It was the time that the Long Divide Blooms and glows like an hour-old bride; It was the days when the cattle come Back from their winter wand’rings home; Time when the Kicking Horse shows its teeth, Snarls and foams with a demon’s breath; When the sun with a million levers lifts Abodes of snow from the rocky rifts; When the line-man’s eyes, like the lynx’s, scans The lofty Bridge of the Hundred Spans.
Round a curve, down a sharp incline, If the red-eyed lantern made no sign, Swept the train, and upon the bridge That binds a canon from ridge to ridge. Never a watchman like old Carew; Knew his duty, and did it, too; Good at scouting when scouting paid, Saved a post from an Indian raid-- Trapper, miner, and mountain guide, Less one arm in a lumber slide; Walked the line like a panther’s guard, Like a maverick penned in a branding-yard. “Right as rain,” said the engineers, “With the old man working his eyes and ears.”
“Safe with Carew on the mountain wall,” Was how they put it, in Montreal. Right and safe was it East and West Till a demon rose on the mountain crest, And drove at its shoulders angry spears, That it rose from its sleep of a thousand years, That its heaving breast broke free the cords Of imprisoned snow as with flaming swords; And, like a star from its frozen height, An avalanche leaped one spring-tide night; Leaped with a power not God’s or man’s To smite the Bridge of the Hundred Spans.
It smote a score of the spans; it slew With its icy squadrons old Carew. Asleep he lay in his snow-bound grave, While the train drew on that he could not save; It would drop, doom-deep, through the trap of death, From the light above, to the dark beneath; And town and village both far and near Would mourn the tragedy ended here.
One more hap in a hapless world, One more wreck where the tide is swirled, One more heap in a waste of sand, One more clasp of a palsied hand, One more cry to a soundless Word, One more flight of a wingless bird; The ceaseless falling, the countless groan, The waft of a leaf and the fall of a stone; Ever the cry that a Hand will save, Ever the end in a fast-closed grave; Ever and ever the useless prayer, Beating the walls of a mute despair. Doom, all doom--nay then, not all doom! Rises a hope from the fast-closed tomb. Write not “Lost,” with its grinding bans, On life, or the Bridge of the Hundred Spans.