It was a quarter of four o’clock. At half-past three there had been a Johnstown. Now there was none.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
Volumes might be written of the sufferings endured and valor exhibited by the survivors of the flood, or of the heart-rending grief with which so many were stricken. At Johnstown an utterly wretched woman named Mrs. Fenn stood by a muddy pool of water trying to find some trace of a once happy home. She was half crazed with grief, and her eyes were red and swollen. As a correspondent stepped to her side she raised her pale, haggard face and remarked:
“They are all gone. O God! be merciful to them! My husband and my seven dear little children have been swept down with the flood, and I am left alone. We were driven by the awful flood into the garret, but the water followed us there. Inch by inch it kept rising, until our heads were crushing against the roof. It was death to remain. So I raised a window, and one by one, placed my darlings on some driftwood, trusting to the great Creator. As I liberated the last one, my sweet little boy, he looked at me and said: ‘Mamma, you always told me that the Lord would care for me; will He look after me now?’ I saw him drift away with his loving face turned toward me, and, with a prayer on my lips for his deliverance, he passed from sight forever. The next moment the roof crashed in, and I floated outside, to be rescued fifteen hours later from the roof of a house in Kernsville. If I could only find one of my darlings I could bow to the will of God, but they are all gone. I have lost everything on earth now but my life, and I will return to my old Virginia home and lay me down for my last great sleep.”
A handsome woman, with hair as black as a raven’s wing, walked through the depot where a dozen or more bodies were awaiting burial. Passing from one to another, she finally lifted the paper covering from the face of a woman, young, and with traces of beauty showing through the stains of muddy water, and with a cry of anguish she reeled backward to be caught by a rugged man who chanced to be passing. In a moment or so she had calmed herself sufficiently to take one more look at the features of her dead. She stood gazing at the corpse as if dumb. Finally, turning away with another wild burst of grief, she said: “And her beautiful hair all matted and her sweet face so bruised and stained with mud and water!” The dead woman was the sister of the mourner. The body was placed in a coffin a few minutes later and sent away to its narrow house.
A woman was seen to smile, one morning just after the catastrophe, as she came down the steps of Prospect Hill, at Johnstown. She ran down lightly, turning up toward the stone bridge. She passed the little railroad station where the undertakers were at work embalming the dead, and walked slowly until she got opposite the station. Then she stopped and danced a few steps. There was but a small crowd there. The woman raised her hands above her head and sang. She became quiet and then suddenly burst into a frenzied fit of weeping and beat her forehead with her hands. She tore her dress, which was already in rags.
“I shall go crazy,” she screamed, “if they do not find his body.”
The poor woman could not go crazy, as her mind had been already shattered.