Light at the End
6 A.M., Fort Wayne, Allen County Orphanage
The children who were sleeping were roused awake and given their breakfast. It was just another morning, if they could ignore the grownups standing around, the boats outside moored to the front porch, the horrific flashbacks of the drownings from the day before, and the sense of foreboding that filled the entire room.
Early morning, Dayton, Ohio
Ben Hecht woke up with a start. He was on a bed—well, a cot, really, and wearing a peculiar nightgown, peculiar because it wasn’t his own. Baffled at first, Hecht gradually recognized where he was: the National Cash Register plant and surrounded by Red Cross staff and bedridden patients.
He had fallen asleep in his canoe, been “rescued,” and then brought here.
Hecht shouted for his clothes. A nurse came up to him and told him he couldn’t leave until he had been examined by a doctor. Hecht protested—he was fine, he had just fallen asleep, he needed to go so he could file a story for the first edition of the Chicago Daily Journal. The nurse wouldn’t be dissuaded. Hecht stood his ground, “yelling in my skimpy refugee’s nightgown, as unlike a journalist as could be imagined.”
Suddenly, Hecht was joined by his old pal, Christian Dane Hagerty. He had been collecting information about the flood’s refugees.
“Tell them, will you,” begged Hecht, looking imploringly at Hagerty. “Tell them I’m a newspaperman and not a goddamn refugee.”
Hagerty looked him over and smiled, as if he was considering telling the nurse otherwise. But then to Hecht’s utter relief, Hagerty offered his confirmation: “He’s a newspaperman.”
Morning in Dayton and Columbus
Governor Cox dreaded the thought of calling John Bell. Not that he didn’t want to talk to him, but he knew the telephone operator was famished, weary, and wet, and, judging from the skies in Columbus, he couldn’t imagine what Bell and Dayton were going through now.
Still, he asked Columbus operator Thomas Green to put him through.
“Good morning, Governor,” John Bell said, happy as a clam. “The sun is shining in Dayton.”
Snow would fall on the city later in the day, and Bell became less buoyant as the day wore on, but both men would later agree that it was a turning point. There had been hours of doubt, but now they knew that the flood couldn’t last forever.
Approximately 7 A.M., Fort Wayne
Seven-year-old Opal Jacobs, who remembered vividly the terror of her last boat ride, refused to board. Some of the men forced the screaming girl on the boat, who was then held and comforted by a woman from the First Presbyterian Church.
Four boats took all of the children, all at once, with the remaining adults in a fifth boat. Just as the last boat left, as if on cue, one of the porches of the home, the one connected to the fire escape, broke free from the house and floated a short distance into a grove of trees. That was the closest thing to anything going wrong on this boat ride. The sun was peeking through the clouds and the rain had finally stopped falling.
March 27, morning, from approximately 8 to 10 A.M., Peru, Indiana
Sam Bundy was finding it increasingly challenging to steer his boat. After fifty-five hours of rowing down streets and plucking people out of houses and trees without even a nap, his body was finally begging for him to call it quits. But when Jake Marsh offered him two hundred dollars to rescue his wife and daughter and several other family members, trapped in at least two different places in the city, Bundy found himself torn.
The money would help out on the home front, and if he refused, and if these people didn’t survive the flood because he hadn’t gone after them, it would gnaw at him for the rest of his days.
It may not have been the smartest course of action in his exhausted state, but he said he would go.
Bundy only needed to travel three blocks in downtown Peru, but nobody else would take their boat for good reason. Those three blocks contained a raging current that still had not abated. When Phillip Landgrave, a local school official, watched Bundy board, he couldn’t help somberly thinking, Good-bye, Sam. But to his and everyone’s relief and surprise, around 10 A.M., Bundy returned with the mother and daughter, two hours after he set out.
Landgrave explained Bundy’s success to a reporter: “He did not do like the others, but he took his own time and did not become excited. He used his own sure method and came back with the folks he went after.”
