“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.
“I went toward the heart of the city. I do not know what the names of the streets were or where I was going. I simply picked my way through masses of slime and rubbish which scar the beautiful wide streets of the once beautiful city.
“They won’t bear looking at, those piles of rubbish. There are things there that gripe the heart to see—a baby’s shoe, for instance, a little red shoe, with a jaunty tasseled lace—a bit of a woman’s dress and letters.
“The stench from these piles of rubbish is almost overpowering. Down in the very heart of the city most of the dead bodies have been removed, but it will not do to walk far out. To-day I came upon a group of people in a by-street, a man and two women, colored. The man was big and muscular, one of the women was old and one was young.
“They were dipping in a heap of rubbish and when they heard my footsteps the man turned an evil, glowering face upon me and the young woman hid something in the folds of her dress. Human ghouls, these, prowling in search of prey.
“A moment later there was noise and excitement in the little narrow street, and I looked back and saw the negro running, with a crowd at his heels. The crowd caught him and would have killed him, but a policeman came up.
“They tied his hands and took him through the streets with a whooping rabble at his heels. It goes hard with a man in Galveston caught looting the dead in these days.
“A young man well known in the city shot and killed a negro who was cutting the ears from a living woman’s head to get her ear rings out. The negro lay in the streets like a dead dog, and not even the members of his own race would give him the tribute of a kindly look.
“The abomination of desolation reigns on every side. The big houses are dismantled, their roofs gone, windows broken, and the high water mark showing inconceivably high on the paint. The little houses are gone—either completely gone as if they were made of cards and a giant hand which was tired of playing with them had swept them all off the board and put them away, or they are lying in heaps of kindling wood covering no one knows what horrors beneath.