The Iron Trail

XXV

PREPARATIONS

The building of the Salmon River bridge will not soon be forgotten by engineers and men of science. But, while the technical features of the undertaking are familiar to a few, the general public knows little about how the work was actually done; and since the building of the bridge was the pivotal point in Murray O'Neil's career, it may be well to describe in some detail its various phases—the steps which led up to that day when the Salmon burst her bonds and put the result of all his planning and labor to the final test.

Nowhere else in the history of bridge-building had such conditions been encountered; nowhere on earth had work of this character been attended with greater hazards; never had circumstances created a situation of more dramatic interest. By many the whole venture was regarded as a reckless gamble; for more than a million dollars had been risked on the chance not alone that O'Neil could build supports which the ice could not demolish, but that he could build them under the most serious difficulties in record-breaking time. Far more than the mere cost of the structure hinged upon his success: failure would mean that his whole investment up to that point would be wiped out, to say nothing of the twenty-million-dollar project of a trunk-line up the valley of the Salmon.

Had the Government permitted the Kyak coal-fields to be opened up, the lower reaches of the S. R. & N. would have had a value, but all activity in that region had been throttled, and the policy of delay and indecision at headquarters promised no relief.

Careful as had been the plans, exhaustive and painstaking as had been the preparations, the bridge-builders met with unpreventable delays, disappointments, and disasters; for man is but a feeble creature whose brain tires and whose dreams are brittle. It is with these hindrances and accidents and with their effect upon the outcome that we have to deal.

Of course, the greatest handicap, the one ever-present obstacle, was the cold, and this made itself most troublesome in the sinking of the caissons and the building of the concrete piers. It was necessary, for instance, to house in all cement work, and to raise the temperature not only of the air surrounding it, but of the materials themselves before they were mixed and laid. Huge wind-breaks had to be built to protect the outside men from the gales that scoured the river-bed, and these were forever blowing down or suffering damage from the hurricanes. All this, however, had been anticipated: it was but the normal condition of work in the northland. And it was not until the middle of winter, shortly after Eliza's and Natalie's visit to the front, that an unexpected danger threatened, a danger more appalling than any upon which O'Neil and his assistants had reckoned.

In laying his plans Parker had proceeded upon the assumption that, once the cold had gripped the glaciers, they would remain motionless until spring. All available evidence went to prove the correctness of this supposition, but Alaska is a land of surprises, of contrasts, of contradictions: study of its phenomena is too recent to make practicable the laying down of hard and fast rules. In the midst of a season of cruelly low temperatures there came a thaw, unprecedented, inexplicable. A tremendous warm breath from the Pacific rolled northward, bathing the frozen plains and mountain ranges. Blizzards turned to rains and weeping fogs, the dry and shifting snow-fields melted, water ran in the courses. Winter loosed its hold; its mantle slipped. Nothing like this had ever been known or imagined. It was impossible! It was as if the unhallowed region were bent upon living up to its evil reputation. In a short time the loosened waters that trickled through the sleeping ice-fields greased the foundations upon which they lay. Jackson Glacier roused itself, then began to glide forward like a ship upon its ways. First there came the usual premonitory explosions—the sound of subterranean blasts as the ice cracked, gave way, and shifted to the weight above; echoes filled the sodden valley with memories of the summer months. It was as if the seasons had changed, as if the zodiacal procession had been thrown into confusion. The frozen surface of the Salmon was inundated; water four feet deep in some places ran over it.

The general wonder at this occurrence changed to consternation when it was seen that the glacier acted like a battering-ram of stupendous size, buckling the river ice in front of it as if ice were made of paper. That seven-foot armor was crushed, broken into a thousand fragments, which threatened to choke the stream. A half-mile below the bridge site the Salmon was pinched as if between two jaws; its smooth surface was rapidly turned into an indescribable jumble of up-ended cakes.

