Doma Reel stood planted in the boiling foam of the rail cut like a granite bridge pier, the four-foot current tearing at her heavy wool trousers. The heat of the water was eighty degrees, hot enough to blister living tissue within seconds. But she had stripped off her canvas apron and wrapped the thick, grease-stained fabric in double layers around her forearms and shins. She tied the ends with tarred hemp twine.
Her face was dark red, almost purple from the blasting heat, sweat pouring from her forehead in steady streams that washed clean channels through the coal dust on her cheeks.
In her hands, resting against her hip, was the kitchen screw-jack. A massive sixty-pound pillar of cast bronze and iron that had been salvaged seven winters ago from the locomotive repair pits behind Platform Six. It was a heavy-duty tool built for lifting forty-ton boiler shells. A heavy square base of ribbed cast iron fitted with a central bronze collar and a double-threaded Acme screw three inches in width. Turned by a four-foot iron lever. Then, the clockwork advantage of the Acme threads could exert twelve tons of upright thrust.
Behind her, wading through the scalding current with grim, desperate determination, came three veteran kitchen stokers. They were dragging a ten-foot baulk of squared pine timber, twelve inches on a side, that had served for ten years as the central cutting frame stand in the Tram cooperative bakery.
