Chapter 47

CAST OFF!” ISAAC BELL ORDERED.

He and Archie raced up the boarding stage. Bell gathered Mack and Wally on the wheelhouse stairs. “Somehow we have to keep them apart.”

The wheelhouse stood five decks above the river, and from it Bell could see much of the tent city sprawled on the Amalgamated point. On the other side of the barricades of heaped trolley cars, a rippling blue mass marked Pittsburgh police pacing in the rain.

“Itching for an opening,” muttered Mack Fulton. “Can’t wait to break heads.”

Captain Jennings stood with both hands on the six-foot-high brass-trimmed wheel, grim-faced and intent. At Bell’s command, he rang the engine room for Astern, turned his wheel slightly to swing the stern into the stream, and flanked the three-hundred-foot hull off the improvised wharf.

A Defense Committee detail, wielding axes, surged onto the barge they had raised to make a wharf and chopped holes in the bottom, resinking it into a protective wall of barges half sunken in the mud.

Bell said, “Put us between them and the point.”

Jennings angled the boat into the river and turned upstream. A tall Homestead Works blast furnace blocked the view beyond the next bend. For moments that seemed endless, they had the rain-spattered water to themselves.

“Did you write Mary?” Wish asked.

“I should have said it to her face— Here they come!”

Vulcan King’s tall chimneys showed first, swinging around the somber obstruction of the Homestead furnace. She was moving fast, flying with the current, and upon them before the White Lady was halfway into the river. Suddenly, with no warning, the cannon on her bow boomed.

A shell screamed, skimming the river, and exploded on one of the barges blocking the bank. Timbers flew in the air.

Isaac Bell moved closer to Captain Jennings. “He’s got a cannon and we don’t. Can you ram him?”

“Saddlebag the murdering devils? You bet. Tell your boys down there to put on the blowers.”

Bell shouted the order into the engine room voice pipe.

Forced draft blowers roared in the chimneys, fanning the furnaces white-hot.

The Vulcan King fired again, and a second barge exploded. A third shot went high. It tore a swath through a line of tents, and the hillside seemed to quiver as hundreds of people ran, screaming.

“How can I help?” Bell asked Jennings.

“Tell me if he’s got himself a Mon pilot or a Cincinnati pilot.”

“I don’t know.”

“If he’s from Cincinnati, when he comes around that bend he just might put himself in the wrong place. There’s a crosscurrent when the river floods this high that’ll kick his stern and crowd him to the bank.”

The cannon boomed. A fourth shell blasted the barges. And Isaac Bell thought, I’m supposed to be stopping a war, not losing it.

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