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gashes clear across the right of way a gorge six hundred feet wide and half again as deep. On the east, where Hutchins had already set his concrete abutments, the cliff was perpendicular to the torrent below. On the west, where the bridge builders had nearly completed their share of the seven-hundred foot iron truss that was to span the gorge, the cliff is no less steep. The two sections of a continental trunk line were to be united across the abyss, and suddenly there came the winter. Snow seldom choked the traffic in Forest Park-all great mountain basins are "parks"-but on the eastern slope of the divide, where the moisture-laden clouds are transformed into tons of snow as they touch the mountains, the mines were snowbound from January to March. The great men who were driving the railroad across the continent knew all of these things, and day after day the wires that reached up to Hutchins in the sky told him to stow his instruments, to paint his girders against the rust, and to come away with his shivering Italians. Hutchins would painstakingly copy these despatches down to the last authoritative initial, and treasure them away in the official cabin. Then the thing that makes life worth living to an engineer in the wilderness would surge up in his breast. From the door he could see it all, the new ties and rails dipping into the valley with now and then a glimpse of the grade, before it dove in the clouds below like a stairway to a lower story of the world; the half-made arch that stretched out to him across the gorge; the red steel beams piled on the flat cars, and the little white numbers that gave them each a place. At the point of the bridge, only a few yards from his feet, sat a crosslegged foreman, smoking a pipe. There was a sort of taunt in this stranger's presence, this man from the other side of the world who was impossibly out of reach. He sat like a boy, on the end of a gigantic see-saw, thrust out into the air. With a megaphone that the surveyors had used, Hutchins could talk to the spy across the gulf. Nothing but gunpowder could reach him, however, and one day

before the winter drove him hence, the engineer had been tempted nearly to that. Besides all this, the bridge was Hutchins' bridge. He might never see it finished unless the gap was filled now, for the doctors had talked meaningly and told him that such a heart as his was not to be taken above the clouds. The man who built bridges had smiled gratefully and hurried hither to finish the last of them before he crossed the bridge of all endings. Long delays with the steel had hampered, and now winter threatened to maroon the gang on the mountain tops. Yet the span needed only to be erected, piece by piece, like a child's house of blocks. Some one else might not do it sympathetically. There was no snow in the valley yet. would wait another day.

He

It was the custom of Hutchins, who dreaded the superintendent no less than the elements, to send consoling, apologetic messages into the valley each evening, explaining that this truss needed false work for the winter, or that the riveters were not yet housed, so that when finally one day the agent had wearied his fingers for twenty-four hours without an answer from the divide, the superintendent's wrath overrode his prudence. In the morning a work train panted its way along the switchbacks and carried between the flats and the caboose, like a ballet dancer in a machine shop, a private car, whither private cars should never go. When the brake shoes clutched tight at last on the unballasted rails on the divide an angry superintendent threaded his way among the girders to the shanty. He found only a County Galway foreman with a Morse code in one hand, struggling with the sounder to tell an obdurate valley station that Hutchins had left his last bridge undone. He had fallen among the T beams, plying a lateral over, that he might check its number.

When the superintendent, who knew neither Hutchins nor the love of a great-bridge, turned about, the Tumbleweed was facing him. Among the rivet-kegs on the work cars, he had come from his distant somewhere to earn a week's

pay with the engineer. The two men, the over-bearing superintendent, a man of hard-won importance and the culture of a construction crew, face to face with a broken-down ne'er-do-well of twice his possibilities and a fraction of his deserving, as they inspected each other in the cabin doorway, both were suddenly distracted with the click of the telegraph.

"Hch, Hch, Hch," it repeated, calling Hutchins. superior leaned against the table and answered the call.

His

"Have you messages O. K.?" asked the sounder, and then after a moment, "Heavy snow. Will block traffic in two hours. Rotary sent on road derailed in section 73. Wheeler reports six hours to clear track. Eastern wires down."

The foreman looked out over the cloud-heaped land before him. Below them rolled an ocean of impenetrable mists, save that now and then the edges broke into stray films that gave a glimpse of timber line. The eternal clouds were unchanged; yet upon the other side of the peak just such clouds were suddenly, steadily blocking them off from the world. Was it the first of many mountain blizzards; or would the snow-plows break through? Hutchins had waited too long.

