Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/334

520 RIOT AND DESTRUCTION.

lines. The men were a unit, and the paralysis was perfect.

That night the road was dead. The next morning the papers blazed with accounts of the strike and advertisements for help. Engineers, firemen, railroad men of any kind, laborers who never saw a railroad, anybody that could work, could find permanent employment and good wages at the office of the superintendent of the ——— railroad.

The clerks in the offices were hustled out into the yard, and made to sweat and lacerate their delicate hands, tear and soil their clothes, and injure their tender feelings, by pulling spikes from switches, clawing the green coal out of the fire-boxes, dragging heavy and "narsty" hoses to the engines, and forming bucket and cordwood brigades, while we sat on the fences and cheered them on to their unaccustomed and unwelcome toil by such remarks as never fail to present themselves to the mind under such circumstances. The new employees, as fast as hired, were sent to help. Their appearance and awkward manner of going about the work offered fresh subjects for our witticisms. Their patience must have been sorely tried. From jeering it was but a short step to throwing various missiles. The clerks dodged in fear and trembling, but the laborers talked back, and gave threat for threat, sarcasm for sarcasm.

At length a half brick struck a burly Irishman in the small of the back as he was straining at the clawbar to draw a spike. He straightened up a moment, rubbed his sore back, and then with a yell of rage he started for a grinning crowd with the heavy clawbar. It was the one spark necessary to kindle a furious conflagration. The whole population of the locality sympathized with us. They were out in force, and when the interloper resented what was considered to be his just deserts, he found that he had stirred up a hornets' nest. The crowd having once broken loose, charged through the yard, driving everything before them. Before the police arrived a dozen fires were started in as many different places; and owing to the impossibility of getting the fire engines through the yard, over fifteen hundred cars, many of them loaded with valuable merchandise, were burned to the ground before the flames could be extinguished, and seven locomotives, their tanks and boilers empty, were completely ruined. The night shut down on a dreary scene of smoking desolation, where but the day before the air had rung with the cheerful sounds of busy commerce. The sheriff telegraphed to the governor for troops, saying that he was unable to control the mob. The next morning militiamen were patrolling the yard, and the work proceeded with no further interruptions than an occasional jeering by the onlookers at the awkward attempts of the new men to get the few remaining dead engines watered and fired up.

"THE NIGHT SHUT DOWN ON A DREARY SCENE OF SMOKING DESOLATION."