Chapter II

From a spur on an Alaskan mountainside, Bruce Harcourt regarded the
recently completed bridge which straddled the river like a gigantic
skeleton. A row of eighty-pound rails, set a foot apart all round, bound
together with concrete, surrounded the great steel reinforced piers.
Above the piers, ice-breakers, similarly constructed, were planted. He
sniffed the soft wind which sobbed through the thick growth of spruce
and cottonwoods behind him. Spring in it. The break-up was due any hour,
any minute. Across the canyon sparkled a cave of ice, apparently as
green and harmless as a velvet arras. Above, the sky was clear cerulean
blue. Below, the frozen scarf which was the river lay gray and hard as
granite, with no suggestion of the seething, surging current underneath.
The glacier from which it issued five or six miles away was faintly
discernible. He sniffed again.

“It won’t be long now before we know how good we are,” he told himself.
He turned at a hail. A man, almost as broad as long in his Eskimo parka,
which hung down to meet the tops of his skin boots, was hurrying toward
him. The part of the face which the fur hood left uncovered was
russet-apple brown from exposure to an Alaskan winter, the nose was
peeling from frost-bite. Harcourt’s grave face brightened.

“Tubby! Back so soon? Boy, but I’m glad to see you!”

Theodore Grant Junior’s green eyes responded to the affection in the
greeting. His face was rough from lack of a shave, but his teeth showed
beautifully white as he grinned.

“I’ve got him, ba-gosh!”

“Got who?”

“Got who? Has your memory frozen up? The secretary. An assistant for
myself, Theodore Grant Junior, accountant extraordinary for this branch
of the Alaskan Expeditionary Force to crack a way through the great
Northwest.”

“How did you get him?”

“From an agency in Seattle. They sent him on the first boat. I’ll bet
the old tub had to plow and crush its way through ice.”

“Did he know what he was coming to? Did that dumb agent explain that the
job was no coast cinch?”

“Is there a coast cinch in this outfit?”

Harcourt laughed. “Relatively. Everything’s relative, Tubby. Did you
bring him along?”

“Did I! Do you think I’d give him a chance to sneak back on the next
boat? I brought him. He—he wasn’t all I brought.”

“What do you mean?”

“Keep your shirt on, Bruce. I brought the Samp girls.”

“The Samp girls! Tubby! Have you gone plumb crazy?”

“Now listen!”

“Listen! Look here, does Hale know?”

“Hale! What’s he got to say about it?”

“Considering that he’s chief of this outfit, considerable.”

“Chief! Who’s had to take his place most of the time this winter? You.
He opened up high, wide and handsome while you were away. He got the
Indians on their ears, driving them like slaves when he was sober and
chucking their squaws under the chin when he was plastered. He’s a bad
hombre and we’re in for trouble if the Crowned Heads of this enterprise,
back home, don’t get busy. If anyone’s got anything to say, it’s you.”

“I’ll say it pronto. I’d send the Samp sisters out if I could spare a
man. But I can’t; the break-up’s due any minute. Why the dickens did
those two women leave the Waffle Shop at headquarters, which is remote
enough, to come out here to this wilderness of snow and ice?”

“That’s what I asked them. Martha Samp, a little leaner, a little
gaunter, a little grayer than when we left in the fall, asked to come. I
went into the air at the suggestion, just as you did. I growled:

“‘Take you out to that wilderness! Nothing doing!’

“She inveigled me into the shop to talk it over. Heaped my plate with
the hottest, crispest waffles, dripping with melting brown sugar and
butter, Bruce—_butter_; filled my cup with honest-to-goodness coffee
and reminded:

“‘Mary and I can’t do missionary work with books, but we can with food.
One of the biggest forces which prods men on to deviltry is the trash
they put into their stomachs. That bridge you’re building is a big thing
for the country. I’ve been talking with the men who worked on it. They
claim that ’twill stand or fall in the spring break-up.’”

“She’s right.”

“She argued that we wouldn’t be here long, that she and Mary would like
to see the interior, and on and on _ad lib., ad infinitum._ That she
wanted to keep our courage up with good food. She has the missionary
spirit, all right.”

