The Bridge-Builder

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_ I

IN WHICH WE VISIT A PLACE OF UNUSUAL FEARS AND PERILS

AS I went time and again to the great East River Bridge, the new one whose huge steel towers were drawing to full height in the last months of the century, I found myself under a growing impression that here at last was a business with not only danger in it, but fear of danger. Divers and steeple-climbers I had seen who pronounced their work perfectly safe (though I knew better), and balloonists of the same mind about perils of the air; there were none, they declared, despite a list of deaths to prove the contrary. And so on with others. But here on the bridge were men who showed by little things, and sometimes admitted, that they were afraid of the black-ribbed monster. And it seemed to me that these were men with the best kind of grit in them, for although they were afraid of the bridge, they were not afraid of their fear, and they stuck to their job week after week, month after month, facing the same old peril until--well--

I came upon this fear of the bridge the very first time I sought leave to go upon the unfinished structure. It was in a little shanty of an office on the Brooklyn side, where, after some talk, I suggested to an assistant engineer, bent over his plans, that I would like to take a picture or two from the top of the tower. That seemed a simple enough thing.

"Think you can keep your head up there?" said he, with a sharp look.

I told him I had climbed to a steeple-top.

"Yes. But you were lashed fast then in a swing, and had a rope to hold on to. Here you've got to climb up by yourself without anything to hold on to, and it's twice as high as the average steeple."

"How high is that?" I asked.

"Well, the saddles are three hundred and forty feet above the river."

"Saddles?"

"That's what we call 'em. They're beds of steel on top of the towers for the cables to rest on--nice little beds weighing thirty-six tons each."

"Oh!" said I. "How do you get them up?"

"Swing 'em up with steam-derricks and cables. Guess you wouldn't care for that job, hanging out on one o' those booms by your eyelashes."

"Perhaps not," I admitted. "But I'd like to watch it."

He said I must see somebody with more authority, and turned to his plans.

"You don't feel in danger yourself, do you," I persisted, "when you go up?"

"Don't, eh?" he answered. "Well, I nearly got cut in two the other day by a plate-washer. It fell over a hundred feet, and went two inches slam into a piece of timber I was standing on." Then he explained what havoc a small piece of iron--some stray bolt or hammer--can work after a long drop.

"That plate-washer," said he, "weighed only two pounds and a half when it began to fall; but it weighed as much as you do when it struck--and you're a fair size."

"Is that based on calculation," said I, "or is it a joke?"

"It's based on the laws of gravitation," he answered, "and it's no joke for the man who gets hit. Say, why don't you go down in the yard and look around a little?"

I told him I would, and presently went down into the yard, a noisy, confusing place, where the wind was humming through a forest of scaffolding that held the bare black roadway skeleton a hundred feet overhead. It was a long street of iron resting on a long street of wood, with timber and steel built up in X's on X's, the whole rising in an easy slant to yonder grim tower that loomed heavy and ugly against the sky, a huge bow-legged H with the upper half stretched to a great length, and each leg piled up with more black X's held by two enormous ones between. It looked for all the world as if it had come ready made in a box and had been jointed together like children's blocks, which is about the truth, for this great bridge was finished on paper, then in all its parts, before ever a beam of it saw the East River. As I drew near its feet (which could take a row of houses between heel and toe) I had the illusion, due to bigness and height, that the whole tower was rocking toward me under the hurrying clouds; and at first I did not see the workmen swarming over it, they were so tiny.

But they were making noise enough, these workmen, with their striking and hoisting and shouting. There was the ring of hammers, the chunk-chunk of engines, the hiss of steam, the mellow sound of planks falling on planks, and the angry clash of metal. Presently, far up the sides of the tower, I made out painters dangling on scaffolding or crawling out on girders, busy with scrapers and brushes. And higher still I saw the glow of red-hot iron, where the riveters were working. And at the very top I watched black dots of men swing out over the gulf on the monster derrick-booms, or haul on the guiding-lines. And from time to time the signal-bell would send its impatient call to the throttle-man below, six strokes, four strokes, one stroke, telling him what to do with his engine, and to do it quick.

The yardmen seemed to get on in the din by a system of strange yells. Here were a score of sturdy fellows doing something with a long steel floor-beam. They were working in scattered groups, some on the ground, some on the roadway overhead. It was lower pulley-blocks, and spread out flapping cables, and hitch fast the load, all without any hurry. Suddenly a man at the left would put a hand to his mouth and sing out: "Hey-y-y!" and a man overhead would answer: "Yeow-yeow-yeow!" and then they all would cry: "Ho-hoo-ho-hoooo!" and up would go the floor-beam, twisting as she lifted, a nice little load of ten tons, and presently clang down on her lofty bed like a peal of high-pitched thunder.