For twenty-four hours the superintendent had the roughmouthed man from Galway, the Tumbleweed and the Italians very busy above the clouds. The curt messages from the foothills about rotary plows, and winter prophets, and Miller's crew toiling to repair a track in ten-foot drifts, wavered and suddenly broke off, when the snow had taken the wire. From sleepers, hand-car platforms, and other things, the prisoners made crude snow-plows that they bolted on the end of a rail-heaped freight car and sent over the summit with their two locomotives. The first and the second plows were crushed like paper before the impact of the drifts, and when the crews had dragged the wrecks from the right of way, they dove with the third into a thirty-foot cut, where the snow was higher than the top of the plow.

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So they left the last of them in the trench buried with its locomotive, and the six men weariedly shovelled their way back through snow that had drifted in the rear, and all but one fell asleep in the cab of the engine that was left. When he drove his battered hill-climber across the last mile of clear track there were wispy clouds following along the hollows behind him. As dark came on for the second day a cloud had swallowed the peak and a chill white blanket was burying the steel piles at the bridge. The "dagoes" retreated shivering to their shanties, the superintendent, in his car on the siding, drank gulp after gulp of whiskey to warm his blood, and exchanged noisy banter with the foreman, who drank no less; but the Tumbleweed, without knowing why, shut himself in Hutchins' cabin, calculated idly the week's supplies that lay in the box-cars, and studied innumerable blue-prints that hung on the wall.

The snow had drifted waist high before his door when the ghost of a morning lighted the snow-fields like a lamp through wax paper,-and Orris ploughed his way to the private car on the siding. The door was deaf to his demands and the little electric bell rang shrilly inside the curtained window, unheeded. So the Tumbleweed in Hutchins' boots and his own gray sweater stumbled back to the supply-cars, and dealt out half-rations to a bevy of big-eyed Italian cooks, who asked nothing and gave no thanks. All day long he fed the fire and read the engineer's books in the cabin,-books of meaningless diagrams, calculations and barbarian terms in a blank, inhuman sort of tongue. With the dusk the snow flurries worried the camp again and swept off into the gulf so that the Tumbleweed, who was wise in the hill-country, knew that the winter had come unconquerably. Far into the night, though the storm had charged past them and the stars were circling overhead, he explored the supply-books and labored from rivet to rivet in the understanding of the blue-prints. daybreak he ploughed his way again to the ice-bound car on the siding, pounded unavailingly and then clambered

At

through the pantry window. A white-aproned negro lay half-frozen and totally numb with mountain whiskey, just at his feet, and in the frosty, drift-darkened vault of the observation section, the superintendent and foreman were no less frozen and equally drunken. Orris cursed and shook the superintendent into a sort of consciousness and flung at his toppling head sentence after sentence that would have buried a soberer man in despair.

"This is winter. Three months of winter, you hell-fiend," he shouted. "Hutchins left two weeks' grub and it'll take those folks three months to get a snow-plow in here. Then they can't get it back." (Orris was right. When a rescue crew did break through in the spring, they found the road snow-bound behind them, and sought refuge in Forest Park.)

The Tumbleweed vented the long, lurid curses of the prairie and after a while shocked the superintendent from his stupor again.

"There's just one game to play before we freeze,” he would repeat over again. "Hutchins built about fifty of his four hundred in the span. That's a quarter. Can you

build the rest of it in three weeks? Listen. They never have snow enough to bother them in that cursed park. Can you build that bridge in three weeks? I can make the grub last."

And the superintendent time and time again fended him off wearily, and said, "Get out, you cursed fool! It would take three months in this kind of weather!"

The Tumbleweed knew that it was true. The manuals that Hutchins had kept on the pine table told him that and more. Yet partly because it was true and partly because there were forty helpless Italians with only a drunken official above them, and partly because there was a full longing in his heart for more of this roving star-light world, but more than all because he was the Tumbleweed, all at once Orris resolved that it should be done. He took a Colt revolver from the superintendent's drawer, packed all the

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