AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The yellow balloon had drifted on the light wind. Now that it was no longer directly overhead, Bell could read huge black letters on its side:
VOTES FOR WOMEN
“A suffragette?”
“A suffragist,” Edna Matters corrected him.
“What’s the distinction?”
“A suffragette tries to convert men to the cause of enfranchisement.”
“I heard Amanda Faire at Madison Square Garden,” said Bell, recalling a statuesque redhead who had enthralled her mostly male audience.
“The fair Amanda is a shining example of a suffragette. A suffragist converts women. You’ll get further with Nellie if you understand that women will gain the right to vote when all women agree that enfranchisement is a simple matter of justice.”
“What about the men?”
“If they want their meals cooked, shirts ironed, and beds warmed, they will have no choice but to go along. Or so Nellie believes . . . And by the way, you’ll get nowhere if you ever mention Amanda Faire in her company.”
“Rivals?”
“Fire and ice.”
Archie Abbott hurried up, shielding his eyes to inspect the balloon. “Get ready for a speech if that’s Nellie Matters.”
“Do you know her?”
“I heard her in Illinois last fall at a county fair. Two hundred feet in the air, she delivered a William Jennings Bryan stem-winder that had the ladies eyeing their husbands like candidates for a mass hanging.”
“This is her sister,” said Bell, “E. M. Hock . . . May I present my good friend Archibald Angell Abbott IV?”
The redheaded, blue-blooded Archie whisked his bowler off his head and beamed a smile famous in New York for quickening the heartbeats of New York heiresses and their social climbing mothers and arousing the suspicions of their newly wealthy fathers. “A pleasure, Miss Hock. And may I say that rumors I have heard among journalists that you are a woman are borne out splendidly.”
Bell could not help but compare the chilly response when he uttered a similar compliment to the warm smile Archie received f
rom Edna.
“How’d you happen to get here so quickly?” Archie asked her. “The fire is still smoldering.”
“I was passing by on my way back from Indian Territory.”
Archie stared at the buckboard. “In that?”
“Reporting on ‘oil fever’ takes me places the trains don’t visit.”
“I salute your enterprise and your bravery. Speaking of oil fever, Isaac—I’m sure you’ve heard this already, Miss Hock—the wildcatters are blaming Standard Oil for the fire.”
“Did you interview any witnesses who presented evidence to support their contention?” asked Bell.
“Mostly, like you said, they heard that somebody saw Straub, somewhere—that’s Big Pete Straub, Miss Hock, a Standard—”
“Mr. Straub was just promoted to refinery police superintendent,” Edna interrupted.
“Which means he travels anywhere he pleases,” said Bell. “Go on, Archie.”
“I did find one guy who claimed to see Mr. Straub renting a horse in Fort Scott.”
“Did he see the horse?”
