Careers of Danger and Daring Part 10

The story was from his own boyish experience--how he made his first trip to the clouds at the age of twelve, and set a whole city talking. This was the city of Cleveland, Ohio, where on a certain Sunday afternoon there was to be a balloon ascension at the great pleasure park. Young Stevens, of course, was present, wild with excitement, for balloons had been in his thoughts and dreams ever since he could remember. He pressed forward through the crowd and, with bulging eyes, watched the aeronaut arrange his barrels and pipes for the hydrogen-making, danced with delight as the great bag swelled and struggled, and finally was bitter in disappointment when the police appeared suddenly with orders to prevent the ascension, because the day was Sunday.

Then, while the balloonist was protesting and pleading, Stevens formed his plan. He would go up himself instead of the man. There was the balloon all ready, held by a single rope. There was the basket swinging impatiently, empty, and he more impatient than the basket. Quickly he turned to a boy who was with him. "Say, I'll tell you what. You get a knife and cut that rope, and I'll go up." But the boy demurred. Anyhow, he had no knife. So away dashed Stevens, and returned in a jiffy with a knife, taken from his father's shop. It was a sharp one.

"There," panted the boy. "Now, cut her quick, soon as I climb in."

The people about were so occupied with the parley growing warm between balloonist and police that few paid attention when a little shaver in knickerbockers crept close to the basket and then slipped over its side.

But the next minute nine thousand people paid considerable attention and shouted their surprise and delight as the eager balloon suddenly shot skyward, a small white face peering down and trying not to look frightened. The knife had done its work, and the subject of dispute, abruptly removed, was presently soaring half a mile above the city, drifting with the wind.

Meantime little Leo, curled up at the bottom of the car, was saying over to himself a story he had read of two little babies who went up once in a balloon and sailed far, far away and never came back, but they might have come back if only they had been strong enough to pull a string that hung over them. h.e.l.lo! So there was a string to pull! Well, any boy could pull a string. He wasn't a baby. But where was the old string? He must look about and find it. And sure enough he did find it, only it turned out to be a stout rope, and he tugged at it valiantly until the valve opened and the balloon began to descend, just as the story-book said it would. And so occupied was Leo with keeping this valve open that he never once looked at the wide view spread beneath him, nor knew where he was until he came b.u.mping into a treetop, and found himself upset among the branches, which first tore his clothes to tatters and then dropped him into a muddy ca.n.a.l, whence he emerged a sadly battered and bedraggled aeronaut, yet happy. And even when his mother chastised him that evening with a ram-rod (his father being a gun-maker) he remained serene, for had he not gone up in a balloon, and was not the whole of Cleveland admiring him, and would he not go up again (he knew he would, despite all promises made under ram-rod stress) as soon as the chance presented?

And within a year the chance did present, a bait of fifty dollars per ascension being offered the lad, and the outcome was he ran away from home, and saw no more of his family until years had pa.s.sed and he had grown accustomed to dangers of the air and diamonds of value in his apparel.

"Isn't it queer," said Stevens, talking it over, "how a fellow will stay away from his people when everything is all right, and get back to them through trouble? After I started in to be a balloonist I never saw my mother for seven years. Then I came once more to Cleveland to give an exhibition at the very park where I first went up--they call it Forest City Park. I was to perform on a slack wire nine hundred feet long, stretched between two towers one hundred and fifty feet high. My wire wasn't long enough to reach all the way, so they spliced on a length of three hundred feet more, and before I began my feats I walked back and forth over the wire to test it. I always do that. Then I walked to the middle of the wire and pretended to slip and fall--that's a regular trick to startle the crowd. You let yourself drop suddenly, catch on the wire, and spring up again. Well, this time when I let myself drop I didn't spring up again, and I didn't know anything more for nineteen days, when I came to myself in the Huron Street Hospital. Somehow that splice in the wire had broken, and I went straight to the ground, breaking one arm, both wrists, and cracking my spinal column in four places. It's a wonder I lived at all, they say, and during that hard time my mother came to me, as mothers do. Oh, she doesn't love the balloon business, I can tell you. But I love it. I've made over a thousand ascensions, and never been badly hurt but once."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

We were far away now from our balloon-making, and I reminded Stevens that we had still to tell the boys how to make a parachute.

"All right," said he; "here you are," and he gave me the following directions: "The parachute is made of fourteen segments of tissue paper, each one like this, measuring thirty-six inches long, six inches wide at the base, and tapering like the pattern up to a point. These segments must be pasted together lengthwise, the fourteen points joining at the top of the parachute, and in each one of the fourteen side-seams a length of eighty inches of No. 8 thread must be pasted, leaving two inches sticking out at the top and about four feet hanging down below.

