HEROES OF THE TELEGRAPH

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 2746, 26 February 1910, Page 1 (Supplement)

HEROES OF THE TELEGRAPH

SERVICE.

SUPERB DEVOTION TO DUTY.

MAGNIFICENT SELF-SACRIFICE OF MEN AT THE M IRE ENDb.

(By A. W. Rolker in “Everybody’s Magazine.”)

Oil the thirteenth floor of the Postal Telegraph Company’s skyscraper m New York they sat, eight hundred men, shoulder to shoulder in front of rows of tables, in their fingers the knobs of eight hundred telegraph keys that churned bedlam like myriads oi spi-ing frogs. Overhead raged a roaring threealarm fire, and a regiment of hose men played scores of streams. Rivers or water poured down shafts, short-cireuit-ino- and stopping the electric elevators. Deluges came down the walls tlirougn the ceilings, running off tarpaulins thrown over switchboards, drendnng men, and flooding the floor six inches dC ln' a corner of the room stood the dynamos that generated the current unleashed in dots and dashes through wires crisscrossing earth. v\ a ter on these, and they, too, would have been short-circuited, and the terrific voltage necessary to hurl the current tlirougnout the system would have been shot through the bodies of the men. Y\ ith a roar out of each key would have sizzled a white-hot flame, and like the snapping of fingers the eight hundred avould have been flashed into eternity as if they had been sti'apped in so many executioners’ chairs. .. c From overhead came the trample or feet, the shouts of firemen, and the dull impact of streams. The smell of burnt wood and volumes of choking smoke filled the room. But not tor an instant did the jingling of keys cease; for to quit at this, the busiest hour of the night, would have snarled the company into a tangle which it would require days to unravel. For an hour the men sat in mackintoshes, or under umbrellas, knowing that between them and sudden death was the thickness of a taifpaulin. Their faces showed the ALMOST SUPERHUMAN. STRAIN of concentrating their minds on the work in hand; but not a man deserted his key. On bared nerves they worked, for the honor of the service wherein it is admitted that man born of woman may blunder, but wherein, too, is an unwritten law that in tamo of peril no man may desert his post, an> more than a captain may desert his ship or an engineer leap from Ins locomotive before it is needless suicide to remain. . No record of the men who sacrificed or risked their lives on behalf of the service is kept either by the Postal Telegraph or the Western Lmon Telegraph Company. So far as the companies are concerned the man who endangers his life in the service is doing simply what is expected of him. But up on the floors of the skyscrapers of our cities, where work regiments of operators into whose cars and out of -whose fingers .pulsate the throbs of warm hearts, veterans who have helped . to make the history of the country for two generations tell many a splendid story of tho telegrapher’s devotion to duty. . Among the most striking instances was that of Leo Fairchild, night telegraph operator in a signal tower on a single-track railroad running through Weldon North Carolina. He had let a north-’bound ferry train into Ins block and while it was burning up the rails at the rate of forty-five miles an hour he was horrified to see a south-hound excursion train, laden with four hundred men, women and children, whiz by the signal he had set against it 2ooyds up the track. _ . , ... One chance in a thousand Fairchild saw to prevent 'head-on collision and frightful slaughter —and he took it. As the locomotive of 1 the excursion-roared by he stood for an instant on the sill of the window in the tower, then ho dived flat, six feet forward and downward, landing on hands and knees upon the roof of a .passenger ear. The impetus of tho train was _so enormous that it slid from under him almost the length of the car and the impact all but°snapped his back in two; but he clutched 'blindly, fetching up against a ventilator, and there be lay for anno seconds, hardly able to stir hand or foot, the breath knocked out of him. Within three feet, was the bell rope, but he could not reach it by a foot and to try to squeeze down between the ends of the cars would have < meant being cut in two„l)y ..the roof 'fiiditCS*' V- •' * * q •*„ j v • One thing only was left. .With, the last strength in over the roof of the car to th&.'dngme, poised a moment, leaped ah’*to the coal m. the swaying tender, arid scrambled forward to the engineer" in; the cab.; \Yitfi blood : gushing ph’t of his scalp •wounds he /

