Chapter 27

HOW A DREAM CAME TRUE

Early on the following morning Eliza was awakened by a sound of shouting outside her window. She lay half dazed for a moment or two, until the significance of the uproar made itself apparent; then she leaped from her bed.

Men were crying:

"There she goes!"

"She's going out!"

Doors were slamming, there was the rustle and scuff of flying feet, and in the next room Dan was evidently throwing himself into his clothes like a fireman. Eliza called to him, but he did not answer; and the next moment he had fled, upsetting some article of furniture in his haste. Drawing her curtains aside, the girl saw in the brightening dawn men pouring down the street, dressing as they went. They seemed half demented; they were yelling at one another, but she could not gather from their words whether it was the ice which was moving or--the bridge. The bridge! That possibility set her to dressing with tremulous fingers, her heart sick with fear. She called to Natalie, but scarcely recognized her own voice.

"I--don't know," came the muffled reply to her question. "It sounds like something--terrible. I'm afraid Dan will fall in or-- get hurt." The confusion in the street was growing. "ELIZA!" Natalie's voice was tragic.

"What is it, dear?"

"H--help me, quick!"

"How?"

"I can't find my other shoe."

But Eliza was sitting on the floor, lacing up her own stout boots, and an instant later she followed her brother, pursued by a wail of dismay from the adjoining chamber. Through the chill morning light she hurried, asking many questions, but receiving no coherent reply from the racing men; then after endless moments of suspense she saw with relief that the massive superstructure of the bridge was still standing. Above the shouting she heard another sound, indistinct but insistent. It filled the air with a whispering movement; it was punctuated at intervals by a dull rumbling and grinding. She found the river-bank black with forms, but like a cat she wormed her way through the crowd until the whole panorama lay before her.

The bridge stood as she had seen it on the yesterday--slender, strong, superb in the simplicity of its splendid outline; but beneath it and as far as her eyes could follow the river she saw, not the solid spread of white to which she had become accustomed, but a moving expanse of floes. At first the winter burden slipped past in huge masses, acres in extent, but soon these began to be rent apart; irregular black seams ran through them, opened, closed, and threw up ridges of ice-shavings as they ground together. The floes were rubbing against the banks, they came sliding out over the dry shore like tremendous sheets of cardboard manipulated by unseen hands, and not until their nine- foot edges were exposed to view did the