By the fourth hour after midnight, the mountain storm had settled into a freezing drizzle that coated the timber work frames of the Oakhaven gorge in a dangerous glaze of clear ice.
Sixty feet below the swaying staging, the Karst River boiled white against the jagged limestone boulders, throwing up plumes of icy spray that smelled of wet slate, sulfur, and crushed shale. But on the timber stone wall-brackets flanking Pier Six, fifty master masons, carpenters, and draymen from the Canton Mutual Association worked with the silent, furious coordination of men defending their own hearths against an oncoming flood.
Four huge bronze screw-jacks, brought up from the deep railway cuttings by ox teams in the dead of night, had been hauled onto the staging platforms. Each jack was a four-hundred-pound monster of cast glowing-bronze. Its two-inch square threads shone with fresh sheep fat, its broad six-sided cap-plate bedded on three-quarter-inch sheets of soft lead leaf to prevent point-loading against the stone.
Above the jacks, twelve massive fourteen-inch-square needle-beams of seasoned upland heart-oak had been driven through holes chiseled directly through the arch corner walls of the central arch, resting on heavy timber raking-shores keyed into the bedrock abutments of the gorge. The rigging of the shores had needed three hours of brutal manual labor, maneuvering sixty-foot balks of virgin timber across the swaying narrow high walkways using ash rollers, hemp snubbing lines, and iron pinch-bars.