“Did Miss Mary come?”

“Of course; she’s only a plump echo of Miss Martha. You should have
heard the men cheer when I appeared with them. They are busy now
clearing out the shack which was the cook-house. We brought in a
sledge-load of their equipment. They’ll be ready for business at supper
time.”

Waffles and brown sugar! Real coffee! Harcourt’s opposition oozed. He
knew the appetizing quality of the Samp sisters’ productions.

“Now that they are here, they will have to stay. I can’t spare a man to
take them out. Got your secretary located?”

“He brought a tent with his outfit. Wish you could see the amount of
truck put off the boat for him. Made me think of Archie Harper’s
pearl-handled revolvers. I asked him where he found out what to bring,
and he said from a book in the Public Library. From the amount of stuff
dumped from the boat I’d say he’d chucked in the library itself for full
measure. Made him park it at headquarters. The Samp girls have taken him
under their wings. He’s no cave-man. Even in his parka and mukluks he’s
as slim as a fishing-rod. He’s got a little mustache like the down on a
yellow chicken’s back, black curly hair—big crimson spots on his
cheeks.”

“I get you. T.B. That’s why he was willing to leave the land of lights
and movies.”

“Said he’d been ordered to live out-of-doors. By the expression of that
part of his face left visible by the hood of his parka, as we came over
the pass, I reckoned that he hadn’t expected quite so much in one dose.
I tried to see our surroundings as he saw them and ba-gosh, accustomed
to them as I am, it gave me the heebe-jeebes. Miles of untrodden snow.
Peaks, spires and ridges of ice, their glittering surfaces crossed by
thousands of crevasses and fissures. Overhead an eagle hovered,
somewhere, far off, a wolf howled sinister as the dickens. Mountains
thrust jagged fangs through thin vapors. The weather-demon shook out his
whole bag of tricks with sound effects. It sleeted, it rained, it
hailed. Lightning did its stuff and the thunder was deafening. Then it
snowed, so thick and fast that the dogs lost the trail. Suddenly, almost
under our feet, a cliff dropped straight down to the gun-metal river.
Through it all, neither the Samp girls, nor the secretary, crabbed or
whimpered once. They might have been tooling along in a Rolls Royce in
sunny Spain. Only the boy’s eyes played traitor. Poor little fella, it
would be terrible to die in this wilderness.”

“Die! Good grief, Tubby, you haven’t brought a boy up here to die?”

“No, of course not. I’ll bet with the Samp girls’ cooking and this air
he’ll be O.K. Now that’s all washed up—what’s bust now?” he demanded as
one of the workmen raced toward them. As the man struggled for breath
which whistled through his porcelain teeth, Harcourt encouraged:

“Take it easy, Gallagher. What’s up?”

“Sure”—gulp—“Chester sent me to tell you the false works has suddenly
moved!”

Harcourt’s face whitened. The false works! The two thousand piles which
had been driven forty feet into the bottom of the river!

“How much! Quick!”

“Fifteen inches! Sudden as the crack of doom!”

“Where’s Hale?”

“Gone back to headquarters with his dog-team. Said everything was O.K.
Didn’t need him; he’d take the boat out to Seattle to get Mrs. Hale.
Said you’d had your leave, he’d take his.”

“Gone! Gone to Seattle! Without letting me know! Get every man out,
Tubby!” Harcourt started on a run. A pier supervisor was charging toward
him, his eyes like glassies too big for their sockets. The man answered
his unspoken question.

“Ice-cap lifted twenty feet. Moving. False works fifteen inches out of
plumb.”

“We must get it back.”

“Back!”

“We must. Otherwise the whole span, supports and all, will be carried
away.”

In the prolonged nightmare which followed, Bruce Harcourt felt as though
he were his own double looking at a great motion picture. Steam from
every available engine was turned into every available feed-pipe. Men
chopped seven-foot thick ice away from the piles. A stinging
needle-pointed Arctic night settled down. The river rose. The forest
quiet was broken by the chop, chop of picks. The piles must be kept
free. Hundreds of cross pieces were unbolted. The shifting into place
began. No man relaxed his vigilance until another stood ready to go on
with his job.