the wreck, on hands and knee stumps, came an apparition leaving a red trail behind. It. proved to be Frank Shalcy, a telegraph lineman who had been sent up the road to locate a wire trouble, s:nd who, with his satchel of instruments strapped across a shoulder, had been in the baggage car when the crash came. Clutching the precious satchel, he dragged himself forward, but his legs had been smashed off at the knees, and he was bleeding frightfully. “The tele-graph! Cut in on the telegraph!” lie shouted, hut not a man there knew which one of the score of wires to out, and Shaley himeslf could not tell without testing. They threw a rope across an arm of one of the poles, passed a sling about the dying man, and hoisted him up. Then he cut and grounded the wire and .connected liis telegraph key. Tenderly propped by anxious hands, he began to send the call for the Cheyenne operator, meanwhile .gazing stoicailv at the jiool where his lifeblood ebbecl away. At that unusual hour of the night he found trouble in raising his man, and he pounded his key for ten minutes before he got an answering click. “Number 17 terribly wrecked forty miles west of Cheyenne. (Send hospital train,” he said. Then they pillowed his head on the satchel and an armful of waste, while forty miles away a whistle shrieked .through the night and brought engineer, fireman, and two hundred Japanese tumbled on to the wrecking train, followed by the hospital train with doctors and nurses. But Shaley was gone when they came. Not a line in the ashen face betrayed the inhuman torture he must have undergone, nor the strain of turning his; mind from his own agony and impending doom to the little brass instrument with which he had SAVED SCORES OF LIVES.

Volumes might be filled with tales the veterans tell of operators in the railroad branch of the service; but there are heroes- as well in other branches. Among these was James Igoe, a telegraph operator in the office of the “Minneapolis Tribune,” who was taking an important message from New York when fire broke out in his building. To desert his post before the very last moment and take the chance of having his paper “beaten” by a rival newspaper in so important a story would have been, from newspapermen’s viewpoint, little short of high treason. The hour was shortly past ..midnight, when the clicking of typewriters ami telegraph keys, the ringing of telephones, the shuffle of feet and cries for copy turn a newspaper office into a boiler shop, with every man bent upon cramming his- story into the first or mail edition.

Wheri the fire was discovered, Igoe interrupted the sender at the other end long enough to say : “The building is on fire. 1 s hall finish this item. Hurry up” ; and he stuck to his/key -while reporters, .copy readers, and night editors grabbed stories and raced down the street to another newspaper office to have the matter set up. None in the office noticed the man in shirt sleeves with the green shade over his eyes, as he bent over the sheets while his pencil sped feverishly, taking ovbat the man at the other end was “pumping at him.” From down in the streets—five storeys as the.stone falls —the screech and clatter of fire engines, the shouts of firemen, and cries from a crowd told the lone operator the seriousness of the situation; hut if he quit, he could not finish the story in tune for the first edition, and.he trusted to his nerve and strength to get out of the scrape alive. The room filled with smoke that stifled him and drove tears to his eyes. He heard the blows of firemen’s axes, the fjhud and splash of streams against the building, and the clatter of glass as windows were smashed below. He heard the snap and crackle of flames beneath him and saw they were lighting the sky. “Good night,” signalled the New Man, and with a hound the operator sprang for the door, only to bang it shut. He had looked into a-livid furnace. He ran toward a window, and a shout of borrow went up as the crowd saw him —a hundred feet in air, apparently .lost.. .■ ~.yv: vCTr-'-F'FF: , dowsin- with'iegs dangling', v ga'zing.down at- the firemen • who' were Try in'g tb' 'flrid aylahe. for. ladders through'the of.. ‘ flames that Now . and then. her bent ' hi i ey es ' towards the ■ upturned face's and; waved a hand, ; bringing frantjc .cheers { and even; when he realised that the efforts.of tho firemen were useless, he did not lose his nerve. Into the window on the floor directly under him led a dozen stout telegraph wires, sloping fro’m the window to the top pf a taU pole ’ across "the’“street. If he could sdrop on to these and save himself from the rebound, he knew he would escape. Standing on tho edge of the sill, he gazed at the frightful drop, below which were the red and yellow flames of a blast furnace. His handkerchief bo tied around one hand, the sleeve of a shirt about the other, to prevent laceration. He aimed carefully, leaned forward, and jumped. For an instant A HUSH FELL UPON THE SICKENED MULTITUDE.

