When Martin walked into the union tent across from the construction site, the organizer who kept an eye on things during the night, a tough little guy named Pete Mazzini, wore a worried expression. "What's up?" Chester asked, grabbing the coffee pot that perked lazily over the blue flame of canned heat.
"I hear they really are gonna sic the goddamn Pinkertons on us today," Mazzini said.
"Shit," Chester said, and the other man nodded. "Pinkertons are bad news." Mazzini nodded again. Martin hadn't seen Pinkerton goons since the steel-mill strikes in Toledo after the Great War. In a way, fighting them was even worse than fighting cops. A fair number of cops were fundamentally decent guys. Anybody who'd sign up to use a club or a blackjack or a pistol for the Pinkertons had to be a son of a bitch.
"At least I found out." Mazzini jerked a thumb toward the building site. "Dumb night watchmen over there don't think about how voices carry once everything quiets down."
"Good." Martin had never got more than three stripes on his sleeve during the war, but he'd commanded a company for a while. Now he had to think not like a captain, but like a general. "We've got to let the pickets know as soon as they start showing up. They'll be ready, because we've had word the builders might pull this. We've got to bring in as many weapons as we can. Not just sticks for the signs, either. We'll need knives. Guns, too, if we can get 'em in a hurry."
"We start shooting, that gives the cops all the excuse they need to land on us with both feet," Mazzini said.
He wasn't wrong. All the same, Chester answered, "If we let the goons break us, we're screwed, too. If they break us, we might as well pack it in. You want that?"
"Hell, no," Mazzini said. "I just wanted to make sure you were thinking about it."
"Oh, I am. Bet your ass I am." Martin scratched his chin. "I'm going to call somebody from the Daily Breeze. Torrance papers aren't down on unions the way the goddamn Times is. We ought to have an honest witness here. I think I'll talk to the Torrance cops, too. The builders don't have them in their pocket, like in L.A. If they know the Pinkertons are going to raise hell ahead of time, maybe they can step on 'em."
Pete Mazzini looked as if he would have laughed in anybody else's face. "Good luck," he said. His shrug declared that he washed his hands of dealing with all police anywhere. "I don't suppose it can make things any worse."
Yawning, he agreed to hang around and warn the incoming pickets of the trouble ahead while Chester went to talk with the man from the Daily Breeze and the police and make other arrangements. When Chester got back, he said, "Thanks, Pete. You can go home and get your forty winks now."
Mazzini gave him a look. "Hell, no. If there's gonna be a brawl, I want in on it. Those bastards aren't going to lick us as easy as they think they are." He yawned again, and fixed himself what had to be his millionth cup of coffee.
The reporter from the Daily Breeze showed up an hour or so later. He had a photographer with him, which gladdened Chester's heart. Meanwhile, union backers came up to the men on the picket line, slipped them this or that, and then went on their way. Martin and Mazzini exchanged knowing glances. Neither said a word.
At twenty past eleven, half a dozen autos with Torrance cops in them pulled up by the building site. Martin wondered if they'd known what would go on before he told them. When a reporter from the Times showed up five minutes later, he stopped wondering. They had.
At twenty to twelve, two buses that had seen a lot of better years pulled up around the corner. "Here we go," Chester said softly. It had been a long, long time-half a lifetime-since he'd shot at anybody, but he knew he could. Nobody who'd been through the Great War was likely to forget what gunplay was all about.
Here came the Pinkerton men. They looked like goons: drunks and toughs and guys down on their luck who'd take anybody's money and do anything because they hadn't had any real work for such a long time. They carried a motley assortment of iron bars and wooden clubs. One guy even had what Martin belatedly recognized as a baseball bat, something far, far from its New England home. Others, grim purpose on their faces, kept one hand out of sight. Knife men and shooters, Martin thought, and made sure he could get at his own pistol in a hurry.
"We don't want any trouble, now," said a Torrance policeman with the map of Ireland on his face. He and his pals formed a thin line between the advancing goons and the picketers, who were shaping a line of their own: a skirmish line. Chester warily watched the scabs on the site. If they took his men from behind while the Pinkertons hit them from the front… He grimaced. That wouldn't be good at all.
As if reading his mind, Mazzini said, "I told a couple of our guys to start shooting at the scabs if they even take a step towards us. Some bullets go past their heads, I don't think they've got the balls to keep coming."
Chester laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. "Good. Thanks."
A short, scrawny, ferret-faced man in a loud, snappy suit seemed to be the Pinkertons' commander. "Time to teach these damn Reds a lesson," he said in a voice that carried. Low growls rose from his men, as if from a pack of angry dogs. He pointed. "Go get 'em!"
Instead of growling, the goons roared and charged. Some of the Torrance cops swung their billy clubs. Most of them let the Pinkertons go by. The union men roared, too. They were outnumbered, but not too badly. Some of them ran forward to meet the goons head on. A few others hung back, watching the scabs.
"Here we go!" Chester said, an odd note of exultation in his voice. He snatched up a club and waded into the brawl. He didn't want to start shooting first, but he had nothing at all against breaking a few heads.
He almost got his broken as soon as he started fighting. A goon carrying an iron bar with a chunk of concrete on the end swung it for all he was worth. It hummed past Chester's ear. He clobbered the Pinkerton before the fellow could take another swing at him.
That scrawny guy in the sharp suit didn't mix it up along with the strikebreakers he'd brought. He stayed out of the fight and yelled orders. Martin pointed at the man with his club. "Get him!" he yelled to one of the Torrance cops, who'd managed to whack his way clear and was standing on the sidewalk as if it were the sideline of a football game. The cop paid him no attention.
But when the union men started getting the better of the strikebreakers, their boss was the one who first pulled a pistol out of his pocket. Chester tried to shift his club to his left hand so he could grab his own gun, but a goon had hold of his left arm. In desperation, he threw the club instead. He got lucky. It caught the fellow in the sharp suit right in the bridge of the nose.
He let out a howl that pierced the shouts and curses of the brawling men in front of him, dropped the pistol, and clapped both hands to his face. When he took them away a moment later, he had a mustache made of blood.
He bent for the pistol. But the Daily Breeze photographer, not content to stay neutral, dashed up and grabbed it. Screaming, "You fucker!" the Pinkertons' boss jumped on him. They had their own private brawl till the reporter from the local paper weighed in on the photographer's side. Then the little guy with the gaudy clothes took his lumps.
So did his goons. Thanks to Martin and that photographer, nobody started shooting. Chester knew how lucky that was. The union men drove the toughs back to their buses in headlong retreat. A rock smashed the windshield on one of the buses. Both drivers got out of there a lot faster than they'd come.
The next morning, the Times called it "a savage labor riot." The Daily Breeze knew better. So did Chester. He also knew the union had won a round. They wouldn't see the Pinkertons for a while-but when they did, the other side would be loaded for bear.