The Striker

Free of the mud, Isaac Bell poured on the speed. The man ahead of him was tiring, stumbling occasionally, and Bell was catching up. Better yet, Bell thought, the tu

Suddenly, the man scrambled up the side of the tu

“Get out of there, you damned fool,” he shouted. “That chunk of work is loose.”

A shaft of daylight fell on the man Bell was chasing and Bell saw his face was still covered by the bloody bandage and the hat. But his eyes were gleaming as if in triumph, and Bell knew that he had seen something to his advantage. Bell ran harder. The man scrambled up the slanting side of the gallery where a section of bedrock had broken loose from the wall and slid down on the floor.

Bell could see that layers of the bedrock slanted at a steep angle. An immense chunk was propelled like a toboggan about to slide down an icy slope. He caught up with the foreman, who was shouting, “That’ll kill you! Get down from there, you idiot! Hey, what are you doing? Don’t do that. You’ll kill us all.”

The man had found a heavy pick and was using it to dig into the crumbling rock and pull himself higher up the slope.

“He’ll start another slide!” the foreman wailed in despair. “Run, boys! Run for it.”

Bell scrambled up onto the slope. The man had reached the opening and was flailing away with the pick, trying to make it wide enough to fit through. Broken rock rolled down at Bell. The hole suddenly opened wider, and the man started scrambling up through it. Bell took one of the throwing knifes and hurled it overhand.

The blade flew true to its target and stuck in the heel of the man’s boot as he disappeared up the hole. Bell scrambled after him. Then the rock around the hole separated in a giant sheet of stone that slid down the slope, hurtled past Bell, and crashed to the tu

It left in its wake a jagged slope that Bell climbed as easily as a flight of stairs. He emerged at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street just in time to see a full block of brownstone mansions shaking as if in an earthquake. A chasm opened in the sidewalk. The front walls separated from the brownstones and plunged into the subway tu

Isaac Bell could see into the front rooms of the mansions as if he were at the theater watching a play on a stage. The occupants ran like actors who were exiting upstage as fast as they could. Bell ran to help. Motion caught his eye a short block across Thirty-seventh Street. A train on the tracks elevated above Third Avenue was accelerating downtown. Clinging to the back of the rear car was the man in the long coat, and as the El disappeared behind the buildings, he waved good-bye to Isaac Bell.

“He got away,” Bell reported to Joseph Van Dorn.

The Boss was seething.

“What happened to the young lady I ordered you to follow?”

“I lost sight of Mary in a riot. I was looking for her at the Tombs when I ran into him.”

“Was she arrested?”

“The police arrested a hundred women, so I thought I might find her there. But she was not among them.”

“The police,” growled Van Dorn. “Speaking of the police, I just had an unpleasant conversation by telephone with a deputy commissioner who informed me that his patrolmen received reports from the subway contractor that you were present at the street collapse. Apparently, there is speculation that you caused it.”

“I did not,” said Bell. “But I did ask the engineers to explain what happened. They refer to that section of the tu

Van Dorn spoke in a voice that rose. “Rest assured, I do not believe that any of my detectives would deliberately precipitate the collapse of a city block, but I would hope that at future such events you would not stick around to allow the police to link the name of the Van Dorn Agency to a natural disaster.”

“I had to help some people out of the buildings.”

“You’re sure you’d seen this man before?”

“I’m not sure,” Bell said, because he was not yet able to explain, to the Boss’s satisfaction, his strange, dreamlike memory of the man with amber eyes who had to be the provocateur. “But I am convinced that he was looking for me. He lured me into that cellar.”

“Lured?” echoed Van Dorn. “Lured is what pe

“What I mean to say is, I feel like a darn fool.”

Van Dorn nodded agreement. “I think you could do with a night’s rest.”

“Yes, sir,” said Isaac Bell. But instead of going home to his room in the Yale Club, he went straight to a gunsmith that Wish Clarke patronized on Forty-third Street. It was after hours, but the gunsmith lived above his shop, and Wish’s name got Bell in the door.

He bought a two-shot derringer, a tiny one-shot, and a Colt Army to replace the weapons taken by the amber-eyed man. Then he described the man’s revolver to the smith.

“It was a .45. And I would have thought it was a Colt. But it had no front sight. And the hammer was much wider than this,” he added, hefting the gun. “I was wondering, do you know a smith who might modify a Colt that way?”

“Folks do all sorts of things to six-shooters. Did you notice the top strap?”

“It was flat,” said Bell. “Not beveled like this. And the hammer had a graceful little curl to it.”

“Was the front sight cut off or ground down?”

Bell considered for a moment. “No. There seemed to be a notch you could slip one into.”

“How long was the barrel?”

“Not so long it couldn’t come out of his holster real quick.”

“And it had a slot for the front sight?… Did you get a look at the trigger?”

“No. His finger was curled around it.”

“How big was the grip?”

“Let me think… The man had large hands, but I could see the butt— It was longer than most.”

“I think you were looking at a Bisley.”

“The target pistol?”

“Yes, that flat top is for mounting a rear windage sight. Fine, fine weapon. Very accurate.”

“It is, in my experience,” said Bell, remembering how close two pistol shots had come to killing him at extreme range in Gleasonburg.

“But it is more than a target pistol,” said the smith. “It makes an excellent close-in fighting gun with that long grip and wide hammer.”

“Do you have one?”

“I’d have to order it special.”

“Send it to the Van Dorn office at the Cadillac. They’ll forward to me.”

Bell paid for the guns, dropped the one-shot in his pocket, and put the Army in his shoulder holster. Then, as he started to slide the two-shot up his coat sleeve, he weighed it speculatively in his hand, wondering. Had the amber-eyed provocateur assumed or guessed he had a derringer in his sleeve? Or had he been sharp enough to spot that the sleeve was tailored extra-wide? Or had he just been covering all the places a man might hide a gun?