There was the crowd, steadily and relentlessly pressing forward. There were big men—well-dressed men—business men, from their appearance, in the van of the crowd; and in the center of it all there were the two officers with their prisoner, who was handcuffed to one of them, and the three policemen in uniform.
Five officers of the law, surrounded by two hundred and fifty determined rescuers.
Just at the instant when the officers became convinced that assistance was necessary—just at the moment, in fact, when one of them was on the point of calling for it, somebody in the distance, and from a point higher up, as if its owner was so situated that he could overlook the conditions, whistled shrilly and peculiarly.
It was evident that the crowd was awaiting that signal, for with almost the mechanical precision of machinery, it acted.
The five officers were seized as one man might have been—and they were seized by many pairs of hands at once.
It was the same with each of the five, so we need only know the experience of one of them, as he afterward described it at the investigation that was ordered.
“Two hands, bigger than my own, went across my mouth, and the fingers locked together so that I couldn’t have opened my jaws to utter a word if my life had depended upon it. My head was pulled back with a jerk by those same two hands, for their owner was directly behind me, and I am willing to swear that he was a giant, although I did not see him. Then, at the same second, two more hands grabbed me by the throat and squeezed, not hard enough to choke me exactly, but near enough to that to keep my attention fixed for the moment on the desire to get my breath. Then, and also at the same instant, each one of my legs was seized by more hands, and I was lifted off my feet, and laid, face down, on the pavement. Then, a moment later there wasn’t a hand touching me, and I leaped to my feet ready for fight, only to find myself facing a crowd of a hundred or more innocent-looking men who were vieing with each other in asking what had happened and offering their assistance.
“Sure, I couldn’t arrest the whole crowd of them for attacking me, for I was not certain that a single one of them had been concerned in the attack.”
That finished his testimony, and that was, in fact, all that he or any one of the officers of the law knew about the occurrence—save, perhaps, one other—the officer to whom the prisoner was handcuffed.
His story given at the investigation was almost the same.