“Let go of me.”
“Who’s game is it? Is someone else giving orders?”
“I have no idea.”
“But you do know that Clay answers to someone, don’t you?” She shook her head. It was too dark to see her eyes, much less read her expression. He tried again to force an honest answer. “Who paid for a hundred barges?”
“That was the first thing I asked,” she said.
“Did he answer?”
“Bank robberies. They raised the money with bank robberies.”
“Where?”
“Chicago.”
“What would you say if I told you that those robberies were committed by several different gangs, half of whom have been caught this week?”
“I’d say you’re practicing again.”
Mack stepped out of the cabin, calling urgently. “Isaac! If you insist on trying this tonight, there isn’t a moment to lose.”
A towboat loomed out of the fog, paddles thrashing, and banged against the barges. Miners clambered onto them with ropes and looked around uncertainly, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
“Now or never, Isaac.”
“Mary, I will talk to you tomorrow.”
She climbed the ladder onto the barge and started toward the shore.
“Where are you going?”
“You’re not the only one who has ‘right’ to do, Isaac.”
“Will you be careful?” Bell called after her.
“Why should I be careful? You’ll be following me.”
“Not tonight. I can’t tonight.” He gestured helplessly at the steamboat and the barges.
“Then tonight I’ll take my chances.”
“Clay is deadly.”
Mary Higgins stopped, turned around, and looked back at him. Spark and flame erupted from the towboat’s stacks, illuminating her pale skin. Eyes aglow, chin high, she looked, Bell thought, utterly beautiful and supremely confident. He wondered how she could be so sure of herself in the face of her disappointment. The answer came like an icicle in his heart.
“He is not deadly to me.”
36
Pittsburgh’s infamous “black fog” was a grimy mix of the natural fog that rose from the rivers and the coal smoke and soot that tumbled out of mills, foundries, powerhouses, locomotives, and steamboats. Black fog was dense and oily, painful to breathe, and nearly impossible to see through. When the pilot of the lead tow shined his electric carbon arc searchlight ahead to inspect the empty barges he was pushing, the beam bounced back into the pilothouse as if reflected by a mirror.
“The barges are up there somewhere,” the pilot joked to Isaac Bell, who was standing at his shoulder. He was Captain Jennings, an old-timer with a tobacco-stained swallow-tailed beard. His boat was the Camilla, a low-slung, two-deck ninety-footer with a stern paddle wheel as wide as she was. The glass pilothouse, which reminded Bell of a New England sea captain’s widow’s walk, was perched on the second deck behind the chimneys and let them view the murk ahead, behind, and to both sides.
“You can feel it different in the wheel if the tow breaks up and you and the boat are out all by your lonesome while they’re drifting every which way. We’re doing fine, don’t you worry none. I don’t have to see what I know.” He spit tobacco juice into a box filled with sawdust. “Heck, most of what I can’t see I can feel in the floor or whether the paddle wheel turns sluggish. Feeling the river shoals tells me where I am. What I can’t see or feel, I have stashed in my memory machine.”
Bell wondered how the pilot saw other tows on a collision course with his. Jennings’s white beard suggested he had survived decades on the river, but it seemed worth asking.