ANDREW CARNEGIE WASN’T IN THE AREA WHEN THE SOUTH Fork dam broke and Johnstown and the other towns were wiped out. He wasn’t often in the area, and he wasn’t even in the country in the spring of 1889.
Carnegie was in Paris, visiting the Universal Exposition. The Eiffel Tower had been erected to serve as an astonishing entrance arch and viewing platform for that fair. At twice the size of the Washington Monument, this tower was now the tallest construction in the world. Machinery Hall, also a feature of the exposition, was the longest interior space in the world, a vaulting series of glass, iron, and steel arches that seemed to go on and on with no evident internal support.
There was also the “Great Model of the Earth,” a globe built to exact scale, housed in a high, circular building. You could see the North Pole by riding up in an elevator. The huge globe showed, in a beautiful color scheme, all of the seagoing trade routes and railroad and telegraph lines of the world, all the mines for everything from gold to coal. At the Universal Exposition, the nations and businesses of the world showed off their wares and innovations and cultural practices and military accoutrements. The world seemed to be transforming itself, bringing humankind into what people had begun to call modernity.
It was in Paris that Carnegie got shocking word of the disaster in Johnstown. He’d long had important ties, if sometimes difficult ones, with the Cambria company there. He’d hired Captain Bill Jones away, for one thing, along with Jones’s top men, and he’d competed successfully with the late Daniel Morrell. The western Pennsylvania steel world was a very small one. It was Carnegie who had pioneered, too, the love of the Alleghenies as a resort. He knew the Conemaugh Valley well, and this horrible news overwhelmed him.
He wrote to Henry Frick to say that the news from Johnstown had driven everything else from his mind. Almost immediately, Carnegie sent $10,000 for relief of the city. He wouldn’t be back from Europe until the fall. He would then visit Johnstown to look at the scene of such overwhelming destruction, and he would provide full funding for the rebuilding of Johnstown’s Carnegie Library.
Andrew Carnegie wouldn’t, however, express any regret about the failure of the dam at the club of which he was a member. His mind, as usual, was on the higher things.
Nor was Carnegie alone, among the South Fork Club members and big men of Pittsburgh, in not coming to Johnstown in the days and weeks right after the disaster, or saying anything about the dam. Henry Frick and many others would give relief money, and other barons of Pittsburgh industry would organize much of the giving and supply that came in from around the country. Yet members of the South Fork Club were at pains to deny any responsibility for the titanic devastation that occurred when their dam broke.
That refusal began even before they knew the full scale of the disaster. It began even while the devastation of Johnstown was still going on.
Of the South Fork Club members who hadn’t been up at the lake when the dam broke, Robert Pitcairn, head of the all-important Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was probably the most important, for reasons having little to do with his club membership. And it wasn’t because of the South Fork Club that Pitcairn spent the afternoon of May 31 trying to get to Johnstown.
As the top railroad executive in the area, and one of the top railroad executives in the country, Pitcairn was always directly alerted of danger to the tracks and the trains: he charged companies a lot of money to move their freight on his tracks, and when the trains stopped, industry stopped, and money disappeared, and he had to get things moving again fast. In normal times, his days were spent at his gigantic desk in constant communication with many elements of a complicated system. On a day of a record flooding, with track washing out between Lilly, high up on the mountains, and Bolivar, about fifty miles east of Pittsburgh, Pitcairn knew he had to check things out in person.
When Emma Ehrenfeld and the Mineral Point operator had tapped out their telegraph messages that day, warning about the condition of the dam, and sent them down on paper and then again by telegraph to East Conemaugh, and then to Frank Deckert in the Johnstown railroad station, another of their recipients had been Robert Pitcairn. Nobody was more important to alert. Indeed, so important was Pitcairn’s role in keeping freight moving that he’d already left Pittsburgh by the time those messages about the dam arrived in his office.
For the dam wasn’t on his mind, as he would say later. It was the flooding that concerned Pitcairn. Reports had begun coming in during the night of high water the likes of which had never been seen before. Trains were stopped dead, and by around noon Pitcairn had his private car hitched to the No. 18 passenger train and was riding eastward through driving rain in hopes of locating the source of all the flooding and assess repair. He planned to go all the way up to the station at Lilly, where he presumed the flooding originated, and look in on Johnstown on the way.
