"Excuse me, sir," said the conductor. "They want their property back."

Isaac Bell tugged a leather-sheathed sap of lead shot from his pocket. "What's your name?"

"Billy," came the sullen reply. Bell tossed him the sap, and said coldly, with barely contained anger, "Billy, next time a man offers to come quietly, take him at his word."

He turned to the man with the black eye. "And you?"

"Ed."

Bell produced a revolver and passed it to Ed, butt first. Then he dropped five cartridges into the guard's hand, saying, "Never draw a weapon you haven't mastered."

"Thought I had," muttered Ed, and something about his hang-dog expression seemed to touch the tall detective.

"Cowboy before you joined the railroad?" Bell asked.

"Yes, sir, needed the work."

Bell's eyes warmed to a softer blue, and his lips spread in a congenial smile. He slid a gold coin from a pocket concealed inside his belt. "Here you go, Ed. Get a piece of beefsteak for that eye, and buy yourselves a drink."

The guards nodded their heads. "Thank you, Mr. Bell."

Bell turned his attention to the president of the Southern Pacific Company, who was glowering expectantly. "Mr. Hennessy, I will report as soon as I've had a bath and changed my clothes."

"The porter has your bag," Joseph Van Dorn said, smiling.

THE DETECTIVE WAS BACK in thirty minutes, mustache trimmed, hobo garb exchanged for a silver-gray three-piece sack suit tailored from fine, densely woven English wool appropriate to the autumn chill. A pale blue shirt and a dark violet four-in-hand necktie enriched the color of his eyes.

Isaac Bell knew that he had to start the case off on the right foot by establishing that he, not the imperious railroad president, would boss the investigation. First, he returned Lillian Hennessy's warm smile. Then he bowed politely to a sensual, dark-eyed woman who entered quietly and sat in a leather armchair. At last, he turned to Osgood Hennessy.

"I am not entirely convinced the accidents are sabotage."

"The hell you say! Labor is striking all over the West. Now we've got a Wall Street panic egging on radicals, inflaming agitators."

"It is true," Bell answered, "that the San Francisco streetcar strike and the Western Union telegraphers' strike embittered labor unionists. And even if the leaders of the Western Federation of Miners standing trial in Boise did conspire to murder Governor Steunenberg--a charge I doubt, as the detective work in that case is slipshod--there was obviously no shortage of vicious radicals to plant the dynamite in the Governor's front gate. Nor was the murderer who assassinated President McKinley the only anarchist in the land. But--"

Isaac Bell paused to turn the full force of his gaze on Hennessy. "Mr. Van Dorn pays me to capture assassins and bank robbers everywhere on the continent. I ride more limited trains, expresses, and crack flyers in a month than most men will in a lifetime."

"What do your travels have to do with these attacks against my railroad?"