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Wrecker got you in his sights the instant Osgood Hennessy sealed his deal to take control of the Jersey Central, which gained him access to the city”

The harbor vessel that had sparked Abbott’s civic pride was a long, low-in-the-water steaer than a tugboat She belonged to the newly formed Eastern Marine Division of the Southern Pacific Railroad and flew her colorsthe Port of New York A brand-new verht as sealing wax, circled her soot-smeared smokestack

Even her old name, Oxford, had been painted over Lillian I now circled her cruiser stern Hennessy had renaboat in the Eastern Marine Division fleet, Lillian I through Lillian XII, and had ordered SOUTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD painted on their transoht-white letters

“Just in case,” Archie remarked, “the Wrecker doesn’t know he’s here”

“He knows,” Bell said grimly

His restlessly probing blue eyes were dark with concern New York City was the Holy Land, as Harper’s Weekly had put it, to which all railroaders longed oal, and Isaac Bell knew in his heart that the Wrecker’s taunting note on the azine’s cartoon of the railroad president was no bluff The murderous saboteur was bent on a public attack The next battle would be fought here

Stone-faced, Bell watched one of the countless tugboats shunting a rail barge, or car float, past the pier Deckhands cut the barge loose, and it continued under its own lide sentle landing In the short ti had seized another barge filled with a dozen freight cars and shoved it into the strong current, urging it toward Manhattan Si repeated everywhere Bell looked, like theparts in a colossal, well-oiled machine But despite every precaution he had taken, the rail yards, the piers, and the car floats looked to hiround

He had put a score of Van Dorn operatives in charge of the terminal Superintendent Jethro Watt had furnished one hundred handpicked Southern Pacific special railway police, and for a week nothing had o went unchecked Dynamite trains especially were searched car by car, box by box They had discovered an astonishingly casual approach to the handling of high explosives in Jersey City, which was the largest city in the state and as densely peopled as Manhattan and Brooklyn across the harbor

Under Bell’s regiuards boarded the dyna the yards After allowing the trains to enter, the guards oversaw every step of the off-loading, as boxcars bearing twenty-five tons of dynaes and into sons drawn by draft horses Van Dorn detectives intercepted all but that which would be immediately shipped out to contractors

Still, Bell knew that the Wrecker would find no shortage of high explosives Dynamite was in such deht New Yorkers were blowing up the city’s bedrock ofsubways and cellars in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx New Jerseyites were blasting traprock fro stone out of the Hudson River cliffs, from New Jersey’s Palisades all the way up to West Point Railroad builders were blasting approaches to the Hudson tunnels being bored under the river

“When the rail tunnels connecting New Jersey and New York are finished next year,” Archie bragged, “Osgood Hennessy can park his special eight blocks from Times Square”

“Thank the Lord the tunnels are not finished,” said Bell “If they were, the Wrecker would try to blow them with a Southern Pacific Limited trapped under the river”

Archie Abbott flaunted the New Yorker’s disdain for districts west of the Hudson in general, and the state of New Jersey in particular, by re Isaac Bell that over the years entire sections of Jersey City and nearby Hoboken had been periodically leveled by dynamite accidents, most recently in 1904

Bell did not need any reotten around, and tips had poured in froht so a half ton of dynamite for the New York and New Jersey Trap Rock Coe a trolley would have resulted in a deadly explosion on the busiest street in Jersey City The co forced to take dynamite up the Hackensack River to their Secaucus mine But the Jersey City fire commissioner, not at all pleased by all the public attention, had stood untypically firm

“These Jersey harebrains won’t need any help froh one of these days,” Archie Abbott predicted, “purely through negligence”