A customer beckoned from across the street. Johnny darted toward him just in front of the Hotel Martinique. A Broadway surface car loomed up suddenly. There was a little cry, then the forward pair of wheels ran over the boy and his body became jammed in the rear wheels.
While a tremendous crowd of shoppers surrounded the car, some men--and Eddie--crawled underneath. The men came out with Johnny’s body. His little chum had his torn cap and the two evening papers.
In the police station, before a group of policemen who wept, Eddie told the whole story while he clung to the battered relics.
“Mr. Lieutenant,” he asked at the end, “do you think Johnny will get alive again?”
“Maybe Santa Claus will take care of him,” said Dr. Gilhooley gravely, and he turned quickly away.
Seven persons were killed and eighty-five injured shortly before 8 o’clock yesterday morning when a blast of dynamite in the excavation for the new Seventh Avenue subway carried away all the plank thoroughfare between Twenty-third and Twenty-fifth Streets, sweeping down into the great hole a crowded trolley car and a brewery automobile truck.
That the toll of dead and injured was not many times greater was due to the fact that the supports of the subway structure gave way slowly, affording an opportunity for hundreds of persons who were on their way to work to scurry to side streets and to the walks which were at the sides of the excavation. Most of those injured were in the Seventh Avenue trolley car, which was of the closed type and was north-bound. When the tracks sagged the car slid into the hole. It crumpled like pasteboard when it struck the tangle of iron, wood, and rock in the bottom of the excavation. Two of the persons killed were passengers in the car. All the others were laborers in the tunnel caught beneath the wreckage.
Within an hour after the accident happened seven independent investigations to place the blame were under way. These inquiries were started by District Attorney Perkins, the Fire Department, the Public Service Commission, Coroner Feinberg, the contracting company, the State Industrial Commission, and the Street Railway Company.
The investigators said that before the responsibility could be determined positively they would need the testimony of August Midnight. Midnight is the licensed blaster who set the dynamite charge. He was seen after the accident, but disappeared, and up to a late hour last night had not been found. The police sent out a general alarm for his arrest.