WRINGING THEIR HANDS IN AGONY.
“Two women—I talked to them—had left two children each in Galveston in the destroyed district, and they sat through that whole five hours’ trip wringing their hands and trying to curb the volcano of lamentation which lies in the mother’s heart when those of her flesh are imperiled or dead.
“We passed corpses. We passed the corpses of men and women and children. The moon was out, floating real brilliantly, and the boat cut past, barely missing a woman with her face turned toward God and the sky. I fervently prayed I might never see the like again. And when we reached the wharf, torn and skinned so that we had to creep to land, I saw beneath me, white and naked seven bodies.
“My very soul turned cold at the grewsome sight. Horrible! The contemplation of it yet makes me sick, though I have seen things since then that make me and would make the world sick, if I were able to describe them, unto death.”
Of the pitiful tales, that of Thomas Klee, of Galveston, is one of the most pitiful. His wife was away from home when the house was destroyed, and has not since been heard from. Klee with his infant boy and girl in his arms was carried for an hour in the whirling water. Once he tried to fasten the four year old girl in the branches of a tree, but she was torn from his arms while he was trying to make her fast. When he finally gained a firm foothold he found his boy dead in his arms. Since that time he has hardly been a conscious being and he is still in the hospital at Houston, where he was taken Friday.
The body of a nephew of Alderman John Wagner, a youth eighteen years old, was found lodged in the forks of a tall cedar tree on Galveston Island, two miles from his wrecked home, and tightly clinched with a death grip in his right hand was $200 which his father gave him to hold while the father attempted to close a door, when the house went down and the whole family perished in the storm and flood.
CLASPED HANDS AND ESCAPED.
Encircling a water stand pipe with clasped hands, W. R. Jones and fifteen other men prevented themselves from being carried away by the water, and so saved their lives at Galveston.
In a wooden bathtub Mrs. Chapman Bailey and Miss Blanche Kennedy were carried out into the gulf, where they spent Saturday night. Not till the next morning did the tide bring them back to where the rescuing parties could reach them. Neither of them has a relative in Galveston left alive.
Captain John Delaney, chief customs inspector of the port of Galveston, is one of the courageous men of the town. He lost his entire family, wife, son and daughters, but his sixty years were not bowed by his fate. The day following the disaster he was at his post, attired in a suit of overalls, the only clothing he had saved from the wreck of his home, and he has inspected all the vessels that have arrived since then.