Carnegie Medal Is Well Won by Boy.
The stuff they mold heroes of cropped out at Dothan, Ala., one spring morning. Now Henry T. Matthews, a youngster of that city, is wearing a bronze medal presented by Andrew Carnegie for a remarkable deed of valor committed with such modesty as would almost suggest indifference. Newspapers throughout the State are now presenting the youth’s name as a new representative of Alabama in the select few the Carnegie commission chooses to call heroes. It all came about something like this:
Little Benjamin Grant, son of B. J. Grant, Dothan banker, and several other playmates, whose ages averaged about the three-year mark, had slipped from their nurses who chatted in the sunshine and were enjoying the fine spring morning away up under the Grant residence, digging trenches, making frog houses, tunnels, and such things and getting their fresh linen just as dirty as they shouldn’t. Suddenly Benjamin disappeared, right before the eyes of his mystified young friends. It was as if the earth had swallowed him up.
The fair-haired tot had slipped into a deserted bored well, hid up under the house for so long that no one ever remembered when it had been dug, when it had been used, or when it had been deserted and covered[{63}] up by the building. Moreover, no one happened to know how deep it was, as was later learned, and with these thoughts rushing through her frightened brain the nurse girl in charge of little Ben prepared to inform the child’s mother that her son was somewhere below earth, in a darkened, unknown hole.
The alarm spread with a swiftness hardly believable. Within a few minutes every woman in the neighborhood and every man who might be located sitting about home during the busy part of the morning had rushed to the scene.
The hole into which the boy had fallen was not large enough to carry light more than a few feet; no man in a thousand could squeeze his shoulders into the opening. To be exact, it measured thirteen inches in diameter, as a later measurement showed.
Several men gazed into the blackness of the hole and gazed back again, their faces pale, their eyes wide with a helplessness that brought on an uncanny fright, even in the hearts of the strongest.
Some suggested a rope, others thought of hooks, and some said dig a tunnel. All soon agreed, however, that none of the plans of rescue could be carried out, for a three-year-old boy would never be expected to grab a rope to be pulled through yards and yards of a bored well; iron hooks might tear the baby to pieces while rescuers knelt and heard his cries in vain, and a tunnel to the distance where his cries indicated he had fallen would certainly mean a fatal cave-in.
Suggestions that some person be lowered had, of course, been advanced long before, but had proven useless, for not one person in the great crowd could enter the small opening.
“Send out and get some boys,” shouted one of the directors of the work. The schools and their numerous offerings of all sizes and ages of lads came first into the minds of the volunteer hunters. Two automobiles rushed to a school less than three blocks away.
“We want the nerviest, bravest kids you’ve got in the building,” said a member of the party to the superintendent. “Give us some small ones, who are not afraid.”
The boys arrived. One by one they crept under the house; one by one they looked into the blackness of the hole, and one by one they drew back again. Their eyes glared and they soon became members of the back row of spectators.
Then Henry Matthews came up. He rode into the edge of the crowd on his bicycle, upon which he carried clothes for a tailor, to support his widowed mother.
“What’s the matter?” he inquired meekly. Some one broke the uncanny quietness for a moment and told him.
“Here’s another kid; try him,” whispered a man to the would-be rescuers who had grown despondent. Henry walked forward. They told him what it meant to go headfirst for perhaps twenty or thirty feet downward.
“Let me down,” said the frail boy quietly.
His feet were securely tied with a heavy rope. An electric light with an extension cord was placed in his hand. The boy gazed slowly about the peering faces and shoved his pale face into the blackness. Down he went, inch by inch, and then foot by foot. The rope disappeared, behind him for one yard, two yards, then[{64}] three, four, five, and six yards. He was still going down, and the light had disappeared in the blackness. The rope must have gone forty feet, thought the men at the other end of the line. Then:
“Pull,” came the faint command from down in the ground. The men at the other end smiled with eagerness as they carefully drew on the line. Then they looked at each other in excited expectation, for the load on the rope was heavier than when Harry descended.
Ten feet of the rope had been pulled to the surface, when the men’s faces changed. Their eyes again filled with fright. Quickly they drew on the line, and soon Henry, his body covered with mud, sticks, and rubbish, appeared alone. They gave him water, fanned him for a second, and his pale face began to show faint color again. Then he spoke.
“I pulled him about ten feet,” he panted, “but his hands—his hands—were so slick—the mud came off and he dropped back. He was on some sticks—sticks caught in the well—when I found him—I’m afraid he fell back through them. If he did, we can’t get him.”
Bennie’s mother fainted and was carried away. Other women, screamed and rushed about blindly. Bennie’s voice was getting fainter. Old men cried—men whose hearts had faced everything from the trials of the Civil War to modern troubles.
“Let me down again,” said the brave young rescuer, as he rubbed his face, as if to awaken to his undertaking.
Again his face disappeared, then his body, and then his feet. On and on he went down. Thirty-five feet of the grass rope had disappeared when the order to “pull” was heard far off. Anxiously, and with, less hope than before, the men pulled. The line was heavier as they pulled, foot after foot, above the surface.
The crying of a baby was heard down in the ground. The larger boy’s feet appeared at the top; then his body, and then his face.
Then—little Bennie, clasped by each wrist by a pair of muddy hands, appeared on earth again.
The women screamed and cried for the hundredth time that morning. The men, or rather, most of them, wept and then cheered. Now everybody cheered, and hundreds of voices let everybody within a block know that the romper-clad boy was in his mother’s arms. They also let those about know that Henry had emerged from beneath the house with eyes, hair, hands, and clothing covered with mud. They grabbed him; women kissed him, and men crowded about the boy.
“Haven’t got time to stop now,” said Henry. “Got to get back to the shop.” And he hurriedly washed the dirt from his face. But they wouldn’t let him go. They surged about the wondering lad and held him for a while, or at least until the praising crowds could press fifty dollars into his bread-earning little hands. Then he turned, jumped upon his bicycle, and rode speedily away, to deliver the clothes for the tailor, for the support of himself and his widowed mother.