THREW HIMSELF UPON THE EN-

GINEER FROM BEHIND. “Stop! Stop! For God’s sake, back up!” he shouted above,the racket. Not , at second nvas to spare,went brakes, and the fireman van ahead y>ith a torch to check the oncoming freighter, while the engineer of the excursion train backed frantically, and on the floor of the cab lay the senseless form of the man who had saved a tramload of human beings from hideous death. Afterward Fairchild rose high in the Service of the Seaboard Air Line and /*,fued in harness;' but had it not been ' /bis story even now would not be told for he worked simply for the honor of the service. . ~ , .. Incidents of heroism like that or Fairchild seldom become known to the public, for the policy of railroads is not to let passengers know when they have had a narrow escape. The hero who <rets through witlrhis life must keep his mouth closed, else he finds himself tramping the ties in search of another job. Even the one who dies in performing a brave act may not be honored. Many and many a hero of this fort the veterans point out in the telegraph £e Qne of these was Frank Shalcy. Three years ago as the Overland Limited dashed through the night, in the bad lands forty-five miles west of Cheyenne, Wyoming, a rail broke m two and came up through the_ bottom Oi the baggage car. In an instant the train of nine cars was piled thirty feet high, while about and beneath the wreckage were -more than one hundred and fitly dead or injured human beings. A frightful sleet storm with biting cold was raging, and to this the hurt and dying lay exposed. The locomotive was wrecked so that it was impossible to cut loose and race ahead to the nearest settlement with word of the disaster, and it seemed as if nothing could b© done to save the sufferers except to flag the next train, due in five hours, -even, from under

Then it grew frantic, for upon; coming down after bounding ten feet into air, the man had managed to clutch a single strand of wire. Hand along hand, steadily, and with the strength of a trained athlete, the operator worked nearer and nearer the pole—but he was not to be saved. As he hovered between heaveu and earth directly over the street, the wire broke. Head first against the (pavement he crashed. In the upper left-hand pocket of his vest, folded neatly, they found the despatch —too late for the first edition. Proud although tho old-timer may be, of such records as Igoe’s and Fairchild’s, it is not until you come to acts of heroism performed during historical catastrophes that his eves grow a shade darker and sparkle. There, for instance, was, Mrs H. M. Ogle, a soldier’s widow, mother of two grown daughters, who stuck to her key during the Johnstown flood, saving thousands of lives by sending warning after warning to' flee into the city, and deliberately sacrificing her own life. “Good-bye, this is my last message,” she telegraphed to Manager Charles 0. Rowe at the Pittsburg office. Then the waters closed over her.

Another great historical catastrophe, in which telegraphers. played' a 7 heroic part, was the yellow fever epidemic which . swept New Orleans, Memphis

and Grenada in IS7B—the most frightful epidemic in the history of our country—when thirty thousand went down in the grip of 'Yellow Jack” and six thousand died in less than sixty days. About the middle of August of that year it was feared that the entire South would be- swept by the pest, and the announcement was made that a cordon of guards with shotguns would be stretched around the affected districts. The stampede that followed the announcement beggars description. Within less than ten days the white population of Memphis was reduced from forty thousand to less than thirty-five hundred. In the mad scramble for eelf-preservation sons fled from stricken mothers, wives abandoned doomed husbands, and mothers deserted their dying children. Clergymen, physicians, nurses and town officials fled in terror of being pent up in the live rat-trap, leaving their duties to a few brave ones who stayed behind, or to outside volunteers. To risk entering this circle of death was all but certain destruction. More than lour thousand were attacked in a single week and taken to makeshift hospitals, where nurses 'with glassy eyes and lire-red faces trembled with tho “shakes,” but stayed until tho black vomit overtook them. Mo-re than six hundred died in a single week. They died so fast that coffin-makers and grave-diggers could not keep up with them. Trenches forty feet long were scooped out with horse scrapers, and victims were buried four bodies deep, without coffins and without even a relative to stand by and murmur a prayer. In this gigantic charnel-house, abandoned by the Government through the cutting off of the mails, eleven out of fifteen Western Union Telegraph operators who had stuck to their posts were under ground by August 20, while messages piled up on the four survivors —messages of heartbroken mothers, wives and sisters pleading for scraps of information about children, husbands, and brothers; messages of anxious mothers, wives and sisters in the city of death trying to assure loved ones without that the v wore still alive, messages from convalescents begging for money: messages from the Howard Relief Association clamoring for doctors and volunteer nurses, and for drugs, cots, supplies, and funds; messages. from newspaper correspondents describing the plight of the sufferers and the horrors of tho Yellow Death, and appealing broadcast for help. How long'tlio four operators would last"^'before the thousands in the pest crater would bo cut off even from sending cries of distress to the outside world, was problematical. Therefore the company issued from its Now York beadquarters a general call for volunteers. But sticking to one’s key in time of danger was one thing, volunteering deliberately to expose one’s life another. Out of fifteen hundred operators in New York only one responded—Edward V. Wedin, twenty-two years old, a si™, slightly-built-, quiet young man, a cracker jack operator who feared not man, pest, nor devil. On August 2S ho stepped aboard the train bound for New Orleans,' an army of friends

GRASPING HIS HAND FOR A LAST GOOD-BYE.

