Chapter 25

PREPARATIONS

The building of the Salmon River bridge will not soon be forgotten by engineers and men of science. But, while the technical features of the undertaking are familiar to a few, the general public knows little about how the work was actually done; and since the building of the bridge was the pivotal point in Murray O'Neil's career, it may be well to describe in some detail its various phases--the steps which led up to that day when the Salmon burst her bonds and put the result of all his planning and labor to the final test.

Nowhere else in the history of bridge-building had such conditions been encountered; nowhere on earth had work of this character been attended with greater hazards; never had circumstances created a situation of more dramatic interest. By many the whole venture was regarded as a reckless gamble; for more than a million dollars had been risked on the chance not alone that O'Neil could build supports which the ice could not demolish, but that he could build them under the most serious difficulties in record-breaking time. Far more than the mere cost of the structure hinged upon his success: failure would mean that his whole investment up to that point would be wiped out, to say nothing of the twenty-million-dollar project of a trunk-line up the valley of the Salmon.

Had the Government permitted the Kyak coal-fields to be opened up, the lower reaches of the S. R. & N. would have had a value, but all activity in that region had been throttled, and the policy of delay and indecision at headquarters promised no relief.

Careful as had been the plans, exhaustive and painstaking as had been the preparations, the bridge-builders met with unpreventable delays, disappointments, and disasters; for man is but a feeble creature whose brain tires and whose dreams are brittle. It is with these hindrances and accidents and with their effect upon the outcome that we have to deal.

Of course, the greatest handicap, the one ever-present obstacle, was the cold, and this made itself most troublesome in the sinking of the caissons and the building of the concrete piers. It was necessary, for instance, to house in all cement work, and to raise the temperature not only of the air surrounding it, but of the materials themselves before they were mixed and laid. Huge wind-breaks had to be built to protect the outside men from the gales that scoured the river-bed, and these were forever blowing down or suffering damage from the hurricanes. All this, however, had been anticipated: it was but the normal condition of work in the northland. And it was not until the middle of winter, shortly after Eliza's and Natalie's visit to the front, that an unexpected danger threatened, a danger more appalling than any upon which O'Neil and his assistants had reckoned.

In laying his plans Parker had proceeded upon the assumption that, once the cold had gripped the glaciers, they would remain