The fight in the big room lasted only a moment. The rioters crowded toward the rear and escaped as best they could. Vigilantes with torches made short work of the rest of it. Dancing stove in a cask of alcohol, and as the attacking party ran out of the front door a torch was flung back into the spreading pool.
A great burst of fire lighted the street. The next moment the long building was in flames.
Emboldened by this success and driving the outlaws from their further retreats, the vigilantes fired one after another of the gaudy places that lined the upper street. Met by close shooting at every turn, the rioters were driven up the hill 304 and fighting desperately were pursued to cover by men now as savage as themselves. The scattered clashes were brief and deadly. The whole upper town was on fire. Men fleeing for their lives skulked in the shadows of the side streets and the constant scattering report of fire-arms added to the terrors of the night.
Hour after hour the conflagration raged and day broke at last on the smoking ruins of the town of Medicine Bend. The work of the vigilantes had been mercilessly thorough. Along the railroad track stiffened bodies hanging from the cross-bars of telegraph poles in the gloom of the breaking day told a ghastly story of justice summarily administered to the worst of the offenders. In the gloom of the smoking streets stragglers roamed unmolested among the ruins; for of the outlaws, killed or hunted out of the town, none were now left to oppose the free passage of any one from end to end of Medicine Bend.
CHAPTER XXV
The victory was dear, but none murmured at its cost. Medicine Bend for once had been purged of its parasites.
At the railroad head-quarters Stanley, before daylight, was directing the resumption of operations so interrupted by the three days of anarchism on the mountain division. New men were added every hour to the pay-roll, and the smaller tradesmen of the town, ruined by the riots, were given positions to keep them until the town could be rebuilt.
The pressure on the operating department increased twofold with the resumption of traffic. Winter was now upon the mountains, but construction could not be stopped for winter. The enormous prizes for extending the line through the Rockies to meet the rival railroad heading east from California, spurred the builders to every effort to lengthen their mileage, and something 306 unheard of was attempted, namely, mountain railroad-building in midwinter.