spurs up-stream were marked by no more than eddies and
spoutings, and down-stream the pent river, once freed of her
guide-lines, had spread like a sea to the horizon. Then hurried
by, rolling in the water, dead men and oxen together, with here
and there a patch of thatched roof that melted when it touched a
pier.

"Big flood," said Peroo, and Findlayson nodded. It was as big a
flood as he had any wish to watch. His bridge would stand what
was upon her now, but not very much more, and if by any of a
thousand chances there happened to be a weakness in the
embankments, Mother Gunga would carry his honour to the sea with
the other raffle. Worst of all, there was nothing to do except
to sit still; and Findlayson sat still under his macintosh till
his helmet became pulp on his head, and his boots were
over-ankle in mire. He took no count of time, for the river was
marking the hours, inch by inch and foot by foot, along the
embankment, and he listened, numb and hungry, to the straining
of the stone-boats, the hollow thunder under the piers, and the
hundred noises that make the full note of a flood. Once a
dripping servant brought him food, but he could not eat; and
once he thought that he heard a faint toot from a locomotive
across the river, and then he smiled. The bridge's failure would
hurt his assistant not a little, hut Hitchcock was a young man
with his big work yet to do. For himself the crash meant
everything - everything that made a hard life worth the living.
They would say, the men of his own profession . . . he
remembered the half-pitying things that he himself had said when
Lockhart's new waterworks burst and broke down in brick-heaps and
sludge, and Lockhart's spirit broke in him and he died. He