Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/111

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of the militia. The soldiers were just then going into camp on the level rocks by a bridge across the canal and the Desplaines River—the bridge, according to the military scientists, was, I believe, considered, for some mysterious reason, to be a strategic point.

The picture was one for the brush of Remington—those young blue-clad soldiers (it was before the days of our imperialism, and of the khaki our soldiers now imitate the British in wearing)—and Baker and I stood and gazed at it a moment, affected by the fascination there always is in the superficial military spectacle; and then, suddenly, we were aware that there was another and more dramatic point of interest, where a group stood about the body of a workman who had been shot in the riots of that morning. He was a foreigner, the clothes he wore doubtless those he had had on when he passed under the Statue of Liberty, coming to this land with what hopes of freedom in his breast no one can ever know. The wife who had come with him was on her knees beside him, rocking back and forth in her grief, dumb as to any words in a strange land whose tongue she could not speak or understand.

The reporters from the Chicago newspapers were there, and among them Eddie Bernard, an old Whitechapeler, who told us that the man had reached Lemont only a few days before, and had been happy in the job he had so promptly found in the new land of promise. And now, there he lay, shot dead. Bernard looked a moment, and then