But Bundy was depleted, and he knew if he tried another trip to pick up the rest of the family members, he wouldn’t return. Bundy tracked down an extremely competent rescuer, Irwin Baldwin, and offered him the $200 instead, the whole enchilada, if he would make the second trip. Baldwin agreed and, to Bundy’s relief, returned safely with the rest of Jake Marsh’s family.
Bundy decided he was finished with rescue work. He had gone at it for fifty-seven hours straight. “I am glad that I came, even though it might be some time before I fully recover,” Bundy told a reporter. “I saw some harrowing scenes but no one can say that I faltered when duty called me. I’m going back home now to sleep—to dream of the flood.” Then he added, sincerely: “I hope not.”
Morning, March 27, New Castle, Pennsylvania
The city woke up to learn that civilization as they knew it was regressing. The west side of the city was hit the hardest, but people in all directions were without gas or water, and without much food. The grocery stores were mobbed, and by noon they were cleaned out.
Meanwhile, in the midst of the handful of crooked officers on the New Castle police force were men like Thomas Thomas. Aside from having a memorable name, Thomas was, by all accounts, an ethical, likeable man, not to mention a husband and father of three. He had only been on the force for about a year and a half, appointed by the mayor after working at the city’s tin mill. He had been in the flooded streets of New Castle since Tuesday, leading and rowing people to safety. If the reports are true, Thomas Thomas hadn’t taken a break since then.
For the last forty-eight hours, he had been rowing families to safety. Affected by the gratitude of those he helped and the cries of people whom he hadn’t reached yet, Thomas apparently couldn’t stand the thought of stopping. Even when it began to snow, he continued rowing.
Thomas was pushing himself too hard. He didn’t realize it, but if he didn’t stop and take a long break soon, his luck was going to run out.
Morning, Fort Wayne, Indiana
Judge J. Frank Mungovan turned loose ten drunks who had over-celebrated the fact that they worked a couple of hours helping to secure the Lakeside dike and at other danger points. He turned them free, the papers reported, because the jail was in such an unsanitary condition as a result of the failure of the water supply that he didn’t want to send any more men to it.
Thursday morning, Indianapolis
Mischa Elman, the violinist, and Rudolph Ganz, the Swiss pianist, heard that the first train out of Indianapolis would be leaving that morning. Many of the guests decided to stay put, fearing that their train would crash through a bridge like so many had already done, or become embedded in a riverbank somewhere, but Elman and Ganz reasoned that with people already getting sick in Indianapolis, and the potential for disease spreading in the flooded city, wherever they went probably wouldn’t be much worse than staying where they were.
They took the first train. Elman was struck by the fact that there were no porters, which was eerie and inconvenient. He had to lug his Stradivarius and Amati with him.
It would take ten hours to make the two-hour trip to Goshen, Indiana, and as Elman told the New York Times, “We saw many dead bodies floating in the swollen river. Terrible! We also saw submerged houses, many, very many, poking their roofs out of the yellow swirling water that ran like a mill race, and other houses that leaned like drunkards up against bridges. We all felt shaky, of course, whenever our train passed over a bridge. At Goshen we caught a train for Toledo, where we had the good luck to make a close connection with the Lake Shore Limited. We were without food all day, except for a hot dog at one little way station. There was a man there who kept cutting open rolls as fast as he could and slapping in a piece of sausage. Those tasted good.”
But Elman found a lot of beauty and wonder in being in less than ideal circumstances with so many fellow travelers, saying, “It was a wonderful experience, and I would not have missed it for anything—but I would not care to go through it again,” and then he added, “Yes, I intend to compose a piece describing my feelings—and also my cold feet.”
Mid-morning, Fort Wayne, Ohio Another day, another crisis.
The headline on a late morning edition of the Fort Wayne Daily News gave everyone a start. It blared: DAM AT ST. MARY’S RESERVOIR BREAKS.