Gazing from the car window as the train neared the fever district, 'Wedin could see for himself the ravages of the epidemic. Entire villages were desert-ed,'half-starved dogs the sole signs of life. Doors and windows of houses sFod wide open, showing bodies stretched under sheets, candles burned to their sockets in the sole death watch. Graveyards he. saw that looked liko newlyiplanted truck farms,: with white sheets of lime covering the mounds to “keep the iioisons down.” When he stepped off tho train in New Orleans, the station was deserted. At tho telegraph office the men' were thunderstruck to see him. Work had piled feet high in the short-handed office,.and he sat down at once in front of a key. He’“tent more than live hundred messages at his first sitting. Food and drink were brought him, and lie ate with one hand and worked with the other, worked for twelve hours, until .his wrist ached, and the copy danced before his eyes, and he had to sit on the arm of his chair to keep awake; worked -until his arm was as if paralysed to the elbow, and he fell forward on his key fast asleep. For two hours they left him there because they could not -waken him; then they aroused him and he staggered home through the night, through the sickening stench with which tho epidemic reeked to heaven, past trucks, express and farm waggons jouncing dead bodies to graveyards, past hundreds of bonfires of stumps and tar, burning, for disinfection, in front of houses where people had iust died. The next morning, and the next, and the next, other volunteer-. operators ar",rived;'from bthefrlqitiffs—young men' lUcff.\Y£(lin, for 'the/.ifidst .part without -riniiilySties. Tfiffyd drbpjfed, ‘like flies., OiVdjii’f/These arti.ved>;r>f'.a: iuorning and; 'hy vtu'ttjjiht of The iiextfdayboy were , hoveijftfcg him uiFiiv. 'Qtiiffcs.'ifasted on]ly ; l ; ■ forty-eight' hours, "■^ohii&^ppped^.dii th'eir'Svay home after work and lay 'dying in the streets; others who went home of an evening in seemingly good health failed to report the next day and were found dead in their beds. Numbers were stricken in the office. The wire chief alongside Wedin collapsed early one afternoon and was lifted out of his seat, his lifeless hand still clutching the key. Yet only once did Wedin falter. That was when this man who had unflinchingly looked death in the face found himself unexpectedly talking to his sister, hundreds of miles away in his own cool North. “Lord! It was as if suddenly her soft, cool fingers were laid across-my forehead,” lie said. He himself took this message, sent from Jersey City: “Is Edward V. Wedin still alive? His death is reported. His sister waits here in the office for answer.”

“Tell her Ed himself is answering this. Tell her God bless her and that Ed sends her a kiss,” Wedin answered, hot tears welling from his eyes. Throughout September to the first of October the dread weeks dragged; and then there came an early, sharp frost—and men fell into each other’s arms and wept and raised haggard faces in thanksgiving, and church bells pealed joyously, for this was the death of Yellow Jack.

Of all the men who sacrificed and risked their lives in the epidemic, Wedin, to-day a , veteran employed by the Western Union Telegraph Company, is most famed; as he says, solely by virtue of escaping Unharmed. A list of the 1 men. who died about him would , read like the absent list of a regiment roster after a hot skirmish. In unmarked Southern graves they lie;, but memory of their names is green among their brethren, for they died the death of heroes of the key in Honor of the Service. Most striking, when a community is overwhelmed by disaster, is the absence of grief or lament. Terror,-driven to an extreme, benumbs the 'human bram and is turned into ajpathy. So it was in Galveston on the orning of September 9, 1900, when, after a night of

inferno amid tidal wave and hurricane, survivors emerged from their homes to see what was left of their ruined city. Thirty thousand dazed, helpless men, women and children huddled about six thousand human bodies sprawled among the wreckage of houses piles twenty feet high. The weakest would die of shock and exposure and disease and pestilence un. less promnt aid arrived. Within fifty miles of These sufferers was help m abundance —food, drink, clothing, sliel-, ter and medical attendance-, which could be rushed fast as steam could race if neighbors only knew. But wires were. down. Bridges to the mainland were gone. Railroads-were no more. Steamships h a( i been floated on’ the tidal wave and swept high and dry, miles across country. EVERY HOPE OF COMMUNICATION WAS GONE.

