Page:Argosy, volume 44, December 1903-March 1904.djvu/669
"That—that noise!" I gasped, already wondering if I had not made a fool of myself. "What was it?"
"Eh? Oh, that was nothing—the machinery—why are you——"
He was interrupted by a crash and splash from the far end of the place, followed by an exclamation of terror and horror, and a nice collection of French and English oaths from the men.
Lawrence had been holding in his hand while he spoke to me what looked like a peculiar piece of metal. It was cylindrical in shape, and little shades of color played over its surface continually.
Now he thrust this into my hands with a muttered injunction to be careful of it, and rushed off to the scene of the catastrophe. I followed him, at my best pace, with the thing in my hand.
At the end of the room were two immense vats of enameled iron, their edges flush with the floor, half filled with some livid, seething acid mixture, through which little currents writhed and wriggled.
The farther side of the largest vat sloped up at an angle of about thirty degrees, a smooth, slimy slide of zinc about ten feet from top to bottom and extending the full length of the vat.
The surface of this slide was covered to about half an inch in thickness with some kind of yellowish paste, whose ultimate destination was the mixture in the vat.
Above towered an engine of many wheels and pistons, and this operated two great pestles or stamps, slant-faced to fit the slide; these, running from one end of the zinc to the other, worked the paste with a grinding motion, as an artist mixes his paints with a palette knife.
The grinding motion was quite swift, but the lateral movement was comparatively slow. I should say that it must have taken about four minutes for the two stamps to pass from one end of the fifteen-foot vat to the other.
In the vat floated a plank. On the surface of the slide, almost in the middle, sprawled a man, his arms spread out on either side, not daring to move an inch on the slippery paste, for the slightest motion meant a slip downward into the hissing acid.
Worst of all, there seemed to be no means of getting across to him. The great engine occupied one side entirely to the wall—on the other the second vat barred passage.
Beyond the vats the room extended some little distance, and there was a door there, open, through which one could see a fenced yard piled high with ashes and cinders.
And the great stamps, twenty cubic feet of solid metal in each, were making their inevitable way toward the man. When they reached him—well, their smooth surface would afford him no finger hold, even if their rapid movement allowed him to clutch them. They must push him down—they might stun him first, but most certainly they would push him down.
I need hardly say that I did not take in the full significance of all this at the time—it was only afterward that I fully understood the details.
Even as Lawrence ran he shouted:
"Stop that engine! Quick, men!"
I saw two stalwart workmen spring at the levers of the stamp machine—saw them twisting at a wheel—heard another crash, and a deep groan from all! The guiding mechanism had slipped a cog, or broken a rod, or something.
In my excitement, shaking so from weakness that I could hardly stand, I had half fallen against a piece of machinery that seemed to be at a standstill. Unconsciously my fingers grasped at a sort of handle.
I heard a whirring noise, felt something like a tremendous shock, and a burning pain. I let go the handle in a hurry, just as Lawrence wheeled on me with the cry, "For God's sake, you fool"
But I could give no heed either to what I had done or to him. My eyes were still fixed on the unfortunate man on the slide.
The stamps were not more than five feet from his body now, and their low rattle and swish sounded in my ears loud as the tread of an army.
"A rope!" cried Lawrence in despair.
And then, in my horror, and in the