"Pretty bad, I guess. He couldn't get up, and we lowered him in a
coal-box with a runner; that's a single line. You see, it's very easy to
take a wrong step."

[Illustration: RIDING UP ON AN EIGHTEEN-TON COLUMN.]

Presently somebody yelled something, and this man moved away to his
task; but we were joined almost immediately by another bridge-man, who
told us how they ride the big steel columns from the ground clear to the
cap of the tower. Two men usually ride on a column, their duty being to
keep her from bumping against the structure as she lifts, and then bolt
her fast when she reaches the top. Of course, as a tower grows in
height, these rides become more and more terrifying, so that some of the
men who are equal to anything else draw back from riding up a column.

These fears were justified just at the last on the New York tower, and a
man named Jack McGreggor had an experience that might well have blanched
his hair. They had reached the 325-foot level, and were placing the last
lengths of column but one, and McGreggor was riding up one of these
lengths alone. It was a huge mass twenty-five feet long, square in
section, and large enough to admit a winding ladder inside. It weighed
eighteen tons. As the overhead boom lifted the pendent length (with
McGreggor astride) and swung it clear of the column it was to rest on,
the foreman, watching there like a hawk, wiggled his thumb to the
signal-man on a platform below, who pulled four strokes on the bell,
which meant "boom up" to the engine-man. So up came the boom, and in
came the column, hanging now in true perpendicular, with McGreggor ready
to slide down from his straddling seat for the bolting.

Now the foreman flapped his hand palm down, and the signal-man was just
about to jerk two bells, which means "lower your load," when
rip--smash--tear! Far down below a terrible thing had happened: the
frame of the engine had snapped right over the bearing, and out pulled
the cable drum that was holding the strain of that eighteen-ton column,
and down came the falls. It was just like an elevator breaking loose at
the top of its shaft. The column started to fall; there was nothing to
stop it; and then--and then a miracle was worked; it must have been a
miracle; it is so extraordinary. That falling column struck squarely,
end to end, on the solid column beneath it, rocked a little, righted
itself, and stayed there! Which was more than Jack McGreggor did, for he
came slidi