A motion was made that after forty-eight hours' further search the debris of the city be consumed by fire, the engines to be on hand to play upon any valuable building that despite previous precautions, might become ignited by the general conflagration. This motion was debated pro and con for nearly half an hour. Those whose relatives or friends still rest beneath the wreck remonstrated strongly against any such summary action. They insisted that all the talk of threatened epidemic was only the sensation gossip of fertile brains and that the search for the bodies should only be abandoned as a last extremity. The physicians in attendance warned the committee that the further exposure of putrid bodies in the valley could have but one result--the typhus or some other epidemic equally fatal to its victims. It was a question whether the living should be sacrificed to the dead, or whether the sway of sentiment or the mandate of science should be the ruling impulse. Although the proposition to burn the wreck was defeated, it was evident that the movement was gaining many adherents, and the result will doubtless be that in a few days the torch will be applied, not only to the field of waste in Johnstown, but also to the avalanche of debris that chokes the stream above the Pennsylvania bridge. End of Project Gutenberg's The Johnstown Horror, by James Herbert Walker