The Bridge-Builders | Page 4

of
brown and white stone banging behind them till the side-boards were
unpinned, and with a roar and a grumble a few thousand tons' more
material were flung out to hold the river in place.
Findlayson, C. E., turned on his trolley and looked over the face of the
country that he had changed for seven miles around. Looked back on
the humming village of five thousand work-men; up stream and down,
along the vista of spurs and sand; across the river to the far piers,
lessening in the haze; overhead to the guard-towers -and only he knew
how strong those were - and with a sigh of contentment saw that his
work was good. There stood his bridge before him in the sunlight,
lacking only a few weeks' work on the girders of the three middle piers
- his bridge, raw and ugly as original sin, but pukka - permanent - to
endure when all memory of the builder, yea, even of the splendid
Findlayson truss, has perished. Practically, the thing was done.
Hitchcock, his assistant, cantered along the line on a little switch-tailed
Kabuli pony who through long practice could have trotted securely

over trestle, and nodded to his chief.
"All but," said he, with a smile.
"I've been thinking about it," the senior answered. "Not half a bad job
for two men, is it?"
"One - and a half. 'Gad, what a Cooper's Hill cub I was when I came on
the works!" Hitchcock felt very old in the crowded experiences of the
past three years, that had taught him power and responsibility.
"You were rather a colt," said Findlayson. "I wonder how you'll like
going back to office-work when this job's over."
"I shall hate it!" said the young man, and as he went on his eye
followed Findlayson's, and he muttered, "Isn't it damned good?"
"I think we'll go up the service together," Findlayson said to himself.
"You're too good a youngster to waste on another man. Cub thou wast;
assistant thou art. Personal assistant, and at Simla, thou shalt be, if any
credit comes to me out of the business!"
Indeed, the burden of the work had fallen altogether on Findlayson and
his assistant, the young man whom he had chosen because of his
rawness to break to his own needs. There were labour contractors by
the half-hundred - fitters and riveters, European, borrowed from the
railway workshops, with, perhaps, twenty white and half-caste
subordinates to direct, under direction, the bevies of workmen - but
none knew better than these two, who trusted each other, how the
underlings were not to be trusted. They had been tried many times in
sudden crises - by slipping of booms, by breaking of tackle, failure of
cranes, and the wrath of the river - but no stress had brought to light
any man among men whom Findlayson and Hitchcock would have
honoured by working as remorselessly as they worked them-selves.
Findlayson thought it over from the beginning: the months of
offce-work destroyed at a blow when the Government of India, at the
last moment, added two feet to the width of the bridge, under the
impression that bridges were cut out of paper, and so brought to ruin at

least half an acre of calculations- and Hitchcock, new to
disappointment, buried his head in his arms and wept; the
heart-breaking delays over the filling of the contracts in England; the
futile correspondences hinting at great wealth of commissions if one,
only one, rather doubtful consignment were passed; the war that
followed the refusal; the careful, polite obstruction at the other end that
followed the war, till young Hitchcock, putting one month's leave to
another month, and borrowing ten days from Findlayson, spent his poor
little savings of a year in a wild dash to London, and there, as his own
tongue asserted and the later consignments proved, put the fear of God
into a man so great that he feared only Parliament and said so till
Hitchcock wrought with him across his own dinner table, and - he
feared the Kashi Bridge and all who spoke in its name. Then there was
the cholera that came in the night to the village by the bridge works;
and after the cholera smote the small-pox. The fever they had always
with them. Hitchcock had been appointed a magistrate of the third class
with whipping powers, for the better government of the community,
and Findlayson watched him wield his powers temperately, learning
what to overlook and what to look after. It was a long, long reverie, and
it covered storm, sudden freshets, death in every manner and shape,
violent and awful rage against red tape half frenzying a mind that
knows it should be busy on other things; drought, sanitation, finance;
birth,