Chapter XXVIII: Consternation

THE end of steel, as railhead is called, on this particular bit of track, was at the junction of a small river with a large one, which necessitated the building of an extra long bridge to take the track across the river valley into the country of low rolling hills which lay beyond.

The building of the bridge naturally delayed progress, so, meantime, quite a considerable town had grown up. There were stores of sorts, and a hotel, so-called, which was kept by a dour-faced Scot and his smiling Irish wife.

The huts of the construction workers were made of any odd materials that came handy; indeed, some of them were mere holes scraped from the face of the cliff-like banks of the river and fronted with boards, sheets of tin, or any other building material which came to hand. But the whole place hummed with work and endeavour; there was no room for idleness or even leisure. From dawn to dark, or, to use a colloquialism, from kin to k’int, everyone toiled to the utmost of their strength; since the more work they did the more money they earned, and to earn money was with most of them the sole end and aim of their existence.

The place was all astir when, in the first faint light of dawn, the long freight train from Rownton rolled and rocked over the last half-mile of unfinished track, finally coming to a stand in the middle of the crazy collection of dwellings which, after the manner of such places, had the impudence to consider itself a full-fledged town.

It had been expected from the previous evening, and quite a crowd had gathered, since it would bring a mail bag, newspapers, and all those other attributes of civilization for which the dweller in the wilderness hungers; so when the engine was sighted coming round a bend in the track, there was something like a rush to be the first to greet the arrivals. Foremost among these was a big man wearing the uniform of the Mounted Police. Mike Walford was a splendid specimen of a man, and he towered over his fellows like a pine tree of the forest might tower above the scrub growing at its base.

“Hulloa! Here, I say, have you got my wife on board?” he shouted, in a voice that matched the rest of him, as with much squealing and groaning of couplings the long freighter came to a standstill.

“We’ve got two passengers on board this trip. At this rate we shall soon need to hitch a pullman on at the end of every freighter,” said the brakeman, with a pretended groan of dismay at this addition to his work.

There was an instant rush to follow the brakeman along to the rear of the train, which, owing to the curve in the track, was not visible from the engine; but, sweeping the others to the right and left of him, Mike Walford strode to the side of the brakeman and led the way.

“My word, what a train! The last car, did you say? Why, man, it is a wagon loaded with ties! You surely did not put a couple of women to ride all night in a place like that!” exclaimed Mike, with anger in his tone.

“They are in a box car of bedding—a little stuffy, but downright warm and comfortable,” explained the brakeman, and then suddenly he stopped, and a cold horror crept into his eyes. “The car is gone—broke away it must have done; and yet I know that it was safe when we cleared out of Wastover.”

Mike Walford turned on him savagely. “How was it that you didn’t take more care? And I thought that it was the place of the brakeman to ride in the rear of his train?”

“It ain’t no use to do that when there are as many cars as we have got here, so I ride in the middle, then I can see her tail as she twists round the curves, and yet I’m not too far away to call to the driver if I want to,” said the brakeman, on the defensive now, for it was a serious thing to drop a wagon _en route_ and not to know that it was gone. Then he started to run back towards the engine, while Mike Walford, with dismay in his heart, started to run by his side, and the crowd coming along in the rear ran also.

If the brakeman had looked dismayed, it was nothing to the consternation displayed by the engine driver, who was prompt to locate the place at which the disaster must have occurred.

“You remember the job we had with her when we came over the Wastover bridge?” he said, with a jerk of his head towards the long train of freight wagons that comprised the “her” of which he spoke. “I thought at one time that we should have had to leave half the train behind and come on with the first part, for there is a bit of up-grade directly the bridge is past, and this old puffer had its work cut out to pull her along; so it must have been when we were starting and stopping, starting and stopping, that the couplers of the last car broke. How many wagons is missing, Jim?”

But Jim, who was the brakeman, declared that he had been too scared to count. The thing which mattered most was that the box car with the passengers was not there.

“Uncouple that old engine of yours and set off back as hard as you can go, and don’t waste any more time in talking about it,” said Mike Walford sternly. “You’ll take me with you too, if you please.”

“That is what we are going to do, just as soon as we can get her unhooked from the wagons; but we shall have to break up a bit before the engine can get past,” answered the driver, as he began to shout to the brakeman, who in his turn shouted back, while the stoker had to turn shunter for the time being; so half an hour was wasted in endless starting and stopping, pulling up and setting back, in order that the wagons might be out of the way, to allow the engine to slip back on to the main rails.

If Mike Walford raged up and down silently abusing the men for their slowness, he might surely be forgiven, since he knew the country so well, and all his fears pointed to the car having broken away on the bridge; and Wastover bridge was not a very safe place to be stranded upon with the wind blowing a gale as it was this morning.

The crowd looked on for the most part with a sort of fascinated curiosity. No one could quite make up his mind to go back to work while the engine was puffing and panting to and fro, and Mike Walford was raging up and down like a wild beast escaped from his cage. There was an element of tragedy peeping through his unrestrained anxiety, for, as a rule, he was one of the most unemotional sort of men, as some of them knew to their cost.

