HOW BENDER LOWERED THE PRICE OF DYNAMITE
Once, when entering my storage magazine at Maxim, New Jersey, in which were several carloads of dynamite, along with 37,000 pounds of nitrogelatin, made to fill an order from the Brazilian Government, I saw John Bender, one of my laboring men, calmly but emphatically opening a case of dynamite with cold chisel and hammer. With some epithetitious phraseology, I dismissed him.
It was not long after this incident, when the Boniface of the inn at Farmingdale, a nearby village, called upon me to buy some dynamite. He told me that he had employed John Bender to blow the stumps out of a meadow lot. I related to him my experience with that reckless person, and tried to impress him with the fact that Bender was temperamentally so constituted as to court death, not only for himself but for others about him, when handling dynamite.
But Boniface was unconvinced. He wanted Bender to do the work and he wanted the dynamite to do it with. Bender, he said, had assured him that he was a great expert in the handling of dynamite—that he could so place a charge under a stump that he could always tell beforehand the direction the stump would take, and about how far it would go under the impulse of the blast. Therefore, it was only a question of the price of the dynamite.
“Well,” said I, “the dynamite you want is sixteen cents a pound, but I’ll bet you the dynamite against the price of it that John Bender kills himself with it, so that if he does not succeed in blowing himself up and killing himself with the dynamite, you can have it for nothing. On the other hand, if he does blow himself up, you must pay for the dynamite.”
A few days later, there was some hitch in Bender’s exceptional luck. A particularly refractory old stump had resisted a couple of Bender’s dynamic attacks. The failure to dislodge the stump Bender took as a personal affront, because it reflected upon his skill as a stump-blaster.
“Next time,” said he, “something is going to happen.”
He placed about twenty pounds of dynamite under the deep-rooted veteran, touched it off, and several things happened in very quick succession. The huge stump let go its hold on earth, and proceeded to hunt Bender. It was a level race, but the stump won. Striking Bender on the north quarter, it stove in four ribs, dislocated a few joints, and damaged him in several other respects and particulars.
Boniface came to settle for the dynamite.
“Sixteen cents a pound,” I said. “Bender hasn’t a chance in a hundred. Wait till the doctors are through with him.”
“What do you say to a compromise,” suggested Boniface, “of eight cents a pound? For really,” quoth he, “I do not believe that Bender is more than half dead.”
And the account was settled on that basis.