Part 8

In their upward flight, Chinamen raced with rockets, while the heaven was filled with burning fireworks--and then it rained Chinamen. In fact, it was a real cloudburst of Chinamen, fire-crackers and ship's wreckage.

BROWN, THE GUNNER

For many years, all inventors and manufacturers having occasion to attend experiments with their productions at the Naval Proving Grounds at Indian Head, were aided in their work by Brown, the gunner. He was a very ingenious, genial, gigantic fellow, one of the most likable men in the world. There was nothing about the mechanism of guns and gunnery unfamiliar to him.

Once, during the early years of his service there, a fragment from an exploding gun struck him in the forehead, leaving a great dent. As soon as he recovered, he returned to his duties undeterred, although he had had many other close calls.

One day, a few years ago, he walked in on me at my summer home on Lake Hopatcong. During his visit, he asked me if I believed in presentiments. He said he had had a very strange presentiment of impending danger in his work at Indian Head. He told me that he had confided this to the commanding officer there, who laughed at him, and said, "Oh, Brown, at last you are losing your nerve. Go and take a two weeks' vacation, and then come back."

Brown did go back at the end of his vacation.

A few weeks later, while testing a new heavy gun, something went wrong. The breech block blew out, and Brown was killed.

THE HAPPENING OF THE UNEXPECTED

Some time ago, a young lady who had been my private secretary for about four years got married. Thinking that one of the best ways of securing another competent stenographer and typist to take her place would be to go to an employment agency, Mrs. Maxim and I called upon the manager of one of those institutions.

Mrs. Maxim, according to the habitude of her sex, led in the conversation. She told the manager about the unusual requirements that the person engaged must have--that she must have a good general education, must be very expert as stenographer and typist, and above all, must be an exceptionally good speller. Furthermore, Mrs. Maxim placed especial emphasis upon one stipulation--that we did not want a girl under twenty or a woman over thirty-five, for the reason that a girl under twenty is very apt to lack the necessary experience and serious-mindedness for such a position, while a woman around and above forty is apt to be set in her ways, and to lack the necessary flexibility of mind and nature readily to adapt herself to anything to which she has not always been accustomed, and is, furthermore, likely to be unable to learn anything new with the facility of a younger person.

The manager was all suavity, pleasant manners and promises, and assured us that he had on his waiting list a number of young women who would exactly meet our requirements, and that he would send three of them over that very evening.

We learned from the bit of experience which followed that employment agencies and those who are sent by them to apply for positions, are apt to be governed by reasoning similar to that of the small boy, who, seeing an advertisement that twenty-five dollars' reward would be paid for a Pekinese spaniel, thought it would do no harm to try, and so he called to claim the reward with a huge mongrel--a cross between a Newfoundland and a St. Bernard.

Well, at the appointed hour, two archaic dilapidations wafted themselves in upon us, who looked as though their nascency had a priority on the Stone Age and they had been vouchsafed to us among the antediluvian survivors of Noah's Ark.

The first one--a slip of a girl of some sixty-seven to the nth-power summers and as many winters--betrayed her lack of typistical experience by mistaking a national cash register for a typewriter. Then she confided in us the little confidence that she really knew nothing about typewriting as yet, but that, in the sweet long ago, in the days of auld lang syne, she used to drum quite a lot on the piano, and, consequently, she imagined that typewriting, being a sort of mere finger play, would come so easy to her that she would have little difficulty in acquiring the necessary aptitude on a typewriter to qualify for the position.

The next applicant was a tall, slight, sinuous, willowy, sylph-like and ethereal creature of the hippopotamus variety, who floated into our presence like a breath of old winter, made sweet summer by the mingled odor of violets, lilacs, musk and new-mown hay. I gave her a short dictation, which she took down in longhand. I asked her why she did not write shorthand. She said she did write shorthand, unless she was in a hurry. Contemplating her huge bulk, I insinuated that we should want someone a little lighter on her corns than she, as one of the desirable accomplishments in a private secretary was that she should be able to play tennis. She said that although she had never played tennis herself, still it ran in the family, because her grandchildren were expert tennis players.

When the third antique entered, the thing began to get monotonous, as Mark Twain remarked, when a mule had fallen through his tent three times in one evening. We were getting out of patience. I told the old lady at once that we did not want anyone under twenty or over thirty-five. She assured me that she was not under twenty. I told her that I had guessed as much, and asked, "How about the other limit!" She sharply retorted that she had never, in all her life, touched thirty-five. "Well," said I, "if that be so, you must have been skidding some when you went by that numeral."

