It was not "good morning" in Johnstown nor "good night" that passed as a salutation between neighbors who meet for the first time since the deluge but "How many of your folks gone?" It is always "folks," always "gone." You heard it everywhere among the crowds that thronged the viaduct and looked down upon the ghastly twenty acres of unburied dead, from which dynamite was making a terrible exhumation of the corpses of two thousand mortals and five hundred houses. You heard it at the rope bridge, where the crowds waited the passage of the incessant file of empty coffins. You heard it upon the steep hillside beyond the valley of devastation, where the citizens of Johnstown had fled into the borough of Conemaugh for shelter. You heard it again, the first salutation, whenever a friend, who had been searching for _his_ dead, met a neighbor: "Are any of your friends gone?" It was not said in tears or even seemingly in madness. It had simply come to be the "how-d'ye-do" of the eleven thousand people who survived the twenty-nine thousand five hundred people of the valley of the Conemaugh. Still finding bodies by scores in the debris: still burying the dead and caring for the wounded; still feeding the famishing and housing the homeless, was the record for days following the one on which Johnstown was swept away. A perfect stream of wagons bearing the dead as fast as they were discovered was constantly filing to the various improvised morgues where the bodies were taken for identification. Hundreds of people were constantly crowding to these temporary houses, one of which was located in each of the suburban boroughs that surround Johnstown. Men armed with muskets, uniformed sentinels, constituting the force that guarded the city while it was practically under martial law, stood at the doors and admitted the crowd by tens. [Illustration: RUINS, CORNER MAIN AND CLINTON STS.] In the central dead-house in Johnstown proper there lay two rows of ghastly dead. To the right were twenty bodies that had been identified. They were mostly women and children, and they were entirely covered with white sheets, and a piece of paper bearing the name was pinned at the feet. To the left were eighteen bodies of the unknown dead. As the people passed they were hurried along by an attendant and gazed at the uncovered faces seeking to identify them. All applicants for admission, if it was thought they were prompted by idle curiosity, were not allowed to enter. The central morgue was formerly a school-house, and the desks were used as biers for the dead bodies. Three of the former pupils lay on the desks dead, with white pieces of paper pinned on the white sheets that covered them, giving their names.