“The man in front of me on the car had floated all Monday night with his wife and mother on a part of the roof of his little home. He told me that he kissed his wife good-bye at midnight and told her that he could not hold on any longer; but he did hold on, dazed and half-conscious, until the day broke and showed him that he was alone on his piece of driftwood. He did not even know when the woman that he loved had died.
“Every man on the train—there were no women there—had lost some one that he loved in the terrible disaster, and was going across the bay to try and find some trace of his family—all except the four men in my party. They were from outside cities—St. Louis, New Orleans and Kansas City. They had lost a large amount of property and were coming down to see if anything could be saved from the wreck.
“They had been sworn in as deputy sheriffs in order to get into Galveston. The city is under martial law, and no human being who can’t account for himself to the complete satisfaction of the officers in charge can hope to get through. We sat on the deck of the little steamer. The four men from outside cities and I listened to the little boat’s wheel plowing its way through the calm waters of the bay. The stars shone down like a benediction, but along the line of the shore there arose a great leaping column of blood-red flame.
“What a terrible fire,” I said. “Some of the large buildings must be burning.”
A man passing on the deck behind my chair heard me. He stopped, put his hand on the bulwark and turned down and looked into my face, his face like that of a dead man; but he laughed.
“Buildings!” he said. “Don’t you know what is burning over there? It is my wife and children—such little children! Why, the tallest was not as high as this”—he laid his hand on the bulwark—“and the little one was just learning to talk. She called my name the other day, and now they are burning over there—they and the mother who bore them. She was such a little, tender, delicate thing, always so easily frightened, and now she’s out there all alone with the two babies and they’re burning!”
The man laughed again and began again to walk up and down the deck.
HAD TO BURN BODIES OF THOUSANDS.
“That’s right,” said the Marshal of the State of Texas, taking off his broad hat and letting the starlight shine on his strong face. “That’s right. We had to do it. We’ve burned over 1,000 people to-day, and to-morrow we shall burn as many more. Yesterday we stopped burying the bodies at sea; we had to give the men on the barges whisky to give them courage to do the work. They carried out hundreds of the dead at one time, men and women, negroes and white people, all piled up as high as the barge could stand it, and the men did not go far enough out to sea, and the bodies have begun drifting back again.”
“Look!” said the man who was walking the deck, touching my shoulder with his shaking hand. “Look there!”