I came mighty near slipping from the girder the moment I put my knee to it. The wind seemed to come with a sort of broadside force. What saved me I don’t know. At the end of the girder I found a plank, and the solution of my troubles, in part. This plank was not so heavy as the others and had not been so thoroughly frozen to the iron that a strong gust of wind could not sweep it toward the right side of the bridge, one end more than the other. In this manner had my straight passage along the planking been interrupted. I crawled on the plank, finding it very unsteady, owing to the way it rested on the girders. I crept along, and thus I bore to the left, where, after going sixteen feet, I came to the resumption of the straight and narrow path, which I hoped would lead me to the end of my perilous route; that is, I thought so, but to my disappointment I was confronted with another stretch of ice-covered iron to be struggled over. However, it proved to be only eight feet from plank to plank, and I succeeded in spanning it without a mishap. But my hands and feet were aching with the cold. If I had dared, I would have sat astride the plank and slapped my hands together, but time was so precious and the moments must seem so endless to Mark, that I would not. So, pressing on, I gained ten more feet, and felt encouraged. Then I found myself on a terribly slippery and much narrower piece of planking, which evidently had been used as a filler in the pathway. In my anxiety to get along, I did not discover it until I’d taken an insecure hold. Suddenly my hand slipped off, and, sheering to one side, I toppled over. Catching at the planking with both hands, I found myself hanging under the planking instead of shooting down to the cable’s end. Vainly for a minute I tried to fetch my feet up around the plank. Struggling with all my might, it seemed impossible under the conditions, as I was almost stiff from the cold and weakened by the terrible strain upon me. As my feet swung back and forth in an effort to get a momentum that would assist me, they struck against the girder I’d crossed just before I fell. Here was a simple solution of my nerve-taxing plight. I wondered if another man, Mark Shinburn, for instance, would have been so bewildered as not to think sooner of using the girder as a means of getting back to the planking. I always believed, without wishing to appear egotistical, that I possessed at least the ordinary common sense allotted to man. In this case I seem to have been very short-sighted. Perhaps--ay, I must believe that the awful test to which my mind and body had been subjected, and the fearful roar of the wind and the swirling of the snow, confused me.