Held for Orders: Being Stories of Railroad Life

by Frank H. Spearman

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 reënforcing 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 passenger 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 Gods!" 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 passed 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-glass windows, the mob split into two great waves, and one headed for the passenger 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 nobody thought of a man until Cameron with the quicker eyes cried:

"For God's sake! There's McTerza!"