Mrs. Lathrop was oblivious to all, smashed by her own old-gold-plush stationary rocker.
Susan Clegg stood as one fascinated, staring after the trail which was all that was left of Mrs. Macy.
"It was a tornado!" she said over and over. "Mrs. Macy'll always believe in the Bible now, I guess. It was a tornado! It was a tornado!"
"No, they ain't found her yet," Susan said, coming into the hotel room where Mrs. Lathrop and Gran'ma Mullins had found a pleasant and comfortable refuge and were occupied in recuperating together at Jathrop's expense. Neither lady was seriously injured. Gran'ma Mullins had been preserved from even a wetting through the neat capping of her climax by Mrs. Macy's roof; while Mrs. Lathrop's squeeze between the piazza post and her well beloved old-gold-plush stationary rocker had not—as Gran'ma Mullins put it—so much as turned a hair of even the rocker.
"No one's heard anything from her yet," continued Susan, "but that ain't so surprising as it would be if anybody had time to want to know. But nobody's got time for nothing to-day. The town's in a awful taking, and I d'n know as I ever see a worse situation. You two want to be very grateful as you're so nicely and neatly laid aside, for what has descended on the community now is worse'n any cyclone, and if you could get out and see what the cyclone's done, you'd know what that means."
"Was you to my house, Susan?" asked Gran'ma Mullins anxiously.
"I was; but the insurance men was before me, or anyhow, we met there."
"The insurance men!"
"That's what I said,—the insurance men. Oh, Mrs. Lathrop, we all know one side of what it is to insure ourselves, but now the Lord in his infinite wrath has mercifully seen fit to show us the other side. The Assyrian pouncing down on the wolf in his fold is a young mother wrapping up her first baby to look out the window compared to those insurance men. They descended on us bright and shining to-day, and if we was murderers with our families buried under the kitchen floor, we couldn't be looked on with more suspicion. I was far from pleased when I first laid eyes on 'em, for there's a foxiness in any city man as comes to settle things in the country as is far from being either soothing or syrupy to him as lives in the country; but you can maybe imagine my feelings when they very plainly informed me as I couldn't put the roof back on Mrs. Macy's house till it was settled whether it was a cyclone or a tornado—"