"Then I'll drive for it myself," answered the Governor, as he swung into
his powerful car and started it out into the valley. "I'll make it back
in six hours. No other man can drive this car as fast as I can."
And true to his promise, he was back within the time with nurses and
surgeons and supplies of all kinds. By that time the whole Harpeth
Valley had heard of our tragedy and all who could find a way were
hurrying to our rescue or comforting.
The dawn of the beautiful new day found Nickols still alive, stretched
on his bed in his own wing of the Poplars, which alone of all the homes
in the Town had not been touched by the storm monster. The old house
stood unharmed in all its beauty in its garden which had hardly a leaf
or a branch broken, and hovered under its roof the last of the name of
its builders. He lay quiet and unconscious while his life jetted itself
away from a great hole in his lung made by a splinter from the beam he
had held up until old Goodloet's children had been given back to its
future. The great surgeon who had come down with the Governor, watched,
shook his head and went at his task again and again with a dogged
courage. For an hour he would leave him to go and help Dr. Harding with
some of the other injured, but back he would come to his fight for
Nickols' life.
And all over the stricken town there were similar tragedies being
enacted. Over at the Morgans Mark lay cold and still in the long parlor,
which was almost the only part of the handsome old house left intact by
the tornado, and Harriet sat beside him while Nell nursed maimed wee
Susan and torn Jimmy, and restrained Charlotte from injuring her sorely
twisted ankle.
Down at the Last Chance, Jacob Ensley was stretched upon a bed in the
bar with a sheet drawn straight and decorously over his bruised white
head. He had been killed by a blow from a roof timber, while from right
beside him young George Spain had been rescued unharmed. When he had
crawled from the ruins he had held in his hand a bottle of whiskey which
he had just uncorked for his own and Jacob's refreshment when the
tornado tore at the East Chance, and scarcely a drop had been spilt. And
the tornado had displayed the vagaries of its kind.
Old Granny Todd had been lifted in her rocking chair and carried halfway
over the Town and left beside the Spain cottage with her feeble life
intact, while Mrs. Spain, upon whose shoulders the burden of mothering
all seven of the Spains rested heavily, had had one of those valuable
shoulders broken and was left crushed and bleeding beside the rocking
chair in which the helpless old dame arrived for her enforced visit. The
household goods of one family had been torn from them and thrown into
the melee of another, and the Jamison clock was found ticking busily
away over on the roof of the Todd's chicken house. A girl mother in a
little cottage on the edge of the river bank was found floating against
the shore in her wooden bedstead, drowned, while near her the little two
days' old life had been perfectly preserved upon the pillow in the
rocking chair where it had been sleeping when the great storm beast had
made its raid.