A TRAGEDY OF CONSTRUCTION
Stretched on the dry grass beside the trestle, hanging perilously over
the edge of the dizzy drop to the river bottom, Tressa watched the
unceasing struggle with the hungry quicksands.
A hive of industry was below her--men and horses, huge tree trunks and
masses of rock, network trestle and piled poles. Men swarmed
everywhere, appearing from her height mere dots of movement,
ridiculously unfit to cope with the force that was making her father so
irritable these days.
Two distinct gangs were at work. Over beyond the water the filling in
of the trestle was almost complete, the material being hauled by a
train working from cuttings to the west. A great hundred-and-fifty
foot bank of loose earth had swallowed the "crazy conthraption" to the
very edge of the water, sloping steeply upward at its near side from
the bridge that spanned the permanent course of the river. Everything
hung now waiting only for the choking of the quicksand to commence the
filling of the near side.
From bank to bank of the river a heavy boom of logs caught the trees
felled in the forest above and floated down for the great maw that had
already swallowed so much. These trees, trimmed of all but their
larger branches, were being drawn to the shore by the surer footed men
and several teams of horses; the river bottom down there was a tangle
of trunks ready to feed to the quicksands.
Closer in beneath the bank over which she looked men were piling rocks
on the spongy area, as they had been for weeks--as they were a year ago
under O'Connor--as they might be forever, unless luck favoured her
father.
To the inexperienced eye the scene was ceaseless activity, but Tressa
had long since learned the skill with which the bohunk conceals his
laziness. A dozen civilised workmen would accomplish as much as three
times their number of foreigners. But this was a bohunk's job;
civilised workmen treated it as a plague.
The swift figure of Adrian Conrad moved from group to group, leaving a
wake of energy. By sheer personality and grit he gained his ends,
though railway construction was as foreign to his life's plans, past
and future, as suicide.
She smiled as she thought of the reason of his presence, and blew a
kiss over the edge to his unsuspecting head. This, the great task of
her father's career, would mark the end of Conrad's apprenticeship.
These days of a mass attack on the bottomless pit might be the
beginning of the end. When the mass of logs and trees and rocks was
dumped in, surely she could lay her plans for a new life! Conrad would
return to the city, to the partnership he had dropped only temporarily
to be near her; and her father would have enough for the rest of his
days.
A week or two to test the success of their latest effort, another to
build the permanent foundations and strengthen the trestle in its final
shape, and then a few weeks at most for the fill-in. Already the wave
in the trestle beneath the supply trains was scarcely noticeable. The
end was in sight.
Her father she could pick out easily enough--that still, large figure
standing by itself, or joined now and then by Adrian. Once it jerked
forward, and half a dozen men catapulted themselves at some part of the
work that did not please him.
Presently Adrian and two others gathered before the contractor, where
they seemed to confer a long time. One, Tressa knew, would be
Koppowski; the other must be one of his friends, Werner probably, or
Morani, or Heppel. They alone of the five hundred possessed
intelligence enough to justify consultation. The rest merely obeyed
orders, like the horses, and crammed their stomachs till the dishes
were empty. Yes, and made strange music of evenings. She never
understood that.
Then Adrian and her father were alone.
The men swarming through the lower lacework of the trestle were keying
up with sledge and rope and wrench, adding a pole here and there.
These they lifted by means of rope and pulley attached to convenient
parts of the existing structure. Her father was pointing upward. A
bohunk climbed clumsily to the point indicated and tied a pulley there.
Passing a rope through the pulley, he tossed the end down. Several men
seized it. To the other end a log was attached.
Down below, Torrance watched the carrying out of his orders with
keenest interest. He had been at this for months, and his trained eye
could pick out the weak spots with unerring instinct. To his eye he
was forced to trust for the support of those twin bands of steel high
above his head, since the uncertain and uneven sinking of the trestle,
green timber, and ignorant and careless workmen, with the incidence of
accident far above the average, made construction at the best patchy
and haphazard.
He was surprised and a little chagrinned by the weakness he had
discovered; he could not understand how it had escaped him before. The
pull, the brace of the trestle poles just there did not seem unsound,
yet instinct warned him that something was amiss in the sag of adjacent
supports. His orders to Conrad, accordingly, were hurried and abrupt.
