It was time to go up to the top of the tower, they told Alexander, for the best view of all.

So the windows were opened and the sharpshooters laid their rifles in their cradles of different kinds.

Who were the four sharpshooters, really — and was there really such a trade? There was less work for sharpshooters than there was for hangmen at the time. Not one of the four had ever been hired in this capacity before, nor was he likely, unless war came, to be paid for such work ever again. One was a part-time Pinkerton agent, and the other three were his friends. The four of them hunted together regularly, and had for years praised one another for what unbelievably good shots they were. So when the Pinkerton Agency let it be known that it could use four sharpshooters, they materialized almost instantly, like the company of citizen soldiers.

The man with the tripod had invented the device for the occasion. Nor had the man with the sandbag ever couched his rifle on a sandbag before. So it was, too, with the chairs and tables and the tidy displays of ammunition and all that: They had agreed among themselves as to how truly professional sharpshooters should comport themselves.

Years later Alexander McCone, when asked by Starbuck what he thought the principal cause of the Cuyahoga Massacre had been, would reply: "American am-am-am-amateurism in muh-muh-matters of luh-life and duh-duh-duh-death."

When the windows were opened, the oceanic murmurs of the crowd came in with the cold air. The crowd wished to be silent, and imagined itself to be silent — but this person had to whisper a little something, and that one had to reply, and so on. Hence, sounds like a sea.

It was mainly this seeming surf that Alexander heard as he stood with his father and brother in the belfry. The defenders of the factory were quiet. Except for the rattles and bumps of the opening of the windows on the second floor, they had made no reply.

Alexander's father said this as they waited: "It is no dainty thing to shape iron and steel to human needs, my boys. No man in his right mind would do such work, if it were not for fear of cold and hunger. The question is, my boys — how much does the world need iron and steel products? In case anybody wants some, Dan McCone knows how they're made."

Now there was a tiny quickening of life inside the fence. The chief of police of Cleveland, carrying a piece of paper on which the Riot Act was written, climbed the steps to the top of the scaffold. This was to be the climax of the pageant, young Alexander supposed, a moment of terrible beauty.

But then he sneezed up there in the belfry. Not only were his lungs emptied of air, but his romantic vision was destroyed. What was about to happen below, he realized, was not majestic. It would be insane. There was no such thing as magic, and yet his father and his brother and the governor, and probably even President Grover Cleveland, expected this police chief to become a wizard, a Merlin — to make a crowd vanish with a magic spell.

"It will not work," he thought. "It cannot work."

It did not work.

The chief cast his spell. His shouted words bounced off the buildings, warred with their own echoes, and sounded like Babylonian by the time they reached Alexander's ears.

Absolutely nothing happened.

The chief climbed down from the scaffold. His manner indicated that he had not expected much of anything to happen, that there were simply too many people out there. It was with great modesty that he rejoined his own shock troops, who were armed with shields and lances, but safe inside the fence. He was not about to ask them to arrest anyone, or to do anything provocative against a crowd so large.

But Colonel Redfield was enraged. He had the gate opened a crack, to let him out so he could join his half-frozen troops. He took his place between two farm boys at the center of the long line. He ordered his men to level their bayonets at those in front of them. Next, he ordered them to take one step forward. This they did.

Looking down on the plaza, young Alexander could see the people at the front of the crowd backing into those behind them as they shrank from the naked steel. People at the back of the crowd, meanwhile, had no idea what was going on, and were not about to depart, to relieve the pressure some.

The soldiers advanced yet another pace and the people retreating put pressure not only on those behind them, but on those beside them, too. Those at either end found themselves squashed against the buildings. The soldiers facing them had no heart for skewering someone so hopelessly immobilized, so they averted their bayonets, opening a space between the blade tips and the unyielding walls.

When the soldiers took yet another step forward, according to Alexander when old, people began " . . . to squh-squh-squirt around the ends of the luh-luh-line like wuh-wuh-water." The squirts became torrents, crumpling the flanks of the line and delivering hundreds of people to the space between the factory fence and the undefended rears of the soldiers.

Colonel Redfield, his eyes blazing straight ahead, had no idea what was happening on either side. He ordered yet another advance.

Now the crowd behind the soldiers began to behave quite badly. A youth jumped onto a soldier's pack like a monkey. The soldier sat down hard and struggled most comically, trying to rise again. Soldier after soldier was brought down in this way. If one got back to his feet, he was pulled clown again. And the soldiers began to crawl toward each other for mutual protection. They refused to shoot. They formed a defensive heap, instead, a paralyzed porcupine.

Colonel Redfield was not among them. He was nowhere to be seen.

No one was ever found who would admit to ordering the sharpshooters and the guards to open fire from the windows of the factory, but the firing began.

Fourteen people were killed outright by bullets — one of them a soldier. Twenty-three were seriously wounded.

Alexander would say when an old man that the shooting sounded no more serious than "puh-puh-popcorn," and that he thought a freakish wind had blown across the plaza below, since the people seemed to be blowing away like "luh-luh-leaves."

When it was all over, there was general satisfaction that honor had been served and that justice had been done. Law and order had been restored.

Old Daniel McCone would say to his sons as he looked out over the battlefield, vacant now except for bodies, "Like it or not, boys, that's the sort of business you're in."

Colonel Redfield would be found in a side street, naked and out of his head, but otherwise unharmed.

Young Alexander did not try to speak afterward until he had to speak, which was at Christmas dinner that afternoon. He was asked to say grace. He discovered then that he had become a bubbling booby, that his stammer was so bad now that he could not speak at all.

He would never go to the factory again. He would become Cleveland's leading art collector and the chief donor to the Cleveland Museum of Fine Arts, demonstrating that the McCone family was interested in more than money and power for money's and power's sakes.

His stammer was so bad for the rest of his life that he seldom ventured outside his mansion on Euclid Avenue. He had married a Rockefeller one month before his stammer became so bad. Otherwise, as he would later say, he would probably never have married at all.

He had one daughter, who was embarrassed by him, as was his wife. He would make only one friendship after the Massacre. It would be with a child. It would be with the son of his cook and his chauffeur.

The multimillionaire wanted someone who would play chess with him many hours a day. So he seduced the boy, so to speak, with simpler games first — hearts and old maid, checkers and dominoes. But he also taught him chess. Soon they were playing only chess. Their conversations were limited to conventional chess taunts and teasings, which had not changed in a thousand years.