Part 5

It has always been our rule, in order to obtain accurate pictures, to entrust the illustration of our stories only to artists who have actually visited or lived in the various countries referred to, and are consequently familiar with the conditions of life prevailing there. The result of this custom is that our artistic staff is composed of men who have travelled extensively, roughing it in many remote parts of the world. In the course of their journeyings our illustrators have themselves met with exciting and unusual experiences, some of the most interesting of which are here given, each artist depicting his own adventure.

I.

That the artists who illustrate the stories in +The Wide World Magazine+ are recruited from a specially-qualified staff is, we venture to think, an obvious fact. Our stories, dealing as they do with stirring adventures and strange happenings, ranging in their _locale_ from our own shores to the uttermost ends of the earth, could not, of necessity, receive adequate and accurate pictorial embellishment save at the hands of experts--men, in fact, who have themselves had experience of the world in its most varied aspects.

Our illustrators must, indeed, have in them something of the soldier, the sailor, the hunter, the cowboy, or the explorer to find a place in our pages. Thus, should we have a story dealing with Patagonia, the pictures are drawn by an artist who has actually visited that remote country; when it is necessary to illustrate a scene in the Arctic we employ an artist to whom the everlasting ice is as familiar as the streets of London. Should we find it necessary to depict a marine incident we have recourse to the brush of an artist who has himself been a sailor. In connection with every story we consult our list of "specials" for one who has either met with a like experience or is thoroughly familiar with the country concerned. Thus it will be seen that +The Wide World+ is able to avail itself of the pictorial services of an altogether exceptional body of men, many of whom have themselves met with thrilling adventures. As their experiences will have a particular interest for our readers, we are glad to be able to give an account of the most exciting episodes in the lives of some of the artists whose work has been a prominent feature in this magazine.

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Mr. Henry Sandham is a +Wide World+ artist who has had a distinguished and adventurous career. By birth a Canadian, of British descent, he has seen much of the world in out-of-the-way places. He has hunted on the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and has probably travelled North America as extensively as any man living, his sketching trips having taken him from the north of Canada to the south of the United States, and across country from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He served his time in the Canadian Volunteer Artillery and saw active service during the Fenian raid on Canada in 1864. Much to the consternation of his friends, he once set off on a tour with a notorious desperado known as "Curley Bill," a "bad man," whose boast it was that he could not sleep unless he shot a man per month; if troubled with insomnia, he said, he shot an extra one. Mr. Sandham roughed it for some time with this fire-eating companion, who tended him with a solicitude only equalled by that of a mother for her only child; all he could beg, borrow, or steal he cheerfully placed at the artist's disposal. They were attended by a dwarf, cousin to "Curley Bill," who, although of diminutive stature, was quite as desperate a ruffian as his bigger relative, whom he venerated with an ardour amounting to hero-worship, and whose dress, manners, and habits he followed as closely as he could. "Curley No. 2," as he was called, nearly got the party into serious trouble by wanting to shoot a too-inquisitive miner, and was only prevented from so doing by "Curley Bill" himself, who took him by the nape of his neck and shook him as a dog does a rat.

Mr. Sandham has visited the West India Islands, the Azores, Italy, France, Germany, and Holland. He is a Charter member of the Royal Canadian Academy, and President Roosevelt accorded him the signal honour of selecting him to illustrate his book of hunting adventures.

Among his varied experiences Mr. Sandham has had several narrow escapes from death, and on one occasion in particular the perilous position in which he was placed might well have been a creation of the brain of Edgar Allan Poe rather than an experience from real life.

It was in August, 1882, during a sketching tour in California, that Mr. Sandham met with this alarming adventure. Accompanied by a brother artist, he paid a visit to the Little Sailor Mine, which is situated on a spur of the Sierra Madre Mountains, by the side of the Sacramento River, some fifty miles from San Francisco. The manager of the mine, in which hydraulic power is used, invited Mr. Sandham to accompany him on the occasion of the monthly clean-up of the gold in the tunnels. Always anxious to add to his store of information, the artist gladly accepted the invitation, asking at the same time that his friend might join the party, to which request the manager readily assented.

On the following day Mr. Sandham was on the spot at the appointed time, eager for what was to him an entirely novel experience. His friend, however, was late, and he decided to wait for him. As subsequent events proved, Mr. Sandham owes his life entirely to this trivial incident! The manager and his staff of assistants, anxious to start the work of cleaning up without delay, thereupon entered the tunnel, which had been cut through a high bluff to allow the water a free passage to the Sacramento River, several thousand feet below the level of the mine.

