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The muckers were just finishing clearing rock when water suddenly gushed into the heading. A water-bearing seam had opened, disturbed, perhaps, by the last shift’s blast.
“Il fiume!” cried a laborer.
The others laughed, and the Irishman explained to Bell. “Ignorant wop thinks the river’s busting through the roof.”
“Why are they laughing at him?”
“They’re not as dumb as him. They know there’s nine hundred feet of shale and a hundred feet of solid granite between the roof and the river. It ain’t river water. It’s just water that was in the rocks. How much you think it’s running? Hundred gallons a minute?”
He gave Bell the broad wink of a know-it-all barfly. “Feller told me the company knew they’d hit water along this stretch, but kept it quiet. If you get my meaning . . .”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” said Bell. “I’m new here. If they knew they were going to hit water, why did they keep it quiet?”
“The way it works; they bid low to get the job, but they’ll make it back with extras. They gotta grout the water-bearing seams. And that don’t come cheap. Before they grout, they’ll need more pumps, and pipes to divert the water. Might even have to build a reinforced concrete bulkhead to fill the entire heading to keep from flooding.”
“You mean they get their cake and eat it, too.”
“That’s what the feller told me. Smart man . . .” The foreman’s voice trailed off, and he frowned. The water was running harder. Some of the other muckers who had laughed at the Nervous Nellie moments ago were looking anxious.
“Calm down, you dumb guineas. Calm down. Back to work. Calm down. No worry.”
But the laborers continued casting anxious looks at the face of the heading, where the seam gushed, and at water rising over the muck car tracks.
“Il fiume!”
Others repeated the cry. “Il fiume!”
“There’s no ‘fu-may,’ dammit,” yelled the foreman. “It’s just rock water.”
A laborer, who was older than the others, pointed with a trembling finger at the cleft in the stone where the water gushed.
“Mano Nero.”
“Black Hand?” The foreman seized a young laborer he used as a translator. “What the hell’s he talking about?”
“Mano Nero. Sabotage.”
“That’s nuts! Tell them it’s nuts.”
The translator tried, but they shouted him down. “They say someone didn’t pay.”
“Pay what?” asked Isaac Bell. It sounded like word of the Black Hand letter had trickled down to the workmen.
“The dollars we’re supposed to give from our pay,” said the translator.
“It’s a Black Hand shakedown,” said the foreman. “They make ’em fork over a buck on payday.”
The lights flickered.
Every laborer in the mucking gang dropped their picks and shovels and fled down the tunnel. They ran in headlong confusion toward the shaft, splashing through the ankle-deep water, tripping on the muck car tracks, shoving and trampling each other in their panic. The foreman charged after them, bellowing to no avail.
Isaac Bell followed at his own pace. There would be a long wait for the hoist to come down the shaft and load all the men. Nor could he believe that the Hudson River had breeched a thousand feet of stone.
But when he got to the surface, rumor was rampaging through the labor camp, infecting not only the panicked Italian laborers but the Irish and German engineers, machine operators, foremen, and Board of Water Supply Police, and the Negro rock drillers and mule drivers. The Black Hand had sabotaged the siphon. The Hudson River had broken into the tunnel. Even the engineers, who should know better, were scratching their heads. Was the tunnel lost?
None of it was true, and it would be cleared up. The rock water would be pumped down, the cleft seam grouted, and the digging would continue. But, at the moment, newspaper scouts were wiring New York. On Manhattan and Brooklyn streets fifty miles away, newsboys would soon be hawking the baseless story.
“Extra! Extra!”
