We weren’t conscious of Smith any more than we were of one another. He was an integral part of the whole, and we couldn’t function any other way.
It was noon of the second day when I stopped long enough to realize we’d pulled another one out of the fire. We had the job whipped and could afford to straighten up and look around us. The muddy water was already above the lowest steel braces in the side of the cliff, but a webwork of steel was bolted securely in place on both sides, and you could see the river was conceding defeat. It was turbulent and spiteful, eddying in swift whirlpools and roaring its frustration.
Suddenly the whole scene seemed calmly peaceful to me. Just an ordinary job moving along smoothly, when up to that moment it had been an electrified inferno of activity with success hanging in the balance.
Smith was at the controls of his rudely improvised boom and Walter was finishing up his anchor plates on the Mexican side. Larry had a mixer grinding out concrete into his forms on both sides of the river, and the steel erectors were calmly laying out their stuff for the end trusses. Blaine and the Mexican engineer were conferring together in front of the field office, and they both looked as smugly pleased with themselves as though they had figured out the whole deal.
On the other side of the river — the American side — a couple of well-dressed gents were leaning over the cliff’s edge to inspect the work beneath. You could tell they were big shots from the way they acted. Suddenly something went wrong with a block at the end of Smith’s tree-trunk boom and there was a snarl of cable up there as he tried to lift a piece of steel to swing it across the river.
It looked like a bad tangle from where I stood, and I started down to the winch to take the control for him if he had to go up the boom to straighten it out.
I stopped before I’d gone very far. I hadn’t paid much attention to Smith’s end of things during the past forty-eight hours and during that time he’d found a workman who could push the winch while he handled the rigging. A feeling of pleasure went through me at this evidence of the thorough way Smith had taken hold and put everything out of his mind except getting the work done. Some riggers I’ve known wouldn’t have thought of a small detail like that, wouldn’t have bothered to train a winchman during the stress Smith had been under, but it’s just those small details that differentiate a real craftsman from those who don’t quite succeed.
Smith left the workman at the winch and went hand over hand up the steep-sloping steel boom. I watched his big body snake upward and out over the river to the end of steel and then up the roughly trimmed trunk of the pine extension.
I walked on down to the edge of the river while he hung on at the top with one hand and worked at the twisted cables with the other. One of the big shots on the American side looked up and recognized me and I knew I’d have to go over and make my report to them in person. Well, the job was under control and I was ready to make my report. I nodded and waved that I’d be over, but the cable buckets were busy and I had to wait my turn.
Smith got the tangle loosened and signaled the winchman to take up the slack easy while he stepped down to a support on the boom and waited to see that it didn’t snarl again.
A twenty-foot piece of steel was slung on the end of the cable ready for hoisting, and it was on the bank behind me. I saw the cable tighten easily and the steel slide toward the edge.
I stepped onto the steel and grabbed the cable for a ride across. My responsibility was ended and I wanted to turn the whole thing over to someone else and get some sleep.
The steel beam slid off the bank smoothly and out over the water. The winchman lifted it a few feet as we swung so it would clear the higher bank on the other side. I glanced up and waved at Smith riding the end of the boom above me — it looked like a goodwill gesture to thank him for the part he’d played in filling up my gang and helping me out of a tight spot.
I was half-doped with weariness and lack of sleep, and as I waved, I shifted my weight just enough to unbalance the beam in its sling.
When a two-ton beam starts slipping, you don’t readjust it by shifting your weight back. One end of it lifted up and I started riding the other end down toward the water. My one-hand grip on the cable wrenched loose and things happened fast. We were near enough to the American bank so that I could jump for the steel framework jutting out from the cliff.
I went into the roaring water, and as I hit, I remembered the remark Walter had made two days previously about a man’s body being washed up at the other end of the canyon, miles below us, if he ever went into that fast water.
I was sucked under like a floating chip, and then heaved up and slammed on my right side against the steel I’d reached for. I got a left-hand grip, but the current was tearing at me and I knew I wouldn’t last long. My right arm hung limp and I couldn’t let go to grab the rope let down from above or the sling on the end of the cable which the winchman had let down for me when he saw what had happened.
There were people leaning over the edge above me shouting for me to hang on until they could let down a rope, but none of them seemed to realize that my right arm had been smashed and was useless.
None of them except Smith who was perched high above me on the boom. Looking straight down, maybe his perspective was better. Anyhow, he caught on at once and he acted with the hair-trigger speed that drives a man instinctively at a time like that.
He swung out from the boom and caught the swinging cable and came down it toward me. I saw him coming and I wasn’t surprised to see a killer risking his life to save mine. I knew that’s the way construction men are built. They get that way working together on jobs where death is everywhere.
He hit the water beside me and got the sling between my legs and signaled the winchman. We went up with a jerk and swung out over dry land and the cable set us down gently together on American soil.
We were surrounded before we got untangled, and the two well-dressed gents had hold of Smith before he could reach the gun under his wet coat. They flashed Ranger badges on him and took him away quietly. Back to El Paso to stand trial for strangling Lola.
Larry and Walter couldn’t get over how queer it was the way everything happened so opportunely. They wondered how a guy like me could so far forget himself as to shift his weight on a delicately balanced steel beam while riding it across the river, and they thought my right arm healed mighty quick after having been hurt so badly that it was useless while I was in the water.
I never explained those things to them, nor how the Texas Rangers happened to be on hand when Smith came back to the American side. A repentant Benny Arentz was waiting to go on the next job with us when we got back to headquarters, and I don’t think any of the three men needed to know that I had intentionally shuffled Benny aside that night in Juarez so we could take a killer along with us as rigger in his place.
There were still other jobs to be done, and a boss isn’t much good if his men begin to lose faith in him.
I think they might have understood and forgiven my deception if I’d told them the whole truth, but somehow that was part of the past I wanted to forget. I’ve always felt I was a poor brother to Lola, and it was partly my fault, I guess, that she ended up in an El Paso crib.