“Never mind where, Mark,” I laughed, despite the gravity of our situation.
“Well, I’m an iceberg and no mistake, George; and I want to go anywhere to find a place that will thaw things.”
We hustled among several stables in the neighborhood, and soon had two clothes-lines and three pairs of horse reins. Then back to the bridge we went, where in a few minutes we’d rigged up a cable that seemed strong enough to withstand the strain to which we would put it. I said I’d make the first attempt to cross, so tied one end of the cable to a bridge stay and the other around my body close under the arms. The cable was about seventy feet in length, long enough, I reckoned, to let me get to the other side of the skeleton work. If the cable was exhausted before I got over, then I would have to return. That was the alternative. When ready to start, I fastened the treasure satchel to Mark’s back, and told him to remain at the cable stay, and do the best he could for me, in case I slipped from the planks and fell through the skeleton work. If he could pull me to the bridge again, why, all right; if not, well—I shivered at the prospect of dangling in the air hundreds of feet above the dark river.
“If I should fall through, Mark,” I said to him, “and you can’t get me back, just cut the rope. I guess that will end me. Anyway, it will be better than being suspended in the air and freezing to death.”
“Don’t talk like a fool!” he said, in a sort of shivering voice, I thought; “if you think it so serious as that, you shouldn’t start.”
“Well, in case anything should happen, Mark, old boy, I’ll say good-by.”
With that I stepped on the plank and, bending to my knees, began my journey over the slippery planking, with the storm raging about me. Far below was the roaring river I could hear but not see. Suddenly it occurred to me that I had not agreed with Mark on a code of signals. I dared not turn round, so cried out to him, that if I got over all right, I would pull the cable three times. In that case he was to fasten the cable about him and return to me a similar indication of his readiness for the journey. Then I would fasten the cable to a stay at my end of the bridge, and notify him by the same signal to come over. I called back another good-by, which he answered. The wind swept through the thousands of strings of the great skeleton bridge, rendering wild, weird music, it seemed to me; and at times, as I struggled along the treacherous planks, I imagined that the wires were of a prodigious harp, designed to give forth melancholy and discouragement, and that ten thousand demons were at the strings in a mad struggle to achieve my undoing. Again, so mournful was the sweep of the wind, that I could, in my terrible position, fancy my ears laden with the weight of my funeral song. I wished with all my heart that it would cease, that I might better work out my exemption from death, but it persisted in beating on, occasionally threatening to dislodge me by a sudden and more terrifying evidence of its unlimited energy.
I had been creeping along inch by inch, and it seemed to me that I must have been on the way an hour, before I had covered a score of feet, when I paused to catch my breath, which had been almost driven from my body by a fierce shock of wind. And, too, I was compelled to clutch at the planking with all the strength left me, that I might not be hurled below as far as my cable would permit. When the wind relented, I called out to Mark, but no response came, the sound of my voice, in all probability, having been drowned ere it got ten feet away. I resumed the struggle and had traversed a dozen feet more, when a gust struck me and one hand slipped from the plank. Down I went with a crash that nearly cracked my head on the ice, and I must have gone below, had not my right hand come in contact with a girder, fortunately close by, when I met with the mishap. With this aid I was able to balance myself and regain my place on the plank. I was trembling with fright, and I knew that my forehead, notwithstanding the cold, was wet with perspiration. It was fortunate I was near a girder when this piece of ill-luck came. The girders, as near as I could guess, were five feet apart. Had I been midway of two, I dare not think of what would have been my fate. Without these supports, from time to time, I am certain that I would have been unable to keep to the path.
Perhaps I’d crawled fifty feet when I came to the end of a plank, and, feeling further ahead and to the right and to the left, I could put my hand on no support save an iron girder at my right side. It was about eight inches wide, and no doubt extended to the edge of the bridge. To the right I thought I saw another plank, but to reach it I must crawl along the narrow, ice-covered beam. I had barely saved myself from disaster on the planking; how I’d fare on the iron, still narrower, I did not know. Ahead, as I became more accustomed to the darkness, I made out the next girder, but it was too far away. I must creep to the plank at my right or go back to Shinburn. Try as I might, I could find no other solution. My predicament can easily be understood, if any one doubts this history, by an attempt on hands and knees, in broad daylight, to crawl fifty feet along a board twelve inches wide, at an elevation of several hundreds of feet, and coming to the end of that narrow path, turn squarely, and, still on the hands and knees, creep along an eight-inch wide ice-covered iron beam. If this journey will not put the nerves to the test, then I’m no judge of human nature and endurance. But the full force of my danger can only be realized, when the course I have outlined has been gone over in such a night as I have described, with its howling winds and blinding snow clouds. A person who can accomplish the task without the trouble I felt must be a practised athlete or a monkey with a ringed tail.
I came mighty near slipping from the girder the moment I put my knee to it. The wind seemed to come with a sort of broadside force. What saved me I don’t know. At the end of the girder I found a plank, and the solution of my troubles, in part. This plank was not so heavy as the others and had not been so thoroughly frozen to the iron that a strong gust of wind could not sweep it toward the right side of the bridge, one end more than the other. In this manner had my straight passage along the planking been interrupted. I crawled on the plank, finding it very unsteady, owing to the way it rested on the girders. I crept along, and thus I bore to the left, where, after going sixteen feet, I came to the resumption of the straight and narrow path, which I hoped would lead me to the end of my perilous route; that is, I thought so, but to my disappointment I was confronted with another stretch of ice-covered iron to be struggled over. However, it proved to be only eight feet from plank to plank, and I succeeded in spanning it without a mishap. But my hands and feet were aching with the cold. If I had dared, I would have sat astride the plank and slapped my hands together, but time was so precious and the moments must seem so endless to Mark, that I would not. So, pressing on, I gained ten more feet, and felt encouraged. Then I found myself on a terribly slippery and much narrower piece of planking, which evidently had been used as a filler in the pathway. In my anxiety to get along, I did not discover it until I’d taken an insecure hold. Suddenly my hand slipped off, and, sheering to one side, I toppled over. Catching at the planking with both hands, I found myself hanging under the planking instead of shooting down to the cable’s end. Vainly for a minute I tried to fetch my feet up around the plank. Struggling with all my might, it seemed impossible under the conditions, as I was almost stiff from the cold and weakened by the terrible strain upon me. As my feet swung back and forth in an effort to get a momentum that would assist me, they struck against the girder I’d crossed just before I fell. Here was a simple solution of my nerve-taxing plight. I wondered if another man, Mark Shinburn, for instance, would have been so bewildered as not to think sooner of using the girder as a means of getting back to the planking. I always believed, without wishing to appear egotistical, that I possessed at least the ordinary common sense allotted to man. In this case I seem to have been very short-sighted. Perhaps—ay, I must believe that the awful test to which my mind and body had been subjected, and the fearful roar of the wind and the swirling of the snow, confused me.