But Mother Gunga would not fight as Peroo desired.  After the first down-stream plunge there came no more walls of water, but the river lifted herself bodily, as a snake when she drinks in midsummer, plucking and fingering along the revetments, and banking up behind the piers till even Findlayson began to recalculate the strength of his work.

When day came the village gasped.  “Only last night,” men said, turning to each other, “it was as a town in the river-bed!  Look now!”

And they looked and wondered afresh at the deep water, the racing water that licked the throat of the piers.  The farther bank was veiled by rain, into which the bridge ran out and vanished; the spurs up-stream were marked by no more than eddies and spoutings, and down-stream the pent river, once freed of her guide-lines, had spread like a sea to the horizon.  Then hurried by, rolling in the water, dead men and oxen together, with here and there a patch of 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 brick-heaps 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 would judge him by his bridge, as that stood or fell.  He went over it in his head, plate by plate, span by span, brick by brick, pier