I chanced to be talking with the yard foreman when there came such a sudden clang, and then I saw an easy-going, rather stolid man pass through a singular transformation. Like a piece of bent steel he sprang back, every muscle in him tense, and up came his arms for defense, and there in his eyes was the look I came to know that meant terror of the bridge, and fear of sudden death. To me, unfamiliar with the constant danger, that clang meant nothing; to him it was like a snarl of the grave.

"Better stand back here," said he, and led me over by the air-compressing engine, where we were out of range.

Then he told how a superintendent of construction had been nearly killed not long before by a piece of falling iron, just where we were standing. And looking up through the criss-cross maze, with openings everywhere from ground to sky, with workmen everywhere handling loose iron, I realized that this was a kind of slow-fire battle-field, not so very glorious, but deadly enough, with shots coming from sky to earth every ten minutes, every half-hour--who can know at what moment the man above him will drop something, or at what moment he himself will drop something on the man below! A tiered-up battle-field, this, where each black X, with its hammers and bolts and busy gang, is a haphazard battery against all the X's below, and a helpless target under all the X's above.

"Why, sir," said the foreman, "that tower went into a reg'lar panic one day because some fool new man on top upset a keg o' bolts. Sounded as if the whole business was coming down on us."

I began to realize what tension these men work under, what vital force they waste in vague alarms!

"It's queer, though," continued the foreman, "how the boys get used to it. See those timbers right at the top that come together in a point? We call that an A-frame; it's for the hoisting. Well, the boys walk those cross-timbers all the time, say a length of thirty feet and a width of one. It's nothing on the ground, but up there with the wind blowing--well, you try it. I saw one fellow do a thing that knocked me. He stopped half-way across a timber not over eight inches wide, took out his match-box, stood on his right foot, lifted his left foot, and struck a match on his left heel. Then he nursed the flame in his hands, got his pipe going good, and walked on across the timber. Wha'd' ye think of that? There he was, balanced on one foot, sir, with an awful death on either side, and the wind just whooping--all because his pipe went out. I wouldn't do it for--for-- Well, I wouldn't do it."

"Why didn't he wait to light his pipe until he got across?" I asked.

The foreman shook his head. "I give it up. He just happened to think of it then, and he done it. That's the way they are, some of 'em. Why, there was another fellow, Pat Reagan, as good a man as we've got, and he went sound asleep one day last summer,--it was a nice warm day,--sitting on the top-chord. That's a long, narrow girder at the very highest point of the end-span. First thing we knew, there was Pat, legs dangling, head nodding, comfortable as you please. A few inches either way would have fixed him forever; but he stuck there, by an Irishman's luck, until two of his mates climbed up softly and grabbed him. They didn't dare yell for fear he'd be startled and fall."

While we were talking the wind had strengthened, and now every line and rope on the structure stood out straight from the sides, and swirls of spray from hoisting engines overhead flew across the yard, also occasional splinters. The foreman hurried a man aloft with orders to lash fast everything.

"There's a hard blow coming up," he predicted, "and it 'wouldn't do a thing' to those big timbers on the tower if we left 'em around loose! People have no idea what force is in the wind. Why, sir, I've seen it blow a keg of railroad spikes off that tower clean across the yard. And one day two planks thirteen feet long and two inches thick went flying over the whole approach-works right plumb through the front of a saloon out on the street. That made eight hundred feet the wind carried those planks. As for coats and overalls, why, we've watched lots of 'em start from the tower-top and sail off over Brooklyn city like kites--yes, sir, like kites; and nobody ever knew where they landed."

"I don't see how the men keep their footing in such a gale," I remarked.

"Well," said he, "we order them down when it blows an out-and-out gale, but they work in 'most anything short of a gale. And it's a wonder how they do it. It's not so bad if the wind is steady, for then you can lean against it, same as a man leans on a bicycle going around a curve; but--"

"Do you mean," I interrupted, "that they walk narrow girders leaning against the wind--against a hard wind?"

"Certainly; they have to. But that's not the worst of it. Suppose a man is leaning just enough to balance the wind, and suddenly the wind lets up, say on a gusty day. Then where's your man? Or suppose it's winter and the whole bridge is coated with ice, so that walking girders is like sliding on glass. Then where is he, especially when it's blowing tricky blasts? Oh, it's no dream, my friend, working on a bridge!"

And I, in hearty accord with that opinion, betook me back to the office, where I read just outside the door this ominous notice: "All accidents must be reported as soon as possible, or claims therefor will be disregarded."

A workman came up at this moment, and, with a half-smile, asked if I knew their motto, the motto of the bridge-men.

"No," said I; "what is it?"

"'We never die,'" said he, with a grim glance at the notice; "we don't have to." Then, pointing overhead: "Come up and see us. I'll introduce you to the boys."

