Neale left the tent. He had started to walk away when he heard Blake speak up in a fierce undertone.
“Didn’t I tell you? We’re up against it!”
And Coffee growled a reply Neale could not understand. But the tone of it was conclusive. These men had made a serious blunder and were blaming each other, hating each other for it. Neale was conscious of anger. This section of line came under his survey, and he had been proud to be given such important and difficult work. Incompetent or careless engineers had bungled Number Ten. Neale strode on among the idle and sleeping laborers, between the tents, and then past the blacksmith’s shop and the feed corrals down to the river.
A shallow stream of muddy water came murmuring down from the hills. It covered the wide bed that Neale remembered had been a dry, sand-and-gravel waste. On each side the abutment piers had been undermined and washed out. Not a stone remained in sight. The banks were hollowed inward and shafts of heavy boards were sliding down. In the middle of the stream stood a coffer-dam in course of building, and near it another that had collapsed. These frameworks almost hid the tip of the middle pier, which had evidently slid over and was sinking on its side. There was no telling what had been sunk in that hole. All the surroundings—the tons of stone, cut and uncut, the piles of muddy lumber, the platforms and rafts, the crevices in the worn shores up and down both sides—all attested to the long weeks of fruitless labor and to the engulfing mystery of that shallow, murmuring stream.
Neale returned thoughtfully to camp. Blake and Coffee were sitting under the fly in company with a stalwart Irishman.
“Fine sink-hole you picked out for Number Ten, don’t you think?” queried Blake.
Neale eyed his interrogator with somewhat of a penetrating glance. Blake did not meet that gaze frankly.
“Yes, it’s a sink-hole, all right, and—no mistake,” replied Neale. “It’s just what I calculated when I ran the plans.... Did you follow those plans?”
Blake appeared about to reply when Coffee cut him short “Certainly we did,” he snapped.
“Then where are the breakwaters?” asked Neale, sharply.