Waterbury Democrat., 1901-06-14

through their hides if they stirred a foot through the company's gates that the mob that went there bent on de- struction, determined to burn and loot the offices and warehouses, slunk away completely cowed. "That feller's boss of the Big Horn yards this day, boys, and we ain't in it,' was the way the leader of the strikers expressed 1t, and there was no sane man who cared to put it to the test.
 Ascribe it to whatever cause we may, it was a petrified fact that from the in- stant Eric Langdon stepped out at the head of that company the Big Horns property was safe. The few willing workers left to the management took hold with a vim. An experimental :rain, guarded by militiamen from oth- CT companies, was started down the Red Water. A construction train fol- lowed with soldier boys manning both brakes and shovels. Charming, the hustling manager, tumbled clerks, bookkeepers, switchmen and car smiths into engine cabs, wired for oth- CTS to meet them at Gunnison and ac- tually had his trains moving at the very moment when the Seattle sheds were going up in flame, and the great general manager of that great corpora ton, with curses in his heart and his hands in his pockets, stood scowling on the scene of ruin through which the belated regulars were driving the last vestiges of the mob, and MT. Barclay, the general manager aforementioned, was both thinking and saying un- wholesome things of the regulars com mander, at whose hospitable board he had been wining and dining but month or so agone, the too deliberate Captain Nathan.
 What Melville would have said to that crestfallen officer when at last about noon, his train and command ar rived cannot we'll be conjectured, but that the long delay was of serious i'm port there can be no doubt, for Cap tain Nathan's explanation in writing was demanded and forwarded a day or two later, and both the unique expla- nation and old Gray Fox's 1.-the name of Gray Fox was given by the Indians to the famous frontier soldier at that time commanding the department of the Platte] telling reply was speedily the talk of the department of the Platte. Nathan said that it was true he might have earlier reached the Red Water valley, but he conceived that his first duty was to protect the lives of his devoted men and prevent the possi- bility of an ambuscade or pitfall. To this end every dangerous bridge was examined, certain deep cuts were ex- III otn ho n6 caf fn to proceed. He admitted long delay at the Junction, but declared it necessary because of the alarming reports brought him by reliable railway officials" to the effect that the tracks were under mined, the trestles sawed" and every mile of the Seattle from the junction to Brentwood thread of mines and mantraps. It was true, he said, that the train bearing some militia compa- nies had passed him at Gunnison and gone forward by the Big Horn road, but the way was cleared for them by the sheriff and other officials, whereas on the south bank no friends were to be hoped for.l
 And so it had resulted, to the un- speakable disgust of the few officers with Nathan's command, that the un- tried militia, under fearless and ener- getic leadership, had forced their way despite mobs and Instructions, to the seat of action and rescued the property of the Big Horn road, while the regu- lars, hampered by their timorous head, were held back for hours in front of purely imaginary obstacles and only reached the yards at Brentwood in time to find the buildings a mass of flame. Even that calamity might not have happened but that at II in the forenoon Major Melville, learning that the mob was drifting away from the Big Horn and gathering in threatening force about the Seattle yards down on the south side, had hurried in from the suburbs, whither he had gone to sta ton the recently rusticated battalion, and while standing on the platform of the freighthouse, calm and unmoved in the presence of a jeering, bowling pack of tatterdemalions and writing an order Summoning certain compa1lieS to