When a fortnight had passed O'Neil began to fear that this movement would go on until the channel had been closed as by a huge sliding door. In that case the rising waters would quickly wipe out all traces of his work. Such a crumpling and shifting of the ice had never occurred before—at least, not within fifty years, as the alder and cottonwood growth on the east bank showed; but nothing seemed impossible, no prank too grimly grotesque for Nature to play in this solitude. O'Neil felt that his own ingenuity was quite unequal to the task of combating this peril. Set against forces so tremendous and arbitrary human invention seemed dwarfed to a pitiable insignificance.

Day after day he watched the progress of that white palisade; day after day he scanned the heavens for a sign of change, for out of the sky alone could come his deliverance. Hourly tests were made at the bridge site, lest the ice should give way before the pressure from below and by moving up-stream destroy the intricate pattern of piling which was being driven to support the steelwork. But day after day the snows continued to melt and the rain to fall. Two rivers were now boiling past the camp, one hidden deep, the other a shallow torrent which ran upon a bed of ice. The valley was rent by the sounds of the glacier's snail-like progress.

Then, without apparent cause, the seasons fell into order again, the mercury dropped, the surface-water disappeared, the country was sheeted with a glittering crust over which men walked, leaving no trace of footprints. Jackson became silent: once again the wind blew cold from out of the funnel-mouth and the bridge-builders threshed their arms to start their blood. But the glacier face had advanced four hundred feet from its position in August; it had narrowed the Salmon by fully one-half its width.

Fortunately, the bridge had suffered no damage as yet, and no one foresaw the effect which these altered conditions were to have.

The actual erection of steelwork was impossible during the coldest months; Parker had planned only to rush the piers, abutments, and false-work to completion so that he could take advantage of the mild spring weather preceding the break-up. The execution of this plan was in itself an unparalleled undertaking, making it necessary to hire double crews of picked men. Yet, as the weeks wore into months the intricate details were wrought out one by one, and preparations were completed for the great race.

Late in March Dan Appleton went to the front, taking with him his wife and his sister, for whom O'Neil had thoughtfully prepared suitable living-quarters. The girls were as hungry as Dan to have a part in the deciding struggle, or at least to see it close at hand, for the spirit of those engaged in the work had entered them also. Life at Omar of late had been rather uneventful, and they looked forward with pleasure to a renewal of those companionable relations which had made the summer months so, full of interest and delight. But they were disappointed. Life at the end of the line they found to be a very grim, a very earnest, and in some respects an extremely disagreeable affair: the feverish, unceasing activity of their friends left no time for companionship or recreation of any sort. More and more they, too, came to feel the sense of haste and strain pervading the whole army of workers, the weight of responsibility that bore upon the commander.

Dan became almost a stranger to them, and when they saw him he was obsessed by vital issues. Mellen was gruff and irritable: Parker in his preoccupation ignored everything but his duties. Of all their former comrades O'Neil alone seemed aware of their presence. But behind his smile they saw the lurking worries; in his eyes was an abstraction they could not penetrate, in his bearing the fatigue of a man tried to the breaking-point.

To Eliza there was a certain joy merely in being near the man she loved, even though she could not help being hurt by his apparent indifference. The long weeks without sight of him had deepened her feeling, and she had turned for relief to the writing of her book—the natural outlet for her repressed emotions. Into its pages she had poured all her passion, all her yearning, and she had written with an intimate understanding of O'Neil's ambitions and aims which later gave the story its unique success as an epic of financial romance.

Hers was a nature which could not be content with idleness. She took up the work that she and Natalie had begun, devoting herself unobtrusively yet effectively to making O'Neil comfortable. It was a labor of love, done with no expectation of reward; it thrilled her, filling her with mingled sadness and satisfaction. But if Murray noticed the improvement in his surroundings, which she sometimes doubted, he evidently attributed it to a sudden access of zeal on the part of Ben, for he made no comment. Whether or not she wished him to see and understand she could hardly tell. Somehow his unobservant, masculine acceptance of things better and worse appealed to the woman in her. She slipped into O'Neil's quarters during his absence, and slipped out again quietly; she learned to know his ways, his peculiarities; she found herself caressing and talking to his personal belongings as if they could hear and understand. She conducted long conversations with the objects on his bureau. One morning Ben entered unexpectedly to surprise her in the act of kissing Murray's shaving-mirror as if it still preserved the image of its owner's face, after which she banished the cook-boy utterly and performed his duties with her own hands.

