For some reason that “swear-word” pleased New York and the country generally, showing that even an oath has its purpose in this world, so long as it is properly used.  Dean Swift said a lie “was too good to be lavished about.”  So it is of profanity.  The crowd understood Peter’s remark as they would have understood nothing else.  They understood that besides those rifles and bayonets there was something else not to be trifled with.  So in this case, it was not wasted.

And Mr. Bohlmann, Christian though he was, as he read his paper that evening cried, “Och!  Dod Beder Stirling he always does say chust der righd ding!”

CHAPTER LVI.

CUI BONO?

Of the further doings of that day it seems hardly necessary to write, for the papers recorded it with a fulness impossible here.  The gathering crowds.  The reinforcement of the militia.  The clearing and holding of Forty-second Street to the river.  The arrival of the three barge-loads of “scabs.”  Their march through that street to the station safely, though at every cross street greeted with a storm of stones and other missiles.  The struggle of the mob at the station to force back the troops so as to get at the “rats.”  The impact of the “thin line” and that dense seething mass of enraged, crazed men.  The yielding of the troops from mere pressure.  The order to the second rank to fix bayonets.  The pushing back of the crowd once more.  The crack of a revolver.  Then the dozen shots fired almost simultaneously.  The great surge of the mob forward.  The quick order, and the rattle of guns, as they rose to the shoulder.  Another order, and the sheet of flame.  The great surge of the mob backwards.  Then silence.  Silence in the ranks.  Silence in the mob.  Silence in those who lay on the ground between the two.

Capital and Labor were disagreed as to a ten per cent reduction of wages, and were trying to settle it.  At first blush capital had the best of it.  “Only a few strikers and militia-men killed,” was the apparent result of that struggle.  The scabs were in safety inside the station, and trains were already making up, preparatory to a resumption of traffic.  But capital did not go scot-free.  “Firing in the streets of New York,” was the word sent out all over the world, and on every exchange in the country, stocks fell.  Capital paid twenty-five million dollars that day, for those few ounces of lead.  Such a method of settlement seems rather crude and costly, for the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Boys all over the city were quickly crying extras of the “Labor-party” organ, the first column of which was headed: 

    BUTCHER STIRLING

    THE NOMINEE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

    SHOOTS DOWN UNARMED MEN

    IN

    COLD BLOOD.

This was supplemented by inflammatory broadsides.  Men stood up on fences, lamp-posts, or barrels, wherever they could get an audience, and shrieked out invectives against police, troops, government, and property; and waved red flags.  Orders went out to embody more regiments.  Timid people retired indoors, and bolted their shutters.  The streets became deserted, except where they were filled by groups of angry men listening to angrier speakers.  It was not a calm night in New York.