ADVENTURE NUMBER EIGHTEEN
AN ADVENTURE IN SAFETY
Betty told Sure Pop what Bob had said about getting a job in one of the big mills by and by, and the little Colonel remembered it a few weeks later when he was showing several of the Safety Scouts through the steel mills.
"Do you think it will be one of these mills you'll pick out for your first job?"
"Well, I don't know, now. It's a pretty big, lonesome sort of place for a fellow like me, Sure Pop, and there don't seem to be so many fellows of my own age here as in some of the other factories."
Betty and Joe and Chance followed Bob's eyes around the big steel mill yards. They knew how he felt. It was a lonesome looking place till you got used to it, in spite of the thousands of men who swarmed around them. The queer, raw smell of the reddish iron ore added to the feeling, too.
Away down in the big ore boats along the docks, gangs of big, brawny workmen strained and sweated, filling the iron buckets that traveled up the wire cables to the ore dumps. Others were trucking the ore to the furnaces, while a swarm of little switch engines panted and puffed back and forth over the network of steel rails.
The steel works covered many acres of ground, and, shut off as they were by high fences, seemed almost like another world. The roar of the furnaces and the din of steel on steel made Betty and the boys feel rather confused at first. "I should think all these men just over from the old country would get mixed up, so many of them not understanding a single word of English," said Betty to their guide.
"Yes, we have to be mighty careful," said the man, who was one of the Safety men who gave all his time to making the steel mills safer for the thousands of workmen. "We print this little book of Safety Rules in all the different languages, so that each new man can study it and find out how to do his day's work without getting into danger."
"Wow! what's that?" Joe's black eyes opened very wide as he pointed to a great ball of fire that rose from one of the furnace stacks, floated a little way like a balloon, and then burst into a sheet of flame.
"Just the gas from the blast furnace—regular Fourth of July fireworks, isn't it? I remember how queer those gas bubbles used to look to me when I first came to work here."
He waited while his visitors stared for a few minutes at the fiery clouds, then led the way to the blast furnaces. They went through two or three big buildings, all of them fairly alive with hurrying, sweating laborers. But in spite of the seeming confusion all around them, Bob noticed how carefully the aisles and passageways were kept free and clear of anything the hurrying men might stumble over.
"We simply have to do it," explained the steel man. "Before we woke up to the importance of never leaving anything in the way where it might be stumbled over, we had more broken arms and legs every month than you could shake a stick at. Now it's different; it's as much as a man's job is worth to leave anything lying in the passageways for his fellow workmen to stumble and fall over."
"I saw some white lines painted on the floor of that last room we came through, the one where all those castings were stacked up in rows," said Chance. "Was that what they were for? Great scheme, isn't it? And as simple as falling off a log!"
"Simple? Sure—most of these things are simple enough, once you think of them," agreed their guide. "It took perhaps an hour of one man's time and a gallon or two of white paint to paint those dead-lines along the sides—and many's the man who has been saved weeks in the hospital by those same white lines."
The five friends followed him into the foundry department. Hardly had they stepped through the doorway, when the clang of a big gong overhead scattered a group of laborers who were piling heavy castings on flat cars.
Five pairs of eyes looked up as the five Safety Scouts turned to see where the gong was. Away up above them on a track that went from one end of the long room to the other, they saw something like an oddly shaped freight engine running along with a heavy wire cable dangling toward the floor. The big, strong cable was carrying a load of several tons of steel castings as easily as a boy carries in an armful of wood. "And with a whole lot less fuss and bother!" said Betty, with a sly look at Brother Bob.
"When a man hears that gong overhead," said the guide, "he knows what it means even before he looks up. That's what is called a traveling crane. It runs back and forth on those overhead tracks, wherever the crane driver wants to pick up or drop his load. He kicks that gong with his heel, just like the motorman on the street car, and it gives warning to the workmen below just as plainly as if it yelled out, 'Look out, below! Here comes a load that might spill on your heads!'"
"Sounds exactly like a street-car gong," said Betty.
The steel man smiled. "It ought to—it was made for use on a street car. Watch sharp when the crane comes back this way and you'll see the gong fastened right up under the cab floor. See? We tried whistles for a while, and automobile horns, too; but this plain, everyday street-car gong beats 'em all. A man doesn't have to understand English to know what that sound means!"
"It must have made a good deal of difference in the number of accidents," said Sure Pop, "with so many men working underneath those cranes right along."
"Did it? Well, I should say so! That's another little thing that's as simple as A B C, but it saves lives and broken bones just the same. Sometimes I think we get to thinking too much about the big things, Colonel, and not enough about these little, everyday ideas that spell Safety to all these thousands of men who look to us for a square deal."
Sure Pop reached up to say something in Bob's ear as they went on to the chipping yard, where long rows of men were trimming down the rough steel castings with chisels driven by compressed-air hammers.
"Did you ever see anything like it, Bob, the way this 'square deal' and 'fair play' idea gets into their systems, once they wake up to the possibilities of Safety First?"
"It certainly does," said Bob. "I thought of that, too. It's what that tailor told the boys in the clothing factory, the day we got our uniforms, and it's just what the foreman in that machine shop told us, too."
"Yes, sir," said Sure Pop, "the spirit of fair play means everything to a fellow who's any good at all—it's the very life of the Boy Scout law, you know."
Joe was looking hard at the chippers.
"Every one of those men wear glasses! Isn't that queer!"
"It's all the difference between a blind man and a wage earner," was the way the steel man looked at it. "When those steel chips fly into a man's eyes it's all over but the sick money." He turned to little Sure Pop again. "There it is again, Colonel—another of the simplest ideas a man could imagine—just putting goggles on our chippers and emery wheel workers—but it has saved hundreds and hundreds of eyes, and every eye or pair of eyes means some man's living—and the living of a family."
"Splendid idea," nodded the little Colonel—just as if he, the Spirit of Safety, had not thought it all out years before, and put it into the minds of men! "Do you ever have any trouble getting the men to wear them?"
"Plenty! Most of the men treated it as a joke at first. Then, gradually, they began to notice that the men who wore theirs on their hats (the rule is that they must wear goggles while at this work or lose their jobs), those were the men who lost their eyes. Several of the first men to be blinded after the new rule was posted were those very ones, the chaps that had made the most fun of the goggles. Then the others began to wake up.
"Over in my office, I've several hundred pairs of goggles that have had one or both lenses smashed by flying bits of steel—and every pair has saved an eye, in some cases both eyes. Seems sort of worth while, eh, Colonel?"
It was an enthusiastic group of Safety Scouts that passed out through the big steel mill gates and started home in the mellow September twilight. "Oh, I think it's wonderful," cried Betty, as they talked over what they had seen, "perfectly wonderful, Sure Pop, that such little things can save so many lives!"
"But I don't see why you call a trip like this 'an adventure,'" broke in Chance, who had never been along on any of the twins' Safety Scouting trips before. "We didn't see an accident or an explosion or anything!"
Colonel Sure Pop gave Chance one of his wise smiles. "That's the best part of the whole trip, as you'll see when you've been at it as long as I have. The most delightful adventure a lover of fair play can possibly have to look back on, my boy, is one just like what we've had today—a real, live adventure in Safety!"
The spirit of fair play is the very life of the Scout Law.—Sure Pop
