n, grimly defiant
still, the conqueror against the rage of the tempest, and an unwrecked
Galveston shone triumphant.

"But I should do the hurricane a grave injustice," he continued, "to
leave you boys with the story of Galveston alone. Its terrors were far
more widespread than that. On my way here from Galveston, I saw the
ravages of the storm inland. Everywhere on the flat prairie near Texas
City were ruined houses and outbuildings, many of them absolutely
abandoned, others still with a corner occupied by their ruined owners.
Trees were broken short off or up-rooted and lying prostrate. The
hurricane which had been foiled of the slaughter which had been granted
to its predecessor fifteen years before, had swept on, mile after mile,
for hundreds of miles, slaying and wrecking as it went. Acres of pear
orchards were stripped as though the giant of the winds had drawn each
separate branch through his clenched fists. For twenty miles inland the
prairie grass lay prostrate. Twelve miles from the shore I saw a fishing
schooner there, her masts still standing, and near it lay a child's
rocking-horse, a cradle, a boy's baseball-bat and a five hundred pound
bale of cotton.

"Not fifty yards from the hastily relaid railway track, I saw a strange
example of the fury of the waves and wind. On the floor of the first
story of a negro shack, without a scrap of furniture around it, with no
wreckage or piece of wood to be seen in any direction, a rude cabin
indeed, was a large grand piano, its boards warped by the water and the
sun, but otherwise uninjured. From what house in Galveston had this
floated, to find a resting-place on the floor of an un-roofed and
un-walled negro's cabin? Around it was not a sign of wreckage save the
bodies of scores of drowned horses and cattle and, among them, many
human forms.

"No census will ever tell how many were killed in that stretch of
prairie between Galveston and Texas City. Years hence men will stumble
over human bones on that grassy plain and give burial to some victim of
the greatest storm that ever visited American shores. Yet, withal, that
the hurricane of 1915 claimed six hundred victims instead of tens of
thousands was due alone to the warnings of the Weather Bureau, to the
heroism of the men and women of Galveston and to the craft, skill and
honesty of the men who built the great sea-wall."

CHAPTER X

STRUCK BY LIGHTNING

There was but little further interest in kite-fl