and
stones, the skeleton or putrid remains of many was all that could be
hoped to be recovered.

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

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