"I'm Blake—engineer in charge—from Griffith!" he shouted. "Bridge overloaded—will go down when wind rises. We've got to clear her. She may go down when the empties back out. Any yellow cur that wants to quit can call for his pay-check. I'm going out. Come on, boys!"
He started along the service-track at a quick jog-trot. The men, without a single exception, followed him in a mass, jostling each other for the lead. Near the outer end of the approach span they met the morning shift of carpenters and laborers, who were hurrying shoreward in response to the wild alarm of the engine whistle. Blake waved them about.
"Bridge in danger!" he shouted. "Volunteers to clear material."
Few of the carpenters and none of the chattering Slovaks and Italians caught anything except the word "danger." But zeal and fearlessness are sometimes as contagious as fear. A half-dozen or so drew aside to slink on shoreward. All the others joined the silent eager crowd behind Blake. Before they had gone a hundred feet every man in the crowd knew that at any moment the huge cantilever might crash down with them to certain destruction in the chasm, yet not one turned back.
A short distance beyond the cantilever towers they came to the foremost of the on-shift steel workers, who had halted in their shoreward run when they saw that the outcoming party showed no sign of halting. But those in their rear and McGraw, who had been left behind farthest of all in the race, were still moving forward.
Blake waved his pad to McGraw and called out to him over the heads of the others: "Here's my order! I'm in charge. Take every man you can handle, and work the main traveller to the towers. Hustle!"
"Your order!" wheezed McGraw stubbornly.
Blake was already close upon him. He had dealt before with men of McGraw's character. He tore off Ashton's order, thrust it into the other's pudgy hand, and paused to scribble an order to hold the train on the shore span.
On occasion McGraw could be nimble both in mind and body. The moment he had read Ashton's order, he wheeled about to rush back the way he had come, and let out a bull-like bellow: "Hi, youse! clear f'r trav'ller! Out-shift, follow me!"
The steel workers who had been on shift raced after and past him to the main traveller. He followed at a surprisingly rapid pace, bellowing his instructions. Blake, holding back in the lead of his far larger party from the shore, began to issue terse orders to the gangs of carpenters and laborers. They strung along the extension arm, outward from the point where the floor-system was completed. Before Blake could pass on ahead, tons of beams and stringers, iron fittings and kegs of bolts and nails began to rain down into the abyss.