For a second, Bell stood frozen. I led these people into this, he thought. All their lives are in mortal danger. This was why Joseph Van Dorn had warned not to take sides. Two thousand were about to drown in the bitter- cold river, and what in the name of God could he do to save them?
Bell ran back and leaped to the towboat’s main deck. Archie was peering down into the engine room. The water was knee-deep and rising. When it drowned the engine, the current would sweep the people past Amalgamated while the damaged barges sank.
Bell jumped into the hold and waded toward a surge of current that marked the breach in the planks. The water clamped around his legs like ice. Archie peeled off his coat and threw it to Bell and ran, shouting he would get blankets. Bell waded to the breach, stomped Archie’s coat in it, pulled off his own and stuffed it in. His shirt went next. Archie returned with blankets, towels, and people’s precious coats.
Isaac Bell stuffed garments and blankets into the broken seam.
The leak slowed, but not enough. The water kept rising. He heard steam roar. The rising water had reached the furnace and was beginning to drench the fire. Steam pressure was dropping. The engine slowed. Just as the stern wheel stopped turning, Bell felt the hull grounding in the mud.
Boots pounded on deck as men ran with ropes.
“O.K., she’s on the bottom. She can’t sink any more. Save the blankets.”
“You’ll need one more,” said Archie, throwing it to him. “The ladies have suffered enough. Spare them their hero in his altogether.”
Bell slung the blanket around himself and climbed out of the hold. To his astonishment, in the time he was belowdecks, the sun had burned through the fog and was shining bright. Ashore, the gentle upward slope of the Amalgamated Terminal was dotted with white tents pitched by the people who had arrived on the first tows. He smelled bacon frying and coffee brewing. In the shadow of the coal tipple, small boys had started a pickup game of baseball.
“Happy sight, Isaac. A safer place, and no one drowned.”
“It would be a lot happier if they weren’t tearing up that rail line.”
A thousand miners were uprooting track on which the coal trains entered the terminal. A thousand more were tumbling cars on their sides, blocking the trolley lines from the Golden Triangle.
“They’re digging in,” said Archie. “You can’t blame them for keeping the Pinkertons out.”
“And the cops,” said Bell, directing Archie’s attention to the downtown side of Amalgamated’s spit of land.
A contingent of uniformed Pittsburgh police dismounted from a toast-rack trolley that had been stopped by a heap of crossties and a gap in the tracks. A second contingent was milling around blocked tracks on the Homestead side. Neither formed a line nor charged. On the river, a police steam launch flitted about agitatedly like a bird helpless to stop its nest from being invaded. The cops on land climbed back on their trolleys and rode away.
As Isaac Bell watched the miners fortify the point, he had to concede Archie was right. This place they had retreated to was vulnerable until they barricaded the approaches. But it had the grim face of war.
“At least,” he said, “the hotheads lost their dynamite. Maybe now both sides can settle down and horse- trade.”
“What in heck is that?” said Archie. The tall redhead was staring at the river behind Bell, his expression a mix of puzzlement and awe. Bell turned to see.
Chimneys billowing smoke, stern wheel pounding foam, an enormous steamboat rounded the point. It was immensely long, and tall, and black as coal.
39
“Is that a cannon on the foredeck?” asked Archie.
Bell shielded his eyes with cupped hands and focused on the gun. “Two-inch Hotchkiss,” he said. “The Navy had them on a gunboat Wish and I boarded in New Orleans.”
“Where the heck did they get it?”
“More to the point,” said Bell, “who are they and what do they want?”
“I can’t quite make out her nameboard.”
The black giant came closer.
One after another, then by the hundreds, the women pitching tents and the men building barricades stopped what they were doing. Ten thousand stood stock-still, waiting for the black apparition to turn midriver and point its cannon at them. It steamed very slowly, its giant wheel barely stirring the river, closer and closer, at a pace no less menacing for its majesty.
Directly opposite the point, it stopped, holding against the current. Not a living figure showed on deck, not a deckhand, not a fireman. The boiler deck and engine doors were shut, the pilot invisible behind sun-glared glass. Ten thousand people held their breath. What, Isaac Bell asked himself again, have I led these people into?
It blasted its whistle. Everyone jumped.
Then it moved forward, slicing the current, up the river, swung around the bend of the Homestead Works, and disappeared.
“Where’s it going?” asked Archie.
“My guess is, to collect the Pinkertons,” said Bell. “We’ll have to find out. But if I’m right, then the miners hold this point of land, and the owners hold the river. And if that isn’t the beginning of a war, I don’t know what is.”
Dried off and clothes changed, Bell went looking for
He found Captain Jennings and his son in a Smithfield Street saloon up the slope from where their boats were docked. The two pilots congratulated him on the strikers’ safe passage.
“Did you see the
“Hard to miss,” said the younger Jennings, and his father declared, “Who in hell would paint a steamboat black?”
“Who owns her?”
Both pilots shrugged. “Never seen her before. We was just asking ourselves, was we thrown off by the black? But even imagining her white, she does not look familiar.”
“Where do you suppose it came from?”
“She weren’t built in Pittsburgh or we’d know her for sure. That leaves Louisville or Cincinnati.”
“Nowhere else?”
“It took a heck of a yard to build a boat that size. Like I say, Louisville or Cincinnati. I’d say Cincinnati, wouldn’t you, Pa?”
The older Jennings agreed. “One of the big old yards like Held & Court.”
“They still in business, Pa?”
“They’re the last that make ’em like that anymore.”
“What do you think of that cannon?” asked Bell.
“Not much,” said the senior Jennings.
His son explained, “Riverboats are made of spit-and-sawdust. The recoil will shake her to pieces.”
“Could they reinforce it to stand the recoil?”
Both Jenningses spit tobacco. “They’d have to.”
“Insurrection,” said Judge James Congdon, casting a stony gaze about the Duquesne Club’s paneled dining room. “When first offered the privilege of addressing the august membership, I intended to call my speech ‘New Economies in the Coal, Iron, Coking, and Steelmaking Industries.’ But for reasons apparent to anyone in your besieged city, my topic is changed to ‘Insurrection.’”
He raised a glass of mineral water to his wrinkled lips, threw back his head, and drained it.
