returning home for Christmas, the general rush of holiday travelers—and I was fortunate to get a reservation at all for that particular day.
A chum of mine, Dorothy Cooper, who lived where I had been staying, went down in the taxi with me to the train. I felt so faint that she suggested we stop at a drug store and get a bottle of smelling salts for me to have on the train. As a result, when we reached the Grand Central Station, we were just in time to see the iron gate close and watch the train pull out. I had wired Elizabeth I would be there for Sunday, and of course I was just sick over missing the train. I went to the Consolidated Ticket Office and learned that I could not get another reservation until the following Tuesday. Those days of waiting tortured me. When finally I found myself in the train, bound for Chicago, where I longed to creep into my sister Elizabeth's arms and cry, I sighed audibly with relief.
I had taken an "extra fare" train, scheduled to reach Chicago earlier than the others, and that night I wakened after a first sleep to feel the train fairly skimming the tracks. "Gone wild!" I thought and sat up quickly in my berth. I pulled the curtains and peeked out. Everything seemed to be normal and the passengers were sleeping. How could they sleep, I thought, when every moment brought us nearer to destruction! It would be awful to die in a railroad crash, I thought to myself. And terrible fears assailed me when I thought that maybe Elizabeth wouldn't be able to locate our precious baby, and perhaps my sweetheart would be afraid to claim her openly after my death—horrible, horrible! I felt I ought to get up and go forward to the engineer—but what could I tell him! Evidently he knew the train was going wild and couldn't do a thing to stop it. Nor could I help him, surely. I became drowsy and concluded that a protecting Providence would intervene. At any rate, this was a case beyond human power! I lay back on my pillow praying, and gradually the rhythm of the flying wheels grew fainter and fainter and I slept.