With the second headline, right underneath: THE FLOOD WILL REACH FORT WAYNE IN FROM FOUR TO SIX HOURS SAYS WEATHERMAN PALMER.
So the dam at St. Mary’s was broken. Just what the city needed. The paper didn’t say how much water was behind it, but every resident over the age of six years in Fort Wayne knew that just twenty-five miles south of the city was the largest artificial body in the world, which had been completed in 1845 as a feeder for the Great Miami and Erie Canal that went from Lake Erie to the Ohio River. In fact, it held over 13,000 acres of water, 2 billion cubic feet of liquid, and the way everyone saw it, a wall of water would hit St. Mary’s first, and then go into Rockford and Willshire, both villages in Ohio. From there, it would take out Pleasant Mills, Indiana, Decatur, and then aim for destroying Fort Wayne.
The alarm had been sounded by someone manning an oil-pumping station near the dam, and he had said on the telephone, “Can tell no more. Must run for life.”
Morning, Dayton, Ohio
Dayton residents heard the news. St. Mary’s dam had broken. Men dashed through the streets, shouting, “Flee for your lives,” and, “The reservoir has broken.”
The paper in nearby Xavier described the situation thusly: “Without waiting for confirmation, the now thoroughly frightened people are leaving the city like rats from a sinking ship. People are frantic. Children are separated from their parents, women are throwing their babies away in their terrible fright. The streets on the east side are black with hundreds and thousands of fleeing people. They have only one thought and that is to flee.”
One has to think and hope the reporter was mistaken and a little melodramatic himself—babies being thrown away?
But, sure enough, similar to what had happened the day before in Columbus, there was absolutely no foundation for the alarm. And once again, there was an understandable panic in the streets. Of course, it may seem as if there weren’t any dry streets to panic in, but there were plenty of neighborhoods in Dayton, particularly in the northwest and southeast parts of the city, away from the rivers, that were relatively untouched by the flood. Hundreds of individuals and families in Dayton gathered their kids and important papers and hopped into their horse-and-buggies and automobiles, clogging the streets that were drivable and made haste to the National Cash Register headquarters, pushing themselves past guards, storming offices, and threatening to overwhelm the already-overcrowded facility.
The mob didn’t settle down until Patterson stepped forward and spoke, explaining that if the dam had broken, it was sixty-five miles away, and that the water wouldn’t make their situation much more grave than it already was. In fact, some professor later calculated that even if the dam and its 17,000 acres of water had become free, and assuming there was no water on the ground across the several million acres that it would have spread over, the area would have been one foot deep. Not nothing when you own a half-sunken two-story row house, but not a tsunami either.
The Thoma family were among the people in the crowd at NCR. Norma Thoma’s father Albin, an optometrist, wasn’t sure how much more fearing for his life he could take. He just wanted to get back to his home in Piqua, although he couldn’t have been sure he would have been much better off.
His house was far enough away from any waterways, as far as he knew, but Piqua had serious flooding as well. Years later, on September 12, 1983, Gene Rees, an 89-year-old farmer, told the Shelby County Historical Society of how he had visited Piqua with his uncle, where they saw a house leave its moorings. On top of the roof were a man, a woman, and a little girl. Rees and his uncle were horrified—and completely helpless to do anything but watch. The parents and girl were all crying for help—until it hit a bridge and they plunged into the water and disappeared.
Sometime in the afternoon, Columbus
Even while some people were still trapped in their homes, including 250 very hungry and cold people at the Sun Manufacturing Company, there was a morbid, grim sign that the flood would eventually end: two trucks, full of dead bodies, rolled out of the west side of the city. Relief trains, meanwhile, with food and clothing were coming in, and fifty armed deputies patrolled the city, all with orders to shoot any looters.
