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Chimneys billowing smoke, stern wheel pounding foam, an enormous steamboat rounded the point. It was immensely long, and tall, and black as coal.
39
“Is that a cannon on the foredeck?” asked Archie.
Bell shielded his eyes with cupped hands and focused on the gun. “Two-inch Hotchkiss,” he said. “The Navy had them on a gunboat Wish and I boarded in New Orleans.”
“Where the heck did they get it?”
“More to the point,” said Bell, “who are they and what do they want?”
“I can’t quite make out her nameboard.”
“Vulcan King.”
The black giant came closer.
One after another, then by the hundreds, the women pitching tents and the men building barricades stopped what they were doing. Ten thousand stood stock-still, waiting for the black apparition to turn midriver and point its cannon at them. It steamed very slowly, its giant wheel barely stirring the river, closer and closer, at a pace no less menacing for its majesty.
Directly opposite the point, it stopped, hol
ding against the current. Not a living figure showed on deck, not a deckhand, not a fireman. The boiler deck and engine doors were shut, the pilot invisible behind sun-glared glass. Ten thousand people held their breath. What, Isaac Bell asked himself again, have I led these people into?
It blasted its whistle. Everyone jumped.
Then it moved forward, slicing the current, up the river, swung around the bend of the Homestead Works, and disappeared.
“Where’s it going?” asked Archie.
“My guess is, to collect the Pinkertons,” said Bell. “We’ll have to find out. But if I’m right, then the miners hold this point of land, and the owners hold the river. And if that isn’t the beginning of a war, I don’t know what is.”
* * *
Dried off and clothes changed, Bell went looking for Camilla’s pilot.
He found Captain Jennings and his son in a Smithfield Street saloon up the slope from where their boats were docked. The two pilots congratulated him on the strikers’ safe passage.
“Did you see the Vulcan King?” Bell asked.
“Hard to miss,” said the younger Jennings, and his father declared, “Who in hell would paint a steamboat black?”
“Who owns her?”
Both pilots shrugged. “Never seen her before. We was just asking ourselves, was we thrown off by the black? But even imagining her white, she does not look familiar.”
“Where do you suppose it came from?”
“She weren’t built in Pittsburgh or we’d know her for sure. That leaves Louisville or Cincinnati.”
“Nowhere else?”
“It took a heck of a yard to build a boat that size. Like I say, Louisville or Cincinnati. I’d say Cincinnati, wouldn’t you, Pa?”
The older Jennings agreed. “One of the big old yards like Held & Court.”
“They still in business, Pa?”
“They’re the last that make ’em like that anymore.”