At last the engine had a clear track, and was able to slide out backwards on to the main track, to go in search of the car that had broken away. But before he boarded her to go with the train-men, Mike Walford held up his hand and called for volunteers.

“I want half a dozen men who are prepared to risk their lives, and to lose them, if need be,” he said, his strong voice echoing clear and steady over the silent crowd. “I know what that bridge at Wastover is like when the wind is blowing only half a gale, and this morning it is more than that. If the car broke away on the bridge, something will have happened to it before we can get back there; so I want six men who can dig, and who are willing to risk their lives for the sake of saving life.”

Thirty men rushed forward. Thirty more would have followed, if there had been the slightest chance of their being able to go. But of the first lot Mike hastily chose six who happened to have shovels in their hands, and the last man thus picked was Edgar Bradgate.

“Hold, Bradgate, you mustn’t go; remember, man, how long you have been ill, and you can’t swim, either,” objected a clerk of works, as Bradgate swung himself aboard the crazy tender, which rocked behind the locomotive.

“There are other things to do besides swimming, and I’m not afraid to risk my life, or to lose it either, if need should be. Besides, Mike is my friend, and I’m proud to be chosen to help him now,” replied Edgar Bradgate, with a haughty upward fling of his head, which might have gone against him with the clerk had the fellow not been sufficiently a gentleman to recognize another gentleman when he saw one.

“Well, go along with you then; all the luck comes to some people!” growled the clerk, in such deep chagrin at not having been chosen for the purpose of risking his life, that it would have been comic if only it had not been so intensely tragic.

Directly the engine and tender had slid out of sight round the bend, everyone hurried off to work again, for they could do no good by hanging about there staring at the empty track; while the need to earn money was acute, and the necessity to toil so urgent, that nothing in the nature of delay could be excused.

The volunteers rode on the tender with the brakeman, but Mike Walford was on the engine itself, prepared to help stoke if need be, and also determined to see that the driver got every ounce of speed possible out of the crazy old engine.

The rocking was truly awful as the engine tore its way along the half-made track, and the marvel was that those men, who had come out to risk their lives if it were necessary, did not lose them on the way to the scene of action.

It was fifteen miles to Wastover bridge, and the engine did it in something over an hour, though it had taken the train more than three hours to crawl its weary way up to Brocken Ridge. But every minute of that backward journey was a peril so great, that nothing but the danger of the two in the box car could have justified the risk being taken.

“There is no car on the bridge,” said Mike, as they came in sight of the towering trestles which carried the railway track across the Wastover river.

“Then it’s below the bridge that we’ll have to look for it!” groaned the driver, “for I’m sure that is the only place where it could have broken away. Jim went the length of the train before we cleared out of Wastover town, and the car was all right then, and being downgrade until the bridge, there would be no pull on the couplers, can’t you see?”

Mike nodded, and now his gaze went searching along that bewildering network of bars and crossbars, almost as if he expected to find the missing car stuck somewhere halfway down. In reality he was trying to see the water, but could not as yet, because the valley was so narrow and deep that the river was not visible until they were close on to the bridge.

“What is that?” cried Mike, in a tone of horror, as with slackened speed the engine went slowly out on to the bridge, and every man of them all was craning his head downwards to get a better view of the river, swollen now with melting snows.

“It is the car! Holy Mary, have mercy on the women!” groaned the driver, who was a good Catholic when he remembered to be anything at all, and then he put his head down on the side of the cab and burst into tears like a woman. But Mike Walford gave him a fierce push and bade him reverse his engine.

“Slip back to the bank, man, and stop. I’m going down there to find my wife, and you can do your howling while I am gone,” he said, with brutal sternness, which was the only way he had of hiding his own pain.

“You’ll never be for swimming out in such a current?” objected the driver. “It will be murder and sooicide all in one, for where you go the boys will be sure to follow.”

“If my wife is down there I am going to get her out, dead or alive,” replied Mike; and there was that in his tone which made the other feel that he dared say no more.

The engine retreated slowly to where the land, rising in an embankment, gave it a little shelter from the wind. There it stopped, and the little band of volunteers scrambled down and, falling into line behind their leader, made their way down the steep slope to the water’s edge.

“I will swim out first with a rope,” said Mike, who had a serviceable hatchet slung at his waist; “then one of you can follow when I’ve got the rope fixed, and we will chop an opening at the end of the car that is out of water, and pray God we are not too late!”

There was a murmur which sounded like “Amen”, and then the men scrambled downwards for a few moments in silence.

“Help! Help! Help!” It was a girl’s voice, hoarse and strained, shrieking against the roaring of the wind. The heads of the men jerked upwards with a sudden flash of hope, for the sound had come from above.

“There they are—two of them!” yelled out one of the volunteers. “Hurrah!”

“Hurrah! Hurrah!” chorused the others, as, breaking into a run, they scrambled across the rough slope to the trestling, up which they swarmed like a set of monkeys.