Then he saw that the third train, although they were soldiers, took their lesson from the men who had just preceded them. They left the tracks and spreading still farther out took up the wings of a long line that was now stretching east to west along the fringe of the hills. The soldiers in the centre retired a little way down the roadbed, stood bunched together for a little time while their officers evidently conferred together, then left the road by twos and fours and began spreading out and pushing the other lines out still farther. It was perfect and systematic work, he agreed, that could not have been better done if he and his companions had planned it for their own capture.
There were easily eight hundred men there in 288 front, he judged; men well armed and ready for an indefinite stay in the hills, with a railroad at their back to bring up supplies, and with the entire State behind them. And the State was ready to send more and more men after these if it should be necessary. He had no doubt that hundreds of other men were being held in readiness to follow these or were perhaps already on their way. He saw the end.
Those lines would sweep up slowly, remorselessly and surround his men. If they stood together they would be massacred. If they separated they would be hunted down one by one.
Their only chance was to scatter at once and ride back to where their homes had been. This time he implored them to take their chance, begged them to save themselves while they could. But he might have known that they would do nothing of the kind. Already they were breaking away and spreading out to meet that distending line in front of them. Nothing short of a miracle could now save them from annihilation, and Jeffrey Whiting was not expecting a miracle. There was nothing to be done but to take command and sell his life along with theirs as dearly as possible.
The echoes of the outbreak in the hills ran up and down the State. Men who had followed the course of things through the past months, men who 289 knew the spoken story of the fire in the hills which no newspaper had dared to print openly, understood just what it meant. The men up there had been goaded to desperation at last. But wise men agreed quietly with each other that they had done the very worst thing that could have been done. The injury they had done the railroad would amount to very little, comparatively, in the end, while it would give the railroad an absolutely free hand from now on. The people would be driven forever out of the lands which the railroad wished to possess. There would be no legislative hindrances now. The people had doomed themselves.
The echoes reached also to two million other men throughout the State who did not understand the matter in the least. These looked up a moment from the work of living and earning a living to sympathise vaguely with the foolish men up there in the hills who had attacked the sacred and awful rights of railroad property. It was too bad. Maybe there were some rights somewhere in the case. But who could tell? And the two million, the rulers and sovereigns of the State, went back again to their business.
The echo came to Joseph Winthrop, Bishop of Alden, almost before a blow had been struck. It is hardly too much to say that he was listening for it. He knew his people, kindly, lagging of speech, slow to anger; but, once past a certain point of 290 aggravation, absolutely heedless and reckless of consequences.
He did not stop to compute just how much he himself was bound up in the causes and consequences of what had happened and what was happening in the hills. He had given advice. He had thought with the people and only for the people.
He saw, long before it was told him in words, the wild ride down through the hills to strike the railroad, the fury of destruction, the gathering of the forces of the State to punish.