where there was any depth of water, to guard the piers, and the
empty boats themselves were poled under the bridge down-stream. It
was here that Peroo's pipe shrilled loudest, for the first stroke
of the big gong had brought the dinghy back at racing speed, and
Peroo and his people were stripped to the waist, working for the
honour and credit which are better than life.

"I knew she would speak," he cried. "I knew, but the telegraph
gives us good warning. O sons of unthinkable begetting - children
of unspeakable shame - are we here for the look of the thing?" It
was two feet of wire-rope frayed at the ends, and it did wonders
as Peroo leaped from gunnel to gunnel, shouting the language of
the sea.

Findlayson was more troubled for the stone-boats than anything else.
McCartney, with his gangs, was blocking up the ends of the three
doubtful spans, but boats adrift, if the flood chanced to be a high
one, might endanger the girders; and there was a very fleet in the
shrunken channel.

"Get them behind the swell of the guard-tower," he shouted down to
Peroo. "It will be dead-water there. Get them below the bridge."

"Accha! [Very good.] I know; we are mooring them with wire-rope,"
was the answer. " Heh! I Listen to the Chota Sahib. He is working
hard."

>From across the river came an almost continuous whistling of
locomotives, backed by the rumble of stone. Hitchcock at the last
minute was spending a few hundred more trucks of Tarakee stone in