incapable of punching a man twice his age, but he was getting tempted.

  Suddenly, Aloysius Clarke was standing in the doorway.

  He was a big, red-faced fellow who moved quietly.

  Bell said, “Hello, Wish.”

  Clarke nodded. “Kid.”

  “We was just discussin’ who ramrods this outfit,” said Mack Fulton.

  Wish Clarke stood silent. He had small blue eyes buried so deeply in drink-swollen, purple-veined cheeks that observers who associated whiskey with dulled wits and melancholy would miss the glow of intelligence and laughter. He smiled unexpectedly and answered the question on all minds. How long had Wish Clarke been standing there and how much had he overheard?

  “It’s Isaac’s case. The kid’s the boss.”

  Wally Kisley shook his head. “Them coal miners ain’t the only ones who need a union.”

  “And to close another subject,” said Wish Clarke, a self-educated man who revered the English language, “Provoker is too general a word, agitator is a misspelling of adjutator, which means ‘a representative,’ and instigator is vague. But provocateur, short for agent provocateur, describes exactly what Isaac suspects we’re up against—a smart fellow who’s hoodwinking not-so-smart fellows into committing crimes that will discredit them.”

  “For what reason?”

  “For reasons,” said Wish Clarke, “we have not yet detected, Detective Kisley.”

  Isaac Bell raised his voice. “Saddle up, gents!”

  He pulled tickets from his vest and passed them out.

  “Train’s leaving for West Virginia. All aboard!”

  • • •

  LOCOMOTIVE HEADLAMP blazing through the night, a train of sixty ore cars steamed from the Cripple Creek gold mines on Pikes Peak down the Colorado Front Range into the smoke-shrouded city of Denver. Pinkerton detectives boarded the locomotive in the Auraria rail yard.

  Three thousand smelter workers had walked off the job—the opening gun in a united strike led by the Western Federation of Miners to win an eight-hour workday for every union with which it was affiliated. The Pinkertons posted riflemen on the engine pilot and took command of the heavily laden train to escort it to the Nyren Smelter.

  Jim Higgins stood arm in arm with a thousand strikers blocking the tracks. In his opinion—not that the hotheads were asking for it—ruining the Nyren furnaces had been a mistake, and the strike, which could have blossomed into a general strike the breadth of the continent, was going nowhere, stuck in Denver, mired in bitterness.

  Old Man Nyren—a cantankerous bully detested equally by labor and the Rocky Mountain smelter owners he had driven out of business with his giant plant fired by cheap coal—was in no mood to bargain. The strikers had drawn the fires from under his furnaces. The molten ore had frozen into a solid mass from the charge hoppers on top to the crucible drains below, rendering them useless until the hardened mass of ore, slag, and gold could be cut out. Nyren ordered the ore train parked in the smelter’s elevated yard, ready to tip its load into his furnaces the instant that cutting was done by scab labor.

  The Pinkertons ordered the train to run the strikers off the tracks.

  “Go to hell!” said the locomotive engineer. “I ain’t killing those fellers.”

  “Me neither,” said the fireman, crossing his massive arms.

  The detectives clubbed both men to the floor of the cab. A hard-bitten engineer they had brought with them took the controls. “Can’t see what’s behind the bastards,” he said. “For all we know, they could have pried up the rails.”

  “Clear ’em,” ordered the detective in charge.

  They tied down the whistle. Blowing an unbroken, ungodly shriek, the train accelerated, and the riflemen on front opened fire.

  Union men scattered, dragging their wounded with them.

  The riflemen kept firing until the track ahead was empty but for fallen bodies. The train increased speed. Unable to stop it, the outraged, frightened strikers roared their anger. Stones scooped up from the ballast clanged against the sides of the locomotive, shattered the headlamp, and knocked one of the shooters off the engine pilot.

  “Don’t slow down ’til we’re inside the gates or they’ll mob us.”

  The gates were just beyond an iron girder bridge that carried the rails above the workers’ slum that encircled the smelter, and it looked to the Pinkertons as if they would make it. Suddenly, from the helplessly raging, stone-throwing mob of strikers, a hero darted—a slight figure, no bigger than a boy—dragging a heavy ore rake.

  “Where the hell— Stop him! Don’t let him move that switch!”

  No one had to tell the remaining gunman riding on front of the danger to the locomotive. His Winchester leaped to his shoulder and he snapped a shot at the running figure. The bullet missed but slammed the rake out of the boy’s hands. The boy picked it up and kept running toward the switch. The rifleman took careful aim. He squeezed the trigger slowly and gently. Three stones struck at once, hitting his shoulder, hand, and knee. He dropped his rifle, fell off the engine pilot, and rolled, screaming, under the wheels.

  His bullet missed the boy, ricocheted off the girdered overpass, and pierced a window in the Nyren Smelter gate tower.

  The boy ran in front of the train and jammed the rake into the switch.

