Held for Orders Part 9

The day the carload of detectives was imported the fight was on.

Scattering collisions breaking here and there into open fights showed the feeling, but it wasn't till Little Russia went out that things looked rocky for the company property at McCloud. Little Russia had become a pretty big Russia at the time of the strike. The Russians, planted at Benkleton you might say by Shockley, had spread up and down the line like tumbleweeds, and their first cousins, the Polacks, worked the company coal mines. At McCloud they were as hard a crowd after dark as you would find on the steppes. The Polacks, four hundred of them, struck while the engineers were out, and the fat went into the fire with a flash.

The night of the trouble took even us by surprise, and the company was wholly unprepared. The engineers in the worst of the heat were accused of the rioting, but we had no more to do with it than homesteaders. Our boys are Americans, and we don't fight with torches and kerosene. We don't have to; they're not our weapons. The company imported the Polacks, let them settle their own accounts with them, said our fellows, and I called it right. Admitting that some of our Reds got out to mix in it, we couldn't in sense be held for that.

It was Neighbor, the craftiest old fox on the staff of the division, who told the depot people in the afternoon that something was coming, and thinking back afterward of the bunches of the low-browed fellows dotting the bench and the bottoms in front of their dugouts, lowering at the guards who patrolled the railroad yards, it was strange no one else saw it. They had been out three weeks, and after no end of gabbling turned silent. Men that talk are not so dangerous; it's when they quit talking.

Neighbor was a man of a thousand to act on his apprehension. All the afternoon he had the switch engines shunting cars about the roundhouse; the minute the arc lights went on the result could be seen. The old man had long lines of furniture vans, box cars, gondolas, and dead Pullmans strung around the big house like parapets. Whatever anybody else thought, Neighbor was ready. Even old John Boxer, his head blacksmith, who operated an amateur battery for salutes and celebrations, had his gun overhauled: the roundhouse was looking for trouble.

It was barely eight o'clock that night when a group of us on Main Street saw the depot lights go out, and pretty soon telephone messages began coming in to Gatling's from the company plant up the river for the sheriff; the Polacks were wrecking the dynamos. The arc lights covering the yards were on a different circuit, but it didn't take the whiskered fellows long to find that out. Half an hour later the city plant was attacked; no one was looking for trouble there, and the great system of arcs lighting the yard for miles died like fireflies. We knew then, everybody knew, that the Polacks meant business.

Not a man was in sight when the blaze sputtered blue, red, and black out; but in five minutes a dozen torches were moving up on the in-freight house like coyotes. We could hear the crash of the big oak doors clear down on Main Street. There, again, the company was weak; they hadn't a picket out at either of the freight houses. There wasn't so much as a sneeze till they beat the doors in; then there was a cry; the women were taking a hand, and it was a loot with a big L. The plunder maddened them like brandy. Neighbor, who feared not the Polacks nor the devil, made a sortie with a dozen men from his stockade, for that was what the roundhouse defenses looked like, to try to save the building. It wasn't in men to do it. The gutting was done and the kerosene burning yellow before he was half-way across, and the mob, running then in a wavering black line from the flames that licked the high windows, were making for the storehouse. The fellows were certainly up to everything good, for in plundering the freight house first they gave their women the chance to lay in supplies for months. Neighbor saw in a minute there was nothing left for him to protect at the east end, and before he could cut off the constantly lengthening line of rioters, they were between him and the long storehouse. It must have made the old man weep blood, and it was there that the first shooting occurred.

A squad of the detectives reenforcing Neighbor's little following, ran in on the flank of the rioters as the master mechanic caught up with their rear. They wheeled, on his command to disperse, and met it with a cloud of stones and coupling pins. The detectives opened with their Winchesters, and a yell went up that took me back to the Haymarket.

Their answer was the torch to the storehouse and a charge on the imported guards that shook their front like a whirlwind. The detectives ran for Neighbor's breastworks, with the miners hot behind, and a hail of deadly missiles on their backs. One went down at the turn-table, and it didn't look as if his life was worth a piece of waste. But the fellow, raising on one arm, began picking off the Polacks closest with a revolver. They scattered like turkeys, and he staggered across the table before they could damage him any worse. Half a dozen of us stood in the cupola of the fire-engine house, with the thing laid below like a panorama.

Far as the blazing freight house lit the yards, we could see the rioters swarming in from the bottoms. The railroad officials gathered up stairs in the pa.s.senger depot waited helpless for the moment when the fury of the mob should turn on the unprotected building. The entire records of the division, the despatchers' offices, the headquarters of the whole West End were under that roof, with nothing to stand between it and the torches.

Awkwardly as the rioters had maneuvered, they seemed then to be getting into better shape for mischief. They were quicker at expedients, and two intensely active leaders rose out of the crowds. Following the shouts of the pair, which we could just hear, a great body of the strikers dashed up the yard.

"By the G.o.ds!" cried Andy Cameron at my elbow, "they're going for the oil-house!"

