The Cup of Trembling, and Other StoriesFoote, Mary Hallock
General
The Cup of Trembling, and Other Stories
Foote, Mary Hallock
United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
Where indeed were all the U. S. marshals? The question was being asked
with anxiety in the town, for a posse of them had gone down to arrest
the defiant train-stealers, and it was rumored that the civil arm had
been disarmed, and the deputies carried on as prisoners to Pocatello,
where the Industrials, two hundred strong, were intrenched in the
sympathies of the town, and knocking the federal authorities about at
their law-abiding pleasure. Pocatello is a division town on the Union
Pacific Railroad; it is full of the company's shops and men, the latter
all in the American Railway Union or the Knights of Labor, and solid on
class issues, right or wrong; and it was said that the master workman
was expected at Pocatello to speak on the situation, and, if need arose,
to call out the trades all over the land in support of the principle
that tramp delegations shall not walk. Disquieting rumors were abroad,
and there was relief in the news that the regulars had been called on
to sustain the action of the federal court.
The troops at Bisuka barracks were under marching orders. While the town
was alert to hear them go they tramped away one evening, just as a
shower was clearing that had emptied the streets of citizens; and before
the ladies could say "There they go," and call each other to the window,
they were gone.
Then for a few days the remote little capital, with Coxeyites gathering
and threatening its mails and railroad service, waited in apprehensive
curiosity as to what was going to happen next. The party press on both
sides seized the occasion to point a moral on their own account, and
some said, "Behold the logic of McKinleyism," and others retorted,
"Behold the shadow of the Wilson Bill stalking abroad over the land. Let
us fall on our faces and pray!" But most people laughed instead, and
patted the Coxeyites on the back, preferring their backs to their faces.
It seemed as if it might be time to stop laughing and gibing and
inviting the procession to move on, when a thousand or more men,
calling themselves American citizens, were parading their idleness
through the land as authority for lawlessness and crime, and when our
sober regulars had to be called out to quell a Falstaff's army. The
regulars, be sure, did not enjoy it. If there is a sort of service our
soldiers would like to be spared, doubtless it is disarming crazy
Indians: but they prefer even that to standing up to be stoned and
insulted and chunked with railroad iron by a mob which they are ordered
not to fire upon, or to entering a peaceful country which has been sown
with dynamite by patriotic labor unions, or prepared with cut-bridges by
sympathetic strikers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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