They were rising the grade to the bridge approach, and when they

emerged a few moments later from the woods the conductor said, "There!"

The panorama of the valley lay before them. High above their level and

a mile away, the long thread-like spans of Hailey's great bridge

stretched from pier to pier. To the right of the higher ground a fan

of sidetracks spread, with lines of flat cars and gondolas loaded with

stone, brush, piling and timbers, and in the foreground two hulking

pile-drivers, their leads, like rabbits' ears laid sleekly back,

squatted mysteriously. Switch engines puffed impatiently up and down

the ladder track shifting stuff to the distant spurs. At the river

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front an army of men moved like loaded ants over the dikes. Beyond

them the eye could mark the boiling yellow of the Spider, its winding

channel marked through the waste of waters by whirling driftwood,

bobbing wreckage and plunging trees--sweepings of a thousand angry

miles. "There's the Spider," repeated the West End conductor,

pointing, "out there in the middle where you see things moving right

along. That's the Spider, on a twenty-year rampage." The train,

moving slowly, stopped. "I guess we've got as close to it as we're

going to, for a while. I'll take a look forward."

It was the time of the June water in the mountains. A year earlier the

rise had taken the Peace River bridge and with the second heavy year of

snow railroad men looked for new trouble. June is not a month for

despair, because the mountain men have never yet scheduled despair as a

West End liability. But it is a month that puts wrinkles in the right

of way clear across the desert and sows gray hairs in the roadmasters'

records from McCloud to Bear Dance. That June the mountain streams

roared, the foothills floated, the plains puffed into sponge, and in

the thick of it all the Spider Water took a man-slaughtering streak and

started over the Bad Lands across lots. The big river forced Bucks'

hand once more, and to protect the main line Glover, third of the

mountain roadbuilders, was ordered off the high-line construction and

back to the hills where Brodie and Hailey slept, to watch the Spider.

The special halted on a tongue of high ground flanking the bridge and

extending upstream to where the river was gnawing at the long dike that

held it off the approach. The delay was tedious. Doctor Lanning and

Allen Harrison went forward to smoke. Gertrude Brock took refuge in a

book and Mrs. Whitney, her aunt, annoyed her with stories. Marie Brock

and Louise Donner placed their chairs where they could watch the

sorting and unloading of never-ending strings of flat cars, the

spasmodic activity in the lines of laborers, the hurrying of the

foremen and the movement of the rapidly shifting fringe of men on the

danger line at the dike.




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