Atlanta Georgian. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1912-1939, August 20, 1913, Image 7

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The Story That Amazed All Europe—A Vivid Picture of the Future, and a Novel of Love, Adventure and Gigan tic Enterprises—Begin It To day and It Will Hold Your Interest Until the End. * Wuai 9m 0<nmn of Bernhard Kellermann— GmMUB rondon Copyrighted, 1918, by 8. FWw, Vcrlac. Berlin. KnghA translation and corarflattw b, Copyrighted, 1913, by international fJew» Serrice.) R IVES went up to the forward car of the train—the officers’ car —and took a seat in a comer. On the opposite side four young engineers were playing whist, in an extremely amateurish ; fashion, judging from their frequent laughter. , Baermann, a young German-American, in charge of Main Sta- lion No. 4, just two hundred miles out under the bed of the Atlan tic, came in and walked past him, pausing with a pleasant greet ing as if only waiting for an encouraging sign to sit with his chief during the two-hour trip to the end of the completed boring. But Rives dismissed him with a curt, “Good evening, Baermann,” and I the subordinate passed on to the far end of the two-hundred-foot car. Rives wanted to be alone. He was in no mental condition for j conversation. He wanted to think. Baermann recognized his desire for solitude and laid it to the worries of a man on whose shoulders rested the responsibility for the welfare of Tunnel City and the great American boring of MacKendree Allan’s sub- Atlantic tunnel to Eufope. Being: a sincere and serious-minded young: engineer, he would have been immeas*urably shocked if he had known that the whirl In his chiefs brain was due to a woman. "Pardon me, Mr. Rives, but can you tell me where Mr. Allan Is?” Rives looked up with a start that was almost guilty; Baermann has re turned and was standing over him in deferential attitude. “Mr. Allan—oh—he Is In Montreal.” he replied, with something of a stam mer. “Can you tell me when he will be here again?** “I can't say,” replied Rives shortly, and sank down In his seat to Indi cate that he wished to be alone. Where Was Allan? Where was Allan, indeed? he thought, with bitterness. If Allan had been where he belonged, at the side of his wife, he, Rives, his best friend, would not now be writhing In the torment known only to the man who had betrayed a sacred trust. As the train dashed Into the endless cav ern at a speed of more than 100 miles an hour his mind went around and around in a deadly, wearying cir cle over the events of the past few years — events that had nearly reached an inevitable climax that night on the veranda of Mac Allan's home. Or, rather, Maud Allan’s home, for the chief of the great tun nel project was in the house scarce ly enough to learn his way about. For months he had known that he loved Maud Allan. For months he had seen her husband’s neglect- forced though it was^ by ter terrific demands on his time in a half-dozen quarters of the world — killing . the love she had once borne him. There had been no stain in his, Rives', love. He loved because he could not help It. In the days before he had agreed to Help Allan drive the tunnel he had been a dilettante, a man-about-town, as well as a world-famous architect. Handsome, rich and brilliant, he had had many “affairs,” but he had never loved. And he had his oode. It had never been put to the test before this night, and he had failed to live up to It. There was, he reflected bitterly, “no harm done.” But what would be the end of it all? When he had se cretly loved Maud Allan with a pure and chivalrous love—that was differ ent. Now she knew' that he loved and —the *nds of his fingers crept to his lips—he knew that she loved him or was very near to it. “It isn’t our loving each other that makes It so bad,” he said to himself, “lt*s the fact of our mutual knowl edge.” What could he do? For more than an hour he grappled with the prob lem from every angle; he could not leave without some very acceptable excuse to Allan. “I can’t go up to him,” he reflected at last with a whimsical sense of humor that driving two hundred and j •lxty-flve miles of tunnel under the ocean had obliterated. “I can’t go up to him and say, ‘Excuse me, Mac, I think I’d better chuck this Job and go away because I’m in love with your wife.' And so far as I can see—and i I’m pretty level-headed ordinarily— I can’t stay here and remain an honest man. There’s Baermann. He’s a German, and the Germans have made a specialty of dissecting the j immortal souls of human beings. It is an omen. I w ( lll go up and talk to | Baermann. and if he drops anything that fits my case I will follow it.” 118 Miles an Hour. Baermann was reading, and he closed his book with a proud and pleased smile when Rives dropped Into a seat beside hin\ for the master of the works w'as loved by every man who worked under him. “We’re pretty nearly there, Baer mann,” observed ^ftives w ith a smile, as he glanced at his watch. “We’re doing about 118 miles an hour now, eh?” “Not more than 112, I think, Mr. Rives,” the young man ventured to correct him. Rives laughed. It was characteristic of the German, and boded well for his mission. “What have you"been reading?” he asked with a glance at the book. “One of Ibsen's plays,” replied the young man, offering the volume for his inspection. Rives ran idly through the pages. “Ibsen, eh?