  One hundred yards from the safety of the smelter gates, the locomotive’s pilot wheels were derailed by the rake. The massive drivers right behind them sliced the steel rake like a length of sausage. But the forces squeezing that extra piece of steel crammed between the movable switch point and the fixed rail spread the rail a single inch out of line. With nothing for their flanges to grip, the drive wheels slipped off the rails.

  The locomotive jumped the track and tumbled off the overpass into the slum streets below, dragging its coal-laden tender and ten full ore cars onto the roof of the building that housed the Nyren company store.

  • • •

  “WHAT’S TROUBLING YOU, JIM? We did all right today.”

  Jim Higgins looked up bleakly from his desk in the union hall. The local’s secretary and vice president had returned with celebrants’ beers under their belts. “Not counting eight in the hospital and two men dead?” he asked, although the victims were not h
is only source of concern.

  “They died like heroes.”

  “Speaking of heroes, wasn’t that little guy something?”

  “Has anyone seen him since?” asked Higgins.

  “Neither hide nor hair. Too bad. He deserves a medal.”

  “He’s smart to lay low—better yet, light the heck out of Denver.”

  “Halfway to San Francisco, if he’s got a brain in his head,” agreed Higgins, hoping against hope. From the first instant he had seen the slight figure with the rake he had an awful feeling that the “little guy” was neither a man nor a boy but instead a slim young woman in trousers named Mary Higgins.

  He had sent telegrams to friends in Chicago and Pittsburgh, where she should have gone after West Virginia. So far, no one reported seeing her. Times like this, he wished he wasn’t an atheist. Times like this when there was nothing left to do but pray.

  “Brother!”

  In she walked, not in trousers and cap, thank God, but in a bedraggled skirt and a lady’s hat with a perfunctory feather decorating it.

  “Mary,” he said, rising, “how wonderful to see you. When did you get into town?”

  Mary took note of the red-faced vice president and secretary and replied, “I just got off the train. I had a feeling I’d find you here. How is it going?”

  “Gentlemen, my sister Mary.”

  The secretary and vice president nearly broke their arms whipping off their hats, reminding Jim Higgins how attractive men found his sister. They told her that the strike was going wonderfully and that they would surely win. Higgins waited until he and Mary were alone in his rented room before he told her the truth. “It’s not working,” he said. “The strike is stuck in Denver. It won’t spread far.”

  “I saw Mother Jones in Chicago,” said Mary, referring to a brave old labor leader who was an inspiration to them both. “She was hoping you would convince the Western Federation to join with eastern miners back in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.”

  “So was I.”

  “She said that since all the mines are owned by Wall Street operators, the unions should strike simultaneously. The operators are national. We should be national.”

  “Did you say you just got into Denver this evening?”

  Mary looked him straight in the face. “What do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to say that wasn’t you who derailed the ore train.”

  “Why?”

  “You could have been killed.”

  “You could have been killed in Gleasonburg.”

  “I would have been if that young miner hadn’t come to my rescue, but that is not the point.”

  “Miner hell!” said Mary. “Isaac Bell is a Pinkerton.”

  Jim Higgins could not believe his ears. “He can’t be. That’s not possible.”

  “I saw with my own eyes.”

  “Did he say he’s a Pinkerton?”

  “Well, not in so many words. He claimed to be a Van Dorn.”

  “There’s a big difference,” Jim argued. “Pinkertons provide strikebreakers to break unionist heads and protect scabs. I’ve never seen Van Dorns doing that. They are a cut above.”

  “Have you ever heard of a Van Dorn working for the union?” Mary fired back.

  “Bell helped you get out of West Virginia, didn’t he?”

  “Bell was spying, brother. Bell tricked us. He’s no better than the rest of them.”

  13

  LAST STOP, GENTS,” SAID ISAAC BELL AS THE TROLLEY from Morgantown bounced into Gleasonburg. “Round up what you can before dark. Meet back here. Mr. Van Dorn will buy us supper in that saloon,” he added, indicating Reilly’s, where Mary had wangled coffee.

  “What I most enjoy about detecting work is the opportunity to travel,” said Mack Fulton, gazing upon Main Street’s unpainted company houses, goats chewing bark from dying trees, piles of broken rock and coal dust, and muddy hillsides logged to ragged stumps for propping timber.

  “To see new sights,” said Wally Kisley.

  “Broadening our horizons— Get the bags, Archie.”

  Wish Clarke passed their bags to the redheaded apprentice but held on to the heaviest, an usually long, reinforced carpetbag that made a muted clank when he set it on the ground.

  “Looks like they burned down the jail.” He winked at Isaac Bell. “Most of the courthouse, too. Is that how you cut loose of the lynch mob?”

  “I had some help from a lady— O.K., gents, let’s get moving.”

  Mack Fulton asked, “Who gets Archie?”

  “You two,” answered Bell, and said to Archie, “Help them up stairs and crossing streets.”

  Wish Clarke headed for the company store.

