Page:History of Washington The Rise and Progress of an American State, volume 4.djvu/447

 two militia companies arrived, and thus reënforced the guards were able to hold their ground until the mob gradually dispersed and permitted them to escort the Chinamen to their quarters. But this was not done until nearly an hour later, during most of which time the soldiers stood with their rifles cocked and ready to fire at the first indication of an attack.

During the shooting a charge of buckshot was fired from the west end of the line into the side of the New England Hotel, at the northwest corner of First Avenue and Main Street, tearing a hole nearly as large as the crown of a man's head in the clapboards. Judge Burke held a place with a double-barreled shotgun in this part of the line, and it was for a long time charged that he fired the shot that made the hole, though it was afterwards proved that his gun was not discharged during the fighting. But somebody drew a mark around the hole and labeled it “Burke's mark,” and it remained there for a long time afterwards.

The man Stewart seems to have had no part in the agitation, and no relations with the agitators, until he appeared in the mob on First Avenue on the day he was wounded. He was not a resident of Seattle, but had come to town that morning to see the excitement, and like one who “passeth by and meddleth with strife not his own,” he had fallen into trouble from which there was no escape. He and the others who had been wounded were carried to express wagons, by which they were taken to the hospital. Stewart died on the following day, but all the others recovered.

Finding that the guards would shoot, and shoot to kill, the rioters could not again get up courage to make a second attack, but they remained for a long time to hurl impotent abuse at the militia, the guards and the Chinese. Then some of them bethought themselves to invoke the law in their