er
lifted herself bodily, as a snake when she drinks in mid-summer,
plucking and fingering along the revetments, and banking up behind the
piers till even Findlayson began to recalculate the strength of his
work.

When day came the village gasped. "Only last night," men said, turning
to each other, "it was as a town in the river-bed! Look now!"

And they looked and wondered afresh at the deep water, the racing
water that licked the throat of the piers. The farther bank was veiled
by rain, into which the bridge ran out and vanished; the spurs
up-stream were marked by no more than eddies and spoutings, and
down-stream the pent river, once freed of her guide-lines, had spread
like a sea to the horizon. Then hurried by, rolling in the water, dead
men and oxen together, with here and there a patch of thatched roof
that melted when it touched a pier.

"Big flood," said Peroo, and Findlayson nodded. It was as big a flood
as he had any wish to watch. His bridge would stand what was upon her
now, but not very much more; and if by any of a thousand chances there
happened to be a weakness in the embankments, Mother Gunga would carry
his honour to the sea with the other raffle. Worst of all, there was
nothing to do except to sit still; and Findlayson sat still under his
macintosh till his helmet became pulp on his head, and his boots were
over ankle in mire. He took no count of time, for the river was
marking the hours, inch by inch and foot by foot, along the
embankment, and he listened, numb and hungry, to the straining of the
stone-boats, the hollow thunder under the piers, and the hundred
noises that make the full note of a flood. Once a dripping servant
brought him food, but he could not eat; and once he thought that he
heard a faint toot from a locomotive across the river, and then he
smiled. The bridge's failure would hurt his assistant not a little,
but Hitchcock was a young man with his big work yet to do. For himself
the crash meant everything--everything that made a hard life worth the
living. They would say, the men of his own profession--he remembered
the half-pitying things that he himself had said when Lockhart's big
water-works burst and broke down in brick heaps and sludge, and
Lockhart's spirit broke in him and he died. He remembered what he
himself had said when the Sumao Bridge went out in the big cyclone by
the sea; and most he remembered poor Hartopp's face three weeks
later, when the shame had marked it.