* * *
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 Ahead to 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.