Argosy, Vol. 112, No. 2 — page 22: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

= them to wield as a club whereby to get = themselves bought off from making any trouble. ; No reasonable union could have found a ground of complaint with Grout. His workmen had often found him ready to take their side against a company for which he and they were working, but only when there was just cause for dissatisfaction. Twice in his dife he had struck with his men. But the precious pair he had uncere- moniously dumped into a box-car were not the principals of the scheme. He became surer of that, as he thought them over. Cleverer, nervier men than they had set them on to see what would happen to them. And by being a little slower he might have learned who the‘principals were. Too late for that now. But it was not too late to get down to the work under his hand. Too long he had sat there, unable to do anything but answer the telephone in a panic of fear lest it be the cable-office relaying Norma’s message to him—and the wrong message. He got up and put on his hat. He strode down the path to the bridge and out upon it. He cleared up orders he had failed to make clear to McGrath. “Wanted on the telephone, sir ’’—from the head foreman of a raising gang, step- ping from one of the numerous booths about the structure—failed to overcome the stiffening of his nerve. “ Who is it?” he asked with at least per- fect outward calm. ‘“ Hogan, I think, sir,” said the foreman. “Tell him I’m coming right .over,” Grout replied. He turned and looked to where the conveyer traveler was just lifting a heavy girder. He hurried back and boarded it. But even here, as he was borne along over the top of the colossal thing of his building, there was a sense of strain rather than any of the slight thrill of exultation he usually experienced on the highest points of the bridges he built. His mind would revert to the possibility of the cable mes- sage coming while he was on the other side, being delayed an extra moment in getting to him. same THE ARGOSY. He had reached almost exactly the point beyond the farthest beams of the bracket where, yesterday, Antonio Goro had so nearly started a hurtling plunge to the depths below, when a shout arose on shore, and the traveler was suddenly halted. “ Cablegrama! Cablegrama!” he caught the words of the shout. It was borne along to the end of the bridge. Less than thirty feet from him, in a wooden box tied to the barely finished truss, a telephone bell rang. The switchboard operator was putting the connection to the nearest instrument. Mc- Grath opened the box, then waved to him. It was not more than six feet down; it was a bit less than six feet behind the point at which he stood on the hanging girder to the end of the top chord of the truss as thus far completed. That chord was a lattice box-girder twenty~ inches wide. Grout crouched for the leap. It was less than he had done a thousand times. A moment he stood thus, in the half- crouching position. Then his face grew whitish under the bronze tan. An expres- sion of amazement spread over it. At the instant the engineer started the traveler backward. Grout lowered himself to hang by the hands, dropped off at a cross-brace of the truss. But there he paused a moment, look- ing out at the end of the top chord— on beyond it. Why hadn’t he jumped? What had stopped him? He had been scared! Somehow, the thought of it slowed his intended rush for the telephone-box, to which he now climbed down one of the diagonals. He could not sense any fear in the climbing, nor yet in walking the ten or twelve feet over a ten-inch girder to the box. It was all at giddy height, where a misstep would be one of a thousand feet down. But he had never been afraid of anything before. But he got it again, enough of it to make him hesitate a second, as he turned from the box after hanging up the receiver. There was a two-foot open space between the plank-walk in the middle and the side girders, on one of which he had stood to telephone. A thrill of indefinable dread of that two feet of space, a throb of relief at COmicboo