"I've put the bag in charge of that chauffeur, McGroarty, and armed him with my automatic," he explained. He paused to wipe his eyes. The fumes from the film had distressed all of us. "Shirley and Marilyn Loring are both missing still," he added. "I've been asking everyone about them. No one has seen them."
The fire chief looked up. "Everyone is out? You are sure everybody is safe?"
"I had Wagnalls at my elbow with a hose," Manton replied. "I saw the boy around, also. No one else had any business down there and the vaults were closed and the cellar shut off."
The door leading from the adjoining basement was hot yet, but not so that we were unable to handle it. However, the catch had stuck and it took considerable effort to force it in. As we did so a cloud of acrid vapor and steam drove us back.
Then Kennedy seemed to detect something in the slowly clearing atmosphere. He rushed ahead without hesitation. The fire chief followed. In another instant I was able to see also.
The form of a woman, dimly outlined in the vapor, struggled to lift the prone figure of a man. After one effort she collapsed upon him. I dashed forward, as did Mackay and Manton. Two of them carried the girl out to the air; the other three of us brought her unconscious companion. It was Marilyn and Shirley.
The little actress was revived easily, but Shirley required the combined efforts of Kennedy and the chief, and it was evident that he had escaped death from suffocation only by the narrowest of margins. How either had survived seemed a mystery. Their clothes were wet, their faces and hands blackened, eyebrows and lashes scorched by the heat. But for the water poured into the basement neither would have been alive. They had been prisoners during the entire conflagration, the burning vault holding them at one end of the basement, the door in the partition resisting their efforts to open it.
"Thank heaven he's alive!" were Marilyn's first words.
"How did you get in the cellar?" Kennedy spoke sternly.
"I thought he might be there." Now that the reaction was setting in, the girl was faint and she controlled herself with difficulty. "I was looking for him and as soon as I heard the first explosion I ran down the steps into the film-vault entrance—I was right near there—and I found him, stunned. I started to lift him, but there were other explosions almost before I got to his side. The flames shot out through the cracks in the vault door and I—I couldn't drag him to the steps; I had to pull him back where you found us." She began to tremble. "It—it was terrible!"