"'Drop the fire curtain,' I shouted again, looking in vain for it to come down. I know that not a soul in the theater proper would be in danger if this was done. The switchboard was there—but no one to work it. I cried out for Carleton, our stage manager. He was gone. I called for 'Pete,' one of the electricians. He, too, was gone.
"'Does any one know how this iron curtain is worked?' I yelled at the mob of fleeing stage hands, members of the company, property men, and musicians. Not an answer.
"At the first sign of danger, after reaching the footlights, I said to Dillea, our orchestra leader:
"'An overture, Herbert, an overture.'
"Dillea—God bless him, his ranks already thinning out in the orchestra pit—struck up the 'Sleeping Beauty and the Beast' overture. Of the thirty odd musicians in the pit not over half a dozen remained to follow Dillea and his baton. But the little fellow, ashen pale, his eyes glued on the raging mass of flame above, never whimpered. He kept right on, and only left his post when the flames drove him away from his leader's stand. When Dillea disappeared down the opening in the orchestra pit half of the lower floor had been emptied. This I noticed only in an aside, for my eyes were fastened on the sea of agonized, distracted little ones in the balcony and gallery."
AN ELEVATOR BOY HERO.
The bottom of the elevator shaft in the doomed theater was a scene of pandemonium when the stage hands tried to get the girls out. Archie Barnard headed the chain gang and behind him were J. R. O'Mally, Arthur Hart and William Price. As soon as the women reached the floor they began to run wild, and had to be caught and tossed from one man to another. The women in the first tier of dressing rooms were the first down and they were helped out without much trouble.
On his second trip up with the elevator young Robert Smith ascended into an atmosphere that was so thick with smoke that he could not see or breathe. He found one of the girls on the sixth floor and then took on another load from the fifth. By the time he had come down with these, the flames and smoke were threatening the men in the chain. The clothing of Barnard and William Price was on fire and their hair was burning. Nevertheless they threw the girls out and waited for the third load.
This load came near not arriving. The smoke was so thick that Smith had to find the girls and drag them into the elevator and by the time he had done this he was almost overcome. The elevator was burning at the place where the controller was located, and Smith had to place his left hand in the flame to start the car. The hand was badly burned, but the car was started and came down in time for the girls to receive assistance from the men who were waiting. When the last girl was out the men left the building.
Up in the gridiron, where the smoke was thickest, the four German boys who worked the aerial apparatus were caught, fully sixty feet from the stage floor, and no one had time to come to their assistance or to pay any attention to them, because there were too many other people to be saved.