“She's holding strong and dandy,” said Orde to Tom North, examining critically the clumps of piles. “That channel helps a lot in more ways than one. It takes an awful lot of water out of the river. As long as those fellows keep the logs moving, I really believe we're all right.”
But shortly the water began to rise again, this time fairly by leaps. In immediate response the jam increased its pressure. For the hundredth time the frail wooden defences opposed to millions of pounds were tested to the very extreme of their endurance. The clumps of piles sagged outward; the network of chains and cables tightened and tightened again, drawing ever nearer the snapping point. Suddenly, almost without warning, the situation had become desperate.
And for the first time Orde completely lost his poise and became fluently profane. He shook his fist against the menacing logs; he apostrophised the river, the high water, the jam, the deserters, Newmark and his illness, ending finally in a general anathema against any and all streams, logs, and floods. Then he stormed away to see if anything had gone wrong at the dredged channel.
“Well,” said Tom North, “they've got the old man real good and mad this time.”
The crew went on driving piles, stringing cables, binding chains, although, now that the inspiration of Orde's combative spirit was withdrawn the labours seemed useless, futile, a mere filling in of the time before the supreme moment when they would be called upon to pay the sacrifice their persistence and loyalty had proffered for the altar of self-respect and the invincibility of the human Soul.
At the dredged channel Orde saw the rivermen standing idle, and, half-blind with anger he burst upon them demanding by this, that and the other what they meant. Then he stopped short and stared.
Square across the dredged channel and completely blocking it lay a single span of an iron bridge. Although twisted and misshapen, it was still intact, the framework of its overhead truss-work retaining its cage-like shape. Behind it the logs had of course piled up in a jam, which, sinking rapidly to the bed of the channel, had dammed back the water.
“Where in hell did that drop from?” cried Orde.
“Come down on top the jam,” explained a riverman. “Must have come way from Redding. We just couldn't SCARE her out of here.”
Orde, suddenly fallen into a cold rage, stared at the obstruction, both fists clenched at his side.