Now this was tactful and it might be prophetic, but it was not exactly accurate. The community heart was not softened—yet. It was mad, bewildered, sore. Just now, in particular, the town was hungry. Breakfastless, besides physically exhausted, it was irritably unable to cope with the problem of immediate needs—yet feeling peevishly that somebody should cope with them.
Babies were crying for milk and in all that blackened area there was no milk; children clamored for bread and there was no bread; citizens looked about for some vestige of organization or leadership and there was no organization. Mayor Foster, the chief of police, the chamber of commerce—they had been accustomed so long to look for leadership to that golden circle, the cabinet of Boland General, that they looked there now. But the golden circle today was brass. Today the cabinet was not active—in leadership at least. Calls to nearby cities should have gone out for succor. Had they? Nobody knew. A statement of what the condition and the needs of the populace would be this morning should have been flashed out by wire or radio or messenger to the governor of the state while yet the flames were burning. Had it? Nobody knew. Everybody wondered; everybody felt lonely, desolate, abandoned. Everybody was realizing, of course, that by now a charitable and sympathetic world was reading of their calamity and that by afternoon supplies of every sort would be rushing to them. But now?
No food—no stoves to cook the food on—no water to cook it with or wash it down—hunger, faintness, misery! And the first pangs of hunger are the sharpest, the most desolating. Empty-stomached the refugees turned and twisted in aimless, forlorn procession