The man who crossed those 50 miles and flashed the news which within two hours started races of relief ships from many ports in the country, was Richard Sp el lane, a former telegraph operator whose expertness at the keys is famous among old-timers to this day. 'Wracked, unnerved, and limp with the horrors of the frightful night, when the hurricane raged, when a hundred mes his house was on the very verge oi toppling over, when for ten hours lie stood among his throe children with his arm about his wife’s waist, resolved to swim with her and go down locked in her arms, Spellanc ventured forth at dawn.

Galveston, the beautiful semi-tropi-cal city of snowy cottages and green lawns, was. razed so that he could see the seething waters of tho Gulf. Houses lie saw smashed into each other and piled high in the streets, mangled bodies lying among thousands of dead animals. Coffins he saw with bodies long since buried that had been gouged out of the very cemeteries and had smashed open, strewing their ghastly contents. Over everything lay a three-incli sog of disease-breeding filth. "Worse, as he saw the first human creatures, ho realised that he was in a. city of the mad. Hardly a man over forty but had Veil driven temporarily insane. ■Head bowed, ashen of face, Galveston Mayor, "Walter C. Jones, came tor ard Spellane. “My God, Dick, this is terrible, terrible !” he said in a voice choked and broken. “We’re cut off r.s if on an island in the Pacific, and before night thirty thousand will be starving. What under heaven can we do?” .. Spellanc .up .to this time had himself -wandered as if in a half dream, but at the question the telegraph operator, who for years had sat taking messages of disaster by land and sea, awoke. “Do, man? Get into communication with the outside world somehow, quick as heaven will let you. Give me a requisition t-o impress anything or anyone I want into mv service, and I’ll show vou what to do.”

Within an hour Spellanc was aboard the Pherabe, a powerful thirty-foot launch, and had set forth to cross Galveston Bay to the mainland, and to follow the railroad track on foot for Houston, forty-seven miles away. But the bay was a seething turmoil that ran house-high. For two hours the launch fought, covering a bare seven miles abreast of the mainland ; but nowhere along shore, could Spellane. see a place to land. .Wreckage of houses, barns, ships, railroad trains littered the shore far as the eye could , reach. Off what had been Texas City, Spellane realised he would have to hit or miss, and ran full speed ahead at the shore, fetching up in a heap of debris. All he could find of the railroad was the right- of way. Ties were gone. Seventy-pound steel rails lay bent and twisted like hairpins, and corkscrews, and telegraph poles were razed clean as if cut off -with a buzz saw. Through knee-deep water and ankle-deep mud he slinped and floundered. The hot sun. beating through the murk of tho sweltering calm- that had followed the storm, baked him as if in a kiln, until he was mad with thirst; hut in the midst of that watery desolation there was not a drojp of water fit to drink, for the brine of the Gulf had floodem streams and wells. His feet were covered only with felt slippers, and dye had soaked out of these, poisoning his ankles until they were as if on fire and swollen big around as saucers. But lie trudged l on all day, mile after mile, now climbing heaps of debris, now swimming streams where bridges and culverts had been swept away, until by sundown, within sight of Houston, lie was ready to

DROP IN HIS TRACKS "WITH EXHAUSTION.

Y’et he staggered into Houston teat evening—head bent, shoulders sagging, arms dangling, in liis brown eyes the uncanny gleam of a human being driven beyond endurance. A ghastly figure he was, clad in an uudersliirt, •li non trousers a rid an ’oil t i ng : cap, ba re legs swollen to the size of watermelons. \\ ith: eyes like burnt, holes in a. woollen,. blankett.b«.•/man stared; hi&-face of "tfie.vgrey-white, olio sees when- the blood: recedes from ail /olive .'complex-!-ioft. • 5 • i- ‘“ ■ ‘‘; . ' ."

“Galveston is -gone! Galveston is gone P'’ the mtUnbled thickly as he limpF ed through the streets toward the telegraph office, followed by a crowd. “Any wires working?” he gasped. He sank into a chair in front of a desk, and the -magic fingers that had sent the quick, clear, even, incisive Morse for which eyep, t<>day .this. man Jsyfamed, graspted the lcnob Iff’ a teTegfaipli' key and Called up. St Louis, where President M’Kihley happened to be. This was the message : “President McKinley, St. Louis, Mo. A hurricane and tidal wave destroyed Galveston. At leajst ten thousand are dead in Galveston and surrounding country. Twenty to thirty thousand are homeless. We need food, clothing, tents, doctors, drugs and—above all —disinfectants.”

