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III
HOW JOSHUA PLUMSTEAD STUCK TO HIS NITROGLYCERIN-VAT IN AN EXPLOSION AND SAVED THE WORKS

I DROVE over from the works to Kenvil under the escort of a red-nosed man who discoursed on local matters, particularly on the prospects of his youngest son, who was eighteen years old and earned three dollars a day.

"What does he do?" I asked.

"He's a packer," said the red-nosed man.

"What does he pack?"

"Dynamite. Guess there ain't no other stuff he c'd pack an' get them wages. Jest the same, I wish he'd quit, specially sence the big blow-up t' other day."

"Why, what blew up?" I inquired.

"Freezing-house did with an all-fired big lot of nitroglycerin. Nobody knows what set her off. Reg'lar miracle there wa'n't a lot killed. Man in charge, feller named Ball, he went out to look at a water-pipe. Hadn't been out the door a minute when off she went. Say, you'd oughter seen the boys run! They tell me some of 'em jumped clean through the winders, sashes an' all. If ye want to know more about it, there's my boy now; he was right near the house when it happened."

We drew up at the Kenvil hotel, where a young man was sitting. Here was the modern dynamite-worker, and not at all as I had pictured him. He looked like a summer boarder who liked to take things easy and wear good clothes. Wondering much, I sat down and talked to this young man, a skilful dynamite-packer, it appears, who happened at the time to be taking a day off.

"They put me at machine-packing a few days ago," he said, "and it's made my wrist lame. Going to rest until Monday."

After some preliminaries I asked him about the process of packing dynamite, and he explained how the freshly mixed explosive is delivered at the various packing-houses in little tubs, a hundred pounds to a tub, and how they dig into it with shovels, and mold it into shape on the benches like so much butter, and ram it into funnels, and finally, with the busy tamping of rubber-shod sticks, squeeze it down into the paper shells that form the cartridges. One would say they play with concentrated death as children play with sawdust dolls, but he declared it safe enough.

"How large are the cartridges?" I asked.

"Oh, different sizes. The smallest are about eight inches long, and the largest thirty. And they vary from one inch thick up to two and a half. I know a man who carried a thirty-inch cartridge all the way to Morristown in an ordinary passenger-car. He had it wrapped in a newspaper, under his arm like a big loaf of bread. But say, he took chances, all right."

At this another man informed us that people often carry nitroglycerin about with them, and take no risk, by simply pouring it into a big bottle of alcohol. Then it can do no harm; and when they want to use the explosive, they have only to evaporate the alcohol.

The talk turned to precautions taken against accidents. In all powder-mills the workmen are required to change their clothes before entering the buildings, and to put on rubber-soled shoes. There must be no bit of metal about a man's person, no iron nail or buckle, nothing that could strike fire; and of course the workman who would bring a match on the premises would be counted worse than an assassin.

"Just the same, though, matches get into the works once in a while," remarked the young packer. "I found a piece of a match one day in a tub of dynamite; it had the head on, too. Say, it's bad enough to find buttons and pebbles, but when I saw that match-head – well, it made me weak in the knees."

This brought back the old question, When does dynamite explode, and when does it not explode? I mentioned the red-spark theory.

"I think that's correct," agreed the packer. "I've watched 'em burn old dynamite-boxes, and if there are iron nails in the boxes they explode as soon as the nails get red-hot; if there are no nails, they don't explode."

"You mean empty boxes?" I asked.

"Certainly; but there's nitroglycerin in the wood, lots of it. It oozes out of the dynamite, especially on a hot day, and soaks into everything. Why, I suppose there's enough nitroglycerin in the overalls I wear to blow a man into – well, I wouldn't want to lay 'em on an anvil and give 'em a whack with a sledge."

There was a certain novelty to me in the thought of a pair of old overalls exploding; but I was soon to hear of stranger things. By this time other workmen had drawn up chairs, and were ready now with modest contributions from their own experience.