Disappointed, and highly indignant, we called again the next day upon that manager of the employment agency. He was profoundly apologetic, and said that he happened to have waiting in another room a young lady who was exactly what we wanted. She was immediately asked into the private office, where Mrs. Maxim and I examined her. She was about twenty-five years of age, and was, as they say down in Maine, as smart as a steel trap. I gave her a dictation replete with multi-syllabic terminology, and with unusual words of difficult orthography, but she took down everything with lightning speed, read back her notes to perfection, and transcribed them rapidly on the typewriter without a mistake.

We asked for what salary she would be willing to come to us. The salary asked was pretty high, but we instantly agreed to pay it. The manager and the young lady exchanged glances, and both looked a bit surprised. Mrs. Maxim and I then asked if we might talk with the young lady alone for a few minutes.

After some Sherlock Holmesy talk with the young woman, Mrs. Maxim and I came to the conclusion that she was a show girl kept by the manager merely to prove that he had the goods when required, provided anyone wished to pay a sufficiently high salary, and the salary was made high enough to deter most applicants. We got it from the girl that she had several times been hired and had worked a few days for each of a number of employers, until she could find some rational excuse for breaking away and returning to the agency, the manager of which, we also learned, was her brother, and she was a partner in the business.

The incident reminded me of a story told by a friend of mine in New York who bought a beautiful and highly trained Scotch terrier of a Broadway dog vendor, thinking that after keeping the dog tied up for a week, feeding him and treating him with kindness, he could be depended upon to stay with his new master, but the moment the dog was freed he disappeared, and the next day he was again with his master, the dog vendor, ready to be resold. Some time later, a light was thrown upon the inner consciousness of my friend by reading an account in the newspapers of the arrest of the dog vendor for obtaining money under false pretenses and practicing fraud in the sale of dogs, or rather, of the dog. The canine was a sort of homing-pigeon dog, trained, like a carrier pigeon, to return from each new master as soon as freed. The buying and selling of that one dog constituted the main business of the scamp.

When our interview with the young woman was concluded, we started to leave the office in disgust, but at that moment a young woman of rather prepossessing appearance, about thirty years of age, entered the office looking for a position. She explained that her late employer having gone to Europe, she was looking for a new place.

After a critical examination, we found that she would meet our requirements very well. Then it developed that, having read in newspapers and magazines some of the accounts, highly colored by the writers of them, of how I cooked with high explosives and lighted my cigar with a stick of dynamite, and burned nitroglycerin in a lamp to light the room, she, being of a rather nervous temperament, was afraid of the prospective companionship with explosive materials.

I assured her that the accounts were misrepresentations of actual facts, and explained that we lived at a very safe distance from any explosive works, and that she would be exposed to no danger whatsoever. I finally convinced her that our home was a safe place, and although still harassed with some doubts she decided to come with us.

In the edge of the evening, after her arrival, she and I were sitting at the dining-room table engaged in conversation. I was telling her how groundless had been her fears, when there came a terrific explosion. The sky was lighted up with a brilliancy that would shame the noon-day sun, and fragments of brands from the burning fell all about the house.

I confess that I was as much surprised as she was--and that was going some. I rushed out, and found that my tool-house, located about a hundred yards from my residence, had blown up, and the wreckage was on fire. Being sure that there were no explosives in the building, I was greatly puzzled.

There were in the place at the time perhaps a hundred rounds of Mauser rifle cartridges. These were exploding, one after another, from the heat. The neighbors who had run to witness the fire, were greatly frightened, and did not dare to render any assistance in putting out the flames, especially while the cartridges were exploding.

I ran to a hydrant nearby, got out the fire-hose, and found, to my amazement, what one usually finds under such circumstances, that the nozzle of the hose had been taken off, and the hose disconnected from the hydrant, and that there was no wrench there. I ran and got another hose and a wrench, made the connections, and ran out the hose to extinguish the fire, when I found that only a small stream of water as big as my thumb flowed from the hose. I then ran down to my house to see if there were any faucets open which would reduce the pressure, and then to the pump-house to measure the water in the supply tank, and found that the tank was nearly full, and that thirty-five thousand gallons of water were available for extinguishing the fire. Yet I could get no pressure. The result was that nothing was saved, and the building and all its contents were a complete loss. As there was no insurance, the loss was about fifteen hundred dollars.

After it was too late to save the building, I walked down to the Hotel Durban, on my property, which I supplied with water, to calm the fears of some of the guests who were agitated, when, to my amazement, I found a two-inch fire-hose turned on full, and running in the road. I learned then that a stupid fellow who was staying at the hotel, had turned the water on at several fire hydrants to play water on the hotel, although the hotel was at such a safe distance from the tool-house that there was not a particle of danger whatsoever. It never occurred to him to close off one hydrant when he opened another; consequently, the pressure was reduced so that no water at all could be had at the scene of the fire, and not pressure enough on the hose-pipes that he had turned on to do any good even had they been needed.

