When we asked how he dared go about so carelessly over a reeling abyss, he said they all did it; they all got used to it, or else got killed. Why, when the whistle blew we'd see men swinging and sliding and twisting their way down like a lot of circus performers. That's how they came to dinner; that's how they got back aloft. No, sir; they couldn't use life-lines; they moved about too much. Besides, what good would a life-line be to a man if the "falls" started at him with a ten-ton load, yes, or a twenty-ton load? That man has got to skip along pretty lively, sir, or he'll get hurt. Did he mean skip along over this web of boards and girders? I inquired. He certainly did, and we'd see plenty of it, if we stayed up long. The artist and I shook our heads as we looked down that skeleton roadway, gaping open everywhere between girders and planks, in little gulfs, ten feet wide, five feet wide, two feet wide, quite wide enough to make the picture of a man skipping over them a very solemn thing.
Our friend went on to tell us how the riveters often get into tight places, say on the tower, where there is so little room for the forge-man to heat his bolts that he has to throw them up to the hammer-man, twenty or thirty feet.
"What!" exclaimed the artist. "Throw red-hot bolts twenty or thirty feet up the tower!"
"That's what they do; and we've got boys who are pretty slick at it. They'll grab a bolt out of the fire with long-handled nippers, and give her a swing and a twist, and away she goes sizzling through the air straight at the man above; and say, they don't miss him once in a hundred times; and, what's more, they never touch a truss or girder. If they did there'd be a piece of red-hot iron sailing down on the lads below, and that wouldn't be good for their health."
"How does the hammer-man catch these red-hot bolts?" I asked.
"In a bucket. Catches 'em every time. That's a thing you want to see, too."
There were so many things we wanted to see in this strange region! And presently we set forth down the iron street, keeping in mind a parting caution of the riveter not to look at our feet, but at the way before us, and never to look down. As we edged ahead cautiously (no skipping along for us, thanks, but pausing often, and holding fast to whatever offered support), we saw that all the bridge-men come over the girders, eyes straight ahead, in a shuffling, flat-footed way, without much bend in the knees. Look, there comes one of them in from the end of a long black arm that pushes out like a bowsprit over the gulf! He has been hanging out there, painting the iron. In the pose of his body he is a tight-rope walker, in the hitch of his legs he is a convict, in the blank stare of his face he is a somnambulist. Really he is nothing so complicated, but an every-day bridge-man earning a hard living; and his wife would be torn with fears could she see him now.
Presently we came to the busiest scene on the structure, down where the covered part ended and the iron roadway reached on, bare of framework, to the tower. Here the "traveler" was working with a double gang of men, raising a skeleton of sides and cross-beams that were pushing on, pushing on day by day, and would finally stretch across the river. Once on the "traveler's" deck, we breathed easier, for here we were safe from fearsome crevasses, safe on a great wide raft of iron and timber, set on double railroad tracks, a lumbering steam-giant that goes resounding along, when the need is, with its weight of four locomotives, its three-story derricks swinging out great booms at the corners, its thumping niggerhead engines (two of them) for the hoisting, its coal-bins, its water-tanks, its coils of rope, its pile of lumber, and its mascot kitten, curled up there by the ash-box in a workman's coat. They say the bridge has to wait when that kitten wants her dinner, and woe to the man who would treat the little thing unkindly!
This "traveler," with its gangs, is a sort of gigantic sewing-machine that stitches the bridge together; it lifts all the parts into place and binds them fast, as it were, with basting-threads of temporary iron, to hold until the riveters arrive for the permanent sewing. Five or six tons is the weight of ordinary pieces handled by the traveler, but some pieces weigh twenty tons, and, on a pinch, forty tons could be managed, the weight of six elephants like Jumbo. Of course, when I say that the traveler "stitches" these pieces together, I really mean that the "traveler" gangs do this, for the big brute booms can only lift things and swing things; the bolt-driving and end-fitting must be done by little men.
