The Striker ib-6

by Clive Cussler

  The barkeep’s mouth popped open. “How did you know?”

  “My father owned such an establishment once. He always said if you drink what you sell you’ll end up in the poorhouse.”

  “He knew his business,” said the owner. “Come this way.”

  Mary Higgins swept ahead, skirts swirling the sawdust strewn upon the floor. In his office, the barkeep apologized, “I have no milk.”

  “Not necessary,” she said with a glance at Isaac Bell, who concurred with a silent nod that black coffee would be perfectly fine.

  “I’ll leave you two… alone. Presuming,” he added gruffly, “we all understand that my office is not a trysting place.”

  He saw a sudden dangerous glint in the young coal miner’s eye and quickly apologized, “I did not mean to imply—”

  “Thank you,” Mary Higgins dismissed him.

  She sat behind the rough-plank desk and indicated Bell should pull up the barrel that served as a side chair. “Mr. Bell, you are a mystery.”

  “How is that, Miss Higgins?”

  “You’re dressed like a coal miner. You speak like a Fifth Avenue swell trying to sound like a coal miner. And you are failing, woefully, to hide the mannerisms of the privileged. Who are you and what do you want?”

  Bell hung his head, the picture of embarrassment, if not guilt. She was sharp-eyed and sharp-eared, so he was not exactly astonished that she had picked out flaws in his disguise. She would make a canny detective. But having noticed her probing gaze, he had already prepared a defense, determined to stay in disguise as long as he could. Stick to your story, Wish Clarke had taught him, illustrating the lesson with a sip from his flask. Show folks you’re a harmless drunkard. Polish the edges, but keep the frame. Nearer the truth, the less to defend.

  Bell said, “I’ll start with who I am. Yes, I was born to privilege. You’re absolutely right. But my father lost everything in the Panic of ’93. My mother died. My father shot himself — out of shame or grief, I know not which. All I’ve known since are hard times. But I am proud to say that I have made my way, on my own, by the labor of my own hands.”

  Mary Higgins cast a sharp look at his hands, and the young detective was glad of the shovel blisters that had hardened to callus.

  “Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade?” she quoted Goldsmith with an eyebrow raised inquiringly.

  “A breath can make them, as a breath has made,” Bell quoted back.

  “You would have me believe that you were visiting my brother out of the kindness of your heart?”

  “That’s about all I have to offer him.”

  “Something is agley with your story, Mr. Bell. Don’t try to fool a workman’s daughter.”

  “I thought he owned a saloon.”

  “That was for the benefit of an honest cup of coffee,” she said, revealing an ability equal to Bell’s to bend the truth for a good cause. “Maybe you’ve lost your mansions, but your environment and your whole life keep you from even seeing, much less understanding, the conflict of the capitalist class and the working class.”

  “Not quite my whole life.”

  “The war for justice is simply expressed: There can be no peace without justice — no justice without equality.”

  “That is eloquently put,” said Bell. “I never quite thought of it in such terms.”

  “I don’t intend to be ‘eloquent,’ Mr. Bell. Eloquence is folderol. Like the gimcrackery that decorated your mansion.”

  “Your brother’s hopes are more modest. He told me, ‘All we’re asking is to live like human beings, feed our families, and send our kids to school.’”

  “My brother is a gentle dreamer. He needs to understand that we won’t win the war for justice until the working class and the capitalist class become one, and the worker owns the capital he produces.”

  “He needs a lawyer first. A smart one who can convince the judge that Jim cannot be blamed for failing to throw the derailer switch. The company assigned him to a second job, oiling the winch engine, which took him too far from his post at the switch to derail the runaway. When they arrested him, he said it was because they learned he was a union organizer and trumped up the charges to sideline him.”

  “I’m not surprised. Nor am I surprised my brother couldn’t see their scheme. As I say, he’s a dreamer.”

  The barkeep burst into the office with panic in his eyes. “You have to leave. I’m shutting down early. All hell’s busting loose.”

  Outside, the sun had slid behind the mountain, and night was closing in on the hollow. A cold wind blew down from the higher elevations. Damp air and tendrils of fog rose from the river. The courthouse was deep in shadow.

