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“Did you manage a look at the rifle?”
Hatfield said, “The sheriff cooperated. The rifle smelled recently fired. Four rounds still in the magazine, which holds five.”
“Telescope?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe that’s why the assassin missed.” Bell turned back to the newspaper publisher.
“Can you tell me what you remember?”
“The window broke. I was setting type for my editorial by the light of the window. All at once, the glass shattered.”
“What happened next?”
“I’m afraid my answer is not going to help you, Detective Bell. What happened next was I woke up in a strange bed with my wife holding a cool cloth to my brow. Looked around. Walt was standing nearby with his hands on his guns as if to discourage additional potshots.”
Bell asked, “Would you feel up to visiting your newspaper?”
“I was heading there when Walt suggested we have a snort, and then you walked in.”
They walked the long way to the Humble Clarion, taking back streets and alleys to skirt the mob collected around the gusher. The riggers were struggling to cap the new well, while ditchdiggers excavated a catch basin to contain the oil that was raining down like a monsoon. The train had gone. Most of the men aboard it had stayed.
The Clarion occupied the first floor of a corner building. C. C. Gustafson led them into the composing room where he set type. “It was that window,” he said. “My wife replaced the glass, and finished setting the editorial for me. After picking up all the type that went flying.”
Bell looked for bullet holes in the walls. He remarked that the office had been freshly painted.
“Janet Sue cleaned up the mess soon as the sheriff was done looking things over.”
“Did Mrs. Gustafson happen to mention how many bullet holes she plastered before painting?”
“She told me three.”
Bell looked to Hatfield. “How many rounds had been fired from the Springfield the sheriff found?”
“One.”
Isaac Bell stood in the window. It fronted on the side street. Across the street was a frame building under construction. Carpenters building the platform were hammering floorboards onto ground-floor joists. The otherwise-open lot allowed a long view over low-lying neighbors to the tall false front that topped the two-story Toppling Derrick saloon on the far side of Main Street three blocks away.
—
Averell Comstock walked at a remarkably brisk pace for a man his age thanks, he was quick to boast, to a regimen he had started when he first came to New York twenty years ago. He walked every midmorning from the office at 26 Broadway to the East River, where he could order oysters shucked fresh off the boat. He ignored the ketchup and crackers, preferring the briny taste of the bivalves unadulterated, and leaving room for coffee and cake from a food stall on Fulton Street, where he had fallen half in love with a middle-aged widow who h
ad a hard face softened by beautiful blue eyes.
She stirred in the sugar for him. Just this week she had begun to insist on refilling his cup at no charge, stirring in more sugar with a pretty smile. What would she think, Comstock wondered, if she learned that the old man in the ancient coat was ten thousand times richer than any customer she had ever served?
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“A little under the weather.” For several days he had felt not quite himself.
“I thought you looked pale. I hope you’ve not been eating oysters. They say there’s typhoid fever.”
“I eat only those from Staten Island,” he said. “It’s the Jamaica Bay oysters that carry the typhoid.”
“Well, I hope you feel better.”
“Well enough to walk down here,” he said. “That’s all I ask.”
