Poker Jim, Gentleman, and Other Tales and Sketches

by G. Frank Lydston

As I looked upon the Death’s head, it seemed to single me out from the crowd, leering at me triumphantly. Did it note my emotion and gloat over it?

I raged inwardly and was tempted to—But, had I seized a paving stone and smashed that vile image to bits, I could not have made them understand. Least of all could I have compelled the understanding of that huge policeman, who stood idly by, swinging his club in a way that suggested danger to sentimental cranks. When that team of horses swung around the corner, narrowly missing a woman who, bundles in arms and children at her side, was frantically trying to cross the street, the officer was gazing at a figure of Gambrinus in the saloon window across the way. He had appetites, but no sentiment, that man in blue.

Standing there in the street, jostled and elbowed by the surging crowd that had no time for dreaming, there rose before me a picture which the Death’s head also saw;—its expression showed that.

When on that fateful afternoon the call came for physicians to succor the hapless victims of that pitiless massacre of the innocents, there was no hesitancy upon the part of all who were within call. They hastened to respond, and stood not upon the order of their going. Humanity cried for aid—that was enough. When I arrived at the scene, only a few moments after the occurrence of the frightful disaster, the firemen had just forced their way into the foyer. The air within had begun to be barely breathable. Noticing several firemen groping their way up one of the marble stairways, I followed them. The air was so full of pungent smoke that objects were with great difficulty to be made out. At the top of the stairs, on the landing just outside the only door that was open in the front of the theater, the firemen met with an obstruction—a solid, monstrous cube of human bodies, as high as one could reach. This ghastly mass of bodies was free upon two sides—at the upper steps of the main stair and at the top of several steps leading to a main balcony within the foyer. On the other side the mass was hemmed in by the wall of the stairway. Behind it were piled the bodies of other human beings who had tried to climb over those in front and had failed. These last extended from the choked up door almost to the lower balcony rail within the theater. There was another door, but this was closed tight, and staunchly held by a strong lock and a heavy something behind it.

Seeing this wall of bodies I stopped short;—I confess it. The awful shock of it all came over me. For a moment I felt my knees give way beneath me. I grew faint and sick,—and then started back the way I had come. Half way down the stairs I stopped, and pulling myself together went back to duty. And then I stayed, like a soldier who runs away at the first volley of shot, but comes back and fights to the end.

The firemen were pulling at the mass of bodies, vainly trying to dislodge them. Several of the men climbed on top of the awful pile and tried to disentangle the bodies, bruising and crushing the while the upturned faces and helpless limbs with their cruel boots.

Alas! The mass of bodies was not to be untangled until too late, far too late. And yet, the pile was free upon two sides, and it looked easy enough to extricate those who were there. And so we tugged, and strained, and pulled, and pried at them. “My God!” I thought. “If we can only break the dead-lock and get them started!”

“Break the dead-lock?” Well, perhaps we might have done so if we had worked longer and more systematically. But the firemen said, “It’s no use.”

A big policeman who stood idly by, too dignified to help in the work of rescue, said to me, “Gwan out o’ that!”

“But,” I answered, “I’m a doctor. Some of these people must be alive. I can’t go away without trying to get a body out. If I get only one out we may break the lock.”