“Before I had time to think I had to look, and saw floating in the water the body of an old woman, whose hair was shining in the starlight. A little farther on we saw a group of strange drift wood. We looked closer and found it to be a mass of wooden slabs, with names and dates cut upon them, and floating on top of them were marble stones, two of them.
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.
OLD SOLDIER SHUDDERED AT THE SIGHTS.
“I am an old soldier, madame. I have seen many battlefields, but let me tell you that since I rode across the bay the other night and helped the man at the boat steer to keep away from the floating bodies of dead women and little children I have not slept one single instant. Five thousand would never cover the number of people who died here in that terrible storm.
“In the short time I have been here I have met and talked with women who saw every one they loved on earth swept away from them out in the storm. As I look out of my window I can see the blood-red flame leaping with fantastic gesture against the sky. There is no wire into Galveston, and I will have to send this message out by the first boat.
“For the present the two things needed are money and disinfectants. More nurses and doctors are needed. Galveston wants help—quick, ready, willing help. Don’t waste a minute to send it. If it does not come soon this whole region will be a prey to a plague such as has never been known in America. Quick-lime and disinfectants, and money and clothes—all these things Galveston must have, and have at once, or the people of this country will have a terrible crime on their conscience.