Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/165

Rh "I could n't use compressed air on the job. The company would n't stand for the expense.

"I want to hurry over these professional details, you understand, but I can't very well tell the story without them."

They encouraged him: "Go ahead. Go ahead."

Well, we got this caisson, and bolted some of the sections together, and placed the tube in position and began to sink it in the soft sand by its own weight. It went down thirty feet, and there the suction held it. We loaded it with a deck of heavy timbers and a hundred tons of iron; and it sank four feet further before it stopped again. Then we pumped the water out of it, and began to dig out the sand to see if we could lower the caisson by relieving the suction on the inside. When the men had gone down twenty feet, the quicksand rose on them like a rush of water, and they had to scramble up the ladders to save their lives. Any one could see that if we kept on taking out the sand as it rose, we 'd cause another shifting under the foundations of the cofferdam and wreck the whole work again. Besides, Larsen reported that his men were afraid to go below to dig, because two of them had been caught in the quicksand and nearly lost. So we decided that we'd try dynamite in the toe of the caisson. The explosion breaks the suction and lets the tube drop a little. We did that, and we were succeeding with it, when—well, when my story began.

"You see, by that time, we 'd been working for five