While waiting for his friend, Mr. Sandham employed his time in making a sketch of the only "monitor" (delivery-nozzle) then working, and the man in charge of it sauntered over to watch the progress of his facile pencil. Before his sketch was finished Mr. Sandham noticed that the "monitor," which had hitherto been throwing a regular jet of water at a terrific pressure, by means of which the solid rock was literally washed away, had become spasmodic in its action. Curious to learn the reason, he called the miner's attention to the fact. To his utter astonishment the engineer received his remark with the utmost consternation, and, throwing up his hands with a gesture of despair, shrieked:--

"Good heavens! The pipe has burst, and all the boys will be drowned!"

With that he at once dashed off frantically in the direction of the signal-station to order the water to be turned off at the upper reservoir, which was situated many hundred feet above the level of the mine, and was fed from the Sierra Madre Mountains, twenty miles away. Meanwhile Mr. Sandham realized that with the bursting of the pipe the tunnel must have been instantly flooded with an immense volume of water, and that the unfortunate manager and his staff were caught like rats in a trap. At that very moment they were, without a doubt, fighting desperately for their lives. With characteristic energy Mr. Sandham's one desire was to help in the work of rescue, but the very thought of the men's seemingly hopeless plight left him with a sickening feeling of impotency. He quickly decided, however, that the one place where he might be of use was at the outer end of the tunnel, from which the escaping waters rushed headlong over a precipice, to fall in a series of frightful leaps some thousands of feet into the river far below. To reach this spot Mr. Sandham had to climb the high bluff through which the tunnel was cut, and descend the almost perpendicular cliff on the other side. The climb itself was no mean test of a man's agility and nerve, but Mr. Sandham has both, and he was soon at the summit. As to how he got down the other side Mr. Sandham says he is to this day not quite clear, but judging from his battered and bleeding condition and the state of his clothing afterwards he thinks he must have done so by alternately falling and sliding.

Exhausted and breathless, he finally reached the short section of the flume, immediately under the outlet of the tunnel, leading to the edge of the precipice. At that instant a dark object shot like a ball from a cannon out of the cavern into the flume, and was carried along and swept over the edge of the cliff. Mr. Sandham discovered afterwards that this was the body of the ill-fated mine-manager. After an interval of a few seconds another body was fired out of the tunnel, and as it swept down the flume towards him Mr. Sandham instinctively reached out his arm to catch it. Next instant his hand was grasped with a convulsive grip, the man's body swung out to the rush of the water, and Mr. Sandham knew that on the strength of his arm depended a human life.

At first he thought he could easily rescue the man by hauling him out of the water, but he speedily found that this was impossible, and that he was not only fighting for a fellow-creature's life but for his own as well. His position on the side of the flume afforded him but a precarious hold, and such was the terrific force of the racing torrent of water as it threatened to tear the drowning miner from his grasp that Mr. Sandham realized that he was not only powerless to pull the man out, but that he himself was in imminent danger of being pulled in. Once at the mercy of the rushing waters, no power on earth could save the pair of them from an awful death.

It is vastly to Mr. Sandham's credit that even in this dire extremity he had no thought of releasing his grip of the man's hand in order to save his own life. At the same time, any such intention on his part would have been futile, for the frenzied miner, with the fear of death strong upon him, held him in such a vice-like grip that it was perfectly clear they must both share the same fate, be it life or death.

The struggle was a grim one, and, putting forth every effort he was capable of, the artist strove hard to pull the man out of danger. His frantic endeavours, however, were unavailing, and he felt himself gradually slipping--drawn irresistibly into the mill-race, which would sweep him and the hapless miner down the flume and hurl them over the precipice to meet a frightful death on the rocks far below. Meanwhile his companion in danger was powerless to help himself, but the agony of mind he endured was vividly portrayed on his drawn and ghastly face as he fought with all his strength against the onrush of the current.

Slipping, slipping, inch by inch, until his body overhung the water to a perilous extent, Mr. Sandham felt instinctively that his strength was failing him. A few seconds more and the end must come! A cold sweat broke out on his brow, and his arm felt as though it was being wrenched from its socket. And then, suddenly, the dreadful strain lessened. The miner, in his frantic struggles, had managed to grasp the side of the flume, and, with this added opposition to the force of the water, Mr. Sandham was able to recover his balance, and at last, with an almost superhuman effort, he dragged the man from the water.

