46
The White Lady careened through a sharp bend in the river at mile marker 25 and pounded toward Pittsburgh belching black columns from her chimneys and churning a white wake behind her.
“She smells the barn!” said the Ohio River pilot — one of two Isaac Bell had hired in Cincinnati — along with a chief engineer famously reckless in the pursuit of hotter steam.
“Faster,” said Bell, and the pilot rang the engine room.
Forced draft furnace fans roared. Jim Higgins’s miners shoveled on the coal. And the engineer played fast and loose with his boiler levels, tempting eternal oblivion by pumping water on red-hot plates to jump the pressure.
At mile marker 10, Bell saw the horizon grow dark with city smoke. Thunderheads loomed. Bolts of lightning pierced them. Rain sizzled down and flattened the seething currents of the river in flood.
Soon the hills of Pittsburgh hunched into the dismal sky. Tall buildings emerged from the smoke. The White Lady steamed out of the Ohio River and up the Monongahela, past the Point and under the bridges of the Golden Triangle. Fifty-five minutes after mile marker 10, by Isaac Bell’s watch, forty-four hours from Cincinnati, the immense steamboat backed her paddle blades.
Escape pipes blew off excess steam with a roar that drowned out the ringing of her bell, and she nosed to a landing at the foot of the Amalgamated coal miners’ tent city. Miners recruited as deckhands hoisted her boarding stage onto a temporary wharf that the strikers had improvised by raising one of the barges that the Defense Committee had sunk to fortify the point with a crenellated breakwater.
Coal miners, their wives and children, church ladies, reformers, and scribbling newspaper reporters stared. Isaac Bell stared back, as amazed. The last person he expected to walk up the stage lugging his long carpetbag was Aloysius Clarke, decked out in top hat and tails.
“Pretty steamboat, Isaac.”
“What are you doing out of the hospital?”
Wish dropped his bag with a clank and caught his breath. “Couldn’t miss the Duquesne Cotillion.”
“You came all the way to Pittsburgh for the ball?”
“Quite a shindig. Everybody who was anybody was there. I even met Colonel J. Philip Swigert of the Pennsylvania state militia. Talkative gent, particularly when he’s had a few.”
“Well done!” Bell reached to slap Wish on the shoulder in congratulations. Wish stayed him with a gesture. “Don’t tear the stitches.”
Bell pulled up short. “Are you O.K.?”
“Tip-top.”
“You don’t look tip-top— What did the colonel say?”
“You got here just in time,” Wish answered gravely. “State militia, and the Pinkertons, and the Coal and Iron Police, are marching aboard the Vulcan King this morning. They’ll head downstream lickety-split. Reckon to round the Homestead Works two or three hours from now, depending how fast they load up. Then their cannon’ll blast an opening in these barges, and their whole gang will storm ashore.”
Bell called down to the miners tending the White Lady’s furnaces. “Get her coaled up and the boys fed. We’re going back to work.”
The appearance of Captain Jennings, master of the exploded Camilla, was even more unexpected, and Isaac Bell thought for an instant he was seeing a ghost. But the old pilot was no ghost, only a grieving father. “We swapped boats that night. They murdered my boy.”
“I am so sorry, Captain.”
“I’ll run your boat. I know this stretch of the Mon better than your fellers from Cincinnati.”
“She’s a lot bigger than Camilla.”
Jennings started up the stairs to the wheelhouse. “Boats are the same. Rivers ain’t.”
“Letter came for you,” said Wish, pulling an envelope from his vest. “Lady’s handwriting.”
He stepped aside to give Bell privacy to read it.
Bell tore it open. It was from Mary. But it contained only four lines.
My Dearest Isaac,
What I am going to do, I must do.
I hope with all my heart that we’ll be together one day in a better world.
He read it over and over. At length, Wish stepped closer to him. “You’re looking mighty low for a fellow about to fight a naval battle.”
Bell showed him Mary’s letter.
“Write her back.”
“I don’t know what to say. I don’t know where to send it.”
“Write it anyway. If you don’t, you’ll wish you had. You’ve got a moment right now before all hell breaks loose.”
Bell stood aside while the firemen wheelbarrowed coal and tried to pen an answer in his notebook. The words would not come. He stared at the crowded tent city. They’d flown a defiant red flag from the top of the tipple. But people were staring at the river, bracing for attack. He saw Archie Abbott, running down the slope, waving to get his attention, and, in that instant, he suddenly knew what to write.
Dear Mary,
When you hope we’ll be together in a better world, I hope you mean a changed world on Earth so we don’t have to wait until Heaven, which your words had the sound of. Wherever it is, it will be for me a better world with you by my side. If that’s not enough for you, then why don’t we do something here and now to fix it, together?
He paused, still grasping for clarity. Archie was almost to the stage and calling him. Bell touched his pen to the paper again.
What I’m trying to say is, come back.
All my love
“Isaac!” Archie bounded up the stage, out of breath. He spoke in a low and urgent voice. “The miners got a cannon.”
“What?”
“I heard that someone — presumably, our friend Mr. Clay — gave the strikers a cannon. I found it. They told me it’s a 1.65 Hotchkiss Mountain Gun. Fast-firing and accurate. Look up, right at the foot of the tipple. They just pulled the canvas off it.”
Bell focused his eyes on the distant emplacement. It was a wheel-mounted gun, and largely hidden behind stacked gunnysacks of coal and thick masonry at the base of the tipple.
He said, “The first shot the miners fire at the Vulcan King will give the militia all the excuse they need to pounce ashore shooting — unless the miners get lucky and sink her with their first shot, which is highly unlikely. Even if they did, it would just prolong the inevitable and make it worse.”
“What are you going to do, Isaac?”
Bell called, “Hey, Wish, do you have a cigar?”
“Of course,” said Wish, tugging a Havana from his tailcoat. “What dapper bon vivant attends a ball without cigars?”
Bell clamped it between his teeth.
“Want a light?”
“Not yet. You got a sawed-off in your bag for Archie?”
Wish beckoned Archie and handed him the weapon. “Try and make sure no innocents are downwind.”
Archie said, “I thought apprentices aren’t allowed—”
“You’re temporarily promoted. Stick it under your coat. Don’t get close to me unless I yell for you.”
Bell strode down the boarding stage and hurried across the point to the powder shed the miners had erected far from the tents to store the fresh dynamite they’d managed to smuggle in at night. They were guarding it closely, recalling, no doubt, the accidental explosion that nearly sank the Sadie and half her barges. The Powder Committee remembered, too, the tall detective, who had recommended — at gunpoint — that the dynamite ride in its own barge apart from the people, and greeted him warmly.