“Now!” said Peter. His comrade raised the window, and Peter’s arm went out swiftly. He tossed the bomb.
It fell in front of the blue-jackets and burst. The detachment reeled. But the smoke had not quite dissipated before the sailors were in order again, running back, dragging their machine-gun and carrying two men, one dead, one wounded.
At the corner they stopped and aimed the gun at the mill. There was a tearing scream, like the sudden yelp of a circular saw when it bites a plank. A stream of steel-jacketed bullets blew against the building. The windows vanished with a clash of splintering glass. Three men, their heads bent low and their arms covering their faces as if to breast a tempest of hail and wind, ran out of the door. They had not gone ten yards when they were jerked, and tossed high, and flung forward, and dropped into a heap that might have been nothing except a huddle of old clothes.
The man at the machine-gun grunted. Squatting comfortably behind his little demon, he turned it on the factory again like a man manipulating a hose. Exactly as if he were sprinkling, he fanned the rows of windows, systematically.
Behind them the gunboat awoke. Its men had learned by signal what had occurred. Their guns opened fire on the street. Four steel projectiles struck the brick buildings, broke through them and tore up floors and walls and girders. As the shells exploded inside, the walls bent outward, seemed to recover, and then suddenly leaned out again and toppled, with smoke and dust mounting into a column on a cyclone of their own making.
Through the smoke and thick dust sped another flock of shells. A building at the head of a street moved. It seemed to jump, curiously like a frightened man staggering backward. Then there was no building. There was nothing but a pile of stone and twisted iron—with half a dozen men under it.
Providence’s Handful of Desperate Men
The gunboat lowered boats and sent more men ashore. They rushed machine guns into the town. “Our men have been attacked,” said their Commander, appearing at the City Hall. “The town is subject to punishment under the rules of war. Write a proclamation to your people at once. Inform them that a single other hostile act will cause your immediate execution and the complete destruction of your city.”
“Fall River Destroyed!” was the news that went through the country. It was spread by men who had seen the houses fall, and had run away in terror with the roar of tumbling walls and exploding shells in their ears, and who truly believed that they had seen the entire city in flame and ruin.
“Quick! Quick!” shouted a newspaperman in Providence when the news came in. “Get this on the street with the biggest head you can and rush copies to the madmen at the barricade. It’ll probably be the last thing we print; but it may save Providence.”