Of course, discovery was inevitable. At last O'Neil stumbled in upon her in the midst of her task, and, questioning her, read the truth from her blushes and her incoherent attempts at explanation.

"So! You're the one who has been doing this!" he exclaimed, in frank astonishment. "And I've been tipping Benny for his thoughtfulness all this time! The rascal has made enough to retire rich."

"He seemed not to understand his duties very well, so I took charge. But you had no business to catch me!" The flush died from Eliza's cheeks, and she faced him with thoroughly feminine indignation.

"I can't let you go on with this," said Murray. "_I_ ought to be doing something for YOU."

But the girl flared up defiantly. "I love it. I'll do it, no matter if you lock me out. I'm not on the pay-roll, you know, so you have no authority over me—none at all!"

His eyes roved around the room, and for the first time he fully took in the changes her hands had wrought.

"My dear child, it's very nice to be spoiled this way and have everything neat and clean, but—it embarrasses me dreadfully to have you saddled with the sordid work—"

"It isn't sordid, and—what brought you home at this hour, anyhow?" she demanded.

O'Neil's smile gave place to an anxious frown.

"The ice is rising, and—"

"Rising?"

"Yes. Our old enemy Jackson Glacier is causing us trouble again. That jam of broken ice in front of it is backing up the water—there's more running now, and the ice is lifting. It's lifting the false-work with it, pulling the piles out of the river-bottom like splinters out of a sore hand."

"That's pretty bad, isn't it?"

"It certainly is. It threatens to throw everything out of alignment and prevent us from laying the steel if we don't check it."

"Check it!" cried Eliza. "How can you check a thing like that?"

"Easily enough, if we can spare the hands—by cutting away the ice where it is frozen to the piles, so that it won't lift them with it. The trouble is to get men enough—you see, the ice is nine feet thick now. I've set every man to work with axes and chisels and steam-points, and I came up to telephone Slater for more help. We'll have to work fast, night and day."

"There's nobody left in Omar," Eliza said, quickly.

"I know. Tom's going to gather all he can at Cortez and Hope and rush them out here. Our task is to keep the ice cut away until help arrives."

"I suppose it's too late in the season to repair any serious damage?"

"Exactly. If you care to go back with me you can see what we're doing." As they set off for the bridge site Murray looked down at Eliza, striding man-like beside him, with something of affectionate appreciation in his eyes, and said humbly: "It was careless of me not to see what you have been doing for me all this time. My only excuse is that I've been driven half mad with other things. I—haven't time to think of myself."

"All housekeepers have a thankless task," laughed Eliza.

When they reached the river-bank she saw everything apparently just as when she had last seen it. "Why, it's not as bad as I imagined!" she exclaimed. "I thought I'd find everything going to smash."

"Oh, there's nothing spectacular about it. There seldom is about serious mishaps in this business. The ice has risen only an inch or more so far, but the very slowness and sureness of it is what's alarming. It shows that the water is backing up, and as the flow increases the rise of the ice will quicken. If it starts to move up or down stream, we're lost."

There was ample evidence that the menace was thoroughly understood, for the whole day shift was toiling at the ice, chopping it, thawing it, shoveling it away, although its tremendous thickness made their efforts seem puerile. Everywhere there was manifested a frantic haste, a grim, strained eagerness that was full of ominous meaning.

All that day Eliza watched the unequal struggle, and in the evening Dan brought her reports that were far from reassuring. The relentless movement showed no sign of ceasing. When she retired that night she sought ease from her anxiety in a prayer that was half a petition for O'Neil's success and half an exceedingly full and frank confession of her love for him. Outside, beneath the glare of torches and hastily strung incandescents, a weary army toiled stubbornly, digging, gouging, chopping at the foot of the towering wall of timbers which stretched across the Salmon. In the north the aurora borealis played brilliantly as if to light a council of the gods.

