All the time he kept telling his wife to hold onto him, and this she did. Along in the night the raft struck a tree and was swept from under them. Gray caught a limb with his wife still clinging to him. By this time he was almost completely exhausted but he managed by a hundred successive efforts to get his wife into the tree.
A little later a colored man was seen coming through the water. Gray called to him to take to the lower limbs and not come higher, for he was afraid the tree with three people on it would be made top-heavy. When daylight came he took his wife in his arms and told the negro to go ahead for a house they saw in the distance, for had there been any holes he wanted to be advised of it before he went into them with his wife, for it was all he could do to push through the water in his exhausted condition.
After walking until 10 o’clock he reached the high land in the Denver resurvey and eventually got to town. Not until yesterday had he sufficiently recovered from his exhaustion to come onto the streets. He is cut and bruised in a dozen places. He says the water in Kinkead addition was ten feet deep.
Robert Park and a party of men came in from Hitchcock Sunday, arriving that evening. They started in a skiff, and finally reached a prairie, over which they carried the boat. Finally they reached water again, and along about noon went alongside the British steamer “Roma,” which was dragged from her moorings in the roads between the jetties, about seven miles up the channel and landed in the draw of the county bridge. They report the steamer in good condition. They got water and food there and came on across.
A GRUESOME SIGHT.
Mr. Park says twenty people arrived at Hitchcock on rafts from Galveston before he left. These had been carried by the storm from Galveston to Hitchcock, a distance of about eighteen miles. They also saw a pile driven from the Huntington wharves high on the prairie far beyond Virginia Point.
A gruesome sight passed along the street Monday afternoon. Workmen in digging bodies from the debris found one of a handsome man with dark hair and mustache and dressed in a light suit of clothes. He was on his knees, his eyes were uplifted, and his clasped hands were extended as in prayer. It was evident that the man had been praying when he was struck and instantly killed. As a rule, the attitudes of those who were found were with hands extended up as if endeavoring to save themselves.
The destruction of the Catholic Orphans’ Home and the loss of seventy-five lives with it was told by one of three boys who came through a terrible experience by dint of good Providence and nothing else. It is a fact that three boys came into the city from there who had passed through a terrible experience. With these three and one reported on the bay shore but four out of a total of seventy-eight people lived to tell the tale.
According to the story all the children were gathered with the Sisters and the two workmen in the chapel on the ground floor in the west wing of the building. The storm was raging terribly outside and they all engaged in prayer. The east wing finally went down and they were driven from the chapel to the floor above, the water coming in and threatening to drown them. Some clambered out on the roof of the part remaining, but not all. Finally along about 8 o’clock—they are not positive as to the time by an hour—the remainder of the building went and the roof went into the water.