"JIM, FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE TAKE NO PART IN THIS RIOTING!"
"Jim—brother—think what you're doing! For Heaven's sake take no part in this rioting! Go to mother and the girls. They're all alone."
"Go yourself, Fred," answered the elder, thickly. To Fred's dismay he saw that his big brother, his pride and protector for many a boyish year, had been drinking, and was flushed and unbalanced as a result. "Go yourself and keep out of harm's way. I'm in this to stay now. I'm not the man to see my brothers wronged and abused and robbed of their rights. You go to them, Fred. Why are you not at the office?" he added, with sudden suspicion in his glittering eye.
"I'm here to find you," said Fred, evasively. "Mother is crying because of her anxiety about you. Father has been searching. Do come out of this, Jim, and home with me."
But a yell of wrath and defiance drowned the boy's words, and as though with one simultaneous impulse the mob heaved and surged and broke into a run. The engines had switched to the side tracks a block away, and, protected by armed guards on the tender, the pilot, and footboard, were coupling on to the standing trains. Fred felt himself swept along, tugging at his brother's arm. Half a dozen agile men edged out of the crowd and dove under the cars to which the foremost engine was now attached. Shriek went the whistle, clang the bell, back leaped the guards, some of them swarming up the freight-car ladders. The engine jetted smoke and steam and backed promptly away, but a roar of triumph and derision went up from the mob. Only one car followed it. The strikers had drawn the coupling-pins of the rest.
Two of the deputies, Winchesters in hand, had clambered to the roofs of the second and third cars, and now as their comrades were trundled away there they stood irresolute. Instantly those cars were the centre of a jeering, howling mob. Instantly stones, coupling-pins, and mud began to fly. Throwing themselves flat upon their faces, the luckless fellows sought to escape the storm. Missiles hurled by the mob on one side came raining down into the faces of their fellows on the other, and even as Fred was imploring his brother to come away now and at once, a rock, hurtling over the nearest car, struck the roof and bounded into the throng below, cutting a gash on the younger brother's white forehead, and striking him senseless to the earth, just as some untaught, undisciplined fool among the deputies pulled trigger and fired. Whistling overhead the bullet went hissing away up the tracks the signal for a mad rush of men and boys. An instant more and only three forms occupied the ground where a hundred were struggling but the moment before—Jim Wallace and a fellow-trainsman bending over the senseless, bleeding form of brother Fred.
"They've shot him! They've killed him!" howled the retreating crowd. "Down with the deputies! Kill 'em! hang 'em!" were the furious yells. Three or four policemen came running up to assist the fallen. An old gray-haired man dropped the lever of the switch engine, calling to his assistant to watch it, and ran forward along the tracks, wild anxiety in his eyes, and in another moment, brushing aside the bluecoats, old Wallace threw himself upon his knees and raised the blood-stained face of his boy to his heaving breast. "In God's name," he cried, his lips piteously quivering, "how came he here? Why is he not at the office?"
There was a moment of silence. Covering his face in his hands, big burly Jim turned almost sobbing away. A young man leaping across the tracks caught the last question as he joined them, and it was his voice that was heard in answer. "Because they've discharged him, Mr. Wallace, as they have me, for obeying orders to join our regiment at once."
And as though recalled to his senses by a comrade's words, Corporal Fred faintly opened his eyes and looked up and saw his father's face. "Don't let mother know," he murmured. "It might frighten her for nothing. Help me over to the cable road, Charley; we've got to hurry to the armory."
And then the crowd came swarming back even as a little boy, escaped for the moment from watchful eyes at home and drawn by eager curiosity to the gates, now ran sobbing back to tell the dreadful news he had heard among the women in the crowd—that brother Fred was shot and killed.