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Alfred Boles, roadmaster of the California Street Cable R. R. Co., was working on the cables all of the previous night, and up to about 4:30 on the morning of the 18th. Therefore, that night at their home in the Richmond District, the daughter slept with her mother.
When the anchors were thus placed in position, the ends of the cables still remaining on board the ship were passed around capstans, and by means of the donkey-engine drawn taut.
The original Filipino hand-sawyers were ultimately replaced by small portable mills, and these in turn by large modern mills to which logs are brought by skidding engines or overhead cables, yet it is true to-day, as it has always been true, that no sawmill has ever been able to furnish dry lumber, for the simple reason that the green output is purchased as fast as it can be sawed.
The desperate squadron had only proceeded three leagues, when a faulty, if not treacherous manoeuvre, broke the tow-line which fastened the captain's boat to the raft; and this became the signal to all to let loose their cables. The weather was calm.
Louis, on May 15th, to take the fleet tender in tow and proceed to Santiago de Cuba to cut the cables at that point. The grappling implements were secured from the tug Wampatuck on May 16th, and at eleven P. M. the expedition, in the small boats, left the cruiser for the entrance of Santiago. It was then perfectly dark and hazy, but the Santiago light was burning brightly.
Instead of blackening the streets, the wire nerves of the telephone are now out of sight under the roadway, and twining into the basements of buildings like a new sort of metallic ivy. Some cables are so large that a single spool of cable will weigh twenty-six tons and require a giant truck and a sixteen-horse team to haul it to its resting-place.
Close to my face were the lines ascending and descending, while just above me were hundreds of thousands, a bushel-basket of army ants, with only the strength of their threadlike legs as suspension cables.
Since I wrote, I ought to be madder, for I have been to the trenches outside of Rheims in Champagne; and, had they not deviled the spirit out of me with cables, I believe I could have written such a lot of stories of France that no one else has had the opportunity to write. Believe me no one has yet told the story of the trench war.
By the middle of the afternoon Lund had related his sixth story, being the veracious history of how one Louis McGraw, a famous fishing-skipper of Mingan, rode out a tremendous gale on the Orphan Bank, with both cables out, the storm-sail set, her helm lashed amidships, and the crew fastened below as tightly as possible.
It was the gun and gunnery control cables that were the weak spots. So I had L.T.O.'s posted in the spotting top, the conning tower, the transmission room, the four turrets, and at the side batteries. Every few minutes they put through tests which would have shown up at once any wires that had been tampered with.
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