  The crowd around it had tripled in size. Where, earlier, people had whispered, now they were calling out loud, and some were shouting. Bell saw mothers dragging children away, as if they had gauged the mood and found it dangerous. Men came running up Main Street, carrying baseball bats and pick handles.

  “What are they shouting?” asked Mary, though surely she heard but could not believe.

  “Murderer!” said Bell. “Stay here. Let me see what I can do.”

  * * *

  Henry Clay drifted through the crowd on a route seemingly aimless. He was a broad-shouldered man of thirty-five who moved with effortless grace. Though not markedly tall, he was powerfully built, an asset that he concealed with expensive tailoring when in his Wall Street office in New York City and with a loosely fitted coat and overalls when pretending to be a coal miner. The red bandanna tied at his throat did not necessarily shout from the rooftops that he was a union man, but it could be construed as a sign of where he stood in the conflict between the working class and the capitalist class. The slouch hat that shadowed his face kept the fading daylight from reflecting the golden yellow hue of his amber eyes.

  Face-to-face for an instant with a grim-visaged miner, Henry Clay muttered, “The son of a bitch might as well have taken up a pistol and shot those boys.” As he moved along, the miner shouted “Murderer!” at the jail, where the Gleason police were looking nervous.

  Clay whispered as he passed another man, “Those poor boys, I just can’t bear thinking on them.”

  “Murderer!” erupted behind him. It was like pushing an electric doorbell. “Poor boys”—“Murderer!”

  Clay stopped in front of two men who were looking dubious. Smart ones, the sort who would be tempted to take a flier on the union. “Bunch of fellers told me Higgins is a company spy.”

  “The hell you say. Who are you? What’s your name?”

  “Claggart,” Clay replied, extending his hand and reeling them in with a drummer’s smile. “John Claggart.”

  “What’s this about Higgins being a spy, Claggart? I heard he’s a union man.”

  “So did I,” said the other.

  “That’s what the company wants you to believe. Those fellers told me that the minute their pal said yes to the snake, the Pinkertons were all over him like paint. Blackjacked him something awful, bloodied his face, busted his hand.”

  “Spy!”

  “Murderer!”

  “Spy!”

  Clay continued toward the back of the mob, casting aspersions calculated to inflame, and stepped up on a horse trough for a better view. Lo and behold, there was Joseph Van Dorn’s favorite — young Isaac Bell — springing up the courthouse steps to try to reason with the mob.

  6

  “Hang him!”

  Isaac Bell had vaulted up the steps just as the grieving crowd of the victims’ friends and families exploded into a savage lynch mob howling for Jim Higgins’s blood.

  “Hang him high!”

  “Murderer!”

  “Spy!”

  “Hold it!”

  Bell had a big voice, and when he filled his chest and let it thunder, it carried to the farthest man in the mob and echoed off the mountain. He raised both hands high above his head and it seemed to double his height. He spoke slowly, clearly, and loudly.

&nb
sp; “Jim Higgins is no spy. Jim Higgins is an honest workingman just like every one of us.”

  “Spy!”

  Bell pointed a big hand at the miner who had shouted.

  “Who told you Jim’s a spy? Come on, man, tell us. Was it anyone you know? Any man you trust? Who?”

  The miners looked at one another and back at Bell.

  “Jim Higgins is no more a company man than you or me.”

  The men in front were looking confused. But from far in the back, Bell heard shouting. “Murderer! Murderer!”

  He could not see who was shouting in the failing light. A shadowy figure in a slouch hat flitted behind the mob. A dozen throats picked up the cry “Murderer! Murderer!” and from where Bell stood on the steps he could see a wavelike ripple of motion, and hundreds began to surge closer.

  The company police guarding the jailhouse door edged aside.

  “Stand fast, you men!” Bell shouted down from the steps.

  “Murderer!”

  The cops broke and ran. Some fled straight into the crowd, some around it, and when they had gone nothing stood between the lynch mob and the union organizer but a young Van Dorn detective on his first case.

