Lawless (69 page)

The press of business, as well as the ineptness of underlings, had kept Thomas Courtleigh from dealing with Gideon Kent as he deserved. But Kent’s punishment had never been rescinded, only postponed. The subscription materials, and the list of charities, had so enraged Courtleigh, he’d decided to make a new effort to finally administer that punishment. Preferably before Kent had a chance to see the disgusting, overblown book published by his company in Boston.

Of course, if Lorenzo Hubble had done his job a year ago, Courtleigh wouldn’t have been forced to suffer such feelings of frustration now.

Standing among his guests, he cocked his head suddenly. The others hadn’t caught the sound, but he had been anticipating it, and heard it easily. In the drive on the far side of the mansion, a carriage was arriving.

He excused himself. A footman came onto the terrace and intercepted him, saying quietly, “He’s here, sir.”

Courtleigh started for the house, murmuring about an urgent business matter. A vestryman’s wife broke away from a group and rushed to catch him.

“Tom dear, do set my mind at ease before you go. This urgent business has nothing to do with that railroad strike in the East, does it?”

He lied. “No, Lilly. That’s a small, isolated affair in West Virginia. Of no consequence.”

Actually West Virginia was the lightning heralding an almost certain storm—a storm that could conceivably spread over several states and buffet certain sectors of their economy quite severely. But he didn’t let on. He continued to parrot the official line of the secret consortium to which he belonged.

“It’s only the work of a very small number of Marxians desperate to disrupt the status quo.”

She fanned her bosom with a kerchief. “Oh, thank heaven. Several of my friends have been saying those anarchists would cause riots out here.”

“I sincerely hope not, Lilly. And I really doubt it. As I said, there are just a few radicals involved.”

“Thank you, Tom. You’ve reassured me. I told my friends that if anyone knew, it would be you.”

Courtleigh nodded and moved on. Actually, he believed there was a fifty-fifty chance of the strike reaching Illinois. He was preparing for the worst, and wished he could have given Lilly reassurances based on those secret plans.

If it does spread here
—
or anywhere
—
decent people needn’t worry. The strike, and the strikers, are going to be crushed without mercy.

Lorenzo Hubble was waiting in the library.

Hubble was a slovenly young man who weighed nearly two hundred and fifty pounds. He had a wispy goatee, a mustache, and a round head already devoid of hair. He wheezed when he spoke, and his clothes always fit badly; he was forced to buy for size rather than style.

Self-educated, Hubble had come out of Conley’s Patch. He was one of nine attorneys in the Wisconsin and Prairie’s legal department, and not even a senior member of the staff. But in some ways he was closer to the president than any other person in the organization. It wasn’t entirely accidental.

Hubble had joined the line several years earlier. At that time, Courtleigh had been confronting a crisis. One of his vice presidents, an important man on the W & P, had been on the griddle because of charges brought privately by the father of a fourteen-year-old girl from one of the poor sections. The girl was expecting a child, the vice president was married, and the father wanted fifty thousand dollars—the first year.

Courtleigh called a meeting of the legal staff. He stated his position. The vice president had to be protected, but the payment was a precedent he didn’t care to set. Were there suggestions?

To the distaste of less aggressive colleagues, Lorenzo Hubble immediately volunteered to assume the burden of handling the entire problem. He promised that Mr. Courtleigh would not be unhappy with the results of his action. Several days later, the Chicago newspapers published accounts of a curious and coincidental double death. On her way home from the office of a physician who had examined her and found her pregnant, a young girl had drowned in the Chicago River. Not an hour later, her father had been shot during an attempted holdup.

The police couldn’t connect the crimes, nor locate the man who’d made the girl pregnant. The victims had no other living relatives, and the gentleman, who’d brought the girl to the doctor and paid spot cash for the examination to which she cheerfully submitted, had insisted the doctor turn down the gas in his waiting room. In that way the man’s face was never seen. All the physician could say was that the man had a huge belly, and breathed with difficulty because of his weight—and heaven knew there were hundreds like that in Chicago.

Courtleigh’s trust hadn’t been misplaced. Hubble was not only ruthless beneath the bovine exterior; he was discreet. After that conference of the legal staff, he never again spoke to his employer about the girl. Courtleigh and the vice president had learned that the matter was settled only by reading the papers.

