Summary
Glacial winds scour the Chugach Range while two iron serpents lurch toward the same gaping river gorge. Murray O’Neil, sleeves rolled above frost-lashed forearms, drives his survey stakes as if each blow could hammer rectitude into the continent itself. Across the muskeg, Curtis Gordon’s payroll brutes burn tent-villages, bribe Aleut elders, and spike counterfeit rails that gleam like quicksilver lies. Between them, a cantilevered skeleton of steel—half bridge, half prayer—swings above black water whose ice pans already groan with spring’s approaching artillery. O’Neil’s creed: every rivet must sing with honesty; Gordon’s gospel: velocity justifies villainy. Their race coils through gambling dens in Nome, through avalanche chutes that cough death down gullies, through the flickering affections of two women: Alma Tell’s engineer-poet who sketches stress diagrams on birch bark, and Betty Carpenter’s war-correspondent whose flash-powder exposes graft. When the midnight sun bleeds low, the bridge’s final girder hangs like a question mark; meltwater drums louder than dynamite; locomotives hiss, pistons pounding a countdown to obliteration. One man will lay steel across eternity, the other will watch the river gorge swallow ambition whole.
Synopsis
Honest railroad man Murray O'Neil competes with the crooked railroader Curtis Gordon to be the first to complete a trans-Alaska railroad. O'Neil must complete work on a massive bridge before the spring ice floes can destroy the project.
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