On the following day "Happy Tom" arrived with fifty men.

"I got the last mother's son I could find," he explained, as he warmed himself at O'Neil's stove.

"Did you go to Hope?"

"I did, and I saw the splavvus, himself."

"Gordon?"

"He's worse than we thought." Tom tapped his shining forehead significantly. "Loft to let!"

"What—insane?"

"Nothing but echoes in his dome. The town's as empty as his bonnet too, and the streets are full of snow. It's a sight!"

"Tell me about Mrs. Gordon."

"She's quite a person," said Slater, slowly. "She surprised me. She's there, alone with him and a watchman. She does all the work, even to LUGGING in the wood and coal—he's too busy to help—but she won't leave him. She told me that Dan and Natalie wanted her to come over here, but she couldn't bring herself to do it or to let them assist in any way. Gordon spends all his time at his desk, promoting, writing ads and prospectuses. He's got a grand scheme. He's found that 'Hope Consolidated' is full of rich ore, but the trouble is in getting it out; so he's working on a new process of extraction. It's a wonderful process—you'd never guess what it is. He SMOKES it out! He says all he needs is plenty of smoke. That bothered him until he hit on the idea of burning feathers. Now he's planning to raise ducks, because they've got so much down. Isn't that the limit? She'll have to fit him into a padded cell sooner or later."

"Poor devil!" said O'Neil. "I'm sorry. He had an unusual mind."

Slater sniffed. "I think it's pretty soft for him, myself. He's made better than a stand-off—he lost his memory, but he saved his skin. It's funny how some men can't fall: if they slip on a banana-peel somebody shoves a cushion under 'em before they 'light. _I_ never got the best of anything. If I dropped asleep in church my wife would divorce me and I'd go to the electric chair. Gordon robs widows and orphans, right and left, then ends up with a loving woman to take care of him in his old age. Why, if I even robbed a blind puppy of a biscuit I'd leave a thumb-print on his ear, or the dog's mother would turn out to be a bloodhound. Anyhow, I'd spend MY declining years nestled up to a rock-pile, with a mallet in my mit, and a low-browed gentleman scowling at me from the top of a wall. He'd lean on his shotgun and say, 'Hurry up, Fatty; it's getting late and there's a ton of oakum to pick.' It just goes to show that some of us is born behind the game and never get even, while others, like Gordon, quit winner no matter how much they lose." Having relieved himself of this fervid homily, "Happy Tom" unrolled a package of gum and thrust three sticks into his mouth. "Speaking of bad luck," he continued, "when are you going to get married, Murray?"

O'Neil started. "Why—never. It isn't the same kind of proposition as building a bridge, you know. There's a little matter of youth and good looks that counts considerably in the marriage business. No woman would have an old chap like me."

Slater took a mournful inventory of his chief's person, then said doubtfully: "You MIGHT put it over, Murray. I ain't strictly handsome, myself, but I did."

As O'Neil slipped into his fur coat, after the fat man had slouched out, he caught sight of himself in the glass of his bureau and paused. He leaned forward and studied the care-worn countenance that peered forth at him, then shook his head. He saw that the hair was growing grayer; that the face was very plain, and—yes, unquestionably, it was no longer youthful. Of course, he didn't feel old, but the evidence that he was so admitted of no disproof, and it was evidence of a sort which no woman could disregard. He turned from the glass with a qualm of disgust at his weakness in allowing himself to be influenced in the slightest by Tom's suggestion.

For a week the ice rose slowly, a foot a day, and in spite of the greatest watchfulness it took the false-work with it here and there. But concentrated effort at the critical points saved the structure from serious injury. Then the jam in front of Jackson Glacier went out, at least in part, and the ice began to fall. Down it settled, smoothly, swiftly, until it rested once more upon the shores. It was still as firm as in midwinter, and showed no sign of breaking; nor had it moved down-stream a hair's breadth. O'Neil gathered his forces for the final onslaught.