Cops gathered on the corners, big men in blue coats and tall helmets.

Bell almost lost sight of Mary in a mob of women screaming at one another.

“My babies are sick. They must eat.”

Isaac wedged through and ran after Mary. He was no longer afraid of Mary seeing him. There was a grim electricity in the air—the same threat of imminent, mindless violence that he had felt in the miners’ mob at Gleasonburg. The women and the butchers and the glowering cops were all about to lose the last vestiges of reason, and Mary Higgins was caught in the middle.

•   •   •

A HUNDRED FEET ahead of Isaac Bell, half a city block, Mary Higgins followed her ears to the exciting roar of a mass meeting that was spilling from the new Irving Hall and packing Broome Street sidewalk to sidewalk. She was thrilled that the bold immigrant Jewish women leading New York’s needle-trades union battle were exerting their newly won power against the Beef Trust’s extortionate prices.

“The Hebrews are rioting!” roared a red-faced Irishman.

Whistles shrieked and the police advanced.

“Break it up!”

The women screamed back at the cops. “Who do you work for? The trusts? Or the people?”

“Move along, sister.”

“Cossacks!” screamed a woman, and her sisters combined to chant.

“Cossacks! Cossacks! Cossacks!”

“Break it up! Break it up!”

Then a girl screamed at the top of her lungs, “What’s a penny made of?”

“Dirty copper!”

A big cop shoved a woman. She fell on the rain-slicked cobblestones.

Mary Higgins jumped to help and pulled her to her feet before she was trampled.

Another woman sprawled and her bundles went flying. Something soft landed on Mary’s boots—blood-soaked butcher paper had torn open, spilling a slab of liver. A fat cop with a handlebar mustache and bushy eyebrows knocked Mary to her knees. Terrified of being trampled, she tried to stand.

The cop held her down and roared in her face, “What’s a pretty Irish lass doing with a bunch of dirty Yids?”

In that eruption of hatred, Mary Higgins felt her doubts evaporate. There was a huge difference between right and wrong, and what she had to do in Pittsburgh was right. She picked up the liver, hauled back, and slapped the cop’s face with it. The soft red flesh splattered on his eyebrows and mustache and stuck to his skin. Blinded, he reeled away, shouting in anger and confusion.

The other cops saw him pawing at his bloodstained face.

Thirty charged up Broome Street, swinging clubs.