AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Jake,” the driver told his shotgun, “hop down and make the gentlemen comfortable in back.”
Bell laid Wish on a long bench and knelt beside it to keep him from rolling off. The driver whipped up his team, and the paddy wagon lurched through the city.
“Stop trying to talk,” Bell told Wish.
Wish beckoned him closer.
“I said, that mustache is working like I said it would.”
* * *
Aloysius Clarke woke up at dawn and looked around the private room Isaac Bell had paid for. “What are you doing here?” he asked Bell.
“Wish, what do you mean what am I doing here? You saved my life.”
“Heck, you did the same for me in New Orleans.”
“I didn’t step in front of a knife.”
Wish shrugged, which made him wince. “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.” Then he winked. “Fact is, I enjoy the occasional wound. Nobody complains when I take a little something for the pain.”
Bell passed him his flask.
“How bad am I?”
“Doc says a couple of weeks in bed ought to do you.”
“Sorry, Isaac. I’ll catch up as soon as I can. You going to Pittsburgh?”
“Just stopping at Union Station to see Mack and Wally and Archie on my way to New York.”
“Why New York?”
“Report to the Boss.”
“What happened to the telegraph?”
“I want to see his face when I tell him what I’m thinking.”
* * *
Mary Higgins felt like she was falling backwards in her nightmare.
But she knew for sure that she was not dreaming. And she certainly was not sleeping. She was too cold and wet to sleep. Besides, who could sleep standing up, much less slogging along a road that had turned to mud?
Suddenly, screams pierced the dark, worse than any nightmare.
“They’re coming!”
“They’re coming!”
A glaring white light almost as bright as a locomotive raced straight at them. Men and women scurried off the road, dragging their children into the ditches and shoving them through the hedges. Eight huge white firehorses galloped up the road towing a freight wagon on which the Coal and Iron Police mounted a gasoline dynamo and an electric searchlight. Its only purpose was to terrorize. The miners’ wives had named it the Cyclops.
Their march was twenty miles short of Pittsburgh, and they were pressing on through the night, hoping to reach a farm where philanthropists and progressive church people were erecting a tent city. In this place, they dreamed, they would find hot food and dry blankets.
When the Cyclops had gone and Mary was helping people to their feet, a deep despair descended upon her. The cause seemed hopeless. But worse than her fear that the march and the strikes would achieve nothing was the bleak realization there existed in the world a brand of human being that wanted to attack with something as diabolically cruel as the Cyclops. A tiny, tiny minority, her brother always said, but he was wrong. It had taken many to dream up such a monstrosity, many to build it, and many, many more to allow it.
“Cyclops!”
