“No fear,” called out the thrower of the bottle. “The gentlemen are going to have one with me, Robins; they can have one with you after. Here, Sims, look alive, trundle up those drinks.”
“Keep your temper, Hallett,” replied the imperturbable landlord. “A man can’t wait on a dozen fellows at once, you see; and there are a precious deal more than a dozen of you here.”
“And devilish glad you are of that same, you old humbug,” retorted the other, cheerily.
“Tell you what it is,” an oracle of “the road” was saying in a loud voice, for the benefit of the assemblage. “That bridge’ll go, I say, before night; but, anyhow, it’s bound to go before morning.”
“Don’t know about that, Bill,” said another. “It’s a good strong bit of iron, and my opinion is that it’ll hold out.”
“It won’t, though. It’ll never stand the crush of drift-wood that’s against it now. And, mind you, the river’s coming down harder nor ever it was—I know. It’s raining like blazes up the country, far more’n it is here, and what with the Tarka and the Little Fish and half-a-dozen other streams besides, emptying into this, the bridge is bound to go. Mark my words.”
“Well, p’raps you’re right, Bill. We haven’t had such a flood as this in my time, and I’ve known this road, man and boy, for over fifty years. Still I should have thought the bridge’d stand. It’s a good bit of iron. But what do you say, Mister?” he added, appealing to Thorman. “You’ve just come over it, I hear.”
“What do I say? Why, that the damned thing won’t hold out till night,” was the gruff reply. “It jumped about like a twenty-foot swing while we were on it. And the fool that made it ought to be strapped upon it now, say I.”
“I’ve known one flood bigger than this, but that was before your time,” observed a wiry-looking little man, with white hair and a weasel-like face, self-complacent in the consciousness of having the pull over the two last speakers, and, indeed, over most of those present. “That was the time poor Owens was drowned. The river rose to within a foot of where we are sitting now before it went down again.”
“Who was Owens, and how was he drowned?” inquired Hicks, spotting an episode.