Page:St. Nicholas, vol. 40.1 (1912-1913).djvu/606

 406 I was up among the riveters and their pneumatic hammers were pounding away with a noise that deafened me. I watched a gang at work on my floor. There were four in the gang. One had a forge to which he fed air with a blower turned by a hand crank. In this forge he was heating rivets. Every now and then, he would pick out an incandescent rivet with his tongs, and sling it easily but with perfect aim over to a man who sat carelessly on a girder close to where the riveting was done. This man had a bucket in which he caught the rivet; then he picked out the glowing bit of metal with his tongs, and placed it in the hole it was to occupy. A third man held a huge sledge-hammer with cupped head against the head of the rivet, while the fourth battered down the incandescent end of the rivet with the pneumatic hammer.

Suddenly something struck Will’s straw hat and bounded to the planks at my feet, spluttering fire. I was so startled that I jumped a yard; then I realized the hat was on fire. I threw it to the floor and stamped out the blaze, amid the guffaws of the gang of riveters overhead.

“Hello, kid!” they shouted. “Does your mother know you ’re out? Say, skeeters are pretty hot up here, eh? Don’t cry. Your big bruvver will be down in a minute.” Then, in a quick undertone: “Easy! here comes the boss!”

A young man, but powerfully built, ran lightly up the ladder from the floor below, caught sight of me, and stopped short.

“Well, for the land of Jehoshaphat! Where did you blow in from?”

“I am just taking a look at the building.”

“So I see, but how the dickens did you get here? Don’t you know you can't enter this building without a permit? Where was the watchman?”

“I did n’t see any.”

“I ‘ll have to look into this. Have the boys been having a little fun with you? What is the matter with your hat?”

“It is n't mine. It ’s Will’s hat.”

“Will? Who ’s Will?”

“My chum; he ’s gone on up to the top.”

“What! Two of you—eh? I'll have to go up and see about it. You wait just over there where the boys can’t play you any more tricks.”

I took his advice, and watched him run up to the top of the building. In view of my previous experience, it seemed advisable to look up, and avoid further trouble. The guying I had received rankled in me. I was only cautious, I said to myself; I was n’t really afraid, but it seemed useless to take further risks. I wondered whether, should any one’s life depend upon it, I could run around on the steel girders as recklessly as the iron-workers. I watched one fellow overhead. He picked up a board and was walking along a beam only a few inches wide. A gust of wind caught the board and swung him around. I marveled that he kept his balance, but he did n’t look alarmed; it was all in the day’s work.

Before long, Will and “the boss” darkened the hole in the top floor, and began to climb down, their coats flapping wildly in the howling gale.

“Say, Jim, it was great up there!” exclaimed Will, when he reached my story. “You certainly missed it. That setting gang is a nervy lot of men. They were setting a girder in place across the top of two columns. Two men were standing on the ends while it dangled from the derrick and swung around in the wind. They could n’t quite get it into position because the wind was