it
rolled angrily away she quickly raised the window-curtain.

The heavens were frenzied. She looked toward the river. Electrical
flashes charging from end to end of the angry sky lighted the bridge,
reflected the black face of the river and paled flickering lights and
flaming torches where, on vanishing stretches of dike, an army of dim
figures, moving unceasingly, lent awe to the spectacle.

She could see smoke from the hurrying switch engines whirled viciously
up into the sweeping night and above her head the wind screamed. A
gale from the southwest was hurling the Spider against the revetment
that held the eastern shore and the day and the night gangs together
were reinforcing it. Where the dike gave under the terrific pounding,
or where swiftly boiling pools sucked under the heavy piling, Glover's
men were sinking fresh relays of mattresses and loading them with stone.

At moments laden flat cars were pushed to the brink of the flood, and
men with picks and bars rose spirit-like out of black shadows to
scramble up their sides and dump rubble on the sunken brush. Other men
toiling in unending procession wheeled and slung sandbags upon the
revetment; others stirred crackling watchfires that leaped high into
the rain, and over all played the incessant lightning and the angry
thunder and the flying night.

She shut from her eyes the strangely moving sight, returned to her
compartment, closed her door and lay down. It was quieter within the
little room and the fury of the storm was less appalling.

Half dreaming as she lay, mountains shrouded in a deathly lightning
loomed wavering before her, and one, most terrible of all, she strove
unwillingly to climb. Up she struggled, clinging and slipping, a
cramping fear over all her senses, her ankles clutched in icy fetters,
until from above, an apparition, strange and threatening, pushed her,
screaming, and she swooned into an awful gulf.

"Gertrude! Gertrude! Wake up!" cried a frightened voice.

The car was rocking in the wind, and as Gertrude opened her door Louise
Donner stumbled terrified into her arms. "Did you hear that awful,
awful crash? I'm sure the car has been struck."

"No, no, Louise."

"It surely has been. Oh, let us waken the men at once, Gertrude; we
shall be killed!"

The two clung to one another. "I'm afraid to stay alone, Gertrude,"
sobbed her companion.

"Stay with me, Louise. Come." While they spoke the wind died and for
a mome