II

THE EXPERIENCE OF TWO NOVICES IN BALANCING ALONG NARROW GIRDERS AND WATCHING THE "TRAVELER" GANG

NOT that day, but later on, when I had arranged it. I accepted this bluff invitation and became acquainted with "the boys," the ones who "never die," and took in the fears and wonders of the bridge at closer view. My permit was granted on the express understanding that I hold nobody responsible for any harm that might befall. I was fortunate in having with me as companion in this climb Mr. Varian, the artist, who had faced perils of many sorts, but none like these.

First we clambered, pyramid fashion, up the pile of granite, big as a church, that will hold the cable-ends; they call it the anchorage. From the top of this we could look along the iron street that stretched away in a slight up-grade toward the tower. We were on a level with the roadway of the bridge, and far below us spread the housetops of Brooklyn. Between our stone precipice and the iron street-end yawned a gulf that we drew back from, with water in its deepest bottom. Here the cables would be buried some day, sealed and cemented, piled over with masonry, to hold for centuries.

Standing in the lee of a block that kept off the wind, we looked across at the bridge, and planned how presently we might reach it by skirting the moat-walls and drawing ourselves up at yonder corner where the end-span rested.

Somehow, seen from here, the iron street looked delicate, not massive; its sides were trellis-work, its top frames gently slanting, and one could fancy the whole thing beautifully grown over with vines, a graceful arbor-way suspended in mid-air. And down the length of this came the strangest sounds--one would say a company of woodpeckers of some giant sort making riot in an echoing forest. Br-r-r-ip-ip-ip-ip--br-r-r-r-up-up-up--br-r-r-ap-ap-ap-ap-ap. What was it? Now from this side, up-up-up-br-r-r-up-up, and ending abruptly. Then straightway from near the top on the other side, ap-ap-ap-br-r-r-r-ap-ap-ap. Then fainter from half-way down the street, and then from all points at once, a chorus of hammer-birds making the bridge resound in call and in answer, hammer-birds with strokes as swift as the roll of a drum. What is it?

And look! Those points of fire that glow forth here and there and vanish as the eye perceives them, tiny red lights, tiny yellow lights, that flash from far down the iron street and are gone, that flash from all along the iron street and are gone! What are they? What strange work is doing here?

It was the riveters driving the endless red-hot bolts that hold the bridge together, driving them with hammers that you work with a trigger, and aim like a fireman's hose, hammers with rubber pipes dragging behind that feed in compressed air from an engine. Long past are the days when bolts were driven by brawny arms and the slow swing of a sledge. Now the workman, leaning his stomach against an iron club, touches a spring, and, presto! the hard-kicking, pent-up air inside drives the darting club-head back and forth, back and forth, quick as a snake strikes, br-r-r-r-r-ip-ip-ip-ip, against whatever the steering arms may press it. Driving rivets nowadays is something like handling a rapid-fire gun. And how your body aches from the bruise of that recoil!

"We must get nearer to those fellows," said the artist; and presently, after some mild hazards, we were safely over on the span, quite as near as was desirable to a gang of riveters dangling twenty feet above us on a swing. For presently, with a sputter of white sparks, a piece of red-hot iron struck the girder we were straddling, and then went bounding down--down--

"Nice, hospitable place, this!" remarked the artist, as we edged under cover of a wide steel beam.

Crouching here, we watched another gang of riveters on the structure opposite, where we had a better view, watched the forge-man pass along the glowing rivets, and the buffer-man slip them through ready holes, and the hammer-man flatten the flaming ends into smooth, burnished heads. And presently a riveter in black cap and faded blue jersey climbed down from the swing overhead, and explained things to us. He did this out of sheer good nature, I think, although he may have been curious to know what two men with derby hats and kodaks were doing up there. We watched his descent in wonder and alarm, for it involved some lively gymnastics, that he entered upon, however, with complete indifference. First he swung across from the scaffolding to a girder, the highest rail of the bridge, and along this walked as coolly as a boy on a wide fence-top, only this happened to be a fence one hundred and fifty feet high. Then he bent over and caught one of the slanting side supports, and down this worked his way as a mountain-climber would work down a precipice. Presently he stepped off at our level, never having taken the pipe from his mouth.

When we asked how he dared go about so carelessly over a reeling abyss, he said they all did it; they all got used to it, or else got killed. Why, when the whistle blew we'd see men swinging and sliding and twisting their way down like a lot of circus performers. That's how they came to dinner; that's how they got back aloft. No, sir; they couldn't use life-lines; they moved about too much. Besides, what good would a life-line be to a man if the "falls" started at him with a ten-ton load, yes, or a twenty-ton load? That man has got to skip along pretty lively, sir, or he'll get hurt. Did he mean skip along over this web of boards and girders? I inquired. He certainly did, and we'd see plenty of it, if we stayed up long. The artist and I shook our heads as we looked down that skeleton roadway, gaping open everywhere between girders and planks, in little gulfs, ten feet wide, five feet wide, two feet wide, quite wide enough to make the picture of a man skipping over them a very solemn thing.

