With Duncan still missing, William Vanderbilt couldn't help but think of Henry. The boy had performed so many miracles already. He sent a telegram to the Pinkerton agency, instructing them to find Henry and ask for his help in the search for the missing marshal.
Aboard the train to Pittsburgh, Henry maintained his aloof demeanor, his nose buried in the intelligence files. The next morning, on August 3rd, the train arrived.
Pittsburgh was the "Steel City," a sprawling industrial powerhouse at the confluence of three great rivers. The air was thick with smoke, the streets scarred with the ruts of heavy wagons.
Henry rode west out of the city, following the directions from the black market files. After several miles, he found the landmark: a massive oak tree with a thirty-meter canopy. From there, he followed a series of turns until he came to a three-way crossroads. On a two-meter-high white wall was a crude painting of a raven, a bloody, sharpened bone in its beak.
He dismounted and went into the woods, where he assembled a hundred 5-pound TNT charges, all fitted with two-second fuses.
He then followed the path indicated by the painted bone.
Half a mile later, he found it: a pair of massive, red-brick warehouses, each two hundred meters long, surrounded by a three-meter-high stone wall. A series of twenty-four two-story red-brick apartment buildings formed a defensive perimeter, with snipers positioned in the second-floor windows. He counted a total of 119 guards.
He put on his mask and changed into his cloth shoes. Two guards were smoking by the wall, ten meters away. They saw him and started to call out, but two 12-inch throwing knives had already found their throats.
He ran, a blur of motion, his body an arrow loosed from a bow. This was the first time he had sprinted at full speed since his upgrade to LV 4 Constitution. He was covering over twenty meters a second.
In one second, he was at the door of the first apartment building. He activated his Super Reflexes and, in another two seconds, had thrown a 5-pound TNT charge into the second-story window of all twenty-four of the apartment buildings, and a final one through the door of the main hall.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The world erupted in a continuous, deafening roar.
He used a grey pearl to reset his health, and then, with a pair of double-action revolvers in his hands, he began to hunt. His enhanced senses painted a perfect picture of the battlefield in his mind. He knew where every man was, where every gun was pointed. He moved through the chaos, and for every man who raised a weapon, a bullet was already on its way.
In twenty seconds, he emptied a dozen pairs of revolvers. The close-quarters battle was a whirlwind of death. His shields absorbed eight hits. The rest of his enemies were all dead. He cleared the last of the buildings, then went for the two warehouses.
He was met with a staggering sight: a massive arsenal of military-surplus weapons. Most of it was obsolete junk, single-shot Springfield rifles and outdated revolvers.
But then he saw them. Sixteen cannons.
Three M1857 12-pounder "Napoleon" field guns, and a collection of Parrott rifles of various sizes. They were old, but they were more than enough for his purposes. He took them all, along with 1,322 cannonballs. The total haul took up less than twenty cubic meters of his storage space. He also took 20,000 pounds of TNT.
He locked the warehouse doors, then went back to the main hall, where he piled the 269 bodies, doused them with kerosene, and set them ablaze.
Then he rode for the train station.
He didn't want to leave a trail that led back to Pittsburgh. He didn't want Richard Mellon to know that every city he visited was destined to burn.
At 5:35 PM, he was on a Pullman sleeper, heading back to Chicago.
At the Chicago livestock exchange, the five stable hands who had been hired to care for Henry's horses were plotting.
"The kid is a fool," their leader, a Hispanic man named Diego, said. "He left a hundred prime warhorses in our care, and not a single guard."
"A hundred horses," another man said, his eyes shining with greed. "That's at least six thousand dollars! We could each take twelve hundred and start our own ranch in Texas!"
"My cousin, Mario, is a leader in the 'Little Pony Gang'," Diego said with a grin. "He'll help us fence them. The stable manager here is one of his men. That's why he's only charging sixty a head. He says they're top-quality animals; we could get double that on the open market."
"Then what are we waiting for?" a bald man named Pedro said. "Let's do it!"
Aboard the train, Henry counted his latest harvest of pearls. His progress bar now read Level 3, 77.11%. He was getting close.
He arrived back in Chicago the next morning. He went straight to the law office of Carlson, the lawyer from the train, who presented him with a Wells Fargo check for $9,450—the bounties for the James and Younger gangs.