They climbed a dreary, rough street, lined with monotonous if comfortable cottages. It was a depressing town, as harsh as the iron by which all of its inhabitants lived. “People ought to be well paid to live in such a place as this,” said Emily.
“I don’t see how they stand it,” Holyoke replied. “But the local paper has an editorial against the militia this morning, and it speaks of the town as ‘our lovely little city, embowered among the mountains, the home of beauty and refinement.’”
The Palace was a three-story country-town hotel, with the usual group of smoking and chewing loungers impeding the entrance. Emily asked Holyoke to meet her in the small parlour next to the office in half an hour.
CHAPTER XI.
SEEN FROM A BARRICADED WINDOW.
SHE was in the parlour when Holyoke returned. The loungers and her fellow-guests had been wandering through the room to inspect her—“the lady writer from New York.” She herself was absorbed in the view of the mills rising above a stockade fence not five hundred feet away, across a flagged public square. There were three entrances, and up and down in front of each marched a soldier with a musket at shoulder-arms. In each entrance Emily saw queer-looking little guns on wheels. Their tubes and mountings flashed in the sunlight.
“What kind of cannon are those?” she asked.
“They’re machine-guns,” explained Holyoke. “You put in a belt full of cartridges, aim the muzzle at the height of a man’s middle or calves as the case may be. Then you turn the crank and the muzzle waggles to and fro across the line of the mob and begins to sputter out bullets—about fifteen hundred a minute. And down go the rioters like wheat before a scythe. They’re beauties—those guns.”
Emily looked from Holyoke to the guns, but she could not conceive his picture. It seemed impossible that this scene of peace, of languor, could be shifted to a scene of such terror as some of the elements in it ought to suggest. How could these men think of killing each other? Why should that soldier from the other end of the State leave his home to come and threaten to shoot his fellow citizen whom he did not know, whose town he had not seen until yesterday, and in whose grievance, real or fancied, he had no interest or part? She felt that this was the sentimental, unreasoning, narrow view to take. But now that she was face to face with the possibility of bloodshed, broad principles grew vague, unreal; and the actualities before her eyes and filling her horizon seemed all-important.
She and Holyoke wandered about the town, he helping her quickly to gather the materials for her first “special,” her impression of the town and its people and their feelings and of the stockaded mills with the soldiers and guns—her supplement to the strictly news account Holyoke would send. Camp accompanied them, making sketches. He went back to the hotel in advance of them to draw several large pictures to be sent by the night mail that they might reach New York in time for the paper of the next day but one. Toward four o’clock Emily shut herself in her room, and began her first article.
An hour of toil passed and she had not yet made a beginning. She was wrought to a high pitch of nervous terror. “Suppose I should fail utterly? Can it be possible that I shall be unable to write anything at all?” The floor was strewn with sheets of paper, a sentence, a few sentences—failed beginnings—written on each. Her hands were grimed with lead dust from sharpened and resharpened pencils. There was a streak of black on her left cheek. Her hair was coming down—as it seemed to her, the forewarning of complete mental collapse. She rose and paced the floor in what was very nearly an agony of despair.