Through the smoke and thick dust sped another flock of shells. A building at the head of a street moved. It seemed to jump, curiously like a frightened man staggering backward. Then there was no building. There was nothing but a pile of stone and twisted iron--with half a dozen men under it.
The gunboat lowered boats and sent more men ashore. They rushed machine guns into the town. “Our men have been attacked,” said their Commander, appearing at the City Hall. “The town is subject to punishment under the rules of war. Write a proclamation to your people at once. Inform them that a single other hostile act will cause your immediate execution and the complete destruction of your city.”
“Fall River Destroyed!” was the news that went through the country. It was spread by men who had seen the houses fall, and had run away in terror with the roar of tumbling walls and exploding shells in their ears, and who truly believed that they had seen the entire city in flame and ruin.
“Quick! Quick!” shouted a newspaperman in Providence when the news came in. “Get this on the street with the biggest head you can and rush copies to the madmen at the barricade. It’ll probably be the last thing we print; but it may save Providence.”
Behind the barricade, made of stones and wagons and all the useless, pitiable defenses that desperate men in desperate cities have always used, there were a hundred or more men who had lost their heads and would listen to nothing but the voice of their own fury. They were armed with old rifles taken from a plundered marine store’s establishment whose dusty cellar was piled with condemned arms. From the same place they had taken four automatic guns on rusty tripods.
Lashing themselves to greater and blinder rage at every attempt at opposition or argument, they had sworn to turn the weapons on their own police. But the black headlines on the extras that were tossed to them acted like the shock of ice-cold water on a drunken man.
One by one they slouched away. When the enemy arrived, there was nobody to oppose the files of bluejackets and marines that marched past the silent, gloomy crowds to occupy the city for the troops.
“Reports here that Providence is occupied,” Washington telegraphed to the army. “Send details.”