After things had quieted down, I returned to the house to resume my conversation, and to repeat my assurances to the young lady secretary, but I found a polite note tacked to the table-cloth, requesting that her trunk be forwarded the next day. She had not waited for further conviction as to the safety of her new position.

On investigation, I learned that a fire had started in the tool-house from some cause unknown, and had proceeded long enough to get one side of the interior of the building well ablaze. As there were five gallons of denatured alcohol in the place, and the same quantity of gasoline, and about ten pounds of sulphuric ether, it is probable that one of these had become heated and, bursting, set free a lot of vapor which, mixing with the atmosphere, exploded. There were also in the building about thirty pounds of finely pulverized aluminum, ten pounds of magnesium powder and other ingredients for flashlight powders, with which I intended to conduct experiments. As these materials were not mixed, they were not explosive, but their combustion was what produced the wonderful light when the explosion occurred. The result was not like that from an explosion of dynamite, in which case the building would have been literally blown to fragments, but, as is usual in gas explosions, the roof of the building was lifted up, the sides thrown out, and the roof dropped in. Even the front door of the building, charred from the initial fire, was found otherwise intact.

While sitting on the porch of my house on Lake Hopatcong, dictating this story to my stenographer, and when I had arrived at this point, she suddenly called to me, "Look!" pointing her finger across the Lake to a huge column of smoke going up from the Atlas Powder Works, and mushrooming out into the sky. The direct distance is about three miles, but it seemed quite a long time before we felt the shock and heard the sound. Although the sound was loud and the shock considerable, the sound was much louder and the shock much heavier even at longer distances in several directions, owing, I imagine, to the difference in the underlying strata of earth.

As I learned later, the explosion took place at one of the packing houses, which carried another packing house with it, together with a nitroglycerin storehouse, so that about ten tons of dynamite, or its equivalent, went up in that column of smoke. I understand that seven men were killed, and about twice as many injured. It was the largest and most destructive explosion that had ever occurred at those works.

WHEN THE WASH VANISHED

I was once invited to speak at a County Fair at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where I used to live when in the publishing business. My subject was Explosive Materials and Their Use in Warfare.

The management was especially desirous that I should give my auditors some sort of spectacular demonstration, to show what explosives would do. A platform was erected in an open field, and I had an arena roped off at the rear of the platform about fifty feet wide, and running back several hundred feet. In the rear portion of this arena I buried several sticks of dynamite, and connected them with an exploder and a battery on the platform.

Also, I brought several cotton bosom-shirts, several cotton undershirts, half-a-dozen handkerchiefs, a couple of towels, half-a-dozen pairs of cotton socks, and as many cheap cotton collars and cuffs. These I had immersed in a concentrated mixture of nitric and sulphuric acids, converting them all into guncotton. Then I washed and soaked the acid out of them, and dried them.

I stretched a clothes-line from the speaker's platform to a distance of about thirty feet to my right, and on this I hung my guncotton clothes, only a few feet away from the front of the audience.

There were, perhaps, a thousand people massed in front of me, crowding up close, that nothing should miss them. I made a brief talk on the nature and use of explosives, and burned some smokeless powder under water, and then I touched off the dynamite in the rear of the field, which made a very pretty showing.

The audience was very curious about that wash. That I should have hung my linen out to dry on that occasion they thought was very peculiar taste, to say the least; and some of them did not hesitate to say that they considered it very bad taste.

I then said to the audience that I must beg their pardon for displaying my underwear as I had done; that I appreciated the fact that it was an unsightly display, and, to accommodate them, I would immediately proceed to get it out of sight. I then touched it off with an electrical igniter, and that laundry disappeared in one great bright flash of flame.

There happened to be in my audience an ingenious fellow with some knowledge of chemistry, who was a noted wag and practical joker. Taking the hint from my nitrated laundry, he nitrated a cotton handkerchief and sent it to the Chinese laundry with the rest of his wash.

When he called for his clothes, he found John Chinaman with his right arm in a sling. However, John was all smiles, and apologized for the absence of the one handkerchief, but said nothing more about it.

A short time after the fellow had put on his clean underwear, he developed a very severe case of prickly heat, followed, a little later, by a sensation like that of needles being stuck into his body over the entire surface. Anyone who has taken a bite of a wild Indian turnip knows what that sensation is. The Chinaman had charged his customer's garments with a preparation extracted from a Chinese variant of the Indian turnip. It took a couple of weeks, with the aid of a physician, for the wag to recover from the little unpleasantness which the Chinaman had inflicted upon him.

