ing 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!

[Illustration: "'THERE WAS PAT, FAST ASLEEP, LEGS DANGLING, HEAD
NODDING, AS COMFORTABLE AS YOU PLEASE.'"]

"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'