“Help! Help! Help!” It was a girl’s voice, hoarse and strained, shrieking against the roaring of the wind. The heads of the men jerked upwards with a sudden flash of hope, for the sound had come from above.
“There they are—two of them!” yelled out one of the volunteers. “Hurrah!”
“Hurrah! Hurrah!” chorused the others, as, breaking into a run, they scrambled across the rough slope to the trestling, up which they swarmed like a set of monkeys.
CHAPTER XXIX
A Great Embarrassment
The men had seen the two huddled figures high up in the trestling, and were climbing as fast as they could go to reach them. Bertha ceased to shout when she saw them coming. Her voice was strained, and her throat was sore from the efforts she had made to attract attention, ever since she had first heard the engine coming on to the bridge. But the wind roared so loudly, and the engine was noisy too, that it was little wonder she could make no headway against it, and when the engine went slowly back again she had almost given up hope of getting help.
Then she saw the men go scrambling down the bank towards the water, and guessed that they were making for the box car, which just showed sticking up in the bed of the river, and the sight had given her courage to shout her loudest, and so she had made them hear at last. But she was dreadfully spent and almost perished with cold, for the raging wind seemed to blow right through her; moreover it had required every atom of will power that she possessed to prevent poor Mrs. Walford from flinging herself headlong from the trestling into the river down below.
The trouble was that although it would have been quite possible for them to have climbed upward on to the track, after the manner in which Bertha had climbed down from the platform where they were, it was not possible to get lower save by a drop of four or five feet, and that Mrs. Walford could not face. Equally she declared that she could not climb higher—her head would not stand it—so, seeing the dangerous state of excitement under which she laboured, Bertha dared not urge her to move, being afraid that if she were to get any higher she would lose self-control entirely.
She had wrapped the poor woman in a blanket and urged her to shut her eyes, even to sleep, if she could, knowing that sleep, more than anything else, would rest the nerves and quiet down the wild agitation. But sleep was impossible to Mrs. Walford just then, and every time a blast of wind roared down the valley, she shrieked out that they would be blown away.
It was a terrible experience for Bertha. Never, never had she faced a situation calling for more strength of mind and quiet self-control. She was sick and giddy herself with all she had gone through, and from the awful height at which they were perched. She was faint, too, from want of food, and so thoroughly chilled that she could scarcely keep her hold on the timber against which she leaned for shelter. By drawing Mrs. Walford close to one of the uprights on the windward side, she had sheltered her a little from the force of the wind; but it was necessary to hold her there, or the poor woman, in her excitement, might easily have made an incautious move which would have sent her hurtling downwards through the network of crossbeams into the muddy water of the river.
It was that four or five feet of distance from the last crossbars on to the platform where the two were crouching which proved a serious obstacle to the men who were climbing up to the rescue, and for a few minutes it looked almost as if they might have to climb down again, then scramble up the bank, and come down from above. But after a moment spent in silently surveying the situation, Edgar Bradgate solved it for the others by flinging his arms round a bit of the trestling and calling out to Mike Walford to step on to him, and so mount upward to the crossbar immediately above.