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!'
[Illustration: WALKING A GIRDER TWO HUNDRED FEET IN AIR.]
"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.
THE FIREMAN
I
WHEREIN WE SEE A SLEEPING VILLAGE SWEPT BY A RIVER OF FIRE AND THE
BURNING OF A FAMOUS HOTEL
I WILL first tell a story, fresh in my memory, about a New Jersey
village lost in the hills back of Lake Hopatcong, a charming, sleepy
little village that reaches along a stream fringed with butterball-trees
and looks contentedly out of its valley up the steep wooded hill that
rises before it. Nobody in Glen Gardner cares much what there is in the
world beyond that hill.
The general attitude of Glen Gardner toward progress is shown well
enough by this, that the village could never see the use of a fire
department. They never had one, and never proposed to; other people's
houses might get on fire; theirs never did. As a matter of fact, nobody
could remember when there had been a fire in Glen Gardner, unless it was
Aunt Ann Fritts, who was eighty-eight years old, and remembered back
farther than was necessary.
[Illustration: BURNING OIL-TANKS.]
This was the case on a certain drizzling Sunday in March of the
new-century year, when, at 6.30 A.M., the world beyond the hill intruded
itself upon Glen Gardner's peacefulness in such strange and sudden
fashion that old Mrs. Bergstresser collapsed from the shock. What made
it worse was the fact that there had been a dance the night before at
Farmer Apgar's, and half-past six found most of the village dozing
comfortably. There was really nothing to do before church-time. So they
all thought, at least, little suspecting that even now, as they slept, a
long oil-train was puffing up the steep grade from Easton, bringing
sixty cars loaded with crude petroleum and trouble.
On came the oil-train, its front engine panting as the drivers slipped,
and the "pusher" back of the caboose shouldering up the load with snorts
of impatience. Ouf! The front of the train climbs over the ridge at
Hampton Junction, half a mile back of Glen Gardner, where the Jersey
Central tracks reach their highest point. Now they are all right. There
is a long down grade ahead for three miles. The pusher gives a final
shove at the rear end, and cuts loose, glad to be rid of the job. The
men in the caboose wave good-by to the fireman and engineer as they drop
away.
Hello! What's that jerk? They look out and see the last oil-car just
clearing the divide. It's nothing; they're over now; they're running
faster. Queer place, this! There's a spring here with two streams that
part in the middle like a woman's hair; one goes down the east side, the
other down the west side. What? Broken in two?
The caboose crew start to run forward; a brakeman on the front half
starts to run back. Thirty-seven cars behind the engine a coupling has
snapped, and the train is taking the down grade in two sections:
twenty-three loaded oil-cars are running away, and a million gallons of
oil are chasing two million gallons down a mountain-side!
Everything now depends upon the brakeman on the forward section. He is
the only man who can judge the danger, and signal the engineer what to
do. The engineer does not even know that anything is wrong. It is
plainly the brakeman's business to keep the front half of the train out
of the way of the rear half. They must go faster, faster as the runaway
cars gain on them. Any one can see that it is undesirable to have two
million gallons of oil struck by a million gallons coming at forty miles
an hour.
Yet the brakeman does the wrong thing (no man can be sure how he will
act in imminent peril); the brakeman signals the engineer to stop.
Perhaps he planned a gradual slow-up to block the flying section gently;
perhaps he did not realize how fast the runaway was coming. Most likely
he lost his head entirely, as better men have done in less serious
crises. At any rate, the front section presently drew up with grinding
brakes on the ledge of track that stretches along the cheek of the
mountain just over the slope where the slumbering village lay, not five
feet from Carling's warehouse, beyond which were the coal-yards and the
wooden houses of Glen Gardner, the post-office, the hardware store, and
the main street. Of all places for that train to stop, this was the
worst.
[Illustration: "SNYDER, WHITE AS A GHOST, RACED AHEAD OF THE FIRE."]
It was a matter of seconds now until the crash came, and on this
followed a shattering blast that shook the valley and hill, and brought
the village to its feet in a daze of fear. Four oil-cars were smashed in
the wreck and hurled across the tracks for the rear cars to pile up on.
And straightway there was a gushing oil-well here, out of which in the
first ten seconds came an explosion with the noise of cannon, that
showered burning oil over fields and trees and shingled housetops, while
a fire column shot up fifty feet in the air and began its fierce feeding
on the broken tanks. And out of this fire fountain came a smoking fire
river, that rolled down the hill toward the village.
