561CHAPTER XLVII
IN WHICH GRANT ADAMS AND LAURA VAN DORN TAKE A WALK DOWN MARKET STREET AND MRS. NESBIT ACQUIRES A LONG LOST GRANDSON-IN-LAW
Grant Adams and Henry Fenn were among the first to arrive at the scene of the explosion. Henry Fenn had tried to stop Grant from going so quickly, thinking his presence at the scene would raise a question of his guilt, but he cried:
“They may need me, Henry–come on–what’s a quibble of guilt when a life’s to save?”
When they came to the pile of débris, they saw Dick Bowman coming up–barefooted, coatless and breathless. Grant and Fenn had run less than fifteen hundred feet–Dick lived a mile from the shaft house. Grant Adams’s mind flashed suspicion toward the Bowmans. He went to Dick across the wreckage and said:
“Oh, Dick–I’m sorry you didn’t get here sooner.”
“So am I–so am I,” cried Dick, craning his long neck nervously.
“Where is Mugs?” asked Grant, as the two worked with a beam over a body–the body of handsome Fred Kollander–lying near the edge of the litter.
“He’s home in bed and asleep–and so’s his mother, too, Grant, sound asleep.”
During the first minutes after the explosion, men near by like Grant and Fenn came running to the scene of the wrecked shaft by the scores, and as Grant and Dick Bowman spoke the streets grew black with men, workmen, policemen, soldiers, citizens, men by the hundreds came hurrying up. The great siren whistles of the water and light plants began to bellow; fire bells and church bells up in Harvey began to ring, and Grant knew that the telephone was alarming the town. Ten minutes after the explosion, while Grant was 562ordering his men in the crowd to organize for the rescue, a militia colonel appeared, threw a cordon of men about the ruins and the police and soldiers took charge, forcing Grant and his men away. The first few moments after he had been thrust out of the relief work, Grant spent sending his men in the crowd to summon the members of the Council; then he turned and hurried to his office in the Vanderbilt House. For an hour he wrote. Henry Fenn came, and later Laura Van Dorn appeared, but he waved them both to silence, and without telling them what he had written he went with them to the hall where the Valley Council was waiting in a turmoil of excitement. It was after two o’clock. South Harvey was a military camp. Thousands of citizens from Harvey were hurrying about. As he passed along the street, the electric lights showed him little groups about some grief-stricken parent or brother or sister of a missing militiaman. Automobiles were roaring through the streets carrying officers, policemen, prominent citizens of Harvey. Ahab Wright and Joe Calvin and Kyle Perry were in a car with John Kollander who had come down to South Harvey to claim the body of his son, Fred. Grant saw the Sands’s car with Morty in it supporting a stricken soldier. The car was halted at the corner by the press of traffic, and as Grant and Laura and Henry passed, Morty said under the din: “Grant–Grant, be careful–they are turning Heaven and earth to find your hand in this; it will be only a matter of days–maybe only hours, until they will have their witnesses hired!”