The Iron Trail Part 61

Eliza felt with vexation that her face was burning. She was sure he was laughing at her.

"Can't I read the ma.n.u.script?" he pleaded.

"Heavens! No! I--" She changed the subject abruptly. "I've left word to be called the minute the ice starts to go out. I want to see the last act of the drama."

When O'Neil left her he was vaguely perplexed, for something in her bearing did not seem quite natural. He was forlorn, too, at the prospect of losing her. He wondered if fathers suffered thus, or if a lover could be more deeply pained at a parting than he. Somehow he seemed to share the feelings of both.

XXVII

HOW A DREAM CAME TRUE

Early on the following morning Eliza was awakened by a sound of shouting outside her window. She lay half dazed for a moment or two, until the significance of the uproar made itself apparent; then she leaped from her bed.

Men were crying:

"There she goes!"

"She's going out!"

Doors were slamming, there was the rustle and scuff of flying feet, and in the next room Dan was evidently throwing himself into his clothes like a fireman. Eliza called to him, but he did not answer; and the next moment he had fled, upsetting some article of furniture in his haste. Drawing her curtains aside, the girl saw in the brightening dawn men pouring down the street, dressing as they went. They seemed half demented; they were yelling at one another, but she could not gather from their words whether it was the ice which was moving or--the bridge. The bridge! That possibility set her to dressing with tremulous fingers, her heart sick with fear. She called to Natalie, but scarcely recognized her own voice.

"I--don't know," came the m.u.f.fled reply to her question. "It sounds like something--terrible. I'm afraid Dan will fall in or--get hurt."

The confusion in the street was growing. "ELIZA!" Natalie's voice was tragic.

"What is it, dear?"

"H--help me, quick!"

"How?"

"I can't find my other shoe."

But Eliza was sitting on the floor, lacing up her own stout boots, and an instant later she followed her brother, pursued by a wail of dismay from the adjoining chamber. Through the chill morning light she hurried, asking many questions, but receiving no coherent reply from the racing men; then after endless moments of suspense she saw with relief that the ma.s.sive superstructure of the bridge was still standing. Above the shouting she heard another sound, indistinct but insistent. It filled the air with a whispering movement; it was punctuated at intervals by a dull rumbling and grinding. She found the river-bank black with forms, but like a cat she wormed her way through the crowd until the whole panorama lay before her.

The bridge stood as she had seen it on the yesterday--slender, strong, superb in the simplicity of its splendid outline; but beneath it and as far as her eyes could follow the river she saw, not the solid spread of white to which she had become accustomed, but a moving expanse of floes. At first the winter burden slipped past in huge ma.s.ses, acres in extent, but soon these began to be rent apart; irregular black seams ran through them, opened, closed, and threw up ridges of ice-shavings as they ground together. The floes were rubbing against the banks, they came sliding out over the dry sh.o.r.e like tremendous sheets of cardboard manipulated by unseen hands, and not until their nine-foot edges were exposed to view did the mind grasp the appalling significance of their movement. They swept down in phalanxes upon the wedge-like ice-breakers which stood guard above the bridge-piers, then they halted, separated, and the armored cutting-edges sheared through them like blades.

A half-mile below, where the Salmon flung itself headlong against the upper wing of Jackson Glacier, the floating ice was checked by the narrowed pa.s.sageway. There a jam was forming, and as the river heaved and tore at its growing burden a spectacular struggle went on. The sound of it came faintly but impressively to the watchers--a grinding and crus.h.i.+ng of bergs, a roar of escaping waters. Fragments were up-ended, ma.s.ses were rearing themselves edgewise into the air, were overturning and collapsing. They were wedging themselves into every conceivable angle, and the crowding procession from above was adding to the barrier momentarily. As the pa.s.sageway became blocked the waters rose; the river piled itself up so swiftly that the eye could note its rise along the banks.

But the attention of the crowd was divided between the jam and something far out on the bridge itself. At first glance Eliza did not comprehend; then she heard a man explaining:

"He was going out when we got here, and now he won't come back."

The girl gasped, for she recognized the distant figure of a man, dwarfed to puny proportions by the bulk of the structure in the mazes of which he stood. The man was O'Neil; he was perched upon one of the girders near the center of the longest span, where he could watch the attack upon the pyramidal ice-breakers beneath him.

"He's a fool," said some one at Eliza's back. "That jam is getting bigger."

"He'd better let the d.a.m.ned bridge take care of itself."

She turned and began to force her way through the press of people between her and the south abutment. She arrived there, disheveled and panting, to find Slater, Mellen, and Parker standing in the approach.

In front of them extended the long skeleton tunnel into which Murray had gone.

"Mr. O'Neil is out there!" she cried to Tom.

Slater turned and, reading the tragic appeal in her face, said rea.s.suringly:

"Sure! But he's all right."

"They say--there's danger."

"Happy Tom's" round visage puckered into a doubtful smile. "Oh, he'll take care of himself."

Mellen turned to the girl and said briefly:

"There's no danger whatever."

But Eliza's fear was not to be so easily quieted.

"Then why did he go out alone? What are you men doing here?"

"It's his orders," Tom told her.

Mellen was staring at the jam below, over which the Salmon was hurling a flood of ice and foaming waters. The stream was swelling and rising steadily; already it had nearly reached the level of the timberline on the left bank; the blockade was extending up-stream almost to the bridge itself. Mellen said something to Parker, who shook his head silently.

Dan Appleton shouldered his way out of the crowd, with Natalie at his heels. She had dressed herself in haste: her hair was loose, her jacket was b.u.t.toned awry; on one foot was a shoe, on the other a bedroom slipper muddy and sodden. Her dark eyes were big with excitement.

"Why don't you make Murray come in?" Dan demanded sharply.

"He won't do it," muttered Slater.

"The jam is growing. n.o.body knows what'll happen if it holds much longer. If the bridge should go--"

Mellen whirled, crying savagely: "It won't go! All h.e.l.l couldn't take it out."

From the ranks of the workmen came a bellow of triumph, as an unusually heavy ice-floe was swept against the breakers and rent asunder. The tumult of the imprisoned waters below was growing louder every moment: across the lake came a stentorian rumble as a huge ma.s.s was loosened from the front of Garfield. The channel of the Salmon where the onlookers stood was a heaving, churning caldron over which the slim bridge flung itself defiantly.

Eliza plucked at her brother's sleeve imploringly, and he saw her for the first time.

"h.e.l.lo, Sis," he cried. "How did you get here?"

"Is he in--danger, Danny?"

"Yes--no! Mellen says it's all right, so it must be, but--that dam--"

At that moment Natalie began to sob hysterically, and Dan turned his attention to her.