A BRIDGE GAME
The cold snap at Michamac had been broken for nearly a month, and work
on the bridge was progressing with unprecedented rapidity.
Two days after the ball, Ashton had returned to the bridge sobered and
chastened. The change in him may have been due to another cut in his
allowance, or to a peppery interview during which Mr. Leslie had sought
to browbeat him into resigning his position.
Whatever the cause of his change of heart, Ashton had so far proved
himself almost feverishly eager to establish a record. Griffith, badly
shaken by the failure and disappearance of Blake, had been peremptorily
ordered South by his physician. Seizing the opportunity, Ashton,
instead of interfering with the work, as McGraw expected, had
astonished the phlegmatic general foreman by pushing operations with
utmost zeal and energy.
More mechanics and laborers had been hired, and the augmented force
divided into three eight-hour shifts. All day, in sun or fog or snow,
and all night, under the bluish glare of the arc-lights, the expert
bridgemen toiled away upon the gaunt skeleton of the gigantic bridge,
far out and above the abyss of the strait. Not a moment of the
twenty-four hours was lost.
But the Resident Engineer's brief spurt of energy had already notably
relaxed, when, one sunny day near the end of March, a man not a member
of the train crew nor a regular passenger came in on the afternoon
train. As he emerged from under a coal car, one of the switchmen stared
at him blankly, swore a few lurid oaths, and laughed.
The brake-rider had paid for his ride, though not in money. He limped
as he walked off, and the gray pallor of his unshaven face was
grotesquely shaded and blotched with coal dust. His shoddy clothes were
torn and mud-stained, his soft hat begrimed and shapeless, his cheap
shoes too far gone for repair. Yet for all his shiftless footwear and
his limp, his stride was long and quick.
A watchman caught sight of him, and hurried after, to warn him off the
grounds. The hobo disappeared behind a pile of girders. When the
watchman turned the corner, his quarry had disappeared. He shook his
head doubtfully at the bridge-service train, which was backing out
along the track before him with a load of eyebars and girders. There
was reason to believe that the hobo had boarded it; but if so, it was
under too speedy headway for the rheumatic watchman to follow.
His suspicions were well founded. As the train clattered past the
unlovely buildings of rough lumber and sheet iron clustered about the
bridge terminus, the stranger clambered up between two of the swaying
cars and perched himself upon the wheel-like top of the handbrake.
Seated thus, with feet dangling and hands thrust carelessly into the
pockets of his disreputable coat, he gazed intently about at the
bridge, regardless of the bitter sting of the lake wind.
The train rattled out across the shore span and along the anchor arm of
the south cantilever. The brake-rider scrutinized the immense webs and
lofty towers with the look of a father greeting his first-born. The
train rolled on out between the towers and beyond, where swarms of
carpenters and laborers were laying beams and stringers and floor
planking and piling up immense stacks of material to be used farther
out. The finishing gangs were following up the steel workers as fast as
they could be pushed.
Beyond them, out near the end of the extension-arm, the
electro-magnetic cranes of the huge main traveller were sorting and
shifting forward a great heap of structural steel. The material thus
handled came within the reach of the smaller traveller, which crouched
upon the top-chords like a skeleton spider, swinging out the steel as
wanted to the end of the unfinished suspension span.
At sight of the great heaps of structural steel and flooring material
and of the ponderous main traveller so far out toward the end of the
overhang, the glow in the sunken eyes of the brake-rider died out, and
his grimy brows gathered in a troubled frown.
The airbrakes hissed, the cars bumped and clanked, and the train came
to a laborious stop with the outermost cars beneath the lofty latticed
framework of the main traveller. At once the electro-magnetic cranes
began to descend, ready to swing off whole carloads of steel in their
magic monstrous clutch.
The brake-rider had slipped down and was walking rapidly outward along
the narrow plank footway. As he advanced he looked about him with an
anxious gaze, but it was at the unfloored substructure of the bridge,
not at the awesome spectacle of the swift-flowing, ice-covered stream a
hundred and fifty feet beneath. Once he paused and stooped over to look
closer at a rivet head.
He hurried on to where, under the smaller traveller, the uncompleted
south part of the central, or suspension, span poised dizzily in space,
over-arching the abyss. Many yards of gap still yawned between its tip
and the tip of the sections that strained out to meet it from the end
of the north cantilever.
The sections built on to the southern part of the central span had
brought the overhang still more dizzily out over the broad strait. The
wonder was that men could be found who were willing to work day after
day in a position of such real peril. Yet since Ashton's change of
attitude, McGraw had experienced no difficulty in securing and holding
enough and to spare of expert bridge-workers, who toiled and sweat at
their task with seemingly never a thought of the abyss that yawned
beneath them.
