Careers of Danger and Daring

by Cleveland Moffett

Merrill shook his head. "No, they said it was lightning; but it's queer how lightning could kill a man without being seen, isn't it?"

Then Merrill gave an experience of his own with a thunderbolt. It was during this same busy summer of 1900, while he and his partner were scraping the great steel smoke-stack that rises from ground to roof along one side of the American Tract Society Building, that towering structure which looks down with contempt, no doubt, upon ordinary church steeples.

"We were in our saddles," Merrill explained, "swung down about two thirds of the smoke-stack's length, when some black clouds warned us of danger, and we hauled ourselves up to the roof. My partner, Walter Tyghe, got off his saddle and stood there where my wife was waiting (she often goes to climbing-jobs with me—she's less anxious when she can watch me); but I thought the storm was passing over, and kept on scraping, sort of half resting on the cornice, half on my saddle. Suddenly a bolt shot down from a little pink cloud just overhead, and splintered a big flagpole I had just put halyards on, and then jumped past us all so close that it knocked Walter over, and made me sick and giddy so that I fell back limp on my saddle-board, and swung there helpless until my wife pulled the trip-rope that opens the lock-block and drew me in from the edge. That's not the first time she's been on deck at the right minute. Once she came up a steeple to tell me something, and found the hauling-line smoldering from my helper's cigarette. If that line had burned through it would have dropped me to the ground from the steeple-top, saddle, lock-block, and all. The man with the cigarette was so scared he quit smoking for good and all."

"'THEN MY PARTNER STOOD ON MY SHOULDERS.'"

Here, in reply to my question, Merrill explained the working of a lock-block, which is simply a pulley that allows a rope to pass through it, but will not let it go back. With this block the steeple-climber can be hauled up easily, but cannot fall, even if the man hauling should let go the rope. When it is necessary to descend, a pull on the trip-rope releases a safety-catch and the saddle goes down.

"Do steeple-climbers always work in pairs?" I asked him.

"Usually. It would be hard for one man to do a steeple alone. There are lots of places where you must have some one to fasten a rope or hold the end of a plank or pass you something. Besides, it wouldn't be good for a man's mind to be spending days and days upon steeples all alone. It's bad enough with a partner to talk to. That makes me think of poor old Dan O'Brien. If I hadn't been up with him one day—" Merrill checked himself and changed the subject.

"I'll give you a case where a man alone could never have done the thing, I don't care how clever a steeple-climber he might be. It was on St. Paul's, New York, after we had finished the job and taken everything down. Then somebody noticed that the weather-vane on top of the ball wasn't turning properly. I knew in a minute what the matter was; it was easy enough to fix it, but the thing was to reach the weather-vane. I don't mean that the climb up the steeple was anything; we had done that before; but if I tried to climb around that big ball again (it was the same sort of a wriggling business as that over the bulging stones at Trinity) I would be sure to scrape off a lot of the fine gilding we had just put on. And yet I couldn't get at the weather-vane without getting over the ball. I studied quite a while on this little problem, and solved it with my partner's help. We both climbed the steeple as far as the ball; we went up the lightning-rod; then we roped ourselves on the steeple-shaft by life-lines, and then my partner, that was Joe Lawlor, stood on my shoulders and did the job. You see it was easy enough that way."

"Easy enough!" Think of it! Two men clinging to the point of a steeple. One of them braces himself with the toes of his rubber shoes in crannies of the stone, and the other, balancing on his shoulders like a circus performer, does a piece of work, no matter what, with a reeling abyss all around (what is looking over a precipice compared to this?), and all the time the spire swaying back and forth like a forest tree. And then you hear that, instead of getting a large sum for such an achievement, these men, taking it through the year, get scarcely more than ordinary workmen's wages.