Our friend went on to tell us how the riveters often get into tight places, say on the tower, where there is so little room for the forge-man to heat his bolts that he has to throw them up to the hammer-man, twenty or thirty feet.

"What!" exclaimed the artist. "Throw red-hot bolts twenty or thirty feet up the tower!"

"That's what they do; and we've got boys who are pretty slick at it. They'll grab a bolt out of the fire with long-handled nippers, and give her a swing and a twist, and away she goes sizzling through the air straight at the man above; and say, they don't miss him once in a hundred times; and, what's more, they never touch a truss or girder. If they did there'd be a piece of red-hot iron sailing down on the lads below, and that wouldn't be good for their health."

"How does the hammer-man catch these red-hot bolts?" I asked.

"In a bucket. Catches 'em every time. That's a thing you want to see, too."

There were so many things we wanted to see in this strange region! And presently we set forth down the iron street, keeping in mind a parting caution of the riveter not to look at our feet, but at the way before us, and never to look down. As we edged ahead cautiously (no skipping along for us, thanks, but pausing often, and holding fast to whatever offered support), we saw that all the bridge-men come over the girders, eyes straight ahead, in a shuffling, flat-footed way, without much bend in the knees. Look, there comes one of them in from the end of a long black arm that pushes out like a bowsprit over the gulf! He has been hanging out there, painting the iron. In the pose of his body he is a tight-rope walker, in the hitch of his legs he is a convict, in the blank stare of his face he is a somnambulist. Really he is nothing so complicated, but an every-day bridge-man earning a hard living; and his wife would be torn with fears could she see him now.

Presently we came to the busiest scene on the structure, down where the covered part ended and the iron roadway reached on, bare of framework, to the tower. Here the "traveler" was working with a double gang of men, raising a skeleton of sides and cross-beams that were pushing on, pushing on day by day, and would finally stretch across the river. Once on the "traveler's" deck, we breathed easier, for here we were safe from fearsome crevasses, safe on a great wide raft of iron and timber, set on double railroad tracks, a lumbering steam-giant that goes resounding along, when the need is, with its weight of four locomotives, its three-story derricks swinging out great booms at the corners, its thumping niggerhead engines (two of them) for the hoisting, its coal-bins, its water-tanks, its coils of rope, its pile of lumber, and its mascot kitten, curled up there by the ash-box in a workman's coat. They say the bridge has to wait when that kitten wants her dinner, and woe to the man who would treat the little thing unkindly!

This "traveler," with its gangs, is a sort of gigantic sewing-machine that stitches the bridge together; it lifts all the parts into place and binds them fast, as it were, with basting-threads of temporary iron, to hold until the riveters arrive for the permanent sewing. Five or six tons is the weight of ordinary pieces handled by the traveler, but some pieces weigh twenty tons, and, on a pinch, forty tons could be managed, the weight of six elephants like Jumbo. Of course, when I say that the traveler "stitches" these pieces together, I really mean that the "traveler" gangs do this, for the big brute booms can only lift things and swing things; the bolt-driving and end-fitting must be done by little men.

When we arrived the "traveler" was bringing to one spot the massive parts of a cross-section in our arbor-way. It was a stretched-out iron W, flattened down between girders across top and bottom. This, we learned, was a "strut," and it weighed sixteen tons, and it would presently be lifted bodily overhead to span the roadway. We waited a full hour to see this thing done--to watch another stitch taken in the bridge; and it seems to me, as I think of it, that I can recall no hour when I saw so many perils faced with such indifference.

First, the booms would drop down their clanking jaws and grip the chain-bound girders from little delivery cars, then swing them around to the lifting-place at the farther end of the traveler. Now we understood what our friend down the way meant by "skipping along lively when the falls come at you." He meant this boom-tackle and its load as they sweep over the structure in blind, merciless force. And, indeed, they did skip along, the bridge-men, as the traveler turned its arms this way and that, and several times I saw a man slip as he hurried, and barely save himself. A single misstep might mean the crush of a ten-ton mass, or a plunge into space, or both. It seemed a pretty shivery choice.

"One of our boys got hit this morning," said a man.

"Hit by the falls?"

"Yes; he tried to dodge, but his foot caught somehow, and he got it hard right here." He touched his thigh. "It flattened him out, just over there where that man's making fast the load."

"Was he badly hurt?"

"Pretty bad, I guess. He couldn't get up, and we lowered him in a coal-box with a runner; that's a single line. You see, it's very easy to take a wrong step."

Presently somebody yelled something, and this man moved away to his task; but we were joined almost immediately by another bridge-man, who told us how they ride the big steel columns from the ground clear to the cap of the tower. Two men usually ride on a column, their duty being to keep her from bumping against the structure as she lifts, and then bolt her fast when she reaches the top. Of course, as a tower grows in height, these rides become more and more terrifying, so that some of the men who are equal to anything else draw back from riding up a column.