"Tell ye a queer thing," said one man. "In that explosion the other day, – I mean the freezing-house, – a car loaded with powder [dynamite] had just passed, not a minute before the explosion. Lucky for the three men with the car, wasn't it? But what gets me is how the blast, when it came, blew the harness off the horse. Yes, sir; that's what it did – clean off; and away he went galloping after the men as hard as he could leg it. Nobody touched a buckle or a strap. It was dynamite unhitched that animal."

"Dynamite did another trick that day," put in a tall man. "It caught a bird on the wing. Dunno whether 'twas a robin or a swaller, but 'twas a bird, all right. Caught it in a sheet of tin blowed off the roof, an' jest twisted that little bird all up as it sailed along, and when it struck the ground, there was the bird fast in a cage made in the air out of a tin roof. Alive? Yes, sir, alive; and that shows how fast dynamite does business."

So the talk ran on, with many little details of explosions. The expert explained that the air waves of a great concussion move along with crests and troughs like water waves, and the shattering effect comes only at the crests, so that all the windows might be broken in a house, say, half a mile from an explosion, and no windows be broken in a house two hundred yards nearer. The first house would have been smitten by a destructive wave crest, the second passed over by a harmless wave trough. And, by the way, when windows are broken by these blasts of concussion, it appears that they are usually broken outward, not inward, and that the fragments are found on the ground outside the house, not on the floors inside. The reason of this is that the concussion waves leave behind them a partial vacuum, and windows are broken by the air inside houses rushing out.

"How about thunder-storms?" I asked.

"There is always danger," said the expert, "and all hands hurry out of the works as soon as the lightning begins to play. If a bolt struck a lot of dynamite it would set it off."

Then he explained that the policy of dynamite manufacturers is to handle explosives in small quantities, say a ton at a time, each lot being finished and hauled away in wagons before another lot is started. This is possible because of the short time occupied in making dynamite. He assured me, for instance, that if there were only raw materials at the works on a certain morning when the seven-o'clock whistle blew, it would be perfectly possible to have a ton of dynamite-cartridges finished, packed in boxes, and loaded on freight-cars by nine o'clock.

After this some one told of a thrilling happening in the mixing-house, by the great vat, wherein nitroglycerin is mixed with porous earth, called dope, and becomes dynamite. Over this vat four men work continually, two with rakes, two with hoes, kneading half a ton or more of explosive dough to the proper consistency.

One day a powder-car loaded with heavy stone got loose on its track a quarter of a mile up the slope, and started down the steep grade. The tracks ran straight into the mixing-house. The switch was open, and the first thing these men knew, there was an angry clang at the switch, and then a swift, heavy car was plunging toward the open door, with every chance that it would set off twelve hundred pounds of dynamite there. Workmen outside shouted, and then stared in horror. Not a man in the mixing-house moved. All four kept their places around the vat, held tight to their rakes and hoes, while the car, just missing the dynamite, hurled its mass of two tons through the back wall of the building, and spent its force against a tree-trunk. There was no explosion, and nothing happened, which was something of a miracle; but what impressed me was that these four men stood still, not from courage, but because they were frozen with fear!

While there is danger in every step of dynamite manufacture, it appears that the center of peril is in the nitrating-house, where the fresh glycerin is mixed with nitric acid, or, more correctly, is nitrated by it. This operation takes place in a great covered vat about which are many pipes and stop-cocks. A man stands here like an engineer at the throttle, watching his thermometer and letting in fresh glycerin. These are his two duties, and upon the right performance of them depends the safety of the works. Every hour he must let in some seven hundred pounds of glycerin upon the deadly acid, and every hour he must draw off some fifteen hundred pounds of nitroglycerin and let it go splashing away in a yellowish stream down the long, uncovered trough that leads to the separating-house yonder. From this separating-house runs another trough to the freezing-house, and a third to the distant mixing-house. These three troughs inclose an oblong space, at the corners of which stand the nitrating-house, the separating-house, and the freezing-house. In each one of these, at any hour of the day, is a wagon-load of pure nitroglycerin, while in the three troughs are little rivers of nitroglycerin always flowing.

