The stone was a signal. As it flew, into the crowd from every
direction the Beech Hollow gangs tore their way, yelling and
cursing and striking out right and left --trampling children,
knocking down women, pouring out the foulest insults. The street
lamps all round Market Square went out, the torches on the
platform were torn down and extinguished. And in a dimness
almost pitch dark a riot that involved that whole mass of people
raged hideously. Yells and screams and groans, the shrieks of
women, the piteous appeals of children--benches torn up for
weapons--mad slashing about--snarls and singings of pain-stricken
groups-- then police whistles, revolvers fired in the air, and
the quick, regular tramp of disciplined forces. The police
--strangely ready, strangely inactive until the mischief had all
been done entered the square from the north and, forming a double
line across it from east to west, swept it slowly clean. The
fighting ended as abruptly as it had begun. Twenty minutes after
the flight of that stone, the square was empty save a group of
perhaps fifty men and women formed about Victor Dorn's body in
the shelter of the platform.
Selma Gordon was holding his head. Jane Hastings and Ellen
Clearwater were kneeling beside him, and Jane was wiping his face
with a handkerchief wet with whisky from the flask of the man who
had escorted them there.
``He is only stunned,'' said Selma. ``I can feel the beat of his
blood.
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