The wind was fitful and blew in gusts. Its advance was met with frequent lulls and interruptions. An embankment of dark, ominous clouds rose steadily in the west. At first it was broken by an occasional rift which revealed the blue sky. But as the cloud bank rose it darkened and rolled over the plains toward Chicago with increasing speed. At 3 o’clock all the blue patches of sky had disappeared, the heavens had assumed a forbidding look and the lake rolled. The increased violence of the storm carried everything before it. No one disputed its rights to the streets, and it blew down wires innumerable, badly crippling the telegraph and telephone service.
The Western Union’s fifty-two New York lines were all down.
From Chicago the storm continued its progress across Lake Huron, but was steadily diminishing in intensity.
The storm’s velocity diminished after leaving Texas, but increased with wonderful rapidity after reaching the lake region. The wind reached the greatest velocity at Chicago it had attained since leaving Galveston.
CHAPTER XVIII.
The World Not So Heartless as Supposed—People Give Generously to Aid the Suffering—A Social Phenomenon—Value of United States Weather Bureau.
Perhaps the world is not so bad as it has been painted, or so heartless and indifferent as some pessimists would have us believe. Ordinarily men and women have enough to do in attending to their own affairs, expecting others, of course, to do the same, and consequently they pay small attention to what is going on around them; but when their hearts are really touched they drop everything and rush to the rescue of the afflicted.
So it was in the case of Galveston.