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Mary froze the detective with a stern glare, brushed past him, passed the bowing doormen, and set a fast pace down Broadway, which veered southerly and easterly across the Tenderloin District. She walked fast, block after block, oblivious to fine hotels and theaters on the wide thoroughfare, and saloons and gambling halls along the dark and narrow cross streets, her destination a settlement house in the East Side slums where she could find shelter with the girls and women who had founded the Shirtwaist Makers’ Union.
She tried to outpace the storm in her mind. But walking didn’t help any more than stalling by the elevator. She was too confused, her brain swirling with questions about her brother and their cause of equality and justice, his vague dreams of a general strike, her sharp plan to block the river. How different Isaac Bell was than any other man she had ever met: strong, but
tender; ferocious in a fight, but able to be gentle; privileged, but not obliviously; quick to laugh, but just as quick to comfort. Had she believed in some vague way that she could use Isaac to help her grand plan? Or had she really only wished they could somehow repeat a cold night on a freight train?
Drowning in doubt, she revisited her scheme: At Pittsburgh, the Monongahela River was lined with coal barges tied ten deep on either shore. They narrowed the channel. When the river was crowded with tows five and six wide, there was scarcely room for two to slip past each other. Plus, six bridges crossed the Mon. The piers that supported the six narrowed the waterway, dicing it into narrow channels. She envisioned drifting barges piling up against them like ice floes. If half the river was carpeted with barge fleets, how many would have to sink before they blocked traffic? Would they cause a flood? And now she could hear her brother asking, How many will be injured? How many will die? None? Guarantee it? She couldn’t. The Mon washed along the Point, the river-girded stretch of land that formed Pittsburgh’s rich Golden Triangle. Thousands lived and worked there.
The sky turned gray and it began to drizzle. She walked. The drizzle quickened to rain. And still she walked, ignoring streetcars she could ride downtown, ignoring the Els that would whisk her there in a flash, noticing nothing ahead of her or behind her, seeing neither the young detective shadowing her nor the steamfitter in the slouch hat trailing them both.
21
Isaac Bell followed Mary Higgins at a distance that varied from a half to a full block, depending upon how crowded the sidewalks were. He endeavored to keep numerous pedestrians between them, and repeatedly donned and removed his dark coat and his broad-brimmed hat to change his silhouette.
Joseph Van Dorn’s orders were ringing in his ears—Find out what the devil she is up to. If he hadn’t seen her throw the lantern that burned down the Gleasonburg courthouse, he might have protested her innocence, or at least taken the accusation with a grain of salt. But he had seen her hurl it and had seen the look of triumph on her beautiful face. So he followed, intensely curious, and pleased to be near her, even though it took him off his own case.
She was easy to follow, taller than most people thronging the busy sidewalks, and plunging along single-mindedly, never looking back. It started to rain. She bought a red scarf from a peddler on Twenty-third Street.
She stopped on Fourteenth Street where Broadway and Fourth Avenue joined at Union Square and listened to a speaker haranguing a crowd about the coal strikes and the United States war against the Philippine insurgents.
“Three cheers for anarchy!” he roared, and the crowd took up the cry.
Mary Higgins put money in the hat when passed and hurried on. South of Houston Street, she cut east into the crowded Jewish district, and Bell drew closer to keep her in sight.
“Don’t buy beef!”
Groups of women were mobbing Kosher butcher shops and yelling at housewives who emerged with bundles: “Boycott the Beef Trust!”
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!”