Before the words were out we could hear the dull stroke of the picks sinking into the cleated doors. Buckets were pa.s.sed in and out from the house tanks. Jacketed cans of turpentine and varnish were hustled down the line to men drunk with riot; in a moment twenty cars were ablaze. To top the frenzy they fired the oil-house itself. Destruction crazed the entire population of the bottoms. The burning cars threw the front of the big brick depot up into the sky. As the reflection struck back from the plate-gla.s.s windows, the mob split into two great waves, and one headed for the pa.s.senger depot. They crossed the coal spurs brandishing torches and sledges and bars. We could see them plain as block signals.

Every implement that ever figured in a yard showed in their line, but their leader, a youngish fellow, swung a long, tapering stake. As the foremost Polack climbed up on the last string of flats that separated them from the depot, the storage tanks in the oil-house took fire. The roof jumped from the wall-plates like one vast trap-door, and the liquid yellow spurted flaming a hundred feet up into the black. A splitting yell greeted the burst, and the Polacks, with added fury, raced towards the long depot. I made out then the man with the club. It was Rucker.

The staff of the superintendent, and the force of despatchers, a handful of men all told, gathered at the upper windows and opened fire with revolvers. It was just enough to infuriate the rioters. And it appeared certain that the house would be burned under the defenders' feet, for the broad platform was bare from end to end. Not a ghost of a barricade, not a truck, not a shutter stood between the depot and the torch, and n.o.body thought of a man until Cameron with the quicker eyes cried:

"For G.o.d's sake! There's McTerza!"

Such as pay-day there he was, walking down the platform towards the depot, and humping alongside--Sinkers.

I guess everybody in both camps swore. Like a man in his sleep he was walking right in the teeth of the Polacks. If we had tried ourselves to pit him it couldn't have been done cleaner. His friends, for McTerza had them, must have shivered--but that was just McTerza; to be where he shouldn't, when he shouldn't. Even had there not been more pressing matters, n.o.body could have figured out where the fellow had come from with his convoy, or where he was going. He was there; that was all--he was there.

The despatchers yelled at him from above. The cry echoed back short from a hundred Polack throats, and they sent a splitter; it was plain they were mad for blood. Even that cry didn't greatly faze the fellow, but in the clatter of it all he caught another cry--a cry sent straight to McTerza's ear, and he turned at the voice and the word like a man stung.

Rucker, leaping ahead and brandishing the truck-stake at the hated stutterer, yelled, "The scab!"

The Reading engineer halted like a baited bear.

Rucker's cry was enough--in that time and at that place it was enough.

McTerza froze to the platform. There was more--and we knew it, all of us--more between those two men than scab and brotherhood, strike and riot, flood or fire: there was a woman. We knew it so well there was hardly a flutter anywhere, I take it, when men saw McTerza stooping, grasp Sinkers, shove him towards the depot, slip like a snake out of his pea-jacket, and turn to front the whole blooming mob. There wasn't any fluttering, I take it--and not very much breathing; only the scab, never a tremendous big man, swelled bigger in the eyes then straining his way than any man in McCloud has ever swelled before or since.

Mobs are queer. A minute before it was the depot, now it was the scab--kill him.

The scab stood. Rucker stumbled across a rail in his fury, and went sprawling, but the scab stood. The line wavered like tumbleweeds. They didn't understand a man fronting forty. Then Ben Nicholson--I recognized his whiskers--began blazing at him with a pistol. Yet the scab stood and halted the Polack line. They hesitated, they stopped to yell; but the scab stood.

"Stone him!" shouted Ben Nicholson. McTerza backed warily across the platform. The Polacks wavered; the instinct of danger unsettled them.

Mobs are queer. A single man will head them quicker than a hundred guns.

There is nothing so dangerous as one man.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Old Man Nicholson.]

McTerza saw the inevitable, the steady circling that must get him at last, and as the missiles flew at him from a score of miners he crouched with the rage of a cornered rat, one eye always on Rucker.

"Come in, you coyote!" yelled McTerza tauntingly. "Come in!" he cried, catching up a coupling pin that struck him and hurling it wickedly at his nearest a.s.sailant. Rucker, swinging his club, ran straight at his enemy.

"Kill the scab!" he cried and a dozen bristling savages, taking his lead, closed on the Reading man like a fan. From the windows above, the railroad men popped with their pistols; they might as well have thrown fire-crackers. McTerza, with a cattish spring, leaped through a rain of brickbats for Rucker.

The club in the striker's hands came around with sweep enough to drop a steer. Quick as a sounder key McTerza's head bobbed, and he went in and under on Rucker's jaw with his left hand. The man's head twisted with the terrific impact like a Chinese doll's. Down he went, McTerza, hungry, at his throat; and on top of McTerza the Polacks, with knives and hatchets and with Cossack barks, and they closed over him like water over a stone.

n.o.body ever looked to see him pull out, yet he wormed his way through them corkscrew fashion, while they hacked at one another, and sprang out behind his a.s.sailants with Rucker's club. In his hands it cut through guards and arms and knives like toothpicks. Rucker was smothering under toppling Polacks. But others ran in like rats. They fought McTerza from side to side of the platform. They charged him and flanked him--once they surrounded him--but his stanchion swung every way at once. Swarm as they would, they could not get a knife or a pick into him, and it looked as if he would clear the whole platform, when his dancing eye caught a rioter at the baggage room door mercilessly clubbing poor little Sinkers. The boy lay in a pitiful heap no better than a dying mouse.

