Unfortunately our managers hadn't always sense, and one of them countenanced a shameful change in the name of Spider Water. Some idiot dubbed it the Big Sandy; and the Big Sandy it is to this day on map and in folder. But not in the heart of the Sioux or the lingo of trackmen.
It was the only stream our bridge engineers could never manage. Bridge after bridge they threw across it—and into it. One auditor at Omaha, given to asthma and statistics, estimated, between spells, that the Spider Water had cost us more than all the other watercourses together from the Missouri to the Sierras.
Then came to the West End a masterful man, a Scotchman, pawky and hard. Brodie was his name, an Edinburgh man, with no end of degrees and master of every one. A great engineer, Brodie, but the Spider Water took a fall even out of him. It swept out a Howe truss bridge for Brodie almost before he got his bag opened.
Then Brodie tried—not to make friends with the Spider, for nobody could do that—but to get acquainted with it. For this he went to its oldest neighbors, the Sioux. Brodie spent weeks and weeks, summers, up the Spider Water, hunting. And with the Sioux he talked the Spider Water and drank fire water. That was Brodie's shame, the fire water.
But he was pawky, and he chinned unceasingly the braves and the medicine men about the uncommonly queer creek that took the bridges so fast. The river that month in and month out couldn't squeeze up water enough for a pollywog to bathe in, and then, of a sudden, and for a few days, would rage like the Missouri, and leave our bewildered rails hung up either side in the wind.
Brodie talked cloudbursts up country; for the floods came, times, under clear skies—and the Sioux sulked in silence. He suggested an unsuspected inlet from some mountain stream which, maybe, times, sent its stormwater over a low divide into the Spider—and the red men shrugged their faces.
Finally they told him the Indian legend about the Spider Water; took him away up where once a party of Pawnees had camped in the dust of the river bed to surprise the Sioux; and told Brodie how the Spider—more sudden than buck, fleeter than pony—had come down in the night and ambushed the Pawnees with a flood. And so well that next morning there wasn't enough material in sight for a ghost dance.
They took Brodie himself out into the ratty bed, and when he said heap dry, and said no water, they laughed, Indian-wise, and pointed to the sand. Scooping little wells with their hands, they showed him the rising and the filling; water where the instant before was no water; and a bigger fool than Brodie could see the water was all there, only underground.
"But when did it rise?" asked Brodie. "When the chinook spoke," said the Sioux. "And why?" persisted Brodie. "Because the Spider woke," answered the Sioux. And Brodie went out of the camp of the Sioux wondering.
And he planned a new bridge which should stand the chinook and the Spider and all evil spirits. And full seven year it lasted; and then the fire water spoke for the wicked Scotchman, and he himself went out into the night.