A few months later, all of Hubble’s work was rendered worthless when a heart seizure killed the vice president. But at least Courtleigh had found a valuable aide. The railroad’s general counsel and staff still handled all legal matters. The president and Lorenzo Hubble handled the illegal ones.

Hubble had come with a sheaf of papers. He began to sort various items while Courtleigh closed and locked the library’s black walnut doors, then its leaded windows. Perspiration shone on Hubble’s cheeks and upper lip as he squeezed himself into a chair. He pulled a large Havana from the inner pocket of his linen jacket. The jacket had sweat rings under the arms.

“Don’t smoke in here,” Courtleigh snapped. “You know I can’t stand the fumes in hot weather.”

Without a complaint or even a flicker of disappointment, Hubble broke the cigar and tossed it into the dark fireplace.

“What’s happened in Martinsburg?”

In reply, the lawyer chose a handwritten sheet from the material he’d spread on a small table at his elbow. Courtleigh’s eyes moved across the array of items. When he saw a folded copy of the New York
Union
with the tea bottle device on the masthead, he felt rage of the kind that had nearly overpowered him on the terrace.

Part of that rage was directed at Lorenzo Hubble. The attorney had botched only one major assignment since entering into his private relationship with the president of the W & P. After Courtleigh had seen Gideon Kent at the Philadelphia exhibition, Hubble had arranged the attempted murder on Walnut Street. Later Hubble claimed he’d hired the best men he could find. The bungler who’d driven the hack had vanished afterward without attempting to claim the second half of his fee. As a result of the fiasco, Hubble was still not fully back in Courtleigh’s good graces. It was time he tried to get there.

“—I’m sorry,” Courtleigh interrupted, aware that Hubble had been answering his question about events in Martinsburg. Firelight from the croquet court shimmered on the windowpanes. Full dark had fallen.

“This”—Hubble waved the handwritten sheet—“is the text of a telegraph message being sent tonight by Governor Mathews of West Virginia.”

“Sent to whom?”

“To President Hayes. The men I’ve posted to Martinsburg spread a lot of money around just to obtain this copy.” He extended the paper. Courtleigh gestured in an impatient way. Hubble understood that his employer wanted the message summarized. He said, “Mathews is requesting Federal troops to put down what he terms unlawful combinations and domestic violence along the Baltimore and Ohio. To quote him—
it is impossible with any force at my command to execute the laws of the state.”

“Is it really that bad?”

“No, not yet. He’s a calamity howler. The violence has been sporadic, and of a minor nature. However, large crowds are out supporting the strikers.”

Sharply, Courtleigh said, “Let’s begin to refer to them properly, Lorenzo. Not strikers. Revolutionaries. Communists.”

“Yes, of course.” The fat man smiled nervously in response to Courtleigh’s cynical smirk.

“Is any freight moving around Martinsburg?”

“Not a car.”

Courtleigh smacked his fist lightly on the mantel. “None of us wanted it to get this far. We feared it might but we hoped it wouldn’t.”

Hubble again understood perfectly. By using the plural, his employer meant the consortium. The small, informal and highly secret group of railroad presidents chaired by Tom Scott of the Pennsylvania and including Jay Gould of the Erie, John Garrett of the B & O, and several others. Courtleigh had been invited to represent lines based in the middle West.

The consortium met from time to time at Newport or White Sulphur Springs or Saratoga to decide policy matters pertaining to the welfare of all American railroads. No decisions were binding, yet the consortium’s so-called guidelines had a way of being widely observed, first by lines that were represented within the group, then by lines that were not.

“No one thought that son of a bitch Ammon would be so successful,” Courtleigh fumed. “Is he in Martinsburg?”

“Our operatives haven’t seen him, sir.”

“Then where is he?”

“Traveling, we presume.”

It outraged Courtleigh that the current trouble had been caused not by some low-class Jew radical, but by the college-educated son of a prosperous insurance executive. God knew where Robert Ammon had acquired his dangerous views. But in just a little over a month, he’d caused unprecedented damage.

