Read Online The Lightning Keeper by Starling Lawrence - Free Book Online Page A

Springfield, even Boston and New York: aqueducts or sewers, depending on which way the water was running.
    Then history intervened in the form of the Civil War, and Aaron Bigelow’s cast ring pipe was reincarnated as a cannon barrel that could withstand greater pressure, and hence achieve greater range, than conventional cannon of equivalent weight. Patents were taken, and this efficient engine of destruction, the Bigelow Rifle as it was called, made a great fortune for its inventor, and gave him pride of place among the capitalists and industrialists of the North West Corner.
    The war came to an end, and life returned to its old ways in Beecher’s Bridge and at the Bigelow works. Some of the men had to be laid off, of course, for although the Bible speaks of beating swords into ploughshares, in practice the Bigelow Rifle would not be changed backinto pipe. The orders never materialized: the ring-casting process was deliberate and costly, and the product was of an awkward bulk and heft for a manufactory serviced by no railroad or canal link. During the war, each cannon barrel was ferried or floated across the Buttermilk, then carted eight miles to the nearest railroad depot. Aaron Bigelow understood that he had been defeated as much by the difficulty of transportation as by the unwillingness of municipal officials to invest in plumbing of the highest grade.
    Bigelow was still a young man, not yet forty, and he was very, very rich. But he did not think that it was time to rest on those laurels; he must do something, else Beecher’s Bridge would be forever cut off from the outside world, or at least handicapped in its pursuit of progress. He still came to the works every day, and on his way past the cannon would rub the decorative brass B for good luck. This cannon, a Bigelow eighteen-pounder, squatted in the dust at the entry to the ironmaster’s office, chained off from the general chaos and drayage of the works by huge iron links cast by Bigelow’s great-grandfather and salvaged from the chain that had once prevented British warships from navigating the Hudson. The cannon was the first fruit of Bigelow’s process and patent, and in order to encourage visiting generals and politicians, Aaron Bigelow would sit astride the charged cannon and light the fuse with his own cigar. When the smoke cleared, there was the ironmaster, grinning and puffing his cheroot as if nothing had happened, and his audience, mouths agape and ears still ringing, would applaud. Young Amos Bigelow, much taken with the spectacle, asked each time if he might join his father in this adventure, and was told by Aaron that this was a man’s business, and no game.
    The cannon and the chain were potent reminders of what Bigelows could do when they turned their minds to something, and they gave Aaron Bigelow no peace: surely some greater work awaited him than merely filling orders for iron wheels. The story, perhaps true, is that the idea for the canal that would harness the Great Falls came to him in the middle of the night, and that he rose from his bed and began the labor himself with a pick and shovel, young Amos holding the lantern. When the sun rose he stalked into the woods in his nightshirt with an axe and several yards of bright ribbon from Mrs. Bigelow’s sewing basket to map the course of his dream. Saplings werecut and trimmed, then hammered into the ground with the flat of the axe, a scrap of ribbon as the final touch. Three great loops were laid out—some say the plan was determined by the amount of ribbon in his pocket—to return the water taken above the falls to the river below, and Bigelow calculated that there was room enough for eighty-five mills, each receiving water from its section of the canal and spilling it back into the level below.
    Eighty-five mills representing any and every conceivable enterprise requiring power: weaving, wood turning, tool manufacture, gunsmiths, box makers, tanneries,