The limit of patience was passed.  “Fire!” he thundered, and the howitzers poured their deadly canister point-blank into the throng.  At the same time the soldiers discharged their muskets.  Not only men, but women fell on every side, one with a child in her arms.

A warfare in which women stand an equal chance for death and wounds is a terrible thing, and yet this is usually an inseparable feature of mob-fighting.  However, setting aside the natural and instinctive horror at injuring a woman, the depraved creatures in the streets were deserving of no more sympathy than their male abettors in every species of outrage.  They did their utmost to excite and keep alive the passions of the hour.  Many were armed with knives, and did not hesitate to use them, and when stronger hands broke in the doors of shops and dwellings they swarmed after,—­the most greedy and unscrupulous of plunderers.  If a negro man, woman, or child fell into their hands, none were more brutal than the unsexed hags of the mob.

If on this, and other occasions, they had remained in their homes they would not have suffered, nor would the men have been so ferocious in their violence.  They were the first to yield to panic, however, and now their shrieks were the loudest and their efforts to escape out of the deadly range of the guns the most frantic.  In a few moments the avenue was cleared, and the military marched away, leaving the dead and wounded rioters where they had fallen, as the police had done before.  Instantly the friends of the sufferers gathered them up and carried them into concealment.

This feature, from the first, was one of the most marked characteristics of the outbreak.  The number of rioters killed and wounded could be only guessed at approximately, for every effort was made to bury the bodies secretly, and keep the injured in seclusion until they either died or recovered.  Almost before a fight was over the prostrate rioters would be spirited away by friends or relatives on the watch.

The authorities were content to have it so, for they had no place or time for the poor wretches, and the police understood that they were to strike blows that would incapacitate the recipients for further mischief.

In the same locality which had witnessed his morning fight, Colonel O’Brien, later in the day, met a fate too horrible to be described.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

Desperate fighting.

Having again reached police headquarters, Merwyn rested but a short time and then joined a force of two hundred men under Inspector Dilkes, and returned to the same avenue in which he had already incurred such peril.  The mob, having discovered that it must cope with the military as well as the police, became eager to obtain arms.  It so happened that several thousand carbines were stored in a wire factory in Second Avenue, and the rioters had learned the