Down below, Torrance watched the carrying out of his orders with keenest interest. He had been at this for months, and his trained eye could pick out the weak spots with unerring instinct. To his eye he was forced to trust for the support of those twin bands of steel high above his head, since the uncertain and uneven sinking of the trestle, green timber, and ignorant and careless workmen, with the incidence of accident far above the average, made construction at the best patchy and haphazard.
He was surprised and a little chagrinned by the weakness he had discovered; he could not understand how it had escaped him before. The pull, the brace of the trestle poles just there did not seem unsound, yet instinct warned him that something was amiss in the sag of adjacent supports. His orders to Conrad, accordingly, were hurried and abrupt.
The men in the trestle went about the work in their usual clumsy way, but at last a score of men had hold of the rope and the fresh log rose on its end in slow jerks. Then it was clear of the ground, rolling in a leisurely way against the lower supports of the trestle in response to the uncurling of the rope. Up above, men were holding it away from the trestle; a dozen more waiting to fasten it in place.
It had risen twenty feet when a cry of warning burst from Torrance's lips. He scarcely knew why. His wandering eyes had fancied a sag in the support that held the pulley; his quick ear had caught a new note in the creaking timbers.
From above came the sound of snapping ropes--a chorus of panic-stricken cries--a succession of crashes as the two logs dashed earthward.
The swarthy man half way up, who had been directing the rising log, a task for which he was chosen on account of his great strength and cool judgment, turned a lightning backward somersault without pausing to look where he might land. As he turned over he twisted in the air, caught a support, and swung himself easily to safety. For a moment he contemplated the tragedy below, then like a cat sprang upward through the trestle. The others merely closed their eyes and hung on.
Of the two freed logs the upper bounced from support to support, finally resting in the trestle itself. But the one that had been on its way to remedy the weakness turned slightly sideways and glanced off into the group of frozen bohunks below. The trestle trembled from end to end.