Caeser's Column: Chapter XXXVII. The Second Day

It was a dreadful night. Crowds of farmers from the surrounding country kept pouring into the city. They were no longer the honest yeomanry who had filled, in the old time, the armies of Washington, and Jackson, and Grant, and Sherman, with brave patriotic soldiers; but their brutalized descendants--fierce serfs--cruel and bloodthirsty peasants. Every man who owned anything was their enemy and their victim. They invaded the houses of friend and foe alike, and murdered men, women and children. Plunder! plunder! They had no other thought.

One of our men came to me at midnight, and said:

"Do you hear those shrieks?"

"Yes," I replied.

"They are murdering the family next door."

These were pleasant, kindly people, who had never harmed any one. But this maelström swallows good and bad alike.

Another came running to me, and cried:

"They are attacking the house!"

"Where?" I asked.

"At the front door."

"Throw over a hand-grenade," I said.

There was a loud crash, and a scurrying of flying feet. The cowardly miscreants had fled. They were murderers, not warriors.

All night long the awful Bedlam raged. The dark streets swarmed. Three times we had to have recourse to the hand-grenades. Fires sprang up all over the city, licking the darkness with their hideous tongues of flame, and revealing by

"What has happened?" I asked.

"I went this morning to Prince Cabano's palace to get Cæsar to help me. He had held high carnival all night and was beastly drunk, in bed. Then I went out to counsel with the mob. But another calamity had happened. Last night the vice-president--the Jew--fled, in one of the Demons, carrying away one hundred million dollars that had been left in his charge."

"Where did he go?" I asked.

"No one knows. He took several of his trusted followers, of his own nation, with him. It is rumored that he has gone to Judea; that he proposes to make himself king in Jerusalem, and, with his vast wealth, re-establish the glories of Solomon, and revive the ancient splendors of the Jewish race, in the midst of the ruins of the world."

"What effect has his flight had on the mob?" I asked.

"A terrible effect. They are wild with suspicions and full

"'What would you have us do?'

"'You must establish a provisional government. You must select one man to whose orders you will all submit. Then you must appoint a board of counselors to assist him. Then the men among you who are engineers and conductors of trains of cars and of air-lines must reassume their old places; and they must go forth into the country and exchange the spoils you have gathered for cattle and flour and vegetables, and all other things necessary for life.'

"'He wants to make himself a king,' growled one ruffian.

"'Yes,' said another, 'and set us all at work again.'

"'He's a d----d aristocrat, anyhow,' cried a third.

"But there were some who had sense enough to see that I was right, and the mob at once divided into two clamorous