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The sparrows wrangled desperately in the road, defying perspiration. Once a team went jangling and creaking past, raising a yellow blur of dust before the soft tones of the field and sky. In the long grass of the meadow across the road the insects chirped and clacked eternally. Suddenly a frouzy-headed boy appeared in the roadway, his bare feet pattering rapidly. He was extremely excited.

Sixteen iron chains, one thousand seven hundred and fifteen feet in length, pass from pier to pier, and support the bridge. The chains have a dip in the centre of forty-four feet, thus allowing the roadway to have a clear elevation of a hundred feet above high-water at spring tide. These sixteen chains are carried through sixty feet of solid rock.

In its upper stretches, three thousand feet above the sea, the Murray River flows through a level country before it plunges into mountain fastnesses, almost impregnable in summer, for a long and troubled détour, to emerge at length into this last valley. To reach this flat upland one must drive through a beautiful mountain pass with great heights towering on either side of the winding roadway.

He craned out to stare at the helpers, while they, pausing in their work and dragged to and fro by the flapping canvas, stared back as the coach went by. It came to a halt on a level roadway some few rods beyond this bright traffic, in an open space which, he knew, must be near the waterside, for beyond the lights of the booths he had spied a cluster of masts quite close at hand.

Buffaloes, with a crude hoop collar of wood around their coarse necks, dragged rough-hewn planks along the stone-paved roadway, the timber swerving dangerously from side to side as the heavy animals pursued their painful plodding. To the Chinese the buffalo is the safest of all quadrupeds, if we perhaps except the mule, which, if three legs give way, will save himself on the remaining one.

The new-comers soon had a chance of seeing to what lengths they would go, for in the roadway near to Caulnes they came upon an English man-at-arms who had been waylaid and slain by them.

The upper windows of nearly all the great buildings were arrayed with plants in full bloom. The roadway was covered with superb automobiles, some of them nearly as long as trains.

At one end of it was Pine Camp; in the other direction, after passing the knoll on which the Vanderwillers lived, the roadway came out upon a more traveled road to the forks and the railroad. Pine Camp was the nearest place where help could be secured to beat down the fire, if, indeed, this were at all possible.

Lieutenant Ribouville now set to work to inspect the bridge; and ordered the men who were provided with the necessary implements to set to, and dig a hole down to the crown of the principal arch. It was harder work than they had expected. The roadway was solid, the ballast pressed down very tightly, and the crown of the arch covered, to a considerable depth, with concrete.

Soon a knife-edge of water glistened along the crest of the earth embankment supporting the roadway of the boulevard, scattered into a dozen sluiceways, gashing the sides of the slopes, and then, before Jack could realize his own danger, the whole mass collapsed only to be swallowed up in a mighty torrent which leaped straight at him.