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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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"Get out of this!" cried the officer, swinging his club. "I’ll give ye a bat on the sconce. Back, now." "What the hell!" cried another of the strikers, pushing the other way, adding at the same time some lusty oaths. Crack came an officer’s club on his forehead. He blinked his eyes blindly a few times, wabbled on his legs, threw up his hands, and staggered back. In return, a swift fist landed on the officer’s neck. Infuriated by this, the latter plunged left and right, laying about madly with his club. He was ably assisted by his brother of the blue, who poured ponderous oaths upon the troubled waters. No severe damage was done, owing to the agility of the strikers in keeping out of reach. They stood about the sidewalk now and jeered. "Where is the conductor?" yelled one of the officers, getting his eye on that individual, who had come nervously forward to stand by Hurstwood. The latter had stood gazing upon the scene with more astonishment than fear. "Why don’t you come down here and get these stones off the track?" inquired the officer. "What you standing there for? Do you want to stay here all day? Get down." Hurstwood breathed heavily in excitement and jumped down with the nervous conductor as if he had been called. "Hurry up, now," said the other policeman. Cold as it was, these officers were hot and mad. Hurstwood worked with the conductor, lifting stone after stone and warming himself by the work. "Ah, you scab, you!" yelled the crowd. "You coward! Steal a man’s job, will you? Rob the poor, will you, you thief? We’ll get you yet, now. Wait." Not all of this was delivered by one man. It came from here and there, incorporated with much more of the same sort and curses. "Work, you blackguards," yelled a voice. "Do the dirty work. You’re the suck-ers that keep the poor people down!" "May God starve ye yet," yelled an old Irish woman, who now threw open a nearby window and stuck out her head. "Yes, and you," she added, catching the eye of one of the policemen. "You bloody, murtherin’ thafe! Crack my son over the head, will you, you hard-hearted, murtherin’ divil? Ah, ye-" But the officer turned a deaf ear. "Go to the devil, you old hag," he half muttered as he stared round upon the scattered company. Now the stones were off, and Hurstwood took his place again amid a continued chorus of epithets. Both officers got up beside him and the conductor rang the bell, when, bang! bang! through window and door came rocks and stones. One narrowly grazed Hurstwood’s head. Another shattered the window behind. "Throw open your lever," yelled one of the officers, grabbing at the handle himself. Hurstwood complied and the car shot away, followed by a rattle of stones and a rain of curses. "That-- - - hit me in the neck," said one of the officers. "I gave him a good crack for it, though." "I think I must have left spots on some of them," said the other. "I know that big guy that called us a-- - -," said the first. "I’ll get him yet for that." "I thought we were in for it sure, once there," said the second. Hurstwood, warmed and excited, gazed steadily ahead. It was an astonishing experience for him. He had read of these things, but the reality seemed something altogether new. He was no coward in spirit. The fact that he had suffered this much now rather operated to arouse a stolid determination to stick it out. He did not recur in thought to New York or the flat. This one trip seemed a consuming thing. They now ran into the business heart of Brooklyn uninterrupted. People gazed at the broken windows of the car and at Hurstwood in his plain clothes. Voices called "scab" now and then, as well as other epithets, but no crowd attacked the car. At the downtown end of the line, one of the officers went to call up his station and report the trouble. "There’s a gang out there," he said, "laying for us yet. Better send some one over there and clean them out." |
