Tombstone epitaph., 1917-06-17
CHAPTER VI.
The Failure.

The Failure.
 Tn sp,te of himself and his confidence In the bridge. Abbott felt a little un- easy the next morning. At bottom he had more respect for Meade's tech nical knowledge than he had displayed or even admitted to himself. The younger engineers terrified alarm. his utter forgetfulness of the amenities be- tween them. his frantic but futile ef- forts to telephone. of which the op- orator told Abbott in the morning. his hurried departure to New York. were. to say the least. somewhat disquietng. much more so than he was fain to ad- init to himself.
 Although 1t involved a hard and somewhat dangerous climb downward and took upwards of a half hour of his valuable time. the first thing the erect ins engineer did In the morning was to go down to the pier head and make thorough and careful examination of the buckled member. C-10R was, Of course, a part of the great lower chord of the huge diamond-shaped truss, which, with Its parallel sixty feet away on the other side of the bridge and Its two opposites across the river, support ed the whole structure. If anything: were wrong. seriously. irreparably wrong, with the member and It gave way the whole truss would go. The cthe. truss would inevitably follow suit. sad the cantiIever would immedi- ately collapse. Abbott realized that. of course. as he climbed carefully down to the pier head and stood on the shoe.
 Abbott, as he stood by the member and surveyed it throughout its length, could easily see that it had buckled. al- though the deviation was slight, about two inches at its maximum in sixty feet. He brought with him a line and, with infinite care and pains, he drew ft taut across the slight concavity like a bow-string. He had estimated the camber. or the distance between the center of the bow and the string, at one and . ..aII inches. As he maue uaure careful measurements. he discov- cred that 1t was slightly over one and three-quarter inches. In seven hun dred and twenty that was scarcely mo- ticeable, and it did not seem very much to Abbott. As he stood there feeling himself an insignificant figure amid this great lnterwoven mass Of steel, again the sense of its strength and stability came to him overpowering- ly, so much so that he laughed aloud in a rather grim fashion at the un- wonted nervousness which had been induced Tn his mind by Meade's words and actions.
 But he was conscientious man. so he pursued his investigations further. He climbed up on top of the member. which was easy enough by meanss Of ,he criss-crossed lacing. and carefully inspected the Iacings at the center of tt-c .ancavIty. or sidewise spring from the right line.
 He noticed. by getting down on his face and surveying the lacing bars closely. a number of fine hair-line cracks in the paint. surface traceries apparently. running here and there from the rivet holes. The rvets them selves had rather a strained look. Some of the outer rivets seemed slightly loose, where before they must have been tight, for the members. like all other parts of the bridge. had been carefully Inspected at the shop and any looseness of the rivets would cer- fsinly have been noticed there. But Abbott's obsession as to the strength of the bridge had grown stronger. Lin- ing 1t out. crawling over 1t, feeling It's rigidity, he decided that these evident strains were to be expected. Of course the lacings that held the webs together would have to take up terrific stress. They had been designed for that pur- pose. Largely because he did not find anything very giaring. and because he wanted to believe what he believed. the chief of construction left the pier head and cIambered up to the floor with more satisfaction In his heart than his somewhat surprising anticipation vdich had so unwilIingly grown under the stimulus of Meade's persistence. had led him to expect
 The whistle was just blowing for the commencement of work when he got back to the bridge floor. He could not but reflect. as the men came swarmins , along the tracks to beftn their days work. that the responsibility for their Hves lay with him Well. Abbott was . big nsn in his way, he had assumed respon, Utilities before and was per escsIy ,.flYng ts e % again. both for