The Assassin by Clive Cussler (epub ebook reader .txt) 📕

Spike Hopewell before he joined Standard Oil?”

“Until six years ago. Is that what you were discussing with Mr. Hopewell when he was shot?”

“Did they part on good terms?”

“Didn’t Mr. Hopewell tell you that he was angry with Father for joining up with Standard Oil?”

Bell recalled Hopewell’s emotional telling of Matters’ son, this woman’s brother, running away, and said, “He did not. In fact, he spoke with some sympathy. How did they part?”

“Mr. Hopewell called Father a traitor. Father called Mr. Hopewell a stuck-in-the-mud fool. Mr. Hopewell asked Father was there anything lower than a Standard Oil magnate, except he pronounced the word as ‘maggot.’”

She cast Bell a smile. “Witnesses swore the first punches were thrown simultaneously.”

Bell asked, “Have they spoken since?”

“Of course. Six years is too long for old friends to hold a grudge, and, besides, they both flourished—Mr. Hopewell wildcatting in Kansas and Father managing the Standard’s pipe lines.”

“How will he take the news of Hopewell’s death?”

“He will take it hard. Very hard.”

Isaac Bell asked, “Would I find your father in New York, at 26 Broadway?”

“When he’s not traveling.”

Something thumped the canvas roof. Edna Matters looked up. A delighted smile made her even more beautiful, Bell thought. She brushed past him and out the tent flaps. He followed. A thick Manila hemp rope hung down from the sky. Three hundred feet over his head, a wicker basket suspended under a yellow gas balloon was dragging the rope, which hopped and skipped across the ground.

Edna ran after the dragline.

A canvas sack like a bank’s money bag slid down it and landed at her feet.

She waved it to the person looking down from the basket and hurried back to the tent, where she opened the bag and removed a sturdy buff-colored envelope. Inside was a tin cylinder of the type that contained Kodak roll film.

“Is that camera film?”

“My sister snapped an aerial photograph of the devastation.”

“Your sister?”

“Half sister. My real father died when I was a baby. My mother married my stepfather and they had Nellie.”

She stepped inside the tent and emerged with binoculars. “I got the impression you like beautiful women, Mr. Bell. Have a look.”

Bell focused on chestnut hair cut as short as Edna Matters’, a brilliant smile, and exuberant eyebrows. Edna’s fine features seemed magnified in Nellie’s face.

“If you find her appealing, Mr. Bell, I recommend you leave her beauty and womanliness out of your conversational repertoire.”

“Why?”

“Read.”

The yellow balloon had drifted on the light wind. Now that it was no longer directly overhead, Bell could read huge black letters on its side:

VOTES FOR WOMEN

“A suffragette?”

“A suffragist,” Edna Matters corrected him.

“What’s the distinction?”

“A suffragette tries to convert men to the cause of enfranchisement.”

“I heard Amanda Faire at Madison Square Garden,” said Bell, recalling a statuesque redhead who had enthralled her mostly male audience.

“The fair Amanda is a shining example of a suffragette. A suffragist converts women. You’ll get further with Nellie if you understand that women will gain the right to vote when all women agree that enfranchisement is a simple matter of justice.”

“What about the men?”

“If they want their meals cooked, shirts ironed, and beds warmed, they will have no choice but to go along. Or so Nellie believes . . . And by the way, you’ll get nowhere if you ever mention Amanda Faire in her company.”

“Rivals?”

“Fire and ice.”

Archie Abbott hurried up, shielding his eyes to inspect the balloon. “Get ready for a speech if that’s Nellie Matters.”

“Do you know her?”

“I heard her in Illinois last fall at a county fair. Two hundred feet in the air, she delivered a William Jennings Bryan stem-winder that had the ladies eyeing their husbands like candidates for a mass hanging.”

“This is her sister,” said Bell, “E. M. Hock . . . May I present my good friend Archibald Angell Abbott IV?”

The redheaded, blue-blooded Archie whisked his bowler off his head and beamed a smile famous in New York for quickening the heartbeats of New York heiresses and their social climbing mothers and arousing the suspicions of their newly wealthy fathers. “A pleasure, Miss Hock. And may I say that rumors I have heard among journalists that you are a woman are borne out splendidly.”

Bell could not help but compare the chilly response when he uttered a similar compliment to the warm smile Archie received from Edna.

“How’d you happen to get here so quickly?” Archie asked her. “The fire is still smoldering.”

“I was passing by on my way back from Indian Territory.”

Archie stared at the buckboard. “In that?”

“Reporting on ‘oil fever’ takes me places the trains don’t visit.”

“I salute your enterprise and your bravery. Speaking of oil fever, Isaac—I’m sure you’ve heard this already, Miss Hock—the wildcatters are blaming Standard Oil for the fire.”

“Did you interview any witnesses who presented evidence to support their contention?” asked Bell.

“Mostly, like you said, they heard that somebody saw Straub, somewhere—that’s Big Pete Straub, Miss Hock, a Standard—”

“Mr. Straub was just promoted to refinery police superintendent,” Edna interrupted.

“Which means he travels anywhere he pleases,” said Bell. “Go on, Archie.”

“I did find one guy who claimed to see Mr. Straub renting a horse in Fort Scott.”

“Did he see the horse?”

“Said it was tall as a Clydesdale.”

“The one I saw was a mighty lean Clydesdale. Are your witnesses suggesting Standard Oil’s motive for setting the fire?”

“One school of rumor says Standard Oil wants to shut down Kansas production to raise the price of oil by limiting the product reaching market.”

Bell looked to see Edna’s reaction. She said, “The Standard is still heavily invested in the Pennsylvania and Indiana fields. They’re somewhat depleted, so the oil is more expensive to pump. The Standard will lose money if they don’t keep the price up.”

“What else, Archie?”

“Another rumor, a doozy, claims that Standard Oil is laying pipe lines straight through Kansas to tap richer fields in Oklahoma. After they connect those fields to their interstate pipe line, they’ll bypass Kansas oil completely and shut down Kansas production. Then when the producers are forced to the wall, the Standard will buy their leases cheap and lock the