TELEGRAPH HEROES' "ROLL OF GLORY.

Otago Witness, Issue 2921, 9 March 1910, Page 80

TELEGRAPH HEROES' "ROLL OF GLORY.

; FACING DEATH IN A WIREROOM. Eight hundred men working telegraph wires at top speed on the thirteenth floor •of a.New York skyscraper, with a raging fire overhead and the knowledge that if any of the water which was being poured on' the flames fell on their dynamo they would be burned to death in an instant—this is one of the features of every-day heroism contained in an article in the American Everybody's Magazine. The article is entitled "Heroes of the Telegraph Key," and it tells of brave men in shirt-sleeves whj, by risking and often sacrificing then- lives, have prevented jliany a disaster. There are many such stories. Lee Faircbild, night operator in a California signal tower, is another of the heroes. His self-sacrifice averted a terrible railway disaster. "He had let a north-bound berry train into his section, and while it was traveling at the rate of forty-five miles an four, he was horrified to see a south-bound J Excursion train, laden with four hundred Sien, women, and children, rush by the j Mgnal he had set against it 250 yards up j the track. j "One chance in a thousand Fairchild I *aw to prevent head-on collision and fright- | *ul slaughter—and he took it. As the locoj motive of the excursion roared by he ! rtood for an instant on the sill of tho window in the tower, then he dived fiat, six feet forward and downward, landing on hands and knees upon the roof of a | passenger car.

" The impetus of the 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 he lay for some 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, ind to try to squeeze down between the ends of the cars Avouldi have meant being cut in two by roof edges. "One thing only was left. With the last strength in him he crawled over the roof of the car to the engine, poised a moment, leaped on to the coal in the swaying tender, and scrambled forward to the engineer in the cab. With blood gushing out of his scalp wounds he threw himself upon the engineer from behind. "Stop! stop! For God's sake back up!" he shouted above the racket. Not a second was to spare. Down went brakes, and the fireman ran ahead with 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 trainload of human beings from hideous death."

There are eleven pages of these heroes, Mrs H. M. Ogle, the soldier's widow who stuck by her wire in Johnstown to warn the neighbouring villages of the approaching flood until that flood burst into her little cabin and drowned her; Edward V. Wedin, who went into the heart of the yellow fever plague area to organise relief by means of his telegraph key, whi'e his mates died all around him. The heroism of which the article tells is not confined to the wireroom. One man, Richard Spellane, who went across .1 raging sea in a matchwood launch and staggered for miles, in carpet. slippers to find the end of a telegraph wire through which he could flash a message to President M'Kinley to tell him that the town ot Galveston was cut off hv a tidal wave and thousands were starving. It nearly cost him his "life, but the answering tide of food and relief saved the town.