Their startled imagination saw the missing one dead or dying under the huge piles of fallen buildings. There were excited cries and calls and wailing of the living; a mad rush and frantic tugging at the ruins, from beneath which were sometimes heard shrieks for help or groans of the dying. To add to the universal terror, fires broke out in many places, threatening imprisoned wretches with a fate more horrible than the crush of falling walls, or timbers, bricks or iron, hurtling through the air. Before help could reach them the flames took hold on some and hushed their cries forever. Fortunately, the fire-alarm connections were left intact, and as alarm after alarm was sent, there was a dashing of the engines to the rescue, and the whole fire-department was presently engaged in extinguishing the flames, or recovering the living and the dead. Hospitals and morgues were suddenly improvised in sheds or shops, where the wounded were cared for, or the dead were deposited to await the recognition or claim of the living.
Falls City Hall was the theatre of the principal loss of life. It was a brick building fronting on Market between Eleventh and Twelfth. The ground-floor had long been used as a market, and contained forty or fifty stalls of gardeners and butchers. These stalls were closed and the keepers were absent at the hour of the disaster. In front on the second floor were three small rooms, one of them utilized as an office, the other two as toilet rooms. Behind these was a large hall, and in the rear of this still another hall, in which a young lady, her father, brother and sister being present, was teaching a dancing school. There might have been sixty-five persons in this room, though one witness says twenty-eight. In one of the small rooms seven men, constituting the Executive Committee of the Roman Knights, was holding a business meeting. In another room a band of musicians, fifteen in number, were going through a rehearsal. Some decorators were at work in the large hall, preparing it for some coming occasion. On the third floor were assembled the Jewel Lodge No. 2 of the Knights and Ladies of Honor, with an attendance of a hundred or more. In an adjoining hall the Humboldt Lodge No. 146 of I. O. O. F. with seventeen members was in session. The whole number of people in the building must have been nearly or quite two hundred. In an instant the fearful wrench of the cyclone had twisted the building into fragments, and tumbled it in shapeless ruin upon the inmates.
Ten minutes after the collapse might have been seen a frantic multitude hastily gathering from all quarters, among them many women clutching vainly with their fingers at the slate roof, and madly tearing at the wreck beneath which the imprisoned and wounded were crying for help. Presently, fire broke out, but it was happily extinguished. The work of rescue was now organized and speedily set in motion, but an hour elapsed before the first victim was extricated. This was a lady, found sitting upright with bruised head and broken arm. She told of her vain effort to escape, and of the position in which she had last seen her companions. Meanwhile, some were digging in the center of the debris in answer to a voice which grew fainter and fainter until it was hushed forever. The work of rescue was now shifted to the other end of the pile.
James Hassen was foremost among the workers, and on reaching the hall room of the Knights and Ladies, he took from the ruins the first body, which proved to be that of his wife, and who expired in his arms. He gently laid his dead wife aside, and hurried again to aid in recovering the rest. Presently, ten women were reached, clasped in each others arms—all dead but one. The dancing room was
AT WORK IN THE WRECK.