McGue's eyes grinned; but his face remained set, as he doggedly kept
pace with the head of the marching guards.
Two more men were taken in the same methodical fashion. The surging
procession was now near the open center of the location, where a square
had been left as a common, with the artesian well at one end.
Girls and women quietly replaced the men in the front line, jeering and
cursing at the flushed faces of the soldiers, occasionally stumbling
awkwardly against them. There was a scream as a soldier turned suddenly
on a pretty red-haired girl, and caught her wrist. An old Irish virago
beside clutched his shoulder and flung him sideways.
"Touch my daughter, you dirty bastard, and I'll tear your heart out!"
Huggins re-formed his men at the entrance to the square. There were only
fifty soldiers in line; there were already several hundred of the
tenters, and their number swelled constantly. Of course, they couldn't
do anything.... He had his orders.
The stage was set for trouble. Over the heads of the women and girls,
from the shelter of the nearest house, a rock whished--an apple-sized
ore boulder from the iron heart of the hill. It crunched into one of the
guards, square on his cheek. He grunted. An uncertain hand patted his
dazed face. When he drew it away, it was smeared with blood; the stain
widened over his collar and breast.
A second stone came from the opposite side. Then another ... another....
Two deputies fired wildly in the direction of the hidden throwers.
Out of the dissolving panorama of frightened strikers came a spurted
crack, a spit of smoke. One of the deputies screamed, was supported,
writhing terribly, by the men on either side of him. His head hung limp.
"Back to that building, there," boomed Huggins, pointing to the
distributing store at the mountain end of the square.
The retreat began. The strikers eddied backward from the cleared place.
From houses along the way unexpected bursts of rocks, an occasional
shot, crashed into the close ranks of the law-enforcers.
Four or five revolvers puffed off to the left. A guard dropped his gun,
shaking his hand in agony. The left third of the soldiers at a command
raised their rifles, and blazed away at the infuriated welter of
retreating humanity. A madhouse of screams, men and women running, two
bodies settling onto the stained July grass....
Another volley, this toward the right.
"Take that, you----" screamed a deputy, as the startled face at a window
was met by the blaze of a rifle. The woman hung swaying over the ledge;
choking horribly, she trembled further and further out, dropped
hideously upon the ground.
At the storehouse now. "Hey, you, get out of that," Huggins commanded
the strikers' distributors.
"This is our----"
The sight of the rifles settled the matter. The two dead guards were
stretched on the floor, the wounded were roughly bandaged. Huggins
phoned the facts to the militia headquarters on the mountain.
"Said for us to wait here," he explained to the army lieutenant in
charge. "It 'ud be suicide, trying to get out. For all we know, all them
houses is full of strikers. There'll be two companies here inside of an
hour. By God, we'll do for 'em this time!" His tone shook in fierce
rapture--the man hunt was on!
The main bulk of the rifles covered the big open field in front; small
parties watched toward west, south and north, to warn if any activity
showed in the houses fifty feet away.
There was no water; the wounded cursed continually for it. Huggins sent
a party, well protected, over to the well, seventy feet away, to bring
back two bucketfuls. One of the detail was shot in the collar bone, but
managed to make his way back with the bearers of the precious drink.
There was a shouting from in front. "Hey," came a voice, waving a white
towel raised high on a clothes-pole. "Can we talk with your man in
charge?"
It was Edward McGuire, the father of little hump-backed Frank, who had
been arrested, but had slipped away in the disorderly retreat to the
store. He had been selected as one of the older, more law-abiding of the
miners, to bring the flag of truce.
"What d'ye want?" Huggins demanded belligerently. "Ain't no use to talk;
I got a regiment comin' in half an hour, will clean up this whole damned
nest of rats."
"Can I come closer?" called McGuire.
There was no answer. He came over to where the lieutenant of the guard
stood, clutching the pole with its white symbol high above his head.
"Well?"
"Can we pick up those bodies out on the field? You can get any of your
men there. We'll carry this flag, sir--one of 'em 's my son, I think."
The deputy beside Huggins stepped two feet forward. His revolver
reversed, he brought it down with all his force on the undefended
grizzled head. McGuire dropped in a heap.
All the while, down the dusty July road, Major Grinnell, of the State
Guards, had double-quicked his men. They reached the railroad spur just
out of sight of the shack village. Here he divided his force. The
company automobiles, equipped with searchlights and machine guns, had
gone by the county road to the eastern end of the colony, behind the
sand ridge, to cut off possible retreat. The motley mass of deputies,
mine guards and special police cut in after them, to work back with the
machines. The militia marched above the camp, close to the store held by
Huggins. After a fifteen minutes' wait, they proceeded in open
formation, converging toward the common.
