Page:McClure's Magazine v9 n3 to v10 no2.djvu/105

Rh their lives. When the huts were entered, the six girls were found seated in perfectly natural attitudes, their faces showing no trace of agony or fear. It was evident that, having been stunned by the sudden explosion, they had been suffocated before recovering from the shock. It will be noted that the loose dynamite burned and did not explode. This is one of several curious facts concerning dynamite which will be considered later.

It may be well to state at this point that the two hundred and odd young ladies employed in this dangerous work are all strictly beautiful. Everybody who visits the factory admits this at once. Nobody, in fact, seems inclined to invidious comparisons among strong and courageous girls, when each of them has enough dynamite in her possession to blow a hole in Scotland. Moreover, there is some reason for the statement. The breathing of nitroglycerin by the workers gives them a universal clearness of skin, and among the fairer girls the contrast of scarlet and white in their faces is most unusual. You learn that (perhaps in consequence of their complexions) the girls marry quickly after entering the factory.



After being rubbed through the sieves the dynamite becomes a finely divided, greasy, coffee-colored earth. It is now the dynamite of commerce, and is ready to be made into cartridges. As you approach one of the cartridge houses, which are small white one-story buildings, you hear a tremendous thumping. You ask your guide in some perturbation if it is a good day to look at cartridge houses, but he smiles and says that the noise is merely the cartridge machines. The hut is about ten feet square, with a single door. Four girls are at work. Against the right and left walls are four spring pump-handles about the height of a girl's head. Each pump-handle when pulled down forces a brass rod through a small conical hopper of loose dynamite fixed to the wall, and jams a portion of the dynamite down a brass tube at the bottom of the box. The girl wraps a small square of branded parch-