fire; conch, drum, and whistle echoed the call, and the village
quivered to the sound of bare feet running upon soft earth. The
order in all cases was to stand by the day's work and wait
instructions. The gangs poured by in the dusk; men stopping to knot
a loin-cloth or fasten a sandal; gang-foremen shouting to their
subordinates as they ran or paused by the tool-issue sheds for bars
and mattocks; locomotives creeping down their tracks wheel-deep in
the crowd; till the brown torrent disappeared into the dusk of the
river-bed, raced over the pilework, swarmed along the lattices,
clustered by the cranes, and stood still each man in his place.

Then the troubled beating of the gong carried the order to take up
everything and bear it beyond highwater mark, and the flare-lamps
broke out by the hundred between the webs of dull iron as the
riveters began a night's work, racing against the flood that was to
come. The girders of the three centre piers - those that stood on
the cribs - were all but in position. They needed just as many
rivets as could be driven into them, for the flood would assuredly
wash out their supports, and the ironwork would settle down on the
caps of stone if they were not blocked at the ends. A hundred
crowbars strained at the sleepers of the temporary line that fed
the unfinished piers. It was heaved up in lengths, loaded into
trucks, and backed up the bank beyond flood-level by the groaning
locomotives. The tool-sheds on the sands melted away before the
attack of shouting armies, and with them went the stacked ranks of
Government stores, iron-bound boxes of rivets, pliers, cutters,
duplicate parts of the riveting-machines, spare pumps and chains.
The big crane would be the last to be shifted, for she was hoisting
all the heavy stuff up to the main structure of the bridge. The
concrete blocks on the fleet of stone-boats were dropped overside,