The Striker

“If I were to give you unlimited operating funds, private information, rail passes, and specials, how would you use them?”

“The details are mine alone to know.”

Congdon frowned. “You’re a brave man to stand your ground in your precarious situation. Or a fool.”

“A determined man,” Clay shot back. “The only thing you can count on in this world is determination. I’m offering determination. I repeat: The details are mine alone to know.”

“Assume, for the moment, that tactics are up to you,” Congdon conceded. “What is your strategy?”

“You need a story to destroy the unions. The newspapers are already on your side. They will tell your story. I will give you your story.”

“What story?”

“The owners upon whom God has seen fit to bestow property will protect property and liberty from murderous agitators.”

“How will you tell it?”

“By starting a war in the coalfields.”

“How?”

“Are you familiar with the accident at Gleason Mine No. 1?”

“Runaway coal train, some hands killed, and production interrupted for four days. Are you telling me you started that?”

“And finished it. Before the miners returned to work, they burned down Gleason’s jail and the courthouse. I’d call that a war.”

“I’d call it a good begi

“A quadruple play, counting the fire.”

“Yes indeed you outdid O’Hagan. But I am deeply disappointed.”

“Why, sir?”

James Congdon answered with a wistful sigh. “My lunatic stopper will have to wait for another lunatic.”

He let go the steam lever and gestured for Henry Clay to take a seat beside him.

12

Crackerjack army Mr. Van Dorn gave you, kid: two spavined geezers and an amiable drunk.”

Isaac Bell defended his friend. “Wish goes long stretches when he never touches a drop.”

Wally Kisley, who looked less like a private detective than an aging harness salesman in a sack suit patterned bright as a checkerboard, gri

“Say, Mack, what is the difference between a drinking man and a drowning man?”

“Beats me, Wally. Didn’t know there was a difference between a drinking man and a drowning man.”

“The drowning man sinks in water. The drinking man sinks in whiskey.”

“Say, Wally,” asked Mack, “here comes a passerby, strolling by the sea, what does the drowning man yell?”

“Throw me a rope.”

“What does the drinking man yell?”

“Throw me a bottle.”

They looked to Bell for a laugh.

Stone-faced, Isaac Bell said, “I worked with Wish Clarke in Wyoming and New Orleans. He’s sharp as they come.”

“So’s a busted bottle.”

“I also remember when you ‘spavined geezers’ took over my apprenticeship from Mr. Van Dorn, you taught me plenty. And you weren’t so spavined that you couldn’t clear a saloon of Harry Frost’s boys.”

“Your recent apprenticeship,” Kisley and Fulton chorused.

Bell saw that the old detectives were not joking but deadly serious and with a purpose. Kisley stared hard at him. Mack Fulton got down to brass tacks.

“Who’s ramrodding this outfit?”

“It’s my case,” said Isaac Bell. “I am.”

Kisley said, “It was not long ago we was changing your diapers in Chicago.”

“I’ve got the hang of it since.”

The partners shot back obstinate glowers and Mack said, flatly, “The man bossing an outfit has to change everyone’s diapers and still stay on top of the case.”

“You’re looking at him.”

“I’m looking at a kid who started shaving yesterday,” Fulton shot back.

“Spouting highfalutin French,” Kisley piled on. “Provocateur? Whatever happened to good old agitator?”

“Or provoker?”

“Or instigator?”

Isaac Bell was constitutionally incapable of punching a man twice his age, but he was getting tempted.

Suddenly, Aloysius Clarke was standing in the doorway.

He was a big, red-faced fellow who moved quietly.

Bell said, “Hello, Wish.”

Clarke nodded. “Kid.”

“We was just discussin’ who ramrods this outfit,” said Mack Fulton.

Wish Clarke stood silent. He had small blue eyes buried so deeply in drink-swollen, purple-veined cheeks that observers who associated whiskey with dulled wits and melancholy would miss the glow of intelligence and laughter. He smiled unexpectedly and answered the question on all minds. How long had Wish Clarke been standing there and how much had he overheard?

“It’s Isaac’s case. The kid’s the boss.”

Wally Kisley shook his head. “Them coal miners ain’t the only ones who need a union.”

“And to close another subject,” said Wish Clarke, a self-educated man who revered the English language, “Provoker is too general a word, agitator is a misspelling of adjutator, which means ‘a representative,’ and instigator is vague. But provocateur, short for agent provocateur, describes exactly what Isaac suspects we’re up against — a smart fellow who’s hoodwinking not-so-smart fellows into committing crimes that will discredit them.”

“For what reason?”

“For reasons,” said Wish Clarke, “we have not yet detected, Detective Kisley.”

Isaac Bell raised his voice. “Saddle up, gents!”

He pulled tickets from his vest and passed them out.

“Train’s leaving for West Virginia. All aboard!”

Locomotive headlamp blazing through the night, a train of sixty ore cars steamed from the Cripple Creek gold mines on Pikes Peak down the Colorado Front Range into the smoke-shrouded city of Denver. Pinkerton detectives boarded the locomotive in the Auraria rail yard.

Three thousand smelter workers had walked off the job — the opening gun in a united strike led by the Western Federation of Miners to win an eight-hour workday for every union with which it was affiliated. The Pinkertons posted riflemen on the engine pilot and took command of the heavily laden train to escort it to the Nyren Smelter.

Jim Higgins stood arm in arm with a thousand strikers blocking the tracks. In his opinion — not that the hotheads were asking for it — ruining the Nyren furnaces had been a mistake, and the strike, which could have blossomed into a general strike the breadth of the continent, was going nowhere, stuck in Denver, mired in bitterness.

Old Man Nyren — a cantankerous bully detested equally by labor and the Rocky Mountain smelter owners he had driven out of business with his giant plant fired by cheap coal — was in no mood to bargain. The strikers had drawn the fires from under his furnaces. The molten ore had frozen into a solid mass from the charge hoppers on top to the crucible drains below, rendering them useless until the hardened mass of ore, slag, and gold could be cut out. Nyren ordered the ore train parked in the smelter’s elevated yard, ready to tip its load into his furnaces the instant that cutting was done by scab labor.

The Pinkertons ordered the train to run the strikers off the tracks.

“Go to hell!” said the locomotive engineer. “I ain’t killing those fellers.”

“Me neither,” said the fireman, crossing his massive arms.

The detectives clubbed both men to the floor of the cab. A hard-bitten engineer they had brought with them took the controls. “Can’t see what’s behind the bastards,” he said. “For all we know, they could have pried up the rails.”

“Clear ’em,” ordered the detective in charge.

They tied down the whistle. Blowing an unbroken, ungodly shriek, the train accelerated, and the riflemen on front opened fire.

Union men scattered, dragging their wounded with them.

The riflemen kept firing until the track ahead was empty but for fallen bodies. The train increased speed. Unable to stop it, the outraged, frightened strikers roared their anger. Stones scooped up from the ballast clanged against the sides of the locomotive, shattered the headlamp, and knocked one of the shooters off the engine pilot.