Argosy, Vol. 112, No. 2 — page 27: what you’re looking at

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

CROSSES to take warning from skies and clouds and winds. The furious demonstrations of these forces of nature find only the foolish wholly unawares. Even the eruptions of volcanoes begin with certain slow increase of fiery activity. But we have yet to discover if this earth of ours gives forth the slightest tick of advance information about an earth- quake. It was not much of an earthquake. Most of the people down in Machala and Guaya- quil learned of it from early risers who had been awake to feel the moment of swaying tremor. It woke few of Grout’s workmen. It was not because it shook him from his balance that he, standing before his cracked mirror for what should be his last shave in the crude shack, dropped his razor to the floor and gripped the table for support. It was because he felt it as the final proof of his fears. “There it goes,’ he muttered, as if the rustle and shake were just what he had been waiting to hear. Then he dashed to the eastward window of the iron room. The designer of the bridge had figured on worse earthquakes than this. Grout knew that it should stand, without a hairbreadth shift from its ac- curately gaged lines, through a shake-up of four times the violence of tremor he had just felt. He was in time to see, across the canon, a great section of one of those fan-rib braces bulge outward, tear from their rivets a dozen counterbraces, snap itself from the last hold on the plates that held it above and below, reach outward, its short braces like wild-waving arms clutching in the air for support. As it finished the backward lurch and plunged down, while he waited the seconds it took for the tons of steel to fall and the sound of their crash and splash to come up again— ‘‘“ Ves—there it is,” he repeated through white lips. It was the fulfilment of his presentiment that his dreams could not come true. From where he stood he could see enough to know that twenty-four hours, with fifty men working at top speed, might save the whole east end of the bridge from buckling hopelessly; that it would take the best of 2 Arcosy OF STEEL. 193 his command over those fifty men to get . them at work on their promised holiday, and his constant presence with them to keep them at the work, he knew without seeing. That three-quarters of a million dollars’ worth of work depended on the promptness with which the remaining structure was re- braced and riveted; that two million dol- lars’ worth of delay must result from fail- ure; that half his own prestige would be lost in that delay—were obvious to his mind without a single thought. He could not meet hi§ bride in Machala. He might sacrifice the prestige to do so. The vast moneys were not his to sacrifice; they belonged to men who entrusted them upon their faith that he would do his best to preserve them. He did not hesitate. Quick as the switch- board operator could be got his order ran to the big sleeping shacks, calling the en- gineers to their banked fires, and bidding them turn their whistles loose to scream the death-knell of the holiday. CHAPTER VI. ‘““ WHY DID I DO IT?” HE steamer Reina de Barbados was on schedule time in rounding the point that marks the northwest corner of Guaya- quil Bay. Sheltered from the sun by an awning the width of the vessel, the two dozen ~ first-class passengers lined the rail, peering through glasses at the shore. Soon they picked up the cathedral tower of Guayaquil. “Didn't shake it attic I guess,’ visaged young Briton remarked to another of his countrymen. Word of the earth- quake had come by the ship’s wireless. ‘“No-o,” the other drawled disgustedly. “Tm going back to my bally book.” The first hngered a moment at.the rail, seeming to ponder and decide against an attempt to engage.the girl on his right in conversation. Then he retreated the few steps to the two chairs on one of which the other Briton was hunting -his place in a novel. ‘““T say, what .do you think of this yarn, ~ (ECO AMIE .OO ’ a tan-