But all the factories in town had to be ordered to cease the use of water, and the anxious city learned that the Croton was a vital aorta. The vast accumulation in the reservoir at Forty-Second Street was sucked down to within a foot of the bottom.
Chief Engineer Craven had his men at work within thirty minutes of the disaster, and for fifty hours they dabbled in the muck, battling the leaping waters while new pipes were crowded in.
Keith was among the fiercest toilers. He fought with the ardor of a Hollander at a broken dyke, and would not give over till he fell prone and had like to have drowned in the mud.
Shortly after this there was a strange break in the subterranean financial waters: a mysterious panic shook the commercial peace of New York. The reservoirs of credit dried up over night. Bankers, the least unreliable of prophets, were smitten with a great terror, which their clients promptly shared. Its meaning was public all too soon.
On December twenty-first there was another break in the water mains at Sixty-fourth Street, where the pipes had been carried across a marsh in a raised embankment.
As Keith worked with his men that morning his heart was shaken for the morning papers had shrieked the telegraphic news that, on the day before, the state of South Carolina had seceded from the Union, had actually carried out what nearly everybody had pooh-poohed as a silly threat. The South Carolina newspapers spoke of New York and other states as foreign countries.
The Charleston Mercury proclaimed: “This is War.” New York bankers and merchants realized that they must, then, assume the chief burden of furnishing men, munitions, and money.
RoBards’ heart sank within him. The great war had found him fifty-five years old. He would never get to a war, never fight for his country.
But Patty’s heart leaped like a doe startled from a covert. It leaped with a cry:
“My boy is in the first regiment that will go!”