It is quite certain this was the case in New York's recent tunnel accident near One Hundred and Eightieth Street, and I have some facts of interest here obtained from a workman who was in the main gallery at the time. This man heard a shout of warning, and, looking down the rock street, saw a puddle of blazing oil from one of the lamps lapping at the side of a heavy wooden box. He knew that the box was full of dynamite, and as he looked he saw the yellow oil flame turn to blue. That was enough for him, and he started to run for his life. But the explosion caught him in the first step, lifted him from the ground, and bore him on, while his legs kept up the motions of running. He was running on the air.
As he was thus hurled along his knee struck a large stone between the siding and the north heading, and he fell on his face, half dazed. The air was thick with strangling fumes, there was a frightful din about him—yells and crashing stones. Every lamp had been blown out, and in the utter darkness he could see the glaring eyeballs of fleeing negroes, who cursed in awful oaths as they ran. He pressed his mouth close to the ground, and found he could breathe better. He felt some one step over him, and seized a leg. The leg kicked itself free and went on. He groped about with his hands, and touched an iron rail; it was the little track for hauling the dumping-cars. He crept along this painfully to the siding, then down the siding to the shaft, where, in the blackness, he found a frantic company—negroes mad with fright, Italians screaming and praying, Irishmen keeping fairly cool, but wondering why, oh, why! the elevator did not come, and several men stretched on the ground quite still or groaning quietly.
Time lacks for the rest of the story; they took out men dressed in a collar and shirt-band only—everything else blown off, and some whose faces were mottled with fragments of stone, a kind of dynamite tattooing, and some grievously injured. There are no limits to the fury of dynamite, once it sets out to be cruel.
II
WE VISIT A DYNAMITE-FACTORY AND MEET A MAN WHO THINKS COURAGE IS AN ACCIDENT
ON a certain pleasant morning in June, I set forth to visit a dynamite-factory, and see with my own eyes, if might be, some of the men who follow this strange and hazardous business. As the train rushed along I thought of the power for good and evil that is in this wonderful agent: dynamite piercing mountains; dynamite threatening armies and blowing up great ships; a teacupful of dynamite shattering a fortress, a teaspoonful of the essence of dynamite—that is, nitroglycerin—tearing a man to atoms. What kind of fellows must they be who spend their lives making dynamite!
In due course I found myself back in the hill land of northern New Jersey, where everything is green and quiet, a lovely summer's retreat with nothing in external signs to suggest an industry of violence. Stop; here is a sign, though it doesn't seem much: two sleepy wagons lumbering along the road between these cool woods and the waving fields. Farm produce? Lumber? No. The first is loaded with a sort of yellow meal, and trails the way with yellow sprinklings. That is sulphur. They use it at the works. The second is piled up with crates, out of which come thick glass necks like the heads of imprisoned turkeys. These are carboys of nitric acid, hundreds of gallons of that terrible stuff which is so truly liquid fire that a single drop of it on a piece of board will set the wood in flames. This nitric acid mixed with innocent sweet glycerin (it comes along the road in barrels) makes nitroglycerin, and the proper mixing of these two is the chief business of a dynamite-factory.
Farther down the road I came to a railroad track where a long freight-train was standing on a siding. Some men were busy here loading a car with clean-looking wooden boxes that might have held starch or soap, but did hold dynamite neatly packed in long, fat sticks like huge fire-crackers. Each box bore this inscription in red letters: high explosives. dangerous. I looked along the train and saw that there were several cars closed and sealed, with a sign nailed on the outside: powder. handle carefully.