The cannon boomed. A fourth shell blasted the barges. And Isaac Bell thought, I’m supposed to be stopping a war, not losing it.
Henry Clay was beside himself. Why weren’t the miners shooting back?
The Hotchkiss he gave them should be raking Vulcan King’s decks by now. Instead, militiamen were standing in the open, cheering each shot. And the company police and Pinkertons were clapping one another on the back like it was a baseball game.
A grinning Coal and Iron cop slapped Clay’s shoulder. “We’re winning.”
But Clay’s plan was to start a war — a shooting war on both sides — and keep it going, not win it. He grabbed an officer’s field glasses, ignoring his protests, and focused on the Hotchkiss. The cannon was there, shielded by coal bags at the foot of the tipple, but no one was manning it. And when he looked more closely, he saw the tube was perched at an odd angle. Something had happened to it, and that something was very likely named Isaac Bell.
“Give that back or I’ll have you up on charges,” shouted the officer. Clay, disguised in a private’s uniform, pushed through the cheering fools and headed for the main deck where the furnaces fired the boilers. His disguise included a khaki knapsack — a U.S. Army — issue Merriam Pack with an external frame supported by a belt. In it, he carried what at first glance appeared to be jagged chunks of coal but were actually dynamite sticks with detonators and one-inch fuses bundled in chamois leather dyed with lampblack.
Vulcan Kingwas a ten-boiler boat, and firemen were scrambling from one to the next, shoveling coal into wide-open furnaces. Someone saw Clay’s uniform and shouted, “How’s it going up there?”
“We’re winning!” said Clay, and when the fireman turned to scoop more coal, Clay lobbed one of his bombs into the furnace and ran as fast as he could to the back of the boat.
The Monongahela crosscurrent that Captain Jennings had hoped for caught the Vulcan King’s Cincinnati pilot unawares. Generated by the Amalgamated point of land deflecting extraordinarily high water, the current grabbed the steamboat’s stern and overwhelmed her thrashing paddles. Before her pilot could recover, the black boat’s bow was crowding the bank. Her hull thrust across the channel directly in the path of White Lady, which Isaac Bell had churning Full Aheadto ram.
Vulcan King’s cannon boomed.
It sounded immensely louder this time, thought Bell. Did they have a second cannon? Or had they finally unleashed the Gatling? But even as a wild shell soared over the barges and exploded in a kitchen tent, he saw it was the last shot the steamboat would ever fire at the strikers’ camp.
“Her boiler burst,” Captain Jennings shouted.
The steamboat’s chimneys leaned forward, tumbled off her hurricane deck, and crashed on her bow. Timbers followed. Glass and planking rained down. From her wheelhouse forward, her upper works were demolished.
“The murdering devils’ boiler burst!”
“It had help,” said Isaac Bell, who had seen it happen twice at Gleasonburg. “That was no accident.” But why would Henry Clay blow up his own boat?
“They got what they deserved!”
Captain Jennings rang for more steam.
The blowers roared.
“I’ll finish the sons of bitches.”
The shock of the explosion scattered burning furnace coal. The Vulcan King’s forward decks took fire from the shattered wheelhouse to the waterline. Militiamen in khaki stampeded from the flames. A man in the dark uniform of the Coal and Iron Police threw himself into the river. Strikebreakers dropped their pick handles and splashed in after him, calling for help.
“Stop!” said Isaac Bell. “Back your engines.”
48
“What are you doing, Isaac?” Wish, Wally, and Mack were at his side.
“Coming alongside to get those people off. Back your engines, Captain Jennings. Wheel hard over.”
“Not ’til I saddlebag the murderers.”
“Back them!”
“You can’t let ’em win.”
“Henry Clay doesn’t want to win. He wants mayhem. I won’t give it to him.”
Mack Fulton cocked his Smith & Wesson, told the pilot, “Boss man says back your engines.”
A single lever in the engine room engaged the reversing gears on both engines at once. Coupled to the same shaft as the stern wheel, when the engines stopped, the wheel stopped.
Escape pipes roared behind the wheelhouse.
Bell threw an arm around the grieving pilot’s shoulders. “Right now, they’re nothing more than scared fools. Like us— Hard over with your wheel, Captain. Bring us alongside. Let’s get those people off.”
Bell turned to his squad.
“Shoot anyone who tries to bring a weapon. Rifle, pistol, blackjack, or brass knuckles, shoot ’em. And watch for Clay. There’s more militia than anyone else, so he’ll probably be wearing a uniform.”
He led them down to the main deck. Captain Jennings circled to a position upstream from the Vulcan King, where he could use his paddles, rudders, and the hard-running Monongahela to maneuver beside the burning steamer.
Bell stationed Wally, Mack, and Archie where the boats would touch. Wish Clarke passed out shotguns and insisted on staying in the thick of it, claiming he would protect his hospital stitches with his sawed-off. Bell climbed one level to the boiler deck, where he could watch from above.
The fire was spreading, fed by dry wood and fresh paint, marching back from the Vulcan King’s bow, driving men toward the stern. In their chaotic, writhing mass, Bell saw that most wore khaki uniforms — short, four-button mud-colored sack coats, foraged caps on their heads, and cartridge boxes belted in back at the waist. Their weapons were a typically motley state militia collection of Spanish-American War black powder, single-shot .45–70 trapdoor rifles, improved Krag-Jørgensen magazine rifles, and even some 1895 Lee Navys — all with bayonets fixed. The Coal and Iron Police, easily identified by dark uniforms and shiny badges, had pistols and clubs. Known for brutality, they looked terrified, and many of the hard-eyed Pinkerton detectives had lost their bowlers in their panic.
The gap of water separating the boats narrowed.
The ex-prisoners drafted as strikebreakers clawed frantically to the rail.
Isaac Bell cupped his hands to shout, “Drop your weapons!”
Rifles and pick handles clattered to the deck.
Wish Clarke tipped his shotgun skyward and triggered a thunderous round.
“Drop ’em!”
Pistols and blackjacks carpeted the deck.
A Pinkerton scooped up a fallen Colt automatic and slipped it in his coat. Mack Fulton shot him without hesitating. As he fell, men turned out pockets to show they were empty.
The two hulls neared. Men poised to jump.
“Reach for the sky!” the Van Dorns bellowed. “Hands in the air.”
The flames bent toward them suddenly, driven by a shift in wind.
The hulls came together with a crash that nearly threw Bell from his perch on the boiler deck. Hundreds jumped, kicking and fighting to safety. Bell leaped onto a railing to see better. The Coal and Iron cops, the prisoners, and even the Pinkertons, had dissolved into a mob with a single mind — to get off the burning boat — and it was nearly impossible to distinguish individual features. Only the trained militia still held their hands in the air, trusting that if they followed orders, they would not be shot.
Henry Clay, Bell knew, was expert at melting into his surroundings, which was why Bell was positive Clay had disguised himself as a militiaman. But even they were so densely packed, as they crossed over, that every soldier in khaki looked the same. Desperate, Bell tried to concentrate on the bigger soldiers, those built more like Clay.
Here came one now, hands up to show they are empty, jumping onto White Lady, face inclined downward as he watched his footing. He was aboard in a flash, crowding into those ahead of him, stumbling forward when another behind him shoved his pack.