The Assassin, Page 3

  “It’ll take your commission years, if ever, to change a damned thing,” Spike retorted. “But folks in Kansas are itching for a fight right now. We’ll beat the Standard in the State House—outlaw rebates and guarantee equal shipping rates for all. And if the Standard don’t like it, Kansas will build its own refinery—or, better yet,” he added with a loud laugh, “buy this one from me so I can focus my thoughts on my pipe line.”

  Isaac Bell heard a false note in that laugh. Spike Hopewell was not as sure of himself as he boasted.

  —

  Could you snipe a man in the neck at seven hundred yards?

  Ask the winner of the gold medal for the President’s Match of 1902.

  Could you even see him a third of a mile away?

  Read the commendatory letter signed by Theodore Roosevelt in which TR, the hero of San Juan Hill, saluted the sharpshooter who won the President’s Match for the Military Rifle Championship of the United States.

  Doubt me?

  Read about bull’s-eyes riddled at a thousand yards.

  Did President Roosevelt shout Bully! the assassin smiled, when the champion took “French leave”?

  But who’d have had the nerve to tell Teddy that the deadliest sniper in the Army deserted his regiment?

  —

  “Mr. Hopewell,” said Isaac Bell, “if I can’t persuade you to do the right thing by your fellow independents, would you at least answer some questions about one of your former partners?”

  “Bill Matters.”

  “How did you know I meant Matters? You’ve had many partners, wildcat drilling partners, pipe line partners, refinery partners.” Bell named three.

  Hopewell answered slowly and deliberately as if addressing a backward child. “The commission that hired your detective agency is investigating Standard Oil. Bill took up with the Standard. He sits to lunch with their executive committee in New York. Lunch—Mr. Anti-Trust Corporations Commission Detective—is where they hatch their schemes.”

  Bell nodded, encouraging Hopewell to keep talking now that he had gotten him wound up. His investigation so far had been a study in how the giant corporation fired imaginations and spawned fantasies. Standard Oil had been at the top of the heap since before most people were born. It seemed natural that the trust would possess mystical powers.

  “Were you surprised?”

  “Not when I thought about it. The Standard spots value. Oil, land, machinery, men. They pay for the best. Bill Matters was the best.”

  “I meant were you surprised when Bill Matters changed sides?”

  Spike Hopewell raised his eyes to look Bell straight in the face. Then he surprised the detective by speaking softly, with emotion. “You spouted the names of a few of my partners. But Bill and I were different. We started together. We fought men, shoulder to shoulder, and we beat ’em. Teamsters that made grizzlies look gentle. We beat them. We thought so alike, we knew ahead of time what the other was thinking. So when you ask was I surprised Bill went with the Standard, my answer is, I was until I thought it over. You see, Bill was never the same after he lost his boy.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Bell. “What boy? I’m told he has daughters.”

  “The poor little squirt ran off. Bill never heard from him again.”

  “Why did you say ‘poor little squirt.’ An unhappy child?”

  “No, no, no. Smiley, laughy little fellow I never thought was unhappy. But all of a sudden—poof—he was gone. Bill never got over it.”

  “When did he leave?”

  “Must be seven or eight years ago.”

  “Before Bill joined the Standard?”

  “Long before. Looking back, I realize that the boy running off broke him. He was never the same. Harder. Hard as adamantine—not that either of us was choirboys. Choirboys don’t last in the oil business. But somewhere along the line, Bill got his moral trolley wires crossed and—”

  Hopewell stopped abruptly. He stared past Bell at the gasoline storage tank. His jaw worked. He seemed, Bell thought, to be reconsidering.

  “But if you want to understand the oil business, Mr. Detective, you better understand that Bill Matters was not the first to give in to Standard Oil. Half the men in their New York office were destroyed by Rockefeller before he hired them. John D. Rockefeller, he’s the devil you should be after.”

  “What if I told you I suspect that one of those newer men like Bill Matters can lead me to him?”

  “I’d tell you that no man in his right mind would bite the hand feeding him like he’s feeding Bill.”

  “Would you have switched sides if the Standard asked?”

