Over the whole area for miles hung an impenetrable pall of smoke over a raging fire. Word spreads fast in a disaster. Hundreds of relatives and friends pressed against the police barriers. Only police and firemen could penetrate the great fenced-off territory. There is danger of another explosion.
Every newspaper reporter is inevitably a witness to tragedy and horror.
I had in my time seen a dozen men walk alive into the death chamber at the Ohio Penitentiary and come out dead in wicker baskets after they had been electrocuted in the name of society to pay for their crimes. It was brutal. I almost fainted the first time I saw the executioner throw the switch, saw a man's body jerk convulsively in the dreaded chair, saw the prison physician step forward to examine him with a stethoscope and indicate, perhaps, that another charge of electricity was required. That, I thought at the time, would be the most horrible vision ever to move before my eyes. But it did not match this.