  Isaac Bell went to the mouth of Gleason Mine No. 1. No longer disguised as a miner, he presented the Pinkerton in charge of the guards a letter of introduction he had not yet used that identified him as a Van Dorn Agency detective working for Gleason.

  “What the hell is this supposed to mean? We don’t need no detectives. We’re the detectives.”

  “It’s signed by Black Jack himself, and it means you’re ordered to give any Van Dorn who asks for one a safety light and get out of his way. I’m asking for one.”

  They brought him the light. They were edgy, he thought, less cock of the walk, less inclined to bully. “Where you going with this?”

  “A walk,” said Bell. “Come along if you like,” knowing the Pinkerton would never enter the mine.

  “The miners are talking strike.”

  “When did that start?” Bell asked, recalling Jim Higgins’s promise There’s more where I came from.

  “Damned fools are takin’ the bit in their teeth. Whole town’s about to blow sky-high. Wouldn’t be surprised if some of them took a swing at you.”

  “I’ll run the risk,” said Bell. He carried the light through the timbered portal and hurried straight down the haulageway.

  The ventilators were running, and he could hear the clatter of hundreds of miners picking in the galleries, the muffled screech of electric drills, and the occasional heavy crump of dynamite tearing open the seam. He recognized the doorboy he had helped out after the wreck and waved. The child did not know Bell in his sack suit and fedora and looked frightened that he had drawn the attention of a detective.

  Bell stopped and pressed a small gold piece into the boy’s grimy hand. He stared at it with a combination of disbelief and terror. “It’s O.K.,” Bell assured him. “My grandfather left me a few bucks. You can keep it or give it to your mother and father.”

  “I don’t got no father.”

  “Give it to your mother.”

  He started down. The boy called after him, “Are you a Pinkerton, mister?”

  “No. I’m a Van Dorn.”

  “Wow,” said the boy, willing, Bell noted ruefully, to accept a distinction that Mary Higgins had not.

  He continued down the sloping passage to the end. The wrecked train had been removed and the tunnel dug deeper into the seam. Bell worked his way back up to the lowest gallery, then counted up four props and felt behind the fourth for the crack where he had hidden the broken bridle link.

  • • •

  WALLY KISLEY was deep in conversation with a miner for whom he had bought a schooner of beer in the dirtiest saloon he could recall when the man suddenly clammed up. Young Archie, who was doing a good job of standing around not appearing to be on lookout, rapped a warning on the bar, and Kisley looked up to see a pair of Gleason company cops sashay in like they owned the place.

  They walked straight up to him, said “Get out of here” to the miner, who scooted away without finishing his beer. Then one said to Kisley, “That’s the ugliest suit of clothes I ever seen on a man.”

  Wally Kisley studied his checkerboard coat sleeve as if seeing it for the first time.

  The second cop said, “Looks like a clown suit.”

  Wally Kisley remained silent. The first cop noticed Archie Abbott and said, “What the hell are you lo
oking at?”

  The tall, young redhead answered slowly and distinctly, “I am looking at absolutely nothing.”

  “What did you say to me?”

  “Let me revise that, if I may,” said Archie, staring back. “If it were possible to look at less than nothing, then you would provide the opportunity to look at less than nothing.”

  Wally Kisley laughed. “Kid, you’re a blessing in disguise.”

  “What?” said the cop.

  The barkeep, who had been listening anxiously, left the room.

  Wally replied conversationally, “My young redheaded friend sees the joke in the fact that a man who is so ugly his face would stop a clock would criticize the appearance of my garb.”

  The cop pulled a blackjack, and his partner pulled his.

  “Enough,” said Mack Fulton, materializing from a chair in a dark corner with a Smith & Wesson rock-steady in his hand. “Vamoose!”

  • • •

  FOUR GLEASON COPS and two Pinkerton detectives caught up with the Van Dorns in Reilly’s Saloon.

  Kisley and Fulton and Wish Clarke and Archie Abbott were sharing a bottle while waiting for Isaac Bell. Archie was playing the piano, a dusty upright not too badly out of tune, and Mack and Wally were harmonizing in full-blown Weber-and-Fields style on the new Chicago hit, “If Money Talks, It Ain’t On Speaking Terms With Me.”

  The cops and detectives walked in with pistols drawn.

  Reilly vanished into his back office. The miners at the plank-and-barrel bar, who had been talking boldly about rumors of a strike, tossed back their whiskeys and hurried out the door.

  Wally and Mack kept singing: “If money talks, it ain’t on speaking terms with me . . .”

  Wish Clarke said, “If you boys are waving those firearms at us, you seem to be forgetting that the Van Dorn Agency is working for the Gleason Consolidated Coal & Coke Company, hired personally by Black Jack Gleason, who feared, with ample evidence to back him, that you boys were not up to detecting saboteurs.”

  “Not for long,” a beefy West Virginia company cop drawled back. “Word is, company’s fixing to fire you all soon as Mr. Gleason returns from New York City.”