Had the Government permitted the Kyak coal-fields to be opened up, the lower reaches of the S. R. & N. would have had a value, but all activity in that region had been throttled, and the policy of delay and indecision at headquarters promised no relief.

Careful as had been the plans, exhaustive and painstaking as had been the preparations, the bridge-builders met with unpreventable delays, disappointments, and disasters; for man is but a feeble creature whose brain tires and whose dreams are brittle.  It is with these hindrances and accidents and with their effect upon the outcome that we have to deal.

Of course, the greatest handicap, the one ever-present obstacle, was the cold, and this made itself most troublesome in the sinking of the caissons and the building of the concrete piers.  It was necessary, for instance, to house in all cement work, and to raise the temperature not only of the air surrounding it, but of the materials themselves before they were mixed and laid.  Huge wind-breaks had to be built to protect the outside men from the gales that scoured the river-bed, and these were forever blowing down or suffering damage from the hurricanes.  All this, however, had been anticipated:  it was but the normal condition of work in the northland.  And it was not until the middle of winter, shortly after Eliza’s and Natalie’s visit to the front, that an unexpected danger threatened, a danger more appalling than any upon which O’Neil and his assistants had reckoned.

In laying his plans Parker had proceeded upon the assumption that, once the cold had gripped the glaciers, they would remain motionless until spring.  All available evidence went to prove the correctness of this supposition, but Alaska is a land of surprises, of contrasts, of contradictions:  study of its phenomena is too recent to make practicable the laying down of hard and fast rules.  In the midst of a season of cruelly low temperatures there came a thaw, unprecedented, inexplicable.  A tremendous warm breath from the Pacific rolled northward, bathing the frozen plains and mountain ranges.  Blizzards turned to rains and weeping fogs, the dry and shifting snow-fields melted, water ran in the courses.  Winter loosed its hold; its mantle slipped.  Nothing like this had ever been known or imagined.  It was impossible!  It was as if the unhallowed region were bent upon living up to its evil reputation.  In a short time the loosened waters that trickled through the sleeping ice-fields greased the foundations upon which they lay.  Jackson Glacier roused itself, then began to glide forward like a ship upon its ways.  First there came the usual premonitory explosions—­the sound of subterranean blasts as the ice cracked, gave way, and shifted to the weight above; echoes filled the sodden valley with memories of the summer months.  It was as if the seasons had changed, as if the zodiacal procession had been thrown into confusion.  The frozen surface of the Salmon was inundated; water four feet deep in some places ran over it.