The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [130]
The first thing they did was go over to the offices of the Herald of Freedom, one of the Lawrence newspapers, which was on the second story above a shop. They threw out all the type, smashed the press with a couple of sledgehammers, and carried as much as they could in the way of supplies and equipment down to the river and threw it in. Another band was doing the same thing over at the office of the Kansas Free State, the other newspaper.
Late in the afternoon, they bombarded the Free State Hotel. They told the residents to get out, then they drew five cannon up across the street from it and started firing. We all ran from wherever we happened to be and watched as best we could, though there was a fair amount of smoke. The noise was fearsome if you’d never heard cannon before, a loud cracking roar followed by the whistle of the ball leaving the barrel of the cannon, then a great whump as the ball hit the stone wall of the hotel, a noise that was also a feeling of the hotel shaking the ground, shaking the world, shaking you, standing there. Had the hotel been built as a fortress? It withstood the cannon with hardly any sign of damage. "Got to build for the ages," Mr. Eldridge was heard to say. "If something’s worth doing, then it’s worth doing properly." Women and children were crying for a while, but as the hotel continued to stand, that seemed a little beside the point.
When the cannon had little effect, the attackers carried in kegs of powder, intending to blow the place up. After they had taken them in, they made time to carry out whatever they could find, like bits and pieces of furniture and draperies and clothing, not to give to the owners but to keep for themselves. Then they found the liquor, and they came out with bottles and kegs and cases. They opened them right there and got into it. As for the powder kegs, when they got around to lighting them, the onlookers backed away, imagining the four-story stone walls blowing outward in a great hellish boom and light, but Eldridge kept smiling a little, and shortly we knew why. Some windows that had withstood the cannon fire shattered, but the hotel stood. Now the southerners were drunk, and angry. They started screaming, "Fire it! Fire it! D—n, it will burn!" I’d hardly been in the hotel since the winter. I remembered the rickety wooden stairs, four floors of them, and you could see all the way to the cellar if you cared to look. The roof was wood; the interior was all wood, with wooden furniture. I knew it would go up, and it did. Soon enough, flames were shooting from every window and from the roof, and smoke was driving us back toward the river. When I saw him, Mr. Eldridge still had a little smile on his face, fixed there and forgotten, perhaps. Certainly, the sight of our beautiful hotel going up in flames was a great shock to me, but I couldn’t tell what it did to him. At last, the walls began to fall. I heard later that one of the southerners was killed by a piece of falling rock, because he was too drunk to move away from the conflagration. Behold the moral stature of our conquerors!
When we were driven as far back as Louisa’s place, we ran up and checked our things. The booming and crashing had broken her windows, so we swept up the glass and gave thanks that we had put quilts over them and had wrapped the dishes and cups and set them away. Then the smoke drove us out of there. We grabbed our shawls and a few necessary belongings and ran out again, intending to take refuge with the Bushes, who were at the other end of town from the hotel, in a newer section of buildings that were built just that spring. We covered our mouths and noses and made our way around to the west—Thomas, Frank, Louisa, and myself. It was very late, almost dusk, which meant it must have been seven-thirty or eight o’clock. I was running along with my head