“The building gave way and tumbled in upon us. I was just at the door of the ticket office when it went down. I fell, and a man standing near me fell across me. A heavy girder fell on top of him. Mr. Woodard was only a few feet away. I never lost consciousness. I spoke to Mr. Woodard and he replied. We both thought we could get out alive if the depot did not catch fire. I knew that there had been stoves with fire burning in them in the depot before the tornado struck it, and I expected the flames to break out at every moment.
“I spoke to the man who was lying across me and told him that he must manage to squeeze from under the girder. I thought that if he was off me I could manage to get out. After many desperate efforts he managed to get from under the girder, but in doing so his bowels were torn so terribly that the doctors do not think he can recover. He was a brakeman, who had come here to be a witness in some case. I do not remember his name.
“After the brakeman got off me, I was able to use my strength. Then I got out, and so did Mr. Woodard. I was under the wreck just thirty-five minutes. I was slightly bruised in the arm and leg, but that amounts to nothing.”
Though forty or fifty persons were in the depot at the time, only one, a restaurant boy, was killed; Twenty-one passenger coaches were more or less wrecked. On following days the impression of the ruins upon the beholder was peculiarly gloomy. Instead of the stir of life, the brilliancy of electric lights, the scream of whistles and the rumbling of trains, there was a scattered wreck, and comparative silence. A few chickens, liberated from their coop, crept at dusk to roost on a timber, and in subdued tones seemed to be discussing with each other the mournful situation.
“O cold and savage wind! It racks my soul to hear the wild lamenting Of wounded hearts whose grief knows no relenting, Can not their woe e’er sway thee to repenting? O cold and savage wind!
O melancholy wind! Hast thou no requiem for the dead and dying? Art thou some fierce despairing spirit sighing O’er a lost Paradise behind thee lying? O melancholy wind!”
Too frequently in the confusion of great disasters the woes of the poorer classes are forgotten in the attention given to their more opulent neighbors. There is only too often good cause given for a slight modification of Shylock’s speech, “Hath not a Jew eyes?” etc. There is no sadder record than that so frequently given in a single line: “Dead--a woman, name unknown.” What fearful heart-aches often end in the Potter’s field!