Rucker jumped for McTerza, and they mixed like clouds in a cyclone. For a minute it was a whirlwind, and nothing could be made of it; but when they could be seen McTerza had the best man in our camp pinned under a table with his throat in one hand like the latch of a throttle. Nicholson at the same moment raising an oak stool smashed it over McTerza's head. The fellow went flat as a dead man, but he must have pulled up quick, for when Neighbor, rushing in, whirled Nicholson into the street, the Reading man already had his feet, and a corner to work from. Reed, the trainmaster, was right behind the big master mechanic. Rucker was up, but saw he was outnumbered.
"Hurt, Mac?" asked Reed, running toward the Reading man. The blow had certainly dazed him; his eyes rolled seasick for a minute, then he stared straight ahead.
"Look out," he muttered, pointing over Reed's shoulder at Kate Mullenix, "she's going to faint." The trainmaster turned, but Kate was over before her brother Sinkers could reach her as he ran in. Rucker moved towards the door. As he passed McTerza he sputtered villanously, but Neighbor's huge bulk was between the two men.
"Never mind," retorted McTerza; "next time I get you I'll ram a billiard c-c-c-cue down your throat."
It was the first intimation our fighting men had that the Reading fellow could do business, and the affair caused McTerza to be inspected with some interest from behind screens and cracker boxes as he sauntered up and down the street. When the boys asked him what he was going to do about his treatment in the short order house he seemed indifferent; but the indifference, as our boys were beginning to find out, covered live coals; for when he was pressed he threw the gauntlet at the whole lodge of us, by saying that before he got through he would close the short order house up. That threat made him a marked man. The Reading men were hated; McTerza was slated for the very worst of it. Everybody on both sides understood that—except McTerza himself. He never understood anything, for that matter, till it was on him, and he dropped back into his indifference and recklessness almost at once. He even tried the short order house again. That time Mrs. Mullenix herself was in the saddle. There were things in life which even McTerza didn't hanker after tackling more than once, and one was a second interview with Mrs. Mullenix. But the fellow must have made an impression on even the redoubtable Mrs. Mary, for she privately asked Neighbor, as one might of an honorable adversary, for peace' sake to keep that man away from her restaurant; so McTerza was banned. He took his revenge by sauntering in and out of Gatling's, until Gatling himself went gray-headed with the fear that another riot would be brought on his place.
Oddly enough, McTerza had one friend in the Mullenix family. On the strike question, like many other McCloud families, the house of Mullenix was divided against itself. All held for the engineers except the youngest member, Sinkers. Sinkers was telegraph messenger, and was strictly a company man in spite of everything. He naturally saw a great deal of the new men, but Sinkers never took the slightest interest in McTerza till he handled Rucker; after that Sinkers cultivated him. Sinkers would listen just as long as McTerza would stutter, and they became fast friends long before the yard riots.
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.