She then went on to say:
“A man who was 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 the face 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.
“‘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 out far enough 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!’
“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 driftwood.
“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.