Clive Cussler - The Striker

“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.

“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.

The old man scooped some coal into the firebox and banged the door shut. “Son, you a river pilot?”

“No, sir.”

“Looks like you run steamers before.”

“Only yachts.”

“Yachts? Mr. Gleason’s got a yacht. Named Monongahela , after the river— See that courthouse burn? I declare, it will ignite the company store next.”

Mary Higgins, thought Bell, was probably cheering from the bank.

He steered past the barges and the dock to the breakwater where he had left them. They were gone. Searching the bank, he spotted them, running back toward the courthouse. Three men were hot on their trail. Bell swung the tug toward them.

One of the pursuers pulled ahead of the pack, waving a baseball bat. Two yards behind Mary, he raised the bat high in the air. Bell let go the wheel, drew his Colt, took careful aim, and fired his last bullet. The man dropped his bat and fell. His friends tumbled over him.

“Fine shooting,” said the old man. “That’ll larn him.”

Bell rammed the tug’s nose into the soft mudbank.

“Jump!”

Mary scrambled on and reached back for her brother. Jim swung aboard. Bell reversed his quadrant, backed into the current, spun the helm in a blur of spokes, and steamed for the far shore.

Isaac Bell drove the tug across the Monongahela River and slowly downstream, looking for a place to land. The old man recognized Jim Higgins. “You’re that union fellow, ain’t you?”

“Yes, I am. Do you favor the union?”

“Cain’t say I do. Cain’t say I favor the company neither. They treat folks mighty hard.”

“Would you back a strike?”

“Might. Or might not.”

“I feel the same way,” Higgins said, settling into a conversation that Bell would not have expected to hear in the midst of the night on a stolen tugboat. “We don’t necessarily have to strike. A fair settlement of the miners’ and owners’ demands could ensure a generation of no strikes and steady work. Cool heads on both sides know that the nation needs coal. It will be to everyone’s benefit that we can earn a decent living digging it. Unless the hotheads inflame the miners’ imaginations, we can settle this for the good of all, miner and owner.”

Mary Higgins laughed in disbelief. “Cool heads threw you in jail and sent a lynch mob to hang you.”

“Peace for twenty years,” Higgins replied mildly, “if cool heads bargain. Massacres if they don’t.”

“Brother, if it weren’t for Mr. Bell, you’d be dancing on air.”

Isaac Bell listened admiringly as Jim Higgins stood firmly by his beliefs, addressing his sister and the old man as if he was trying to coax them into a union hall. “If hotheads won’t give an inch, labor and owner will go to war. Innocents die in labor wars. Innocents were massacred at Haymarket, and Homestead, and Pullman. Innocents will be massacred again.”

Steering along in the dark, eyes peeled for a landing, Bell decided that Jim Higgins was not a dreamer — and certainly no fool — but a thinker with an overarching strategy to end the labor wars and a healthy fear of the violence the wars would spawn.

Ahead, Bell saw a yellow glow.

The old watchman nudged him. “Sonny, if you intend to keep running — and I reckon, based on events I’ve observed tonight, you ought to — you might be interested to know that ’round the next bend is the Baltimore & Ohio train yard where you might just discover the opportunity to hop a freight and git the hell out of West Virginia.”

“Isaac, I would be dancing on air, like Mary said. But may I ask you one more favor?”

“Name it.”

“Would you escort my sister to safety?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t need an escort,” said Mary. “And I don’t want one.”

Jim Higgins said, “Sister, listen for once in your life. I’m the only fugitive from the law. They’ll charge me with breaking out of jail. All you and Isaac did was run from a lynch mob, and even the owners can’t call that a crime. If you can get past the Gleason company cops, you’ll both be safe.”

“What about you?” asked Bell, and Mary said, “Where are you going?”

“I’m hoping my friends in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen will smuggle me out in a coal tender.”

“Where?”

“Denver, Colorado,” said Jim Higgins. “The Western Miners are helping the fellows striking the smelting companies. It’s an opportunity to all pull together. If we can threaten an enormous general strike that spans the continent, that’ll make the owners listen.”

Alongside the rail yard were the trolley barn and last station stop of a branch of the Fairmont & Clarksburg Traction inter-urban railroad. But when they ventured close, they saw coal cops patrolling the platform. They retreated toward the rail yard. Bell and Mary hid in the woods. Jim returned in an hour and pointed out a string of boxcars on a siding. A freight engine was backing up to it.

“The boys said that empty freight is headed back to Pittsburgh. They put a word in with the brakeman. But look out for the yard bulls. Grab that middle car with the open door. Wait ’til she’s rolling and run aboard. Good luck.”

“Did you get a ride?” Mary asked.

“The boys’ll get me out of here, somehow, don’t you worry. Take care, Isaac. Thank you for looking out for her.”

They shook hands. Mary hugged her brother fiercely, and when she wheeled away Bell saw her eyes were bright with tears. Keeping to the shadows, they walked out of the freight yard and along the main line and waited, shivering, in a cold wind blowing off the river. An hour later they heard a locomotive whistle blow the double Ahead signal and then the heavy chug of steam as it pulled the slack out of its train’s couplers and hauled it toward the main line.