Pipe lines that Matters and Hopewell had already laid stopped just inside the woods at either edge of the field. The west trunk stretched two hundred miles over the Allegheny Mountains to Pennsylvania’s oil fields. The east continued one hundred eighty miles to their seaboard refinery in Constable Hook, New Jersey, where oceangoing tank steamers could load their kerosene. Pumps and breakout tanks were installed every thirty miles, and all that remained to join the two halves was this final connection on land they had purchased, under the railroad.

Spike would not shut up. “You know what the president of the Penney said? He said, ‘Imagine the expense I would save on locomotives, Pullman cars, and complaints if only I could melt my passengers and pump them liquefied through pipes like you pump oil.’”

“I was there,” said Matters. In Philadelphia, at Pennsylvania Railroad headquarters high above the Broad Street Station, asking, hat in hand, to lease a right-of-way. The president, high-toned owner of a Main Line estate, had looked down his Paris-educated nose at the oil field rowdies.

“I envy you gentlemen. I would love to own a pipe line.”

Who wouldn’t? Just ask Rockefeller. Shipping crude direct from the well to the refinery beat a train hands down. Instead of laboriously loading and unloading barrels, barges, and tank cars, you simply opened a valve. And that was just the beginning. A pipe line was also a storehouse; you could stockpile crude in your pipes and tanks until supply dropped and the price rose. You could lend money like a bank and charge interest on credit backed by the same oil in your pipes that the producer was paying you to deliver. Best of all—or worst of all, depending on your morals—when you owned a pipe line, you set the shipping rate to favor your friends and gouge your enemies. You could even refuse to deliver at any price, a Rockefeller specialty to bust independent refineries; Matters and Hopewell’s Constable Hook refinery was sitting idle, dry as a bone, because the Standard declined to pipe them crude.

Spike laughed. “Remember what I told him? ‘We’ll melt your passengers in our refinery, but it’s your job to make ’em solid again.’”

The president of the railroad had granted Spike’s joke a thin smile and their lease a death blow: “You can’t pay me enough to let your pipe cross my tracks.”

“Why not?”

“Orders straight from the Eleventh Floor.”

In the year 1899, there was only one “Eleventh Floor” in the United States of America—Rockefeller’s office at Standard Oil’s Number 26 Broadway headquarters in New York—and it packed more punch than the White House and Congress combined.

Tonight, Bill Matters was punching back.

Sixty men piled out of the wagons with picks and shovels and tongs and pipe jacks. Working by starlight, they dug a shallow trench across the field and under the trestle. Tong hands wrestled thirty-foot-long eight-inch steel pipes off the wagons, propped them on jacks over the trench, and screwed the lengths together.

The distant train sounds they had heard earlier suddenly grew loud.

Matters saw a glow in the trees and realized, too late, he had misjudged their distance. They were indeed on this branch line, not far away, but steaming slowly, quietly, one from the north, one from the south.

Ditchdiggers and tong men looked up.

Headlamps blazed. The monster H6 Baldwin 2-8-0 locomotives burst from the wooded hills and rumbled onto the trestles.

“Keep working!” shouted Bill Matters. “We own this land. We got every right! Keep working.”

The ninety-ton engines thundered overhead and stopped on the trestle, nose to nose, cowcatchers touching, directly above Matters and Hopewell’s just-laid pipe. One was hauling a flatcar crammed with railroad cops, the other a wreck train with a hundred-ton crane. The railroad cops shoved the locomotive firemen from their furnaces, threw open the fire doors, and snaked hoses from the locomotive boilers.

A giant mounted the front of the wreck train. The glaring headlamps lit a hard, hot-tempered face and a mammoth chest and belly. Matters recognized Big Pete Straub, a towering Standard Oil strikebreaker, with a company cop star pinned to his vest, a gun on his hip, and a pick handle in his fist.

“Drop your tools!” Straub shouted down at the men in the field.

“Stand your ground!” yelled Matters. “Back to work.”

“Run!” roared Straub.

“Law’s on our side. We got every right!”

“Let ’em have it, boys!”

The railroad cops scooped burning coals from the furnaces and whirled opened steam valves. Fire and boiling water rained down on Matters’ workmen.

“Stand your ground!”

Burned and scalded, they fled.

Matters intercepted the stampede and waded in with both fists, knocking men down as they tried to get away.

Spike grabbed his arm. “Ease off, Bill. Let ’em go. They’re outgunned.”

Matters smashed a ditchdigger’s ribs and knocked another man cold with a single blow. “Cowards!”

A burning coal sailed down from the starry sky trailing sparks.

It set Matters’ coat sleeve on fire. Hot coals fanned his cheek. The stink of singed hair seared his nostrils. He jerked his Remington from his coat, ran straight at the trestle, and climbed the pier.

Spike charged back into the battle zone and grabbed his boot. “Are you nuts? Where you going?”

“Kill Straub.”

“He’s got twenty years on you and fifty armed men. Run!”

Spike Hopewell outweighed Bill Matters. He dragged him off the trestle.

Fire and steam drove them out of range. Bill Matters aimed his horse pistol at Straub. Spike knocked it out of his hand, snatched it from the mud, and tucked it in his coat.

Matters watched with helpless fury. The hundred-ton crane lowered an excavator bucket. Its jutting spike teeth bit into the freshly dug soil like the jaws of Tyrannosaurus rex. Steam hissed. The jaws crushed shut. The crane clawed pipes out of the ground and dropped them in a welter of bent and broken metal.

A pair of dim lights bounced slowly across the starlit field. The county sheriff pulled up in a Pittsburgh gasoline runabout. A scared-looking deputy was seated beside him.

Bill Matters and Spike Hopewell demanded protection for their workmen. Matters shouted that they had a legal right to route an independent pipe line under the railroad’s right-of-way because they had bought this low-lying farm where the elevated tracks crossed on tall trestles.

“The railroad can’t block us! We own this land free and clear.”

Here was their deed.

Matters shook the parchment in the dim glow of the runabout’s headlamp.

The sheriff glanced down from his steering tiller. He answered too quickly, like a man who had been ordered to read a copy days ago. “Says on your deed that the Pennsylvania Railroad leased their right-of-way across this farm.”

“Only for track and trestles.”

“Lease says you mustn’t damage their roadbed.”

“We’re not hurting their road. We’re trenching between the trestle piers.”

Matters shoved more paper into the light. See their engineer’s report! See their attorney’s brief asserting their case! See this court case precedent!

“I’m no lawyer,” said the sheriff, “but everybody knows that Mr. Rockefeller has a mighty big say in how they run the Pennsylvania Railroad.”

“But we own—”

The sheriff laughed. “What made you think you can fight Standard Oil?”

—

A coal-black Pittsburgh sky mirrored Bill Matters’ despair.

“Business is business,” his banker was droning. Mortgaged to the hilt to build a pipe line they could not finish, they had to sell for pennies on the dollar to Standard Oil. “No one else will make an offer. My advice is to accept theirs and walk away clean.”

“They tricked us into building it for them,” Matters whispered.