The Striker

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, and 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.”

Mary didn’t hear him. “Look at that,” she said, gesturing at a huge white sign so new it was not yet stained by soot.

AMALGAMATED COAL TERMINAL

From his research, Bell recognized the giant tipple that loomed over a combined train yard and barge wharf on a point of land that jutted into the river. It was the latest innovation in the transport of coal to market. Mechanical conveyers lifted coal from wooden Monongahela barges up to the tipple. The tipple rained it down in two directions, filling hundred-car trains, headed east to the seaboard cities, and big, modern barges that were steel-reinforced against the western-river rigors of the Ohio and the Mississippi.

Mary was exasperated by its name. “‘Amalgamated’? Why can’t they just call a combine a combine?”

Bell grinned. “Would you settle for ‘united’?”

She did not return his grin. But he saw some smile in her eyes when she fired back, “If you’ll settle for ‘monopoly.’”

“Shake on it?” They touched fingertips and stood looking at each other, balanced against the motion of the train, until Bell swept Mary into his arms and kissed her on the mouth.

At length, Mary asked, “Weren’t we supposed to jump?”

They were still rolling too fast to jump, and Bell finally realized that since it was running empty, the freight did not have to slow until shortly before it stopped.

When the air brakes finally hissed, they were in the yard, an enormous sprawl of track in every direction. It was securely fenced. Bell spotted a break in the palings down by the river twenty tracks away.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

Bell jumped first and landed with a jolt that seared his ribs. He kept his feet and reached for Mary and caught her as she tripped.

“Let’s go. We’ll get out of here fast as we can.”

They almost made it. They had crossed twenty pairs of rails and were running the last few yards when from behind a derelict caboose pounced a club-wielding railroad dick in a wrinkled sack suit and a dented bowler hat.

“Stop right there, you two!”

“Give us a break,” said Bell. “We’re just leaving.”

“You’re leaving all right — straight to the jailhouse. So’s your floozy.”

The rail dick reached for Mary’s arm.

Bell stepped between them and, when the yard bull raised his club, hit him with a left-right combination similar to the one that floored Eustace McCoy in the mine. The bull went down, holding his jaw. But the attack had been seen. Three more railroad police come running, pawing blackjacks from their coats. If they got past him, Bell knew, Mary would be next. He knelt beside the man he had knocked down and muttered urgently.

Railroad police were at the bottom of the peace-officer heap, despised as dregs, a bare step above brutal criminals. Few would refuse a Van Dorn detective a favor, dreaming that it might one day be returned with an invitation to join the outfit.

“Van Dorn. Pittsburgh field office. Call ’em off before I hurt somebody.”

“Hell, mister. Why didn’t you say you was a Van Dorn!” the rail cop blurted. “Almost broke my jaw.”