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, but 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 brickheaps and sludge, and
Lockhart's spirit broke in him and he died. He remembered what he
himself had said when the Sumao Bridge went out in the big cyclone
by the sea; and most he remembered poor Hartopp's face three weeks
later, when the shame had marked it. His bridge was twice the size
of Hartopp's, and it carried the Findlayson truss as well as the
new pier-shoe - the Findlayson bolted shoe. There were no excuses
in his service. Government might listen, perhaps, but his own kind