2 P.M., Fort Wayne
It was determined that the St. Mary’s River had gone down three inches since 5:30 A.M. With the rain slowing down to a trickle, the end of the flood finally seemed to be in sight.
Throughout the day, Oil City, Pennsylvania
While waterways were going down in the region where the flood first began, Oil Creek was rising at three inches an hour. The river gauge measured twenty feet, instead of the usual foot or two, or even zero, since often the creek bed was dry. The entire business district was under water. The city’s newspapers and industrial plants had also shut down since their power rooms were flooded. But what was really unnerving to the residents was that about four thousand barrels of oil had washed away from the Carmania Refinery plant.
People were afraid that this would be a repeat of June 5, 1892, when something similar had happened: miles of the river had caught on fire and dozens of people had died.
When people heard about the oil barrels, succumbing to humanity’s voyeuristic instinct, they ran to the river to look at the barrels rather than getting as far away from it as possible. The railroads were ordered to make sure their locomotives extinguished their fires, and a government order went out saying that nobody was allowed to light a fire. Not even a match.
Throughout the day, Adams County, Pennsylvania, March 27
Adams County, scene of the infamous 1889 Johnstown Flood, saw their streams two inches higher than they had ever been since that fateful day. Every cellar in the city was full of water, footbridges were destroyed, and travel was virtually impossible. Still, the bigger bridges held, and there were no deaths. Which was something of a minor miracle, or simply better geography than some of the other flood-prone cities. In the days and years after the Johnstown Flood, there was no legislation, in the city, county or state level, that attempted to protect its residents from future floods. Although it was considered a manmade disaster—the dam, for starters, was poorly maintained—the courts saw it as an act of God. The survivors not only received no money for their damages, they had no assurance something like this couldn’t one day happen again.
Afternoon, Dayton, Ohio
“Don’t send us money. We can’t use it,” said J. C. Hale of the National Cash Register company, who was in charge of the relief and wanted food, clothing, and actual life-saving goods. That sentiment would change later, but for the moment there was a cash shortage in Dayton, rendering the checks useless at the city’s banks. That may have inspired Governor Cox to give the state a ten-day banking holiday, knowing full well that people weren’t going to be able to pay their bills on time.
Meanwhile, that afternoon, NCR’s founder, John Patterson, sent a message out that went on the news wire across the country. It was an urgent yet calm missive, furnishing directives on exactly what the city was going through and what it needed. And it’s easy to see why later, after the disaster would pass, the citizens would come to the conclusion that they needed something that a few scattered communities across the country had begun employing: a city manager.
Patterson’s message read:
“Situation here desperate. All people except on outskirts imprisoned by water. They have had no food, no drinking water, no light, no heat for two days. We have had no house to house communication by telephone for two days. Dayton water works stopped two days ago. Fire raging for 24 hours in center of city and now spreading. Beckel Hotel burned.”
(He was wrong about that last part.)
“Weather suddenly turned cold with strong wind and snow; water current too strong for rowboats and rafts,” continued Patterson’s message. “Need help. Can reach us today from nearby cities. Help should be in form of motor boats and people to run them. We need good rowboats. We need troops for protection and help. Fire engines, motor trucks, and automobiles are needed, also provisions, clothing, and medical supplies. Our factory is safe, it has its own power, heat, electricity, and water plant. We and private houses are caring for many people, but they are only a small part of the sufferers.
“We cannot reach central, northeastern, northern, or western parts of the city. Consequently, cannot answer any of the telegrams of inquiry about safety of the people that are coming in. Railroads reaching Dayton are practically all out of use.”
