“Attention!” said another placard. “In case of military occupation of the city, a single disorderly act may mean the ruin of all. It is the duty of all citizens to offer no resistance, and to report to the authorities any plan toward resistance.”
There was a great stir in the crowd. A cab was pushing its way through Washington Street. Two dishevelled and blood-stained artillerymen, and an equally dishevelled civilian were in it.
While the soldiers went on to the City Hall, the civilian got out and entered a newspaper office. He was a reporter.
The rumor sped from man to man in the crowd before the building and from street to street that news had arrived from the forts. There was a tremendous press into Washington Street, where men and women, crushed together, stared at the building.
The cab hardly had stopped at the City Hall before a bulletin went up.
FORT ANDREWS GARRISON
DIES AT ITS POST
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IGNORES SUMMONS TO SURRENDER
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ONLY THREE MEN ESCAPE FROM RUINS
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Ten minutes later the “extras” appeared and were whirled through the town. They passed with the speed almost of the wind; for men passed them from hand to hand. They shouted the news to people looking from windows, in a delirium half of dismay, half of exultation. The newspaper man had brought in such a tale as would live in American history.
The Newspaper Man’s Story
He had been writing his story during the night’s bombardments while the mortar pits quaked around him with the eruptions of their steel volcanoes. He told how, in the morning, there had come suddenly from the shore the enfilading fire that caught the works in the back.
The men at the mortars, unable to turn their ordnance against these assailants, continued to fire at the ships, obedient to the instructions from the range-stations, till the blasts from the bursting charges above and around them tore away all the systems of fire control.[105]