"Really?" I exclaimed. "How did it get there?"
"Somebody ordered it put there when the steeple was built. People often do queer things like that. I painted a flagpole on a barn up in Massachusetts where there was four hundred dollars in gold hidden under the weather-vane. Everybody knew it was there, because the farmer who put it there told everybody, and my partner was crazy to saw off the end of that pole some night and fool 'em, but of course I wouldn't have it."
Here was I quite off my thunderbolt trail, and although curious about that farmer, I came back to it resolutely.
"Well," resumed Merrill, "this lightning stroke came down the new rod all right until it reached the bell-deck, and there it circled round and round the steeple four or five times, wrapping my assistant in bluish-white flame. Then it took a long jump straight down Wall Street, smashed a flagpole to slivers, and vanished. Say, there are things about lightning I've never heard explained. I know of a steeple-climber, for instance, who was killed by lightning – it must have been lightning, although no one saw it strike. There were two of them working on a scaffolding when a thunder-storm came up, and this man's partner started for the ground, as climbers with any sense always do. But this fellow was lazy or out of sorts or something, and said he wouldn't go down, he'd stay on the steeple until the storm was over. And he did stay there, without getting any harm, so far as anybody on the ground could see, except a wetting. Just the same, when his partner went up again, he found him stretched out on the scaffolding, dead."
"Frightened to death?" I suggested.
Merrill shook his head. "No, they said it was lightning; but it's queer how lightning could kill a man without being seen, isn't it?"
Then Merrill gave an experience of his own with a thunderbolt. It was during this same busy summer of 1900, while he and his partner were scraping the great steel smoke-stack that rises from ground to roof along one side of the American Tract Society Building, that towering structure which looks down with contempt, no doubt, upon ordinary church steeples.
"We were in our saddles," Merrill explained, "swung down about two thirds of the smoke-stack's length, when some black clouds warned us of danger, and we hauled ourselves up to the roof. My partner, Walter Tyghe, got off his saddle and stood there where my wife was waiting (she often goes to climbing-jobs with me – she's less anxious when she can watch me); but I thought the storm was passing over, and kept on scraping, sort of half resting on the cornice, half on my saddle. Suddenly a bolt shot down from a little pink cloud just overhead, and splintered a big flagpole I had just put halyards on, and then jumped past us all so close that it knocked Walter over, and made me sick and giddy so that I fell back limp on my saddle-board, and swung there helpless until my wife pulled the trip-rope that opens the lock-block and drew me in from the edge. That's not the first time she's been on deck at the right minute. Once she came up a steeple to tell me something, and found the hauling-line smoldering from my helper's cigarette. If that line had burned through it would have dropped me to the ground from the steeple-top, saddle, lock-block, and all. The man with the cigarette was so scared he quit smoking for good and all."
Here, in reply to my question, Merrill explained the working of a lock-block, which is simply a pulley that allows a rope to pass through it, but will not let it go back. With this block the steeple-climber can be hauled up easily, but cannot fall, even if the man hauling should let go the rope. When it is necessary to descend, a pull on the trip-rope releases a safety-catch and the saddle goes down.
"Do steeple-climbers always work in pairs?" I asked him.
"Usually. It would be hard for one man to do a steeple alone. There are lots of places where you must have some one to fasten a rope or hold the end of a plank or pass you something. Besides, it wouldn't be good for a man's mind to be spending days and days upon steeples all alone. It's bad enough with a partner to talk to. That makes me think of poor old Dan O'Brien. If I hadn't been up with him one day – " Merrill checked himself and changed the subject.
"I'll give you a case where a man alone could never have done the thing, I don't care how clever a steeple-climber he might be. It was on St. Paul's, New York, after we had finished the job and taken everything down. Then somebody noticed that the weather-vane on top of the ball wasn't turning properly. I knew in a minute what the matter was; it was easy enough to fix it, but the thing was to reach the weather-vane. I don't mean that the climb up the steeple was anything; we had done that before; but if I tried to climb around that big ball again (it was the same sort of a wriggling business as that over the bulging stones at Trinity) I would be sure to scrape off a lot of the fine gilding we had just put on. And yet I couldn't get at the weather-vane without getting over the ball. I studied quite a while on this little problem, and solved it with my partner's help. We both climbed the steeple as far as the ball; we went up the lightning-rod; then we roped ourselves on the steeple-shaft by life-lines, and then my partner, that was Joe Lawlor, stood on my shoulders and did the job. You see it was easy enough that way."
"Easy enough!" Think of it! Two men clinging to the point of a steeple. One of them braces himself with the toes of his rubber shoes in crannies of the stone, and the other, balancing on his shoulders like a circus performer, does a piece of work, no matter what, with a reeling abyss all around (what is looking over a precipice compared to this?), and all the time the spire swaying back and forth like a forest tree. And then you hear that, instead of getting a large sum for such an achievement, these men, taking it through the year, get scarcely more than ordinary workmen's wages.
II
HOW THEY BLEW OFF THE TOP OF A STEEPLE WITH DYNAMITE
KNOWN over all Connecticut was the Congregational Church in Hartford, that stood for years on Pearl Street, and was famous alike for the burning words spoken beneath its roof, and the tall, straight spire that reached above it; two hundred and thirty-eight feet measured the drop from cross to pavement. But churches pass like other things, and near the century-end came the decision by landowners and lease interpreters that this graceful length of brownstone and the pile beneath it must move off the premises, which meant, of course, that the steeple must come down, the time appointed for this demolition being August, 1899.
Now, the taking down of a steeple two hundred and thirty-eight feet high, that rises on a closely built city street, is not so simple a proceeding as might at first appear. If you suggest pulling the steeple over, all the neighbors cry out. They wish to know where it is going to strike. Are you sure it won't smash down on their housetops? Can you make a steeple fall this way or that way, as woodmen make trees fall? How do you know you can? Besides, how are you going to hitch fast the rope that will pull it over? And who will climb with such a rope to the steeple-top? It must be said that there is usually some young man at hand, some dare-devil character of the vicinity, who is ready to try the thing and is positive he can succeed at it. But, luckily, he seldom gets a chance to try.
"It's queer," said Merrill, telling me the story, "how people ever built a steeple like this one without a window in it, or an air-passage, or anything for ventilation. Between the bell-deck and the cross there wasn't a single opening from the inside out, so I had to break my way through up near the top. What a place for a man to work, squeezed in the point of a stifling funnel, with no swing for his hammer, and no air to breathe, and the scorch of an August sun! After fifteen minutes of it, my wrists and temples would be pounding so I'd have to come down and rest.
"Of course the purpose of this hole that I knocked through the steeple-top was to make fast ropes and pulleys, so my partner and I could hoist ourselves along the outside, and not have to climb up the inside cross-beams, which, I can tell you, is a lively bit of athletics. Well, we got our ropes fixed all right, about twenty-five feet below the top, and the 'bosun's saddle' swung below for us to travel up and down in, and then we made fast another set of ropes and pulleys about fifteen feet higher up; this was for hoisting timber and stuff that we needed."
"How did you get up that fifteen feet?" I inquired.
"Worked up on the stirrups – that is, two nooses around the steeple, each ending in a loop, one for the right foot, one for the left. You stand in the