Here was a new difficulty--a difficulty never before encountered in lighthouse construction. For three days the force lay idle. There seemed no way of completing the foundation. On the fourth day, after another flooding of the caisson, Mr. Flaherty called for volunteers to go down the air-shaft, agreeing to accompany them himself--all this in the face of the spectacle of thirty-five men moaning in their bunks, with their eyes burning and blinded and their throats raw. And yet fourteen men stepped forward and offered to "see the work through." Upon reaching the bottom of the tower they found that the flow of gas was less rapid, and they worked with almost frantic energy, expecting every moment to feel the gas griping in their throats. In half an hour another shift came on, and before night the lighthouse was within an inch or two of its final resting-place. The last shift was headed by an old caisson-man named Griffin, who bore the record of having stood seventy-five pounds of air-pressure in the famous Long Island gas tunnel. Just as the men were ready to leave the caisson the gas suddenly burst up again with something of explosive violence. Instantly the workmen threw down their tools and made a dash for the air-shaft. Here a terrible struggle followed. Only one man could go up the ladder at a time, and they scrambled and fought, pulling down by main force every man who succeeded in reaching the rounds. Then one after another they dropped in the sand, unconscious. Griffin, remaining below, had signalled for a rope. When it came down, he groped for the nearest workman, fastened it around his body, and sent him aloft. Then he crawled around and pulled the unconscious workmen together under the air-shaft. One by one he sent them up. The last was a powerfully built Irishman named Howard. Griffin's eyes were blinded, and he was so dizzy that he reeled like a drunken man, but he managed to get the rope around Howard's body and start him up. At the eighteen-inch door of the lock the unconscious Irishman wedged fast, and those outside could not pull him through. Griffin climbed painfully up the thirty feet of ladder and pushed and pulled until Howard's limp body went through. Griffin tried to follow him, but his numbed fingers slipped on the steel rim, and he fell backward into the death-hole below. They dropped the rope again, but there was no response. One of the men called Griffin by name. The half-conscious caisson-man aroused himself and managed to tie the rope under his arms. Then he, too, was hoisted aloft, and when he was dragged from the caisson, more dead than alive, the half-blinded men on the steamer's deck set up a shout of applause--all the credit that he ever received.