The deputy seized the military coat he had thrown on the ground, and with it and the weapon started to the regimental headquarters. Then the privates got around him and begged him, one of them with tears in his eyes, not to report their officer, saying that he was a good man when he was sober. He studied a long while, standing in the road, while the officer slunk away over the hill. Then he threw the disgraced uniform to them, and said: “Here, give them to him; and, mind you, if he does not go at once to his quarters, I’ll take him there, dead or alive.”
[CHAPTER XXII.]
While yet the first wild cry of anguish was thrilling among the startled hills of the Conemaugh, the great heart of the nation answered it with a mighty throb of sympathy. On Tuesday afternoon, at Washington, the President called a gathering of eminent citizens to devise measures of relief. The meeting was held in Willard’s Hall, on F street, above Fourteenth, and President Harrison made such an eloquent appeal for assistance that nearly $10,000 was raised in the hour and a half that the meeting was in session.
As presiding officer the Chief Magistrate sat in a big arm-chair on the stage. On his right were District Commissioner Douglass, Hine and Raymond, and on his left sat Postmaster-General Wanamaker and Private Secretary Halford. In the audience were Secretaries Noble, Proctor and Tracy, Attorney-General Miller, Congressman Randall and Senators and Representatives from all parts of the country.
President Harrison called the meeting to order promptly at 3 o’clock. A dead silence fell over the three hundred people as the President stepped to the front of the platform and in a clear, distinct voice appealed for aid for the thousands who had been bereft of their all by the terrible calamity. His voice trembled once or twice as he dwelt upon the scene of death and desolation, and a number of handkerchiefs were called into use at his vivid portrayal of the disaster.
Upon taking the chair the President said:—
“Every one here to-day is distressingly conscious of the circumstances which have convened this meeting. It would be impossible to state more impressively than the newspapers have already done the distressing incidents attending the calamity which has fallen upon the city of Johnstown and the neighboring hamlets, and upon a large section of Pennsylvania situated upon the Susquehanna river. The grim pencil of Doré would be inadequate to portray the horrors of this visitation. In such meetings as we have here in the national capital and other like gatherings that are taking place in all the cities of this land, we have the only rays of hope and light in the general gloom. When such a calamitous visitation falls upon any section of our country we can do no more than to put about the dark picture the golden border of love and charity. [Applause.] It is in such fires as these that the brotherhood of man is welded.