*’ There was & little gleam in his eyes. “What is your real opinion of Ibsen, Baermann?” The-young man smiled a aerioue, self-conscious srnJle. “Isn’t that rath er like asking a man what is his opinion of truth?” he inquired. “Are ‘Ibsen’ and ‘truth’ Inter changeable?” "Well, hardly that,” conceded Baer mann. “He isn’t all of the truth, but everything he wrote was truth.” ‘*1 see,” nodded Rives, still smiling, “but I don’t see how any of us can pr?tend to so wide and exact a knowl edge of workings of so many differ ent minds.” “Do you thing there is anything in consistent In his characters?” asked Baermann. A Startling' Remark. “No,” conceded the other, with a little hesitation. “I was reading something of his life and manner of working the other day,” said the younger man. “Every character he used, he developed prac tically from infancy. Although they fitted into his plays only for a short time of their lives he Tiad worked them out—their k environment and heredity, from the beginning—so that they couldn’t do anything inconsis tent. They had to do certain things if they were true to themselves. It was out of their hands. He made the characters and let them work out their own lives in their own ways. They could only do what they did do.” Rives almost started and looked at the young man curiously. -... ■ , W*NSiV^'l ** m j ft ; IN I • ' >:*■ 1, v ^ y .. - •Y Wi Mm & 5 t sfei -a w “THE TUNNEL HAD EXPLODED." A Scene in the Great TransAtlantic Tunnel Following a Frightful Explosion, Which is Fully Described in the Accompanying Installment—A Vivid Word-Picture That Will Give Ton a Glimpse Into the Future of Things as They Will Be. ‘Then you think that all of us are bound In our conduct in Ilfs by cer tain Immutable lines of our charac ters ?” “Undoubtedly,” replied the young man seriously. “To that extent I am a fatalist.” “Well,” said Rives, slowly, after a little pause. “So am I. Good-by. Baermann, and—thank you.” The young man started after him, wondiring, as the train slowed to a stop and his chief strode down the car and out Into the uncertain dark ness, where the electric lights flick ered and winked and lit up the tem porary terminus of the trane-Atlantic railroad. “It worked,” said Rives to htmself, as he swung himself up on to a car of a construction that was groping its way into the farther recesses of the boring. “It worked. Baermann is right. We are what we are, and the answer is in the hands of the Higher Powers. So be it. I’ll go through with my work here and stick to what I am given to think is right Just as long as I can. There must be & way out.” There was. The next few hours solved all for all time, but in a man ner far from his wildest imaginings. The construction train passed out of the mighty steel tube into a great arched gallery of rough stone where men were at work with shoring tim bers strengthening weak places against the permanent construction. After nearly “fourteen miles of this, the train slowed down to a walking pace. A little more than a mile ahead was the extreme end of the boring. Paralleling and connected with it by cross galleries used for switching construction trains was the duplicate of the gallery through which they had just passed. * Leaving the main station a far- off roar grew Into a hellish ear-apllt- pllng clamor that shrieked and echoed up and down the galleries as if the do. mone under the s«a were soreaming a protest against the invasion of their home. The air was filled with dust and biting pungent odors and vapors that made the eyelids priokle and scraped the throat like a file. The heat was terrific—118 degrees Fah renheit. In the Tunnel. Dropping off the train. Riven walked briskly ahead, picking hie way through the hurly-burly and tumult of an Inferno. In this last mile and a quarter nearly three thou sand men were at work, and beyond them was the monster drilling ma- cln© in the wake of which they toiled frantically to keep from being burled by the debris it wrenched out of the solid earth. Sound warning of the