Patterson sounded like the mayor of the city, and indeed his factory was becoming more like a city within a city every day. If Fred Ward, reporter for the Columbus Citizen, was right, NCR even had turned its basement into a jail, where guards were keeping robbers and vandals. Patterson’s company not only embraced the idea of reporters visiting NCR, Patterson set up a separate living quarters for them, on the upper floors of the building, which were now stocked with beds. It made sense, even if Patterson hadn’t understood the value of favorable publicity—he did—because the hotels weren’t exactly welcoming new customers, unless the new customers had a canoe handy, and the reporters had to stay somewhere. But Patterson not only gave journalists lodging, he had their muddy clothes cleaned and pressed overnight, and the reporters were welcome to use other amenities the company provided, like the dining room, the barber shop, and shoe-shining services. Even more helpful, Patterson managed to get a Western Union wire for the reporters to use at NCR, and for the next three months, newspaper men—sometimes as many as seventy-five—gathered at Patterson’s company to collect news.
City Hall couldn’t have done it better. As Carlos F. Hurd, staff reporter for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, observed, “To me, as I walked through the eleven floors of its administration building, it seemed that its work could not be more effective if it had been built for the express purpose it is now serving.”
But why shouldn’t Patterson act like the city’s mayor? Dayton’s actual mayor, Edward Phillips, had hardly been seen or heard from since the flood started, and while it wasn’t first and foremost on people’s minds in the beginning, as they struggled simply to survive, it was a question that was coming up more and more: Where was the mayor, anyway?
The mayor was marooned at his house with his family. He was stuck at home for about seventy hours, only escaping late in the afternoon on Thursday, March 27, after rescuers took Phillips and his family away. As he told a reporter, “The water caught us early Tuesday morning. During Tuesday, the water was fourteen feet deep around the house, and that night, I chopped a hole through the ceiling of a second-floor room, and we spent the night in a little attic. The big west side fire was just two blocks from us, and when the wind began to carry burning embers in our direction, it looked serious. I watched the roof nearly all night.”
Phillips probably had no choice but to wait out the flood, but it didn’t help his political career. By the following year, he was out as mayor; and as if to add insult to injury, Dayton would change its system of government, reverting to a then-relatively new way of running a city, in which a five-member commission—which includes the mayor, functioning as the commission’s chairman—chooses a city manager to run the show. Phillips’s most enduring legacy may not be as a businessman, but that today most cities employ a city manager.
Not surprisingly, given how many communities were in the flood’s way, Mayor Phillips wasn’t the only politician who didn’t exactly receive praise for how he handled the flood. Governor Ralston of Indiana was roundly thrashed in the editorial pages of the Indianapolis News.
As it observed in the days after the flood, “The people in West Indianapolis leaped into action to aid flood victims within an hour the night of the flood. The Governor, however, was still struggling more than a day and a half later about the issue of possibly losing control over the distribution of the relief supplies the flood victims needed so desperately. He was worried that some glitch might spring up concerning the method of distribution and then criticism might fall on him. He followed the safest course. He equivocated.”
3 P.M., New Castle, Pennsylvania
The bridges kept collapsing. The Black Bridge, a wooden bridge, had been the first to fall into the Shenango River, followed by the Grant Street Bridge on Wednesday afternoon, and now the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge. As was a common practice during heavy rains, railroad cars—in this case, coal cars—were loaded up on the edges of a bridge, to keep it weighted down, and so everyone believed the bridge would survive. But the waters proved too strong, and in another three hours the bridge at Gardner Avenue would fall too.
Around this time, Thomas Thomas was joined by an alderman, John H. Gross. Thomas, on continuous duty since Tuesday, was exhausted and must have welcomed having a partner to help him help others. Still, Thomas should have found a warm bed instead and left the rescuing to others after more than forty-eight hours at the helm. But then one wonders if he knew about some of the graft among his fellow officers who were not as pure of heart as he. Maybe he felt that he simply couldn’t leave the rescuing to men like William Kerr, who were busy blackmailing stranded families.
Gross was going to help Thomas with his latest rescue. Thomas had brought back a mother of six children. Her kids and the father were back at the house, and Thomas was going to go back for them, or some of them, anyway, since it would be impossible to fit nine people, including the rescuers, in a single boat.
