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The company was sending steam-shovels and pile-drivers on limited trains and a first-class laborer could get a private compartment quicker than could a financier. "There will be improvements in railroading through all the districts every day from now on, but there will not be anything like a restoration of former conditions for months," said one railroad official.
By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the people, Sir, some of us with nutcrackers, and some of us with trip-hammers, and some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming with a whish! like air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down on the lumps of nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of them like Aaron's calf!
Like pile-drivers his fore-hoofs struck downwards, one closely following the other. The bear swung aside as lightly as a weasel, and eluded, but only by a hair's breadth, that destructive stroke. As he wheeled he delivered a terrific, swinging blow, with his armed forepaw, upon his assailant's shoulder. The blow was a fair one.
As can be readily seen, the vital point of the whole work, and the problem to solve, was food for men and horses. 1,700 bushels of oats every day and 15,000 pounds of provisions, Sundays and all, for an entire season, which at the beginning of the work had to come about 170 miles by rail, and then be taken from 50 to 150 miles by teams across a wilderness, is on the face of it considerable of an undertaking, to say nothing about hauling the pile-drivers, piles, and bridge-timber there.
Several times she had seen him swinging along defiantly, his dinner pail in his hand, while the neighborhood boys dogged his heels at a safe distance and informed him in yapping chorus that he was a scab and no good. But one evening, on his way to work, in a spirit of bravado he went into the Pile-Drivers' Home, the saloon at Seventh and Pine.
In the general haste pile-drivers, hoists, boilers, and various odds and ends of machinery and material had been left where they stood. They were being inundated now; many of them were all but submerged. There was no possibility of saving them at present, for the men were half dead from exhaustion.
Save for the camps of the laborers, the boats, pile-drivers, implements and materials of their warfare and the debris of their wrecked structures, not a sign of their work remained, while through the breach widened now to nearly a quarter of a mile the great river poured its hundred and fifty thousand second feet of muddy water with terrific velocity and solemn, awful power.
"Tom," said Orde to the old riverman, "I'm going to send Marsh down for the pile-drivers and some cable. The barge company has some fifteen inch manilla." North laughed. "What in blazes do you expect to do with that?" he inquired. "We may need them," Orde stated with conviction. "Everything's safe enough now; and probably will continue so; but I can't afford to take chances.
I tried to make them feel that we were all working by the job. Without boasting I think I can say that we cut down the contractor's estimate by at least a full day. I know they had to do some hustling to get the pile-drivers to the spot on time. On the next job I had to begin all over again with a new gang. It seemed a pity that all my work on the other should be wasted but I didn't say anything.
In half an hour they had explored and pronounced safe as large a bathing place as their supply of rope would "fence in" and then began the "fencing" process. They cut several stout stakes six feet long and took them to the water's edge. Then the three girls in bathing suits assumed their new duty as water pile-drivers.
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