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.
A fifty-thousand-gallon river of gasoline surged through the hole Isaac Bell had ripped in the tank and spilled onto the ground. It flooded down the shallow slope that surrounded the tank and spread in a billowing torrent of rapids and whirlpools.
“Run!” said Bell and led the way.
That they were still alive meant he had prevented a catastrophic explosion. But there was no stopping the fire—not with globs of burning crude oil from the exploding oil tanks falling like brimstone. At least, he hoped, people had a chance to escape.
The gasoline ignited within seconds. It burned fiercely, tumbling great rollers of flame across the prairie. The rollers poured into the gullies and filled them with fingers of fire that raced toward the distant creek and set it ablaze.
Herding men ahead of it, plucking the fallen to their feet, Bell spotted Hopewell’s headquarters. It was a house he had converted into an office. What must have been its garden was now bracketed by a refinery furnace and a storage tank. Telegraph wires ran from it along the uprooted rail spur to the main line.
Bell pushed in the front door.
“Can you wire Washington?”
The telegrapher gaped at the cliff of flame engulfing the tank next door and jumped out the window. Isaac Bell took over the key and rattled out a message to Van Dorn headquarters as fast as he could send Morse code:
DISPATCH INVESTIGATORS HOPEWELL FIELD
MURDER ARSON
ON THE—
The key went dead under his hand.
He looked out the window. The telegraph poles that joined the Hopewell Field to the Western Union system along the main rail line were burning. The wires had melted. The last word never made it, but every detective in the Van Dorn outfit knew that urgent wires from Isaac Bell ended JUMP!
—
Valuable men arrived the next day on fast mail trains.
The volatile gasoline and kerosene had burned off in the intervening twenty-four hours, but the fires still rampaged, feeding relentlessly on the heavy crude oil. Bell brought the first arrivals up to date on what little he had discovered while they were en route and marched them through the destruction.
“I’m pretty much it for witnesses. Everyone was busy working before the explosion and running like the devil after. As for motive, the independents blame Standard Oil for the shooting and burning.”
“Anyone offering proof of a connection?”
“I ran into Big Pete Straub in Kansas City, and there are rumors ‘someone’ saw him yesterday in Fort Scott. The man whose hair I parted with my Winchester fit the ‘big’ part, but I never saw his face.”
The tall detective was hollow-cheeked and hoarse, having not slept since the killing and the fire. His eyes glittered an angry blue in a face black with soot. Quick thinking and decisive action had saved lives. No one had died after Spike Hopewell. But the fire would bankrupt Spike’s friends, the independents.
Damage ranged over both the field and the refinery. The heat had been so intense that it melted the stationary engines that powered the drills and twisted steel pipes. Wooden derricks and pump houses had burned to ash. Wells were ruined, with their casing falling into the bores. Of one hundred wells being drilled or already pumping, only a handful had survived with both derrick and pump house intact.
Van Dorn explosives expert Wally Kisley, who dressed like a traveling salesman in a three-piece checkerboard suit, gave a connoisseur’s whistle of appreciation. “You just can’t beat a refinery fire for utter mayhem.”
Redheaded Archie Abbott, a socially prominent New Yorker, a master of disguise, and Bell’s best friend, was not at all appreciative and in a foul mood. “I was impersonating a London-based jewel fence in Chicago and was one bloody inch from nailing Laurence Rosania when the Boss pulled me off the case.”
“This is a thousand times more important,” said Bell, “than a gentleman safe cracker robbing Chicago tycoons’ wives and mistresses. That Mr. Van Dorn pulled you off the case ought to give you a clue how crucial the Corporations Commission’s contract is to the agency.”
“We’ve got to catch Rosania before he accidentally blows someone’s house up along with his safe.”
“I let old Hopewell down,” Bell cut him off coldly. “I will not rest until his killer hangs.”
“You weren’t on a bodyguard job,” said Archie.
Bell stepped closer with a glacial stare.
Wally Kisley, their elder by many years, reckoned that Archie Abbott was stretching the limits of a friendship that had started in a collegiate boxing ring. He signaled Archie to shut his trap before it turned into a rematch and spoke before the fool made it worse.
“Ready when you are, Isaac.”
Bell said, “First question: Did the same criminals do the shooting and set the fires?
“Archie, I want witnesses. Someone must have seen the sniper either climb up that derrick or climb down. Carrying a rifle, maybe disguised as a tool. Someone must have seen his damned horse.
“Wally, I want you to look for any sort of delayed detonation: clockworks or a slow fuse. It’s likely a team of men attacked, though a timing device would allow one man to first prime an explosive, then pick up his rifle. But crack marksmen are specialists. Would such a sniper also know how to rig a timing device?”
“Any oil driller or refinery hand can turn firebug,” said Wally. “It’s the nature of refineries to explode. Lightning bolts blow them up regularly.”
“I paced the distance from the derrick where I saw the killer to where Spike was shot. Nearly seven hundred yards. How many common arsonists could shoot so accurately at extreme range? Such marksmanship would take a top-notch sniper, not the sort to dirty his hands and risk capture setting fires. Snipers prefer to operate far removed.”
“A delayed detonator can be far removed,” said Archie. “Time instead of distance.”
“Witnesses,” said Bell. “Find witnesses.”
Kisley interrupted whatever answer Archie was about to utter. “Fire’s cooling down. Isaac, can you point me toward the first tank to catch fire?”
—
Isaac Bell traced the rapid click-click-click of a typewriter to a wall tent pitched beside the burned-out ruins of Hope-Hell. It stood next to a buckboard wagon. The mule was out of its traces, grazing on a patch of grass that had escaped the fire. He rapped his knuckles on the tent pole.
“E. M. Hock?”
The typewriter kept going.
Bell ducked his head to pass through the canvas flaps and was astonished to see a woman hunched over the portable machine. She was typing in such a deep state of concentration that he doubted she had any idea he was five feet behind her. She had silky chestnut hair cut so short that Bell could see the graceful line of the nape of her neck. A pale shirtwaist with a high neck snugged close to her long, elegant back.
The tent contained a folding cot with a bedroll, a Kodak developing machine on the card table behind her, and a stack of typing paper. A straw hat was perched on the bedroll as if tossed there as she rushed to the typewriter. Bell read the top sheet of paper: