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MacWilliams called Kirkland to the office at the other end of the Company's wire, and explained the situation to him. He was instructed to run an engine and freight-cars to a point a quarter of a mile north of the fort, and to wait there until he heard a locomotive whistle or pistol shots, when he was to run on to the fort as quickly and as noiselessly as possible.
The ghastly dinner sent up from the dining-room was a great banquet, and the locomotive whistles and the thunderous freight-cars were epithalamial flutes and drums. Outside, the world was a rainy, clamorous, benighted place. And to-morrow they must go forth into it again.
There were heaps of apples on the ground, and horses and cows were eating them in the fields, and rows of freight-cars at all the stations were laden with them, and little boys were selling them in the cars; in short, where were they not?
That was bad enough, but he loaded his bandits upon other trains he locked them into freight-cars like cattle so that not a head could be seen and the devil himself would never have guessed what was in those cars. Of course he succeeded. No one suspected the truth until his infamous army was in Espinal. Then it was too late. The carnage was terrible. But do you call that a nice action?
"The wind, howling around the freight-cars strung about us, sucked the guarded lantern flames up into blue and green flickers in the globes; they lighted the priest's face as he took off his hat and laid it beside him, and lighted the switchman's eyes looking steadily up from the rail.
They had seized the leaders and active men, and thrown them into jail without trial or charges; when the jails would hold no more, they kept some two hundred in an open stockade, called a "bull-pen," and finally they loaded them into freight-cars, took them at night out of the state, and dumped them off in the midst of the desert without food or water. John Edstrom had been one of these men.
In due time they were rattling over a tangled maze of switches, dodging interminable processions of freight-cars, barely missing crowded passenger trains whose bells struck clear and then flatted as the trains flew by; defiling by narrow water-ways, crowded with small shipping; winding through streets lined with high, gloomy warehouses, amid the clang and clatter, the strangely-sounding bells and whistles of a thousand industries, each sending up its just contribution of black smoke to the pall that lay always spread above; and steaming at last into a great roomy shed where all was system, and where the big engine trembled and panted as if in relief at having run in safety a gantlet so hazardous.
He had occupied a public building known as the "Governor's Mansion," and had hastily stripped it of carpets, curtains, and furniture of all sorts, which were removed to a train of freight-cars, which carried away these things even the cabbages and vegetables from his kitchen and cellar leaving behind muskets, ammunition, and the public archives.
She went on indifferently. The night was breathless and dark. Black, wet gusts dragged now and then through the skyless fog, striking her face with a chill. The Doctor quit talking, hurrying her, watching her anxiously. They came at last to the railway-track, with long trains of empty freight-cars. "We are nearly there," he whispered. "It's time you knew your work, and forgot your weakness.
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