Careers of Danger and Daring

by Cleveland Moffett

There came a day, for instance—this was a long time ago—when a swift flame swept through one of the mixing-rooms, nearly empty of powder at the time, yet so permeated with the stuff in floor and walls that instantly the building was burning fiercely. No man can say what started it. The cause of trouble at a powder-mill is seldom known; it comes too quickly, and usually leaves no witness. A nail overlooked in a workman's heel may have done the harm by striking a stone, though of course there is an imperative rule that all footgear made with nails be left outside the walls; or a heavy box slid along the wooden floor may have brought a flash out of the dry timbers. At any rate, the flash came, and the blaze followed on it so swiftly that the building was wrapped in fire before men inside could reach the door, and they presently burst out blazing themselves, for their clothing, as it must be, was sifted through with explosive dust. Indeed, it is always true in fires at powder-mills that the workmen themselves are a serious menace to the buildings by reason of their own inflammability.

So the next thing was a plunge into the placid Brandywine, which winds across the yards between willow-hung banks. In went the men, in went young Alexis Dupont, and with a little hiss their flaming garments were extinguished. Then, as they struck out into the stream, they looked back and saw that the wind was carrying a shower of sparks from the burning building to the roof of a cutting-mill near by, where tons of powder lay. For one of the sparks to reach the tiniest powder train would mean the blowing up of this mill, and almost certainly the blowing up of another and another by the concussion, for it is in vain that they try to protect powder-mills by scattering them over wide yards in many little buildings. When one explodes, the great shock usually sets off others, as a falling rock turns loose an avalanche.

All this young Dupont realized in a single glance. There would be an awful disaster presently, with many lives imperiled, unless those falling firebrands could somehow be kept off that roof. To know this was to act. Millionaire or not, peril or not, it was his plain duty as a Dupont to fight those sparks, and, without a moment's wavering, he turned back and scrambled up the bank.

YOUNG DUPONT WORKING TO SAVE THE POWDER-MILL.

"Come on, boys!" he cried; "start the bucket line," and a moment later he was climbing to the roof of the threatened mill, where he did all that a brave man can do—stamped out the falling embers, dashed water again and again upon the kindling fire as the men passed up full buckets, and for a time seemed to conquer. But presently the fire flamed hotter, the sparks came faster, and the water came not fast enough. He saw—he must have seen—that the struggle was hopeless, that the mill beneath him was doomed, that the explosion must come soon. From the ground they shouted, calling on him to save himself. He shouted back an order that they pass up more water, and keep passing water. There was only one thing in the world he wanted—water.

The men below did their best, but it was a vain effort, for in those days the roofs of powder-mills were made of pitch and cement—not of iron, as to-day—and by this time the fire had eaten its way nearly through. Alexis Dupont, working desperately, stood there with flames spreading all around him. It was plain to every one that the minutes of his life were numbered. Again they shouted—and—

The explosion came like an execution, and out of the wreck of it they bore away his crushed and broken body. The last thing he knew was that he had played the game out fairly to the end—he died like a Dupont, said the men.

Such was the spirit of the second generation (Alexis Dupont was a son of old Eleuthere, founder of the line), and later we find the same courage in the third generation, as on March 29, 1884, when La Motte Dupont, one of the grandchildren, took his stand inside the dynamite-mill—his mill—when it was threatened by fire, and stayed there after every man had left it, struggling with hand and brain against the danger until the explosion, coming like a thousand cannon, crashed his body deep into a sand-heap and left it with the life gone out.