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Steam from every available boiler was carried across the ice in feed-pipes, the night shift had been roused from sleep, and every available man was busied in relieving the pressure. Pile-drivers hammered long timbers into the river-bed above the threatened point, hydraulic jacks were put in place, and steel cables were run to drum and pulley.
To the right of the higher ground a fan of sidetracks spread, with lines of flat cars and gondolas loaded with stone, brush, piling and timbers, and in the foreground two hulking pile-drivers, their leads, like rabbits' ears laid sleekly back, squatted mysteriously. Switch engines puffed impatiently up and down the ladder track shifting stuff to the distant spurs.
Back and forth darted the SPRITE and her sister-tug the SPRAY towing the pile-drivers or the strings of piles. Under the frowning destruction that a breath might loosen, the crews had to do their work. And if ever that breath should come, there would be no chance for escape. Crushed and buried, the men and their craft alike would be borne with the breaking jam to an unknown grave in the Lake.
So soon as I had returned home, I set to work and prepared the working drawings of the steam pile-drivers. They were soon completed, conveyed to Devonport, and erected on the spot where they were to be used. They were ready on the 3d of July 1845.
Initial mistakes he had no patience with, and he was determined to start right, as when he engaged Wilkinson, almost doubling his big salary, and brought him out from Chicago to take charge of the street railway organization. Night and day the road gangs toiled on the streets. And night and day the pile-drivers hammered the big piles down into the mud of San Francisco Bay.
But, as he sat in the Pile-drivers' Home, it looked as if his fall-down was very near. In his pocket was precisely the room-rent for the following week, the advance payment of which was already three days overdue and clamorously demanded by the hard-faced landlady. In the rooms, with care, was enough food with which to pinch through for another day.
She took it for the signal, and promptly delivered a mellow laugh that touched off the whole audience; and the explosion that followed was the triumph of the evening. I thought that that honest man Sawyer would choke himself; and as for the bludgeons, they performed like pile-drivers. But my poor little morsel of pathos was ruined.
Those profits would be greatly diminished, if not wiped out entirely, by the expenses, both regular and irregular, incurred in holding the jam; by the damage suits surely to be brought by the owners of the piles, trees, pile-drivers and other supplies and materials requisitioned in the heat of the campaign; and by the extra labour necessary to break out the jam and to sort the logs according to their various destinations.
I wrote down to my partner by that night's post informing him of the happy circumstance. The order was for two grand steam hammer pile-drivers, each with four-ton hammer-blocks.The wrought-iron guide case and the steam cylinder were to weigh in all seven tons. All this weight was to rest on the shoulders of the pile. The blows were to be about eighty in the minute.
Now, night before last, at the Academy of Music, just after Signorina had finished that exquisite melody, "The Last Rose of Summer," one of these floral pile-drivers came cleaving down through the atmosphere of applause, and if she hadn't deployed suddenly to the right, it would have driven her into the floor like a shinglenail.
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