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He staggered to his feet, vaguely aware that a thunderbolt had slammed him back through the windows. He had landed on the widow’s walk floor. He knew he hadn’t taken a direct hit; neither his skin nor his clothing was burned. But his heart was pounding, as if the immense surge of electricity passing so near had almost stopped it. His lungs felt half-paralyzed, hardly able to pump air, until he collected his spirit and demanded they get back on the job.
His vision cleared. He saw columns of flame fringed with black smoke.
In the refinery yard, fireballs danced jigs among the tanks.
Bell scanned the chaos below for signs of Nellie and quickly realized that what looked like chaos was orderly chaos. Thanks to the Van Dorn advance warning, the men running up and down Constable Street and dashing in and out of the refinery gates were moving with purpose. The company’s firemen hurried through the yards, ringing bells and dragging hose. Blazing oil overflowed from a burning tank. Workmen moved swiftly to pump oil from tanks near the fire to distant empty tanks and into barges on the waterfront. Others dug trenches to divert burning oil from vulnerable tanks.
Nellie was gone. But Bell was convinced that she would not run from the fires she had set. She would stay and finish what she had started. She would not find it easy. Prepared for the battle, the Constable Hook refinery she was trying to destroy was the best defended in the world. It was fighting for its life but not yet desperate.
If Bell knew Nellie, that would not discourage her. The question was how would one woman alone continue to attack? He stayed on his widow’s walk vantage point to find the answer.
A tank roof blew. Thick crude oil bubbled out. The side walls collapsed and a river of crude rushed down the hill. The black torrent split where the slope flattened. Some of it collected, forming a half-acre black lake. Shimmering in the heat, it roared spontaneously into flames. Globs of flaming tar flew in the air and landed on tank roofs. Firemen climbed the tanks with shovels and hoses. They extinguished the fires on all but one. It ignited with a roar and gushed smoke that the flames sucked in and flung at the sky.
The crude that continued to rush down the hill was flowing toward the waterfront. The river split again suddenly and the main branch rampaged onto the docks, caught fire, and ignited stacks of case oil. Mooring lines and tug hawsers were set alight, and as the flames consumed them, they parted, sending ships and workboats adrift on a tide of burning oil. The ships caught fire and burned swiftly. Flames leaped up rigging faster than sailors could climb. Tugboats raced to the rescue and batted flames down with torrents from their fire nozzles.
The second stream of oil veered below the docks and splashed against a three-story hotel and restaurant on a pier in the Kill with a roof board that read:
GOOD NEWS CAFÉ
ROW, FISH, EAT DINNER, AND DRINK A SOCIAL GLASS
The oil ignited. Flame flashed up the restaurant’s wooden walls. A man and woman in cook whites ran out lugging a cash register and a glass case of cigars. The burning oil encircled the building and closed in on the couple from both sides. They ran toward the water on a path swiftly narrowing. The fire chased them onto the dock to the water’s edge, where they teetered, clutching their rescued treasures.
If I hadn’t missed my shot at Nellie Matters, Bell thought, these people would be safe.
A B&O railroad tugboat swooped against the dock. Deckhands pulled them aboard. But the burning oil chasing them splashed off the dock onto the water. Floating, still burning, it surrounded the tugboat with a ring of fire. Six tugs steamed to its aid, fire nozzles pumping water to confine the burning oil while their stricken sister steamed away and wetting down one another’s wheelhouses to cool paint bubbling in the heat. The tugs formed a cordon, spraying to prevent the fire from spreading on the water to nearby ships and piers.
After Isaac Bell saw the burning oil encircle the restaurant, and then the couple, and then the tug, he suddenly realized how Nellie Matters would attack next. He turned around and looked up the hill. The slope was a shallow incline and The Hook saloon was tall. He climbed out the window again and onto the roof of the widow’s walk. From that vantage he could see over the city’s tenement roofs. The swiftly expanding oil refinery had continued building higher up the hill. Tank yards and kerosene and gasoline stills were everywhere, below, around, and up behind the city.
Now he saw Constable Hook as Nellie saw it. He had dubbed her “heiress” to The Hook saloon, but, in fact, she was also heiress to her father’s dream of building on a hilly cape an ultramodern gravity-fed refinery with access to the sea. The refinery that her father had envisioned and the boomtown that sprang up with it were one in her mind. If Bill Matters couldn’t have the refinery, having lost it to Rockefeller, he would destroy it. Since he was locked in a jail cell, Nellie Matters would destroy it for him. By their way of thinking, the city it had nurtured and ultimately surrounded did not exist.
He swung back in the window and raced down the stairs and across the street to the gates. Wally Kisley was there. “Did you see Nellie?” Bell asked.
“No. I was just looking for you. You O.K.?”
“We forced her hand,” Bell said. “This wasn’t her first choice,
setting it off down here.”
“It’s gonna be a record breaker anyway. Good thing the company doubled up on firemen.”
“If we hadn’t blocked the high ground, she’d have attacked from up there. You can’t see from here, but I saw it from the roof. A mammoth crude oil tank above the city.”
Wally nodded. “Number 14. The first of the new crude storage tanks to feed the stills below. One hundred thousand gallons.”
“That’s her goal—a Johnstown Flood of burning oil.”
—
Wally Kisley was incredulous. “Why attack the city?”
“There is a deranged logic to her scheme,” said Bell. “While everyone’s trying to protect the city, she can concentrate on the refinery.”
He borrowed a police sergeant and a squad of local cops from Eddie Edwards’ headquarters at the refinery gates. The cops led him and Wally on a shortcut past twisted ruins of burned-out tanks and through tank yards and stills. Firemen were deluging them with hose water to cool them. They entered the city streets, passing a school from which the children had been sent home and a hospital into which injured firefighters were stumbling.
Bell spotted Edna Matters, somber in black. She had an Evening Sun press card in her hatband and was taking down in shorthand the words of the rail-thin, harried-looking chief of Constable Hook’s volunteer firefighters. “Gossip that we refused to fight Standard Oil’s fire is bunk. We are protecting twenty thousand people in our city—families, friends, and neighbors.”
“Can you speak to the rumor that water is running so low that you won’t have enough pressure to fill your hoses?”
