With his option signed and the task squarely confronting him, he realized with fresh force its bigness and the weight of responsibility that rested upon his shoulders. He began the most dramatic struggle of his career, a fight against untried conditions, a desperate race against the seasons, with ruin as the penalty of defeat.
The channel of the Salmon at this point is fifteen hundred feet wide and thirty feet deep. Through it boils a ten-mile current; in other words, the waters race by with the speed of a running man. Over this O'Neil expected to suspend a structure capable of withstanding the mightiest strains to which any bridge had ever been subjected. Parker's plans called for seventeen thousand yards of cement work and nine million pounds of steel, every part of which must be fabricated to a careful pattern. It was a man-sized job, and O'Neil was thankful that he had prepared so systematically for the work; that he had gathered his materials with such extraordinary care. Supplies were arriving now in car-loads, in train-loads, in ship-loads: from Seattle, from Vancouver, from far Pittsburg they came in a thin continuous stream, any interruption of which meant confusion and serious loss of time. The movement of this vast tonnage required the ceaseless attention of a corps of skilled men.
He had personally directed affairs up to this point, but he now obliterated himself, and the leadership devolved upon two others—Parker, small, smiling, gentle-mannered; Mellen, tall, angular, saturnine. Upon them, engineer and bridge-builder, O'Neil rested his confidence, serene in the knowledge that of all men they were the ablest in their lines. As for himself, he had all he could do to bring materials to them and to keep the long supply-trail open. Long it was, indeed; for the shortest haul was from Seattle, twelve hundred miles away, and the steel bridge members came from Pennsylvania.
The piers at Omar groaned beneath the cargoes that were belched from the big freighters—incidentally, "Happy Tom" Slater likewise groaned beneath his burdens as superintendent of transportation. At the glaciers a city as large as Omar sprang up, a city with electric lights, power-houses, machine shops, freight yards, and long rows of winter quarters. It lay behind ramparts of coal, of grillage timbers and piling, of shedded cement barrels, and tons of steel. Over it the winter snows sifted, the north winds howled, and the arctic cold deepened.
Here, locked in a mountain fastness more than a thousand miles from his base of supplies, O'Neil began the decisive struggle of his life. Here, at the focusing point of his enterprise, in the white heat of the battle, he spent his time, heedless of every other interest or consideration. The shifts were lengthened, wages were increased, a system of bonuses was adopted. Only picked men were given places, but of these there were hundreds: over them the grim-faced Mellen brooded, with the fevered eye of a fanatic and a tongue of flame. Wherever possible the men were sheltered, and steam-pipes were run to guard against the cold; but most of the labor was, of necessity, performed in the open and under trying conditions. At times the wind blew a hurricane; always there was the bitter cold. Men toiled until their flesh froze and their tools slipped from their fingers, then dragged themselves stiffly into huts and warmed themselves for further effort. They worked amid a boiling snow-smother that hid them from view, while gravel and fine ice cut their faces like knives; or again, on still, sharp days, when the touch of metal was like the bite of fangs and echoes filled the valley to the brim with an empty clanging. But they were no ordinary fellows—no chaff, to drift with the wind: they were men toughened by exposure to the breath of the north, men winnowed out from many thousands of their kind. Nor were they driven: they were led. Mellen was among them constantly; so was the soft-voiced smiling Parker, not to mention O'Neil with his cheery laugh and his words of praise. Yet often it was hard to keep the work moving at all; for steam condensed in the cylinders, valves froze unless constantly operated, pipes were kept open only by the use of hot cloths: then, too, the snow crept upward steadily, stealthily, until it lay in heavy drifts which nearly hid the little town and changed the streets to miniature canons.
Out of this snow-smothered, frost-bound valley there was but one trail. The army lay encamped in a cul de sac; all that connected it with the outside world were two slender threads of steel. To keep them clear of snow was in itself a giant's task; for as yet there were no snow-sheds, and in many places the construction-trains passed through deep cuts between solid walls of white. Every wind filled these level and threatened to seal the place fast; but furiously the "rotaries" attacked the choking mass, slowly it was whirled aside, and onward flowed that steady stream of supplies. No army of investment was ever in such constant peril of being cut off. For every man engaged in the attack there was another behind him fighting back the allied forces which swept down from either hand.
Only those who know that far land in her sterner moods can form any conception of the stupefying effect of continuous, unbroken cold. There is a point beyond which the power of reaction ceases: where the human mind and body recoils uncontrollably from exposure, and where the most robust effort results in a spiritless inactivity. It is then that efficiency is cut in half, then cut again. And of all the terrors of the Arctic there is none so compelling as the wind. It is a monstrous, deathly thing, a creature that has life and preys upon the agony of men. There are regions sheltered from it, of course; but in the gutters which penetrate the mountain ranges it lurks with constant menace, and of all the coast from Sitka westward the valley of the Salmon is the most evil.
In the throat of this mighty-mouthed funnel, joining the still, abysmal cold of the interior with the widely varying temperatures of the open sea, O'Neil's band was camped, and there the great hazard was played. Under such conditions it was fortunate indeed that he had field-marshals like Parker and Mellen, for no single man could have triumphed. Parker was cautious, brilliant, far-sighted; he reduced the battle to paper, he blue-printed it; with sliding-rule he analyzed it into inches and pounds and stresses and strains: Mellen was like a grim Hannibal, tireless, cunning, cold, and he wove steel in his fingers as a woman weaves her thread.
It was a remarkable alliance, a triumvirate of its kind unsurpassed. As the weeks crept into months it worked an engineering marvel.