Their peril did not end here, however, for the force he had exerted landed the engineer on top of the artist, and in their nervous excitement the pair clutched each other and rolled over towards the precipice. The rocks sloped sharply down to the edge, and for the second time within the space of a few seconds they were in actual danger of their lives, for the impetus their bodies had acquired carried them down until their heads were actually hanging over the chasm. "There was no earthly reason why we should stop there," says Mr. Sandham, "save that Providence so ordered it." But stop they did, and in a few minutes they were able to crawl back exhausted to a place of safety, where they lay unable to move, speak, or even think for some considerable time. At length the miner sat up and said in a dazed, monotonous voice, "The boss is gone dead, drowned like a rat in a hole. Poor beggar, he was to have gone East to-morrow--he had made his pile. He was going back to his wife and kids. And I should have died with him if you had not caught hold of me." Then his mind seemed to clear and he exclaimed, "Say, stranger, what particular kind of fool are you, anyway? Because, if I had missed my clutch on the flume side when I got my grip on your arm, we would both be down there, ground up into tailings. Shake, stranger."

He held out a huge, hairy hand, and Mr. Sandham realized that he had received a Western miner's heartfelt thanks for the saving of his life.

The water had now been turned off at the reservoir and, the furious torrent being thus reduced to a mere trickle, all further danger to those in the mine was over. The miner's convulsive grip and the terrific strain of the current left Mr. Sandham with a crushed hand and badly-wrenched shoulder, the effects of which he felt for many months.

Looking back to-day on his adventure Mr. Sandham says that the point most vividly impressed on his memory is the fact that if he had not waited for his friend he would have been caught with the others in the flooding of the mine. Naturally, as the guest of the manager, who had gone on ahead of the party, he would have been close to him at the time of the disaster and would undoubtedly have shared his terrible fate. The rest of the party, being near a manhole, luckily made their escape--all except the foreman, who had pluckily allowed his men to go first. His chivalry nearly cost him his life, for he was too late to save himself and was caught in the flood. It was he whom Mr. Sandham so pluckily rescued.

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Among the artists who have contributed to +The Wide World+, one of the most familiar names is undoubtedly that of Mr. Alfred Pearse, whose well-known signature, "A. P.," appeared in the very first number of the magazine.

Mr. Pearse has met with such an extraordinary number and variety of accidents and adventures during his career that he says, "There is no doubt that by all the laws of chance I ought not to be here, but killing seems to agree with me."

His list of casualties is an extraordinary one. He has been nearly drowned three times, and has had concussion of the brain more than once. He has fallen off the tops of omnibuses--on one occasion through the bus skidding when he was on his way to Cowes to make a sketch of Queen Alexandra's pet dogs. This resulted in his being paralyzed in the legs for six months, and one of his most cherished possessions is a kindly letter of sympathy from Her Majesty, expressing her hopes for his speedy recovery. Mr. Pearse has been drugged, poisoned, and shot, has fallen down Beachy Head, and been knocked down and injured by runaway horses and motor-cars. He has slipped between a moving train and the platform, has been within an ace of falling over a precipice in the Alps, has been chased by wild bulls, been blind for two days (the after-effects of a red spider bite), and had his left shoulder put out of joint. It is perhaps permissible, therefore, to refer to him as the most "accidental" man in the world.

Mr. Pearse's alarming list of mishaps, however, does not appear to have affected him in any way, for he is to-day as full of vigour and spirits as many a man of half his years and considerably less than half his accidents.

But there is one particular experience in his life which Mr. Pearse confesses stands out above all others in sheer intensity of horror and nerve-racking anguish--an occasion when he was absolutely and entirely at the mercy of a raving lunatic. There are, it is safe to say, few men who have been so near death and have survived the ordeal.

This alarming adventure dates back to Mr. Pearse's early manhood, and had its inception in the introduction into his family circle of a certain individual who, for obvious reasons, we shall refer to in this narrative as Mr. X----.

Mr. Pearse first made the acquaintance of Mr. X---- owing to the interest he manifested in the affairs of the church at which his family attended. Mr. X---- soon began to show a considerable liking for Mr. Pearse, and the close friendship which ensued led to the latter's father inviting Mr. X---- to his house, where he soon became a welcome visitor. He was undoubtedly an interesting personality, although even at this time he was regarded as being somewhat strange in his manner and subject to hallucinations. For instance, he once declared that he had caused the death of his wife, and also that he took a delight in poisoning his neighbours' dogs and then offering a reward for the apprehension of the poisoner. These wild statements, however, were received with pity rather than credence.

Mr. X---- was, according to his own account, an Australian, and in appearance was gaunt, large-headed, and glaring-eyed, with a scanty beard and moustache. He stood well over six feet in height, and was evidently of immense muscular strength.

Although a man of professedly religious inclinations, his actions were not always in keeping with his words; and Mr. Pearse, when visiting him at his rooms, would often find him raving like a madman, reviling himself and those with whom his past life had been spent. On one of Mr. Pearse's visits he found Mr. X---- almost delirious with laughter, owing to the fact that his servant was seriously ill after drinking some of his master's whisky, into which Mr. X----, suspecting that the man was in the habit of helping himself, had put some laudanum.

