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 ahead of him.
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 frame looked up blearily as Bell stepped briskly from the canoe and marched across the gangplank that connected the coffer dam to the stone pier it surrounded.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” Bell said, not pausing to answer cries of “Who?” and “Where?”
He spied a steel ladder affixed to the stone and started up it rapidly, calling an urgent warning down to the men below. “There’s a flood crest coming down the river any minute. Build higher, and be ready to run for it.”
Sixty feet above the water, the stone stopped and the steel began. The pillar consisted of a square framework bolstered with triangles of girders, and it too had ladders. For painting, he presumed. From where he was standing