The short ends at the top must be tied together, and these made fast to a piece of iron hoop pasted in the mouth of the balloon. Here the fuse must be placed and lighted just as the balloon is ready to start. A five-minute fuse will be long enough, and it must be so placed that when it has burned its time the parachute will fall from the balloon. The long ends below must be tied to a curtain ring, from which the little basket hangs, with the kitten securely fastened in it by a piece of cloth pierced with four holes for the four legs. This can be brought up over the kitten's back and tied to the sides of the basket. In this way the kitten is in neither danger nor discomfort. The boys must be careful to make this plain to mothers and sisters, or their experiments may be stopped by family orders. I'll guarantee one thing, though, if they carry out these instructions carefully, your boy friends will have a fine time."

I certainly hope they will.

THE PILOT

I

SOME STIRRING TALES OF THE SEA HEARD AT THE PILOTS' CLUB

OF all the clubs in New York, I know none where a man who values the real things of life may spend a pleasanter hour than at the Pilots'

Club, far down on the lower water-front, looking out of lofty windows in one of those great structures that make the city, seen from the bay, a place of wonderful fairy towers.

Here on the walls are pictures that call up thrilling scenes, as this painting of pilot-boat No. 11 (they call her _The Phantom_), rescuing pa.s.sengers from the _Oregon_, helpless in the great storm of 1886, sixty miles beyond Sandy Hook. We shall find men sitting about these rooms, smoking and reading, who can tell the story of that night in simple, rugged words that will make the water devils dance before us.

Look at them! These are the pilots of New York, greatest seaport in the world, with its tidy annual total of twenty-odd millions in tonnage entered and cleared, against fifteen millions for London. These are the boys (some of them nearing seventy) who bring the mighty liners in and take them out, who fight through any sea at a vessel's blue-light bidding, and climb her fortress sides by a slamming whip-lash ladder that shames the flying trapeze. And this in trim derby hat (sometimes a topper), with gloves and smart necktie, and some New-York "Heralds"

tucked away in a coat-tail pocket.

Look at them! These are the boys who stay out when every other floating thing comes in, who face an Arctic rigor when masts are barrel big with ice, and ropes like trees, and when climbing to a steamer's deck is like skating up an iceberg. These are the boys who know, through fog and darkness, the call of the whistling buoy that sings at the mouth of Gedney's, and can say "Good morning" to every bobbing juniper-spar that marks the long ship lane (red lights on starboard buoys, as you come in, white lights on port buoys), who know the way even when the gla.s.s and iron lamp-frames are all but sunk with ice--west-northwest and a quarter west for a mile and a half, till the beacon lights of Waackaack and Point Comfort line out straight on the Jersey sh.o.r.e, then west by south until the Sandy Hook light lines with the old South Beacon, then a short way northwest by west and a quarter west until the Conover Beacon lines with Chapel Hill, and so on straight to the Narrows.

These are the boys who know every rock and shoal in this most treacherous bay, with its thirteen lighthouses, its two light-ships, and its eighty danger spots, marked by nun-buoys, bell-buoys, electric-light buoys, whistling buoys, all familiar to them as their own homes.

Great boys they are for story-telling, these pilots, and by the hour I have listened to their memories of the sea. Two things made deep impression on me (so do we of less heroic lives take note of weakness in the strong)--one, that many pilots cannot swim (the same is true of deep-sea divers), the other, that pilots, even after years at sea, may be victims of seasickness like any novice. Pilot Breed, for instance, as trusty a man as stands at a liner's wheel, a.s.sured me that every time he goes out for duty he goes out for torture, too. And he does his duty and he bears the torture, so that after all we must count this rather strength than weakness.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE RESCUE OF THE OREGON'S Pa.s.sENGERS.]

"How can you do your work," I asked, "if you are in such distress?"

"Because I have to," he answered, with a wistful smile. "You know sailors are often seasick, but they go aloft just the same and work--because they have to. You could do it yourself if you had to. And yet," he added, half shutting his eyes, "I've many a time been so bad when we've tossed and tossed for days and nights on the watch for vessels that I've come pretty near to dropping quietly overboard and ending it."

This he said without any special emphasis, yet one could see that it was true.

"Why don't you give up the life?" I suggested.

"Perhaps I would," said he, "if I could do as well at anything else.

Besides--"

Then came the queerest reason. His father, it seems, a pilot before him, had suffered from seasickness for thirty-seven years, and then for thirty years more had been quite free from it. "Now," said Breed, "I've been a pilot for twenty-two years, so I figure if I stick to it fifteen years more I may be like my father after that, and have no more trouble."

Think of that for a scheme of life!

