“Jim Higgins is no spy. Jim Higgins is an honest workingman just like every one of us.”
“Spy!”
Bell pointed a big hand at the miner who had shouted.
“Who told you Jim’s a spy? Come on, man, tell us. Was it anyone you know? Any man you trust? Who?”
The miners looked at one another and back at Bell.
“Jim Higgins is no more a company man than you or me.”
The men in front were looking confused. But from far in the back, Bell heard shouting. “Murderer! Murderer!”
He could not see who was shouting in the failing light. A shadowy figure in a slouch hat flitted behind the mob. A dozen throats picked up the cry “Murderer! Murderer!” and from where Bell stood on the steps he could see a wavelike ripple of motion, and hundreds began to surge closer.
The company police guarding the jailhouse door edged aside.
“Stand fast, you men!” Bell shouted down from the steps.
“Murderer!”
The cops broke and ran. Some fled straight into the crowd, some around it, and when they had gone nothing stood between the lynch mob and the union organizer but a young Van Dorn detective on his first case.
Isaac Bell drew a single-action Colt Army from his coat and leveled it at the crowd. Then he delivered a cold promise.
“I will shoot the first man who steps near.”
Those in the front row, close enough to see his eyes, believed him.
They hesitated and started to fall back.
Joe, you self-righteous son of a bitch! Henry Clay shouted in the confines of his mind, taunting Joseph Van Dorn as if the great detective was glaring across his desk. Or down a gunsight. Goodness fetches goodness. Fools fetch fools.
He reached inside his voluminous coat.
Fool or not, young Bell cut a brave figure. The mob, teetering moments before on the cusp of violence, had been sidetracked by his commanding voice. Clay had fired up the back ranks again. But now the young detective had a gun in his hand and it was time to stop Bell before he ruined everything.
The marksman’s weapon in Clay’s shoulder holster was a top-notch Colt Bisley .45 single-action revolver smithed to a fare-thee-well. In the right hands, at this range, it was as deadly as a rifle. And Henry Clay, who had been trained by a master gunfighter and had drilled with the Bisley as religiously as he had with shotgun, rifle, knife, and fists, had no doubt that his were the right hands.
Isaac Bell saw someone come pushing through the mob even as the front ranks hesitated.
It was Mary Higgins, shoving through them and racing up the steps to stand shoulder to shoulder with him.
“If you brought a gun,” said Bell, “give it to me and get out of here while the getting is good.”
“I don’t need a gun.”
“If you believe that, you’re dreaming worse than your brother— Down!” He saw the blur of a gun barrel swinging their way. He kicked Mary’s skirts out from under her and swept her off her feet. A shot pealed from the back of the mob. The bullet stormed so close to Bell’s head it knocked his cap off. He could not see who had fired or whether he was leveling a second shot. He was. The shot came with no warning, slamming Bell sideways as it ripped through his coat and burned a bloody track across his ribs.
Bell caught his footing and aimed his Army. He raked the crowd, trying to locate the man who shot him. He still could not see him. He was somewhere behind them. Then he saw that the second shot emboldened the angry miners. Pushed by those behind, the men in front surged straight at him.
Isaac Bell triggered his weapon, held it firmly at his waist, and fanned the revolver’s hammer spur repeatedly with his left hand. Four shots roared out of the barrel so fast that the individual reports combined into one long, loud explosion.
The rapid fire sent a blizzard of bullets inches above the mob. Heads ducked, men scattered for cover. Spanish War veterans familiar with field cannon flung themselves face-first in the mud. Their mad scramble lasted just long enough for Bell and Mary to dive down the steps and into the jailhouse — a small, low-ceilinged cellar that smelled of river dampness and the kerosene lamps that lighted it. It was furnished with a crude wooden desk, a gun rack, two cells, and a dark hall that Bell hoped led to a back way out. He bolted the door.
Jim Higgins was watching from his cell, gripping the bars. Bell spotted keys on the rack and a double-barreled shotgun. He unlocked the cell and shoved the shotgun into Higgins’s hands. Higgins stared at the weapon as if Bell had passed him a snake.
“Don’t worry about hitting anything. The noise’ll scatter them.”
“Are you all right, Isaac? There’s blood all over your coat.”
“Tip-top,” said Bell. His ribs felt like he had just fought ten rounds with a strong man who specialized in body blows. But he could breathe, a good sign that no ribs had splintered.
“Here they come!” cried Mary. She grabbed a lantern off the desk and looked down the hall.
The mob was beating at the door. Bell took back the shotgun. Mary returned. “There’s a door and a ladder down to the riverbank.”
“How many are out there?”
“No one. It’s too steep. It’s right on the bank.”
“Take your brother.”
Mary grabbed Jim’s arm and lighted the way. Bell took up the rear. The mob battered at the door. Bell fired the right barrel. The shotgun bellowed. The pounding stopped, but only for an instant. Jim Higgins lowered the ladder. “Go,” said Bell. “I’ll cover.” He had one cartridge left in the shotgun and one in his revolver. Jim Higgins started down the ladder. The front door splintered as the fence post they were using for a battering ram thrust through a panel.
Bell loosed the second barrel of the shotgun, and the fence post fell into the room as if the men wielding it had let go and run for their lives. “Go,” he said to Mary. “That made believers out of them.”
But instead of starting down the ladder, Mary ran to the front room and threw the lamp. It landed on the jailer’s desk. Glass shattered and kerosene oil caught fire, spreading flame across the desk and igniting the second lamp. She paused in the hallway, and Bell saw her profiled by the leaping orange firelight. She looked startlingly beautiful, with a smile of satisfaction shining on her face.
The burning jailhouse, which should have distracted the mob, proved Bell’s, Jim’s, and Mary’s undoing. No sooner had they climbed down the ladder and begun picking their way along the steep riverbank than the fire rose to the courthouse above it. The wood burned fiercely. Flames leaped to the sky and dissolved the darkness of night.
“There they are!”
“Git ’em!”
The mob raced among the shanties along the top of the bank. Bell, Mary, and Jim Higgins slid to the bottom and splashed along the water’s edge. Bell saw ahead of them the barge dock where empties were parked overnight, waiting for steam tugs to push them to the tipple. The street above connected with Dock Street, which sloped down to it. At that point, he realized, the mob would stream down Dock Street and intercept them at the barge dock.
“We’re done for,” said Jim Higgins. “I’m the one they want. I’ll stop here. You two get in the water. Try and swim for it.”
The current was swift, the river over five hundred feet wide and pitch-dark beyond the firelight. Bell was a strong swimmer, he could make it across with a little luck. The expression on Mary’s face was brave but doubtful that she could swim that far.
“Both of you, stop here,” he commanded in a voice that allowed no argument. He found them a hiding place behind a stone breakwater. “I’ll be right back.”
He ran, leaping obstacles lit by the fire, and climbed up on the dock. At the end of the string of barges was a little yard tug that would do the shuttling. Bell jumped onto the first barge and ran along its gunnel, fighting to keep his footing on the narrow timber shelf. Slip to the right, he would fall in the water; slip to his left, break his neck in the empty hold.
“There he is!”
Bell leaped the space between the first and second barge and ran faster. He barely heard the howls behind him, his eyes fixed on the next barge, and the next, and the single light burning on the steam tug. He jumped from the last barge onto the tug and cast off its lines. The current took it immediately and dragged it downriver swiftly into the dark, beyond the mob, but away from the breakwater where Jim and Mary were hiding.