STEADY STREAM OF BODIES.
So fast came the bodies for a time that there was one steady stream of persons carried in—the still living—while without the morgue stood the ambulances waiting for their burdens. The sidewalk, muddy and crowded, was strewn with the dead, lying on blankets or else thrown down in the mud, waiting to be taken to the various morgues of the city.
There was a figure of a man—a large man with broad shoulders and dressed in black—whose entire face was burned away, only the back of the head remaining to show he had ever had a head; yet below the shoulders he was untouched by the fire.
There lay women with their arms gone, or their legs, while one had one side burned off, with only the cross shoulder-bone remaining. She had worn a pink silk waist and black skirt; the fragments of the garments still clung to her like a shroud that had lain in the grave.
There was a little boy, with a shock of red-brown hair, whose tiny mouth was open in terror and whose baby hands were burned off so that his tiny wrists showed like red stumps.
CLOTHING TORN TO SHREDS.
There was one young girl, her garments so torn from her splendid figure that her arms and white bosom rose uncovered from the tattered and torn—not burned—shreds of her clothing, and the shreds of a turquoise-blue silk petticoat draped her limbs. She had died from suffocation—fought and struggled and died. On her finger sparkled a diamond ring, and about her slender throat was a string of pearl beads.
There was another body of a girl that several persons said they knew, yet no one could speak her name. She was beautiful in her terrible death, with a wealth of blonde hair, and staring blue eyes. She was dressed in a blue-black velvet shirt waist, with gold buttons, a mixed white and tan and gray walking skirt, with a pink silk petticoat beneath. She had died of suffocation, and, as she lay on the marble table dead, a tiny blue chatelaine watch, ticking merrily the hour, was pinned upon her breast.
The crowding, the howling, the screaming in Thompson's was so highly pitched, that no one could hear the orders of the physicians. Bedlam reigned—no order, no leader, everyone doing what he could to help. At length came the loud voice of a man, and those who could hear, stopped and listened, while those at the front of the restaurant said: "Some man has gone crazy with grief."
It was State Senator Clark, who, seeing the need of an order, jumped to a table and gave one.