on, have made it a
point to sneer at, vilify, and hold up to public execration the officers
of the regular army. During the past four or five years the lampooning
and lying have been redoubled, and it is like heaping coals of fire on
their heads that the very regiment they have abused the most was the
most conspicuous in Chicago's defence. _We_ had no picnic, but the
Fifteenth simply had hell and repeat,--the meanest, most trying, most
perilous duty, from first to last. Those fellows were scattered in
little detachments all over Cook County, and faced fifty times their
weight in toughs, and carried out their orders and stood all manner of
foul abuse and never avenged it, when if any one of those young captains
or lieutenants commanding detachments had lost his temper and let drive
the lightning sleeping in those brown Springfields, there'd 'a' been a
cleaning out of the rabble that would have thinned the ranks of one
political party in our blessed country, at least. Oh, we're glad enough
to get away and see the change of tone in the Chicago press; but it
won't last."

And Kenyon's was by no means an exaggerated statement. In the
far-spreading course of the great strike "the regulars" came in for many
a hard knock from the mob and for not a few from the press. At one point
experienced railway-hands, not mere ruffian rioters, wrecked the track
at a trestle in front of a coming troop train, hurling the engine, with
its gallant guard of half a dozen artillerymen, into the depths below,
crushing or drowning them like rats. At another point, when baffled in
their efforts to overturn a sleeping-car in front of a patrol engine,
and dispersed by a dozen well-aimed shots, the rioters impanelled their
coroner's jury, and declared the red-handed participants innocent
spectators and the officer and his men murderers. At a third, when a
great railway centre was found in the hands of the strikers and the
troops were ordered to clear the platform, one surly specimen not only
refused to budge, but lavished on the captain commanding the foulest
epithets in a blackguard's vocabulary. The crowd outnumbered the troops
by twenty to one. The faintest irresolution or hesitancy would have been
fatal. One whack with the sword knocked the fight out of the bully, and,
while he was led off to be plastered in hospital, the maddened rioters
held their indignation meeting, and not only they, but high officials
eager for their votes, united in denounci