Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. FIRST AID TO THE INJURED AND CARE FOR THE DEAD. On the heels of the firemen came the police, intent on the work of rescue. Chief O'Neill and Assistant Chief Schuettler ordered captains from a dozen stations to bring their men, and then they rushed to the theater and led the police up the stairs to the landing outside the east entrance to the first balcony. The firemen, rushing blindly up the stairs in the dense pall of smoke, had found their path suddenly blocked by a wall of dead eight or ten feet high. They discovered many persons alive and carried them to safety. Other firemen crawled over the mass of dead and dragged their hose into the theater to fight back the flames that seemed to be crawling nearer to turn the fatal landing into a funeral pyre. O'Neill and Schuettler immediately began carrying the dead from the balcony, while other policemen went to the gallery to begin the work there. In the great mass of dead at the entrance to the first balcony the bodies were so terribly interwoven that it was impossible at first to take any one out. "Look out for the living!" shouted the chief to his men. "Try to find those who are alive." From somewhere came a. faint moaning cry. "Some one alive there, boys," came the cry. "Lively, now!" The firemen and police long struggled in vain to move the bodies. The raging tide of humanity pouring out of the east entrance of the balcony during the panic had met the fighting, struggling crowd coming down the stairs from the third balcony at right angles. The two streams formed a whirlpool which ceased its onward progress and remained there on the landing where people stamped each other under foot in that mad circle of death. In a short time the blockade in the fatal angle must have been complete. ...