Bell turned his back on the gate just as all the headlamps lighted at once. The men who had their faces pressed to the cracks in the gate cried out, temporarily blinded. Bell snatched a rifle from the nearest miner, shut his left eye, slitted his right, scrambled to the top of the barricade, and fired repeatedly into the blazing-white glare. The rifle magazine held five bullets. When it was empty, two headlamps still glared. He whipped out his Colt Army, steadied the barrel on the top of the gate, and squeezed the trigger twice.

The trolley yard was dark again. Shadows rose from the ground, and the strikebreakers who had dropped their battering ram when they ducked for cover picked it up again.

“Run!” Isaac Bell shouted. “Run!”

They started toward the barges, twenty miners trundling wheelbarrows, ten firing wild shots behind them, as the strikebreakers charged the gate. Bell, taking up the rear, gun in hand, heard the battering ram thunder against the gate. Once. Twice. Running backwards, he waited for the third blow to burst the gate open.

An orange flash lit the dark, followed by a loud explosion and the shouts of dismayed strikebreakers. When the fleeing miners cheered, Bell realized that the Defense Committee had mined the gate with dynamite, set off when the battering ram smashed into a detonator.

“That’ll fix the sons of bitches!” Fortis yelled.

And give the militia the excuse to attack, thought Bell.

The towboat Sadie blew her whistle as the running men drew near. The Defense Committee fought to shove their wheelbarrows through the mud to the barges, from which came shouts of encouragement.

Isaac ran ahead of them. “Stow all your dynamite in that lead barge, away from these people.”

The wheels were sticking in the muddy bank, and that barge was distant.

“Here’s fine,” yelled Fortis. “There’s room in this one. Dump it here, boys!”

“Dynamite deteriorates in damp and becomes volatile,” Bell protested. “You’ve been carrying it in the rain.”

“Are you telling a coal miner how to handle explosives?”

Bell seized the older man’s arm in an iron grip. “Volatile means boom, it goes off by itself. Get it away from these people.”

“I won’t abide some whippersnapper—”

Isaac Bell held his Army high. “I’ll blow the head off the first man who puts dynamite anywhere but that front barge.”

•   •   •

ISAAC BELL stood watch outside the pilothouse on towboat Sadie’s hurricane deck, wishing that the river fog was thicker. Sadie wheezed slowly past the Homestead Works, and the Amalgamated tipple rose against a sky that was turning bright.

He heard shouts.