  Isaac Bell drew a single-action Colt Army from his coat and leveled it at the crowd. Then he delivered a cold promise.

  “I will shoot the first man who steps near.”

  Those in the front row, close enough to see his eyes, believed him.

  They hesitated and started to fall back.

  * * *

  Joe, you self-righteous son of a bitch! Henry Clay shouted in the confines of his mind, taunting Joseph Van Dorn as if the great detective was glaring across his desk. Or down a gunsight. Goodness fetches goodness. Fools fetch fools.

  He reached inside his voluminous coat.

  Fool or not, young Bell cut a brave figure. The mob, teetering moments before on the cusp of violence, had been sidetracked by his commanding voice. Clay had fired up the back ranks again. But now the young detective had a gun in his hand and it was time to stop Bell before he ruined everything.

  The marksman’s weapon in Clay’s shoulder holster was a top-notch Colt Bisley .45 single-action revolver smithed to a fare-thee-well. In the right hands, at this range, it was as deadly as a rifle. And Henry Clay, who had been trained by a master gunfighter and had drilled with the Bisley as religiously as he had with shotgun, rifle, knife, and fists, had no doubt that his were the right hands.

  * * *

  Isaac Bell saw someone come pushing through the mob even as the front ranks hesitated.

  It was Mary Higgins, shoving through them and racing up the steps to stand shoulder to shoulder with him.

  “If you brought a gun,” said Bell, “give it to me and get out of here while the getting is good.”

  “I don’t need a gun.”

  “If you believe that, you’re dreaming worse than your brother— Down!” He saw the blur of a gun barrel swinging their way. He kicked Mary’s skirts out from under her and swept her off her feet. A shot pealed from the back of the mob. The bullet stormed so close to Bell’s head it knocked his cap off. He could not see who had fired or whether he was leveling a second shot. He was. The shot came with no warning, slamming Bell sideways as it ripped through his coat and burned a bloody track across his ribs.

  Bell caught his footing and aimed his Army. He raked the crowd, trying to locate the man who shot him. He still could not see him. He was somewhere behind them. Then he saw that the second shot emboldened the angry miners. Pushed by those behind, the men in front surged straight at him.

  Isaac Bell triggered his weapon, held it firmly at his waist, and fanned the revolver’s hammer spur repeatedly with his left hand. Four shots roared out of the barrel so fast that the individual reports combined into one long, loud explosion.

  The rapid fire sent a blizzard of bullets inches above the mob. Heads ducked, men scattered for cover. Spanish War veterans familiar with field cannon flung themselves face-first in the mud. Their mad scramble lasted just long enough for Bell and Mary to dive down the steps and into the jailhouse — a small, low-ceilinged cellar that smelled of river dampness and the kerosene lamps that lighted it. It was furnished with a crude wooden desk, a gun rack, two cells, and a dark hall that Bell hoped led to a back way out. He bolted the door.

  Jim Higgins was watching from his cell, gripping the bars. Bell spotted keys on the rack and a double-barreled shotgun. He unlocked the cell and shoved the shotgun into Higgins’s hands. Higgins stared at the weapon as if Bell had passed him a snake.

  “Don’t worry about hitting anything. The noise’ll scatter them.”

  “Are you all right, Isaac? There’s blood all over your coat.”

  “Tip-top,” said Bell. His ribs felt like he had just fought ten rounds with a strong man who specialized in body blows. But he could breathe, a good sign that no ribs had splintered.

  “Here they come!” cried Mary. She grabbed a lantern off the desk and looked down the hall.

  The mob was beating at the door. Bell took back the shotgun. Mary returned. “There’s a door and a ladder down to the riverbank.”

  “How many are out there?”

  “No one. It’s too steep. It’s right on the bank.”

  “Take your brother.”

  Mary grabbed Jim’s arm and lighted the way. Bell took up the rear. The mob battered at the door. Bell fired the right barrel. The shotgun bellowed. The pounding stopped, but only for an instant. Jim Higgins lowered the ladder. “Go,” said Bell. “I’ll cover.” He had one cartridge left in the shotgun and one in his revolver. Jim Higgins started down the ladder. The front door splintered as the fence post they were using for a battering ram thrust through a panel.

