DANCED AS STEAMER CRASHED INTO BARGE.
Druggists' Outing on the River Narrowly Missed Disastrous Accident.
The festivities of the Kansas Pharmaceutical Association's outing on the Missouri river had just started at 9 o'clock last night. The band was playing and 450 men, women and children, guests of the Parke-Davis Drug Company, were aboard the steamboat Chester.
The strains of a hesitation waltz came floating over the waters and the steamer was aglow with hundreds of electric lights. The capricious dance hall was the biggest attraction to the young druggists, their wives and sweethearts. The floor had only recently been waxed and the dancers glided across the decks to the tune of "Cecile."
At the same time the chairs in the front end of the boat were occupied by those who preferred the moonlit waters of the river to the dance.
Suddenly, without warning, the steamer struck a sand dredge. Those in the dance hall noticed it but continued dancing. On the forward deck a panic was narrowly averted by Captain McCaffrey, who cooled down the passengers by showing that the dredge was a small one and that no damage was done. The dredge, cut loose from its moorings, floated in the middle of the river.
In lurching away from the sand barge the Chester nearly swerved into one of the piers of the Armour-Burlington-Swift bridge. A woman screamed and many others held their breaths. But within a few seconds the Chester continued on its trip down the river.
All of the time the passengers in the dance hall were unaware that their friends in the bow feared a tragedy. The fiddle and the horn and the flute kept on playing without any knowledge of trouble. The rest of the journey down stream and return was made without any further incident.
