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 wor