While thus thinking Myles was threading the unfamiliar streets of a city as strange to him as though it had been a hundred miles from New York, in search of the car-stables of the B—— Avenue line.
It took him so long to find them that, when he finally did so, the car on which he was ordered to ride had been gone some ten minutes. There was nothing to do but overtake it if possible, and the young reporter started down the track at the same pace he was accustomed to set for his crew when they were out for a “sweater,” as they called their training runs.
After running half-a-dozen blocks he began to meet signs of the strike. Here was a broken and overturned market-wagon that had evidently been placed across the track as a barricade, and there a place from which some paving-stones had been torn up. Now he began to be joined by others running in the same direction with himself, and to hear a noise different from the ordinary sounds of the city. As he rounded a corner this noise resolved itself into the shouts, cheers, and yells of an angry mob, and above all rang out sharply an occasional pistol-shot.
The street was filled with hundreds of excited men and boys, whose number was constantly increasing. They were all crowding toward some object of common interest which, when he got close enough to make it out, Myles saw was the very car in which he had been ordered to ride. It was occupied by a dozen or so of policemen, and was slowly urging its way forward with frequent halts, while another squad of policemen cleared a passage for it through the crowd. Every now and then a paving-stone crashed through a window or splintered the woodwork of the car. A throng of reckless men surged alongside of it, trying in every way they could think of to impede its progress. The company had declared this car should go through. The strikers declared it should not. They tried to lift it from the rails, to overturn it, to drag the driver from his platform, to kill the horses, or in some other way to stop that car.
By a steady use of their long, powerful night-clubs, the police who guarded the car had thus far kept the mob at bay, and prevented them from accomplishing their purpose.
[Illustration: A HOARSE VOICE SHOUTED THE OMINOUS WORD “SPOTTER.” (_Page 69._)]