The arrangement of buildings in this part of the works makes clearer what was done at the nitrating-house by a certain Joshua Plumstead in the recent explosion. Joshua is a veteran at dynamite-making. He has worked at the nitrating-vat for twenty-five years, and has probably made more nitroglycerin than any one man in the world. He has been through all the great explosions; he has seen many men killed; he has stood by time and again when his own nitrating-vat has taken fire; and yet he always comes through safely. They say there is no man like Joshua for nerve and judgment when the demons of gas and fire begin to play.

This explosion took place at the freezing-house, which is the one place in all the works where dynamite is never expected to explode. Yet it did explode now, with a smashing of air and a horrible grinding underfoot that stifled all things in men but a mad desire to flee.

Joshua Plumstead was in the nitrating-house alone. His helper had fled. The roof timbers were crashing down about him. He heard the hiss of fire and the shouts of workmen running. He knew that a second explosion might come at any moment. There was danger from fire-brands and flying masses of stone and iron, danger from the open troughs, danger from the near-by houses. A shock, a spark anywhere here might mean the end.

Plumstead kept his eyes on the long thermometer that reached up from the furious smoking mass of oil and acid. The mercury had crept up from eighty-five to ninety, and was rising still. At ninety-five he knew the nitroglycerin would take fire, probably explode, and nothing could save it. The vat was seething with a full charge. Ninety-one! He shut off the inflow of glycerin. Ninety-two! Something might be wrong with the coils of ice-cold water that chill the vat down to safety. He opened the cocks full. Crash! came a beam from overhead, and narrowly missed the gearing of the agitating-blades. Were they to stop but for a single second, the nitroglycerin would explode. He eased the bearings, turned on compressed air, watched the thermometer – and waited.

There was no other man but Plumstead who did wait that day; there was none but he whose waiting could avail anything. He had to fight it out alone with that ton of nitroglycerin, or run and let an explosion come far worse than the other. He fought it out; he waited, and he won. Gradually the thermometer dropped to eighty-five, to eighty, and the danger was passed.

But – well, even the superintendent admitted that Joshua did a rather fine thing here, while the workmen themselves and the people of Kenvil shake their heads solemnly and vow that he saved the works.

THE LOCOMOTIVE ENGINEER

I
HOW IT FEELS TO RIDE AT NIGHT ON A LOCOMOTIVE GOING NINETY MILES AN HOUR

IT is 8.30 p. m., any night you please, and for miles through the yards of East Chicago lights are swinging, semaphore arms are moving, men in clicking signal-towers are juggling with electric buttons and pneumatic levers, target lights on a hundred switches are changing from red to green, from green to red; everything is clear, everything is all right, the Lake Shore Mail is coming, with eighty tons of letters and papers in its pouches. Relays of engines and engineers have brought these messages, this news of the world, thus far on their journey. Up the Hudson they have come, and across the Empire State and along the shores of Lake Michigan, nearly a thousand miles in twenty-four hours, which is not so bad, although the hottest, maddest rush is yet to come.

It is a fine thing to know the men who drive the engines on these trains; just to see them is something, and to make them talk (if you can do it) is better business than interviewing most celebrities you have heard about.

To this end I set out, one evening early in January, for the great round-house of the Northwestern road, that lies on the outskirts of Chicago. A strange place, surely, is this to one who approaches it unprepared – a place where yellow eyes glare out of deep shadows, where fire-dragons rush at you with crunchings and snortings, where the air hisses and roars. It might be some demon menagerie, there in the darkness.

