THE DEAD LAY EVERYWHERE.
Capt. Lardner could be seen upon the bridge. The crew hung over the sides, joyously alive and glad to be home. But in every part of the ship the dead lay. High on the poop deck coffins and rough shells were piled and piled.
Dead men in tarpaulins lined the flooring of the cable-wells both fore and aft, so that there was hardly room for a foot to be put down. And in the forward hold dead men were piled one upon another, their eyes closed as in sleep, and over them all a great tarpaulin was stretched. Those that pressed forward to see were sickened and turned back.
The business of moment was to discharge that freight, and this was done with all possible dispatch.
The uncoffined dead were carried down in stretchers, placed in the rough shells that were piled upon the pier, and one by one driven up the slope and into the town in the long line of hearses and black undertaker’s wagons that had been gathered from every quarter. It was speedily done, but quietly and without irreverent haste.
For two hours this business proceeded before anyone could go upon the pier and the sounds were like the hum of a small factory. There were the muffled orders, the shuffling and tramping of feet, the scraping as of packing boxes drawn across the rough flooring and the eternal hammering that echoed all along the coal sheds.
Two hours it was before any one could go on board, and then came another hour when the coffins were swung down from the deck and piled up on the wharf ready for the removal that took until well into the middle of the afternoon.
Few of the relatives were allowed to pass beyond the cordon that stretched all about the pier at which the dead were landed.
One of the first to get through the lines and the first of all the waiting crowd to make his way aboard after the ship reached her pier was Capt. Richard Roberts, of the Astor yacht, who was filled with a great concern at the news that had come from the Widener party.