IX
THE COMING OF THE SHEPHERD
The wires coming down from the north were flashing the railroad’s call for help. A band of madmen had struck the end of the line at Leavit’s Creek and had destroyed the half-finished bridge. They had raced down the line, driving the frightened labourers before them, tearing up the ties and making huge fires of them on which they threw the new rails, heating and twisting these beyond any hope of future usefulness.
Labourers, foremen and engineers of construction had fled literally for their lives. The men of the hills had no quarrel with them. They preferred not to injure them. But they were infuriated men with their wrongs fresh in mind and with deadly hunting rifles in hand. The workmen on the line needed no second warning. They would take no chances with an enemy of this kind. They were used to violence and rioting in their own labour troubles, but this was different. This was war. They threw themselves headlong upon handcars and work engines and bolted down the line, carrying panic before them.
In a single night the hill men with Jeffrey Whiting at their head had ridden down and destroyed 278 nearly twenty miles of very costly construction work. There were yet thirty miles of the line left in the hills and if the men were not stopped they would not leave a single rail in all the hill country where they were masters.
The call of the railroad was at first frantic with panic and fright. That was while little men who had lost their wits were nominally in charge of a situation in which nobody knew what to do. Then suddenly the tone of the railroad’s call changed. Big men, used to meeting all sorts of things quickly and efficiently, had taken hold. They had the telegraph lines of the State in their hands. There was no more frightened appeal. Orders were snapped over the wires to sheriffs in Adirondack and Tupper and Alexander counties. They were told to swear in as many deputies as they could lead. They were to forget the consideration of expense. The railroad would pay and feed the men. They were to think of nothing but to get the greatest possible number of fighting men upon the line at once.
Then a single great man, a man who sat in a great office building in New York and held his hand upon every activity in the State, saw the gravity of the business in the hills and put himself to work upon it. He took no half measures. He had no faith in little local authorities, who would be bound to sympathise somewhat with the hill people in this battle.
He called the Governor of the State from Albany to his office. He ordered the Governor to turn out the State’s armed forces and set them in motion toward the hills. He wondered autocratically that the Governor had not had the sense to do this of himself. The Governor bridled and hesitated. The Governor had been living on the fiction that he was the executive head of the State. It took Clifford W. Stanton just three minutes to disabuse him completely and forever of this illusion. He explained to him just why he was Governor and by whose permission. Also he pointed out that the permission of the great railroad system that covered the State would again be necessary in order that Governor Foster might succeed himself. Then the great man sent Wilbur Foster back to Albany to order out the nearest regiment of the National Guard for service in the hills.