To this place of fears and pitfalls I came an hour or so before starting-time, and here I found Dan White, one of the Northwestern crack-a-jacks, giving the last careful touches to locomotive 908 before the night's hard run. In almost our first words my heart was won by something White said. I had mentioned Frank Bullard of the Burlington road, a rival by all rights, and immediately this bluff, broad-shouldered man exclaimed: "Ah, he's a fine fellow, Bullard is, and he knows how to run an engine." White would fight Bullard at the throttle to any finish, but would speak only good words of him.

"Tell me," said I, "about the great run you made the other night." From a dozen lips I had heard of White's tremendous dash from Chicago to Clinton, Iowa.

"Oh, it wasn't much; we had to make the time up, and we did it. Didn't we, Fred?"

This to the fireman, who nodded in assent, but said nothing.

"You made a record, didn't you?"

"Well, we went one hundred and thirty-eight miles in one hundred and forty-three minutes; that included three stops and two slow-downs. I don't know as anybody has beat that – much."

By dint of questioning, I drew from this modest man some details of his achievement. The curve-bent stretch of seventeen miles between Franklin Grove and Nelson they did in fourteen minutes, and a part of this, beyond Nachusa, they took at an eighty-mile pace. They covered five miles between Clarence and Stanwood in three minutes and a half, and they made two miles beyond Dennison at over a hundred miles an hour. As the mail rushed west, word was flashed ahead, and crowds gathered at the stations to cheer and marvel.

"There must have been five hundred people on the platform at Dixon," said White, telling the story, "and they looked to me like a swarm of ants, just a black, wriggling mass, and then they were gone. We came on to a bridge there after a big reverse curve with a down grade, and I guess no one will ever know how fast we were going, as we slammed her around one way and then slammed her around the other way. It was every bit of ninety miles an hour. You got all you wanted, didn't you, Fred?"

The fireman looked up, torch in hand, and remarked, in a dry monotone: "Goin' through Dixon I said my prayers and hung on, stretched out flat. That's what I done."

"Fred and I," continued White, "both got letters about the run from the superintendent. Here's mine, if you'd like to read it."

The pleasure of these two blackened men over this graciousness of the superintendent was a thing to see. For such a bit of paper, crumpled and smeared with oil, I believe they would have taken the Mississippi at a jump, engine, train, and all. Superintendent's orders, superintendent's praise – there is the beginning and end of all things for them.

My first long ride on one of these splendid locomotives was with the Burlington night mail (no passengers), 590 pulling her and Frank Bullard at the throttle. It is said that the Baldwin Locomotive Works never turned out a faster engine than this 590. The man must be a giant whose head will top her drivers, and, for all her seventy tons, there is speed in every line of her. She is a young engine, too – only four years old – and Bullard swears he will back her in the matter of getting over rails to do anything that steel and steam can do. "She's willing and gentle, sir, and easy running. You'll see in a minute."

These words from Bullard, first-class engine-driver of the C. B. & Q., a long, loosely jointed man, with the eye and build of a scout. As he spoke they were coupling us to the mail-cars, in preparation for the start. In overalls and sweater I had come, with type-written authority to make the run that night. This was in the first week in January, the second time Bullard had drawn the throttle for Burlington on the new fast schedule. Burlington lay off there in Iowa, on the Mississippi, with all the night and all the State of Illinois between us.

Now the train stands ready – three mail-cars and the engine, not a stick besides. No Pullman comforts here, no bunks for sleeping, no man aboard who has the right to sleep. Everything is hustle and business. Already the mail clerks are swarming at the pouches, like printers on a rush edition. See those last bags swung in through the panel doors! Not even the president of the road may ride here without a permit from the government.

Bullard takes up a red, smoking torch and looks 590 over. He fills her cups, and prods a two-foot oiler into her rods and bearings. Dan Cleary, the fireman, looks out of his window on the left and chews complacently. Down the track beside him locomotive 1309 backs up, a first-class engine she, but 590 bulks over her as the king of a herd might over some good, ordinary working elephant. As she stands here now, purring through her black iron throat, 590 measures sixteen feet three inches from rails to stack-top. Both engines blow out steam, that rolls up in silver clouds to the electric lights.

