The Striker (Isaac Bell 6)

He steered past the barges and the dock to the breakwater where he had left them. They were gone. Searching the bank, he spotted them, running back toward the courthouse. Three men were hot on their trail. Bell swung the tug toward them.

One of the pursuers pulled ahead of the pack, waving a baseball bat. Two yards behind Mary, he raised the bat high in the air. Bell let go the wheel, drew his Colt, took careful aim, and fired his last bullet. The man dropped his bat and fell. His friends tumbled over him.

“Fine shooting,” said the old man. “That’ll larn him.”

Bell rammed the tug’s nose into the soft mudbank.

“Jump!”

Mary scrambled on and reached back for her brother. Jim swung aboard. Bell reversed his quadrant, backed into the current, spun the helm in a blur of spokes, and steamed for the far shore.

* * *

Isaac Bell drove the tug across the Monongahela River and slowly downstream, looking for a place to land. The old man recognized Jim Higgins. “You’re that union fellow, ain’t you?”

“Yes, I am. Do you favor the union?”

“Cain’t say I do. Cain’t say I favor the company neither. They treat folks mighty hard.”

“Would you back a strike?”

“Might. Or might not.”

“I feel the same way,” Higgins said, settling into a conversation that Bell would not have expected to hear in the midst of the night on a stolen tugboat. “We don’t necessarily have to strike. A fair settlement of the miners’ and owners’ demands could ensure a generation of no strikes and steady work. Cool heads on both sides know that the nation needs coal. It will be to everyone’s benefit that we can earn a decent living digging it. Unless the hotheads inflame the miners’ imaginations, we can settle this for the good of all, miner and owner.”

Mary Higgins laughed in disbelief. “Cool heads threw you in jail and sent a lynch mob to hang you.”

“Peace for twenty years,” Higgins replied mildly, “if cool heads bargain. Massacres if they don’t.”

“Brother, if it weren’t for Mr. Bell, you’d be dancing on air.”

Isaac Bell listened admiringly as Jim Higgins stood firmly by his beliefs, addressing his sister and the old man as if he was trying to coax them into a union hall. “If hotheads won’t give an inch, labor and owner will go to war. Innocents die in labor wars. Innocents were massacred at Haymarket, and Homestead, and Pullman. Innocents will be massacred again.”

Steering along in the dark, eyes peeled for a landing, Bell decided that Jim Higgins was not a dreamer — and certainly no fool — but a thinker with an overarching strategy to end the labor wars and a healthy fear of the violence the wars would spawn.

Ahead, Bell saw a yellow glow.

The old watchman nudged him. “Sonny, if you intend to keep running — and I reckon, based on events I’ve observed tonight, you ought to — you might be interested to know that ’round the next bend is the Baltimore & Ohio train yard where you might just discover the opportunity to hop a freight and git the hell out of West Virginia.”

* * *

“Isaac, I would be dancing on air, like Mary said. But may I ask you one more favor?”

“Name it.”

“Would you escort my sister to safety?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t need an escort,” said Mary. “And I don’t want one.”

Jim Higgins said, “Sister, listen for once in your life. I’m the only fugitive from the law. They’ll charge me with breaking out of jail. All you and Isaac did was run from a lynch mob, and even the owners can’t call that a crime. If you can get past the Gleason company cops, you’ll both be safe.”

“What about you?” asked Bell, and Mary said, “Where are you going?”

“I’m hoping my friends in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen will smuggle me out in a coal tender.”

“Where?”