Before the second night three companies of the militia had passed through Utica and had gone up the line of the U. & M. Their orders were to avoid killing where possible and to capture all of the hill men that they could. The railroad wished to have them tried and imprisoned by the impartial law of the land. For it was characteristic of the great power which in those days ruled the State that when it had outraged every sense of fair play and common humanity to attain its ends it was then ready to spend much money creating public opinion in favour of itself.
Jeffrey Whiting stood in the evening in the cover of the woods above Milton’s Crossing and watched a train load of soldiers on flat cars come creeping up the grade from the south. This was the last of the hills. He had refused to let his men go farther. Behind him lay fifty miles of new railroad in ruins. Before him lay the open, settled country. His men, once the fever of destruction had begun to run in their blood, had wished to sweep on down into the villages and carry their work through them. But he had stood firm. This was their own country where they belonged and where the railroad was the interloper. Here they were at home. Here there was a certain measure of safety for them even in the destructive and lawless work that they had begun. They had done enough. They had pushed the railroad back to the edge of the hills. They had roused the men of the hills behind them. Where he had started with his seventy-two friends, there were now three hundred well-armed men in the woods around him. Here in their cover they could hold the line of the railroad indefinitely against almost any force that might be sent against them.
But the inevitable sobering sense of leadership and responsibility was already at work upon him. The burning, rankling anger that had driven him onward so that he had carried everything and everybody near him into this business of destruction 281 was now dulled down to a slow, dull hate that while it had lost nothing of its bitterness yet gave him time to think. Those men coming up there on the cars were not professional soldiers, paid to fight wherever there was fighting to be done. Neither did they care anything for the railroad that they should come up here to fight for it. Why did they come?
They had joined their organisation for various reasons that usually had very little to do with fighting. They were clerks and office men, for the most part, from the villages and factories of the central part of the State. The militia companies had attracted them because the armouries in the towns had social advantages to offer, because uniforms and parade appeal to all boys, because they were sons of veterans and the military tradition was strong in them. Jeffrey Whiting’s strong natural sense told him the substance of these things. He could not regard these boys as deadly enemies to be shot down without mercy or warning. They had taken their arms at a word of command and had come up here to uphold the arm of the State. If the railroad was able to control the politics of the State and so was able to send these boys up here on its own business, then other people were to blame for the situation. Certainly these boys, coming up here to do nothing but what their duty to the State compelled them to do; they were not to be blamed.
His men were now urging him to withdraw a little distance into the hills to where the bed of the road ran through a defile between two hills. The soldiers would no doubt advance directly up the line of what had been the railroad, covering the workmen and engineers who would be coming on behind them. If they were allowed to go on up into the defile without warning or opposition they could be shot down by the hill men from almost absolute safety. If he had been dealing with a hated enemy Jeffrey Whiting perhaps could have agreed to that. But to shoot down from ambush these boys, who had come up here many of them probably thinking they were coming to a sort of picnic or outing in the September woods, was a thing which he could not contemplate. Before he would attack them these boys must know just what they were to expect.
He saw them leave the cars at the end of the broken line and take up their march in a rough column of fours along the roadbed. He was surprised and puzzled. He had expected them to work along the line only as fast as the men repaired the rails behind them. He had not thought that they would go away from their cars.
Then he understood. They were not coming merely to protect the rebuilding of the railroad. They had their orders to come straight into the hills, to attack and capture him and his men. The railroad was not only able to call the State to protect 283 itself. It had called upon the State to avenge its wrongs, to exterminate its enemies. His men had understood this better than he. Probably they were right. This thing might as well be fought out from the first. In the end there would be no quarter. They could defeat this handful of troops and drive them back out of the hills with an ease that would be almost ridiculous. But that would not be the end.
The State would send other men, unlimited numbers of them, for it must and would uphold the authority of its law. Jeffrey Whiting did not deceive himself. Probably he had not from the beginning had any doubt as to what would be the outcome of this raid upon the railroad. The railroad itself had broken the law of the State and the law of humanity. It had defied every principle of justice and common decency. It had burned the homes of law-supporting, good men in the hills. Yet the law had not raised a hand to punish it. But now when the railroad itself had suffered, the whole might of the State was ready to be set in motion to punish the men of the hills who had merely paid their debt.