Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/173

161 a strong wind had been blowing from the northeast, and the waves were working at the outer sheeting. I told Larsen that he had better come along and get a snooze, but he looked up, like a sailor, at the storm in the sky, and shook his head. And I left him.

"As I was going into the office, I saw a company tug coming up, with Nolan in the bows. I was too tired to meet him. I told one of the men to call me if anything went wrong—and climbed up to my bunkroom. I fell asleep."

He looked for a long time at his pipe. It was black out. He had been holding it, forgotten, at his lips.

I heard, afterward, how it happened. The waves caused a shifting of the sand on the eastern front of the dam, and loosened the piles, and spread the sheeting—and the water began to pour in on the square steel dam. The men were ordered up from the shaft, and they ran with timbers and shovels to throw clay into the hole and brace the planking; and Larsen and the shift worked like mad. It was no use. The waves sucked out the clay faster than it could be shoveled in, and the dam just sank under their feet. When the inner sheeting began to give way, Larsen shouted for timbers to reinforce it. And when the men ran for beams and planks, he was just crazy enough to brace himself between the wooden sheeting and the steel dam—his feet against the one, his shoulders against the other—to try to hold the planking until the men could come to his aid.

"I saw him there. The row had wakened me, and I ran to the window. A big wave struck into the breach