Walter Drake and Larry Wheeler were squatting down examining the limestone formation of the river bank. Smith stood alone, about two feet away in actual distance — with us, but not one of us. His hands hung loosely at his sides and his head was lifted and he stared across at the other side. At American soil. Separated from it by eighty feet of muddy water.
I took time off from the problem confronting me to wonder what was in his mind as he looked across the river. He stood solid and immobile, and I couldn’t see his face. This was the course he had chosen when he choked the life out of Lola. The wrong side of the river. He could never go back again. I wondered if that bothered him.
I stopped behind Walter and Larry and asked, “How does it look?”
Neither of them looked up. Larry said, “Not bad. Give me four days to get my forms set and I’ll start pouring concrete. I don’t care what the river does after my abutments and wing-walls get their initial set.”
I looked down at the water and then at my blueprints. The profile showed the opposite cliff to be five feet higher than where we stood. I said, “Have we got that long?”
“Quien sabe.” Larry spread out his hands and was cheerful about it. “Any other ideas?”
Walter was still studying the rock and the water beneath him. “One of the guys on the truck says he’s seen her rise twelve feet in twenty-four hours.”
I squatted down beside them. Smith stood in front of us looking across the river. Larry took the blueprints out of my hand and studied them. “Eight days,” he said after a moment, “and they can start on the trusswork.”
I shook my head. “That’s why we’re here. To beat the river if she takes a notion to come up fast.”
“Eight days,” Larry repeated stubbornly. “You’ve got some bad stresses here. My anchor plates won’t hold—”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Drake broke in. He pointed down the side of the cliff. “I’ll give you a set of steel braces about twelve feet down. We’ll build up from them, grouting into the cliff every two feet. If we’ve got the steel around to do it with, you can forget your anchor plates and just throw up wingwalls to protect the fill.”
Both of us looked at him and began shaking our heads. Smith acted as if none of this meant anything to him.
“Here’s what I mean.” Walter grabbed a pencil and began sketching his idea on the print. “Build up braces from twelve feet down — that’s all the bearing we need.” He paused to study the steel diagram. “Here’s stuff we can steal from the truss. These two I-Beams are only extra weight. We burn them off in six-foot lengths—”
“Wait a minute,” protested Larry. “How are you going to get into the rocks for anchorage and how—”
“Let me worry about that.” Walter was in his stride now. “They’ve got powder here, and drills. Drop me some scaffolding twelve feet down and give me four hours before the water hits that point. I can stay ahead of it after that.”
I said, “You might make it in time. The other side has five feet of elevation, so if we shoot this side first...” I stood up, staring across the river. “Let’s jump in the bucket and ride across. If it’ll work the same on that side, we’ll get started.”
The three of us went toward the bucket. I turned back and said, “Come on, Smith. We’ve got to decide this thing fast.” Larry and Walter stopped and looked back at us.
Smith turned slowly from the river. “You three go ahead. I’ll start rigging a boom for Drake’s scaffolding.”
“You’ll have to check the other side too and get your boom layout started there,” I told him impatiently. “No use jumping in on one side unless it’s workable from the other.”
He shook his head. There was still that remote quietude about him. “I’ll save time by booming the whole job from this side.”
Larry said, “You’re crazy.” He looked across the river. “It’s at least eighty feet across.”
Smith nodded calmly. “I’ve been figuring my end while you guys were arguing. We passed a five-yard dragline in that last cut. I’ll get it here and anchor it to use the boom.”
“It’s only a fifty-foot boom!” Walter ejaculated.
“Don’t you think I know what I’m saying?” Hot anger flared in Smith’s eyes and he took a step forward. I was conscious of that gun under his coat. He stopped and went on flatly, “I’m doing the rigging on this job. One of those pines on the hill behind us will extend the boom to handle the other side from here. Don’t try to tell me my job.”
Walter and Larry looked at me. I said, “Smith’s right. It’ll be faster if he can handle the whole thing from this side.”
Walter looked down at the swift water. He said in a queer voice, “I like to know my rigger when I work above fast water. If a man went into that, his body wouldn’t be recovered until it washed up somewhere beyond the other end of the canyon.”
A muscle jerked in Smith’s face. He said, “if you’re afraid of fast water, you’d better let somebody else do your job.” He turned and strode up the fill toward a truck to drive back for the dragline.
The three of us got in the cable bucket and started across to inspect the American side.
Walter Drake said, “I guess you know he’s packing a gun under his coat.”
“I know a gun-bulge when I see it,” I told him.
Larry said quietly, “I’ve got myself a hunch he feels happier on the south side of the river where the American law can’t touch him. That’s why he wants to boom the whole thing from the Mexican side.”
“Larry’s right,” Walter said. “Smith’s on the dodge. Hell of a guy for the controls of a boom,” he added morosely, looking down at the swirling, deadly water beneath our bucket.
“He’s our rigger for this job,” I reminded them. “No matter what he’s done, he’s still a construction man. When the chips are down, you can’t get the job out of a man’s blood. This is tough enough to take any man’s mind off his own trouble.”
I had to count on that, and I had to make them count on it. No matter what they thought about Smith personally. Time and the flood waters were catching up with us and the job called for teamwork above everything else.
And we got that teamwork. No matter how we felt about Smith, he was a top-hand rigger, and nothing else counted during the next forty-eight hours. A rush job gets hold of you like nothing else in the world. The throbbing pulse of men and machinery against the elements grips a man and puts everything else in the background. You don’t sleep and you don’t eat and you don’t notice the lack of either. It’s you against the job, and that’s all there is in the whole blasted world.
When dark came on, we set up searchlights on both sides of the rising river, and time ceased to exist. The floodwaters crept upward on the sides of the rock cliffs, snarling and angry at being thwarted by human beings. Smith anchored his big dragline back from the edge and lashed a 60-foot pine trunk to the spidery boom. He used the materials at hand and none of us tested the job. The rigging was up to him and we had our own work to do. He slung his blocks from the end and threaded them, and geared his winch for the extra load, and he had Walter’s scaffolds steady against the cliff five feet above the rising water by midnight.
Walter drilled his holes and shot them while I made up his steel the way he wanted it, and before daylight he had the first braces grouted in and was ready for the next set up the cliff.
The water kept rising, but we kept ahead of it. Larry was throwing his forms together out of anything he could get his hands on, and he had a mixer going on both sides by noon of that first day.
Walter Drake rode a hook over the chasm the first time Smith tried out his improvised boom. I saw Walter swinging across on the end of a cable and I remember only a feeling of pleased surprise at knowing he was ahead of the water on our side and ready to tackle the first set across the river. Smith was in it with us and we were a four-man team doing the impossible again, just as my four-man teams had done in the past. If any of us had wasted time wishing we had Benny, it would have been time we couldn’t afford to waste.