ight and
athletic, had bounded to his feet, despite the shock, and in an instant
had picked up his rifle and run to the succour of his companion. With a
yell of triumph the nearest rioters came rushing down upon them around
the corner. Two blocks further away the gas-light showed other parties
of excited, wolflike men hastening in pursuit. The nearest were some
sixty yards away, but at least a dozen of them, with exultant howls and
renewed cries of "Kill 'em!" "Slash 'em!" "Lynch' em!" bore down on the
luckless manager and his sole defender. Instantly Fred slipped one of
the long copper cartridges in the breech and slammed the block. "Stand
back!" he shouted, "or I'll fire!" Then as they still rushed on he
quickly raised the long brown Springfield to his shoulder and sighted
square at the foremost man. "Halt, or I'll drop you in your tracks!" and
the coward knew he meant it, and crouched and dodged, waiting for others
to reach him. Then again, encouraged by the yells of those behind, on
they came, but slower, skulking close to the fence, bending low,
clucking and dancing to disconcert his aim. And then the words of his
Colonel at the armory came ringing in his ears. "Not a shot, men--not a
finger on the trigger except at the order fire!"--and there was none to
order here. Yet dauntless and determined there he stood, and that one
gallant Yankee boy, in whose veins the fighting blood of the Highland
clans was boiling, in the simple service dress of the National Guard,
was just enough to hold ten city "toughs" at bay one vital and
all-important moment, for when, re-enforced by the coming of their
fellows from the rear, they finally rushed on to work their cowardly
hate on the one prostrate man with his sole defender, they were met face
to face by the charge of Company L, and got the hammering they so richly
deserved.

And so morning dawned at last on smoking yards, on half-burned shops, on
slowly but surely moving mail and passenger trains, on the glistening
walls and windows of the unharmed Amity Works, all stoutly guarded by
businesslike detachments of the city's crack regiment, and the great
mobs of the previous day and night were scattered far and wide. All
night police and patrol wagons had been busily at work, and drunken or
still riotous characters were being gathered in and trundled to the
station-houses, or pitched neck and crop into some freight-car
temporarily turned guard-house. The Steinmans, Frenzels, and oth