At the corner of Lower Wharf Street. There, the stonework retaining wall met the old timber boat-slips, a second crisis developed with terrifying speed. A working crew of six timber wagon drivers, led by a burly foreman named Kray, was attempting to shore up a trembling cellar vent beneath a three-story tenement building housing eighteen families.
Kray was shouting at his men to drive three twelve-foot hemlock wooden support posts into the soaked gravel at the base of the wall. It used a heavy iron drop-weight suspended from a timber tripod. But beneath the feet of the crew, the timber working cradle was shifting sickeningly toward the deep water, tilting three inches to the riverward side with every blow of the ram.
Bessa Marr was standing on the lower platform of the cradle. She held the guy-rope of the guide frame. She felt the cedar doorstep snap beneath her boot heel. A sharp, muffled crack that rang through the wet wood. She looked down between the floorboards. She saw that the gray river silt beneath the foundation footing was washing away in a fast, boiling undercurrent.
Without a second’s pause, Bessa seized the crimson emergency tab pinned to her leather apron and gave it a violent, downward jerk. The brass stop-bell mounted on the tripod gallows clanged three loud, ringing strokes: CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
