Bell’s stomach lurched. He thought for a moment that the gas was making him sick. Then he realized the balloon had lost all buoyancy and was plummeting back to earth.
With no way to control the release, Isaac Bell’s only hope was to climb down to the basket and throw everything over the side to reduce the weight dragging the balloon back to earth before it collapsed. Retracing his ascent, hand under hand, boot under boot, he slipped from cross rope to cross rope, down toward the middle bulge as fast as he could.
Was the bag less taut? No doubt about that. The fabric had ceased to press so hard against the net. He looked down. He saw the farms. He saw the silver Sound and Long Island shore. But the balloon had fallen so far that he was no longer high enough to see the ocean.
He lowered himself around the Equator and started the long horizontal climb down under the overhead curve of the globe-shaped envelope, hanging from the net, swinging hand over head, working his way into the vertical wall of the lowest part of the balloon, until he finally reached the load ring and slid down the bask ropes into the basket.
A farm spread under him, green fields speckled with black cows, a big sprawling house sheltered by shade trees, red barns, a pond, and round silos poking up at the sky like pencils standing on end. At the edge of the fields stood the darker green of trees, the wood lot. The Sound was no longer in sight.
Bell ripped the hoses from the steel hydrogen tanks and wrestled the heavy cylinders over the side, one after another, until they were gone. There wasn’t much else to throw, but he was still falling. He hurled the dragline out of the basket.
For a moment, he entertained the fantasy of landing in the woods, where springy treetops might slow him down. But the balloon was aiming at the farmhouse. The shade trees might slow him down, but it was soon apparent he was not on course for the shade trees either. Quite suddenly he was directly over a barn. In another instant, he was close enough to distinguish roof shingles. The weather vane on the peak was shaped like a rooster. The dragline touched. Did it slow him slightly? He grabbed the basket ropes and braced for the crash.
The basket hit the roof, splintering shingles, and blasted through them into the hayloft. Bales of hay had no effect on the impact. The loft floor collapsed. The basket hung up in the rafters and stopped, abruptly. In the still air, the near-empty gasbag settled down over the barn.
Isaac Bell dropped from the bottom of the basket to the floor.
He was reeling to his feet when a red-faced farmer burst into the barn.
Bell took out his wallet. “I will pay for your roof. May I use your telephone?”
“I don’t want women voting!” the farmer yelled.
“What?”
“My whole damned barn says Votes for Women.”
“Do you have a telephone?”
“No.”
“Rent me a horse that can make it to the nearest railroad station.”
Bell wired the New York field office
FIND NELLIE MATTERS?
GUARD ROCKEFELLER.
He caught a local train to New Haven and called the office on a Southern New England Company long-distance public telephone while he waited for an express. Nellie Matters, Grady Forrer reported, had escaped in another balloon.
“She can’t hide in a balloon.”
“Night is falling,” said Grady. “She can hide all night.”
“Guard Rockefeller,” Bell repeated.
“Rockefeller is safe. We’ve got an army around him.”
“I’ll be there soon as I can.”
Long before the express pulled into Grand Central, Isaac Bell had a very clear idea of what Nellie Matters believed John D. Rockefeller valued more than life. When he got to Manhattan, he rounded up every Van Dorn detective in the city and chartered steam launches to ferry them across the harbor to Constable Hook.
42
Hey, you!”
Nellie Matters closed her hand around the derringer in her pocket. She had almost made it home free to The Hook saloon.
“You! Stop right there!”
I belong here, she reminded herself. In the persona of her disguise, she had every right to be hurrying along this street that paralleled the chain-link refinery fence. But the man who shouted at her was sweating in the heavy blue, brass-buttoned uniform of a Constable Hook cop. She pitched her alto voice down to a range between a raspy tenor and a thin baritone.
“What’s up?”
The cop cast a sharp eye on her workman’s duds. Her wig, the finest money could buy, was a thick mop of curly brown hair barely contained by a flat cap. A narrow horsehide tool bag hung from her shoulder strap. A pair of nickel-plated side-cutting pliers protruding from an end pocket was supposed to be the finishing varnish coat on a portrait of a journeyman electrician. No one in the refinery city had challenged it until now.
“How old are you?”
I belong here! “How old am I?” she shot back. “Twenty-four next month. How old are you?”
The cop looked confused. She let go of the gun in her pocket and drew his attention to her tool bag by shifting it from her left shoulder to her right.
“Jeez. From behind, youse looked like a kid cutting school.”
“That’s a good one,” Nellie laughed. “I ain’t played hooky since they kicked me out of eighth grade.”
The cop laughed, too. “Sorry, bud. They stuck me on truant patrol.”
“Tell you what, pal. If your sergeant set a quota, I’m short enough to go in with you. But I can’t stay long. Gotta go to work.”
The cop laughed again. “You’re O.K.”
“I surely am,” she said to herself as the cop wandered off and she hurried to The Hook saloon. “I am O.K. as O.K. can be… And how are you, Isaac?”
Isaac Bell sealed off the Constable Hook oil refinery with armed Protective Services operators commanded by Van Dorn detectives. He put white-haired Kansas City Eddie Edwards in charge because Edwards specialized in locking out the slum gang train robbers who plagued many a city’s railroad yards. The company cops, whom the Van Dorns regarded as strikebreaking thugs in dirty uniforms, resented the invasion and resisted mightily until word from the Eleventh Floor of 26 Broadway reverberated across the harbor like a naval broadside.
“Mr. Rockefeller expects every refinery police officer to do his duty by assisting the Van Dorn Detective Agency to protect Standard Oil property.”
Even before Rockefeller knocked the refinery cops in line, Eddie Edwards was glad-handing the chiefs of the Constable Hook Police Department, the refinery’s private fire department, and the city’s volunteer fire department. These savvy, by-the-book moves bore immediate fruit. Cops were assigned to guard every high point in the city where a sniper might set up shop. Standard Oil transferred battalions of extra firemen from other refineries. The ranks of the Constable Hook volunteers were swelled by volunteers from every town in New Jersey. Standard Oil tugboats from its Brooklyn and Long Island City yards arrived equipped with fire nozzles and were soon joined by Pennsylvania Railroad and New Jersey Central Railroad tugs and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s fleet from St. George. Then a beat cop assigned to the high school truant squad reported encountering a short, slight, youthful electrician who fit one of the Van Dorn Agency descriptions of how the assassin might look disguised as a man.