McTerza, cutting his way through the circle about him, made a swath straight for the kid, and before the brute over him could run he brought the truck-stake with a full-arm sweep flat across his back. The man's spine doubled like a jack-knife, and he sunk wriggling. McTerza made but the one pa.s.s at him; he never got up again. Catching Sinkers on his free arm, the Reading man ran along the depot front, pulling him at his side and pounding at the doors. But every door was barred, and none dared open. He was clean outside the breastworks, and as he trotted warily along, dragging the insensible boy, they cursed and chased and struck him like a hunted dog.

At the upper end of the depot stands a huge ice-box. McTerza, dodging in the hail that followed him, wheeling to strike with a single arm when the savages closed too thick, reached the recess, and throwing Sinkers in behind, turned at bay on his enemies.

With his clothes torn nearly off, his shirt streaming ribbons from his arms, daubed with dirt and blood, the scab held the recess like a giant, and beat down the Polacks till the platform looked a slaughter pen.

While his club still swung, old John Boxer's cannon boomed across the yard. Neighbor had run it out between his parallels, and turned it on the depot mob. It was the noise more than the execution that dismayed them. McTerza's fight had shaken the leaders, and as the blacksmiths dragged their gun up again, shotted with nothing more than an Indian yell, McTerza's a.s.sailants gave way. In that instant he disappeared through the narrow pa.s.sage at his back, and under the shadow behind the depot made his way along the big building and up Main Street to the short order house. Almost un.o.bserved he got to the side door, when Rucker's crowd, with Rucker again on his feet, spied him dragging Sinkers inside. They made a yell and a dash, but McTerza got the boy in and the door barred before they could reach it. They ran to the front, baffled. The house was dark and the curtains drawn. Their clamor brought Mrs. Mullenix, half dead with fright, to the door. She recognized Nicholson and Rucker, and appealed to them.

"Pray G.o.d, do you want to mob me, Ben Nicholson?" she sobbed, putting her head out fearfully.

"We want the scab that sneaked into the side door, Mrs. Mary!" roared Ben Nicholson. "Fire him out here."

"Sure there's no one here you want."

"We know all about that," cried Rucker breaking in. "We want the scab."

He pushed her back and crowded into the door after her.

The room was dark, but the fright was too great for Mrs. Mullenix, and she cried to McTerza to leave her house for the love of G.o.d. Some one tore down the curtains; the glow of the burning yards lit the room, and out of the gloom, behind the lunch counter, almost at her elbow--a desperate sight, they told me--panting, blood-stained, and torn, rose McTerza. His fingers closed over the grip of the bread-knife on the shelf beside him.

"Who wants me?" he cried, leaning over his breastwork.

"Leave my house! For the love of G.o.d, leave it!" screamed Mrs. Mullenix, wringing her hands. The scab, knife in hand, leaped across the counter.

Nicholson and Rucker b.u.mped into each other at the suddenness of it, but before McTerza could spring again there was a cry behind.

"He sha'n't leave this house!" And Kate Mullenix, her face ablaze, strode forward. "He sha'n't leave this house!" she cried again, turning on her mother. "Leave this house, after he's just pulled your boy from under their cowardly clubs! Leave it for who? He sha'n't go out. Burn it over our heads!" she cried pa.s.sionately, wheeling on the rioters. "When he goes we'll go with him. It's you that want him, Curtis Rucker, is it?

Come, get him, you coward! There he stands. Take him!"

Her voice rang like a fire-bell. Rucker, burnt by her words, would have thrown himself on McTerza, but Nicholson held him back. There never would have been but one issue if they had met then.

"Come away!" called the older man hoa.r.s.ely. "It's not women we're after.

She's an engineer's wife, Curt; this is her shanty. Come away, I say,"

and saying, he pushed Rucker and their coyote following out of the door ahead of him. Mrs. Mullenix and Kate sprang forward to lock the door. As they ran back, McTerza, spent with blood, dropped between them. So far as I can learn that is where the courtship began, right then and there--and as McTerza says, all along of Sinkers, for Sinkers was always Kate's favorite brother, as he is now McTerza's.

Sinkers had a time pulling through after the clubbing. Polacks. .h.i.t hard.

There was no end of trouble before he came out of it, but sinkers are tough, and he pulled through, only to think more of McTerza than of the whole executive staff.

At least that is the beginning of the courtship as I got it. There was never any more trouble about serving the new men at the short order house that I ever heard; and after the rest of us got back to work we ate there side by side with them. McTerza got his coffee out of the hot tank, too, though he always insisted on paying twenty-five cents a cup for it, even after he married Kate and had a kind of an interest in the business.

It was not until then that he made good his early threat. Sinkers being promoted for the toughness of his skull, thought he could hold up one end of the family himself, and McTerza expressed confidence in his ability to take care of the other; so, finally, and through his persuasions, the short order house was closed forever. Its coffee to-day is like the McCloud riots, only a stirring memory.