Adventure Magazine Cover — page 94: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

88 They were not frightened, but they winced a little when the tree brought up with a sullen shock against the center pier. Its roots reached out and clutched at the piling, and caught and hung. Lesser trees and branches, borne down on the current, came to tangle themselves in its boughs, and to wedge themselves into the uneasy mass. The bridge took on a sharper, jerkier trem- bling. There came a motion that was less a tremble than a lurch. A stirring as of pain ran through the structure. Now Painter and the others were scared. Their fear lent wings to their feet along that staggering roadway toward the suddenly horror-stricken group on shore. They fled with frantic haste over drunken planking that tilted suddenly beneath them, so that they must claw their way upward on hands and knees. No running now. Nothing to do but clamber desperately upward as the span slid lower and lower into the flood, and rolled heavily under the impact of the water, and ducked and plunged, and staggered down the stream. AMES FARNEY was late on the scene again, and had missed the first ap- palling details. From the bridge he had gone straight about his shopping, bent upon getting out of town and across the flat before it should be overflowed. He was in the grocery store, finishing his purchases, when he heard the crash of yielding timbers and the outcry in the street. By the time he reached the sidewalk the crowd was already racing by, following the low-floating span with its frantic human freight down the river. “They’re all right if they hang on,” he heard some one shouting, “‘it’ll ground ag’in the bank when it hits a turn.” But there was scant truth in the proph- ecy. The span grounded long before it hit the turn. Riding deep in the water, it came to uneasy rest in mid-channel, hung up on what was normally a gravel bar. Now the bar was a raging rapids, sucked down at the lower end into the deep water where an old ferry had once plied. The deep water had become a sullen, greedy whirlpool, spinning silently beneath the rusty ferry cable which still sagged above the hungry stream. They were all right so long as they hung Harry Huse on—and they hung on desperately, shouting uselessly across the water, avoiding the sight of the rapids beneath them, and the gulping whirlpool, and the thought of the gravel bar, their anchor, scouring out slowly under the swift onrush of the current. There was a moment of stunned silence in the crowd on the bank, and then con- fusion. Some one shouted for a rope, al- though no arm could fling a rope that far. Then a cry for a boat was taken up and ran along the bank from one impotent mouth to another. And finally there was, unaccount- ably, a boat. It was an old, battered duck boat, the only craft the town could muster, dragged from a haymow somewhere and carried to the river bank. It lay, flimsy and frail, beside the leaping water—a boat with oars for any one who cared to row. It rested there on the bank, empty, sprinkled with dry, dusty chaff from the haymow, while shamefaced men hung one behind another, and thought of being heroes, and hung back. And then, while they waited, and the figures clinging to the rocking span shouted and waved their arms, there was James Farney, who wanted nothing but to work and save and to be let alone—James Farney with dead man’s luck hovering over his head, with his defiance of dead man’s luck thrusting from his pocket, making his way purposefully through the crowd. And presently there was James Farney, with a stout cord tied to his wrist, in that cockle shell upon the hurrying water, toiling doggedly at the unaccustomed oars. They watched him carried down by the swift rush of water, and paid out the line as he crept farther and farther out into the stream. And then suddenly there was no longer any boat, only James Farney clinging to a mass of wreckage, borne down upon the grounded span. They watched him struggle up on the span, and join the others. He reeled in the line which had parted somewhere along its course. He fashioned it into a coil, and took some object from his pocket. He whirled it on the cord about his head. It glittered in the sun as it flew high above the river, and arched over the ferry cable, and dangled in mid-air. Now there were other men to help, and presently one of them slid out from shore in a sling hanging from a pulley on the cable. He fastened a light rope to the cord COMICOoOokKSs C© 5}