The dam up at the club wasn’t on Pitcairn’s mind because, as he said later, he’d long since satisfied himself on that score. He did have a special relationship with that dam. In the period after the railroad had bought the old reservoir feeder property from the state, and before the company had then sold it to John Reilly, the dam had been among Pitcairn’s responsibilities, and the break in 1862, which damaged some railroad bridges, had brought its weakness to his attention. But then the railroad had sold the property to Reilly, from whom the South Fork Club would later buy it. Official responsibility had long since passed out of Pitcairn’s purview.
Still, he’d felt some concern. He’d heard that Reilly had removed the discharge pipes and sold the metal—heard that selling the metal had been Reilly’s real purpose in buying the property. When Benjamin Ruff had started making plans to rebuild the dam, Pitcairn went up to the property to look things over and discuss the situation. He had a lot of confidence in Ruff. The man had supervised much construction in his day, and by his own report knew more about dam construction than any certified engineer.
So while Pitcairn had paid a number of visits back then, and had sent railroad supervisors and others up to observe as well, he’d become convinced that aside from an early concern about leakage from its bottom, the dam was fine. Ruff had promised to repair that one area of concern, and Pitcairn sent his supervisors to report on whether Ruff had in fact done so, and the report was that Ruff had. Since then, Pitcairn said later, he’d even kept his people checking the dam constantly, at least once a month, sometimes twice. Sometime every year, therefore, he would receive a report from one of his inspectors or another warning him that the dam was damaged or about to break. The reports always turned out to be false.
So if anything, too much vigilance was in play, as far as Pitcairn was concerned. For even if the dam did one day break, he couldn’t imagine it doing very much damage. Today, with rain beating down on his private car, Pitcairn had no concern about the South Fork dam.
The flooding, however, was impressing him as he rode east along the rivers. It was soon clear that he wouldn’t be able to get to Lilly. Indeed, he soon found he couldn’t even get to Johnstown. At Bolivar, between Pittsburgh and Johnstown, he saw water much higher than he’d ever seen before. The train proceeded slowly eastward. At Lockport, Pitcairn saw muddy water as high as the north track. Unheard-of.
Then, only about four miles west of Johnstown, the train stopped. Pitcairn left his car and went up the telegraph tower to see if he could find out what was wrong up the line, but there was already no getting through: wires were down to Johnstown and many points beyond. Without clear information, the train operator couldn’t let the train go ahead.
Pitcairn wasn’t just a railroad executive. He was a railroad executive because he was a railroad man, the region’s top conductor, and he decided to take it on his own responsibility, as head of division. He would go ahead, carefully, and find whatever the trouble was.
But then, still up in the tower, he saw the debris.
Rushing down the river past the track, this seemed an unusual kind of drift, all wood, broken in very small pieces. Meanwhile the telegraph poles started coming down. The tower itself seemed ready to fall.
Then Pitcairn really stared. A man was riding the debris, going past at what must have been 15 miles an hour, and then more people came by in the rising flow. Pitcairn rushed down from the tower. He held the train where it was.
All that afternoon and into the evening, passengers and train crew splashed around in the rain, trying to help the people passing by in the water, to little avail. They saved seven. More than one hundred went by. That whole time, Pitcairn would say later, he still wasn’t giving the South Fork dam any thought. He figured only that the Stony Creek must be astonishingly flooded.
Water kept rising toward the track, and Pitcairn wanted to get two freight trains at Bolivar backed into a siding, but now even that move looked risky. He prepared the passengers to run for the high ground on the hillside.
But then, a little before 6:00 P.M., the water’s current seemed to slow. Pitcairn had seen nothing of what was going on, just four miles up the line: he didn’t yet know about the monster, what it had done, what was still unfolding. Even as fire burned there, and the great cauldron seethed, and the houses kept falling, and the long night of horrors began, Pitcairn was seeing, without knowing it, a monster begin to die here in the plain to the west of town.
Pitcairn did know one thing. Something very bad was going on in Johnstown.
A standstill in the water, then a slight lowering of the level, and at about 6:00 P.M. Pitcairn decided to head No. 18 back to Pittsburgh. But thanks to the water still on the track, it took a long time to get only as far as New Florence. There he stopped the train again.
Pitcairn had decided he needed to hear word, directly from Johnstown, of what was going on there, so he could send some clear word to Pittsburgh. If things up the valley were as bad as he feared, direct word might be hard to come by for some time. And at the rate the train was going, he might not get back home for hours.
