until the next day. So I wrote a carefully worded note to Judge
Brisbane, informing him that I would attend to the matter immediately.
Had I then had the slightest knowledge of the cumulative rapidity with
which a panic moves I would not have taken this risk. But my whole
object was to gain time, with the hope that something would occur to
change the minds of my two timid friends.

On the night of the 28th I avoided the Brisbane establishment, although
my desire drew me in that direction. I resolved to wait until the
morrow, and if nothing happened to change the determination of the Judge
to go to Europe, to then make my arrangements to go with him and Kate.
That night there was a visible change in the metropolis. The theaters
were deserted, men and women were congregated at the corners and were
walking in the roadways--a sure indication in a great city of some
popular disturbance. The bulletins and news centers were crowded, and
the mystery of the great silence was being discussed by everybody. One
thing struck everybody with a vague terror, and it was the accounts of
the strange wind that was now blowing at Cheyenne and Denver. One
special correspondent at Cheyenne said "that it seemed to him that the
atmosphere of the earth, influenced by some incomprehensible suction,
was all rushing to an unseen vortex. It was not in any sense a
disturbance of the atmosphere that we usually call a wind, but a steady,
silent draught. And the spectacle of trees bent over and held all day by
the pressure, but unfluttered and unrelieved by fluctuant variations,
filled them with wonder and dread."

I got up early on the morning of the 29th, for I had slept lightly and
fitfully. To my surprise I found that almost everybody else was up. It
made me realize, as I had not done before, the feverish tension of
public expectation. The news, if news it can be called, was startling.
Let me try and repeat it to you just as it was presented to my sense.
The special train, upon which the eyes of the whole country were fixed,
had been heard from. It had gone west from Cheyenne and passed through
Pocatello without interruption. Then followed the dispatches received
from it at Cheyenne as it passed the stations beyond Pocatello. They
were in this order and to this effect:

MICHANO, 10 A. M.--All right. Instruments working well. Track
clear. Inhabitants appear to be moving east. No intelligence of a
definite character obtained. Shoshone