CHAPTER XIII.
Two Women Tell How They Were Affected at Galveston—One Arrived After the Catastrophe, While the Other Was in the Storm from Beginning to End.
A woman—a newspaper correspondent, and the first of the fair sex from the outside to gain admittance to the Sealed City of Galveston—wrote a description of what she saw and heard there. She arrived in Galveston on Friday, and although she was on a relief train carrying doctors, nurses and medical supplies, she had hard work to get past the file of soldiers at the wharf, but she at last succeeded.
Said she:
“The engineer who brought our train down from Houston spent the night before groping around in the wrecks on the beach looking for his wife and three children. He found them, dug a rude grave in the sand and set up a little board marked with his name.
“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-by 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.”
As the train neared Texas City, near Galveston, a great flame leaped up, and she said to one of four men near her, “What a terrible fire! Some of the large buildings must be burning.”