Wind

Rye Cove sits remotely on a plateau in Nolichuckey Valley, Scott County, Va. Around it and its 100-odd residents, roll and billow the Cumberland Mountains. Locomotive whistles echo from five miles away. Until last week, the seven-room schoolhouse of Rye Cove, set in an open field near the valley head, drew 200 pupils from ten mountainous miles around. Life there was simple, sheltered, unharried by the outer world.

One day last week a sudden spatter of rain drove Rye Cove school children into their plain board study-rooms before the noon recess ended. They were just wriggling themselves quiet in their seats when, down the valley, came a loud howling noise. The sky blackened. A monster wind came twisting between the mountains. It swooped down, caught at the schoolhouse, ripped off the roof, scrunched the rest of it to bits, scattered things insanely. Then it went roaring away, up over the ridge.

From the wreckage, 19 small bodies were pried loose. Twoscore other children were carried to hospitals, faint with pain.

Similar tornadoes twisted over the face of the land elsewhere last week, all evidently offspring of a large cyclonic disturbance which started over northern Texas and swept northeast. In Arkansas, eight persons were blown to death.

Four perished at Catlett, Va. At Brookville, Md., a 300-year-old stone house lost its roof in a gale, crushing out the life of an 88-year-old woman.