By now he’d heard some talk among the passengers and the few people they’d saved that the South Fork dam must have broken. Pitcairn didn’t know whether that could be true. Nevertheless, he’d telegraphed the rumor to Pittsburgh earlier, when he’d first heard it. Now he needed to know something definite.
So he held the train at New Florence until a message finally did arrive there, at about 10:00 P.M. A railroad man had made it from Johnstown as far as Sang Hollow, not a town but a small extension of the railroad, with a station and telegraph office. The man had come on foot, walking the railroad tracks above the river, to bring the awful word. Johnstown was wiped out. Many were dead and dying. Debris was stacked at the stone-arch railroad bridge at least forty feet high—and on fire.
And this wasn’t just some especially bad flooding. The South Fork Club’s dam had in fact broken. The members’ beautiful lake had gone down the valley.
So that’s how the industrialists of Pittsburgh who were members of the South Fork Club and the public at large, first locally but then thanks to the telegraph all over the nation, got the story. Still in his plush car at New Florence, Pitcairn composed a message and had it telegraphed to the Pittsburgh papers. Among other things, his message called for a public meeting in Pittsburgh the next day, to begin relief efforts. The suffering of the Johnstown survivors, Pitcairn noted, was bound to be extreme. Supplies and food and medicine and cleanup tools must get to them as soon as the railroad could get a clear track.
Yet even after sending that message, Pitcairn held the train in New Florence. While his latest message would get on the wire before midnight, and would soon make newspapers nationally, his earlier, less certain message had already started another kind of flood, that of reporters out of Pittsburgh coming eastward toward the scene of destruction. Just after 7:00 P.M., a train chartered by the Pittsburgh Dispatch and the Pittsburgh Times had pulled out of Union Station, sending reporters through the rain; another train followed, with reporters from the Post, the Commercial Gazette, and the Chronicle-Telegraph.
Of course, thanks to the flooding, they couldn’t get very far. Stopped in Bolivar, the reporters detrained and started getting stories from the many people gathered along the riverside and in the station. Crowds had come out in the darkness, bringing gas lamps to marvel at a downed bridge, and at the wreckage and bodies and living people coming down from Johnstown, and to make what rescues they could. Even as the people up in Johnstown were undergoing that awful night of the flood, their story was already being constructed by the first reporters to get to Bolivar and start interviewing an excited, horrified crowd.
These newsmen were acutely aware, however, that they were still twenty miles from their real story. They decided to go on foot and wagon to the next big station, New Florence: that would get them at least closer to Johnstown. They could get stories there and use the station telegraph office to file everything they had, and maybe tomorrow they’d get into Johnstown itself.
About 3:00 A.M. these cold, wet, professionally dogged Pittsburgh reporters got to New Florence, and again they found a crowd at the railroad station, where No. 18 still sat, a crowd of passengers and locals with the wildest stories to tell, many of them true. Then, at about 4:00 in the morning, an actual couple from Johnstown appeared at the New Florence station, the McCartneys, and the reporters mobbed them. The McCartneys had been walking for almost twelve hours, having escaped the city right after the wave hit. They told the reporters that hardly a building was standing in the city.
That was the scoop. The newspapermen all ran to file.
But they’d also discovered that right here at New Florence was the head of the Pittsburgh section of the railroad, Mr. Robert Pitcairn himself, one of the most authoritative men in the region. They interviewed him, and Pitcairn gave the reporters, among other things, the name of the sporting club located above Johnstown, where, as direct word now made clear, a dam had broken, and he gave them the story of that dam, based on his own personal knowledge.
Under his own instructions, Pitcairn told them, the railroad’s expert civil engineers themselves had been inspecting that dam every month, and all indications had been that the South Fork dam was as strong as any dam could ever be. Only an extraordinary natural disaster like today’s record-high flooding could have taken it down.
Having given the reporters that news, Pitcairn ordered the train to move. A little after 4:00 A.M., it pulled out for Pittsburgh, going slowly to cope with water still over the tracks in the low grounds. Pitcairn didn’t arrive in Pittsburgh until about 6:00 A.M. His interpretation of the cause of the flood had meanwhile attached itself to the early stories of the Johnstown Flood.
“Investigations showed,” one reporter informed his readership, “that nothing less than some convulsion of nature would tear the barrier away.”
In Pittsburgh the next afternoon, while survivors in Johnstown were moving through the horrible landscape of death that yesterday had been their city, and the fires still burned at the bridge, a big meeting was held at the Old City Hall. The subject was the relief of Johnstown.