Then, presently came a- moment, when Spellane did that for which Congress owes h<im a medal. A New York sheet had been “tipped ofE” that Spellane had arrived with one of the biggest stories in a generation, and a brazen editor thought he saw his chance for a beat. Ho sent this message to Spellane:— ■“The offers you 5000 dollars for exclusive story of Galveston disaster.” Five thousand dollars! What was not 5000 dollars to a man* unnerved, unstrung, a man thirty-six years old, on tho threshold of beginning life all over again, with a wife and three hungry little ones to feed 1 For a- minute Spellane-sat, , face flushing. Then tho blood receded, and out of his brown eyes, snapped a spark, and under' 'his black moustache the teeth came together with a click. “Impossible,’,’ lie answered simply. “Name your own price,” came the answer.

“I am not selling the lives of thirty thousand human creatures at any price. My first duty is toward them.” Within ten minutes into the office of the Associated Press', Spellane clicked the story, so it sped throughout the country to the hundreds of papers jn the Associated Press service; and how the country responded, how- at first warships and then -trainloads and shiploads of asistance were rushed from

every port and [point, is a matter of * -without food and drink and without • history.- J sleep, for thirty-two hours he worked, Among the veterans of the keys the waning into messages that piled up on stories of “Nixie” Wedin, of Mrs. him. Eyes swollen and bloodshot, hand Ode and of Dick Soellane, will lie trembling with weakness, for twenty handed down to children's children; more hours -he worked, worked until hut if there is a record of heroism to red lids lowered over burning eyes deswhich, more than to any other, the pite himself until he swayed m Jus men point with pride, it is that oi' the chair, until what he sent was gibben&h operations during the San Francisco and liis head dropped forward upon a -earthquake. This is because the hero- nerveless wrist. Alien they picked him ism there was displayed wholesale. up, pillowed Iris head on gunny sacks, A list of the telegraph heroes of the stretched lnm on the floor, and let him g,an Francisco earthquake would in- sink into sleep as well lie might,, -or elude- every operator in the city at from every point of the compass, by the time of the disaster. One opera- land and sea, belclied inky smoke as

tor, however, a man named Swayne, working for the Postal Telegraph Company, had the luck to become especially famous, for he found and nursed back to life a single sickly current which flashed news of the catastrophe that brought prompt RELIEF TO THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND SOULS. On April 18, 1906, at 5.13 a.m., the hour of the earthquake, Swayne was working in the building of the Postal Telegraph Company. He had just taken a signal from Reno and wanted to go ove ron the Los Angeles wire when a peculiar, nauseating sensation overcame Him, as if he were suddenly intoxicated or suffering from vertigo. Dazed, he ran a hand across his iace and staggered to his feet. The dynamos in a corner of the room were sputtering and cutting up capers, and lie ■was on his way to investigate thorn when he was knocked down as if the earth had been jerked from under him. At the same time a chunk of plaster crashed through, the ceiling on to the chair he had just vacated, and filled the room with choking dust, through which he could see the walls waving to and fro. He scrambled to his feet, but- down he went again. Half stunned, he crawled on hands and knees for the door, possessed of the wild desire to flee; hut the door was jammed shut. Strength left him, and, as the building rocked and rocked, he lay half stunned, expecting every instant to be buried alive. Then he heard the crash and thud of falling avails in the streets, and the cries of the terror-stricken, and it -dntvnc-d on him that no was in an earthquake. Like a flash he realised that the hour had come when lie was expected to do liis duty, when a single telegrapher was of more importance than a city full of firemen or an army

