“The bridge is going!”
There came the wail of great timbers as they were twisted and torn from their places. As Gildersleeve’s eyes became more adjusted to the dim, uncertain light, he saw that the torrent rode almost to the brim of the high banks of the Nannabijou, fully thirty feet above the stream’s normal level. In mad succession on its crest swirled logs, stumps, whole trees and other debris from the hills.
It was a terrifying, majestic sight, this great river moving out like an all-conquering, irresistible host, and carrying captive the things that stood in the way of its might as it swept from the confining hills to the freedom of the lake.
From beyond the mouth of the river, above the din of the storm and the freshet in the hills came a sibilant hissing sound like that when waves break over jagged reefs, only this was intensified a hundred-fold.
Shafts of light from the search-lights were flung over the bay.
“The booms are going out!”
Gildersleeve stood fascinated, dumb before the inevitable. The gorged river flinging itself out into the bay swept over the field of pulpwood an ever-widening tidal wave; then the poles rose through the boiling flood, heaving flat for one instant and the next rolled forward in great jams that again held until the invading torrent, gathering head, swept them before it in tossing, grinding masses.
The unequal struggle lasted but a few brief seconds. Then when the connecting links of the boom timbers beyond gave way the whole field of pulpwood sprang forward with a mighty, grinding roar and crowded out of the bay into the raging lake beyond where wind and wave carried it off in howling triumph.
In less time than it takes to tell the magnificent field, comprising thousands of cords of wood ready for grinding, had vanished all but an insignificant remnant the backwash had flung up on the shores of the bay.
The torrent in the river was gradually subsiding now, but still the crowd hung about in the drenching rain.