The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1911-08-09

GREAT GUNS RENT THE AIR.
 A touch of this button, a flash along the wire and the fuse is struck. Then four or five minutes and up goes mountain that has stood here since the world began. Isn't it glorious?" He himself and took off his hat. ''Mr. Rowland, will you press the buttong'
 With a strange thrill Rowland bent over the battery, his eyes turned to the mass of rock looming sullen and black half mile away, as if bidding defiance in the face of impending fate. Tremblingly his finger pressed on the little white knob, and a silence like that of death fell on those who watch ed. One minusettwo-three-five pass ed, while in the bowels of the noun tain the fuse was sizzling to its end. Then there came puff, something like a cloud of dust rising skyward, but without sound, and before it's upward belching had. ceased tongue of flame spurted out of its crest, and after that, perhaps two seconds later. came the explosion. There was a rumbling and jarrtng, as if the earth were con- vulsed under foot. Volumes of dense black smoke shot upward, shutting the mountain in an impenetrable pail of gloom, and in an instant these rolling, twisting volumes of black smoke be- came lurid, and an explosion like that of thousand great guns rent the air. As fast as the eye could follow sheets of flame shot out of the sea of smoke, climbing higher and higher in light ming flashes until the lurid tongues licked the air quarter of mile above the startled wilderness. Explosion fol lowed explosion, some of them coming in hollow, reverberating booms, others sounding as if in midair. The heav- ems were filled with hurtling rocks; solid masses of granite ten feetisQuare were thrown a hundred feet away; rocks weighing ton were hurled still farther, as if they were no more than stones flung by the hand of a giant; chunks that would have crashed from the roof to the basement of a sky scraper dropped a third and nearly a half mile away. For three minutes the frightfuf convulsions continued. Then the lurid lights died out of the pail of smoke, and the pail itself be- gan to settle. Rowland felt a grip on his arm. Dumbly he turned and look ed into the white, staring face of the superintendent. His ears tingled, ev- cry fiber in him seemed unstrung. MacDonalds voice came to him strange and weird.
 "What do you think of that, How Iand"'
 The two men gripped hands, and when they looked again they saw dim ly through dust and smoke only torn and shattered masses of rock where had been the giant ridge that barred the path of the new road to the bay.
 Rowland talked but little on their way back to camp. The scene that he had just witnessed affected him strangely. It stirred once more with in him all of his old ambition, all of his old enthusiasm, and yet neither found voice in words. He was glad when the dinner was over at Thorne's, and, with the going of the mail sledge asd the seaior engineer, there came .scr him a stfif deeper sense of icy. Now he was in charge. It was his road from that hour on. He was in charge .in charge of the greatest rail. road building job on earth-he, Jack Rowland, who less than twenty years ago was a barefooted, half starved urchin peddling papers in the streets where he was now famous! And now what was this black thing that had come up to threaten his chances just as he had about won his great fighti He clinched his hands as he thought