These fears were justified just at the last on the New York tower, and a man named Jack McGreggor had an experience that might well have blanched his hair. They had reached the 325-foot level, and were placing the last lengths of column but one, and McGreggor was riding up one of these lengths alone. It was a huge mass twenty-five feet long, square in section, and large enough to admit a winding ladder inside. It weighed eighteen tons. As the overhead boom lifted the pendent length (with McGreggor astride) and swung it clear of the column it was to rest on, the foreman, watching there like a hawk, wiggled his thumb to the signal-man on a platform below, who pulled four strokes on the bell, which meant "boom up" to the engine-man. So up came the boom, and in came the column, hanging now in true perpendicular, with McGreggor ready to slide down from his straddling seat for the bolting.

Now the foreman flapped his hand palm down, and the signal-man was just about to jerk two bells, which means "lower your load," when rip--smash--tear! Far down below a terrible thing had happened: the frame of the engine had snapped right over the bearing, and out pulled the cable drum that was holding the strain of that eighteen-ton column, and down came the falls. It was just like an elevator breaking loose at the top of its shaft. The column started to fall; there was nothing to stop it; and then--and then a miracle was worked; it must have been a miracle; it is so extraordinary. That falling column struck squarely, end to end, on the solid column beneath it, rocked a little, righted itself, and stayed there! Which was more than Jack McGreggor did, for he came sliding down so fast--he came with a wild, white face--that he all but knocked the foreman over; and the foreman was white himself. And what that eighteen-ton column would have done to the bridge, and the boys on it, had it crashed down those three hundred and twenty-five feet, is still a subject of awed discussion.

All this time a dozen men have been swarming over the strut, hammering bolts, tightening nuts, hitching fast the "falls," making sure that all parts are rigid and everything ready for the lifting. At the front of the traveler two foremen, "pushers" they are called, yell without ceasing: "Hey, Gus! Hey! Hey, Jimmie! Put that winch in! Slack away them falls! What the mischief are you doing? Hey! Hey!" And they shake their hands and dance on their toes, for all the world like a pair of mad auctioneers.

The men work faster under this vigorous coaching. Four or five are stretched flat on their stomachs along the top girder, as many more cling to steep slanting braces, and some hang fast to the uprights, with legs twisted around them like Japanese pole-climbers. No matter what his position, every man plies a tool of some sort--wrench, chisel, or sledge, and presently all is ready.

Now the niggerheads start with a pounding and sputtering that make the bridge quiver. The big spools haul fast on the ropes, the falls stiffen, the booms creak, and with shouts from every one, the strut heaves and lifts and hangs suspended. The "pushers" yell at the niggerheads to stop. The men swarm over the load, studying every joint, then wave that all is well, and come sliding, twisting down just as the engines start again, all but two men, who sit at the ends and ride along with the hoist. Meantime the others are racing up the side frames, from slant to slant to the top of the truss, where they wait eagerly, yelling the while, at the points on either side, where presently the strut-ends must be adjusted and then bolted fast.

It seems like some mad school-boy game of romps. Now we'll all swing over this precipice! Whoop-la! Now we'll all run across this gulf! Wow! wow! wow! Every man in that scrambling crew is facing two deaths, or three deaths, and doing hard work besides. Look! There comes the strut up to its place, and nearly crushes Jimmie Dunn with its sharp edge, as a strut did crush another lad not so long ago. And see that man hang out in a noose of a rope, hang out over nothing, and drive in bolts. And see this fellow kick off on the free pulley-block and come sliding down. Hoooo! And there are the others jumping at the falls after him, and coming down with a rush, laughing. Risking their lives? One would say they never thought of it.

"Why, that's nothing!" said one of them; "we used to slide down the falls from the top of the tower. But you've got to know the trick or the ropes'll burn through your trousers. It's a great slide, though."

"Aren't you ever afraid of falling?" I asked a serious-faced young man who was running one of the niggerheads.

"I'll tell you how it is," said he; "we're not afraid when a lot of us do a thing together, but each one might be afraid to do it alone. In our hearts I guess we're all afraid."

"Ever have an accident yourself?"

"No," he said, "but--" He hesitated, and then explained that he had been standing near the day "Chick" Chandler fell from the Brooklyn tower. It hadn't been a nice thing to see, and--

Finally I got the story. Chandler, it seems, was the first man killed on the bridge, and he died for a jest. He was working that day on the one-hundred-and-ten-foot level; he was an experienced man and counted sure of foot. It had begun to sprinkle, and the men were looking about for their rain-coats, when Chandler, in a spirit of mischief, started across a girder for an oil-skin that belonged to a comrade. And so interested was he in this little prank that he forgot prudence, perhaps forgot where he was, and the next second he was falling, and presently there was the shock of impact far below, and then a red No. 1 was branded on the ugly black bridge.

