The Cup of Trembling, and Other Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

In the summer of 1894, a little black-eyed boy with chestnut curls used to swing on the gate of the Meadows cottage that opens upon the common, and chant some verses of domestic doggerel about Coxey's army, which was then begging and bullying its way eastward, and demanding transportation at the expense of the railroads and of the people at large.

He sang his song to the well-marked tune of Pharaoh's Army, and thus the verses ran:—

"The Coxeyites they gathered,
The Coxeyites they gathered,
And stole a train of freight-cars in the morn,
And stole a train of freight-cars in the morning,
And stole a train of freight-cars in the morn.

"The engine left them standing,
The engine left them standing,
On the railroad-track at Caldwell in the morn.
Very sad it was for Caldwell in the morning
To feed that hungry army in the morn.

"Where are all the U. S. marshals,
The deputy U. S. marshals,
To jail that Coxey army in the morn,
That 'industrious, law-abiding' Coxey's army
That stole a train of freight-cars in the morn?"

Where indeed were all the U. S. marshals? The question was being asked with anxiety in the town, for a posse of them had gone down to arrest the defiant train-stealers, and it was rumored that the civil arm had been disarmed, and the deputies carried on as prisoners to Pocatello, where the Industrials, two hundred strong, were intrenched in the sympathies of the town, and knocking the federal authorities about at their law-abiding pleasure. Pocatello is a division town on the Union Pacific Railroad; it is full of the company's shops and men, the latter all in the American Railway Union or the Knights of Labor, and solid on class issues, right or wrong; and it was said that the master workman was expected at Pocatello to speak on the situation, and, if need arose, to call out the trades all over the land in support of the principle that tramp delegations shall not walk. Disquieting rumors were abroad, and there was relief in the news that the regulars had been called on to sustain the action of the federal court.

The troops at Bisuka barracks were under marching orders. While the town was alert to hear them go they tramped away one evening, just as a shower was clearing that had emptied the streets of citizens; and before the ladies could say "There they go," and call each other to the window, they were gone.

Then for a few days the remote little capital, with Coxeyites gathering and threatening its mails and railroad service, waited in apprehensive curiosity as to what was going to happen next. The party press on both sides seized the occasion to point a moral on their own account, and some said, "Behold the logic of McKinleyism," and others retorted, "Behold the shadow of the Wilson Bill stalking abroad over the land. Let us fall on our faces and pray!" But most people laughed instead, and patted the Coxeyites on the back, preferring their backs to their faces.

It seemed as if it might be time to stop laughing and gibing and inviting the procession to move on, when a thousand or more men, calling themselves American citizens, were parading their idleness through the land as authority for lawlessness and crime, and when our sober regulars had to be called out to quell a Falstaff's army. The regulars, be sure, did not enjoy it. If there is a sort of service our soldiers would like to be spared, doubtless it is disarming crazy Indians: but they prefer even that to standing up to be stoned and insulted and chunked with railroad iron by a mob which they are ordered not to fire upon, or to entering a peaceful country which has been sown with dynamite by patriotic labor unions, or prepared with cut-bridges by sympathetic strikers.

We are here to be hurt, so the strong ones tell us, and perhaps the best apology the strong can make to the weak for the vast superiority that training gives is to show how long they can hold their fire amidst a mob of brute ignorances, and how much better they can bear their hurts when the senseless missiles fly. We love the forbearance of our "unpitied strong;" it is what we expect of them: but we trust also in their firmness when the time for forbearance is past.