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Careers of Danger and Daring

<hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>III</h2> <h3>WHICH TELLS OF MEN WHO HAVE FALLEN FROM GREAT HEIGHTS</h3> <div class='cap'>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.</div> "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. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/illus215.png" width-obs="400" height-obs="171" alt="Handwritten Note: Permit Mr. Moffett to visit the work at any time until further notice. Charles E. Bedell." title="" /></div> 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 café, 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!' <div class="figright"> <ANTIMG src="images/illus48.jpg" width-obs="268" height-obs="600" alt="WALKING A GIRDER TWO HUNDRED FEET IN AIR." title="" /> WALKING A GIRDER TWO HUNDRED FEET IN AIR.</div> "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. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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