Bullard climbs to his place at the right, and a hiss of air tells that he is testing the brakes. Under each car sixteen iron shoes close against sixteen wheels, and stay there. Down the length of the train goes the repair man with his kit, and makes sure that every contact is right, then pulls a rope four times at the rear, whereupon four hissing signals answer in the cab. Bullard shuts off the air.

"It's all there is to stop her with," says he, "so we take no chances with it. She's got high-speed brakes on her, 590 has – one hundred and ten pounds to the inch. Twenty-four, Dan," he adds, and snaps his watch. "We start at thirty."

Dan chews on. "Bad wind to-night," he says; "reg'lar gale."

Bullard nods. "I know it; we're fifteen minutes late, too."

"Make Burlington on time?"

"Got to: you hit it up, and I'll skin her. Twenty-six, Dan."

Four minutes to wait. Two station officials come up with polite inquiries. The thermometer is falling, they say, and we shall have it bitter cold over the plains. They reach up with cordial hand-shakes. I pull my cap down, and take my stand behind Bullard. Our side of the cab is quite cut off from the fireman's side by a swelling girth of boiler, which leaves an alleyway at right and left wide enough for a man's body and no wider. Bullard and I are in the right-hand alleyway, Bullard's back and black cap just before me. Dan, with his shovel, is out on a shaky steel shelf behind, that bridges the space between engine and tender. That is where he works, poor lad! We are breathing coal-dust and torch-smoke and warm oil.

"F-s-s-s-s-s!" comes the signal, and instantly we are moving. Lights flash about us everywhere – green lights, white lights, red lights, a phantasmagoria of drug-store bottles. The tracks shine yellow far ahead. A steady pounding and jarring begins, and grows like the roar of battle. Our cab heaves with the tugging of a captive balloon. Our speed increases amazingly. We seem constantly on the point of running straight through blocks of houses, and escape only by sudden and disconcerting swayings around curves that all lead, one will vow, straight into black chasms under the dazzle. Whoever rides here for the first time feels that he is ticketed for sure destruction, understands that this plunging engine must necessarily go off the rails in two or three minutes, say five at the latest; for what guidance, he reasons, can any man get from a million crazy lights, and who that is human can avoid a snarl in such a tangle of bumping switches? I am free to confess, for my own part, that I found the first half hour of my ride on 590 absolutely terrifying.

Thus, at break-neck speed, we come out of Chicago, all slow-going city ordinances to the contrary notwithstanding. We are chasing a transcontinental record schedule, and have fifteen minutes to make up. I breathe more freely as we get into open country. We are going like the wind, but the track is straighter, and the darkness comfortable. I begin to notice things with better understanding. As the lurches come, I brace myself against the boiler side without fear of burning; that is something learned. I find out later that I owe this protection to a two-inch layer of asbestos. I catch a faint sound of the engine bell, and discover, to my surprise, that it has been ringing from the start – indeed, it rings, without ceasing, all the way to Burlington, the rope pulled by a steam jerking contrivance, but the roar of the engine drowns it.

Deep shadows inwrap the cab, all the deeper for the glare that flashes through them every minute or two as Dan, back there on his iron shelf, stokes coal in at the red-hot door. Two faint lights burn for the gages – a jumping water column in front, a pair of wavering needles on the boiler. These Bullard watches coolly, and from time to time reaches back past me to turn the injector-cock, whereupon steam hisses by my head. For the most part he is quite still, like an Indian pilot, head forward at the lookout window, right hand down by the air-brake valve, left hand across the throttle lever, with only a second's jump to the reversing lever that rises up from the floor straight before him. As we race into towns and roar through them, he sounds the chime whistle, making its deep voice challenge the darkness. At curves he eases her with the brakes. And for grades and level stretches and bridges he notches the throttle up or down as the need is. Watch his big, strong grip on the polished handles! Think of the hours he spends here all alone, this man who holds life and death in his quick, sure judgment!