  Bell loosed the second barrel of the shotgun, and the fence post fell into the room as if the men wielding it had let go and run for their lives. “Go,” he said to Mary. “That made believers out of them.”

  But instead of starting down the ladder, Mary ran to the front room and threw the lamp. It landed on the jailer’s desk. Glass shattered and kerosene oil caught fire, spreading flame across the desk and igniting the second lamp. She paused in the hallway, and Bell saw her profiled by the leaping orange firelight. She looked startlingly beautiful, with a smile of satisfaction shining on her face.

  The burning jailhouse, which should have distracted the mob, proved Bell’s, Jim’s, and Mary’s undoing. No sooner had they climbed down the ladder and begun picking their way along the steep riverbank than the fire rose to the courthouse above it. The wood burned fiercely. Flames leaped to the sky and dissolved the darkness of night.

  “There they are!”

  “Git ’em!”

  The mob raced among the shanties along the top of the bank. Bell, Mary, and Jim Higgins slid to the bottom and splashed along the water’s edge. Bell saw ahead of them the barge dock where empties were parked overnight, waiting for steam tugs to push them to the tipple. The street above connected with Dock Street, which sloped down to it. At that point, he realized, the mob would stream down Dock Street and intercept them at the barge dock.

  “We’re done for,” said Jim Higgins. “I’m the one they want. I’ll stop here. You two get in the water. Try and swim for it.”

  The current was swift, the river over five hundred feet wide and pitch-dark beyond the firelight. Bell was a strong swimmer, he could make it across with a little luck. The expression on Mary’s face was brave but doubtful that she could swim that far.

  “Both of you, stop here,” he commanded in a voice that allowed no argument. He found them a hiding place behind a stone breakwater. “I’ll be right back.”

  He ran, leaping obstacles lit by the fire, and climbed up on the dock. At the end of the string of barges was a little yard tug that would do the shuttling. Bell jumped onto the first barge and ran along its gunnel, fighting to keep his footing on the narrow timber shelf. Slip to the right, he would fall in the water; slip to his left, break his neck in the empty h
old.

  “There he is!”

  Bell leaped the space between the first and second barge and ran faster. He barely heard the howls behind him, his eyes fixed on the next barge, and the next, and the single light burning on the steam tug. He jumped from the last barge onto the tug and cast off its lines. The current took it immediately and dragged it downriver swiftly into the dark, beyond the mob, but away from the breakwater where Jim and Mary were hiding.

  7

  “Mister, what in tarnation are you up to?”

  The little tug was a simple flatboat with its boiler and smokestack standing on deck between the helm and a coal bin. Isaac Bell had just grabbed a fireman’s scoop and was reaching to open the furnace door when an elderly night watchman with a long white Civil War beard rose, yawning, from a sleeping nest of coiled rope and canvas.

  He saw the dark silhouette of the tall detective loom against the burning courthouse, and he pawed a six-gun from his waistband.

  Bell snatched it away.

  “Sir, I’m only going to borrow your boat for a short ride. Can you let me do that?”

  “No, sir. She’s not your boat. She belongs to the Gleason Coal Company. I cain’t let you steal her.”

  “Don’t make me throw you overboard,” Bell snapped, praying the old fellow would believe he meant it because, if he didn’t believe him, Isaac Bell had no idea what he would do next.

  The old man blinked, looked down at the black water, and said, “Don’t hanker to go swimming, just now.”

  “Does she have steam up?”

  “A mite. I threw some coal on a while back.”

  “Throw some more on.”

  “Well, all right. It’s not like I’m helping you steal her, is it? I mean, I cain’t just let her drift into the rocks. Which she’s about to do.”

  Bell opened the quadrant, sluicing steam into the piston, felt the propeller engage, and spun the spoked wheel. The little tug stopped drifting and headed upstream into the current. He steered for the now distant breakwater and tried to coax more power out of her. The steam gauge showed that with her furnace banked for the night, she had barely enough pressure to make headway.