At Friendship the unruly element was very strong.  For a time it held its meetings in a hall.  When that was closed it resorted to the open air.

On the fifteenth of July it held an incendiary meeting on the unused polo field, and the next day awakened to the sound of hammers, and to find a high wooden fence, reenforced with barbed wire, being built around the field, with the state police on guard over the carpenters.  In a few days the fence was finished, only to be partly demolished the next night, secretly and noiselessly.  But no further attempts were made to hold meetings there.  It was rumored that meetings were being secretly held in the woods near the town, but the rendezvous was not located.

On the restored fence around the polo grounds a Red flag was found one morning, and two nights later the guard at the padlocked gate was shot through the heart, from ambush.

Then, about the first of August, out of a clear sky, sporadic riotings began to occur.  They seemed to originate without cause, and to end as suddenly as they began.  Usually they were in the outlying districts, but one or two took place in the city itself.  The rioters were not all foreign strikers from the mills.  They were garment workers, hotel waiters, a rabble of the discontented from all trades.  The riots were to no end, apparently.  They began with a chance word, fought their furious way for an hour or so, and ended, leaving a trail of broken heads and torn clothing behind them.

On toward the end of July one such disturbance grew to considerable size.  The police were badly outnumbered, and a surprising majority of the rioters were armed, with revolvers, with wooden bludgeons, lengths of pipe and short, wicked iron bars.  Things were rather desperate until the police found themselves suddenly and mysteriously reenforced by a cool-headed number of citizens, led by a tall thin man who limped slightly, and who disposed his heterogeneous support with a few words and considerable skill.

The same thin young man, stopping later in an alley way to investigate an arm badly bruised by an iron bar, overheard a conversation between two roundsmen, met under a lamppost after the battle, for comfort and a little conversation.

“Can you beat that, Henry?” said one.  “Where the hell’d they come from?”

“Search me,” said Henry.  “D’you see the skinny fellow?  Limped, too.  D’you notice that?  Probably hurt in France.  But he hasn’t forgotten how to fight, I’ll tell the world.”

The outbreaks puzzled the leaders of the Vigilance Committee.  Willy Cameron was inclined to regard them as without direction or intention, purely as manifestations of hate, and as such contrary to the plans of their leaders.  And Mr. Hendricks, nursing a black eye at home after the recent outburst, sized up the situation shrewdly.