Читать книгу A Change in the Cabinet онлайн

30 страница из 64

It was a Wednesday in that March of 1915 that the Statesman was to speak in Washington at ten: (for two years Demaine House had thriven, it slept that Tuesday night unconscious of its fate). It was for the Wednesday at 3.30 that the order to sell stood in Ole Man Benson’s name.... Well ...

ssss1

LATE upon that Tuesday night Ole Man Benson boarded the Louis XV. Rosewood Express de Luxe as it steamed out of the Chicago Depot of the M.N. & C.: he was off to his mountain property in Idaho, and in the privacy of his section, Ole Man Benson slept.

Not so the forces of Nature, so often destructive of the schemes of pigmy man!

An appalling convulsion altogether exceeding anything heard or dreamt of since the beginning of time, totally destroyed the Popocatapetelian landscape in the small hours of that same morning; and as, a thousand miles to the north, the Louis XV. Rosewood Express de Luxe rolled in a terrific manner upon its insufficient rock ballast, the subterranean river, the perennial fires and the unscrupulously erected edifice of the great dam, shot aloft in a vast confusion and were replaced by a chasm some quarter of a mile in breadth and of a depth unfathomable to mortal plummets. It was March; March 1915. In Iowa in March it snows. The locomotive and two of the cars attached to the Louis XV. Rosewood Express de Luxe were buried a little beyond Blucher in a drift of snow the height and dimensions of which exceeded the experience of the oldest settler in that charming prairie town. The same storm which had caused the misadventure had broken the wires for many miles around.