SHIPS AND TRAINS RUSHED AID TO THE REFUGEES. Already the newest branch of the telegraphy has its heroes. The story of one wireless operator’s bravery is still fresh in the public memory, but it is fine enough to bear more than one repetition. On January 23, 1909, the White Star liner Republic, with seven hundred excursionists, avas bound from New York for Mediterranean -ports on a midwinter cruise, when, shortly before dawn, while ghe was picking her way through a dense fog, twenty-five miles south of Nantucket light, there avas a crash that shook the giant hull from stem to stern. Into the fog backed the Italian Lloyd liner Florida, steel bow crumpled like paper clear to collision bulkheads, while the ocean poured into the side of the Republic through a great gash. Like a pair of wounded bulls, the deep bass brays of the two steamers snorted at each other out of the fog bank, as passengers, tumbled out of bunks, rushed on deck. On the Florida were eleven hundred souls; on the Republic nearly nine hundred: —almost two thousand men, avomen and children, half clad, shivering in the biting cold and with the fear of going down into a avatery grave. How soon one or both of the a-essels might sink, leaving passengers to take to the small boats and suffer the tortures of midwinter cold, with the danger of being lost or cut down in tho jog, not even the captains of the s-team-"ers could tell. But on the Republic was a avire]ess.telegraph, and out in the impenetrable mist the ocean .surface was studded thickly, with steamships that avould race to the rescue if only they could be notified. Almost like so many condemned, hanging on the momentous avord of an eleventh hour respite, the passengers

of soldiers. “The key! The key!” was the one thought that droned in his mind ; but doavn clattered the electric clock and the chandeliers—things coming so fast that to protect his head he put it out of an open window. With a deafening report tho entire coiling crashed down, avindow panes burst out of sashes, the floor cracked and splintered qpen, beams and girders, snapped and groaned and squealed, and the air in the room wheezed like a giant bellows. Through clouds of brick and plaster dust lie saw buildings opposite swaying to and fro, cornices and chimneys falling, av-hilo cracks ran through towering walls as if through ice floes rammed by breakers. In the midst of all this, cue of Swayne’s avires began to talk. Oakland, across the bay, was inquiring the San. Francisco situation, when in the middle of the message this wire was chopped.off. Crawling on bands and knees over tho avreekage in the office, Savayne made, for the key and tried to raise Oakland, but the wire remained dead. Key after key, avire after avire he was trying, when he heard excited voices behind him. “Got a avire? God, the-city is down! Thousands are killed. Water is gone, and ave’ll have 300,000 sufferers on our hand and not a wire, out of Oakland or San Francisco.” At the neavs the heart within Swayne bounded. It avas

cIBYPiILU lIUIU iUojJi tCj u*o crowded upon the upper deck about the operator, in the hollow of whose hand laj 7 their lives. The roof and the three sides of tho operator’s cabin had l>een splintered to matchwood, and tw<> bodies lay crushed and halt buried beneath the debris; but in the middle oi the avreekage sat a clean-cut boa-isk young man in blue uniform, a pair or receivers clamped to liis oars like that of a telephone girl at a switchboard. With one hand he “sent” ; with the other he hold the lever of a broken telegraph key, while with reports like pistol shots sparks leaped out of the instrument up aerial avires. “C.Q.D. —C.Q.D.,” lie sounded tue distress. code avhich, avhenev-er received at avire less stations on land or sea, means the dropping of all business. For five minutes the operator sounded in vain. Heart in throat avith the responsibility suddenly -thrust upon him, he pfcunded and -pounded in cruel suspense, for his current had been cut off by the flooding of the dynamo room, so that- lie avas obliged to connect avitli a weaker current from storage batteries. How far this avould reach, cml whether indeed the instruments had escaped serious injury, nothing but actual test could tell. A-t last from Siasconsot Station on Nantucket Island came answering clicks: “All right. Who are you ?” "The Republic. We are shipwrecked. Stand by for Captain’s message. I

