That caused the guy on his back to loosen his grip, and Ruth surged for the bar and then pulled up short just before he hit it and the guy flew off his back and over the bar and hit the bottles behind the cash register with a great crash.

Babe punched the guy nearest him, realizing only too late but with complete satisfaction that it was the mousy prick, Gene, and Gene went spinning backward on his heels, flailing his hands as he fell over a chair and dropped to his ass on the floor. There might have been ten Bolsheviks in the room, and several of them were of good size, but the other guys had a rage on their side the Bolshies couldn’t touch. Babe saw the freckled one drop Larkin with a single punch to the center of his face and then step right over him and catch another with a jab to the neck. He suddenly remembered the only piece of advice his father had ever given him: Never go toe to toe with a mick in a bar fight.

Another Bolshie took a running leap at Babe from the top of the bar, and Babe ducked him the way he’d duck a tag, and the Bolshie landed on a tabletop that quivered for just a second before collapsing under the weight.

“You are!” someone called, and he turned to see the jake who’d hit him with the stool, a smear of blood on the guy’s mouth. “You’re Babe Fucking Ruth.”

“I get that all the time,” Babe said. He punched the guy in the head, grabbed his coat off the floor, and ran out of the bar.

WORKING CLASS

CHAPTER thirteen

In the late autumn of 1918, Danny Coughlin stopped walking a beat, grew a thick beard, and was reborn as Daniel Sante, a veteran of the 1916 Thomson Lead Miners Strike in western Pennsylvania. The real Daniel Sante had been close to Danny’s height and had the same dark hair. He’d also left behind no family members when he’d been conscripted to fight in the Great War. Shortly after his arrival in Belgium, however, he’d come down with the grippe and died in a field hospital without ever firing a shot.

Of the miners in that ’16 strike, five had been jailed for life when they’d been tied, however circumstantially, to a bomb that had exploded in the home of Thomson Iron & Lead’s president, E. James McLeish. McLeish had been taking his morning bath when his houseman carried in the mail. The houseman tripped crossing the threshold and juggled a cardboard package wrapped in plain brown paper. His left arm was later discovered in the dining room; the rest of him remained in the foyer. An additional fifty strikers were jailed on shorter sentences or beaten so badly by police and Pinkertons that they wouldn’t be traveling anywhere for several years, and the rest had met the fate of the average striker in the Steel Belt—they lost their jobs and drifted over the border into Ohio in hopes of hiring on for companies that hadn’t seen the blackball list of Thomson Iron & Lead.