midnight
At adjacent street-corners helmeted policemen , idly swinging their clubs behind them , looked on and laughed . Where at sundown the previous day perhaps a thousand angry-looking men and women had hovered , menacing , above the great crossing of the Central and the P.Q. & R. , ten thousand furies now seemed loose . The triumphant boast of the strike-leaders that not a wheel should turn on Allison 's road had been laughed to scorn . Not only had Allison , with a force of deputies and loyal trainmen , cleared his tracks at midnight and sent the famous Silver Special , full panoplied , on its way , but the armed deputies that took it to the county line brought in under cover of their Winchesters and the darkness of early morning three side-tracked trains from the far West . And now indeed was there raging and gnashing of teeth . Men thus braved and thwarted turned to fiends . The sun was not an hour high when the emissaries of the Railway Union were haranguing the people all along these outlying districts .