A policeman, under orders from his captain, clambered to the lofty seat
of the coal waggon to arrest the driver. And the driver, rising
leisurely and peacefully to meet him, suddenly crumpled him in his arms
and threw him down on top of the captain. The driver was a young giant,
and when he climbed on his load and poised a lump of coal in both hands,
a policeman, who was just scaling the waggon from the side, let go and
dropped back to earth. The captain ordered half-a-dozen of his men to
take the waggon. The teamster, scrambling over the load from side to
side, beat them down with huge lumps of coal.
The crowd on the sidewalks and the teamsters on the locked waggons roared
encouragement and their own delight. The motorman, smashing helmets with
his controller bar, was beaten into insensibility and dragged from his
platform. The captain of police, beside himself at the repulse of his
men, led the next assault on the coal waggon. A score of police were
swarming up the tall-sided fortress. But the teamster multiplied
himself. At times there were six or eight policemen rolling on the
pavement and under the waggon. Engaged in repulsing an attack on the
rear end of his fortress, the teamster turned about to see the captain
just in the act of stepping on to the seat from the front end. He was
still in the air and in most unstable equilibrium, when the teamster
hurled a thirty-pound lump of coal. It caught the captain fairly on the
chest, and he went over backward, striking on a wheeler’s back, tumbling
on to the ground, and jamming against the rear wheel of the auto.
Catherine thought he was dead, but he picked himself up and charged back.
She reached out her gloved hand and patted the flank of the snorting,
quivering horse. But Drummond did not notice the action. He had eyes
for nothing save the battle of the coal waggon, while somewhere in his
complicated psychology, one Bill Totts was heaving and straining in an
effort to come to life. Drummond believed in law and order and the
maintenance of the established, but this riotous savage within him would
have none of it. Then, if ever, did Freddie Drummond call upon his iron
inhibition to save him. But it is written that the house divided against
itself must fall. And Freddie Drummond found that he had divided all the
will and force of him with Bill Totts, and between them the entity that
constituted the pair of them was being wrenched in twain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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