and the dam had held. At least for the moment.
Bell surveyed the damage, trying to calculate how long the dam would last. A cataract was pouring over the top, and jets of water were blasting like fire hoses through cracks in the face.
Abbott said, “Dash, how’d you learn to shoot like that?”
“My mother wouldn’t let me join the Van Dorns until she taught me.”
“Your
“She rode with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show when she was young.”
Bell said, “You can tell your mother you saved our bacon. And maybe the bridge. Hopefully, that coal train will hold it … What’s the matter, Archie?”
Abbott looked suddenly alarmed. “But that was Kincaid’s idea.”
“What idea?”
“To stabilize the bridge with down pressure. Kincaid said they did it once in Turkey. Seemed to work.”
“Kincaid has never done a thing in his life without purpose,” said Bell.
“But Mowery and the other engineers wouldn’t have allowed it if the weight of the train wouldn’t help. I’d guess he knew the jig was up when he saw me ride up here. So he acted helpful to throw off suspicion.”
“I’ve got to get down there right now.”
“The horses scattered,” said Abbott. “But there are mules in the stables.”
Bell looked around for a better way. Mules trained to pull lumber carts would never ride them to the bridge in time to undo whatever the Wrecker had set in motion with the coal train.
His eye fell on a dugout canoe on the riverbank. The water had already risen to it and was tugging at the front end. “We’ll take the Hell’s Bottom Flyer!”
“What?”
“The dugout canoe. We’ll ride it to the bridge.”
They manhandled the heavy, hollowed-out log on its side to spill out the rainwater.
“On the jump! Grab those paddles!”
They pushed the canoe into the river and held it alongside the bank. Bell climbed in front, ahead of the crosspiece the lumberjacks had stiffened it with, and readied his paddle. “Get in!”
“Hold your horses, Isaac,” Abbott cautioned. “This is insane. We’ll drown.”
“Amorous lumberjacks have survived the run for years. Get in.”
“When that dam lets loose, it’ll sweep a tidal wave down the river that will wash over this canoe like a matchstick.”
Bell looked back at the dam. The torrent that gushed from the hole that Dow had blown in the bottom was tearing at the edges.
“That hole’s getting larger,” said Abbott. “See the logs above it sagging?”
“He’s right,” said Dash. “It could collapse any minute.”
“You’re both right,” Bell said. “I can’t risk your lives. Catch up when you can.”
Bell shoved off from the bank. Abbott lunged to grab the back of the canoe. The current jerked it into the middle of the narrow torrent.
“I’ll meet you down there!” Bell called, paddling furiously to keep the current from smashing him into a rock. “Enjoy the mules.”
The speed took him by surprise. The raging current drove the canoe faster than any horse and most automobiles. Hurtling along at this rate, he would be under the Cascade Canyon Bridge in twenty minutes.
If he didn’t drown.
The banks were steep, the river narrow and studded with boulders. Fallen trees jutted into it. He overtook whole cut trunks floating along almost entirely submerged. The little canoe rode up on one of them, and he started to overturn in a flash. He threw his weight the other way to right it. Then a tree that had been ripped from the bank by the flood rolled ponderously beside him, splaying the air with giant roots that reached for the canoe like tentacles. He fended them off with the paddle, then dug deep in the water, trying to outrun the flailing monster. A root whipped him in the face and nearly threw him out of the canoe.
Paddling for his life, he pulled ahead of the rolling tree, dodged another boulder, slid between two more, and banged over a flat rock hidden under the surface. Then the canyon walls closed in, and deep water tore between them in a long, relatively straight run of several miles. This was better, and Bell began to think he might make it to the bridge intact.
He looked back repeatedly. No sign that the dam had burst.
The straight run ended in a series of sharp bends. The bends caused whirlpools that spun the canoe in circles that one man, in the front of the canoe, could not control. Bell concentrated instead on keeping the canoe upright and fending off rocks that were suddenly jumping out of nowhere. Floating out of the third bend backward, he looked over his shoulder to see where he was going. The canyon walls had spread wider apart, and the water had climbed onto a shallow bank that produced rock-strewn rapids. The current thrust him at the rapids. He paddled with all his strength to straighten out the canoe and head toward the deeper water of the original bed.
But as soon as he had righted himself, he heard an ominous mutter that grew swiftly to a loud rumble. It sounded like a wall of water was rampaging after him. He looked behind him, expecting the worst. But the river was no wilder than before, which was wild enough. The dam, miles behind, was apparently still holding. But the rumble grew louder. Suddenly, Bell realized that the sound echoing off the steep canyon walls came from around the bend
The current sluiced him through the bend in the river.
He caught a glimpse of ropes tied to the trees on the bank. Then his eyes were riveted on what appeared to be a line across the river. But it was not a line. It was the clear break in the water where the river disappeared over a waterfall.
The lumberjacks must have tied the ropes to hold when they climbed out of their canoes to carry them around the falls. Portage was not an option for Isaac Bell. The current had already accelerated and was throwing his canoe at the falls at thirty miles per hour.
The rains saved him. At low water, he would be dead, smashed to splinters on the rocks. The high water shortened the fall and cushioned his landing.
He was still afloat, still flying along high and dry, when suddenly he was bearing down on an island-sized boulder that split the river in half. He dug in his paddle to steer around it. The stream rejoined on the other side of the boulder in a violent leap of spray and foam that battered the canoe on both sides.
Then, against the darkening sky, he saw the airy arch and crisp straight line of the Cascade Canyon Bridge joining the two sides of the gorge. It was strange that the clearest description of its simple beauty was from the Wrecker himself: it soared. It was hard to believe that any structure so large could look so light or span such a long distance. The coal train parked in the middle of it was fifty cars long and yet there were empty stretches of track in front and in back of it.
But the Wrecker who so artfully described the Cascade Canyon Bridge was the man who would destroy it. Surely the Wrecker knew a secret about the coal train that would gain him control of every major railroad in the country. Every act that Bell had seen him commit, every crime the Wrecker had perpetrated, every innocent he had killed, told him that Charles Kincaid had tricked the Southern Pacific Company into parking that coal train on the bridge for a reason that would serve his monstrous ambition and vicious dreams.
Moments later, Isaac Bell saw the lights of the town clustered along the bank under the bridge. He tried to paddle to shore, but it proved futile. The heavy canoe was firmly in the grip of the river. He raced by the outskirts of the town, and as the river narrowed and accelerated he saw electric lights blazing on the piers and on the coffer dams and caissons built around them. A thousand men and a hundred machines were teamed to shore up the flow deflectors with tons of rock and raise the sides of the coffer dams with massive timbers to keep above the rising water.
The river was sweeping Bell’s canoe between the piers. No one noticed him coming, for the canoe looked little different than the many dark logs racing low in the water. Just as he thought he would be swept under the bridge and into the night, the canyon walls narrowed the river. Currents leaped crazily.
The canoe was hurled sideways toward the pier farthest from town. It jumped over a tongue of stone jetty, spun wildly, and crashed against the wooden coffer dam. Fifty exhausted carpenters spiking planks to the timber
