“What happened?” cried Luke.
“Her boiler blew,” said Zeke. “The Good Lord has intervened! He has struck that Satan dead.”
Isaac Bell exchanged dubious glances with Wish Clarke.
The younger detective spoke first. “That one-two punch sounded like someone lent the Good Lord a hand with a hundred pounds of dynamite. First the dynamite, then the boiler.”
“Isaac, old son,” said Aloysius Clarke. “I do believe you’re getting the hang of your line.”
“We better get down there and lend a hand.”
Bell discovered as he and Wish pushed their way onto the dock that the Polish and Italian scabs had not been imported from their home countries. Nor had the numerous black men come directly from the South. They had been rounded up from the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, where an anthracite strike had shut down the hard-coal mines. Those he talked to were stunned by the explosion, bewildered, and afraid.
“They didn’t tell us nothing about the union.”
“They just said there was jobs.”
In the middle of the river, the steamboat that had brought the scab tow was circling the burning remains of the
“Now what?” asked Wish.
Bell pointed upstream where the tipple loomed darkly against the night sky. “Coal barges adrift.”
The entire tow that had been moored to the tipple pier — a fleet of twenty loaded barges lashed together — wheeled ponderously into the river and picked up speed as the powerful current dragged it downstream.
“How in heck did they break loose?”
“First thing I’ll ask, come morning,” said Isaac Bell.
Wish said, “Amazing how many things went wrong at once.”
Isaac Bell’s eyes shot from the drifting tow to the burning yacht to the bewildered scabs milling on the dock to the steamboat, whose captain had stopped his engine to let the current sweep him away from the wreck.
“Too many things. And I have a bad hunch it isn’t over.”
When the boat was a safe distance from any possible survivors still in the water, her big stern wheel churned, and she raced to capture the drifting coal barges. Deckhands scrambled with lines and the steamboat tied on. Stern wheel thrashing the water, she swung the lead barges into the current to master the tow.
“He’s got her,” said Wish. “Captain’s a man to ride the river with.”
Just as he spoke, the big steamboat exploded with a colossal double roar that toppled her chimneys and wheelhouse into the river. To Bell’s ear, the double roar echoed the one-two that destroyed the
But unlike the yacht, which was still drifting and on fire, the big steamboat sank straight to the bottom, leaving the wreckage of her upper decks exposed. The current slammed the coal barges against her, ripping their wooden hulls. Within minutes, twenty had sunk, blocking the channel to Pittsburgh.
“My provocateur,” said Isaac Bell, “is getting the hang of his line, too.”
17
A pipe organ dominated the front room of bloom House, the finest mansion in Pittsburgh. The dining room, ablaze in candle- and electric light, seated thirty-six comfortably. Livery servants glided in with silver trays from a distant kitchen. But R. Kenneth Bloom, the father of Isaac Bell’s school friend Kenny, did not look happy. Nor, Bell observed, did his dinner guests, Bloom’s fellow coal barons, railroad magnates, and steel tycoons, whose evening clothes glittered with diamond studs and cuff links.
Bloom Sr., red-faced and carrying too much weight to be healthy, planted both hands on the snow-white cloth in order to stand up from his chair. He raised his glass.
“I won’t say I liked him. But he was one of ours. Gentlemen, I give you Black Jack Gleason— Struck down by the union! May he rest in peace.”
“Rest in peace!” thundered up and down the long table.
“And may the unionists burn in Hell!” echoed back.
Isaac Bell touched water to his lips.
Kenny Bloom, in line to inherit half the anthracite coal in Pennsylvania from his mother, and control of the Reading Railroad and vast bituminous fields from his father, winked at Bell. “We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” he muttered. “But, if we did, the things we could say.” He drank deeply. “I’m so glad you came, Isaac. These dinners get mighty grim.”
“Thank you for inviting me.”
Kenny grinned, “Didn’t give me much choice, did you, Mr. Make-Believe Insurance Man?”
“I do appreciate it.”
Halfway up the table, Pennsylvania’s attorney general raised his voice. “The union will pay for this outrage. Steamboats dynamited. Innocent workingmen, attempting to travel to Gleasonburg to get an honest job, injured. River blocked. Coal traffic at a standstill.”
“And Gleason murdered.”
“That, too. Yes, sir, the rabid dogs will pay.”
Kenny said to Bell, “They should, and they will, but he’s talking through his hat because West Virginia’s attorney general gets first crack, seeing as how they killed Black Jack in their state.”
“I’m not convinced,” said Bell, “that the union had anything to do with it.”
The military precision of back-to-back dynamitings simultaneous with the barge tow set adrift seemed to him far beyond the capability of the union organizers, who were scrambling to keep one step ahead of the Pinkertons. Inspections of the steamboat boiler rooms had increased his skepticism.
But Kenny, who had been hitting the whiskey before dinner, didn’t hear him. He was boasting instead to everyone at their end of the table about events in the anthracite fields. “So we mounted a Gatling gun on the back of a Mercedes Simplex and welded on steel plates to protect the driver.”
“Did it work?”
“Did it work? I’ll say it worked,” Kenny snickered. “The strikers call it the Death Special.”
At the top of the table, Bloom Sr. was addressing the strikers’ demands.
“The eight-hour workday will be the ruination of the coal business.”
“Hear! Hear!”
“And I’ve heard more than enough nonsense about safety. The miner has only himself to blame if he doesn’t keep his workplace in safe condition.”
Another baron agreed. “It’s not my fault if he refuses to mine his coal properly, scrape down dangerous slate, and install proper timbering.”
“Risk is naturally attached to the trade. Fact is, with prices tumbling, we’ll be lucky to stay in business.”
Bell noticed a perplexed expression on the face of an older mine operator, who called up table, “The iniquitous price we’re paying to ship coal isn’t helping either.”
Bloom Sr. returned a tight smile. “The railroad’s hands are tied, Mr. Morrison.”
“By whom, sir? Surely not the government?”
“Them, too, but it’s not like we don’t report to our investors.”
“There you go blaming Wall Street again. Didn’t used to, in my day. We called our own tune. If the banks wanted to make money, they were welcome to invest with us. But they did not presume to tell us how to dig coal or how to ship it.”
“Well, sir, these are different days.”
Isaac Bell noticed Kenny observing his father with a thoughtful, if not troubled, expression. “Sounds like you’ll have your work cut out for you when it’s your turn to run the railroad.”
“What makes you think I will run the railroad?”
