But if not the union and not the owners, who?

With that unanswered, Bell turned his thoughts to a stranger mystery. It certainly appeared that a saboteur had chiseled the chain apart. But at the moment when the chain had fractured, the coal train had been climbing to the tipple in plain sight of hundreds of miners. Not one of them, Isaac Bell himself included, had seen a blacksmith riding the lead coal car, attacking the bridle chain with hammer and chisel.

4

ISAAC BELL TOOK TWO BATHS UPON ARRIVING IN PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania, the first at the five-cent lodging house where he had left his bags and scrubbed off enough coal dust to gain admittance to the city’s exclusive Duquesne Club—an ornate Romanesque Revival building that dominated the Golden Triangle where the Monongahela joined the Allegheny to form the Ohio River—the second bath at the Duquesne Club before donning an immaculate white suit.

He asked the front-hall porter to escort his lunch guest, Mr. Van Dorn, to the bar when he arrived. Then the young detective shouldered into the favorite watering hole of the industrial barons and railroad tycoons who ruled the capital of America’s coal and steel empire. Having researched the coal industry meticulously, he recognized many in the enormous room. But the man who captured his attention right off was holding court under an acanthus-leaf-carved mantel topped by life-size mahogany satyrs—John “Black Jack” Gleason, ruthless owner of the Gleason Consolidated Coal & Coke Company.

If the day before yesterday’s runaway train, explosion, and deaths of six doorboys in Mine No. 1 troubled Gleason at all, it did not show. Instead, he was taunting his fellow barons, with a grin like the satyrs’: “When I drive the union out of West Virginia, my mines will sell coal cheaper than every man in this room. I’ll take your customers.”

A patrician turned red in the face. “My grandfather was a founding member of this club, sir, and I do not hesitate to tell you that you are a vulture!”

“Proud of it,” Gleason fired back. “If you don’t stick with me against the union, I’ll buy your bones at bankrupts’ auction.”

The founder’s grandson stormed out. But the others, Bell noticed, murmured compromisingly, and looked relieved when one of their number steered the conversation toward the Pirates’ winning streak.

“There you are, Isaac.”

Joseph Van Dorn enveloped Bell’s big hand in a manicured ham-size paw and shook it firmly. He was tall, broad in the chest, broader in the belly, and light on his feet, a balding man in his forties who might have passed for a sea captain who had prospered in the China Trade or a blacksmith who had invented a tool that made him rich. He appeared convivial, with a ready smile that could brighten his hooded eyes. Red burnsides cascading to an even redder beard gave the impression of a man more hail-fellow-well-met than the scourge of the underworld, and many a confined criminal was still wondering how he got confused.