Clive Cussler - The Striker

My God, she thought, Clay had gone straight to the top. Or bottom. Judge James Congdon made Frick look like a company store butcher overcharging for fatback.

He was watching her, waiting. She said, “James Congdon is lucky to have you.”

“Thank you,” Clay whispered. “Thank you for saying that.”

When Henry Clay fell asleep, again, Mary stuffed his Bisley revolver in her bag and left, shaking.

He could have killed me, she thought. But he didn’t.

She went straight to Union Station and bought the cheapest coach ticket on a slow train to New York with the last of her money. On the train, she wrote a letter to her brother, and another to Isaac Bell, and posted both when the train stopped at a station in the middle of Pennsylvania and changed engines to climb the Allegheny Mountains.

The train was crowded. The seat was hard. Her reflection in the night-blackened window revealed her father’s features. His favorite saying had always been, The only thing you’ll ever regret is the thing you didn’t do.

Henry Clay drove a narrow, closed wagon with two high wheels in back and two shorter wheels in front. The wagon was much heavier than it looked, particularly as the words Hazelwood Bakery painted on the sides and the loaves of bread heaped in the left-hand front corner behind glass implied a bulky but light load. It took the combined effort of two strong mules to pull it up the hills.

Clay walked alongside with the reins in his hands. On the driver’s seat beside the loaves sat a kindly-looking middle-aged woman clutching a Bible. Her cheeks were round and pink, her hair pulled back in a modest bun, her eyes alert.

“Cops,” she said.

“Just do as I told you and everything will be fine.” He was not worried. She was levelheaded and had weathered many strikes in the coalfields.

The cops, shivering in dirty blue Pittsburgh Police Department uniforms, were manning the outside of a barricade the strikers had made of toppled streetcars to protect their tent city. They were cold and wet from the rain squalls that kept sweeping the Amalgamated point, they were bored, and they were hungry. The pink-cheeked, gray-haired woman tossed them loaves of bread that were still warm.

The cops tore off chunks and chewed on them. “Can’t let you go in, lady.”

“It’s from our church. There’s children in that camp and they’re hungry.”

“Can’t you give ’em a break?” said Henry Clay.

“We got our orders. No guns, no food.”

Clay tied his reins to the wagon, nodded for the cop in charge to step aside, and passed an almost full bottle of whiskey from his coat. He whispered, “Don’t let her see this, but I figure you guys must be cold.”

The cop took a slug of it.

Clay almost gagged from the smell. The chloral Mary had drugged him with had left him with a heaving stomach, a splitting headache, and weird dreams. But he could not for the life of him remember what had transpired between them at her apartment. All he knew for certain was that she was gone and had stolen his Colt Bisley. What she had wanted he could not guess. Had she drugged him for Bell? But she hated Bell. Besides, if she had done it for Bell, the Van Dorns would have slapped the cuffs on him while he was passed out. The cop was talking to him.

“This is the good stuff.”

“Keep it.”

“You must really love them strikers.”

Clay nodded in the direction of the woman on the driver’s seat. “She’s my big sister. Took care of me when I was a kid. What am I going to do? She wants to bring ’em bread.”

“O.K. O.K. I don’t want to starve kids, either. Go on in. But don’t come back this way. Go out another side in case the sergeant comes.”

“Thanks, pal.”

The cops walked away. Henry Clay rapped on the barricade. Twenty men dragged a car aside, and the mules dug in their shoes to pull the weight over the hump in the road and through the opening. As soon as the car was pushed back, the head of the Defense Committee, Jack Fortis, greeted Henry Clay by the name John Claggart, and led the wagon into the tent city. The woman on the driver’s seat threw bread to the people crouched in their tents but quickly ran out. She climbed down without a word and plodded away in the rain. The wagon continued on, through the tents and up a muddy hill to the masonry base of the coal tipple.

“Put it there,” said Fortis.

Henry Clay nodded his approval. The strikers had chosen well. The site commanded the entire bend in the river.

The mules were unhitched and led away. Carpenters and a blacksmith gathered with crowbars, hammers, wrenches, and chisels and quickly dismantled the bakery wagon. Sides, roof, driver’s seat, dashboard, shafts, and an improvised coupler were carried off. The front wheels were detached and rolled away.

Henry Clay watched the carpenters, the smith, and especially Fortis’s picked men from the Defense Committee, all Spanish War veterans, gaze with great satisfaction at what was left — a four-foot-long cannon capable of firing an explosive shell two miles. It was a Hotchkiss Mountain Gun mounted on its own carriage, which had served as the fake bakery wagon’s high back wheels. The tube and its steel wheels and ammunition weighed seven hundred pounds. Portable and accurate, the type had proved its worth for a generation, slaughtering savages in the Indian Wars and Spaniards on San Juan Hill and currently blasting Philippine insurgents with jagged shell fragments.

Fortis raised his voice. “Thank you, John Claggart. This will even things up. You are a true friend to labor.”

Henry Clay replied, “I wish I could have brought you more ammunition. Only thirty rounds. But once you get the Vulcan King ’s range, you ought to blow enough holes in her to sink her before they get off too many shots. Better yet, blow up a boiler. Remember, her boilers are directly underneath her wheelhouse. If you manage to hit a boiler, the explosion will sweep away the whole forward part of the boat, from the wheelhouse down to the waterline, and bury their guns.”

“And the state militia,” said Fortis.

“And the Pinkertons,” said Clay. “And the Coal and Iron Police. Good luck, boys. God go with all of you.”

A U.S. Marshal boarded the railroad ferry from Jersey City to Cortlandt Street with a prisoner in handcuffs and leg irons who recognized Mary Higgins from the union. He looked away so as not to cause her trouble. She had just bought a sandwich in the terminal. She carried it over and asked the marshal, “May I give this to your prisoner?”

A smile got him to allow it.

It was a short walk from the ferry terminal to Wall Street. She paused in Trinity Church cemetery, and paused again to stare in the tall windows of Thibodeau & Marzen. It looked like a bank.

Nearby, she found the Congdon Building, the tallest on the block. The doorman eyed her borrowed coat and the hat Henry Clay had bought her and asked politely who she had come to see. Her voice failed her. She had lost her nerve. Stammering something unintelligible, she hurried away. She rode a streetcar uptown, clutching Clay’s revolver in her bag, walked a bit, and came back down on the Third Avenue El. The doormen had changed shifts. The new man was polite, too, equally impressed by her coat and hat.

“Mr. James Congdon, please.”

“Top floor,” he said, indicating the elevator.

The elevator runner, a gawky kid who in a better world would still be in school, asked her what floor, and when she told him he asked, “What’s your name, please, miss? I have to call ahead to Mr. Congdon’s floor.”

So much for surprising the great man in his lair. “Mary Higgins.”