In itself the work was arduous enough, since four men alone could toil at the winch, and some of the masses they raised were ponderous. Indeed, there was scarcely room for four persons on the shelf hewn out above the tail of the pool, and the narrow strip of stone was slippery with ice. Fine spray that froze on all it touched whirled about the workers, and every now and then a heavy fragment that slipped from the claws fell with a great splash. Nasmyth’s wrists grew raw from the rasp of the hide jacket, and wide cracks opened in his fingers.
“I remember it as cold as this only once before,” he said. “It was during the few days I spent between the logging camp and Waynefleet’s ranch.”
Mattawa, who hove on the same handle, grinned. “Well,” he said, “this is a tolerable sample of blame hard weather while it lasts, but we get months of it back East. Still, I guess we don’t work then. No, sir, unless we’re chopping, we sit tight round the stove.”
Mattawa was right in this. Excepting the loggers and the Northwest Police, men do not work in the open at that temperature back East, nor would they attempt it on the Pacific Slope were the cold continuous. In the western half of British Columbia, however, long periods of severe weather are rare. It is a variable zone, swept now and then by damp, warm breezes, and men tell of sheltered valleys where flowers blow the year round, though very few of those who ramble up and down the Mountain Province ever chance upon them. But there are times when the devastating cold of the Polar regions descends upon the lonely ranges, as it had done upon the frost-bound cañon.
Those who toiled with Nasmyth were hardened men, 244 and they held on with cracked hands clenched on the winch-handles, or they splashed through the icy shallows with the water in their boots, until, a little before their dinner-hour, when three of them stood straining by Nasmyth’s side beneath the derrick as a mass of rock rose slowly to the surface of the pool. Mattawa glanced at this weight dubiously, and then up at the wire guy that gleamed with frozen spray high above his head.
“I guess we’ve dropped on to a big one this time,” he said. “She’s going to be heavier when we heave her clear of the river.”
This, of course, was correct, and it was clear to Nasmyth that it was only by a strenuous effort that his comrades were raising the stone then. Still, it must be lifted, and he tightened his grasp upon the handle.
“Heave! Lift her out!” he said.
The veins rose swollen on their foreheads, and they gasped as they obeyed him, but as the stone rose dripping there was an ominous creaking overhead.
“Guess she’s drawing the anchor-bolts,” cried one. “We’ll fetch the whole thing down. Shall I let her run?”