The first thirty feet off the dry-dock apron were the heaviest thirty feet on the continent.
When fifty tons of cold-cast hard dark metal steel has rested in a wooden cradle for forty years, the iron doesn’t simply sit on the timber. It keys itself into the grain. The sixteen-inch white oak runners had tightly packed into hardened, stone-hard troughs, their fibers bonded to the rough rusted skin of the metal by four decades of dried mud, lime scale, and rust.
Tomas stood at the head of the lower haul-ramp, his hobnailed boots braced against two heavy railroad ties driven vertically into the gravel as deadmen. The two-inch Swedish wire-rope bridle came off the carriage tongue in two glistening, grease-coated strands, converging at the forged master ring hooked directly into the chest swivel of his cart driver’s harness.
Behind him, the first five squads—one hundred men from the Bellwether Draymen’s Company and the lower river wharves—had their shoulder traces laid out across the shale. Each man leaned forward at a forty-degree angle. His hands gripped the braided hemp cross-bars, his weight thrown against the harness leather.
“Hold the line taut!” Master Gault roared from the carriage roof. He held a three-foot steel wedge in one hand and an eight-pound copper mallet in the other. “Don’t jerk it! If you snatch at forty tons of dead iron with a cold cable, you’ll snap the master link like a dry twig! Lean into the collars! Steady! Steady!”
