“Of the dead that lie in piles in the desolated streets and dot the waters that girdle the city, the true number will never be known. All estimates of the total of the victims of Saturday’s night’s tempest must be qualified with the mark of interrogation. It is not conjecture to say that the death roll in Galveston alone will hardly fall short of 5000. Sober-sensed men, who have brought to the outer world conservative accounts of sights and scenes in the hapless city, say that there are 10,000 dead people within a half dozen miles of Galveston’s centre. No one disputes that the storm victims number the half of 10,000. “Men who have lived through the yellow fever scourge in New Orleans and other Southern cities, where the dead in the streets were more numerous than the living, hold those horrors lightly in comparison with the conditions that exist in Galveston. “In devious ways news of the situation that confronts the living in Galveston comes to this city. There is no telegraphic communication with the island. There is no train service. Boats are plying at irregular intervals across the bay. No one in the city has time to send forth to the world more than meagre accounts of the situation in the city. The bulk of the news is gleaned from refugees who are fleeing to Houston. A few railroad men have penetrated into the desolated city and returned with fragmentary accounts of the perils that menace the living, and the gruesome work that is being carried on day and night to ward off the contagion that is threatened by the hundreds of corpses that lie corrupting under the hot sun. “It will be days before a fairly accurate estimate of the loss of life can be made. Arrivals from Galveston to-night tell that citizens are laboring unceasingly at disposing of the dead in order that the living may not suffer. “To graves beneath the blue waters of the Gulf the dead are being consigned as fast as they can be loaded upon barges and towed to sea. There is no other way. The city must be rid of them. No more than a tithe of the bodies can be interred. So soaked is the ground that trenches fill with water as fast as the shovel can lift the earth. FIERCE HEAT ADDS TO THE HORROR. “There is need of laborers in the city. The remnants of the fire department and police force, both of which organizations contributed many victims to the storm, are doing heroic work. Their efforts are supplemented by the citizens. Hordes of negroes, kin, many of them, to the unspeakable creatures who preyed upon the dead in their hunger for loot, have been commandeered and forced to lend their strength in delving in the ruins for corpses. Stern-faced men with shot guns and rifles stand over them and keep them to their toil. It is heart-breaking work but it is necessary.