Robert Pitcairn addressed the people assembled in the hall and made an impassioned plea for urgent action. A Pittsburgh Relief Committee formed itself at that meeting, and in less than an hour almost $50,000 was raised in the hall, an astonishing sum, about $1.2 million in 2018 terms. Four members of the South Fork Club—Henry Frick, Henry Phipps Jr., Reuben Miller, and S. S. Marvin—were appointed to the relief committee’s executive board, and it was Miller and Marvin, less august than Frick and Phipps, who would carry the ball, working hard to organize relief efforts.
And another meeting, a private one, was held that night. Some of the key South Fork Club members met at one of their palatial homes. The issue at this meeting was their dam.
Where might fault lie, for a degree of destruction whose scope wasn’t by any means known yet? The specter of potential lawsuits, at the very least damage to reputation: none of that would have eluded any of these men. Club policy, arrived at in this private meeting, was therefore to contribute as much as possible to the relief effort and to say as little as possible about the South Fork dam.
What was going on in Johnstown that same day was just the beginning of what would become a ceaseless commitment to an extraordinary variety of horrifying, laborious, daunting, often even overwhelming work. Facing the horror on Saturday morning, it would have been hard to imagine gaining any improvement at all. Yet almost instantly, people started trying to better a disastrous situation. In that process, which would go on against terrible odds for weeks and months to come, the communities of the Conemaugh Valley came together in an effort to revive life in the face of death.
And yet frictions in those communities would also be exposed by the work that lay so dauntingly ahead. Nobody could think about it now, but what the bosses’ club had so blithely done to Johnstown, and differences in how Johnstowners tried to cope, and even differences over relief efforts from outside, would cause unsettling change, even as people began working together to overcome a degree of adversity they’d never seen before.
The Reverend David Beale took a leading role in getting things going. Standing on the hillside, first thing on Saturday, with thousands of cold, homeless, hungry, and bereaved people, he’d sent the boy on horseback to telegraph the governor of Pennsylvania. That was just one of many beginnings of a collective effort on the stunned survivors’ part to save lives, clean up, identify and bury bodies, and, in the end, to restructure their government and rebuild their city.
Another important leader in the recovery effort, with an approach very different from that of Rev. Beale, didn’t live in Johnstown and hadn’t gone through the flood. This was Tom L. Johnson, the dedicated monopolist who had begun to fear that Henry George’s critique of capitalism got things more or less right about the way monopoly created poverty. Johnson’s skeptical mind had long been worried about the South Fork dam, despite the reassurances of the club members, and he was in his house on Millionaires’ Row in Cleveland when late on Friday night he heard the first news reports of the destruction of Johnstown.
With his partner Arthur Moxham, Johnson had built an important part of his business empire in Johnstown. Having become so adept at using special connections in government—this was how, as he’d learned, business empires were built everywhere—to benefit from special highway grants, tariff, patents, and monopolies on land, Johnson and Moxham had just completed building their new steel mill, via relationships with members of state and local government, as well as with the Cambria company. It stood southward and uphill from the city proper at that new town they’d so modestly named Moxham. They’d even bought all the buildable land there, with holdings reaching all the way to the nearly perpendicular hillside above the valley, placing the new mill where they might profit further by increasing land values that would come with the mill’s operation and housing. That mill was just ready to start smelting and rolling on May 31, 1889.
On his hearing the awful news, Tom’s first need was to find out whether his friend and partner was alive and well. He headed for the train station, and arriving in Johnstown on that horrible Saturday, as soon as train service had been restored, he discovered to his great relief that Moxham was unhurt. The next thing was to determine what kind of losses their company had sustained, and almost as immediately, what he could do to begin to solve problems, relieve suffering, and get the city back on its feet.
Johnson and Moxham’s first Johnstown rolling mill had indeed stood right in the flood path, and their buildings had been swept away with everything else. But those buildings were empty when the wave hit: the machinery had all been taken up to the new mill. So they’d lost little in the flood.
Now Johnson and Moxham got to work. In the process of trying to bring Johnstown back, Tom turned from a monopolist into what some might call a socialist but what, to Tom himself, was just common sense.
At 3:00 P.M. that same Saturday, not only Tom L. Johnson, Arthur Moxham, the Reverend Beale, Beale’s friend Captain Hart, and other authoritative survivors, but also a large mass of ordinary survivors of the disaster packed into a surviving building, the Fourth Ward School at Main and Adams streets, to try to determine a course of action.
