“Which of them do you suppose he’s working for?”
“A man wise enough to take account of Henry Clay’s talents and greedy enough to employ them.”
BOOK THREE
STEAM
32
ISAAC BELL REJOINED HIS SQUAD IN PITTSBURGH. AFTER HE had filled in Wally Kisley, Mack Fulton, and Archie Abbott on events in New York, Archie parroted a favorite Weber and Fields saying:
“A poke in the snoot means you’re getting close.”
“If we were close,” said Bell, “we would know what Henry Clay is going to do next. But we don’t have a clue. Nor do we know who gives him his orders. All we know is, we have a bloody-minded provocateur serving a ruthless boss.”
• • •
DRESSED LIKE a wealthy Southern banker, in a white suit, a straw planter’s hat, and rose-tinted glasses, Henry Clay pretended to admire the launchways of the bankrupt Held & Court Shipyard of Cincinnati. Scores of rails ran side by side down a muddy slope into the Ohio River, and the owner of the yard— foppish young Mr. Court Held, who was anxious to borrow money or sell out, or both—boasted that his family had been launching side-paddle steamers and stern-wheelers down those rails for sixty years.
“Ah suppose you-all have the hang of it by now?” said Clay, laying a Deep South drawl on thick as he pleased. Not only was Court Held desperate, but repeated intermarriage among the founding families had bequeathed his generation the brainpower of a gnat.
“Yes, sir. In fact, crane your neck around that bend and you’ll see fine examples of our product.”
Henry Clay had already looked around that bend.
“I would like very much to see a large steamboat.”
Held & Court had two of the biggest paddleboats left over from the steamboat age that ended when fast, modern railroads rendered leisurely travel passé. Nimbler Cincinnati shipyards still boomed, launching by the hundreds utilitarian stern-wheelers that pushed coal barge tows. Numerous such workboats were churning the river white as Clay and the yard owner walked across the yard for a look around the bend. But Held & Court had persisted in building giant floating palaces until the last grand Mississippi riverboat companies went under.
“Behold, sir. Vulcan King and White Lady.”
They towered over their wharf. Four tall decks of painted wood, polished metal, and cut glass were heaped upon broad, flat hulls three hundred feet long. Topping their decks were glass pilothouses near the front, and soaring about the pilothouses were twin black chimneys with flaring tops. Each boat was propelled by a giant stern wheel forty feet in diameter and fifty feet wide.
“We installed the latest triple expansion engines.”
The White Lady was appropriately white.
“She’s the prettier one, don’t you think? A brag boat, sure as shootin’.”
The Vulcan King was painted a dull blue-gray color. It was this more somber of the vessels that had brought Henry Clay to Cincinnati.
“Which has the reinforced decks?”
“Where’d you hear about reinforced decks?” the owner demanded. “That’s a government secret.”
Henry Clay returned a smile much colder than his drawl. “Ah believe a United States senatah acquaintance confided War Department plans to dispatch a shallow-water gunboat to Cuba. Although it could have been my friend the admiral who told me about the cannon and the Maxim gun.”
“Well, then, you know the sad story,” said the shipyard owner. “A darn shame that the Spanish War ended too soon. We were just fixing to mount the cannon when the War Department canceled the order.”
“Which boat?”
“Vulcan King. The Navy said she couldn’t be white, so we found this gray paint.”
“How much are you asking for her?”
The young heir blinked. No one had offered to buy a steamboat from Held & Court since the aborted gunboat scheme and that was four years past. “Are you saying you want to buy her?”
“Ah’d consider it if the price is right.”
“Well, now. The Vulcan King cost the better part of four hundred thousand dollars to build.” He glanced at Clay and appeared to decide that this banker with friends in high places knew too much of her history to be fleeced.
“We would accept a rock-bottom price of seventy-five thousand.”
Clay asked, “Can you have her coaled by morning and steam up?”
“I could certainly try.”
“Try?” Clay asked with a wintry scowl.
“Yes, sir! I’m sure I can do that. Coaled and steam up tomorrow morning.”
“Throw in the cannon and the Maxim, and you’ve got a deal.”
“What do you want her guns for?”
“Scrap steel,” said Henry Clay with a straight face. “Defray the cost of a paint job.”
“Mighty fine idea. She’ll look her best in white.”
Black, thought Henry Clay. Her gigantic stern wheel would thrash the river white. But while she steamed up the Ohio River to Pittsburgh, his crew would paint the Vulcan King black as the coal that fired her boilers.
The strikers who marched down the Monongahela River had cursed the cruel and heartless owners for abusing them with Clay’s Cyclops. Terror bred anger. Hotheads shouted down the moderates, and the miners’ Defense Committee had armed themselves, spending their meager treasury on repeating rifles. How rabidly would they rage at the grim sight of an evil-looking Vulcan King steaming up their river? How angrily would they seize the gauntlet thrown in their faces? How violently would they defend their tent city?
So violently—Henry Clay had promised Judge James Congdon, who had balked initially at buying a steamboat—so rabidly, that law-abiding Americans would offer grateful prayers in their church pews: God bless the mineowners for mounting Maxim guns and cannon to protect them from the mob. And newspapers would thunder, commanding the defenders of property to pull out all stops to crush the socialists before labor tore the nation asunder with a second civil war.
Court Held cleared his throat.
“As ‘steam up’ implies, you intend to leave Cincinnati tomorrow. May I ask how do you intend to pay for her?”
Other than having satchels bulging with
