Regular company guards, augmented by Pinkerton agents and city policemen, meanwhile took turns patrol ling the company fence all night. The company guards, ordinarily armed only with pistols, had rifles, and shotguns, too, borrowed from friends or brought from home.

Four Pinkerton men were allowed to sleep all through the night. They were master craftsmen of a sort. They were sharpshooters.

It was not bugles that awakened the McCones the next morning. It was the sound of hammering and sawing, which gabbled around the plaza. Carpenters were building a high scaffold by the main gate, just inside the fence. The chief of police of Cleveland was to stand atop it, in plain view of everyone. At an opportune moment he was to read the Ohio Riot Act to the crowd. This public reading was required by law. The act said that any unlawful assembly of twelve persons or more had to disperse within an hour of having the act read to it. If it did not disperse, its members would be guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment for from ten years to life.

Nature sympathized again — for a gentle snow began to fall.

Yes, and an enclosed carriage drawn by two white horses clattered into the plaza at full speed and stopped by the gate. Into the dawn's early light stepped Colonel George Redfield, the governor's son-in-law, who had been commissioned by the governor, and who had come all the way from Sandusky to take command of the militiamen. He owned a lumber mill and was in the feed and ice businesses besides. He had no military experience, but was costumed as a cavalryman. He wore a saber, which was a gift from his father-in-law.

He went at once to the machine shop to address his troops.

Soon after that wagons carrying riot police arrived. They were ordinary Cleveland policemen, but armed with wooden shields and blunt lances.

An American flag was flown from the top of the bell tower, and another from the pole by the main gate.

It was to be a pageant, young Alexander supposed. There would be no actual killing or wounding. All would be said by the way men posed. The strikers themselves had sent word that they would have their wives and children with them, and that not one of them would have a gun — or even a knife with a blade more than three inches long.

"We wish only," said their letter, "to take one last look at the factory to which we gave the best years of our lives, and to show our faces to all who may care to look upon them, to show them to God Almighty alone, if only He will look, and to ask, as we stand mute and motionless, 'Does any American deserve misery and heartbreak such as we now know?' "

Alexander was not insensitive to the beauty of the letter. It had, in fact, been written by the poet Henry Niles Whistler, then in the city to hearten the strikers — a fellow Harvard man. It deserved a majestic reply, thought Alexander. He believed that the flags and the ranks of citizen soldiers and the solemn, steady presence of the police would surely do he job.

The law would be read out loud, and all would hear it, and all would go home. Peace should not be broken, or any cause.

Alexander meant to say in his prayer that afternoon that God should protect the working people from leaders like Colin Jarvis, who had encouraged them to bring such misery and heartbreak on themselves.

"Amen," he said to himself.

And the people came as promised. They came on foot. In order to discourage them, the city fathers had canceled all streetcar service in that part of the city that day.

There were many children among them, and even infants in arms. One infant would be shot to death and inspire the poem by Henry Niles Whistler, later put to music and still sung today, "Bonnie Failey."

Where were the soldiers? They had been standing in front of the factory fence since eight o'clock, with bayonets already fixed, with full packs on their backs. Those packs weighed fifty pounds and more. They were Colonel Redfield's idea of how to make his men more fearsome. They were in a single rank, which stretched the width of the plaza. The battle plan was this: If the crowd would not disperse when told to, the soldiers were to level their bayonets and to clear the plaza slowly but irresistibly, glacially — maintaining a perfectly straight rank that bristled with cold steel, and advancing, always on command, one step, then two, then three, then four . . .

Only the soldiers had been outside the fence since eight. The snow had kept on falling. So when the first members of the crowd appeared at the far end of the plaza, they gazed at the factory over an expanse of virgin snow. The only footprints were those they themselves had just made.

And many more people came than had spiritual business to conduct specifically with Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron. The strikers themselves were mystified as to who all these other ragged strangers might be — who also, often, had brought their families along. These outsiders, too, wished to demonstrate to simply anybody their misery and heartbreak at Christmastide. Young Alexander, peering through his binoculars, read a sign a man was carrying that said, "Erie Coal and Iron unfair to workers." Erie Coal and Iron wasn't even an Ohio firm. It was in Buffalo, New York.

So it was against considerable odds that Bonnie Failey, the infant killed in the Massacre, was actually the child of a striker against Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron, that Henry Niles Whistler was able to say in the refrain of his poem about her:

Damn you, damn you, Dan McCone,

With a soul of pig iron and a heart of stone . . .

Young Alexander read the sign about Erie Coal and Iron while standing at a second-story window in an office wing abutting the north wall of the bell tower. He was in a long gallery, also of Venetian inspiration, which had a window every ten feet and a mirror at its far end. The mirror made its length appear to be infinite. The windows looked out over the plaza. It was in this gallery that the four sharpshooters supplied by Pinkerton set up their places of business. Each installed a table at his chosen window and set a comfortable chair behind that. There was a rifle rest on each table.

The sharpshooter nearest Alexander had put a sandbag; on his table and had hammered a groove into it with the edge of his hairy hand. There his rifle would rest, with its butt tucked into his shoulder, as he squinted down his sights at this face or that face in the crowd from his easy chair. The sharpshooter farther down the corridor was a machinist by trade, and had built a squat tripod with a swiveling oarlock on top. This squatted on his table. It was into this oarlock that he would slip his rifle if trouble came.

"Patent applied for," he had told Alexander of his tripod, and he had patted the thing.

Each man had his ammunition and his cleaning rod and his cleaning patches and his oil laid out on the table, as though they might be for sale.

All the windows were still closed now. At some of the others were far angrier and less orderly men. These were regular company guards, who had been up most of the night. Several had been drinking, so they said, " . . . to stay awake." They had been stationed at the windows with their rifles or shotguns — in case the mob should attack the factory at all costs, and nothing but withering fire would turn them away.

They had persuaded themselves by now that this attack would surely come. Their alarm and bravado were the first strong hints young Alexander received, as he would tell young Walter F. Starbuck decades afterward, again stammering, that there were "certain instabilities inherent in the pageant."

He himself, of course, was carrying a loaded revolver in his overcoat pocket — and so were his father and brother, who now came into the corridor to approve of the arrangements one last time. It was ten o'clock in the morning. It was time to open the windows, they said. The plaza was full.