It was the usual banquet of meat, potatoes, eggs, fruit, vegetables, hot breads, preserves, sauces, and coffee. The coffee bettered his inner being so much that he assumed the outer world improved. He found courage to look at the morning paper. RoBards was one of the seventeen hundred New Yorkers who subscribed to a paper.
He took the Courier and Enquirer, edited by General Webb, who had proved himself a soldier, indeed, a year ago when the mob attacked his building and he drove it off. That was the first time the mayor was ever elected by a popular vote, and the riots gave little encouragement to the believers in general male suffrage.
During the fire the Courier reporters had been scurrying about gathering up information, and RoBards read with awe the list of streets destroyed and the summing-up:
“Six hundred and seventy-four tenements, by far the greater part in the occupancy of our largest shipping and wholesale drygoods merchants, and filled with the richest produce of every portion of the globe. How estimate the immense loss sustained, or the fearful consequences to the general prosperity?”
The paper dropped from RoBards’ hands. If that had been the state of affairs at the hour when the paper’s forms were closed, where could the fire be now?
He rose to go to the roof and see if herald embers were not already alighting there. But the knocker clattered on the front door, and his heart leaped at the sound of Patty’s voice.
He ran to meet her and take her pauper family under his roof, while it lasted. But she was alone. She was explaining to her astonished maid, Teen, that she had come home for clean clothes. She needed them evidently, for her pretty gown was streaked and blackened.
She greeted her husband with a look as icy as the air she brought in with her from the street:
“I see you haven’t blown up your own house yet, Mist’ RoBards. May I take some of the things my poor father bought me before you ruined him?”
“Patty!” he groaned. It was some time before he dared go up the stairs she had scaled at a run. He went as reluctantly into her room as he had gone to the principal’s desk at the academy to be whipped for some mischief.