III

WHICH TELLS OF MEN WHO HAVE FALLEN FROM GREAT HEIGHTS

THERE is this to note about falls from bridges, that the very short ones often kill as surely as the long ones. They told me of one case where a man fell eight feet and broke his neck, while other men have fallen from great heights and escaped. A workman of the Berlin Bridge Company, for instance, fell from a structure in New Hampshire, one hundred and twenty feet, and lived. And I myself saw Harry Fleager on the East River Bridge, New York, and from his own lips heard his remarkable experience. Fleager is to-day a sturdy, active young man, and when I saw him he was running a thumping niggerhead engine on the end-span. Nevertheless, it was only a few months since he had fallen ninety-seven feet smash down to a pile of bricks.

"It happened this way," said he. "One of the big booms broke under its load just over where I was standing, and the tackle-block swung around and caught me back of the head. That knocked me off the false work, and I went straight down to the ground. Just to show you the force of my fall, sir, I struck a timber about thirty feet before I landed; it was eight inches wide and four inches thick, and I snapped it off without hardly slowing up. After that I lay for a week in the hospital with bruises, but there wasn't a bone broken, and I've been at work ever since."

Several times while I was seeking permission to go up on the structure I was treated to stories like this and to mild dissuasion. It was too dangerous a thing, they said, for a man to undertake lightly. And I did not succeed until I met the engineer in charge, Charles E. Bedell, a forceful, quiet-mannered man, who, after some talk, granted my request. He did not dwell so much on the danger as the others had, although he did say: "Of course you take all the risks."

"Do you think they are very great?" I asked.

"Not if you use ordinary caution and are not afraid."

Fear was the fatal thing, he said, and he told me of men who simply cannot endure such heights. Every day or two some new hand would start down the ladders almost before he had reached the top, and come into the office saying he couldn't stand the job.

"But you go ahead," said Mr. Bedell; "you'll come through all right. Just take it easy and be careful." Then he handed me a permit.

[Handwritten:

South Kent St & Kent Ave

Permit Mr. Moffett to visit the work at any time
until further notice.

Charles E. Bedell]

We have seen how I fared on the bridge; let me show now what befell this brilliant young engineer a couple of months later, and observe how his own case illustrates the paralyzing effect of fear upon a man. For months he had gone over the structure daily, as sure of himself at those giddy heights as on the ground. He never took chances, and he never felt afraid. But one day a workman fell from far above him and was crushed to death right before his eyes, and this was more of a shock to him than he realized.

How much of a shock it had been was shown weeks later, when the hour of peril came. It was a pleasant day in September, and the bridge was singing its busy song in the morning sunshine. The engineer in charge had made his round of inspection, and was standing idly on the false work under the end-span. He was just over the street, and could look down upon his own office, a hundred feet or so below. Every timber and girder here was familiar to him. Rumbling along on the trestle track came the big "traveler," its four booms groaning under their iron loads. The "traveler" came on slowly, as befits a huge thing weighing one hundred and fifty tons. The engineer was whittling a stick. The "traveler" came nearer, with one of its booms swinging toward Bedell, but lazily. He had plenty of time to step aside. One step to the right, one step to the left, one step forward was all he need take. Of course, he would not think of taking a step backward, for there was destruction--there yawned the gulf. It was inconceivable to the man on the "traveler" that his chief, who knew all about everything, would take a step backward.

Still the engineer in charge did not move. The boom swung nearer. Still he whittled at his stick. His thoughts were far away. The man on the "traveler" shouted, and Bedell looked up. Now he saw, and the sudden fear he had never known surged in his heart. He had still time to step aside, but his mind could not act. The boom was on him. Up went his right arm to clutch it, and back reeled his body. His right hand missed, his left hand caught the stringer as he fell, caught its sharp edge and held there by the fingers--the left-hand fingers--for five, six, seven seconds or so, legs swinging in the void. Down sprang the man on the "traveler," and leaped along the ties to his relief, and reached the spot to find the fingers gone, to see far below on the stones a broken, huddled heap that lay still. So died the man who had been kind to me (as they say he was kind to every one), and who had warned me to "take it easy and be careful."

Despite the constant peril of their days, the nights of bridge-builders are often spent in gaiety. The habit of excitement holds them even in their leisure, and many a sturdy riveter has danced away the small hours and been on his swing at the tower-top betimes the next morning. They are whole-souled, frank-spoken young fellows (there are few old bridge-men), and to spend an evening at their club, on West Thirty-second Street, is a thing worth doing.

On the street floor is a cafe, not to say saloon, where the walls are hung with churches and bridges and towering structures, monuments to the skill of the builders who have passed this way. And if you will join a group at one of these tables and speak them fair you may hear enough tales of the lads who work aloft for many a writing. And up and down the stairs move lines of bridge-men, all restless, one would say, and some pass on crutches and some with arms in slings (there is a story in every cripple), and you hear that New York has half a dozen one-legged bridge-men still fairly active in service. It's once a bridge-man always a bridge-man, for the life has its fascination, like the circus.

