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He had never excelled in calling turkeys, but he was a far better shot than Grandpa Davis. Without demur the two old boys fell naturally into the rôle of former days. Breathless and excited, they crouched there, waiting for the fateful moment. Their nerves were tense, their eyes dilated, and their hearts beating like trip-hammers.
Bennington had gone back to his office, shutting and opening his fists. Ay, they had long since ceased calling him the dude. The man of brawn has a hearty respect for spectacular exhibitions of strength. One o'clock. The trip-hammers began their intermittent thunder, the rolling-machines shrieked, and the hot ore sputtered and crackled.
It was the axe-factory on the river, before which he used to stand as a boy, and watch the men naked to the waist, with huge hairy arms and streaming faces, toiling in the red glare, the trip-hammers endlessly pounding upon the glowing metal. In old days it had suggested pictures of gods and demi-gods toiling in the workshops of the primeval world.
By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the people, Sir, some of us with nut-crackers, and some of us with trip-hammers, and some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming with a whish! like air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down on the lumps of nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of them like Aaron's calf.
Those tiger yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of strength, which periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer.
As near as he could reckon, allowing for the ever-present currents, Dave believed they were nearing the Pole. But his brain was now throbbing as if a hundred trip-hammers were pounding upon it. Moments alone would tell the tale, for the oxygen in the air was exhausted. Already half the crew were unconscious; others were reeling like drunken men.
In February, 1865, General Grant's plans were so well shaped that, with the reenforcement of General Sherman returned from his march to Savannah, he could count on crushing up Richmond, as an egg under trip-hammers. Before this the doom was registered, for the Southerners were at the end of their men, as before they had been at that of their means.
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