adn't
been for blind luck I guess the people down below would have got their
money's worth in about a minute. But my hand struck on the tool-box as
he pressed me back, and I had just strength enough left to shut my
fingers on the first tool I touched and strike at him with it. The tool
happened to be a monkey-wrench, and when a man gets a clip on the head
with a thing like that he's pretty apt to keep still for a while. And
that's what O'Brien did. He keeled over and lay there, and I did, too,
until my head got steady. Even then I guess we'd both have fallen if it
hadn't been for the life-lines.

"The rest was simple enough after I got my senses back. Dan was
unconscious, and all I had to do was fasten a rope to him and lower
away. They took care of him down below until the ambulance came, and he
spent that night in a hospital. And he's spent most of his years since
then in an asylum, his mind all gone except for short periods, when he
comes to himself again, and then he always starts out to put an end to
me. That last impulse to destroy me has never left him."

It was after this that I learned about that other danger to
steeple-climbers, of being startled. Merrill says that men of his craft,
whether they realize it or not, work under constant nervous strain.
However calm a steeple-climber may think himself, his body is always
afraid, his muscles are always tense, his clutch on ropes and stones is
always harder, two or three times harder, than the need is; his knees
hug what comes between them so tightly that it hurts, even when they
might safely be relaxed. That is the trouble, a steeple-climber cannot
relax his body or control its instinctive shrinking. It is not looking
down into the gulf around him that he minds (the climber who cannot do
that with indifference is unfit for the business); what he sees he can
cope with; it is what he cannot see that does the mischief--what he
fears vaguely. And a sudden noise, an unexpected movement may throw him
into all but panic. So the veteran climber, swinging at the steeple-top
opposite his partner, is careful to say in a low tone, "I'm going to
lower my saddle," before he does lower it; or, "I'm going to strike a
match," before he strikes it.

Sometimes a new helper at the hauling-line down on the bell-deck will
shift his place from weariness or thoughtlessness, and let the line move
up an inch or two, which drops the saddle an inch or two far
aloft--drops it suddenly with