kman's coat.
They say the bridge has to wait when that kitten wants her dinner, and
woe to the man who would treat the little thing unkindly!

This "traveler," with its gangs, is a sort of gigantic sewing-machine
that stitches the bridge together; it lifts all the parts into place and
binds them fast, as it were, with basting-threads of temporary iron, to
hold until the riveters arrive for the permanent sewing. Five or six
tons is the weight of ordinary pieces handled by the traveler, but some
pieces weigh twenty tons, and, on a pinch, forty tons could be managed,
the weight of six elephants like Jumbo. Of course, when I say that the
traveler "stitches" these pieces together, I really mean that the
"traveler" gangs do this, for the big brute booms can only lift things
and swing things; the bolt-driving and end-fitting must be done by
little men.

[Illustration: "ITS MASCOT KITTEN, CURLED UP THERE BY THE ASH-BOX."]

When we arrived the "traveler" was bringing to one spot the massive
parts of a cross-section in our arbor-way. It was a stretched-out iron
W, flattened down between girders across top and bottom. This, we
learned, was a "strut," and it weighed sixteen tons, and it would
presently be lifted bodily overhead to span the roadway. We waited a
full hour to see this thing done--to watch another stitch taken in the
bridge; and it seems to me, as I think of it, that I can recall no hour
when I saw so many perils faced with such indifference.

First, the booms would drop down their clanking jaws and grip the
chain-bound girders from little delivery cars, then swing them around to
the lifting-place at the farther end of the traveler. Now we understood
what our friend down the way meant by "skipping along lively when the
falls come at you." He meant this boom-tackle and its load as they sweep
over the structure in blind, merciless force. And, indeed, they did skip
along, the bridge-men, as the traveler turned its arms this way and
that, and several times I saw a man slip as he hurried, and barely save
himself. A single misstep might mean the crush of a ten-ton mass, or a
plunge into space, or both. It seemed a pretty shivery choice.

"One of our boys got hit this morning," said a man.

"Hit by the falls?"

"Yes; he tried to dodge, but his foot caught somehow, and he got it hard
right here." He touched his thigh. "It flattened him out, just over
there where that man's making fast the load."

"Was he badly hurt?"