bis first intimation of the seriousness of the disaster. His one great chance in life, the chance for which every operator waits, had come. In his skill now lay life or death for tens of thousands. For out of his keys he was .able now and then to draw a feeble, sickly spark. Now it would glimmer faintly, now it would remit a half-hearted click, now it would refuse. But just as some telegraphers inexplicably disturb the smooth working of an elcctric-curreut, so between the electric fluid and other men there exists a mysterious bond of sympathy which enables them to cultivate and nurse a dying current hack to strength. Dependent upon this knack, now resting the key, now working it slowly and gingerly, now pounding it, now resting it again ! HUMORING THE CURRENT BACK TO EXISTENCE. The violent shock of the earthquake had by this time subsided, but there were lesser tremors that sent plaster thudding from walls and rattled sashes in windows, and there was no telling at what instant some greater quake would sond the! building 'into al heap: "But of; these’ things fcfivayne - had long sinceceased to thinks_His face,, hair and i eyebrows were; oovered. with.' a layer of . plaster dust,- and: blood was coursing dow n one of his’ cheeks ‘.from a scalp wound, but lie did iiot notice it.. He was seriously bruised oh one hip, but lie felt no pain. The clang and clatter of fire-engines in the street warned him that the city was aflame,-but he heeded not. The peculiar moan of acrowd in distress, the dhouts of men dragging dead bodies out of the buildings, and j,tbe rattle..of ambulance bells sounded.’up from the streets. His own people, alive or dead, were somewhere out iu the ruins at the mercy of strangers. But the eye and the ear of tn*> operator were never diverted from his key. Under liis skilful manipulation the click became louder and louder and more dependable, increasing in strength minute by minute, while incessantly ho called “Chicago—Chicago—Chicago, ' until, with a start that sent his heart into his throat, k e got a feeble answer from more than, halfway across the continent. This, then, he sent: “An earthquake hit us at 15.13 a.in., wrecking many buildings and our offices. They are carting the dead c ut of fallen buildings. Fire all over town. Thme is no water. We lost our power.” Within five minutes this message had .run throughout the land. From the White House went forth orders that sent out warships scurrying, and crews to loading vessels with Government stores. Within four hours newspapers and chambers of commerce had opened subscription lists, and Congress had halted in the midst of business to rush through an appropriation for the relief of the sufferers.Bulletin after bulletin Swayne sent to the Associated Press, sticking to ms office, reporting the progress of the conflagration, telling, of the coming 0 f Funston and liis soldiers, of the hope-lessness-of fighting the fire, and of the dynamiting of buildings to check the flames. Until the heat in his own office became almost unbearable* and until the dynamiting militia ordered him out, he stuck. “They are going to dynamite our building. It’s me for the simple life,” he clicked finally, grasped his instruments, and fled down rickety splintered stairs. In improvised quarters at the foot of a telegraph pole he joined other operators. Almost wholly

am Jack Binns.” What anxiety and suspense were suddenly relieved, once the passengers divined that Binns had reached through the fog to the shore, was shown in THE SHOUT THAT SUDDENLY WENT UP. “We’re saved! They’re coming! We’re saved!” was the cry, and line s-o many hopeless suddenly given new lease or life, women burst into tears, and men with pale set faces grew boisterous as schoolboys and would have hugged Binns, had. they been able to get!over the wreckage surrounding hint. Message after message of hope Binns received, messages from cJLaseons-et telling of revenue cutters, of the City of Everett, the New York, the Lusitania, La Lorraine, and the Baltic, all raised by the powerful* current of the station and sent to aid. Snorting steam and trembling from stem to stern under the throb of ponderous engines, the greyhounds took desperate chances, racing lull speed through fog to the rescue, while toe operators threw message after message- to Binns. ; Before* long it was found that the Republic was- in a serious condition, raiuf .the•- pasiengers •were-- .transfer red •.from her to the Italian ship. But Binns, - -black.' hull sinking lower and 'jp wer u nder" him,. stuck- to the R epub - Tic 'with 'Lis'- captain, and directed the course of the rescuers .as the wreck' drifted. All that day and throughout the night and the next day, the operator, ; suffering the tortures of a shipwrecked man cast on the high seas in a small boat, stuck to his key. Fcg had soaked through his clothing so that not a dry thread whs on him. He could feel icy water trickling in rivulets down his skin, tillable to warm himself even by exercise, lie was so cold that at times feeling left him to knees and elbows, and his hands and arms had to he massaged before lie could “send.” So starved, so ravenously hungry was he that at times lie was doubled up with cramps; so weak and stiff that whenever lie rose he had to steady himself lost he fall; so spent that toward the end ho da red not sit, fearing he would fall asleep. Yet not until cables had Ixk'ii made fast to the -wreck, and the Gresham and Seneca began to tow the steamer, and not until liis storage batteries were spent, did he quit. “Current going. Wireless now closed”—this was his last message from the Republic. On board the Seneca two men led the tottering Binns between them, a nervy, plucky wreck, pale, drawn, hol-low-eyed, smiling the pitiful smile of a man who i,s down and out but does not know it. But when he caught sight of liis brother-operator on the Seneca, he fell into his arms and wept like a baby. They took him to- a bunk and he keeled over it, fast asleep, so that they had to undress him as he lay. He slept the clock around. Single-handed, despite the strain of hardship and excitement, he had worked the legs from two- operators aboard the Baltic. Binns says emphatically that he is no hero. By all that is holy so vows Wedin. so does Spellane, so does Swayne, and so would Mrs Ogle. Which is because your true hero does not begin to understand what a. real hero is.