All these and other details are elaborated upon elsewhere, together with the touching story of the scores of young women employed in the production, "Mr. Bluebeard," who would have been stranded penniless in a strange city a thousand miles from home but for the prompt and noble relief afforded by Mrs. Ogden Armour. 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. Then into this awful heap still plunged the contrary tides of humanity from each direction. Many tried to crawl over the top of the heap, but were drawn down to the grinding mill of death underneath. The smoke was heavy at the fatal angle, for the majority of those taken out at that point bore no marks of bruises. Many, and especially the children, were trampled to death, but others were held as in a vise until the smoke had choked the life from their bodies. It was toward this that the firemen directed O'Neill and Schuettler as they rushed into the theater. The smoke was still heavy and the great gilded marble foyer of the "handsomest theater in America" was somber and dark and still as a tomb, except for the whistling of the engines outside and now and then the shouting of the firemen. Water was dripping everywhere and stood inches deep on the floor and stairs.