Betty told Sure Pop what Bob had said about getting a job in one of the
big mills by and by, and the little Colonel remembered it a few weeks
later when he was showing several of the Safety Scouts through the steel
mills.
"Do you think it will be one of these mills you'll pick out for your
first job?"
"Well, I don't know, now. It's a pretty big, lonesome sort of place for
a fellow like me, Sure Pop, and there don't seem to be so many fellows
of my own age here as in some of the other factories."
Betty and Joe and Chance followed Bob's eyes around the big steel mill
yards. They knew how he felt. It was a lonesome looking place till you
got used to it, in spite of the thousands of men who swarmed around
them. The queer, raw smell of the reddish iron ore added to the feeling,
too.
Away down in the big ore boats along the docks, gangs of big, brawny
workmen strained and sweated, filling the iron buckets that traveled up
the wire cables to the ore dumps. Others were trucking the ore to the
furnaces, while a swarm of little switch engines panted and puffed back
and forth over the network of steel rails.
The steel works covered many acres of ground, and, shut off as they were
by high fences, seemed almost like another world. The roar of the
furnaces and the din of steel on steel made Betty and the boys feel
rather confused at first. "I should think all these men just over from
the old country would get mixed up, so many of them not understanding a
single word of English," said Betty to their guide.
"Yes, we have to be mighty careful," said the man, who was one of the
Safety men who gave all his time to making the steel mills safer for the
thousands of workmen. "We print this little book of Safety Rules in all
the different languages, so that each new man can study it and find out
how to do his day's work without getting into danger."
"Wow! what's that?" Joe's black eyes opened very wide as he pointed to a
great ball of fire that rose from one of the furnace stacks, floated a
little way like a balloon, and then burst into a sheet of flame.
"Just the gas from the blast furnace--regular Fourth of July fireworks,
isn't it? I remember how queer those gas bubbles used to look to me when
I first came to work here."
He waited while his visitors stared for a few minutes at the fiery
clouds, then led the way to the blast furnaces. They went through two or
three big buildings, all of them fairly alive with hurrying, sweating
laborers. But in spite of the seeming confusion all around them, Bob
noticed how carefully the aisles and passageways were kept free and
clear of anything the hurrying men might stumble over.
"We simply have to do it," explained the steel man. "Before we woke up
to the importance of never leaving anything in the way where it might be
stumbled over, we had more broken arms and legs every month than you
could shake a stick at. Now it's different; it's as much as a man's job
is worth to leave anything lying in the passageways for his fellow
workmen to stumble and fall over."
"I saw some white lines painted on the floor of that last room we came
through, the one where all those castings were stacked up in rows," said
Chance. "Was that what they were for? Great scheme, isn't it? And as
simple as falling off a log!"
"Simple? Sure--most of these things are simple enough, once you think of
them," agreed their guide. "It took perhaps an hour of one man's time
and a gallon or two of white paint to paint those dead-lines along the
sides--and many's the man who has been saved weeks in the hospital by
those same white lines."
The five friends followed him into the foundry department. Hardly had
they stepped through the doorway, when the clang of a big gong overhead
scattered a group of laborers who were piling heavy castings on flat
cars.
Five pairs of eyes looked up as the five Safety Scouts turned to see
where the gong was. Away up above them on a track that went from one end
of the long room to the other, they saw something like an oddly shaped
freight engine running along with a heavy wire cable dangling toward the
floor. The big, strong cable was carrying a load of several tons of
steel castings as easily as a boy carries in an armful of wood. "And
with a whole lot less fuss and bother!" said Betty, with a sly look at
Brother Bob.
"When a man hears that gong overhead," said the guide, "he knows what it
means even before he looks up. That's what is called a traveling crane.
It runs back and forth on those overhead tracks, wherever the crane
driver wants to pick up or drop his load. He kicks that gong with his
heel, just like the motorman on the street car, and it gives warning to
the workmen below just as plainly as if it yelled out, 'Look out, below!
Here comes a load that might spill on your heads!'"
"Sounds exactly like a street-car gong," said Betty.
The steel man smiled. "It ought to--it was made for use on a street car.
Watch sharp when the crane comes back this way and you'll see the gong
fastened right up under the cab floor. See? We tried whistles for a
while, and automobile horns, too; but this plain, everyday street-car
gong beats 'em all. A man doesn't have to understand English to know
what _that_ sound means!"
"It must have made a good deal of difference in the number of
accidents," said Sure Pop, "with so many men working underneath those
cranes right along."
"Did it? Well, I should say so! That's another little thing that's as
simple as A B C, but it saves lives and broken bones just the same.
Sometimes I think we get to thinking too much about the big things,
Colonel, and not enough about these little, everyday ideas that spell
Safety to all these thousands of men who look to us for a square deal."
Sure Pop reached up to say something in Bob's ear as they went on to the
chipping yard, where long rows of men were trimming down the rough steel
castings with chisels driven by compressed-air hammers.
"Did you ever see anything like it, Bob, the way this 'square deal' and
'fair play' idea gets into their systems, once they wake up to the
possibilities of Safety First?"
"It certainly does," said Bob. "I thought of that, too. It's what that
tailor told the boys in the clothing factory, the day we got our
uniforms, and it's just what the foreman in that machine shop told us,
too."
"Yes, sir," said Sure Pop, "the spirit of fair play means everything to
a fellow who's any good at all--it's the very life of the Boy Scout law,
you know."
Joe was looking hard at the chippers.
"Every one of those men wear glasses! Isn't that queer!"
"It's all the difference between a blind man and a wage earner," was the
way the steel man looked at it. "When those steel chips fly into a man's
eyes it's all over but the sick money." He turned to little Sure Pop
again. "There it is again, Colonel--another of the simplest ideas a man
could imagine--just putting goggles on our chippers and emery wheel
workers--but it has saved hundreds and hundreds of eyes, and every eye
or pair of eyes means some man's living--and the living of a family."
"Splendid idea," nodded the little Colonel--just as if he, the Spirit of
Safety, had not thought it all out years before, and put it into the
minds of men! "Do you ever have any trouble getting the men to wear
them?"
"Plenty! Most of the men treated it as a joke at first. Then, gradually,
they began to notice that the men who wore theirs on their _hats_ (the
rule is that they must wear goggles while at this work or lose their
jobs), those were the men who lost their eyes. Several of the first men
to be blinded after the new rule was posted were those very ones, the
chaps that had made the most fun of the goggles. Then the others began
to wake up.
"Over in my office, I've several hundred pairs of goggles that have had
one or both lenses smashed by flying bits of steel--and every pair has
saved an eye, in some cases both eyes. Seems sort of worth while, eh,
Colonel?"
It was an enthusiastic group of Safety Scouts that passed out through
the big steel mill gates and started home in the mellow September
twilight. "Oh, I think it's wonderful," cried Betty, as they talked over
what they had seen, "perfectly wonderful, Sure Pop, that such little
things can save so many lives!"
"But I don't see why you call a trip like this 'an adventure,'" broke in
Chance, who had never been along on any of the twins' Safety Scouting
trips before. "We didn't see an accident or an explosion or anything!"
Colonel Sure Pop gave Chance one of his wise smiles. "That's the best
part of the whole trip, as you'll see when you've been at it as long as
I have. The most delightful adventure a lover of fair play can possibly
have to look back on, my boy, is one just like what we've had today--a
real, live adventure in Safety!"
_The spirit of fair play is the very life of the
Scout Law._--SURE POP
[Illustration]