  The oil man drew himself erect and glared at Isaac Bell. “They did ask. Asked me the same time they asked Bill.”

  “Obviously you declined. Did you consider it?”

  “I told them to go to blazes.”

  Bell asked, “Can’t you see that I’m offering you an opportunity to help send them there?”

  He pointed down at the orderly rows of tanks and the belching furnaces, then across the forest of derricks looming over the roofs of what must have been a peaceful town. A gust of wind swept the smoke aside. Suddenly he could see clear to the farthest of the wooden towers.

  “You built your refinery to serve independents. That’s where your heart lies. Wouldn’t you agree, sir, that you owe it to all independent oil men to testify?”

  Hopewell shook his head.

  Bell had one card left. He bet the ranch on it. “How much did the Standard pay for a barrel of crude when you drilled two years ago.”

  “A dollar thirty-five a barrel.”

  “How much are they paying now? Provided you could deliver it.”

  “Seventy cents a barrel.”

  “They raised the price artificially high, nearly doubled it, to encourage you to drill. You and your fellow wildcatters did the Standard’s exploratory work for them, at your own expense. Thanks to your drilling, they know the extent of the Kansas fields and how they stack up against the Indian Territory and Oklahoma fields. They suckered you, Mr. Hopewell.”

  “More homework, Mr. Bell?” said Spike Hopewell. “Is that the Van Dorn Detective motto: ‘Do your homework’?”

  “The Van Dorn motto is ‘We never give up! Never!’”

  Hopewell grinned. “That’s my motto, too . . . Well, it’s hard to say no to a man who’s done his homework. And damned-near impossible to a man who won’t give up . . . O.K., put ’er there!”

  Spike Hopewell thrust a powerful hand into Bell’s. “What do you want to know first?”

  Bell stepped closer to take it, saying, “I’m mighty curious about those tricks up your sleeve.”

  Hopewell stumbled backward, clutching his throat.

  3

  Still gripping the hand that Hopewell had extended, Isaac Bell heard a muted gunshot and realized that the sound was delayed by the time it took a bullet to fly an enormous distance. He pulled Spike down on the cornice’s narrow plank floor, behind the partial shelter of the railings. But it was too late to protect him. The oil man was dead. A slug had pierced his throat and torn out the back of his neck.

  A second slug passed through the space that Bell’s own head had occupied a half a heartbeat earlier. It twanged against the steel crown pulley, ricocheted, and splintered oak. Bell looked for the source. The shot echoed crazily. It seemed to come from the west, where a plain riddled with gullies drained toward a creek. On the far side of the creek, low, wooded hills stretched to the horizon. He spotted a flicker of motion to the north. A figure was climbing down a derrick at an astonishing seven hundred yards’ distance.

  Isaac Bell plunged three rungs at a time down the ladder.

  His Locomobile was parked between the slanting legs of the derrick and the engine house. Still hot, the motor fired on the second spin. He leaped behind the steering wheel and thundered off in the direction the shot had come from, weaving a wild path through the densely packed oil derricks and skidding around drill machine
ry, pump houses, engines, and machine shops. When he burst out of the last row of derricks, he saw a big man on horseback galloping across the open plain that stretched beyond the oil field.

  Bell raced after him.

  The fleeing rider was well mounted on a strong, big-boned animal of fully seventeen hands. Bell shoved his accelerator to the floorboards and wrenched his steering wheel side to side as he plowed his big auto over rough ground, slewing around hummocks and dodging gullies.

  Ahead of the horseman, the grassland ended abruptly at a thick wood. If he got inside the trees, he was free. Bell drove faster. The deep cut of the creek bed separated the grassland from the trees. Bell exulted; he had him trapped.

  He yanked open his exhaust bypass for maximum power. Unimpeded by back pressure, the Locomobile’s four cylinders roared with all their might.

  The horseman galloped straight at the creek and dug his spurs in. The horse gathered its legs and jumped. Its forelegs struck the far bank. Its left rear hoof slipped down the earthen wall of the creek. The right hoof dug into the grass, and the animal scrambled free and galloped for the trees.

