g before the last rumble ceased every night-gong in the village had
taken up the warning. To these were added the hoarse screaming of
conches in the little temples; the throbbing of drums and tom-toms;
and from the European quarters, where the riveters lived, McCartney's
bugle, a weapon of offence on Sundays and festivals, brayed
desperately, calling to "Stables." Engine after engine toiling home
along the spurs after her day's work whistled in answer till the
whistles were answered from the far bank. Then the big gong thundered
thrice for a sign that it was flood and not fire; conch, drum, and
whistle echoed the call, and the village quivered to the sound of bare
feet running upon soft earth. The order in all cases was to stand by
the day's work and wait instructions. The gangs poured by in the dusk;
men stopping to knot a loin-cloth or fasten a sandal; gang-foremen
shouting to their subordinates as they ran or paused by the tool-issue
sheds for bars and mattocks; locomotives creeping down their tracks
wheel-deep in the crowd, till the brown torrent disappeared into the
dusk of the river-bed, raced over the pile-work, swarmed along the
lattices, clustered by the cranes, and stood still, each man in his
place.

Then the troubled beating of the gong carried the order to take up
everything and bear it beyond high-water mark, and the flare-lamps
broke out by the hundred between the webs of dull iron as the riveters
began a night's work racing against the flood that was to come. The
girders of the three centre piers--those that stood on the cribs--were
all but in position. They needed just as many rivets as could be
driven into them, for the flood would assuredly wash out the supports,
and the ironwork would settle down on the caps of stone if they were
not blocked at the ends. A hundred crowbars strained at the sleepers
of the temporary line that fed the unfinished piers. It was heaved up
in lengths, loaded into trucks, and backed up the bank beyond
flood-level by the groaning locomotives. The tool-sheds on the sands
melted away before the attack of shouting armies, and with them went
the stacked ranks of Government stores, iron-bound boxes of rivets,
pliers, cutters, duplicate parts of the rivet-machines, spare pumps
and chains. The big crane would be the last to be shifted, for she was
hoisting all the heavy stuff up to the main structure of the bridge.
The concrete blocks on the fleet of stone-boats were dropped oversid