THE FRIGHTENED FISHERMAN

When testing big guns at Sandy Hook, the officers are often greatly annoyed by fishing boats that persist in getting within range of the guns and in remaining there, entirely regardless of the work or wishes of the officers of Uncle Sam.

It is a curious circumstance that, according to the law of the country, these ships have the right of way, and even the officers of the Government Proving Grounds have no power to compel a fishing smack to move out of range.

There was one boat of this kind that persisted in anchoring daily exactly in the range of a ten-inch gun that was under test, and day after day the tests had to be delayed.

One morning, however, there being a haze or fog floating close down upon the water at a distance of a couple of miles from the shore, and the sea looking perfectly clear to that distance, the officers in charge of the testing of the gun concluded that the range was clear, and they fired, but the captain of the fishing boat above referred to happened to be on his job, just as usual, though concealed by the fog. He had stretched himself out in a hammock on deck and was taking a snooze, when a ten-inch projectile passed through his boat under him, and ricocheted on out to sea. He kept out of the gunner's range after that.

Following this incident, one of the officers conceived the brilliant idea of keeping fishermen from coming into the line of fire in the following manner: When a boat was seen sailing into range he would fire several six-pound shells, exploding them in the water along the line of range, and directly in the path of the oncoming boat. This method served the purpose admirably. While the fishermen would calmly cast anchor and occupy a position directly in range of a gun being tested, they did not dare to sail directly into the line of fire of exploding six-pound shells.

THE COLONEL WAS PROVOKED

An Army officer tells me the following story:

One time, while he was on duty at the Sandy Hook Proving Grounds, they were testing a gun-shield to see whether or not it would resist the penetration of a six-inch shell.

The officer whose duty it was to attend to the loading and firing of the gun did not always allow the required time to elapse after sounding the warning before discharging the gun, especially when he took it for granted that no one was in the zone of danger, in which case he was apt to consider the signal of warning a mere formality.

Such was his attitude and action on the occasion to which this story refers: He gave the signal, and immediately fired. The projectile, which was expected to penetrate the shield, went only half through, and stuck there, when, to the horror of all participants, especially of the careless officer referred to, the Colonel of Artillery emerged from behind the shield, unhurt, but madder than a demon in Dante's Inferno.

No more guns were fired without the lapse of an ample period of warning.

WHEN THE DARKIES TURNED PALE

At one of our Government proving grounds, some years ago, the officers were testing a new high explosive, and, as was their custom, they charged a twelve-inch shell with the material in order to estimate the power of the explosive by the fragmentation of the projectile when the charge was detonated.

They had a bomb-proof chamber prepared for this purpose. It consisted of a room about ten feet wide, twelve feet long, and eight feet high, lined with armorplate. The projectile was placed on the armored floor in the middle of the room, and covered with a few hundred pounds of fine sand. It was armed with an electrical exploder, which was set off from another bomb-proof at a safe distance. After each explosion, the fragments were sifted from the sand and counted and weighed.

A twelve-inch shell charged with Maximite and exploded at Sandy Hook during the tests there of that explosive, was broken into ten thousand fragments. The fragments made deep dents in the hard face of the armorplate. The shell that enters into this story was exploded under similar conditions.

When the officers were ready to explode the shell, they sounded the usual alarm to give warning to laboring men on the premises to seek cover. Now, it so happened that about a dozen negroes who were engaged in some pick-and-shovel work had been in the habit of using this very bomb-proof as a shelter when a big gun was fired; consequently, when the warning was sounded, they immediately rushed for cover within that bomb-proof.

The officer in command was about to close the switch to explode the projectile, and his hand was already upon it, but, being an exceedingly cautious man, he thought he would take another look to be sure that all was safe, and, to his amazement, he saw a negro who had been screening himself behind a pile of rubbish making a dash for the bomb-proof containing the projectile, when it was revealed that the dozen darkies had all huddled into it for safety.

When those darkies found out how close a call they had had, they turned just as pale as negroes can turn. Had the projectile been exploded while they were in the bomb-proof, they would not only have all been killed by the blast, but would also have literally been blown to ribbons.

THE DOG THAT WAS A REAL MASCOT

In the long line of trenches that constitutes the French and British front, facing the equally long German front, the soldiers relieve time's tedium by numerous artifices. Many kinds of pets--dogs, cats, owls, doves, parrots--are harbored for the sake of their company, or as mascots--bringers of good luck.

A French soldier had a dog that was a great favorite in the trenches, for the reason that he was a famous ratter, and as the trenches were infested with rats, he was a most welcome guest.

One day, when the Germans were bombarding the French position before Verdun preparatory to a charge, a huge howitzer shell, penetrating deep into the earth in front of one of the French trenches, and exploding, buried half a hundred men--among them the owner of the dog.