The Witness | Page 5

a seat where he could watch what was going on
without being actually a part of it. If anything should come to the ears
of the faculty he wanted to be on the side of conservatism always. That
Pat McCluny was not just his sort, though he was good fun. But he
always put things on a lower level than college fellows should go.
Besides, if things went too far a word from himself would check them.
Courtland was rather bored with the play, and was almost on the point
of going back to study when the cry arose and panic followed.
Courtland was no coward. He tore off his handsome overcoat and

rushed to meet the emergency. On the opposite side of the gallery, high
up by another fire-escape he rendered efficient assistance to many.
The fire was gaining in the pit; and still there were people down there,
swarms of them, struggling, crying, lifting piteous hands for assistance.
Still Stephen Marshall reached from the gallery and pulled up, one after
another, poor creatures, and still the helpless thronged and cried for aid.
Dizzy, blinded, his eyes filled with smoke, his muscles trembling with
the terrible strain, he stood at his post. The minutes seemed
interminable hours, and still he worked, with heart pumping painfully,
and mind that seemed to have no thought save to reach down for
another and another, and point up to safety.
Then, into the midst of the confusion there arose an instant of great and
awful silence. One of those silences that come even into great sound
and claim attention from the most absorbed.
Paul Courtland, high in his chosen station, working eagerly,
successfully, calmly, looked down to see the cause of this sudden
arresting of the universe; and there, below, was the pit full of flame,
with people struggling and disappearing into fiery depths below. Just
above the pit stood Stephen, lifting aloft a little child with frightened
eyes and long streaming curls. He swung him high and turned to stoop
again; then with his stooping came the crash; the rending, grinding,
groaning, twisting of all that held those great galleries in place, as the
fire licked hold of their supports and wrenched them out of position.
One instant Stephen was standing by that crimson-velvet railing, with
his lifted hand pointing the way to safety for the child, the flaming fire
lighting his face with glory, his hair a halo about his head, and in the
next instant, even as his hand was held out to save another, the gallery
fell, crashing into the fiery, burning furnace! And Stephen, with his
face shining like an angel's, went down and disappeared with the rest,
while the consuming fire swept up and covered them.
Paul Courtland closed his eyes on the scene, and caught hold of the
door by which he stood. He did not realize that he was standing on a

tiny ledge, all that was left him of footing, high, alone, above that
burning pit where his fellow-student had gone down; nor that he had
escaped as by a miracle. There he stood and turned away his face, sick
and dizzy with the sight, blinded by the dazzling flames, shut in to that
tiny spot by a sudden wall of smoke that swept in about him. Yet in all
the danger and the horror the only thought that came was, "God! That
was a man!"
CHAPTER II
Paul Courtland never knew how he had been saved from that perilous
position high up on a ledge in the top of the theater, with the burning,
fiery furnace below him. Whether his senses came back sufficiently to
guide him along the narrow footing that was left, to the door of the
fire-escape, where some one rescued him, or whether a friendly hand
risked all and reached out to draw him to safety.
He only knew that back there in that blank daze of suspended time,
before he grew to recognize the whiteness of the hospital walls and the
rattle of the nurse's starched skirt along the corridor, there was a long
period when he was shut in with four high walls of smoke. Smoke that
reached to heaven, roofing him away from it, and had its foundations
down in the burning fiery pit of hell where he could hear lost souls
struggling with smothered cries for help. Smoke that filled his throat,
eyes, brain, soul. Terrible, enfolding, imprisoning smoke; thick, yellow,
gray, menacing! Smoke that shut his soul away from all the universe, as
if he had been suddenly blotted out, and made him feel how stark alone
he had been born, and always would be evermore.
He seemed to have lain within those slowly approaching walls of
smoke a century or two ere he became aware