The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-05-16

as 0 frightened child Whimpers; and as a mother soothes her child so the wife soothed him with quieting words, her | hand laid on his head until he pulled | himself together again, Afterward the reporter heard the same man spoken of as the hero of the glen some years be- fore, when he had held in check, single | handed, a fire mysteriously started in the long grass at the bottom of the ra- vine, until help came to put it out. He had been terribly burned in doing SO. | With an apology for his weakness, he wiped his eyes and began to talk about the life in the glen.
 You won't find another place like this in this country" said he, unless it's another powder mill settlement, and doubt if any of 'em are as much shut out from the world as we are. | Here's fifty of us, about, and we're, some ways, like big family. When you're working next to man with the l fear of death on you the friendship be- tween you is like that of kin for kin. | It ain't the fear of death either, ex- actly You won't find many men around here that are afraid of dying, | for they've seen too much of it; but it s the constant uncertainty that's hard | You'd think it'd break 'em down, but it
 don't. One reason why so many pow
 der men die in the explosions is that mighty few of 'em die of disease It's
 the greatest business for your health | that there is The country life does it, | I suppose, and then doctors say the chemicals we use are good for you.
 Any way, we're healthy lot and we
 look forward to dying with our boots
 on unless they get blown off.
 | "Of course, we don't wear boots, you
 know, when we're at work, on account
 of the metal nails in lem, but we have | soft shoes, and, speaking of shoes, that reminds me of a queer thing about ex- 1 plosions If a mans running away l from an explosion--it ain't often he has l time to run away-and gets blown to | pieces, one of his feet is always left | whole and the other gets the shoe and
 sock stripped off it. They say the foot
 that's in the air is the one that gets out | whole. I don't know about that, but | know that down in Virginia, where
 was in the glazing house for while,
 we had an explosion once; a double like l | then the other-only in that one there
 was two or three seconds in between. I
 was coming down to the mill, and was on top of hill, where I saw the whole thing, After the glazing house went up I saw four of the men come running
 out of the drying house. Then every
 thing went black and red behind them.
 When got up, feeling pretty dizzy the I echoes were rolling around in the hills | behind me, and my heart beats sound
 ed like cannons being fired into my
 ears. Down in the hollow we found parts of four 1egs-three rights and one left. The feet were all there, with the
 shoes and socks on, but none of the l rights matched the left. The men were
 blown to pieces, and next day we found three teeth buried in a tree. There l were other things we found, too, but | well, I don't like to talk about those
 things"
 What causes the explosions?" asked
 the reporter.
 That's a thing nobody knows was
 the reply. "The slightest spark might | do it, for the air is full of powder dust, l but the question is, where does the 1 spark come from? Never but one man that I've heard of saw the beginning of
 an explosion. and he's only half man
 now, for the other half of him was
 blown away. It was insthe mills where | my father was killed that old Joe saw his explosion and lived to tell about it.. l A flying spark came in through the | window and scuttled along the floor. | He saw it. One jump took him out the
 door and he yelled to the others as he 1 went, but there was no chance for ] them. Old Joe. by his own account, had got about twenty or twenty-five
 feet away and in line of a small tree | when he felt as if he was being torn to | pieces and burned up at the same time. | They picked him up hundred feet
 away One leg was gone, his right
 hand crushed, the right eye destroyed,
 and that side of his face all crushed in,
 and seven ribs broken, besides smaller | injuries. He's living there yet I guess,
 on a pension. Most likely the tree be- l tween him and the explosion saved l him.
 Does that mean that the force of
 the explosion is in any particular direc. tion?"
 ''If it is, l don't know what the diree- tion is. They say dynamite explodes I down and powder follows the wind, but
 nobody knows anything about it. Here's all these light cottages within a | few rods of the buildings that blew up,
 and no harm to them except a little | glass broken. Over there in the vil- | lage, three-quarters of a mile away, a
 whole store front was broken in and a | lot of houses were shaken up. When
 you drive back you'll pass grove of
 trees-too bad it's so dark you can't see | 'em-that had their tops clipped off as l if an axe had done the work, in the ex- ! plosion before this one"
 What effect does the constant anxi-
 ety have on the men?" asked the repor- | ter.
 That depends on the men. Some of | 'em it makes religious, and others don't | care: get reckless and all that sort of
 thing"
 | Drive them to drink?"
 Drink? There's one thing that's l worse than smoking in powder plant,
 and that's drinking. Where the small
 est carelessness may lose the mills and
 few hands thrown in, man who gets | full isn't wanted around. Besides,
 there's no place to get drink around here. No; what meant was that some | of the boys just seem to get careless l tya v1yl,i To