The Heart's Kingdom

"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.