  Isaac Bell was forced to slam on the Locomobile’s anemic brakes and slide the auto into a sideways drift to stop before it tumbled into the creek. He yanked his Winchester from its scabbard buckled to the passenger seat. The horseman was already inside the woods, partially screened by the thinly scattered outer fringe of trees. Bell saw one chance and opened fire.

  He worked the Winchester’s ejection lever in a blur of motion. Had a cartridge jammed, the pivoting lever would have snapped in his hands. The heavy rifle boomed repeatedly. The horseman’s hat flew in the air. He swayed and started to fall off. A flailing hand gripped his saddle horn and he stayed on his mount. Before Bell could fire again, horse and rider found the shelter deep inside the woods.

  Bell heard a loud report behind him. Another gunman? It seemed to come from the oil derricks. It was followed immediately by a metallic clanging noise like a blacksmith’s hammer. Then he heard a sharp retort like a blasting cap or a quarter stick of dynamite.

  A blinding light flashed from the refinery.

  A hollow Boom! shook the air. The explosion blew the top off a crude oil tank that stood in the outermost ring of tanks. Shattered planking tufted into the sky. Black smoke pillared. The first explosion, Bell surmised, had ignited the natural gas that rose from the crude oil and collected in the top of the tanks. The gas explosion had set the oil itself to burning.

  That it threatened to destroy Spike Hopewell’s entire refinery was evidenced by the sight of gangs of oil workers arriving on the run with shovels and picks to dig a trench between the burning tank and its neighbors. They converged from the derricks and the refinery, the rag town, and the saloons. A gang rolled out a cannon on a two-wheeled gun carriage.

  A field gun would be a baffling sight had not Bell studied the oil business from top to bottom to prepare for the Corporations Commission investigation. Regular procedure for fighting an oil tank fire was to shoot holes in the tank below the liquid line to drain the oil that fed the fire. Artillery allowed the firefighters to stay outside the lethal range of explosions.

  One of the gun carriage wheels slipped into a shallow gully and sunk axle-deep in the wet, spongy ground. Bell raced to help, driving the Locomobile across the prairie ground as fast as the clumped grass would allow. He could see at the base of the roiling smoke column a diamond-bright core of flame growing wider, taller, and brighter.

  Bell heaved his steering wheel hard left and drove as close as he dared alongside the cannon while keeping his own wheels on firm ground. He threw the towrope he kept coiled around the spare tires. The gun crew tied onto the carriage trail. Bell accelerated the powerful auto and dragged the cannon out of the gully. Plowing ahead slowly enough to let the men guiding it run alongside, he pulled it into a position that gave them a clear shot at the burning tank.

  The intense heat was making the crude oil boil and foam into a maelstrom of red flame, white steam, and black smoke. Already the heat was too intense for the ditching gang. The men backed away. Suddenly the boiling, foaming oil tank exploded. Tentacles of liquid flame shot into the sky and cascaded to the ground, falling on neighboring tanks.

  The firefighters dropped their shovels and ran. They barely escaped. Two more explosions in quick time sent lids flying. Two more tanks gushed geysers of flame that fountained skyward and collapsed on tanks as yet unscathed. An explosion breached the wall of a tank. Oil spilled, tumbling over the ground, across ditches, and splashing against a burning shack, leveling the flimsy wooden structure, and igniting.

  The fires spread, gaining speed.

  The flames leaped the outer ditch around the refinery. Several buildings erupted into flame, and soon the fire was slithering past the refinery toward the biggest holding tank in Kansas, which Spike Hopewell had built to store his glut of gasoline.

  The cannon crew exchanged frightened looks.

  “Shoot!” said Isaac Bell. “On the jump!”

  More frightened looks. Most scattered, leaving Bell with three brave men: an independent wildcatter sporting a boss’s knee-high riding boots and watch chain, a gray-bearded Civil War vet in a forage cap, and a young farmer in a battered slouch hat.

  “Can’t shoot gasoline,” said the wildcatter.

  “Too volatile,” said the vet. “It’ll blow that tank like a nitro shot. Kill everyone within a mile.”

  “But if the cannon doesn’t set it off,” said Bell, “the fire will.”

