For a year Ole Man Benson had not only kept his promise in the way of building and furnishing for the young people: he had done more. He had floated them upon London with all the revenue that could be reserved from the new venture upon which he designed to double the colossal sums which directly or indirectly stood to his name, and every penny that he could spare from his first early purchases of Popocatapetls went into the status and future social position of his daughter. Now, after two years, Popocatapetl Dam was finished and yet greater things lay before them. Demaine was put into Parliament by a majority comparable only to the financial advantages which had secured it. His birth, her voice and its timbre, gathered into Demaine House all that so small a Great House could hold. So things had stood to within a week of the March day upon which we saw that very different man, Charles Repton, walking into the City of London.... But from the name of Charles Repton let me rapidly slew off to the sombre pyramid of that peak in the neighbourhood of Darien and recall the caprice of Popocatapetl upon which so much was to depend. It was a Wednesday in that March of 1915 that the Statesman was to speak in Washington at ten: (for two years Demaine House had thriven, it slept that Tuesday night unconscious of its fate). It was for the Wednesday at 3.30 that the order to sell stood in Ole Man Benson’s name.... Well ... CHAPTER III Late upon that Tuesday night Ole Man Benson boarded the Louis XV. Rosewood Express de Luxe as it steamed out of the Chicago Depot of the M.N. & C.: he was off to his mountain property in Idaho, and in the privacy of his section, Ole Man Benson slept. Not so the forces of Nature, so often destructive of the schemes of pigmy man! An appalling convulsion altogether exceeding anything heard or dreamt of since the beginning of time, totally destroyed the Popocatapetelian landscape in the small hours of that same morning; and as, a thousand miles to the north, the Louis XV. Rosewood Express de Luxe rolled in a terrific manner upon its insufficient rock ballast, the subterranean river, the perennial fires and the unscrupulously erected edifice of the great dam, shot aloft in a vast confusion and were replaced by a chasm some quarter of a mile in breadth and of a depth unfathomable to mortal plummets. It was March; March 1915. In Iowa in March it snows. The locomotive and two of the cars attached to the Louis XV. Rosewood Express de Luxe were buried a little beyond Blucher in a drift of snow the height and dimensions of which exceeded the experience of the oldest settler in that charming prairie town. _The same storm which had caused the misadventure had broken the wires for many miles around._