"It was the fire," Hart answered slowly, "a terrible fire. People were killed—I saw them. My God! it was awful!"
He buried his face in his hands and shuddered.
"Shook you up considerable, did it? Your nerves are off. Here, wait a minute! I'll fix you something."
The doctor went back into the inner room and returned presently with a small glass.
"Drink this. It will give you some nerve."
The architect took the stimulant and then lay down once more with his face to the wall. Before long he pulled himself together and drank a cup of coffee, which the doctor had prepared. Then he took himself off, saying that he must get to his office at once. He went away in a daze, barely thanking the doctor for his kindness. When he had left, Coburn began to whistle again, thinking, "There's something more'n drink or that fire the matter with him!"
Hart bought a newspaper at the first stand. It was swelled with pages of coarse cuts and "stories" of the "Glenmore Hotel Tragedy." On the elevated train, which he took to reach the city, all the passengers were buried in the voluminous sheets of their newspapers, avidly sucking in the details of the disaster. For a time he stared at the great cut on the first page of his paper, which purported to represent the scene at the fire when the south wall fell. But in its place he saw the sheer stretch of pitiless wall, the miserable figures on the iron ladder being swept into the flames. Then he read the headlines of the account of the fire. Seventeen persons known to have been in the hotel were missing; the bodies of ten had been found. Had it not been for the heroism of a colored elevator boy, Morris by name, who ran his car up and down seven times through the burning shaft, the death list would have been far longer. On the second trip, so the account ran, the elevator had been caught by a broken gate on the third floor. Morris had coolly run his car back to the top, then opened the lever to full speed, and crashed his way triumphantly through the obstacle. It was one of those acts of unexpected intelligence, daring, and devotion to duty which bring tears to the eyes of thousands all over the land. The brave fellow had been caught in the collapse of the upper floors, and his body had not yet been found. It was buried under tons of brick and iron in the wrecked building.
The newspaper account wandered on, column after column, repeating itself again and again, confused, endlessly prolix, but in the waste of irrelevancy a few facts slowly emerged. The Glenmore, fortunately, had not been half full. It had been opened only six weeks before as a family hotel,—one of those shoddy places where flock young married people with the intention of avoiding the cares of children and the trials of housekeeping in modest homes; where there is music twice a week and dancing on Saturday evenings; where the lower windows are curtained by cheap lace bearing large monograms, and electric candles and carnations are provided for each table in the dining-room. Another year from this time there would have been three or four hundred people in the burning tinder box.
The fire had started somewhere in the rear of the second floor, from defective electric wiring, it was supposed, and had shot up the rear elevator shaft, which had no pretence of fireproof protection. The east wall had bulged almost at once, pulling out the supports for the upper three floors. It was to be doubted whether the beams, bearing-walls, and main partitions were of fireproof materials. The charred remains of Georgia pine and northern spruce seemed to indicate that they were not. At any rate, the incredible rapidity with which the fire had spread and the dense smoke showed that the "fireproofing" was of the flimsiest description. And, to cap all, there was but one small fire-escape on the rear wall, difficult of access! "The Glenmore," so the Chicago Thunderer pronounced, "was nothing but an ornamental coffin."
Editorially, the Thunderer had already begun its denunciation of the building department for permitting a contractor to erect such an obvious "fire-trap," and for granting the lessees a license to open it as a hotel. There had been too many similar horrors of late,—the lodging-house on West Polk Street, where five persons had lost their lives, the private hospital on the North Side, where fourteen men and women had been burned, etc. In all these cases it was known that the building ordinances had been most flagrantly violated. There was the usual clamor for "investigation," for "locating the blame," and "bringing the real culprits before the Grand Jury." It should be said that the Thunderer was opposed politically to the City Hall.