Clive Cussler: The Striker

“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.

“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.

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