"ITS MASCOT KITTEN, CURLED UP THERE BY THE ASH-BOX."
When we arrived the "traveler" was bringing to one spot the massive parts of a cross-section in our arbor-way. It was a stretched-out iron W, flattened down between girders across top and bottom. This, we learned, was a "strut," and it weighed sixteen tons, and it would presently be lifted bodily overhead to span the roadway. We waited a full hour to see this thing done—to watch another stitch taken in the bridge; and it seems to me, as I think of it, that I can recall no hour when I saw so many perils faced with such indifference.
First, the booms would drop down their clanking jaws and grip the chain-bound girders from little delivery cars, then swing them around to the lifting-place at the farther end of the traveler. Now we understood what our friend down the way meant by "skipping along lively when the falls come at you." He meant this boom-tackle and its load as they sweep over the structure in blind, merciless force. And, indeed, they did skip along, the bridge-men, as the traveler turned its arms this way and that, and several times I saw a man slip as he hurried, and barely save himself. A single misstep might mean the crush of a ten-ton mass, or a plunge into space, or both. It seemed a pretty shivery choice.
"One of our boys got hit this morning," said a man.
"Hit by the falls?"
"Yes; he tried to dodge, but his foot caught somehow, and he got it hard right here." He touched his thigh. "It flattened him out, just over there where that man's making fast the load."
"Was he badly hurt?"
"Pretty bad, I guess. He couldn't get up, and we lowered him in a coal-box with a runner; that's a single line. You see, it's very easy to take a wrong step."
