“This jamb’s not solid,” he explained. “She’s working open and shutting; and you can’t tell where the breaks are.” He stooped and rubbed his leg, and Vane understood him to add: “Figured I had it smashed.”
Vane swung round towards Carroll, who was standing close by. “We give them a lead.”
Salter ventured another remonstrance: “Stay where you are. How are you going to manage if the boys can’t tackle the thing?”
“They haven’t as much at stake as I have,” was Vane’s reply. “I’m a director of the company as you pointed out. Give me two sticks of giant-powder, some fuse, and detonators.”
After cramming the blasting material into his pocket, Vane called to Carroll: “Are you coming with me?”
“Since I can’t stop you, I suppose I’d better go,” Carroll replied.
They sprang down the bank. Vane crawled out on the working timber, with Carroll, who carried a heavy hammer, a few feet behind him. The perilous bridge they traversed groaned beneath their feet, but they had joined the other men before they came to any particularly troublesome opening. Then the cluster of wet figures was brought up by a gap filled with leaping foam, in the midst of which brushwood swung to and fro and projecting branches ground on one another. Whether there was solid timber a foot or two beneath, or only the entrance to some cavity by which the stream swept through the barrier, there was nothing to show, but Vane set his lips and jumped. He alighted on something that bore him, and when the others followed, floundering and splashing, the deliberation which had hitherto characterised their movements suddenly deserted them. They had reached the limit beyond which it was no longer useful.
When they had crossed the gap, Vane and those behind him blundered on in hot fury. They had risen to the demand on them, and the curious psychic change had come; now they must achieve success or face annihilation. But in this there was nothing unusual; it is the alternative offered to many a log-driver, miner, and sailor-man.
Neither Vane nor Carroll, nor any of those who assisted them, had any clear recollection of what they did. Somehow they reached the boulder; somehow they plied axe or iron-hooked peevie, while the unstable, foam-lapped platform rocked beneath their feet. Every movement entailed a peril no one could calculate, but they savagely toiled on. When Vane began to swing a hammer above a drill, or whom he got it from, he did not know, any more than he remembered when he had torn off and thrown away his jacket, though the sticks of giant-powder, which had been in his pocket, lay close by upon the stone. Sparks sprang from the drill which Carroll held and fell among the coils of snaky fuse; but that did not trouble either, and it was only when Vane was breathless that he changed places with his companion.
About them, bowed figures that breathed in stertorous gasps grappled desperately with grinding, smashing logs. Sometimes they were forced up in harsh distinctness by a dazzling glare; sometimes they faded into blurred shadows as the pulsating flame upon the bank sank a little or was momentarily blown aside; but all the while gorged veins rose on bronzed foreheads and toil-hardened muscles were taxed to the uttermost. At last, when a trunk rolled beneath him, Carroll missed a stroke and realised with a shock of dismay that it was not the drill he had brought his hammer down upon.