But they never made it. Thomas and Gross’s boat overturned. Fortunately, they were in the vicinity of two Shenango Mill employees, John Henderson and Abe Rhoner. They had found themselves trapped at their place of employment, a tin mill, the same that Thomas had worked at before becoming an officer, and they ended up constructing a wooden boat out of factory scraps to use for rescues. It was a rudimentary boat, to say the least. They had no oars; just wooden boards for paddling. By the time Thomas and Gross fell into the drink, Henderson and Rhoner had saved at least twenty-five women, taking them from the windows of two-story homes.
Both men heard Thomas and Gross scream and immediately hopped into their skiff and started rowing toward them. They found Thomas and Gross, their necks just above the churning water, hanging on to a fence, in the middle of a pile of garbage and driftwood, all piling up from the current.
Rohner held the boat to the fence, and Henderson went into the water and took their rope and tied it to the front of the porch. At least whatever happened next, they wouldn’t lose their boat.
Neither Gross or Thomas could talk, they were so cold. Their fingers were so cramped that they couldn’t hold a rope. Henderson and Rohner were at first at a loss—the men couldn’t use the rope to make their way to the boat—but they ultimately helped Thomas onto the roof of the porch. Then they aided Gross, who, when he tried to stand, fell back down.
Both men seemed delirious from the shock and the cold, and after searching the house for a place to light a fire and coming up empty, it was clear that Henderson and Rohner couldn’t just leave them there, nor could they take them anywhere far either.
Fortunately, a woman in an upstairs window, three houses away, shouted that she had a fire going in her room and they could bring the men there. Henderson and Rohner did, taking each man one at a time on the skiff, making their way as carefully as possible to the woman’s house. Once the officers were with the woman, whose name we may never know, Henderson and Rohner then rowed back to the tin mill on an errand for coal. They brought it back for the woman’s fire, so they could keep it going. Gross, and especially Thomas, were fine with where they were. They didn’t want to go anywhere. Thomas recognized his limits. He was officially off the job.
Henderson and Rohner then bid the three farewell and boarded their skiff. It isn’t clear if Henderson and Rohner were asked to go to the police station and report the whereabouts of Thomas and Gross, or if they simply took the initiative. Either way, it would have been better if they had simply rowed back to the factory. Henderson and Rohner rowed their skiff to dry land and then headed to the police station, carrying their skiff with them in case it was needed, and probably fearing that someone might take it in a city where boats were now very valuable. They came to the Gardner Avenue Bridge, which looked unsteady but crossable.
After making it across, Henderson and Rohner found an officer, Lew Thomas, and informed him of the whereabouts of Thomas Thomas and John Gross. The two men made it clear that they were safe and warm and should remain in the house until the water had settled down.
Then they left, returning to the Gardner Avenue Bridge around 6 P.M. Henderson and Rohner once again mulled over whether they should cross the bridge once again, and then the decision was made for them. It collapsed.
Feeling very lucky and shaken, they found another bridge belonging to a railroad and traveled as far as they could until they put their skiff back into the water, rowing to the tin factory they were now calling home. They felt very good about how they had spent their afternoon and that everyone knew Thomas and Gross were safe and sound. They had no idea that what they had actually done was inspire people to form a rescue party.
But that is what happened. Two police officers went after Thomas and Gross, a national guardsman named Fred Moore and another man of very questionable moral character, the one who had been taking money before saving flood victims: William Kerr.
Evening, March 27, Portsmouth, Ohio
As the Portsmouth Times would observe fifty years later, everyone in this river city, with the Ohio River to the south of them and the Scioto River to their west, was pretty apathetic when it came to devising escape plans in case their homes were suddenly underwater. The residents were well aware that they could be flooded out and had faced down many floods, but that was exactly why nobody worried. The city had a 62-foot flood wall, and one local official had recently theorized that maybe someday there would be a fifty-foot flood at the maximum. He apparently forgot or was unaware of the 1884 flood that had reached 66.3 feet on February 12.
