The fires were advancing quickly. Another oil tank exploded and thick burning crude flew through the air. With very little time to pierce the roof, he thanked his lucky stars for the Northwest timber case when he’d masqueraded as a lumberjack. Tar, wood chips, and splinters flew.
He chopped open a hole at the edge of the roof, just inside the iron wall. The fumes that suddenly vented were almost overwhelming. His head spun. The farmer came up the ladder again, gasping for wind. He passed Bell the monkey wrench.
“What’s it for?”
“Anchor,” said Bell, fastening the wrench’s jaws firmly around the cable. “Run while you can.”
He shoved the wrench and the cable loop through the hole and wedged it tightly with the crowbar and the ax. Then he signaled the Civil War vet, dropped down the ladder as fast as he could, and ran toward him.
A space of about two football fields separated the gasoline tank from the switch engine, which backed away, drawing the slack out of the drilling cable. When it was tight at a long, shallow angle between the top of the tank and the siding, Bell swung aboard the engine. “I’ll take her.”
“Welcome to it.”
Bell put his hands on the throttle and quadrant, admitted steam to the cylinders, and backed away smoothly. “Nice and easy, now.”
“Fine touch,” said the vet. “Where’d you learn it?”
Bell eyed the cable, which was tightening like a bowstring. “Borrowed a locomotive when I was in college.”
The drilling cable was strong enough to do the job. And the switch engine had the power. But would his makeshift anchor hold fast to the tank’s iron wall?
More steam. Bell peered through the smoke. Was the wall bulging or was that wishful thinking?
“Where’d you take the locomotive?”
“Miss Porter’s.”
“Girls’ school?”
“Young ladies.”
A little more steam. It looked like a bulge.
Suddenly the cable flew high in the air.
“The wire busted!” yelled the vet.
“No,” said Bell, “the wall.”
A section of the tank’s iron wall, a panel six feet wide, popped a row of rivets, peeled open like a sardine can, and bent toward the ground. Gasoline cascaded.
Isaac Bell held his breath.
One of two things would happen now and it was even money which.
With luck, the escaping gasoline would drown the sparks struck by clashing metal.
But if it didn’t — if the river pushed volatile gas fumes ahead of it — the sparks would detonate the fumes and blow the refinery, the oil field, the hamlet of wooden houses, the boomtown’s shacks, and the rag town’s tents to the other side of Kingdom Come.
4
A fifty-thousand-gallon river of gasoline surged through the hole Isaac Bell had ripped in the tank and spilled onto the ground. It flooded down the shallow slope that surrounded the tank and spread in a billowing torrent of rapids and whirlpools.
“Run!” said Bell and led the way.
That they were still alive meant he had prevented a catastrophic explosion. But there was no stopping the fire — not with globs of burning crude oil from the exploding oil tanks falling like brimstone. At least, he hoped, people had a chance to escape.
The gasoline ignited within seconds. It burned fiercely, tumbling great rollers of flame across the prairie. The rollers poured into the gullies and filled them with fingers of fire that raced toward the distant creek and set it ablaze.
Herding men ahead of it, plucking the fallen to their feet, Bell spotted Hopewell’s headquarters. It was a house he had converted into an office. What must have been its garden was now bracketed by a refinery furnace and a storage tank. Telegraph wires ran from it along the uprooted rail spur to the main line.
Bell pushed in the front door.
“Can you wire Washington?”
The telegrapher gaped at the cliff of flame engulfing the tank next door and jumped out the window. Isaac Bell took over the key and rattled out a message to Van Dorn headquarters as fast as he could send Morse code:
DISPATCH INVESTIGATORS HOPEWELL FIELD
MURDER ARSON
ON THE—
The key went dead under his hand.
He looked out the window. The telegraph poles that joined the Hopewell Field to the Western Union system along the main rail line were burning. The wires had melted. The last word never made it, but every detective in the Van Dorn outfit knew that urgent wires from Isaac Bell ended JUMP!
Valuable men arrived the next day on fast mail trains.
The volatile gasoline and kerosene had burned off in the intervening twenty-four hours, but the fires still rampaged, feeding relentlessly on the heavy crude oil. Bell brought the first arrivals up to date on what little he had discovered while they were en route and marched them through the destruction.
“I’m pretty much it for witnesses. Everyone was busy working before the explosion and running like the devil after. As for motive, the independents blame Standard Oil for the shooting and burning.”
“Anyone offering proof of a connection?”
“I ran into Big Pete Straub in Kansas City, and there are rumors ‘someone’ saw him yesterday in Fort Scott. The man whose hair I parted with my Winchester fit the ‘big’ part, but I never saw his face.”
The tall detective was hollow-cheeked and hoarse, having not slept since the killing and the fire. His eyes glittered an angry blue in a face black with soot. Quick thinking and decisive action had saved lives. No one had died after Spike Hopewell. But the fire would bankrupt Spike’s friends, the independents.
Damage ranged over both the field and the refinery. The heat had been so intense that it melted the stationary engines that powered the drills and twisted steel pipes. Wooden derricks and pump houses had burned to ash. Wells were ruined, with their casing falling into the bores. Of one hundred wells being drilled or already pumping, only a handful had survived with both derrick and pump house intact.
Van Dorn explosives expert Wally Kisley, who dressed like a traveling salesman in a three-piece checkerboard suit, gave a connoisseur’s whistle of appreciation. “You just can’t beat a refinery fire for utter mayhem.”
Redheaded Archie Abbott, a socially prominent New Yorker, a master of disguise, and Bell’s best friend, was not at all appreciative and in a foul mood. “I was impersonating a London-based jewel fence in Chicago and was one bloody inch from nailing Laurence Rosania when the Boss pulled me off the case.”
“This is a thousand times more important,” said Bell, “than a gentleman safe cracker robbing Chicago tycoons’ wives and mistresses. That Mr. Van Dorn pulled you off the case ought to give you a clue how crucial the Corporations Commission’s contract is to the agency.”
“We’ve got to catch Rosania before he accidentally blows someone’s house up along with his safe.”
“I let old Hopewell down,” Bell cut him off coldly. “I will not rest until his killer hangs.”
“You weren’t on a bodyguard job,” said Archie.
Bell stepped closer with a glacial stare.
Wally Kisley, their elder by many years, reckoned that Archie Abbott was stretching the limits of a friendship that had started in a collegiate boxing ring. He signaled Archie to shut his trap before it turned into a rematch and spoke before the fool made it worse.
“Ready when you are, Isaac.”
Bell said, “First question: Did the same criminals do the shooting and set the fires?
“Archie, I want witnesses. Someone must have seen the sniper either climb up that derrick or climb down. Carrying a rifle, maybe disguised as a tool. Someone must have seen his damned horse.