Clive Cussler - The Striker

Isaac Bell was constitutionally incapable of punching a man twice his age, but he was getting tempted.

Suddenly, Aloysius Clarke was standing in the doorway.

He was a big, red-faced fellow who moved quietly.

Bell said, “Hello, Wish.”

Clarke nodded. “Kid.”

“We was just discussin’ who ramrods this outfit,” said Mack Fulton.

Wish Clarke stood silent. He had small blue eyes buried so deeply in drink-swollen, purple-veined cheeks that observers who associated whiskey with dulled wits and melancholy would miss the glow of intelligence and laughter. He smiled unexpectedly and answered the question on all minds. How long had Wish Clarke been standing there and how much had he overheard?

“It’s Isaac’s case. The kid’s the boss.”

Wally Kisley shook his head. “Them coal miners ain’t the only ones who need a union.”

“And to close another subject,” said Wish Clarke, a self-educated man who revered the English language, “ Provoker is too general a word, agitator is a misspelling of adjutator , which means ‘a representative,’ and instigator is vague. But provocateur , short for agent provocateur , describes exactly what Isaac suspects we’re up against — a smart fellow who’s hoodwinking not-so-smart fellows into committing crimes that will discredit them.”

“For what reason?”

“For reasons,” said Wish Clarke, “we have not yet detected, Detective Kisley.”

Isaac Bell raised his voice. “Saddle up, gents!”

He pulled tickets from his vest and passed them out.

“Train’s leaving for West Virginia. All aboard!”

Locomotive headlamp blazing through the night, a train of sixty ore cars steamed from the Cripple Creek gold mines on Pikes Peak down the Colorado Front Range into the smoke-shrouded city of Denver. Pinkerton detectives boarded the locomotive in the Auraria rail yard.

Three thousand smelter workers had walked off the job — the opening gun in a united strike led by the Western Federation of Miners to win an eight-hour workday for every union with which it was affiliated. The Pinkertons posted riflemen on the engine pilot and took command of the heavily laden train to escort it to the Nyren Smelter.

Jim Higgins stood arm in arm with a thousand strikers blocking the tracks. In his opinion — not that the hotheads were asking for it — ruining the Nyren furnaces had been a mistake, and the strike, which could have blossomed into a general strike the breadth of the continent, was going nowhere, stuck in Denver, mired in bitterness.

Old Man Nyren — a cantankerous bully detested equally by labor and the Rocky Mountain smelter owners he had driven out of business with his giant plant fired by cheap coal — was in no mood to bargain. The strikers had drawn the fires from under his furnaces. The molten ore had frozen into a solid mass from the charge hoppers on top to the crucible drains below, rendering them useless until the hardened mass of ore, slag, and gold could be cut out. Nyren ordered the ore train parked in the smelter’s elevated yard, ready to tip its load into his furnaces the instant that cutting was done by scab labor.

The Pinkertons ordered the train to run the strikers off the tracks.

“Go to hell!” said the locomotive engineer. “I ain’t killing those fellers.”

“Me neither,” said the fireman, crossing his massive arms.

The detectives clubbed both men to the floor of the cab. A hard-bitten engineer they had brought with them took the controls. “Can’t see what’s behind the bastards,” he said. “For all we know, they could have pried up the rails.”

“Clear ’em,” ordered the detective in charge.

They tied down the whistle. Blowing an unbroken, ungodly shriek, the train accelerated, and the riflemen on front opened fire.

Union men scattered, dragging their wounded with them.

The riflemen kept firing until the track ahead was empty but for fallen bodies. The train increased speed. Unable to stop it, the outraged, frightened strikers roared their anger. Stones scooped up from the ballast clanged against the sides of the locomotive, shattered the headlamp, and knocked one of the shooters off the engine pilot.

“Don’t slow down ’til we’re inside the gates or they’ll mob us.”

The gates were just beyond an iron girder bridge that carried the rails above the workers’ slum that encircled the smelter, and it looked to the Pinkertons as if they would make it. Suddenly, from the helplessly raging, stone-throwing mob of strikers, a hero darted — a slight figure, no bigger than a boy — dragging a heavy ore rake.

“Where the hell— Stop him! Don’t let him move that switch! ”

No one had to tell the remaining gunman riding on front of the danger to the locomotive. His Winchester leaped to his shoulder and he snapped a shot at the running figure. The bullet missed but slammed the rake out of the boy’s hands. The boy picked it up and kept running toward the switch. The rifleman took careful aim. He squeezed the trigger slowly and gently. Three stones struck at once, hitting his shoulder, hand, and knee. He dropped his rifle, fell off the engine pilot, and rolled, screaming, under the wheels.

His bullet missed the boy, ricocheted off the girdered overpass, and pierced a window in the Nyren Smelter gate tower.

The boy ran in front of the train and jammed the rake into the switch.

One hundred yards from the safety of the smelter gates, the locomotive’s pilot wheels were derailed by the rake. The massive drivers right behind them sliced the steel rake like a length of sausage. But the forces squeezing that extra piece of steel crammed between the movable switch point and the fixed rail spread the rail a single inch out of line. With nothing for their flanges to grip, the drive wheels slipped off the rails.

The locomotive jumped the track and tumbled off the overpass into the slum streets below, dragging its coal-laden tender and ten full ore cars onto the roof of the building that housed the Nyren company store.

“What’s troubling you, Jim? We did all right today.”

Jim Higgins looked up bleakly from his desk in the union hall. The local’s secretary and vice president had returned with celebrants’ beers under their belts. “Not counting eight in the hospital and two men dead?” he asked, although the victims were not his only source of concern.

“They died like heroes.”

“Speaking of heroes, wasn’t that little guy something?”

“Has anyone seen him since?” asked Higgins.

“Neither hide nor hair. Too bad. He deserves a medal.”

“He’s smart to lay low — better yet, light the heck out of Denver.”

“Halfway to San Francisco, if he’s got a brain in his head,” agreed Higgins, hoping against hope. From the first instant he had seen the slight figure with the rake he had an awful feeling that the “little guy” was neither a man nor a boy but instead a slim young woman in trousers named Mary Higgins.

He had sent telegrams to friends in Chicago and Pittsburgh, where she should have gone after West Virginia. So far, no one reported seeing her. Times like this, he wished he wasn’t an atheist. Times like this when there was nothing left to do but pray.

“Brother!”

In she walked, not in trousers and cap, thank God, but in a bedraggled skirt and a lady’s hat with a perfunctory feather decorating it.

“Mary,” he said, rising, “how wonderful to see you. When did you get into town?”

Mary took note of the red-faced vice president and secretary and replied, “I just got off the train. I had a feeling I’d find you here. How is it going?”