Clive Cussler: The Striker

Bell and Mary ducked from the blaze of its headlamp and, when the locomotive passed, started running along the railbed.

“Ever hopped a freight before?” he asked her.

“I’m pretending it’s a carousel.”

“Careful you don’t trip on your skirts.”

“I never trip on my skirts. I hem them four inches short.”

“You first. I’m right behind you.”

They scrambled up the rock-ballast embankment of the railbed, ran alongside the moving train, and jumped into the boxcar.

Bell watched behind the train until he was sure the yard bulls had not spotted them. Then he slid the door shut against the cold, which had little effect on the temperature as the freight picked up speed and an icy wind began whistling through cracks in the walls. His ribs were throbbing and he felt suddenly too weary to stand. The train lurched and, the next thing he knew, he was sprawled on the wooden floor, flat on his back, and Mary was speaking to him as if from across a room.

“I saw your face in the headlight. White as a ghost. Is the bullet inside?”

“No, no, no. Only creased me.”

He closed his eyes and heard cloth ripping. She was tearing a petticoat into strips. “Let’s get your coat off,” she said, peeling it and his shirt away from the wound.

Bell heard the clink of a flask being opened and smelled whiskey. “What are you doing?”

“Dressing your wound,” she said. “This will sting, unless you prefer septicemia.”

“Dress away— Ahh! ” Bell caught his breath. “You’re right, it does sting, just a mite. Where’d you learn to dress wounds?”

“When the strikebreakers retreat and the thugs are done with their pick handles, there’s nursing to be done.”

It occurred to Isaac Bell that Mary Higgins spoke sentences as if they were written on posters. But he loved the sound of her voice. Here, in the dark, the beat of iron wheels clattering on steel tracks rang like music. He was dead tired and he ached all over, but at this moment he could not think of anywhere else in the world he would rather be than riding the rails with this girl Mary Higgins.

“You’re shivering,” she said. “Are you in shock?”

“Just a little. But I’m cold. Aren’t you?”

“Freezing. I’m concerned that your wound is worse than you think.”

Bell had been shot before — winged once in Wyoming, and rather more seriously in Chicago — and had a very clear concept of the difference between a penetrating wound and a graze. “No,” he assured her, “it’s just the shock of the impact. I had heard that a heavy slug like that will really floor you just passing by. Seems it’s true. But it’s cold in here. Maybe you’re right, maybe it’s shock making me cold. I wish we had blankets to keep warm.”

“Lay close to me,” she said. “We’ll keep each other warm.”

“Good idea,” said Isaac Bell.

Bell awakened to a blood-red dawn glinting through splits in the boxcar walls. He thought it was the pain in his side that disturbed his sleep, but it was Mary whimpering in hers. Suddenly, she screamed. Bell held her tighter and gently shook her awake.

“You’re O.K. You’re safe. You’re here with me.”

She looked around the boxcar, rubbed her eyes, and laid her head back on his chest. “I had a nightmare. I’m sorry. Sorry I woke you.”

“No, I was awake.” He felt her trembling. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“What did you dream?”

“Five years ago, when I was eighteen, I marched with thousands of women. We were seeking bread for their children. We marched all night to Pittsburgh. Before we could enter the city, Coal and Iron Police stopped us with bayonets fixed to their rifles. They had orders from the governor to shoot to kill.”

She fell silent.

Bell asked, “What happened?”

“We had no choice but to back down. I could see their orders in their eyes. They would do it, Mr. Bell. They would pull their triggers. They would shoot us, as they shot us at Haymarket, at the Pullman strike, at Homestead, at Lattimer.”

Bell had never heard of Lattimer. “Do you dream it often?”

“Less than at first.”

“Was it harder to march the next time— I presume you did march again.”

“Of course.”

“Was it harder?”

Mary did not answer. Bell listened to the wheels. He could feel her heart beating against his chest, speeding up with remembered fear. “I used to think Pennsylvania was the worst,” she whispered. “The richest railroads, coal mines, coke plants, steel mills are all in Pennsylvania. The state legislature wrote laws founding the Coal and Iron Police to protect them from the workers. The companies own the legislature. They can do anything they want and the law is on their side.”

“You used to think Pennsylvania was the worst?”

“West Virginia is worse. Gleason and his bunch don’t even pretend that murder isn’t a weapon in their arsenal. They don’t bother with legal niceties. The union hasn’t a friend in the state… Where was your father’s mansion?”

“Boston.” Stick to your story. Polish the edges, keep the frame.

“Where in Boston?”

“The Back Bay,” he lied.

If she was at all familiar with Boston, she would know that the Bells of Louisburg Square founded the American States Bank, which had a long history of flourishing through financial panics like that of 1893. The Back Bay that he named instead — a neighborhood of mansions erected on filled land by newly wealthy likely to lose their money as fast as they made it — would lend credence to his riches-to-rags Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade disguise.

“Where did you learn that trick with the gun?”

“Fan shooting?” he asked, buying time to think his way out of this one.

“You fired four bullets as if they were one. Were you in the Spanish War?”

The nearer the truth, the less to defend.

“I ran off with the circus when I was a boy.”

Mary propped herself up on one elbow and looked into his eyes, and Isaac Bell was convinced that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. “Were you a reckless little boy or a brave little boy?”

“I was an adventurous little boy, and circus folk are very, very kind. The acrobats and the lady shootist became my particular friends. They taught me all sorts of wonderful things.”

The locomotive was blowing its whistle more and more frequently as the train steamed through grade crossings, indicating they were nearing a city. Bell shot a look out the door. The smoke of Pittsburgh rose heavily on the horizon, and soon they were trundling between mills and plants. Endless rows of chimney stacks, tall and straight as blackened forests, lined both sides of the Monongahela River, which was twice as wide as where they crossed it at Gleasonburg and crowded with tall stern-wheeled steamboats pushing long tows of coal barges. The coal was heaped everywhere Bell looked, black mountains to burn in glass factories, blast furnaces, open-hearth smelters, coking plants, and gashouses, and in hundreds of locomotives pulling thousands of railcars on broadways that were eight, ten, twelve tracks wide.

“How many men own it all?” Mary had joined him at the door. “Two? Three? How many workers? A hundred thousand? Five hundred thousand? Millions?”

They passed banks of gigantic blast furnaces, the heart of the Homestead Steel Works, which spread over hundreds of acres on both sides of a bend in the river.

“Fort Frick,” Mary said, bitterly. “That’s what the workers called it. Frick built a fence around it to shield his Pinkerton gunmen. We shot it out with the detectives. Dozens were killed. The governor sent militia with Gatling guns. They arrested the entire Strike Committee. Thank God, juries refused to convict. But they broke the union.”