At this moment, Joe Snyder, who had not gone to the dance the night
before, and was doomed now to the early worm's fate, had just put his
key in the door of the butcher-shop. He never turned the key, nor saw it
again, nor saw the butcher-shop again. What he did see was a roaring
torrent of oil sweeping down the street and blazing fifteen feet high as
it came. And the picture next presented when Snyder, white as a ghost,
raced down the sidewalk ahead of the fire, will stay long in the memory
of those who saw it from their windows.
But this was no time for looking at pictures out of windows; there were
other things to be done, and done quickly. Never did fire descend so
swiftly upon a village. Even as the startled sleepers stared in fright,
houses all about them burst into flames like candles on a Christmas
tree. Now the warehouse is burning, and the sheds across the tracks; and
there goes the hardware store; and there goes the carpenter's shop; and
now the fire-stream rolls through Main Street, and licks up the Reeves
house on one corner and Vliet's store on the other. Then the drug-store
goes, and Carling's store and Rinehart's restaurant. Trees are burning,
fences are burning, the very streets are burning, and men see fire
rolling across their front yards like drifting snow.
[Illustration: "THE VERY STREETS ARE BURNING."]
I do not purpose to follow the incidents of this fire and the several
explosions, nor show how the village fought against it vainly, damming
up fiery oil-streams and turning their courses, toiling at bucket-lines,
and spreading blistering walls with soaked carpets. The point is that
these efforts alone would never have availed, and Glen Gardner would
speedily have lain in ashes, had not fire-engines from Sommerville and
Washington been hurried to the spot. And even as it was, a section of
the village was wiped away in clean-licked ruins, which stood for many a
day as a grim reminder that the only safety against fires in these times
lies in being able to fight fires well.
Which brings me, of course, to the modern fire department and the men
who risk their lives as a matter of daily routine to protect their
fellow-men. I will begin with some incidents of one particular fire that
happened in New York on St. Patrick's Day, 1899. It was a pleasant
afternoon, and Fifth Avenue was crowded with people gathered to watch
the parade. A gayer, pleasanter scene it would have been hard to find at
three o'clock, or a sadder one at four.
The Ancient Order of Hibernians, coming along with bands and banners,
were nearing Forty-sixth Street, when suddenly there sounded hoarse
shouts and the angry clang of fire-gongs, and down Forty-seventh Street
came Hook and Ladder 4 on a dead run, and swung into Fifth Avenue
straight at the pompous Hibernians, who immediately became badly scared
Irishmen and took to their heels. But the big ladders went no farther.
They were needed here, oh, so badly needed; for the Windsor Hotel was on
fire--the famous Windsor Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street.
It was on fire, far gone with fire before ever the engines were called;
and the reason was that everybody supposed that of course _somebody_ had
sent the alarm. And so they all watched the fire, and waited for the
engines, ten, fifteen minutes, and by that time a great column of flame
was roaring up the elevator-shaft, and people on the roof, in their
madness, were jumping down to the street. Then some sane citizen went to
a fire-box and rang the call, and within ninety seconds Engine 65 was
on the ground. And after her came Engines 54 and 21. But there was no
making up that lost fifteen minutes. The fire had things in its teeth
now, and three, four, five alarms went out in quick succession.
Twenty-three engines had their streams on that fire in almost as many
minutes. And the big fire-tower came from Thirty-sixth Street and Ninth
Avenue, and six hook-and-ladder companies came.
Let us watch Hook and Ladder 21 for a moment. She was the mate of the
fire-tower, and the rush of her galloping horses was echoing up the
avenue just as Battalion Chief John Binns made out a woman in a
seventh-story window on the Forty-sixth Street side, where the fire was
raging fiercely. The woman was holding a little dog in her arms, and it
looked as if she was going to jump. The chief waved her to stay where
she was, and, running toward 21 as she plunged along, motioned toward
Forty-sixth Street. Whereupon the tiller-man at his back wheel did a
pretty piece of steering, and even as they swung the long truck in the
turn the crew began hoisting the big ladder. Such a thing is never done,
for the swaying of that ten-ton mass might easily upset the truck; but
every second counted here, and they took the chance.
As they drew along the curb, Fireman McDermott sprang up the slowly
rising ladder, and two men came behind with scaling-ladders, for they
saw that the main ladder would never reach the woman. Five stories is
what it did reach, and then McDermott, standing on the top round,
smashed one of the scaling-ladders through a sixth-story window, and
climbed on, smashed the second scaling-ladder through a seventh-story
window, and five seconds later had the woman in his arms.
[Illustration: USE OF THE SCALING LADDERS.]
