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?

But Claggart was not the enemy.

Mary felt no comfort that she had suspected correctly from early on that another man was paying for the barges. She had not been surprised when Isaac told her that bank robbers were not stealing for the workers’ cause. She had never fully believed Claggart’s story. But she had hoped and acted like a drunkard—drunk on the cause, drunk on hope, drunk on passionate belief. Like any drunkard, blind to truth.

She swore that she would never let hope and belief blind her again.

Anger at Claggart was useless, worse than useless. Anger would derail her hunt for the man who paid Claggart. He was the enemy. He was the provocateur sowing violence to give the owners and the government the excuse to destroy the union. He was the enemy of justice served by equality.