bandaged the steeple with the cable and drew it tight with tackle.
Then we lowered the timbers lengthwise inside the cable, which we could
do because the steeple was an octagon with ornamented corners, and these
left spaces where the wire rope was stretched around. Then we wedged
fast the eight timbers so that they formed a sixteen-foot half-collar on
the west side of the steeple just opposite our hole where the jack was.
In other words, we had the steeple shored in so that when we let her go
no loose stones could fall on the west side; everything must fall to the
east.

"Last of all, we widened our hole on the east side, stripping away
stones until that whole side lay open in a half-circular mouth about
four feet high. And in this mouth were two teeth, one might say, that
held the stone jaws apart, the iron jack biting into the block of Norway
pine. On those two now came the steeple's weight, or, anyhow, one half
of it. To knock out one of these teeth would be to leave the east side
of the steeple unsupported, with the result that it must topple over in
that direction and fall to the ground. Anyway, that was our reasoning,
and it seemed sound enough; the only question was how we were going to
knock out that block of Norway pine.

"Well the day of the test came, and I guess five thousand people were
there to see what would happen. Everybody was discussing it, and farmers
had driven in for miles just as they do for a hanging. You understand I
was under the orders of the contractor, and he had his own plan about
getting the block out. He proposed to hitch a rope to it, drop this rope
to a donkey-engine in the yard, and set the engine winding up the rope.
He said the block would have to come out then and the steeple fall. I
agreed that the block might come out, but was afraid it would tip up
through the strain coming at an angle, and throw the steeple over to the
west, just the way we didn't want it to go. And if that steeple ever
fell to the west, there was no telling how many people it would kill in
the crowd, without counting damage to houses.

"However, the contractor was boss, and he stuck to it his way was right,
so we hitched the engine to the block and set her going. She puffed and
tugged a little, and then snapped the rope. We got another rope, and she
broke that too. Then we got a stronger rope, and the engine just kicked
herself around the yard and had lots of fun, but the block never budged.
All that morning