“I want half a dozen men who are prepared to risk their lives, and to lose them, if need be,” he said, his strong voice echoing clear and steady over the silent crowd. “I know what that bridge at Wastover is like when the wind is blowing only half a gale, and this morning it is more than that. If the car broke away on the bridge, something will have happened to it before we can get back there; so I want six men who can dig, and who are willing to risk their lives for the sake of saving life.”
Thirty men rushed forward. Thirty more would have followed, if there had been the slightest chance of their being able to go. But of the first lot Mike hastily chose six who happened to have shovels in their hands, and the last man thus picked was Edgar Bradgate.
“Hold, Bradgate, you mustn’t go; remember, man, how long you have been ill, and you can’t swim, either,” objected a clerk of works, as Bradgate swung himself aboard the crazy tender, which rocked behind the locomotive.
“There are other things to do besides swimming, and I’m not afraid to risk my life, or to lose it either, if need should be. Besides, Mike is my friend, and I’m proud to be chosen to help him now,” replied Edgar Bradgate, with a haughty upward fling of his head, which might have gone against him with the clerk had the fellow not been sufficiently a gentleman to recognize another gentleman when he saw one.
“Well, go along with you then; all the luck comes to some people!” growled the clerk, in such deep chagrin at not having been chosen for the purpose of risking his life, that it would have been comic if only it had not been so intensely tragic.
Directly the engine and tender had slid out of sight round the bend, everyone hurried off to work again, for they could do no good by hanging about there staring at the empty track; while the need to earn money was acute, and the necessity to toil so urgent, that nothing in the nature of delay could be excused.
The volunteers rode on the tender with the brakeman, but Mike Walford was on the engine itself, prepared to help stoke if need be, and also determined to see that the driver got every ounce of speed possible out of the crazy old engine.
The rocking was truly awful as the engine tore its way along the half-made track, and the marvel was that those men, who had come out to risk their lives if it were necessary, did not lose them on the way to the scene of action.
It was fifteen miles to Wastover bridge, and the engine did it in something over an hour, though it had taken the train more than three hours to crawl its weary way up to Brocken Ridge. But every minute of that backward journey was a peril so great, that nothing but the danger of the two in the box car could have justified the risk being taken.
“There is no car on the bridge,” said Mike, as they came in sight of the towering trestles which carried the railway track across the Wastover river.