CHAPTER VIII.
During the famous Pullman strike of last summer, duty bade me cross to Chicago in the interests of the Echo. On Saturday afternoon, July the 7th, I was at the pulse of the Anarchist movement, near the corner of Loomis and Forty-ninth Streets. Taking up my stand in the deep entry of a "House to Let," I watched the operations of a body of strikers gathered round a box car close to the Grand Trunk crossing. They had set it afire, and were trying to overturn it upon the railway track, encouraged by the cheers of a mob numbering about two thousand men, women, and children.
The incendiaries were so much engrossed that they did not observe, backing swiftly down upon them, the wrecking train it was their purpose to block. While still in motion, the cars disgorged Captain Kelly and his company, who had been guarding the Pan Handle tracks all day, but had not yet, it seemed, earned their night's repose.
The crowd greeted the soldiers with stones, brickbats, and pieces of old iron, but the car burners proceeded with their little job, paying no attention at all to the approach of the military.
A pistol bullet out of the mob swished in among his men, and then Captain Kelly gave the order to fire. When the smoke of the volley cleared away, I saw the people stand still, shocked and dumb with surprise. A second later, realizing that the worm had had the audacity to turn, they vented a medley of shrieks and roars, and closed round the handful of soldiers, to be met by the points of bayonets.
The yelling mass of humanity scattered, took refuge in lanes and houses, but regaining courage, appeared here and there in sections, to be assailed once more by soldiers and police. The latter had to fight it out by themselves after a while, for the military boarded the wrecking train again, and the engineer, completely "rattled," opened the throttle, and whisked them away to the West, leaving a dozen revolver-armed policemen to meet the assaults of a mob that had now increased to five thousand.
The Press abuses the police on principle, but, seeing that heroic encounter, I wavered in the keeping of my promise to Belle not to run into danger. Even as I hesitated, "hurry-up wagons" arrived with re-enforcements from neighboring police stations, and then the crowd could not disperse quickly enough. It was a desperate sight—men knocking each other down in their haste to get away, and the women who had been spurring them on, now shrieking and groaning like maniacs. One of the poor creatures was hit on the ankle by a bullet, and her falling over into the gutter was too much for my virtuous resolution. Even if she is a dirty, howling Polack, a man does not enjoy seeing a woman knocked down, so I left my doorstep and went to help the lady up. Constitutionally I am not a brave man, but I forgot all about the flying bullets till one took me in the knee, and I toppled over, hitting my head against the curbstone as I did so. I must have been stunned, for when I opened my eyes again the street was empty, except for a thundering vehicle that was bearing straight down upon me.
At first I thought it was a runaway, for the horse was foaming of mouth and bloodshot of eyeball; but no, there was a man, or fiend, with a similar wild gleam in his eye, urging the brute upon me, while he sounded a gong to keep everything out of his way. All this I saw in a flash, and in a flash too went through my mind the advice given by President Cleveland in his proclamation to non-combatants to keep out of harm's way.