Now he catches the window-frame and slides it open. A blast sweeps in like an arctic hurricane. Bullard leans out into the night and seems to listen. "Try it," he cries, but his voice is faint. I put my head out, and come into a rush of air billows that strangle like breakers.

"Greggs – Hill – three – miles – long. Let – her – go – soon." He closes the window. And now, as we clear the grade, begins a burst of speed that makes the rest of small account. Faster and faster we go, until the very iron seems alive and straining underneath us. I am tossed about in hard pitches. The glow of the furnace lights up continuously. There is no sense of fear any longer. It is too splendid, what we are doing. Of course it means instant death if anything breaks. Let the massive side rod that holds the two drivers snap, and a half – ton knife sweeping seventy miles an hour will slice off our cab and us with it like a cut of cheese. Did not an engineer go to his death that way only last week on the Union Pacific run? After all, why not this death as well as any other? Have we not valves and tubes in our bodies that may snap at any moment!

"How – fast?" I call out.

"Eighty – miles – an – hour," says Bullard, close to my ear, and a moment later pulls the rope for a grade crossing. "Ooooo – ooooo – oo – oo," answers the deep iron voice, two long and two short calls, as the code requires. "Year – ago – killed – two – men – here," he shouts as we whiz over the road. "Struck – buggy – threw – men – sixty – feet." I wonder how far we would throw them now.

In the two hundred and six miles' run to the Mississippi we stop only twice – for water, at Mendota and at Galesburg – nine minutes wasted for the two, and the gale blowing harder. Our schedule makes allowance for no stops; every moment from our actual going is so much "dead time" that must be fought for, second by second, and made up. Drive her as he will, with all the cunning of his hand, Bullard can score but small gains against the wind. And some of these he loses. At Mendota we have made up seven minutes, but we pull out thirteen minutes late. At Princeton we are fifteen minutes late, at Galva fourteen minutes, at Galesburg eight minutes, but we pull out twelve minutes late. Then we make the last forty-three miles, including bridges, towns, grades, and curves, in forty-four minutes, and draw into Burlington at 1.22 a. m. – on time to the dot. This because Bullard had sworn to do it; also because the road beyond Galesburg runs west instead of southwest, and it is easier for a train to bore straight through a gale, head on, than to take it from the quarter.

We took the big, steady curve at Princeton, a down-grade helping us, at a hundred miles an hour – so Bullard declares and what he says about engine-driving I believe. Indeed, these great bursts can be measured only by the subtle senses of an expert, since no registering instrument has been devised to make reliable record. Across the twin high bridges that span the Bureau creeks we shot with a rush that left the reverberations far back in the night like two short barks. And just as we rounded a curve before these bridges I saw a black face peering down from the boiler-top, while a voice called out: "Wahr – wahr – wahr – wahr!" To which startling apparition Bullard, undisturbed, replied: "Wahr – wahr – wahr – wahr!" Then the head disappeared. Dan, from his side, was telling Bullard that he had seen the safety-light for the bridges, and Bullard was answering something about hitting it up harder. How these men understand each other in such tumult is a mystery to one with ordinary hearing, but somehow they manage it.

Half way between Kewanee and Galva a white light came suddenly into view far ahead. I knew it for the headlight of a locomotive coming toward us on the parallel track. Already we had met two or three trains, and swept past them with a smashing of sound and air. But this headlight seemed different from the others, paler in its luster, not so steady in its glare. The ordinary locomotive comes at you with a calm, staring yellow eye that grows until it gets to be a huge full moon. But it comes gradually, without much jumping or wavering. This light danced and flashed like a great white diamond. I watched it with a certain fascination, and as it came nearer and nearer, realized that here was a train of different kind from the others, coming down on us at terrific speed. And Bullard shouted: "Number – 8 – with – the – mail." Then added, as the train passed like the gleam of a knife: "She's – going – too."