The big organizational problem, to Tom Johnson, was the very phenomenon that had helped make his own fortune. City government here, as elsewhere, was fragmented. Each of the boroughs of Johnstown operated as its own little fiefdom, with its own councilmen, burgesses, and executives; they argued, both among themselves and with the other sets of independent officers, over personal jealousies and contested rights. With no overarching leadership to make the kinds of public decisions that might best serve the most people, the system, Johnson thought, worked inefficiently enough even in normal times. But in the face of such destruction, the system would be simply hopeless.
Temporarily, there had to be what Johnson had no problem calling a dictator: one man—both he and everyone else in a position to make public decisions took “man” for granted—with all legislative and executive power.
Others at the meeting thought so, too. In the annals kept by the people who now took charge, everybody agreed, but that probably meant everybody who, to them, counted. The leaders who emerged were all white men, certainly, and most of them were Protestants: such were the hierarchies of the day. The extent to which the small black population and big immigrant population of Greater Johnstown—the Poles and Hungarians and Bohemians and Swedes and others, or the Catholics and the Jews—were involved in public decision-making was small in normal times. In this crisis, the usual powers took the lead, and others either kept their objections to themselves or were ignored.
And yet Tom Johnson, again showing his incipient radicalism, took a dim view of this seemingly natural tendency to turn for leadership to so-called leading citizens. When, for example, the mass meeting voted to dispense with their governments and elect the dictator wielding all legislative and executive power, the choice was obvious: John Fulton, now general manager of the Cambria Iron Company, which was, in a sense, identical with Johnstown. But it turned out that Fulton was out of town. Tom Johnson reflected that in a crisis, so-called leading citizens are often the most worthless of the citizens.
In Fulton’s absence, both Johnson, fast becoming a kind of maverick, and Rev. Beale, a more traditional sort, were pleased that the dictator elected was Johnson’s partner Arthur Moxham. Like Johnson, Moxham was becoming eager for what they were both starting to think of as good government: civic decision-making with a goal of benefiting all the people. That Moxham was, for one thing, a British subject never crossed anybody’s mind.
So Moxham took over the meeting and created six committees: Finance, Supplies, Morgues (with Rev. Beale one of its heads), Removal (with Johnson a head), Police (with Captain Hart a head), and Hospitals. They all got to work right away recruiting labor.
For the Reverend David Beale, the next ten days passed in a blur. Normally a fastidious man, all that time he wore only the clothes he’d worn through the flood. For the first thirty hours or so, he didn’t eat. The constant labor and intense anxiety he felt may have helped him stand it, he thought.
His job was morgues, which meant finding spaces where bodies taken from the wreckage could be laid out, identified as well and quickly as possible, and buried as quickly as possible, too. Burial was urgent. In fact, the cool weather and overcast skies and rain—it had begun again—were delaying the decomposition of the corpses, but it was spring, and the sun might come out and heat things up at any time. The spread of infectious disease was yet another of the terrors that the surviving Johnstowners faced.
Tom Johnson, meanwhile, was in charge not of morgues but of actually getting the corpses removed from the pile. He found himself taking up that work with a gut feeling of horror, really a deep unwillingness. As Tom began directing his crews, and as he and they pulled the first few bodies out of the pile, he looked at the dead and started crying.
Then something strange happened. Very quickly, that first day, he lost any fear, any reluctance, even any sorrow. If anything, Tom knew, he appeared totally unconcerned, heartless. He and his crews just kept at the work.
As Johnson and Beale and many hundreds of others kept at their many awful tasks, around and about the vast pile of wreckage that Johnstown had become, more people started coming into town and more tasks were assigned. A relief committee train left Pittsburgh at 4:00 P.M. Saturday, nearly twenty cars packed with volunteers. It was slow going—all the trains that had been stopped for the flood were being moved out, too—and they didn’t get to Sang Hollow till 10:00, and there they found the roadbed washed out.
Emptying the train, the volunteers came the rest of the way on foot, loaded down with food. They arrived on the west side of the Conemaugh early Sunday morning, and by 7:00 the train was there too, Robert Pitcairn having made it a priority to get the track from Sang Hollow rebuilt.
But everything had to stop on the west side of the river, across from town, near the big pile at the damaged railroad bridge—the pile was still on fire, and there was no going over the bridge anyway—and that became the first deposit point for food and supplies, the hub from which stuff could travel across the river, first by boat, soon by a precariously swinging rope bridge, then by a comparatively reliable pontoon bridge.