Presently another pilot joined us, and set forth a remarkable experience. "I was taking the steamer _Lahn_ once," said he, "through a heavy fog, and the captain and I were both on the bridge, anxious to locate the light-ship. You know she lies eight miles off the Hook, and gives incoming vessels their first bearings for the channel. Of course we didn't expect to see her light--you couldn't see anything in such weather--but we listened for her fog-horn. How we did listen! And presently we heard it. You get accustomed to judging distances over water by the sound, and I put that light-ship at five miles away, or thereabouts, and I wasn't far wrong. Well, we headed straight for it, and heard the fog-horn all the time for about a mile. Then it suddenly stopped.

"'Hullo!' said I. 'What's up?'

"'Confound those light-ship people,' growled the captain. 'I'll make complaint against them for stopping their horn.'

"'Wait a little,' said I, and kept listening, listening for the horn to blow again, and all the time we were running nearer to the shoal. Pretty soon we slowed down, and went on a couple of miles, then another mile.

It seemed as if we must have reached the light-ship, and the captain was in a state of mind.

"Then suddenly the fog-horn sounded again, not four lengths away, sir, and the queer thing is it had been sounding the whole blamed time--we got positive proof of it afterward--only we hadn't heard it. The explanation was that we had pa.s.sed through two sound zones--that's what the scientific people call 'em--and I can tell you those sound zones make considerable trouble for pilots."

To this perplexing statement the others nodded grave a.s.sent, and Breed capped the tale with a sound-zone story of his own. It was just off quarantine, and he was turning a liner to bring her up to dock when another liner came along, also running in. Breed gave the signal three times for the other liner to port her helm, and she signaled back three times for him to port his. By good luck each vessel did the right thing, and they pa.s.sed safely, but neither pilot heard the whistle of the other, and each made angry complaint that the other had failed to whistle: yet witnesses testified that both had whistled, and each one swore that he had.

The truth was, according to the gentlemen who explain acoustic puzzles, that these two steamers happened to be placed there down the bay like two people in a whispering gallery, who cannot hear each other where they are, but would hear plainly if they moved further apart or drew closer together, so as to be in the foci of sound. Thus it was that distant vessels heard both sets of whistles, although there was a nearer region where these were inaudible.

Investigation has shown that these sound zones frequently establish themselves at sea (they vary in extent with wind and tide), so that the sound of horn or bell may be heard for a mile or two, and then become inaudible for, say, two miles, and then become audible again, almost as plainly as at first, for several miles more. The theory is that the sound-waves somehow go skipping over the sea, like a flat pebble over a mill-pond, in long jumps, and that a vessel under the highest part of one of these jumps is out of the sound influence, but will come into it again by going ahead a certain distance or going back a certain distance. Whether this explanation be the true one or not, the facts are abundantly vouched for, and are believed to explain various collisions and wrecks that have long been looked upon as mysteries.

"There are lots of queer things about our business," reflected an old pilot. "Now, you take steamers, they're just as different as people; each one has her own ways, and most likely her own partic'lar kind of crankiness. They talk about twin steamers, but there's no such thing.

You can have 'em both made in the same yard, with every measurement alike, and they'll be as different, sir, as--as two violins. Why, I never saw a craft that'd sail the same on both tacks; they're always harder on one than the other. And as for compa.s.ses--well, I don't suppose there's ever two that came into this port with needles pointing just the same way. They all lean a shade one way or the other, same as watches."

"Lean a shade!" put in another man. "I've known 'em to lean a whole lot.

I've known a steamer's compa.s.s to point plumb northeast instead of north. And that time we nearly went on the rocks by it. We were coming along past Fire Island, and the night was pretty thick. I felt something was queer and wouldn't go below, although the captain wanted me to. I kept looking up, looking up, searching for the north star, and pretty soon I made it out, or thought I did, through a rift in the blackness.

"'Hold on!' said I to the captain, 'something's the matter with your compa.s.s. There's the north star ahead of us, and it ought to be abaft the bridge.'

"'North star nothing,' said the captain. 'You're tired, man; you need a rest. Now, you just turn in for an hour, and I'll run her.'

"'You'll run her on the rocks,' said I, 'inside of fifteen minutes unless you pull her out of here. I tell you that compa.s.s is crazy.'

"Well, sir, he began to get scared when he saw me so positive, and a little later he pulled her out--just in time, too, for we were right on the breakers of Long Island, thanks to that lying compa.s.s. I've heard it's the magnetic sand at Shinnec.o.c.k that devils compa.s.ses. You know there's acres and acres of it along there."

This led to a discussion of magnetic sand, and it was edifying to see how well informed these pilots are in the latest advances of science.