The men in the trestle went about the work in their usual clumsy way,
but at last a score of men had hold of the rope and the fresh log rose
on its end in slow jerks. Then it was clear of the ground, rolling in
a leisurely way against the lower supports of the trestle in response
to the uncurling of the rope. Up above, men were holding it away from
the trestle; a dozen more waiting to fasten it in place.
It had risen twenty feet when a cry of warning burst from Torrance's
lips. He scarcely knew why. His wandering eyes had fancied a sag in
the support that held the pulley; his quick ear had caught a new note
in the creaking timbers.
From above came the sound of snapping ropes--a chorus of panic-stricken
cries--a succession of crashes as the two logs dashed earthward.
The swarthy man half way up, who had been directing the rising log, a
task for which he was chosen on account of his great strength and cool
judgment, turned a lightning backward somersault without pausing to
look where he might land. As he turned over he twisted in the air,
caught a support, and swung himself easily to safety. For a moment he
contemplated the tragedy below, then like a cat sprang upward through
the trestle. The others merely closed their eyes and hung on.
Of the two freed logs the upper bounced from support to support,
finally resting in the trestle itself. But the one that had been on
its way to remedy the weakness turned slightly sideways and glanced off
into the group of frozen bohunks below. The trestle trembled from end
to end.
Torrance did not follow the course of the falling logs. All that
mattered at such a moment was the fate of his great work. He saw the
quiver run through it--felt it in his own body--heard the creaking of
ropes and blots, and there flashed through him a horror that he had not
provided for a strain like that. When the trestle held its place, a
great surge of pride and joy swept over him, but his knees were
trembling.
When his eyes returned to earth, the bohunks were in flight, almost to
a man, though danger was past. Only Conrad, Koppy, and Lefty Werner
were straining at the log that held down their crushed comrades.
Torrance sprang forward and bent his great back to the weight. Two
fewer bohunks were on construction in Canada.
Some one dropped from the trestle close to Torrance, and a hand thrust
itself before the contractor's eyes. In the hand was the end of a
rope. Torrance looked from it to the dusky Indian face above it.
"Cut!" jerked the halfbreed. "Thar's more up thar."
Torrance reached out slowly and took the rope, incredulous.
"'Twan't bolted," said the halfbreed. "An' then that."
A wave of crimson deepened the tan on Torrance's face. Whirling on the
group beside him, he struck viciously, and Koppy hurtled over the log
and lay as still as his dead companions. Instantly Conrad was on the
Pole, running his hands swiftly over the unconscious body. With a
satisfied smile he drew a knife from a leather sheath fastened inside
the trouser-band, and thrust it into his own belt.
"You did well to strike quickly," he muttered to Torrance. "A bullet
would be the proper thing, but we've no direct proof; the Police would
ask questions. He'll be round in a minute."
Torrance was examining the severed rope.
"Where did you find this, Mavy?"
The halfbreed pointed aloft. "Lower end o' the support the pulley was
fastened to. Thar's more."
Torrance was restraining himself for lack of victims on whom to vent
his wrath; Werner had retired to a discreet distance. Koppy was
sitting weakly on the log, wondering what had happened. The contractor
reached out one big hand and jerked him to his feet.
"Now, you--! I'll give you twenty minutes to round up them cusses of
yours and get them up in that trestle. The Indian here'll show you
what you got to do. And you'll stand right under all the time--and
you'll stand there every time we work on the trestle. I'm going to
make it worth your skin to stop this thing. And if after to-day I find
a rope cut or a bolt missing I'll smash you to pulp. And Big Jim
Torrance don't go back on his word. . . . What's more, you and the
other dogs won't be paid for the time it takes to fix things up."
He closed his powerful fist on the Pole's shoulder so tightly that the
man's face twisted.
"You think you're going to bust this job up, you and your gang. I'm
telling you that before you succeed you'll wish you'd stayed in jail in
your own country. I don't know what you got against the trestle, but I
do know you're a hellish cuss I'm going to break to the halter. If you
count to bust things up here, I'll see that the busting falls on your
own head. Scat!"