As I sat in a corner one evening with Zimmer and Jimmie Dunn and some of the others, there came down from overhead a racket that almost drowned our buzz of talk and the frequent ting of the bar register. The bridge-men were in vigorous debate over the question whether or not the interests of the craft call for more flooring on dangerous structures. Some said "yes," some "no," and said it with vehemence. More flooring meant less danger. That was all right, but less danger meant more competition and less pay. So there you are, and the majority favored danger with a generous wage.

"What kind of men make bridge-men?" I inquired.

"All kinds," said one of the group who was drinking birch-beer, "Some come out of machine-shops, some out of locomotive works, I was a 'shanty-jack.'"

"Lots of 'em come from farms," added another. "I know one fellow tried it who'd been a tailor. Said he changed for his health."

This struck the company as highly amusing.

"There's lots of 'em try it and quit," remarked Jimmie Dunn, who is one of the oldest and also one of the youngest men in the guild. I had seen him nearly killed a few days before by the sudden up-swing of a sixteen-ton strut. "I knew a telegraph-pole climber who said he didn't mind any old kind of a tower; he'd go up it all right and work there. Well, he got all he wanted the first morning. Came down white as that paper. Said he wouldn't stay up half an hour longer if they'd give him the whole blamed bridge. Why, it gets us fellows dizzy once in a while."

"I'll bet it does," agreed the shanty-jack man. "I saw an old hand once start to ride up a barrel of water one hundred and seventy feet on a bridge over the St. Lawrence. The barrel was swung on a 'single runner,' and you ought to have seen it spin with his weight tipping it lopsided! Ain't any bridge-man going could have kept his head there. 'Twas a fool thing to do, and the only way this fellow got up alive was by dropping plumb into the barrel of water and shutting his eyes."

"Talking about close calls," spoke up Zimmer, "I can beat that. It was out in Illinois. We were riveting on a high building, where the roof came up in a steep slant from each side to a ridge at the top. There were about twenty of us on this roof, and the way we'd work was in pairs, one man on one side and his partner on the other side, with a rope between 'em, reaching over the ridge, and the two men hung at the two ends, each one balancing the other, like two buckets down a well. We had to get up some scheme like that, or we couldn't have stuck on the roof; it was too steep.

"Well, that was all right as long as both men kept their weight on the rope, but you can see where one would be if the other happened to let go. He'd be chasing down a nice little hill of corrugated iron on a sixty-degree slant, and then over the eaves for a hundred-and-ten-foot drop. It wasn't any merry jest, you'd better believe, but we didn't think much about it and riveted away, until one morning a fellow on my side got his foot out of the noose somehow, and began to slide down. Say, he was about as cool a man as I ever heard of. I'll never forget how he sort of winked at me as he started, and what he said.

"'Going to blazes, I reckon,' said he. Those were his very words. And down he went; couldn't stop himself, and we couldn't help him, it all happened so quick. He got to the eaves, his feet went over, he was just plunging into space when his overalls caught on a rivet that somebody had left sticking up there. And there he stuck. Then he said, with just the same comical look, 'Saved by a miracle, by thunder!'

"Must have been a double miracle, for the man on the other side started to drop, too, when the rope slacked, and he'd have been killed sure if a knot in the rope hadn't happened to catch under a piece of loose iron on the ridge. Say, it's that kind of business whitens out a man's hair."

"It's a bridge-man's fate settles these things, friends," commented another member of the group. And he instanced a case where this fate had followed in cruel pursuit of two brothers named Johnson, Michael and Dan, good men both on the girders. Dan, it seems, had been crushed by a swinging load on a West Virginia bridge, and lay crippled in the hospital, only the wreck of a man, whereupon Michael, zealous in his brother's cause, had followed the work over into Kentucky, where a bridge was building across the river at Covington. His purpose was to bring suit against the company for the injury done to Dan.

"And here came the fateful part of it, for scarcely had Michael set foot upon the structure--he had certainly not been ten minutes upon it--when the false work gave way and two iron spans, unsupported now, tipped slowly, then smashed down into the river, carrying with them ruin and death. In this catastrophe were numbered some dozens of wounded and killed, and among the latter was Michael Johnson, found under the river standing upright in a tangle of wreckage, caught and held by the bridge-man's fate."

Then another man told the story of a falling bridge that thrilled me more than this one, although there was in it no loss of life. I always feel that a man who faces death unflinchingly for a fairly long time shows greater heroism, even though death be driven back, than another man who suffers some sudden taking off with no choice left him. This bridge was building at White River Junction, Vermont, over the upper waters of the Connecticut. There was a single iron span reaching two hundred feet between piers of masonry, and everything was ready to swing her off the false work except the driving of a few iron pins. And a bridge swung is a bridge practically finished, so it was merely a matter of hours to put the contractors at ease of mind against any dangers of the torrent. Meantime the dangers were there, for heavy rains had fallen and angered the river with a gorge of mountain streams.

