case the sergeant comes.”
“Thanks, pal.”
The cops walked away. Henry Clay rapped on the barricade. Twenty men dragged a car aside, and the mules dug in their shoes to pull the weight over the hump in the road and through the opening. As soon as the car was pushed back, the head of the Defense Committee, Jack Fortis, greeted Henry Clay by the name John Claggart, and led the wagon into the tent city. The woman on the driver’s seat threw bread to the people crouched in their tents but quickly ran out. She climbed down without a word and plodded away in the rain. The wagon continued on, through the tents and up a muddy hill to the masonry base of the coal tipple.
“Put it there,” said Fortis.
Henry Clay nodded his approval. The strikers had chosen well. The site commanded the entire bend in the river.
The mules were unhitched and led away. Carpenters and a blacksmith gathered with crowbars, hammers, wrenches, and chisels and quickly dismantled the bakery wagon. Sides, roof, driver’s seat, dashboard, shafts, and an improvised coupler were carried off. The front wheels were detached and rolled away.
Henry Clay watched the carpenters, the smith, and especially Fortis’s picked men from the Defense Committee, all Spanish War veterans, gaze with great satisfaction at what was left — a four-foot-long cannon capable of firing an explosive shell two miles. It was a Hotchkiss Mountain Gun mounted on its own carriage, which had served as the fake bakery wagon’s high back wheels. The tube and its steel wheels and ammunition weighed seven hundred pounds. Portable and accurate, the type had proved its worth for a generation, slaughtering savages in the Indian Wars and Spaniards on San Juan Hill and currently blasting Philippine insurgents with jagged shell fragments.
Fortis raised his voice. “Thank you, John Claggart. This will even things up. You are a true friend to labor.”
Henry Clay replied, “I wish I could have brought you more ammunition. Only thirty rounds. But once you get the
“And the state militia,” said Fortis.
“And the Pinkertons,” said Clay. “And the Coal and Iron Police. Good luck, boys. God go with all of you.”
A U.S. Marshal boarded the railroad ferry from Jersey City to Cortlandt Street with a prisoner in handcuffs and leg irons who recognized Mary Higgins from the union. He looked away so as not to cause her trouble. She had just bought a sandwich in the terminal. She carried it over and asked the marshal, “May I give this to your prisoner?”
A smile got him to allow it.
It was a short walk from the ferry terminal to Wall Street. She paused in Trinity Church cemetery, and paused again to stare in the tall windows of Thibodeau & Marzen. It looked like a bank.
Nearby, she found the Congdon Building, the tallest on the block. The doorman eyed her borrowed coat and the hat Henry Clay had bought her and asked politely who she had come to see. Her voice failed her. She had lost her nerve. Stammering something unintelligible, she hurried away. She rode a streetcar uptown, clutching Clay’s revolver in her bag, walked a bit, and came back down on the Third Avenue El. The doormen had changed shifts. The new man was polite, too, equally impressed by her coat and hat.
“Mr. James Congdon, please.”
“Top floor,” he said, indicating the elevator.
The elevator runner, a gawky kid who in a better world would still be in school, asked her what floor, and when she told him he asked, “What’s your name, please, miss? I have to call ahead to Mr. Congdon’s floor.”
So much for surprising the great man in his lair. “Mary Higgins.”
He called on the intercom, spoke her name, and listened.
“He wants to know who you are.”
“A friend of Mr. Clay.”
“He says bring you up.”
The elevator delivered her to a small foyer with a reception desk. A middle-aged woman at the desk pointed toward a series of rooms that spilled one into another. “Through there. Close each door behind you, please.”
Mary Higgins went through the first door, closed it, and in through a second. Each room was quieter than the last. In the third she found a closed door and knocked.
A strong male voice shouted, “Enter!”
She pushed through the door, closed it behind her, and gasped.
“My sculpture is Auguste Rodin’s
“It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
She tore her eyes from the white marble to look across the room at Congdon, who was standing at his desk. He looked older than in the newspaper sketches but more vigorous. He was very tall and stood well.
“Go on. You can look at it. Touch it. It feels wonderful.”
She approached reverentially. The confident way the woman’s left arm pulled her lover toward her was the most erotic sight she had ever seen.
“What do you want?”
“I want a world where everyone can see this beautiful statue.”
“Not in this life,” Congdon said coldly.
His office had double windows. No sound from the street penetrated. The walls were hung with paintings, most of thinly veiled naked women in the French Academy style. On his desk Mary saw a bronze statuette, another naked woman.
“My wife,” said Congdon, stroking it. “Go on, you can touch it, if you like. I find the marble draws me close.”
Mary laid her hand on the woman’s arm.
“What else do you want?” Congdon asked. “What did you come for?”
“I want you to stand aside and let the coal miners organize, and I want you to pay them a fair wage.”
“Higgins? Yes, of course. You’re Jim Higgins’s sister, aren’t you? The unionist.”
Mary nodded.
Congdon said, “Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, you’re talking to the wrong man. I don’t own coal mines.”
“You control them by the prices you pay for the coal the miners dig and for what your railroads charge to ship it. And please don’t insult my intelligence. If you don’t ‘officially’ own those railroads, you control them by their purse strings. If there is only one person in the country who can allow a union and pay the miners a fair wage, it is you.”
“Assume, for a moment, I could. What would I get out of it?”
“The well-being gained when equality spawns justice.”
“Equality spawns mediocrity at best, the mob at worst.”
“If you refuse, I will expose your scheme to foment violence in the coalfields.”
“And how will you do that?”
“I will persuade Henry Clay to confess everything you two have done and everything you plan to do next.”
James Congdon regarded her with a thoughtful smile. At last, he said, “I’ll be damned… You know, I have no doubt you could do that. I suspect you are an extraordinary young woman. I would not be at all surprised if you’ve established insights into Clay that would allow you to command his frail emotions.”
“You and I are similar,” said Mary Higgins.
“In what way?”
“Clear-eyed and quick.”
