There was hardly any need to ask the men to work harder, for they were pulling and hauling as though their own lives depended on their efforts. Everybody worked.
The reporters, the only ones in the theater besides the police and firemen, laid aside their pencils and note books and struggled down the wet, slippery stairs, carrying the dead. Newspaper artists threw their sketch books on the floor to jump forward and pick up the feet or head of a body that a fireman or policeman found too heavy to carry alone. Constantly now a stream of workers was passing slowly down the stairs. Usually two men supported each body, but often some giant policeman or fireman strode along with a body swung over his shoulders. Coming down the stairs was a fireman with a girl of 16 clasped in his arms.
"Isn't that girl alive?" asked the chief.
"No," shouted two or three men, who had jumped to see. "She's dead, poor thing, rest her soul," said the fireman reverently, and then he picked his way down the stairs. Half-way down the marble steps two arms suddenly clasped the fireman's neck.
He started so he missed his footing and would have fallen had not a policeman steadied him.
"She's alive, she's alive!" shouted the fireman. "Git out of the way, there, out of the way, men," and he went dashing headlong out into the open air and through the crowd to a drug store.
One child after another was taken from the heap and passed out to be carried downstairs. Some were little boys in new suits, sadly torn, and with their poor little faces wreathed in agony. On their foreheads was the seal of death.
A big fireman came crawling from the heavy smoke of the inner balcony. He carried a girl of 10 years in his arms. Her long, flaxen hair half covered the pure white face.
A gray haired man with a gash on his head apparently had fallen down the stairs. A woman's face bore the mark of a boot heel. A woman with a little boy clasped tight in her arms was wedged into a corner. Her clothes were almost torn from her, and her face was bruised. The child was unmarked, as she had thrown her own body over his to protect him.
Out of the mass of bodies when the police began their work protruded one slender little white hand, clinching a pair of pearl opera glasses, which the little owner had tried to save, in spite of the fact that her own life was being crushed out of her. Watches, pocketbooks and chatelaine bags were scattered all through the pile. One man was detailed to make a bag out of a rubber coat and take care of the property that was handed to him.