  He thought fast and pointed at the 0-6-0 switch engine idling on the refinery siding. “Who can run that locomotive?”

  “Me,” said the bearded old soldier.

  “Steam it to this end of the siding close as you can to the tank.”

  Bell pointed at a giant spool of drilling cable. The other two understood his plan immediately. Terrified expressions on their smoke-grimed faces said they didn’t like it.

  “It’s our only chance,” said Bell.

  The spool was six feet high. They extracted the loose end of the cable from the coil, put their shoulders to the spool, and commenced rolling it to uncoil the cable. Men watching saw what they were up to and came to help.

  A rigger ran up with a monkey wrench and a sack of cable clamps, nuts, and bolts. “You boys must be loco,” he shouted over the roar of fire. “Guess I’ll join the crowd.” He bent the loose end of the cable into a loop, clamped it together, and dragged it toward the locomotive, while Isaac Bell and the others dragged their end to the gasoline tank.

  Tanks were burning behind them and to either side. Columns of smoke rose from the incinerated crude, swirling like tornadoes. They climbed swiftly, joined high overhead, and turned the sky black.

  Pursued by the fire, Bell and his helpers pulled the cable to the foot of the gasoline tank. It was as high as a three-story house. A ladder led up its iron side. Bell slung the loop over his shoulder and climbed. The men below pushed the stiff cable up, trying to relieve him of some of the weight. He was breathing hard when he reached the top and swung onto the wooden roof. The farmer followed close behind carrying a crowbar and an ax.

  “Can you run get me that monkey wrench?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Chop a hole in the roof,” said Bell, swinging the ax with all his might. “Run,” he said again. “In case I throw sparks.”

  The fires were advancing quickly. Another oil tank exploded and thick burning crude flew through the air. With very little time to pierce the roof, he thanked his lucky stars for the Northwest timber case when he’d masqueraded as a lumberjack. Tar, wood chips, and splinters flew.

  He chopped open a hole at the edge of the roof, just inside the iron wall. The fumes that suddenly vented were almost overwhelming. His head spun. The farmer came up the ladder again, gasping for wind. He passed Bell the monkey wrench.

  “What’s it for?”

  “Anchor,” said Bell, fastening the wrench’s jaws fir
mly around the cable. “Run while you can.”

  He shoved the wrench and the cable loop through the hole and wedged it tightly with the crowbar and the ax. Then he signaled the Civil War vet, dropped down the ladder as fast as he could, and ran toward him.

  A space of about two football fields separated the gasoline tank from the switch engine, which backed away, drawing the slack out of the drilling cable. When it was tight at a long, shallow angle between the top of the tank and the siding, Bell swung aboard the engine. “I’ll take her.”

  “Welcome to it.”

  Bell put his hands on the throttle and quadrant, admitted steam to the cylinders, and backed away smoothly. “Nice and easy, now.”

  “Fine touch,” said the vet. “Where’d you learn it?”

  Bell eyed the cable, which was tightening like a bowstring. “Borrowed a locomotive when I was in college.”

  The drilling cable was strong enough to do the job. And the switch engine had the power. But would his makeshift anchor hold fast to the tank’s iron wall?

  More steam. Bell peered through the smoke. Was the wall bulging or was that wishful thinking?

  “Where’d you take the locomotive?”

  “Miss Porter’s.”

  “Girls’ school?”

  “Young ladies.”

  A little more steam. It looked like a bulge.

  Suddenly the cable flew high in the air.

  “The wire busted!” yelled the vet.

  “No,” said Bell, “the wall.”

  A section of the tank’s iron wall, a panel six feet wide, popped a row of rivets, peeled open like a sardine can, and bent toward the ground. Gasoline cascaded.

  Isaac Bell held his breath.

  One of two things would happen now and it was even money which.

  With luck, the escaping gasoline would drown the sparks struck by clashing metal.

  But if it didn’t—if the river pushed volatile gas fumes ahead of it—the sparks would detonate the fumes and blow the refinery, the oil field, the hamlet of wooden houses, the boomtown’s shacks, and the rag town’s tents to the other side of Kingdom Come.