If he thought of anything but the bringing back of the bridge into
place, Harcourt thanked God for the Samp sisters. They were
indefatigable. They made the men stop for hot coffee and waffles put
together sandwich fashion with succulent brown sugar. Once he glimpsed a
boy hovering in the background. The new secretary? Not that he cared a
picayune who he was, but the speculation served to take his thoughts for
a moment off the problem of that moving bridge. Hale’s had been the
master mind in construction, but he had to step in so often when the
chief was incapacitated that the responsibility of the result would fall
heavily upon his shoulders. The authorities whom he had seen back home
had intimated that they were thoroughly informed as to the situation.

Melting. Chopping. Coaxing. Melting. Chopping. Coaxing. The hours
dragged on. Harcourt couldn’t close his eyes. With every muscle, every
nerve in his body, he was holding back the torrent which at any moment
might be loosed in the river. Once, hurrying to his office for a plan,
he saw a dim face in the purple dusk between spruce trees. He stopped
short in his stride. The face of the girl who had dined with him that
last night in New York? Behind the absorption in his work, since his
return, like the brilliant lining of a cloud, had glowed the memory of
those hours with Janice Trent. He could see her as distinctly as he saw
her then, the soft waves of hair, the ardent lips, ruby eyes winking in
the long, swaying earrings; he could hear the swing and fire of the
Polish dance; he could feel her pulsing fingers against his lips. But of
course it wasn’t Jan! Had the memory of her become an obsession? His
heart stopped for a terrified instant.

“Am I going dippy under the strain?” he muttered, and plunged on through
the trail.

Inch by slow inch the span settled back on its concrete bed. Haggard,
exhausted, with a two days’ growth of beard on their faces the engineers
watched the last bolt driven in. From the distance came a faint rumble.
It increased in volume.

Grant clutched Harcourt’s arm. “It’s coming!” he whispered through stiff
lips.

The rumble increased to a roar. The river had broken loose. Carrying ice
and timber before it, it swept along on its mad rush to the sea.

Rigid, tense, the two men watched the wreckage and ice sweep by. The
bridge stood immovable against the onslaught. Grant’s eyes were
unashamedly full of tears.

“You’ve done the trick, Bruce. This day will mark a crisis in your life
and Hale’s.”

“The credit belongs to him. I only came in at the end. Tell the division
heads to get the men off duty as fast as possible. Put them on shifts to
watch. I’ll turn in. I haven’t been off my feet for forty-eight hours.
Now that the strain is eased every nerve in them is throbbing protest.”

“You’d better, ba-gosh. You’re the only one of the outfit who hasn’t
caught a cat-nap, at least. The boys will be all right now. The Waffle
Shop’s going at full blast. I’ll say that the Samp girls helped mightily
in keeping the men fit for their job.”

“I’ll say they did. When the history of this bridge-building is written,
their part ought to appear in the records.”

A great wave of heat from the Yukon stove swept out as Harcourt opened
the door of his shack. Firelight glowed through the one window, tipped
with flame the icicles which fringed the roof, threw eerie shadows on
the cache opposite, raised on tall posts, in which supplies were stored
against marauding porcupines and dogs. Smoke from the chimney ascended
in a column as straight as a near-by spruce. He paused on the threshold.

“What’s the name of that secretary of yours, Tubby?”

“Jimmy Delevan.”

“Delevan? Did he help during the late excitement?”

“Sure he did. He was everywhere. Perhaps not so helpful in some spots as
in others. One of the men found him freeing a snowshoe rabbit which had
been snared. When he explained that the rabbits were the chief source of
feed for the dog-teams, Jimmy Delevan went quite white, walked off
without answering, but with the rabbit clutched tight in his arms like a
baby.”

“Delevan? I think I saw him once and thought he was—Delevan—”

He felt himself swaying. The heat from the red-hot stove was
overpowering after the cold. Lord, how his feet throbbed! He
must—Delevan—He must—from a great distance came Tubby Grant’s
strident plea:

“Hold on, Bruce! Don’t go to sleep till I can get you over to that
bunk.”