To carry a woman down the front of a burning building on scaling-ladders
is a matter of regular routine for a fireman, like jumping from a fourth
story down to a net, or making a bridge of his body. It is part of the
business. But to have one foot in the air reaching for the lower rung of
a swaying, flimsy thing, and to feel another rung break under you and
your struggling burden, and to fall two feet and catch safely, that is a
thing not every fireman could do; but McDermott did it, and he brought
the woman unharmed to the ground--and the dog, too.
Almost at the same moment, the crowd on Forty-seventh Street thrilled in
admiration of a rescue feat even more perilous. On the roof, screaming
in terror, was Kate Flannigan, a servant, swaying over the cornice, on
the point of throwing herself down. Then out of a top-floor window crept
a little fireman, and stood on the fire-escape, gasping for air. Then he
reached in and dragged out an unconscious woman and lowered her to
others, and was just starting down himself when yells from the street
made him look up, and he saw Kate Flannigan. She was ten feet above him,
and he had no means of reaching her.
The crowd watched anxiously, and saw the little fireman lean back over
the fire-escape, saw him motion and shout something to the woman. And
then she crept over the cornice edge, hung by her hands for a second,
and dropped into the fireman's arms. It isn't every big strong man who
could catch a sizable woman in a fall like that and hold her, but this
stripling did it, because he had the nerve and knew how. And that made
another life saved.
By this time flames were breaking out of every story from street to
roof. It seemed impossible to go on with the rescue work; yet the men
persisted, even on the Fifth Avenue front, bare of fire-escapes. They
used the long extension ladders as far as they could, and then "scaled
it" from window to window. Here it was that William Clark of Hook and
Ladder 7 made the rescues that gave him the Bennett medal--took three
women out of seventh-story windows when it was like climbing over
furnace mouths to get there. And one of these women he reached only by
working his way along narrow stone ledges for three windows, and back
the same way to his ladder with the woman on his shoulders. Even so it
is likely he would have failed in this last effort had not Edward Ford
come part way along the ledges to meet and help him.
Meantime Fireman Kennedy of Engine 23 had rescued an old lady from the
sixth floor; and Joseph Kratchovil of Hook and Ladder 2 had carried out
Mrs. Leland, wife of the proprietor, from deadly peril on the fifth
floor; and Frank Tissier of Hook and Ladder 4 had found a family named
Wells--father, mother, and daughter--in a blazing room, and borne them
out, with his own clothes burning, to the arms of Brennan and Sweeney,
who were waiting for him in a fury of fire at the top of the
eighty-five-foot extension ladder.
And Andrew Fitzgerald, also of Hook and Ladder 4, but off on sick-leave
with pneumonia, had shown the true fireman spirit as he came from the
doctors. His instructions were to go home and stay there. He was not on
duty at all. He was scarcely strong enough to be out of bed, but when he
heard that there were lives in peril down the avenue he forgot
everything, and ran to the place of danger. There was need of him here,
and, sick-leave or not, pneumonia or not, he would do what he could.
What he did was to carry out the last ones taken alive from the
ill-fated hotel--three women whom he bore in his arms from the fourth
floor through roaring hallways, then up a fire-escape, then back into
the building, with the flames singeing him, and a shattering blast of
exploding gas pursuing him, and finally out on a balcony whence, with
the help of Policeman Harrigan, he got them over safely to an adjoining
housetop. No wonder the Bonner medal was awarded him later for
conspicuous courage.
II
WHAT BILL BROWN DID IN THE GREAT TARRANT FIRE
THE great test for Fire-engine 29 and her crew, the test of life or
death that firemen wait years for (to see what stuff is in them), came
of a mild autumn afternoon, not soon to be forgotten by men who lunch
down City Hall way, by men who swarm in the stone hives of Chambers
Street and Greenwich Street and Washington Street. This was the day when
innocent, wholesome chlorate of potash (excellent for colds) showed what
it can do when you take it by the ton with a pinch of fire. This was the
day of the great explosions, when it rained red-hot stones and blazing
timbers, when whole blocks of lower Manhattan shivered with the
concussion. This was Tarrant's day, October 29, 1900.
It all started smoothly enough, with brass gongs tapping out deliberate
62's, at which the big horses in most engine-houses stamped their
displeasure, for 62 meant nothing to them--at least not on the first
call. But it was great business for Harry and Nigger and Baby, the two
blacks and the gray that pull old 29, and there they were at the first
tap, breasting the rubber-bound stall chains as if to hurry up laggard
electricity, which presently shot its sparks and loosed their
fastenings.