oonstant blasts were impossi ble, and Rives, kaif a mile from the end of his Journey, passed a half- naked, calm little Japanese, mount ing guard over a searchlight battery that threw a steady white glare up the boring until the time for the blast. Then It suddenly turn/d green — the monster drill backed away and the workers threw them selves on their faces behind the dan ger-zone until their muffled roar and the white glare told them the danger was over. Rives made for the giant driller, devised by Allan, and looking like a monster steel devil-fish. It flung long tendons against the face of the slop ing rock into which It burrowed, and these, tipped with drills of Allanite— Allan’s “diamond steel”—sank into came back each left a tiny deposit of high explosive at the end of tne hole the flinty barrier like worms sinking into soft loam. When the tendrils it had made and a connecting fuse. Then It backed lumbering away down the temporary track, the fuses were lit. the explosive wrenched off the lace of the rock and the driller rumbled clown to work again. The rock had just been blasted as Rives approached the driller. The searchlight sent Its chalk-white glare up to the mountainous slope at the end of the boring, up which half- naked men were rushing to clear away the shattered rock. Just back from the driller Rives paused for a moment to admire the picture. Then, suddenly, the entire end of the tunnel seemed to leap forward. He saw two men vanish aa If they had been snuffed out. Hoff a doz®n threw up their arms and turned to run. Then it seemed to him that a mighty whip-oord had suddenly been drawn with deadly tightness about hia head, shutting off sound, breath and all sensation same that of sight. He struok with a violent Jar against the inner wall of the driller, though he was vaguely conscious he had not moved. At the same instant dozens of distorted, whirling bodies of naked men. ringed with fire and min gled with stone and sand, shot past; there was a sound in his head as if a tightly-strung piano wire had sud denly snapped—then a roar that shook him to th© heels, a sharp pain, a blinding flash of red and—oblivion. The tunnel had exploded! The last blast had opened the way Into probably a chamber of highly compressed ^ gas of some explosive nature. As the charge of a shell fol lows the gun-barrel, .so this explo sion launched its full force fnto the tunnel and for fifteen n^tos it swept everything before It. H had picked the great drlHer, which had scooped Rives into its open door and hurled It a quarter of a mile up the boring like a tremendous ram. sweeping piling, girdt/s* pillars, steel cars, debris and human beings before ft *n one horrible rack of ruin. In an Instant it was all over. The roar died down In the distance like a great ball rolling away. There fol lowed a terrible stillness. There wan one long-drawn scream of agony and then a light leaped up, higher and higher. The tunnel wee burning! For fifty miles that devastating roar carried terror through the works. The laborers dropped everything wnere they stood and leaped upon the construction trains, empty, full or half-filled, and the engineers turned on the power for their lives and ran for the entrance at an insane speed, with hundreds of men clinging to the oars in clusters of living terror. Then came a few on foot. And then— nothing. A Voio* Rives first recovered the power of sight. He seemed to be surrounded by walls of fire, and then he was conscious of a fearful heat. In the leaping flames one opening appeared. He craned himself to his feet and no. ticed with dull Interest that a stream of blood trickled from his left arm. He staggered out through the flames md discovered that he had been in side the burning driller. A voice was saying over and over again in his ear: “Oh, God! Oh. God! Oh, God!” As his mind rallied more and more he found out it was hto own voice. He put his hand to. his head and it touched a bare scalp. His hair was gone. One of his trouser-legs was still smoldering and mechanically he batted out ttye sparks with his bare hand, and the stooping pitched him forward on his face. He got to his hands and knees and was con scious that a voice was calling his name. "Mr. Rives! Mr. Rives! Mr. Rives! —again and again. He held to his reeling consciousness like a swim mer clinging to a life-line and h© knew Jhe voice was not his own. It cam© from up th© tunnel way from the heart of th© explosion, and he was able to recognize this fact and crawl slowly In that direction, pick ing his way on hands and knees, me chanically, painfuly and surely’, ower broken timbers and Jagged rocks and —other things unprintable. 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