"But Susan—" interrupted Gran'ma Mullins.
"Mr. Weskins says the great difficulty is the insurance men say they don't see how anything is going to be settled or decided until we hear from Mrs. Macy. The point's right here. If she comes back, it's evidence as it was a tornado, because if she comes back it proves as she was carried off, in which case the insurance men won't have to pay nothing anyhow, and we'll all be unsealed and allowed to go to work putting our roofs back on our heads and clearing up as fast as we can. But Mr. Weskins says if Mrs. Macy don't come back, there'll be no way to prove as she was even carried off by the storm for you, Mrs. Lathrop, had your back turned; and you, Gran'ma Mullins, was under the roof; and I'm only one, and it takes two witnesses to prove anything as is contrary to law and nature."
"Do they doubt—?" cried Mrs. Lathrop, quite excited—for her.
"Yes, they do. They doubt everything. Insurance men don't take nothing for granted. They've decided to just pin their whole case to Mrs. Macy, and there's Mrs. Macy gone away to, heaven knows where."
"Well, Susan," said Gran'ma Mullins, "we must look on the bright side. Mrs. Macy'll have something to talk about as'll always interest everybody if she does come back, and if she don't come back, we'll always have her to remember."
"Yes, and if we don't get our houses unstuck pretty soon, we'll remember her a long while," said Susan darkly.
Three days passed by and no word was heard from Mrs. Macy. As soon as the telegraph assumed its usual route, messages were sent all about in the direction whither she had flown, but not a trace of her was discovered by any one. The town was very much wrought up, for although its members were given to having strange experiences, no experience so strange as this had ever happened there before. The exasperation of being barred out of house and home until Mrs. Macy should be found, naturally heightened the interest. Everybody had had just time to add the magic word "cyclone" to their policies before the cyclone came "damaging along"—as Susan Clegg expressed it. Susan was much perturbed.
"Well, Mrs. Lathrop,"—she said on the afternoon of the third day, as she came into the hotel room where the mother of the millionaire was now equal to her usual vigorous exercise in her old-gold-plush stationary rocker. "Well, Mrs. Lathrop, you may well be grateful as Jathrop has got money enough for us to be living here, for the living of the community is getting to be no living a tall."
Gran'ma Mullins, still in bed, turned herself about and manifested a vivid interest, "Well, Susan," she said, "it's three days now; how long is this going to keep up?"
"It can't keep up very much longer, or we'll have a new French Revolution, that's what we'll have," said Susan. "Why, the community is getting where it won't stand even being said good morning to pleasantly. The children is running all over, pulling each other's hair, and Deacon White says he's going to buy a pistol. Things is come to a pretty pass when Deacon White wants to buy a pistol, for he's just as afraid of one end as the other. But it's a straw as shows which way the cyclone blew his house."