Hailey
And he planned a new bridge which should stand the Chinook and the Spider and the de'il himself, said Brodie, Medicine or no Medicine. And full seven year it lasted; then the fire-water spoke for the wicked Scotchman—and he himself went out into the night.
And after he died, miserable wreck of a man—and of a very great man—the Spider woke and took his pawky bridge and tied up the main line for two weeks and set us crazy—for we were already losing our grip on the California fast freight business. But at that time Hailey was superintendent of bridges on the West End.
I
His father was a section foreman. When Hailey was a kid—a mere kid—he got into Brodie's office doing errands; but whenever he saw a draughtsman at work he was no good for errands. At such times he went all into a mental tangle that could neither be thrashed nor kicked out of him, though both were conscientiously tried by old man Hailey and Superintendent Brodie; and Brodie, since he could do nothing else with him, finally kicked him into learning to read—and to cipher, Brodie called it. Then, by and by, Hailey got an old table and part of a cake of India ink himself, and himself became a draughtsman, and soon, with some cursing from Brodie and a "Luk a' that now!" from his paralyzed daddy, became chief draughtsman in Brodie's office. Hailey was no college man—Hailey was a Brodie man. Single mind on single mind—concentration absolute. Mathematics, drawing, bridges, brains—that was Hailey. But no classics except Brodie, who himself was a classic. All that Brodie knew, Hailey had from him; and where Brodie was weak, Hailey was strong—master of himself. When Brodie shamed the image he was made in, Hailey hid the shame best he could,—though never touched or made it his own—and Brodie, who hated even himself, showed still a light in the wreck by molding Hailey to his work. For, one day, said Brodie in his heart, this boy shall be master of these bridges. When I am rot, he will be here what I ought to have been—this Irish boy—and they will say he was Brodie's man. And better than any of these dough-heads they send me out, better than any of their Eastern graduates he shall be, if he was made engineer by a drunkard. And Hailey was better, far, far better than the graduates, better than Brodie—and to Hailey came the time to wrestle the Spider.
Stronger than any man before or since he was for that work. All Brodie knew, all the Indians knew, all that a life's experience, eating, living, watching, sleeping with the big river had taught him, that Hailey knew. And when Brodie's bridge went out, Hailey was ready with his new bridge for the Spider Water which should be better than Brodie's, just as he was better than Brodie. It was to be such a bridge as Brodie's bridge with the fire-water left out. And the plans for a Howe truss, two pier, two abutment, three span, pneumatic caisson bridge to span the Big Sandy River were submitted to headquarters.
But the cost! The directors jumped their table when they saw the figures. We were being milked at that time—to put it bluntly, being sucked, worse than lemons—by a Wall Street clique that robbed our good road, shaved our salaries, impoverished our equipment, and cut our maintenance to the quick. They talked economy and studied piracy. In the matter of appropriations, for themselves they were free-booters; for us, they were thrifty as men of Hamelin town. When Hailey demanded a thousand guilders for his Spider Water bridge, they laughed and said, "Come, take fifty." He couldn't do anything else; and he built a fifty guilder bridge to bar the Spider's crawl. It lasted really better than the average bridge and since Hailey never could get a thousand guilders at once, he kept drawing fifty at a time and throwing them annually at the Spider.
But the dream of his life—this we all knew, and the Sioux would have said the Spider knew—was to build a final bridge over the Spider Water: a bridge to throttle it for all time.