Harry Orchard Assassinates Governor Steunenberg (Micro-Fiction)

 

KABAM! The bomb explosion rang in his ears as he walked back to the hotel. The blast sent Harry running back in the snowy darkness. When he got there, he paid no mind to the other guests but went right to his room. He heard someone say the window casings had shaken, but that was all the scuttle he heard.

           Inside his room he remembered all the buzz from past years up north. Bill, the union boss, made no qualms about telling Harry he didn’t think he had the nerve to do it. Bill had bought him dinner at the Tiger Hotel in Burke, nudging Harry just enough to get his ire going again about the miner’s union dispute. He knew dynamite. He could do this.

            Bill talked about, Steunenberg, a Democrat labor sweetheart now clearly bought off by big money. The union had helped elect him! Harry remembered how that colored regiment was brought in, how they mocked them, white miners in bullpens. “What you gonna do with those wooden rifles you be carving behind those fences?”

            He had nothing to do with the explosion at the Frisco mine yet he had been detained for weeks being mocked by those colored boys just for being union. Colored boys sent by the President at the governor’s bidding.

Here he was, ears still ringing, down in Caldwell. He may have lacked nerve before all this, but Bill was wrong. Steunenberg was blown all over his lawn because of Harry’s new-found nerve.