e uncertain and uneven sinking of the trestle,
green timber, and ignorant and careless workmen, with the incidence of
accident far above the average, made construction at the best patchy
and haphazard.

He was surprised and a little chagrinned by the weakness he had
discovered; he could not understand how it had escaped him before. The
pull, the brace of the trestle poles just there did not seem unsound,
yet instinct warned him that something was amiss in the sag of adjacent
supports. His orders to Conrad, accordingly, were hurried and abrupt.

The men in the trestle went about the work in their usual clumsy way,
but at last a score of men had hold of the rope and the fresh log rose
on its end in slow jerks. Then it was clear of the ground, rolling in
a leisurely way against the lower supports of the trestle in response
to the uncurling of the rope. Up above, men were holding it away from
the trestle; a dozen more waiting to fasten it in place.

It had risen twenty feet when a cry of warning burst from Torrance's
lips. He scarcely knew why. His wandering eyes had fancied a sag in
the support that held the pulley; his quick ear had caught a new note
in the creaking timbers.

From above came the sound of snapping ropes--a chorus of panic-stricken
cries--a succession of crashes as the two logs dashed earthward.

The swarthy man half way up, who had been directing the rising log, a
task for which he was chosen on account of his great strength and cool
judgment, turned a lightning backward somersault without pausing to
look where he might land. As he turned over he twisted in the air,
caught a support, and swung himself easily to safety. For a moment he
contemplated the tragedy below, then like a cat sprang upward through
the trestle. The others merely closed their eyes and hung on.

Of the two freed logs the upper bounced from support to support,
finally resting in the trestle itself. But the one that had been on
its way to remedy the weakness turned slightly sideways and glanced off
into the group of frozen bohunks below. The trestle trembled from end
to end.

Torrance did not follow the course of the falling logs. All that
mattered at such a moment was the fate of his great work. He saw the
quiver run through it--felt it in his own body--heard the creaking of
ropes and blots, and there flashed through him a horror that he had not
provided for a strain like that. When the trestle held its place, a
gre