heavy
rain.

Weeks passed with no news of the voyagers or their ship. A month later
the body of Grimwood was found on the shores of Lake Michigan and fully
identified.

The precise story of that terrible night will never be written, but
knowing the man and his trade, sequence of incident is as plain to me
as if told by one of the voyagers. Evidently the balloon sprung a leak
early. The last ballast must have been spent before the tug saw her
trailing in the lake. Then anchor and drag ropes were sacrificed.
This would inevitably give the balloon travelling power for a
considerable time,--time of course depending on the measure of the leak
of gas,--but ultimately she must again have descended upon the raging
waters of the lake, where Grimwood, of untrained strength, soon became
exhausted while trying to hold himself secure in the ring, and fell out
into the lake. Thus again relieved of weight, the balloon received a
new lease of life, and travelled on probably, to a fatal final descent
in some untrodden corner of the northern forest, where no one ever has
chanced to stumble across the wreck. For had the balloon made its
final descent into the lake, it would have been only after the basket
was utterly empty, all the loose cordage cut away, and a type of wreck
left that would float for weeks or months and would almost certainly
have been found. Indeed, for months afterwards the writer and many
others of Donaldson's friends held high hopes of hearing of him
returned in safety from some remote distance in the wilds. But this
was not to be.

One more incident and I have done.

Six or seven years ago I read in the columns of the _Sun_ an article
copied from a Chicago paper, evidently written by some close friend of
the unfortunate Grimwood, making a bitter attack upon Donaldson for
having sacrificed his passenger's life to save his own. The story
moved me so much that I wrote an open letter to the Sun over my own
signature, in which I sought to refute the charge by recounting the
story of Donaldson's noble conduct, and his constant readiness for
self-sacrifice in other situations quite as dire.

A few days later, sitting in my office, I was frozen with astonishment
when a written card was handed in to me bearing the name "Washington H.
Donaldson"! As soon as I could recover myself, the bearer of the card
was asked in. He was a man within a year or two of my friend's age at
the time of his death, Wash Donaldso