If the besieged fired in return, the men at the gun did not know it. Their steel beast drowned the farmers’ tiny efforts in roar and flame. They passed as a breath. The cavalrymen cantered to the ruin. A half wall was standing, jagged. The rest was a mound of dirt. Under it lay fourteen men of Massachusetts. The sheriff lay there, with his face more patient than ever, and his arm around his brother. The little gun and its horses and men joined the horses and men that were moving northward through New England. Over the field telegraph wire that unreeled behind the advancing force went the report to the enemy headquarters: “Civilians estimated at about a dozen fired from ambush, killing eight cavalry. Took refuge in building. Annihilated.” It was a perfunctory report telling of a merely perfunctory incident. But the commander-in-chief, sitting at his ease in headquarters in Providence, stopped smoking for a moment. “See that the news does not spread,” said he. “It might raise the country. Reënforce all patrols and warn them.” _New England Ablaze_ He was a quick man. His officers were quick and his system of communication was quick. But the news sped more quickly still. Over every telephone that was intact, over every telegraph wire that still worked in New England, by bicycle, on horseback, by men running, the story was passed from man to man and village to village. They were fourteen humble men, unknown beyond their own township, when they crouched behind the stone wall. They were fourteen shining names before the ruins that covered them had ceased smoking. New England, like a blazing forest, was ablaze with wrath and fury. Vain was it now for cautious men to warn or authorities to command. Men who never in their lives had thought harm to any living thing, dashed out with smoldering eyes to fight. Prudent men, who never in their lives had acted on impulse, now acted without a second’s pause for reflection. Men who had cared all their lives only for their own little affairs, were all drunken now and thought it nothing to fire one shot for their country and die behind a stone wall in the dirt. In Acushnet an old whaling captain, a prosperous, weighty citizen, emptied his shot gun into a raiding party and was left dead under his forsythias with the golden blossoms from the volley-torn shrubs covering him. Between Taunton and Pawtucket a militia company of field artillery that had been unable to move its gun because it lacked horses, got it from its hiding place, and with a party of volunteers who had no firearms, fought behind piled bags of cement against enemy cavalry till artillery had to be brought from miles away to destroy them.