By the next morning forty-eight bodies had been taken out of the
river, but there were still twenty missing. Many of the men had fallen
with the bridge and were held down under the debris. Early on the
morning of the second day a closed carriage was driven slowly along the
river-bank and stopped a little below the works, where the river boiled
and churned about the great iron carcass which lay in a straight line
two thirds across it. The carriage stood there hour after hour, and word
soon spread among the crowds on the shore that its occupant was the wife
of the Chief Engineer; his body had not yet been found. The widows of
the lost workmen, moving up and down the bank with shawls over their
heads, some of them carrying babies, looked at the rusty hired hack many
times that morning. They drew near it and walked about it, but none of
them ventured to peer within. Even half-indifferent sightseers dropped
their voices as they told a newcomer: "You see that carriage over there?
That's Mrs. Alexander. They haven't found him yet. She got off the train
this morning. Horton met her. She heard it in Boston yesterday--heard
the newsboys crying it in the street."
At noon Philip Horton made his way through the crowd with a tray and a
tin coffee-pot from the camp kitchen. When he reached the carriage
he found Mrs. Alexander just as he had left her in the early morning,
leaning forward a little, with her hand on the lowered window, looking
at the river. Hour after hour she had been watching the water, the
lonely, useless stone towers, and the convulsed mass of iron wreckage
over which the angry river continually spat up its yellow foam.
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