When the brake-rider left the train, the men of the evening shift, just
come on, were swarming about the end of the overhang like ants upon the
tip of a broken twig,--alert-eyed, quick-handed, cool-brained "Sons of
Martha," who, balanced unconcernedly in mid-air on narrow stringers,
clenched fast the rivets in Death's steel harness. During the lulls
between the furiously rattling volley-blows of the electric
riveting-machines they grumbled about the deterioration of smoking
tobacco or speculated on next season's baseball scores.
With his beefy shoulders braced against the last top-chord post, McGraw
stood chewing the end of a fat black cigar while he watched the placing
of a bottom-chord of a new sub-panel. From the ox-like unconcern of his
stolid face and deepset eyes, his interest in the proceedings seemed to
be of the most casual nature. But at the slightest gesture of his pudgy
hand, cranes swung up and down, men hauled upon guy ropes, riveters
moved alertly forward with their machines.
One of the men caught McGraw's eye, and jerked a thumb over his
shoulder. The general foreman looked about and saw the grimy stranger
standing on the plank walk a few yards back. McGraw stared, ruminated,
signed to a sub-foreman, and walked stolidly back along a string of
single planks to where the stranger stood waiting for him.
The soft hat of the brake-rider was now pulled down over his eyes, and
his chin was hidden in the upturned collar of his tattered coat. As
McGraw approached him, he drew back out of the deafening clatter of the
riveting-machines. McGraw followed, his heavy face of a sudden grown
truculent. He came up close to the stranger.
"You dirty bum!" he threatened. "What you doin' here? Get t' hell outer
here, or I'll trow you over!"
The stranger pushed back his hat, and met the other's menacing stare
with a grin. His pale blue eyes were twinkling. McGraw's heavy jowl
fell slack.
"Well, McGraw--thought you wouldn't forget me this soon. What's the
latest from Mr. Griffith?"
"Jacksonville--Holy saints! you've sure been lushin' some, Mr. Blake."
"Looks like it; but as it happens I haven't. Tried to turn loose, but
got switched. Instead of a spree, I've been on a bum--tour of the Sunny
South."
"Bum?" repeated McGraw.
"Yes. Needed a change. Too much indoors work; so I got out."
"_Uh?_" mumbled McGraw in slow astonishment. "No booze?"
"No. That's the funny part of it. Didn't touch a drop of anything. I
used to be afraid of it when I wasn't on a tear, but now I don't even
think of it. Seems as if I couldn't get up a thirst if I tried. Can't
make it out."
"Sick," commented McGraw.
"No. I'm eating like a horse, and getting my strength back, hand over
fist."
"In your head," qualified McGraw, touching his forehead.
"Guess that's it. Must be. Never before opened the throttle and cut
loose, to come to a dead stop this way. It's as if you got up a full
head of steam, and then drew the fire. Mighty queer, though,--my head
is as clear as crystal."
"Huh," grunted McGraw ambiguously. "Come to take your job--assistant?"
Blake's face darkened. "No, just dropped by on my way to Canada.
Thought I'd have a look at my--" he paused, and altered his
statement--"that I'd see how your old scrap-heap is getting along."
"Huh."
"But, long as I'm here, guess I'll take hold for a turn or two, just to
keep my hand in."
"Good! Need an engineer."
"I might as well earn enough for railroad fare. This brake-beaming and
riding the rods isn't as soft a snap as it used to seem when I was a
kid."
"Soft? Y'look like a second-hand garbage-can!"
"Thanks. Where's your resident swell?"
"Quarters. Hit up the pace--work--been goin' some." McGraw swept his
fat arm around in an explanatory gesture. "Laid down a'ready."
"All right. I'm on the job. But I've got to get some sleep soon. And
say, just pick out a spry kid to steer me up against the wash-house,
will you?"
McGraw signed to the nearest man. "Pete--Mr. Blake, our 'Sistant
Engineer--t' my room." He turned to Blake. "Help y'self. Safety razor
'n' tub handy. Clothes in locker. You c'n wear 'em over to commissary.
Guess you c'n git into 'em."
He nodded, unaware that he had said anything humorous, and pivoted
around to return to his work. Blake limped briskly away after the
puzzled but silent Pete. At the bunkhouse Pete showed his charge into
McGraw's room, and went to order hot water for a bath.
When he returned, Blake, with half the stubble already shorn from his
lathered face, handed over a telegraph message addressed to Griffith.
Eager to be of service to the Consulting Engineer, the man hurried the
message to the telegraph operator. The latter, no less friendly to
Griffith, corrected the address to the sick engineer's hotel in Tampa,
and wired the despatch "rush."
The message could hardly have been more laconic:
On the job. Tom.
When Pete returned for further orders, he met the Assistant Engineer at
the door of the commissary, baggily draped in a suit of McGraw's
clothes, which fitted nowhere except across the shoulders.
Blake dismissed him, and went in to outfit himself with a costume in
keeping with his position. Almost asleep, he then went back to the
bunkhouse, stumbling and yawning, and stretched out in McGraw's bed,
utterly fagged.