Meanwhile, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad had secured an entrance to Johnstown itself, via the south side. Members of the Pittsburgh Relief Committee, now in Johnstown, had a telegraph working, and by wire back to Pittsburgh they ordered that all supplies for Johnstown proper be sent around by the Baltimore & Ohio, which was dedicating all of its local facilities to relief.
And soon between 6,000 and 7,000 laborers would be on the scene, well beyond the volunteers, men hired and brought in by the Pittsburgh committee and managed by contractors. About 30,000 Johnstowners, volunteers, and paid workers were being fed at a commissary set up to cook and serve massive meals, with the food also hauled in continuously. The contractors’ men came with hundreds of wagons, and many of the wagons carried dynamite. Explosions quickly became constant, jarring the fragile nerves of survivors and workers alike. Some complained, but the contractors insisted that to break up the pile, only blasting would do. At the still-burning pileup at the stone bridge, fire engines sent from Philadelphia shot gallons of water. After some days, the fire would go out, but nobody could tell for sure if the fire engines had beaten it down or if it had finally run out of fuel and died of its own accord.
As blasting now shook the place that had been a city, and bodies were laid out in surviving churches and then carted off for quick burial, and trainloads of supplies were unloaded and deployed by thousands of workers, back in Pittsburgh the Ladies’ Committee was accepting and finding housing for huge numbers of orphaned children and homeless and bereft people of every kind. The committee set up shop at the city’s big Second Presbyterian Church and stayed open twenty-four hours a day to accommodate the train arrivals rendered unpredictable thanks to the ongoing effects of flooding on the tracks. Subcommittees met every train on both the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore & Ohio lines and carried people to the church, where other subcommittees fed them, gave them donated clothing, and found places for them to live. People leaving Pittsburgh to stay with distant family or friends got free transportation on the railroads.
The Ladies’ Committee also handled that all-important thing, information. Some panicked people were joyfully reunited. Others had their worst fears confirmed.
If the first relief train to get from Pittsburgh to Johnstown didn’t bring such great men as Carnegie, Frick, and Mellon, it did bring the kind of hands-on man that Tom L. Johnson, at any rate, couldn’t have been happier to see: Bill Jones. Long the top Bessemer expert at the Cambria Works, before being hired away by Carnegie, Captain Bill was well liked in town and had brought a team of three hundred men from Pittsburgh, much equipment for setting up camp, and a host of tools. He was paying for this operation himself.
The other thing Jones brought was expertise in solving problems and the kind of can-do energy that was harder for the bereaved to sustain. He and his men rolled up their sleeves and went right to work. Jones was a technical man, and he could see right away what needed to be done first and what could wait. And so Bill brought the kind of relief, Johnson thought, that money couldn’t buy. Jones wouldn’t get home for weeks.
Tom Johnson had heard some men in the monopolist community say that at the finer London hotels, where Bill Jones stayed when giving his lectures on steel innovation, he didn’t cut much of a figure. Where Bill’s boss Carnegie hung around in London with the philosopher Herbert Spencer and the poet and critic Matthew Arnold and had intimate chats with Prime Minister Gladstone, Bill the rough-and-ready steel master gave gritty technical demonstrations to other steel people on the chemistry and machinery involved in making steel. Bill was just the opposite, Tom thought, of the “leading citizen” type, so useless, regardless of how much money they might cough up in an emergency.
In his mind, Tom opposed the story of Bill Jones getting looked down on by capitalists and poets and politicians in London, with the sight he had of Bill now, working without pause to bring his old home back from horror. As Tom and Bill, dirty and sweaty from their work, were riding around the pile on horseback, a man hailed Bill, calling him heartily by name, and Jones dismounted, although the man, straight from working on the pile, was so covered with dirt that his face was unrecognizable.
“You’ll have to tell me who you are,” Bill said.
“I’m Pat Lavell,” the man said, and Pat and Bill, overjoyed to see one another, fell into a hug.
Then the painful pause. Everybody in Johnstown had to endure it now, when reuniting with an old friend.
“How did it go with you?” Bill finally asked.
“Lost everything,” Lavell said. “My home, my savings, everything. But I’m the happiest man in Johnstown”—and here the darkened face lit up—“for my family’s all right!”
To Tom Johnson, Bill Jones’s encounter with his old friend Pat Lavell was worth incalculably more than any of the hotels where Bill was so looked down upon, and more than any of the people, for all of their wealth and art and literature, who did the looking down.