ic and fright.
That was while little men who had lost their wits were nominally in
charge of a situation in which nobody knew what to do. Then suddenly
the tone of the railroad's call changed. Big men, used to meeting all
sorts of things quickly and efficiently, had taken hold. They had the
telegraph lines of the State in their hands. There was no more
frightened appeal. Orders were snapped over the wires to sheriffs in
Adirondack and Tupper and Alexander counties. They were told to swear
in as many deputies as they could lead. They were to forget the
consideration of expense. The railroad would pay and feed the men.
They were to think of nothing but to get the greatest possible number
of fighting men upon the line at once.

Then a single great man, a man who sat in a great office building in
New York and held his hand upon every activity in the State, saw the
gravity of the business in the hills and put himself to work upon it.
He took no half measures. He had no faith in little local authorities,
who would be bound to sympathise somewhat with the hill people in this
battle.

He called the Governor of the State from Albany to his office. He
ordered the Governor to turn out the State's armed forces and set them
in motion toward the hills. He wondered autocratically that the
Governor had not had the sense to do this of himself. The Governor
bridled and hesitated. The Governor had been living on the fiction
that he was the executive head of the State. It took Clifford W.
Stanton just three minutes to disabuse him completely and forever of
this illusion. He explained to him just why he was Governor and by
whose permission. Also he pointed out that the permission of the great
railroad system that covered the State would again be necessary in
order that Governor Foster might succeed himself. Then the great man
sent Wilbur Foster back to Albany to order out the nearest regiment of
the National Guard for service in the hills.

Before the second night three companies of the militia had passed
through Utica and had gone up the line of the U. & M. Their orders
were to avoid killing where possible and to capture all of the hill
men that they could. The railroad wished to have them tried and
imprisoned by the impartial law of the land. For it was characteristic
of the great power which in those days ruled the State that when it
had outraged every sense of fair play and common humanity to attain
its ends it was then ready to spe