The haul-line reached the base of the Great Incline. Then, the road tilted suddenly from an easy eight-percent rise to a punishing fourteen-percent grade.
Here, the road had been gouged straight through a spur of rotten shale that was rapidly crumbling under the sleet. The crushed rock had churned into a black, greasy paste that offered no purchase for boots. Meanwhile, the water rushing down the inner ditch was already overflowing its banks, cutting channels across the haul-path.
Tomas stood at the head of the bridle, the ash-wood spreader bar pinned hard against his breastbone by twenty thousand pounds of live cable tension.
Through the four-inch wire thick ship rope, he felt the carriage hit the bottom of the steep grade. The runners didn’t slide smoothly into the incline. They plowed into a drift of wet shale gravel three feet deep. The carriage lurched, shuddered, and stopped dead.
Instantly, the tension on the main line doubled.
The braided steel cable sang a terrifying, high-pitched note. It shook so wildly that droplets of grease flew off the wire like black shot, peppering Tomas’s wool coat and face.
Down the line, men began to slip. Hobnailed boots skidded helplessly across the slick mud. Shouts of panic echoed through the rain as the men of squads two and three were pulled backward toward the rock face by the sheer dead weight of the stalled fifty-ton slab.