Since early June, he’d been traveling from state to state organizing what he called the Trainman’s Union. It was something wholly new and very dangerous in the labor movement—an umbrella organization covering all railroad workers, from senior engineers with years of experience to the newest, lowliest switchman.

Courtleigh’s agents said the T.U. was spreading like a lightning fire on a dry prairie. The union’s actual size was very difficult to ascertain, however. The wily Ammon had taken note of how earlier brotherhoods had operated on a more or less public basis and thereby come under attack, their members threatened or harassed until the brotherhood collapsed. To prevent that, he’d instituted a policy of absolute secrecy in the T.U., complete with passwords, secret oaths and hand grips. Still, it was almost a certainty that radicals from the T.U. were behind the unlawful strike that had hit the B & O in West Virginia.

The strike had come about as a result of the implementation of a ten percent wage cut for all B & O employees earning more than a dollar a day. The cut had gone into effect the preceding Monday, July 16. Strangely, there had been no strike when Tom Scott had instituted the same sort of cut on the Pennsylvania back on June 1. Oh, there’d been complaints—even a grievance committee. But Scott had met with the committee and glibly talked away all of its objections.

Or so everyone in the consortium had thought, congratulating Scott on his victory.

The wage cut had been one of the agreed-upon strategies of the consortium. To offset shrinking profits caused by the nationwide depression, the cut was to be put into effect line by line all across the country. Courtleigh’s chief bookkeeper had already drawn up confidential schedules which would reduce the pay of all W & P employees down to the brakemen who even now received only $1.15 for a twelve-hour day—well below the brakemen’s national average of $1.75.

Obviously the Pennsylvania situation had been atypical. This past Monday, some B & O workers had walked off the job to protest the cuts. By midafternoon, however, less militant workers had gotten a few trains running again. Then, just during the past forty-eight hours, strike leaders had reached and persuaded their more timid brethren and the disruptions had begun to spread.

There were more and more walk-offs and resulting interruptions in service. Quarrelsome mobs of trainmen converged at Martinsburg, one of the B & O’s main junction points. Courtleigh believed that all the turmoil was a harbinger, the lightning visible before the storm. If matters weren’t brought under control, and quickly, Ammon’s damnable new organization could well launch the first national strike in American history.

And once there was that kind of precedent for other unions to follow, the gates of hell were open.

The telegraph message from Governor Mathews to the White House was encouraging, however. Courtleigh and his fellow owners believed they had a friend in President Hayes. The three-time Republican governor of Ohio had in effect lost the ’76 election to the former Democratic governor of New York, Samuel Tilden, who had campaigned as a vigorous foe of corruption; he’d helped smash the Tweed Ring.

Last November Tilden had piled up slightly more than 4,284,000 popular votes as opposed to a little over 4,036,000 for Hayes. But those totals didn’t represent the end of the story. While Grant was preparing to leave office and publicly apologizing for errors of judgment, four different states—Oregon, Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina—had come up with disputed sets of electoral ballots. If accepted, the ballots for Republican electors could overturn the outcome of the popular vote.

The question of the contested ballots was thrown to Congress for resolution. Behind the scenes, the Republicans got busy. Promises were quietly made to a number of Southern Democrats.

If the dispute broke in favor of the Republicans, they’d see that the last Federal troops were withdrawn from the South. There were other, less specific pledges, including one whose vague language seemed to hold out hope of Federal financing for a program of industrial improvements in Southern states. But Courtleigh knew it was Tom Scott’s railroad lobby that had carried the day. Scott’s men had swung the needed votes by persuading Southern Congressmen that approval of a proposed rail line from East Texas to the Pacific depended on their decision in the matter of the disputed ballots. And so, a special Electoral Commission chosen by Congress had certified election of a new president—Rutherford B. Hayes—on March 2. Tilden’s followers cried fraud in vain.

There was no direct evidence that Hayes would be in sympathy with the railroad men, or would cooperate with them. The President had a reputation for integrity, and a spotless one. Still, he
was
a Republican—and so were Courtleigh and his colleagues. Most auspiciously of all, Hayes had received the news of his certification while a guest aboard Tom Scott’s private railcar “Pennsylvania.”