Still, for those who remembered that flood, that was one for the record books. It seemed inconceivable that the river would ever get that high again.
And while the rest of the state was worried about its bridges, Portsmouth had its brand new $75,000 steel bridge crossing the Scioto River, and they were confident that it could survive anything mother nature threw at it.
But during the evening and night of March 27, the Ohio River rose to 67.9 feet. Some people reported seeing a tidal wave, fifteen feet high, going down the Ohio River and smashing into the Kentucky shore. The river soon poured over the flood wall, into downtown Portsmouth, and for anyone thinking of escaping across that steel bridge—no such luck. Perhaps to the concrete industry’s collective smug satisfaction, the Scioto River knocked Portsmouth’s pride and joy into oblivion.
And yet, while the flood wall was nowhere near high enough to save Portsmouth from flooding, it was high enough to save the community from being blotted off the map—and high enough to save lives. There was a stampede of horse-and-buggies, galloping up into the hills, and a swarm of people, grownups and children, racing down the streets and sidewalks, carrying kerosene lanterns and lamps, all running for higher ground. Those who didn’t feel they could make it that far knew the drill, running for their second floor or the roof. Horses left alone were drowned in their stalls. Buildings, many of which were boarded up by shopkeepers hoping to save their plate glass, were overturned. Everything that wasn’t nailed down became part of a muddy sea of debris. The waters were as high as nine feet in downtown Portsmouth, and an estimated 4,500 houses were flooded. By the time it was all over, the mayor estimated that there was half a million dollars in damages.
But thanks in much part to the flood wall, which bought everyone more time and kept much of the river out of the community and from swamping the city even more than it did, not one man, woman, or child in Portsmouth was killed.
Sometime during the evening, Alto Pass, Illinois
While the rivers, creeks, and streams weren’t flooding elsewhere as dramatically as they had been in Indiana and Ohio, the water was still picking off its victims in other states. It was around this time, in Alto Pass, Illinois, that George and Ella Van Cavaness, farmers and parents of five children, discovered that their two-year-old was missing and found their child’s body floating in Hudgeon’s Creek.
7:30 P.M., New Castle, Pennsylvania
William Kerr and Fred Moore reached the house where Alderman Gross and Officer Thomas Thomas were. By the time they reached the home, there wasn’t a ray of light left in the sky. Thomas and Gross were roused awake and taken to the boat. It was never said, but one imagines the kind and hospitable woman who sheltered them was left behind.
That Kerr wasn’t the most honest person in the world doesn’t, of course, mean that he meant any harm toward Thomas. They may have been best friends. He might have been subconsciously trying to make amends for his sleazy behavior in the last couple of days. He may have been ordered by a superior to go after Thomas. But the fact remains that Thomas would have been better off sleeping through the night. He was so weak that he couldn’t sit up in the boat.
Gross felt ill as well, but he managed to at least sit while Kerr and Moore rowed in the choppy water. There was no light, save a searchlight that someone was operating, which moved up and down the muddy creek. They were heading toward a railroad bridge, the same one that, several hours earlier, Thomas and Gross’s original rescuers, Henderson and Rohner, had crossed on their return trip for the police station. Near the bridge was a slew of submerged railroad cars, and the current was sweeping everything it could underneath, including the boat that Kerr and Moore were rowing.
It capsized, and everyone pitched into the river. Knowing Thomas’s condition, Gross lunged for his friend and managed to place him on the roof of a boxcar, just barely over the rushing water. Gross grabbed on to something—but he would never remember what—a branch from a tree? Part of the boxcar? Gross hung on and looked back at Thomas, horrified by what he saw.
In front of his eyes, the current knocked Thomas’s limp body off the boxcar, and he was swiftly pulled under the water.
Gross had a quick thought that he would be joining him soon. Then everything went black.