The Striker (Isaac Bell 6)

The message itself, written by hand, contained several strings of four-digit numbers. He read quickly, deciphering the figures in his head. Then he balled the paper in his fist.

“Cast off!”

He bolted up the boarding stage.

“Any reply, sir?” called the junior broker.

“Send immediately in cipher. ‘The Point. Nine hours.’”

Judge Congdon was in a rage. His spies in Pittsburgh had seen the miners moving camp from the McKeesport trolley park. About to hurl the crumpled telegram into the water, Clay remembered the lesson he had just taught about privacy, smoothed the paper, folded it repeatedly, and slid it deep in an inside pocket reserved for business cards.

“Cast off, I said! Take in the stage!”

The firemen raced aboard. Deckhands threw off lines. The steam winch lifted the boarding stage from the wharf and swung it inboard, and the Vulcan King backed slowly into the river.

Clay ran up the four flights of stairs to the pilothouse.

“Go! What are you waiting for? Full speed!”

The pilot was dithering with the engine room telegram. “Where?”

“Pittsburgh!”

“I don’t know if we took on enough fuel.”

Clay crossed the lavish pilothouse in three strides and slammed both engine levers to Ahead Full.

“Burn the furniture if you have to. Get us there.”

It had taken a full day and a half to steam three hundred and eighty miles from Cincinnati. Ninety more to Pittsburgh. “What speed can you make?”

The pilot wrestled the brass-bound wheel, and the steamboat surged from the bank. “River’s running hard, all this rain,” he said. “Nine knots.”

Clay smoothed out the telegram and read it again. Foolishness. It hadn’t changed. How could it? He stuffed it back in his pocket.

Ninety miles to Pittsburgh would take ten hours at nine knots. “Make it ten knots.”

“I don’t know—”

“Lower the water in your boilers. Jump your pressure. You’ll get hot steam easier with little water.”

“Blow up easier, too.”

“Hot steam! Do what it takes. Ten knots!”

Congdon had every right to rage. The strikers were moving in barges. Clay’s barges. God knows where they were going next, but it couldn’t be good. Had Mary Higgins changed her mind? Not likely. Not at all. No, this reeked of Isaac Bell.

The steamboat had modern voice pipes. Clay shouted down for the boat’s carpenter, who came quickly, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“Mount the cannon.”

“Now?”

“And the Gatling.”

* * *

Mary Higgins knew that Isaac Bell was right. John Claggart — the man Isaac called Henry Clay — was no friend. Not to the strikers betrayed by slogans they had wanted to hear—Bum government and bloodsucking capitalists. Not to her, fooled so cunningly. What could be more seductive to a woman determined to build a new world than to hear anarchy dubbed a joke?