devastation resulting from their ill-advised action.  Many of their number, conscious of their responsibility for the scenes of bloodshed and pillage and wanton destruction of property, public and private, would now gladly undo their work and array themselves among the few defenders of the great corporations they have served for years and deserted at the call of leaders whom they never saw and in a cause they never understood, but there can be “no footsteps backward” now.  The tide of riot has engulfed the great city of the West, and the majesty of the law is but the laughing-stock of the lowest of the masses.  Huddled in their precinct stations the police are bandaging their bruised and broken heads.  Rallied at their armories, the more determined of the militia are preparing to defend them and their colors against the anticipated attack of fifty times their force in “toughs,”—­Chicago’s vast accumulation of outlawed, vagabond, or criminal men.  The city fathers are well-nigh hopeless.  Merchants and business-men gather on ’Change with blanched faces and the oft-repeated query, “What next?  What next?” Every moment brings tidings of fresh dismay.  New fires, and a crippled and helpless department, for the rioters slash their hose and laugh their efforts to scorn.  A gleam of hope shone in at ten o’clock, and the Board-room rang with cheers at the president’s announcement that the regulars were coming,—­a whole regiment of infantry from Omaha was already more than half-way.  But the gleam died out at noon when, with white lips, an official read the telegram saying the strikers had “side-tracked” the special trains bearing the soldiers and they could not advance another mile.

And so they had on one road, but there are others, better guarded, better run.  The sun is well over to the west again, Chicago is resigning itself to another night of horror, when from the suburbs there comes gliding in to the heart of the city the oddest-looking railway train that has been seen for years:  a sight at which a host of riotous men break away from the threatening front, dragging with them those “pals” whom drink has either maddened or stupefied; a sight at which skulking blackguards who have picked up paving-stones drop them into the gutters and think twice before they lay hand on their revolver butts.  No puffing engine hauls the train:  the motor-power is at the rear.  First and foremost is a platform car,—­open, uncovered, but over its buffer glisten the barrels of the dreaded Gatling gun, and around the gun—­can these be soldiers?  Covered with dust and cinders, hardly a vestige of uniform among them, in the shabbiest of old felt hats, in hunting-shirts of flannel or buckskin, in scout-worn trousers and Indian leggings, but with their prairie-belts crammed with copper cartridges, their brawny brown hands grasping the browner carbine, their keen eyes peering straight into the faces of the thronging crowd, their bronze features set and stern, the whole car fairly bristles with men who