have kept his head there. 'Twas a fool
thing to do, and the only way this fellow got up alive was by dropping
plumb into the barrel of water and shutting his eyes."

"Talking about close calls," spoke up Zimmer, "I can beat that. It was
out in Illinois. We were riveting on a high building, where the roof
came up in a steep slant from each side to a ridge at the top. There
were about twenty of us on this roof, and the way we'd work was in
pairs, one man on one side and his partner on the other side, with a
rope between 'em, reaching over the ridge, and the two men hung at the
two ends, each one balancing the other, like two buckets down a well. We
had to get up some scheme like that, or we couldn't have stuck on the
roof; it was too steep.

"Well, that was all right as long as both men kept their weight on the
rope, but you can see where one would be if the other happened to let
go. He'd be chasing down a nice little hill of corrugated iron on a
sixty-degree slant, and then over the eaves for a hundred-and-ten-foot
drop. It wasn't any merry jest, you'd better believe, but we didn't
think much about it and riveted away, until one morning a fellow on my
side got his foot out of the noose somehow, and began to slide down.
Say, he was about as cool a man as I ever heard of. I'll never forget
how he sort of winked at me as he started, and what he said.

"'Going to blazes, I reckon,' said he. Those were his very words. And
down he went; couldn't stop himself, and we couldn't help him, it all
happened so quick. He got to the eaves, his feet went over, he was just
plunging into space when his overalls caught on a rivet that somebody
had left sticking up there. And there he stuck. Then he said, with just
the same comical look, 'Saved by a miracle, by thunder!'

[Illustration: WALKING A GIRDER TWO HUNDRED FEET IN AIR.]

"Must have been a double miracle, for the man on the other side started
to drop, too, when the rope slacked, and he'd have been killed sure if a
knot in the rope hadn't happened to catch under a piece of loose iron on
the ridge. Say, it's that kind of business whitens out a man's hair."

"It's a bridge-man's fate settles these things, friends," commented
another member of the group. And he instanced a case where this fate had
followed in cruel pursuit of two brothers named Johnson, Michael and
Dan, good men both on the girders. Dan, it seems, had been crushed by a
swinging load on a West Virginia bridge, and