"Oh, it's plain enough," Mr. Dailey explained. "They knew all about your wretched burglar alarm, and the paragraph in the paper told them your signal calls. They robbed Bailey's house first, then disconnected Joe's bell, and sent out the call for help. Of course they knew that we would hurry over, leaving our own houses unprotected. As soon as the call was sent they stepped out and came over and robbed our houses at their leisure, knowing that we had gone to Baileys'. I suppose they're sitting somewhere now laughing at us."
Mr. Dailey was quite right about that. The two burglars were at that moment dividing their plunder in an empty barn, and laughing over their work.
"Give me a private telegraph line when you want to do a job up slick," said the older man, handing out a cut-glass pitcher, "specially when there's a newspaper to tell you the office calls. We don't have such luck as that often."
The Westbridge boys have learned from experience that it is hardly safe to ask Tom or Joe or Harry how he likes telegraphing; and the private burglar alarm has gone out of business.
CORPORAL FRED.
A Story of the Riots.
BY CAPTAIN CHARLES KING, U. S. A.
CHAPTER III.
The situation along the line of the Great Western at four o'clock this sultry afternoon was indeed alarming. "No violence," said the leaders of the strike, "will be countenanced, though of course we cannot guarantee that it won't occur. Our men are bitter at the refusal to comply with their just demands, and they have thousands of friends and sympathizers whom we can't control." Whether friends of the striking switchmen and trainmen or not, there could be no question about the number of so-called sympathizers. They swarmed to the yards from every slum in the city, a host of tramps and thugs, vagabonds and jail-birds, re-enforced by bevies of noisy, devil-may-care street boys, and scores of shrill-voiced, slatternly women. The men who ventured to handle switches under instructions of the yard foremen were stoned and driven off. Loyal train hands who had refused to strike and came out with the mail and express trains were hooted, jeered, and assaulted, despite the deputy marshals and the widely scattered police. Some strange apathy chained the city authorities and its battalions of uniformed and disciplined men who were held in reserve at the police stations, while the pitiably small force, distributed by twos and threes along ten miles of obstructed track, made only shallow pretence of resistance to the efforts of the mob or of protection to the objects of its wrath. Mail trains and some few passenger trains, heavily guarded, had managed to crawl through the howling throng, and this partial success of the management served to fan the flame of fury, and every window was smashed by volleys of stones and coupling-pins in the last train to be pulled through. The track behind it was suddenly and speedily blocked by the overturning, one after another, of dozens of freight-cars. The rioters, guided by graduates of the yard, now worked in most effective and systematic fashion. There was no need of assaulting switchmen when they could so readily block the tracks. The last train got in at noon. At 2 p.m. no trains, even the mails, could get either in or out.