Within these walls

by Rupert Hughes

The building of the dam was a work of titanic nicety. The rock bottom of gneiss was so far down that an artificial foundation had to be laid under a part of the wall, while a long tunnel and a gateway must be cut through living rock. A protection wall was building from a rock abutment, but there came a vast rain on the fifth of January and it fell upon the deep snow for two days and nights. The overfall had been raised to withstand a rise of six feet, but the flood came surging up a foot an hour until it lifted a sea fifteen feet above the apron of the dam.

Foreseeing a devastation to come, a young man named Albert Brayton played the Paul Revere and ran with the alarm until he was checked by a gulf where Tompkins Bridge had stood a while before. Then he got a horn and played the Angel Gabriel: blew a mighty blast to warn the sleeping folk on the other shore that their Judgment Day had come.

The earthen embankment of the dam dissolved and took the heavy stone work with it. Just before dawn the uproar of the torrent wakened the farmers miles away as the catapult of water hurtled down the river, sweeping with it barns, stables, homes, grist mills, cattle, people, and every bridge across the Croton’s whole length, till it flung them upon the Hudson’s icy waste.

The Quaker Bridge, which carried the Albany stages, went swirling; also the Pines Bridge that Washington and his men had traversed time and again. At Bailey’s iron and wire mills the snarling wave fell so swiftly upon the settlement that it made driftwood of the factory and flung fifty women and men from their beds into the current. There was such a fleet of uprooted trees afloat that all of the people were saved except two stout men who overweighted the boughs they clung to. A Mr. Bailey waded breast deep carrying his father and a box of gold in his arms and got them both to safety.

Harry Chalender played the hero as usual. After one laborer on the dam had lost his outstretched hand and was drowned, he ran along the black waters and darting in here and there brought forth whatever his hand found, whether girl or babe, lowing calf or squeaking pig. He brought one swirling bull in by the tail and had like to have been gored to death for his courtesy. But with his wonted nimbleness he stepped aside, and the bull charging past him plunged into another arm of the stream and went sailing down with all fours in air.

The collapse of the dam was a grave shock to the public confidence. It meant a heavy loss in precious cash and its time equivalent, but the Crotonians grew only a little grimmer, a little more determined.

There was much blazon of Chalender in the newspapers, and a paragraph describing how meek he was about the strength and courage of his own hands and how proud of the fact that his section at Sing Sing had stood the battering rams of the deluge without a quiver.

Patty’s comment on this was a domestic sniff: “I suppose he got his feet so wet he’ll catch a terrible cold. Well, I hope he doesn’t come here to be nursed. If he should I’ll send him packing mighty quick, I’ll tell you.”

Comment was difficult for RoBards, to whom the mention of Chalender’s mere name was the twisting of a rusty nail in his heart, but his mind leaped with a wonderful meditation:

There had been progress not only in the building of the aqueduct but in the laying of a solid causeway under the feet of his family. A sudden storm had swept Patty’s emotions over the dam of restraint and wrecked their lives for a while, but now the damage was so well repaired that she could speak with light contempt of the man who had carried her heart away; she could say that she would shut in his face the door to the home he had all but destroyed. Plainly the house was now her home, too, and Chalender vagrant outside.