DEAD WASHED FROM THEIR GRAVES.
“The graveyard, which has held the sleeping citizens of Galveston for many, many years, was giving up its dead. We pulled up at a little wharf in the hush of the starlight; there were no lights anywhere in the city except a few scattered lamps shining from a few desolate, half-destroyed houses. We picked our way up the street. The ground was slimy with the debris of the sea.
“We climbed over wreckage and picked our way through heaps of rubbish. The terrible, sickening odor almost overcame us, and it was all that I could do to shut my teeth and get through the streets somehow. The soldiers were camping on the wharf front, lying stretched out on the wet sand, the hideous, hideous sand, stained and streaked in the starlight with dark and cruel blotches. They challenged us, but the marshal took us through under his protection. At every street corner there was a guard, and every guard wore a six-shooter strapped around his waist.
“We got to the hotel after some terrible nightmare fashion, plodding through dim streets like a line of forlorn ghosts in a half-forgotten dream. General McKibben, commander in charge of the Texas Division, was in the hotel parlor reading dispatches. He was horrified to see me.
“How in the world did you get here?” he said. “I would not let any woman belonging to me come into this place of horror for all the money in America.