In a single week Colonel Harris had secured over fifteen hundred new men.  Smoke-stacks were again pouring forth huge volumes of smoke.  The renewed and familiar hum of machinery was audible beyond the high board fence.  This activity in the mills was to the old employees like a red flag flaunted before an enraged bull.  Inflammatory speeches were the order of the hour.  It was three o’clock on the eighth day of the strike, when three thousand of the old employees left their halls and marched directly to the steel mills.  Hundreds of women and children joined the long procession.

The strike leaders in advance carried the American flag, and their band played the “Star Spangled Banner.”  Most of the men, and some of the women, carried clubs and stones.  Radicals concealed red flags and pistols within their coats.  Detectives reported by telephone the threatening attitude of the strikers to Colonel Harris at his home, to Manager Thomas at the mills, and to the mayor who ordered more police in patrol wagons to proceed immediately to the steel works.  Following the police rode the Harrisville Troop, one hundred strong.  Gertrude would not let her father go to the steel plant, so he sat by the telephone in his own house.

Captain Crager in charge of the fifty police on guard in and around the steel plant at once concentrated his force at the great gateway leading into the fenced enclosure.  His men were formed in three platoons, the reserve platoon being stationed fifty feet in the rear.  Captain Crager himself took position in the center of the first line.  He had time only for a few words to his men.  “The city expects each policeman to do his duty.  No one is to use his revolver till he sees me use mine.  Stand shoulder to shoulder, use your clubs, and defend the gateway.”

Probably not one of his fifty men had ever read of the 300 Spartan heroes at Thermopylae, who for three days held at bay the Persian army of five millions.  To pit fifty policemen against three thousand enraged strikers was too great odds.  Captain Crager’s orders were “to defend the property of the steel company.”  The reserve police force and troops en route might or might not reach him in time.  The strikers purposed driving out of the mills all the non-union men, and taking possession.  Nearer came the mob, determined to rule or ruin, O’Connor in the lead holding the Stars and Stripes.  The last fifty feet of approach to the gateway, the mob planned to cover by a rush.  On they came swinging their clubs and filling the air with stones.

Captain Crager and his platoons used their short iron-wood clubs vigorously.  The strikers’ flag was captured.  O’Connor fell bleeding.  Right and left, heads and limbs were broken.  Women screamed and strong men turned pale.  The whole mob was soon stampeded and the rioters fled like animals before a prairie fire.  Those strikers who looked back saw the approach of more patrol wagons loaded with police, heard the clatter of horses’ hoofs, and the heavy rumbling of artillery, and they knew that the city’s reserve forces had arrived.  A battery of Gatling guns at once wheeled into a strategic position.  The police and troop occupied points of advantage, and soon the victory was complete.