Before he reached the center of the stage he had called out to a stage hand: "Take my boy, Bryan, there! Get him out! There by the stage way!"
The stage hand grabbed the little chap. Foy saw him dart with him to safety as he turned his head.
Freed of parental anxiety, he faced the audience.
"Go out in order!" he shouted. "Don't get excited!"
Between exclamations he bent over toward the orchestra leader.
"Start an overture!" he commanded. "Start anything. For God's sake play, play, play, and keep on playing."
The brave words were as bravely answered. Gillea raised his wand, and the musicians began to play. Better than any one in the theater they knew their peril. They could look slantingly up and see that the 300 sets of the "Bluebeard" scenery all were ablaze. Their faces were white, their hands trembled, but they played, and played.
Foy still stood there, alternately urging the frightened people to avoid a panic and spurring the orchestra on. One by one the musicians dropped fiddle, horn, and other instruments and stole away.
Finally the leader and Foy were left alone. Foy gave one glance upward and saw the scenery all aflame. Dropping brands fell around him, and then he fled--just in time to save his own life. The "clown" had proved himself a hero.
The curtain started to come down. It stopped, it swayed as from a heavy wind, and then it "buckled" near the center.
From that moment no power short of omnipotent could have saved the occupants of the upper gallery.
The coolness of Foy, of the orchestra leader and of other players, who begged the audience to hold itself in check, however, probably saved many lives on the parquet floor. Tumultuous panic prevailed, but the maddest of it--save in the doomed gallery--was at the outskirts of the ground floor crowd.
"If you ever saw a field of timothy grass blown flat by the wind and rain of a summer storm, that was the position of the dead at the exits of the second balcony," said Chief of Police O'Neill.
"In the rush for the stairs they had jammed in the doorway and piled ten deep; lying almost like shingles. When we got up the stairs in the dark to the front rows of the victims, some of them were alive and struggling, but so pinned down by the great weight of the dead and dying piled upon them that three strong men could not pull the unfortunate ones free.