At five o'clock of an afternoon the engineer in charge saw that a crisis was approaching. The waters were sweeping down runaway logs in fiercer and fiercer bombardment, and it was a question if the false work could hold against them. And for the time being, until morning surely, the false work must carry the span. If the false work went the span would go, and the bridge would be destroyed.

So the chief engineer ordered all hands down on scows and rafts, which were straightway jammed close against the false work by the current. Down on these lurching platforms went seventeen bridge-men, and set to work with iron-shod pike-poles, spearing the plunging logs as they came by and swinging them out through the bents of false work, down roaring lanes of water twenty feet wide between the legs of scaffolding. If these could be protected from the logs, the bridge might be saved; if they could not be protected, the bridge was doomed. It was the strength and skill of the pike-pole lads against the fury of the river.

For nine hours the battle lasted, and all this time the bridge-men worked wonders down in the black night, with rain beating on them in torrents and the logs coming faster and harder as the hours passed. Every man in the crew realized that the false work might give way at any moment, for the whole structure was groaning and shivering as they swung against it, and they knew that if it went at all it would go as one piece, without a moment's warning. And that would mean sudden death in the river under the crush of a broken bridge. Yet no man shirked his duty, and long after midnight they were there on the scows still, fighting the logs with bridge-men's grit and the comfort of steaming hot coffee--well, we may call it coffee.

But it was a hopeless fight now; the engineer saw this, and at two o'clock ordered all hands off the scows and back to the shore. There is a point beyond which you cannot allow men to go on offering their lives. And scarcely five minutes later--indeed, the last man was barely off the structure, so our friend declared, and he was one of the seventeen--the false work ripped loose and was swept away, and the iron span crashed down into the furious flood.

After this Zimmer described his sensations in a fall of one hundred and thirty-five feet from the eighth story of a skyscraper they were putting up out West. He was sitting on an upright column of the steel skeleton, waiting to pin fast a cross-beam, when a girder swung over from the other side and struck him. It weighed a matter of six tons. Down went Zimmer, and, as he dropped, he caught at a granite block resting loose there and toppled it over with him. And the thought in his mind as he fell was that here was an interesting illustration of what he had learned at school about a heavy body falling faster than a light one, for although he had a start of eight feet on the granite block, it passed him one story down, and smashed ahead through a staging that might have saved him. Then, as the stone sheered off, he estimated, did Zimmer (falling still), that its weight was about fifteen hundred pounds. Then he himself smashed through two stagings and caught at a rope, which burned through his gloves, and the next thing he knew was days later at the hospital, where somebody was bending over him saying: "Will you please tell me about your sensations coming down?" "And there was a newspaper reporter trying to interview me," said Zimmer, "which is what you might call rushing things."

"Tell ye a fall that stirred us boys all right," said another man. "It was in the big shaft at Niagara Falls. You know where they send electricity all over the State. The shaft was a hundred and eighty feet deep, and they used to lower us down in a boat swung from an iron cable. Well, one day the drum slipped and let the whole business fall free with five of us in the boat. We went clear down one hundred and seventy feet, and the boat fell away under us just like that granite block of Zimmer's, and there we were hanging fast to the corner chains and every man of us expecting to die. But somehow the engineer got his brakes on just as we were ten feet above bottom, and blamed if we didn't land fairly easy without a man hurt. Just the same, we'd looked over our lives pretty well in those few seconds."

After this came tragic memories from other men. One recalled the terrible wreck of the Cornwall bridge over the St. Lawrence. Another the disaster at Louisville, when two great iron spans, reaching a thousand feet, went down into the Ohio, with false work, "traveler," and sixty-five men, of whom only four escaped. "And one of the four, sir, was on the "traveler," two hundred feet above the water, when she went down. Never had a scratch."

So the talk ran on, and I came away with mingled feelings of wonder and admiration and sadness. Here are men who leave their families every morning with full knowledge that before nightfall disaster may smite them, as they have seen it smite their comrades. Why, one asks, do they keep to such a career? And if they believe, as apparently they do, that bridge-men are fated to violent death, why do they not leave this work and seek a safer calling?

I suppose the same reason holds them to the bridge that holds the diver to his suit, the climber to his steeple, each one of us to his particular path--it is so hard to find another. And then there is the lash of pressing need, the home to keep, and no time for experiment. Yet there are the hard facts always, that no insurance company will take a risk upon these lives, that bridge contractors are not philanthropists nor issuers of pensions, and that if a man fall from the structure, say at 11.50 A.M., his pay stops short not at twelve o'clock, but at ten minutes before twelve. Which is probably excellent business, although it seems poor humanity. _

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