For three days the city was a monstrous madhouse with the maniacs in control. Thousands descended on the central police station and would have destroyed it if a few hundred police had not flanked them with simultaneous charges down side streets, and clubbed them into a stampede.
Editors who supported the government would have joined the black fruit ripening on the lamp-posts if Mr. Raymond’s Times had not mounted revolving cannon in its defense and Mr. Greeley’s Tribune had not thrust long troughs out of its upper windows as channels for bombshells to drop into the rabble.
Troops came hurrying to the city’s rescue and sprinkled canister upon certain patriots to disperse them. Then and only then the war-hating wolves became lambs again. The Seventh was recalled too late to defend the city from itself, but Keith did not come home with it. He had been commissioned to another regiment. A thousand lives had been lost in the Draft Riots, but the rioters were unashamed.
The Governor had called them “my friends” and promised them relief; the draft had been suspended and the city council had voted two millions and a half, so that those who were too poor to afford substitutes could have them bought by the city ready-made at six hundred dollars apiece.
In Westchester County rails had been torn up, wires cut, and drafting lists set ablaze, and mobs had gone wandering looking for Republicans.
But fatigue brought order and the sale of volunteers began. A Lasher boy of sixteen earned a fortune by going as a substitute. The war was already a war of boys on both sides. The hatred of Lincoln, however, was so keen that Westchester County gave two thousand majority to General McClellan in his campaign for the Presidency against Lincoln. That harried and harrowing politician barely carried the state, and served only a month of his new term before he was shot dead. He looked very majestic in his coffin and those who had laughed at him wept with remorse. In his death he won to the lofty glory his good homeliness had earned, though it brought him contempt while he lived. But that apotheosis was as yet months away, and unsuspected.
Toward the last of the war, RoBards had noted that Patty was forever holding one hand to her heart. He assumed that it was because a canker of terror was always gnawing there on account of Keith, always wandering somewhere through the shell-torn fields where bullets whistled, or the devils of disease spread their gins and springes.
This pain was never absent, but there was another ache that she hardly dared confess to herself. She thought it petty selfishness to have a distress when so many thousands were lying with broken bodies and rended nerves in the countless hospitals.
She put off troubling the doctors. Few of them were left in the city or the country and they were overworked with the torn soldiers invalided home.
Finally the heartache grew into a palpable something, and now and then it was as if a zigzag of lightning shot from her breast to her back. And once when she was reading to her husband about the unending siege of Petersburg where the last famished, barefoot heroes of the South were being slowly brayed to dust, a little shriek broke from her.