Denver, June 26, 9 P. M.—Intelligence from Cheyenne is to the effect that railway travel and telegraphic communication west of Pocatello on the Union Pacific and Ogden and on the Central Pacific have been interrupted by a storm. The telegraph wires are believed to be in good condition, but up to nine o'clock there has been no return current.
I read these paragraphs over three or four times. Ordinarily I should have passed them by and given my attention to other and more congenial news. But now a dull fear that events were conspiring to widen the breach between myself and the Brisbanes focussed my interest on them. There was that easterly wind blowing again; was I, too, growing superstitious? I turned over all the papers. The news was the same in all, but there was not an editorial paragraph of comment in any of the sheets, which, indeed, teamed with all the details of active commercial, political, and social life.
I went down town after eating my breakfast and found that the intelligence had not awakened any public attention that was observable. The two or three persons to whom I spoke with regard to it treated it as one of the passing sensations of the hour that would be explained sooner or later. It was not till the evening papers of the 27th came out that the matter began to be discussed. The dispatches in these papers were of a nature to arouse widespread anxiety. It was very obvious from their construction and import that the feeling west of the Mississippi was more intense than had up to this time been suspected. The columns of the papers were filled with brief but rather startling telegrams from various points. Denver, El Paso, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, St. Paul, St. Louis, and Chicago sent anxious sentences which had a thrill of trepidation in their broken phrases. And it was easy to see that this feeling of deep concern increased with each dispatch from a point further west.
Telegrams sent to St. Louis, Chicago, and St. Paul represented the condition of anxiety in Ogden and Pocatello to be bordering on excitement. Fears were entertained, the dispatches said, of a "meteorological cataclysm," and thousands who had friends either on the coast or in transit were besieging the telegraph offices in vain.
The hurried comments of the evening papers on the news were singularly unsatisfactory and non-committal. "The unprecedented storm that is now raging on the Pacific slope," I read, "and which has temporarily cut off communications with the far West, will by its magnitude fill the country with the most serious apprehensions." "The earliest news from California, which shall give us the details of the storm," said another paper, "will be looked for with eagerness, and will be promptly and fully furnished to our readers."
As curious as anybody could be to know what kind of a storm it was that had stopped railroad travel from Idaho to Mexico, and remarking with surprise that the Signal Office utterly refused to recognize a great storm anywhere, I dismissed the subject from my mind with the reflection that there would in all probability be explanatory news in the morning, and resolved to make my usual visit to the Brisbane family.
To my surprise, Kate received me cordially, and with no other allusion to the unpleasantness of the night before than a demure remark that she was afraid she had offended me.
"Let us not refer to it at all," I said, "and thus avoid making idiots of ourselves."
"I am glad you came to-night," she remarked, after a moment's silence, "for I wanted to tell you of the change we are going to make."
A little pang darted through me. It was said so seriously.