The undertakers and embalmers claim that they are the busiest men in town, and that they have done more to help the city than any other workmen. The people who attend the morgues for the purpose of identifying their friends and relatives are hardly as numerous as before. Many of them are exhausted with the constant wear and tear, and many have about made up their minds that their friends are lost beyond recovery, and that there is no use looking for them any longer. Others have gone to distant parts of the State, and have abandoned Johnstown and all in it.
A little girl in a poor calico dress climbed upon the fence at the Adams Street morgue and looked wistfully at the row of coffins in the yard. People were only admitted to the morgue in squads of ten each, and the little girl’s turn had not come yet. Her name was Jennie Hoffman. She was twelve years old. She told a reporter that out of her family of fourteen the father and mother and oldest sister were lost. They were all in their home on Somerset Street when the flood came. The father reached out for a tree which went sweeping by, and was pulled out of the window and lost. The mother and children got upon the roof, and then a dash of water carried her and the eldest daughter off. A colored man on an adjoining house took off the little girls who were left—all of them under twelve years of age, except Jennie—and together they clambered over the roofs of the houses near by and escaped.
[CHAPTER XXIX.]
Day after day the work of reparation goes on. The city has been blotted out. Yet the reeking ruins that mark its site are teeming with life and work more vigorous than ever marked its noisy streets and panting factories. As men and money pour into Johnstown the spirit of the town greatly revives, and the people begin to take a much more favorable view of things. The one thing that is troubling people just now is the lack of ready money. There are drafts here in any quantity, but there is no money to cash them until the money in the vaults of the First National Bank has been recovered. It is known that the vaults are safe and that about $500,000 in cash is there. Of this sum $125,000 belongs to the Cambria Iron Company. It was to pay the five thousand employés of the works. The men are paid off every two weeks, and the last pay-day was to have been on the Saturday after the fatal flood. The money was brought down to Johnstown, on the day before the flood, by the Adams Express Company, and deposited in the bank. After the water subsided, and it was discovered that the money was safe, a guard was placed around the bank and has been maintained ever since.
When the pay-day of the Cambria Iron Company does come it will be an impressive scene. The only thing comparable to it will be the roll-call after a great battle. Mothers, wives, and children will be there to claim the wages of sons, and husbands, and fathers. The men in the gloomy line will have few families to take their wages home to. The Cambria people do not propose to stand on any red-tape rules about paying the wages of their dead employés to the surviving friends and relatives. They will only try to make reasonably sure that they are paying the money to the right persons.
COLUMBIA, PA., UNDER THE FLOOD.