For, remember that while the sand-hogs were burrowing under the surface of the river to find footholds for this monster, other men were burrowing into the hillsides to find the precious ore for the welding of his muscles. A hundred thousand picks must have fought in his behalf, furnaces blazed for miles before the crude ore became the finished, perfect steel. Of the forging and the rolling of the steel a whole book might be written. It is enough now to say that of the 50,000,000 pounds of steel, every pound was made on honor. The railroad had its inspectors everywhere, but the rolling-mill men held to their formulas for perfect steel, and perfect steel was the result. A slight flaw in the metal, and possibly at some unexpected day, a great catastrophe. The safety of human life was upon the men who forged the steel, and they forged honor into every great girder, into every rod and bolt and plate. This conqueror of the river was a warrior built in honor. The safety of human life depends upon the men who build this bridge. Study carefully the face of this man who stands beside you, the man who evolved this bridge as a season's work of his restless mind. His face is the face of a man who has high regard for human safety; that factor creeps to the fore as he talks to you. He is telling of the method of constructing the upper works of a bridge of this size. "We're getting ahead all the time," he laughs, "and we're moving rather forward in our construction methods. In an older day we did this work with derricks of a rather simple sort, operated them by small portable steam engines. You can't handle bridge-members--units that are only held down by the clearances of tunnels and the transporting powers of the railroads--that way to-day. We've nearly half a million dollars tied up here in constructing-appliances. These steel-boom derricks, travellers, and steel-wire hoists, the compressing engines for handling the riveters, cost big money. "Our method? That's a simple enough affair as a rule. We set up this spindly tower on rails, that we call the 'traveller' and it moves backwards and forwards over the trusses and the timber falsework that we build before the steel really begins to be set up. When the steel--the trusses--is up and riveted, then away with the falsework. Our bridge stands by itself. You can put up a 500-foot span in no time at all by using the falsework." You make bold to ask what the engineer does when the river is too deep to admit of falsework. He is quick to answer.