Poor Vinal! Another victim of that soulless corporation hag, Boston Gas, to prolong whose life he had spent some of the best years of his own. Vinal was very dear to me. He had filled my canteen, held my ammunition, and carried my knapsack through many a hard-fought battle, willingly allowing others to do the cheering in victory, but reserving to himself the right to suggest and console when the clouds lowered and we were left alone on the field of defeat or the dusty road of retreat. Poor Vinal! He was worth a hundred copper deals or corporation hags.
Between death and life, success and failure, what a hair's-breadth after all. If Vinal had stubbed his toe, or had been able to take the first cab he found; if he had heard my call which would have brought him back; if he had tarried a moment longer in the Young Men's Christian Association where he had stopped to deliver a message, he would have escaped. The thought did not occur to me at the moment, for Vinal's death was too keen a personal sorrow to allow me to estimate my own narrow escape, but if that envelope, so miraculously preserved, had been burned as were the other papers in my secretary's pocket, there might have been no Amalgamated. "Coppers" must have dropped back to the lowly place from which Rogers had lifted them, for I should have been financially ruined.
To show the marvelous workings of Him who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb: At the same moment that I was called away from my guns, the commanding general of the opposing forces received the same call. The aged mother of the President of the Boston & Montana and Butte & Boston, while riding in her carriage, had been a victim of the same explosion.