Reinforcing Disorder.

The mob merely helped to swell the host of thieves, cutthroats and
pickpockets with which the region is infested.

The trains which had passed us, going from Johnstown to Pittsburgh
looked as if they might be made up of joyous excursionists. The cars
were crowded to the platforms, and for some reason or other dozens of
the inebriated passengers thought it appropriate to cheer and yell,
though God knows the whole surroundings were calculated to make a human
being shed tears of anguish. The sight of the coffins in the baggage
cars, some of them containing the dead, had no dampening effect upon the
spirit of these roysterers.

The reaction from debauches and excitement is terrible, and there can be
little doubt that many minds will give way under the strain. One of the
wonders of the disaster is the absence of suicide and the apparently
calm way in which the most wofully bereaved support themselves under
their terrible loss. It must be an unnatural calm. Men have quietly told
me that they have lost their entire families and then have suddenly
changed the subject and talked of some absurdly trivial matter with an
air of great interest, but it was easy to see that there was some
numbing influence over the mechanism of the mind. It is unnatural and
awful. It is almost impossible to realize that the troops of workmen
leisurely digging in the ruins as if engaged in everyday employment are
really digging for the dead, and it is only in the actual sight of death
and its emblems that one can persuade one's self that it is all true.
The want of sleep conduces to an unnatural condition of the mind, under
which these awful facts are bearable to the bereaved.

Picketing the Ruins.

It was like a military camp here last night. So many citizens have been
knocked down and robbed that the soldiers had special instructions to
see that no queer characters got through to the centre of the town. I
had an excellent chance of seeing how impossible it was for an
unauthorized person to move about the town easily, although he could get
into the interior. I had been kindly invited to sleep on a wisp of hay
in a neighboring barn, but being detained late in the valley reached the
press headquarters after my host had left. It was a question of hunting
shelter or sleeping on the ground.

A gentleman whom I met told me that he was living in a Baltimore and
Ohio day passenger coach about a mile out, and that if we could