This is
only the backwater."

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
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 t