twenty feet wide between the legs of scaffolding. If
these could be protected from the logs, the bridge might be saved; if
they could not be protected, the bridge was doomed. It was the strength
and skill of the pike-pole lads against the fury of the river.

For nine hours the battle lasted, and all this time the bridge-men
worked wonders down in the black night, with rain beating on them in
torrents and the logs coming faster and harder as the hours passed.
Every man in the crew realized that the false work might give way at any
moment, for the whole structure was groaning and shivering as they swung
against it, and they knew that if it went at all it would go as one
piece, without a moment's warning. And that would mean sudden death in
the river under the crush of a broken bridge. Yet no man shirked his
duty, and long after midnight they were there on the scows still,
fighting the logs with bridge-men's grit and the comfort of steaming hot
coffee--well, we may call it coffee.

But it was a hopeless fight now; the engineer saw this, and at two
o'clock ordered all hands off the scows and back to the shore. There is
a point beyond which you cannot allow men to go on offering their lives.
And scarcely five minutes later--indeed, the last man was barely off the
structure, so our friend declared, and he was one of the seventeen--the
false work ripped loose and was swept away, and the iron span crashed
down into the furious flood.

After this Zimmer described his sensations in a fall of one hundred and
thirty-five feet from the eighth story of a skyscraper they were putting
up out West. He was sitting on an upright column of the steel skeleton,
waiting to pin fast a cross-beam, when a girder swung over from the
other side and struck him. It weighed a matter of six tons. Down went
Zimmer, and, as he dropped, he caught at a granite block resting loose
there and toppled it over with him. And the thought in his mind as he
fell was that here was an interesting illustration of what he had
learned at school about a heavy body falling faster than a light one,
for although he had a start of eight feet on the granite block, it
passed him one story down, and smashed ahead through a staging that
might have saved him. Then, as the stone sheered off, he estimated, did
Zimmer (falling still), that its weight was about fifteen hundred
pounds. Then he himself smashed through two stagings and caught at a
rope, which burned through his glove