The strikers, stunned by the brutal killing of McGuire, swirled together
beyond the well, hidden by the jerry-built shacks.
"We gotter rush 'em," "Micky" Ray insisted, weaving in and out of the
perturbed herd, followed by several adherents as violent. "Damn it, why
doncher rush 'em, before they sneak out?"
McGue confronted him again. "Still at it, you fool? They'd shoot us down
like dogs----"
"They'll shoot us anyway. 'Fraid of 'em, are you, Johnny?" another
taunted.
"We gotter rush 'em. Get your guns ready," commanded Ray. "All that
aren't afraid, line up behind Bill there."
He turned his back to round up others. The line doubled on him, an
excited commotion shaking it. He tried to break his way clear, to
understand what they were saying.
"What the----"
"Aincher heard her?"
"Nellie seed 'em!"
"All the soldiers is come! They're right behind the store!"
"They're everywhere!"
"You see?" stormed McGue, shoving Ray to the side. "Everybody below the
common."
They made the change. The militia assembled before the storehouse,
extended their wings, beat down the open space and the lanes parallel
with it. Undetermined, the strikers waited, poorly armed, but sheltered
behind friendly walls.
Huggins' big voice came faintly. "Lay down your guns," he shouted. "The
first man who shoots, we'll fire. Do you surrender?"
There was no answer.
"We'd better," insisted McGue, perspiring from heat and excitement.
"They ain't got anything on us. You can't fight rifles with bare hands."
"Hell, no! You saw what they did to Ed McGuire. Let's kill the
uglies----"
"Kill 'em!" Ray adopted a new slogan. "Kill 'em! Kill 'em, I says."
They wavered. The blistering sun beat fiercely on the metallic barrels
of the menacing rifles.
A dreadful tumult of shots, shouts, indescribable noises, broke out in
the rear. The shuddering sound of machine guns pelted whistling hail
through the sparse tree leaves above.
Out of the blind turmoil came running figures, blaspheming in horrible
rage. "They're there too!"
"It's another regiment!"
"They're killing everybody!"
The noise grew louder.
Major Grinnell halted at the head of his men. McGue, surrounded by a
cowed hundred of the strikers, walked quietly out. "Do you want to
arrest us?"
Methodically the houses and alleys were combed, until close to five
hundred men, women and children had been herded into the trampled
square. One by one they were marched before the guards and deputies; a
hundred and nine were pointed out largely at random, as having had some
part in the attack. The rest who were involved had slipped away between
the two lines of attackers. Wailing and lamenting, the former were
herded away into the overcrowded jails.
That night the militia encamped in the remains of the settlement. Fire
had destroyed the western third of the houses, a fire which the soldiers
made no attempt to put out.
Not a striker was permitted to enter the barred area.
Jim Hewin, back on duty as a sheriff's deputy, led one of the squads
that scoured the surrounding woods the next morning for fugitives and
bodies. "Hey, 'Red,'--they pipped somebody here," he explained.
It was the rocky road behind the settlement, which led above the
wet-weather falls of the brook that eased away into Shadow Creek. The
oasis of grass in the middle of the sandy road was darkly muddied by a
mixture of dirt and blood. A cap, crumpled, the visor torn loose, lay in
the clawed sand beside it.
"Red" Jones ran up. Hewin's quick eyes zigzagged eagerly. "Look,
'Red'--he went here!"
The trail of blood began again a few feet beyond the road. A heavy body
had been dragged over succulent pokeberry plants: moist pithy leaves
swung crushed, oozing their thick sap; dark berries lay mashed upon a
soil purple with their blood.
They parted the sumach and haw bushes screening the falls.
The slimed slope of gray rocks was darkened by a muddy reddish trickle
of water. It was a broken stretch of seventy feet to the green stagnancy
below.
"Hey, 'Red'----" Jim's voice dropped; his shaking hand pointed to an
awkward mass half way down the incline.
They slid cautiously, clutching the rough crag edges beside the water.
Caught in one of the shelf-flaws of the rock, his miner's shirt
coagulated with blackened blood, his stained overalls soggy with the
water, lay a dead negro.
Hewin turned the body over; his fingers shrank and slipped at the moist
unpleasantness.
They peered into the dead face of Ed Cole. A clinging mould of leaves
half obscured the deputy's badge on his greasy lapel.