On the other hand, for all his evident madness or wickedness, there was a good side to his character, and Mr. Pearse once saw him knock down a bully who had insulted an old man; while on another occasion he interfered to protect a woman from the brutal assault of her husband. It was simply for this reason that Mr. Pearse endeavoured to befriend him, although at times his conduct was such as to strain their relations almost to breaking-point.

Unfortunately, X----'s conduct went from bad to worse, until at length he gained for himself an unenviable notoriety throughout the neighbourhood. Mr. Pearse was still stanch to his ill-guided friend and ready to welcome him in his home, but his father, having regard to his son's welfare, could not but regard their friendship with considerable misgivings, and on one of X----'s periodical visits he was reluctantly compelled to forbid him the house. X---- received the ultimatum in sullen silence, and with a vindictive scowl on his face he took his departure.

Mr. Pearse was at the time studying wood-engraving with Messrs. Nicholls and Aldridge at 13, Paternoster Row, and one afternoon shortly afterwards he was considerably surprised when Mr. Nicholls came into the office and said, "Who is that madman sitting on the stairs?"

Naturally enough the young artist's first thoughts were of Mr. X----, and he immediately ran out on to the landing to investigate. There, sure enough, seated on the top stair, was the familiar figure of X----, wearing a "wideawake" hat and Inverness cape.

They were on the top floor of the building, and there was a large well staircase with a sheer drop of sixty feet straight down to the hall below. Mr. X----, whose eyes were staring wildly and whose every feature was working convulsively, dropped his hat and umbrella at sight of Mr. Pearse, and without a word seized him by the collar of his coat and the left arm and forced him towards the banisters. So sudden was the onslaught that the young man had no time even to call for assistance, but he nevertheless realized his peril and struggled desperately in the grip of the madman. Mr. Pearse was not only young but slight of build for his age, and despite his efforts he was quite powerless in the hands of X----, who, with the almost supernatural strength of a maniac, lifted him, apparently without effort, clean over the banisters, and held him suspended in mid-air over the abyss, with nothing but sixty feet of air between him and the stone floor below.

Even in this awful extremity the one idea uppermost in the artist's mind was as to his best means of escape. Could he clutch hold of anything before the crash came? Could he swing himself on to the next landing or cling to his captor? X----, however, was too cunning in his methods to allow of any such manœuvres, and Mr. Pearse soon realized that he was absolutely and entirely at the mercy of a raving lunatic, and that his life depended, small though the chance was, on his own coolness and resource.

At that critical moment, curiously enough, the young man's chief concern was for the welfare of a friend of his, also studying wood-engraving, who had followed him from the office, and who, with bulging eyes, open mouth, and face ghastly green with fright, was a horrified witness of the proceedings, pressing back against the panelled wall as if he wished he might vanish through it. Mr. Pearse devoutly hoped the young fellow would remain quiet, for the slightest movement, he felt convinced, would hasten his own end. Fortunately, however, he was too petrified by fear to be capable of action or speech.

Thoughts of his mother and her anguish at his tragic death next took possession of Mr. Pearse's mind, but his desire to live and the necessity for concentrating his thoughts on his terrible plight were suddenly brought back to him by Mr. X----, who hissed in a cold, hard voice, "I always repay! I am going to drop you, Alfred; aren't you afraid?"

Mr. Pearse was firmly convinced that his last hour had come, but summoning all his fortitude and exerting his will-power to the utmost he replied without the slightest hesitation, "No; for I know you will put me back."

The apparent coolness and indifference with which the young artist replied were without doubt the means of his salvation, for the madman, with a profound sigh--as though he was sorry, but was obliged to do so--pulled him over the banisters and dropped him on the landing. Then he fled, leaving his umbrella and hat behind him.

Mr. Pearse has never from that day seen or heard of his assailant, but even now the mere thought of the agonizing suspense he endured at his hands brings with it a shudder of horror.

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Mr. A. J. Gough is another +Wide World+ artist--a Yorkshireman by birth--who has seen much of the world and taken part in many an exciting episode in wild and uncivilized places.

His early youth was spent in India, where his father--Mr. J. W. Gough, the architect--was building a palace for the Maharajah of Durbhungah; and there he met with his first adventure, when he lost himself in a tiger-infested jungle, and was only found by the search-party with much difficulty.

Mr. Gough subsequently went to America, where his experiences included encounters with alligators and rattlesnakes and disputes with "bad men" armed with bowie-knives and six-shooters. He has won fame as an amateur boxer, and is still a member of the Belsize Boxing Club, being also well known as a swimmer.