We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
SHOWMAN
by jerking the foremost through to loosen the jam behind. Working at my side I found a tramp off the streets, a regular threadbare, shivering, red-nosed Weary Willie, who had rushed in at the same time I had. He must have saved fifty people that day. And yet the first thing the police did on arrival was throw him out and threaten him with arrest if he showed up again.
Before long plenty of rescuers were on hand, more than could do any conceivable good, and I began to think of my own audience at the Garrick. If the news of the Iroquois ever reached there, we'd have another panic of equal proportions. A single whisper of the two words "fire" and "theater" would be fatal. I tore downstreet to the Garrick and back-stage to see Lackaye, telling him what was happening.
"I'm counting on you to save this audience," I said.
"My Lord!" he said. "What on earth can I do?"
"Hold them in their seats between acts," I answered. "Don't give anybody a chance to get out in the lobby where they'll hear something. Tell 'em stories— walk on your hands— anything to keep 'em in their seats."
He promised. And he certainly came through on that promise. As one of the best after-dinner speakers in the theatrical world, he was a natural for the assignment. He was never so brilliant, so easy, so humanly entertaining as when he was talking against time in this emergency, conscious all the while of the hundreds dying in agony only a block away. The moment the
255