The Striker

“What did you—”

Hurrying down the hill at a fast lope, Bell called over his shoulder in a commanding voice, “Run for it! It’s dynamite. Archie!”

Fifty yards down, he looked back. The dynamite went off with a muffled peal. The gun jumped off its wheels, and the breech peeled open as if made of paper. The crew gathered around the shattered weapon. Angry men ran after Bell, shouting:

“What did you do to us?”

Bell kept walking fast, signaling Archie not to pull the shotgun until they really needed it.

“Why?”

“What did you do to us?”

“I’m hoping I saved your damned fool lives,” Bell said.

“How can we beat ’em? How can we win?”

The shouts died on their lips. All eyes flew to the top of the tipple. A lookout was bellowing through cupped hands:

“They’re coming! The black boat is coming.”

47

“Cast off!” Isaac Bell ordered.

He and Archie raced up the boarding stage. Bell gathered Mack and Wally on the wheelhouse stairs. “Somehow we have to keep them apart.”

The wheelhouse stood five decks above the river, and from it Bell could see much of the tent city sprawled on the Amalgamated point. On the other side of the barricades of heaped trolley cars, a rippling blue mass marked Pittsburgh police pacing in the rain.

“Itching for an opening,” muttered Mack Fulton. “Can’t wait to break heads.”

Captain Je

A Defense Committee detail, wielding axes, surged onto the barge they had raised to make a wharf and chopped holes in the bottom, resinking it into a protective wall of barges half sunken in the mud.

Bell said, “Put us between them and the point.”

Je

“Did you write Mary?” Wish asked.

“I should have said it to her face— Here they come!”

Vulcan King’s tall chimneys showed first, swinging around the somber obstruction of the Homestead furnace. She was moving fast, flying with the current, and upon them before the White Lady was halfway into the river. Suddenly, with no warning, the ca

A shell screamed, skimming the river, and exploded on one of the barges blocking the bank. Timbers flew in the air.

Isaac Bell moved closer to Captain Je

“Saddlebag the murdering devils? You bet. Tell your boys down there to put on the blowers.”

Bell shouted the order into the engine room voice pipe.

Forced draft blowers roared in the chimneys, fa

The Vulcan King fired again, and a second barge exploded. A third shot went high. It tore a swath through a line of tents, and the hillside seemed to quiver as hundreds of people ran, screaming.

“How can I help?” Bell asked Je

“Tell me if he’s got himself a Mon pilot or a Cinci

“I don’t know.”

“If he’s from Cinci

The ca

Henry Clay was beside himself. Why weren’t the miners shooting back?

The Hotchkiss he gave them should be raking Vulcan King’s decks by now. Instead, militiamen were standing in the open, cheering each shot. And the company police and Pinkertons were clapping one another on the back like it was a baseball game.

A gri

But Clay’s plan was to start a war — a shooting war on both sides — and keep it going, not win it. He grabbed an officer’s field glasses, ignoring his protests, and focused on the Hotchkiss. The ca

“Give that back or I’ll have you up on charges,” shouted the officer. Clay, disguised in a private’s uniform, pushed through the cheering fools and headed for the main deck where the furnaces fired the boilers. His disguise included a khaki knapsack — a U.S. Army — issue Merriam Pack with an external frame supported by a belt. In it, he carried what at first glance appeared to be jagged chunks of coal but were actually dynamite sticks with detonators and one-inch fuses bundled in chamois leather dyed with lampblack.

Vulcan King was a ten-boiler boat, and firemen were scrambling from one to the next, shoveling coal into wide-open furnaces. Someone saw Clay’s uniform and shouted, “How’s it going up there?”

“We’re wi

The Monongahela crosscurrent that Captain Je

Vulcan King’s ca

It sounded immensely louder this time, thought Bell. Did they have a second ca

“Her boiler burst,” Captain Je

The steamboat’s chimneys leaned forward, tumbled off her hurricane deck, and crashed on her bow. Timbers followed. Glass and planking rained down. From her wheelhouse forward, her upper works were demolished.

“The murdering devils’ boiler burst!”

“It had help,” said Isaac Bell, who had seen it happen twice at Gleasonburg. “That was no accident.” But why would Henry Clay blow up his own boat?

“They got what they deserved!”

Captain Je

The blowers roared.

“I’ll finish the sons of bitches.”

The shock of the explosion scattered burning furnace coal. The Vulcan King’s forward decks took fire from the shattered wheelhouse to the waterline. Militiamen in khaki stampeded from the flames. A man in the dark uniform of the Coal and Iron Police threw himself into the river. Strikebreakers dropped their pick handles and splashed in after him, calling for help.

“Stop!” said Isaac Bell. “Back your engines.”

48

“What are you doing, Isaac?” Wish, Wally, and Mack were at his side.

“Coming alongside to get those people off. Back your engines, Captain Je

“Not ’til I saddlebag the murderers.”

“Back them!”

“You can’t let ’em win.”

“Henry Clay doesn’t want to win. He wants mayhem. I won’t give it to him.”

Mack Fulton cocked his Smith & Wesson, told the pilot, “Boss man says back your engines.”