The night of the trouble took even us by surprise, and the company was wholly unprepared. The engineers in the worst of the heat were accused of the rioting, but we had no more to do with it than homesteaders. Our boys are Americans, and we don't fight with torches and kerosene. We don't have to; they're not our weapons. The company imported the Polacks, let them settle their own accounts with them, said our fellows, and I called it right. Admitting that some of our Reds got out to mix in it, we couldn't in sense be held for that. It was Neighbor, the craftiest old fox on the staff of the division, who told the depot people in the afternoon that something was coming, and thinking back afterward of the bunches of the low-browed fellows dotting the bench and the bottoms in front of their dugouts, lowering at the guards who patrolled the railroad yards, it was strange no one else saw it. They had been out three weeks, and after no end of gabbling turned silent. Men that talk are not so dangerous; it's when they quit talking. Neighbor was a man of a thousand to act on his apprehension. All the afternoon he had the switch engines shunting cars about the roundhouse; the minute the arc lights went on the result could be seen. The old man had long lines of furniture vans, box cars, gondolas, and dead Pullmans strung around the big house like parapets. Whatever anybody else thought, Neighbor was ready. Even old John Boxer, his head blacksmith, who operated an amateur battery for salutes and celebrations, had his gun overhauled: the roundhouse was looking for trouble. It was barely eight o'clock that night when a group of us on Main Street saw the depot lights go out, and pretty soon telephone messages began coming in to Gatling's from the company plant up the river for the sheriff; the Polacks were wrecking the dynamos. The arc lights covering the yards were on a different circuit, but it didn't take the whiskered fellows long to find that out. Half an hour later the city plant was attacked; no one was looking for trouble there, and the great system of arcs lighting the yard for miles died like fireflies. We knew then, everybody knew, that the Polacks meant business.