Bell awakened to a blood-red dawn glinting through splits in the boxcar walls. He thought it was the pain in his side that disturbed his sleep, but it was Mary whimpering in hers. Suddenly, she screamed. Bell held her tighter and gently shook her awake.
“You’re O.K. You’re safe. You’re here with me.”
She looked around the boxcar, rubbed her eyes, and laid her head back on his chest. “I had a nightmare. I’m sorry. Sorry I woke you.”
“No, I was awake.” He felt her trembling. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“What did you dream?”
“Five years ago, when I was eighteen, I marched with thousands of women. We were seeking bread for their children. We marched all night to Pittsburgh. Before we could enter the city, Coal and Iron Police stopped us with bayonets fixed to their rifles. They had orders from the governor to shoot to kill.”
She fell silent.
Bell asked, “What happened?”
“We had no choice but to back down. I could see their orders in their eyes. They would do it, Mr. Bell. They would pull their triggers. They would shoot us, as they shot us at Haymarket, at the Pullman strike, at Homestead, at Lattimer.”
Bell had never heard of Lattimer. “Do you dream it often?”
“Less than at first.”
“Was it harder to march the next time— I presume you did march again.”
“Of course.”
“Was it harder?”
Mary did not answer. Bell listened to the wheels. He could feel her heart beating against his chest, speeding up with remembered fear. “I used to think Pennsylvania was the worst,” she whispered. “The richest railroads, coal mines, coke plants, steel mills are all in Pennsylvania. The state legislature wrote laws founding the Coal and Iron Police to protect them from the workers. The companies own the legislature. They can do anything they want and the law is on their side.”
“You used to think Pennsylvania was the worst?”
“West Virginia is worse. Gleason and his bunch don’t even pretend that murder isn’t a weapon in their arsenal. They don’t bother with legal niceties. The union hasn’t a friend in the state… Where was your father’s mansion?”
“Boston.” Stick to your story. Polish the edges, keep the frame.
“Where in Boston?”
“The Back Bay,” he lied.
If she was at all familiar with Boston, she would know that the Bells of Louisburg Square founded the American States Bank, which had a long history of flourishing through financial panics like that of 1893. The Back Bay that he named instead — a neighborhood of mansions erected on filled land by newly wealthy likely to lose their money as fast as they made it — would lend credence to his riches-to-rags Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade disguise.
“Where did you learn that trick with the gun?”
“Fan shooting?” he asked, buying time to think his way out of this one.
“You fired four bullets as if they were one. Were you in the Spanish War?”
The nearer the truth, the less to defend.
“I ran off with the circus when I was a boy.”
Mary propped herself up on one elbow and looked into his eyes, and Isaac Bell was convinced that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. “Were you a reckless little boy or a brave little boy?”
“I was an adventurous little boy, and circus folk are very, very kind. The acrobats and the lady shootist became my particular friends. They taught me all sorts of wonderful things.”
The locomotive was blowing its whistle more and more frequently as the train steamed through grade crossings, indicating they were nearing a city. Bell shot a look out the door. The smoke of Pittsburgh rose heavily on the horizon, and soon they were trundling between mills and plants. Endless rows of chimney stacks, tall and straight as blackened forests, lined both sides of the Monongahela River, which was twice as wide as where they crossed it at Gleasonburg and crowded with tall stern-wheeled steamboats pushing long tows of coal barges. The coal was heaped everywhere Bell looked, black mountains to burn in glass factories, blast furnaces, open-hearth smelters, coking plants, and gashouses, and in hundreds of locomotives pulling thousands of railcars on broadways that were eight, ten, twelve tracks wide.