now!"

And they looked and wondered afresh at the deep water, the racing water
that licked the throat of the piers. The farther bank was veiled by
rain, into which the bridge ran out and vanished; the spurs up-stream
were marked by no more than eddies and spoutings, and down-stream the
pent river, once freed of her guide-lines, had spread like a sea to
the horizon. Then hurried by, rolling in the water, dead men and oxen
together, with here and there a patch of thatched roof that melted when
it touched a pier.

"Big flood," said Peroo, and Findlayson nodded. It was as big a flood as
he had any wish to watch. His bridge would stand what was upon her
now, but not very much more, and if by any of a thousand chances there
happened to be a weakness in the embankments, Mother Gunga would carry
his honour to the sea with the other raffle. Worst of all, there was
nothing to do except to sit still; and Findlayson sat still under his
macintosh till his helmet became pulp on his head, and his boots were
over-ankle in mire. He took no count of time, for the river was marking
the hours, inch by inch and foot by foot, along the embankment, and
he listened, numb and hungry, to the straining of the stone-boats, the
hollow thunder under the piers, and the hundred noises that make the
full note of a flood. Once a dripping servant brought him food, but he
could not eat; and once he thought that he heard a faint toot from a
locomotive across the river, and then he smiled. The bridge's failure
would hurt his assistant not a little, but Hitchcock was a young
man with his big work yet to do. For himself the crash meant
everything--everything that made a hard life worth the living. They
would say, the men of his own profession . . . he remembered the
half-pitying things that he himself had said when Lockhart's new
waterworks burst and broke down in brick-heaps and sludge, and
Lockhart's spirit broke in him and he died. He remembered what he
himself had said when the Sumao Bridge went out in the big cyclone by
the sea; and most he remembered poor Hartopp's face three weeks
later, when the shame had marked it. His bridge was twice the size
of Hartopp's, and it carried the Findlayson truss as well as the new
pier-shoe--the Findlayson bolted shoe. There were no excuses in his
service. Government might listen, perhaps, but his own kind would judge
him by his bridge, as that stood or fell. He went over it in his head,
plate by plate, span by span,