"What do you want?"
"Work!" replied the man inside the shell of Challoner.
"With the 'ginneys'?"
"With the 'ginneys,'" assented Challoner.
The foreman stared.
"All right," he said, after thinking a bit, "let's have your name."
For a brief second Challoner hesitated; there was a new light in his
eyes when he said:--
"Challoner--J. L."
And all that day he worked--worked with his hands, and with his
feet--worked with the gang tamping concrete. It is a simple enough
process when one stands aside and looks at it; but after two hours of
it, Challoner thought he would drop in his tracks.
It so happened that his work was on a new department store going up in
town. Concrete suddenly had come into prominence as a building material.
Challoner and the gang stood inside a wooden mould some two or three
feet wide and as long as the wall which they were building; another gang
poured in about them a mixture of sand, cement, and stone. Sand, cement,
and stone meant nothing to Challoner, except that when those three
things were mixed with water and dumped down into his trench, he had to
lift up his tamper and pound, pound, pound the mixture into solidity, in
order to fill the crevices, and to make the wall hard and smooth.
Meanwhile, his feet were soaked; his boots were caked with cement; his
hands were blistered frightfully; and his face was burned by the sun.
Nevertheless, Challoner sweated, toiled on.
For days after this first day of labour he was stiff, lame, and sore all
over. In his soul he wanted to die; but he lived on. And then, much to
his amazement, he found that the harder he worked, the better he felt:
the poison of his dissolute living was working toward the surface.
At last the day came when the doctors allowed him to visit Miriam in the
hospital.
"I've got a job, dear," he whispered to her. That was all he told her
then; but those five words were a history to Miriam.
Another day when again visiting her at the hospital, he told her how
they mixed the stuff, how they made the wooden moulds, and about the
crowds that gathered around them, for the process was a new one.
"People don't believe in it, don't think it will stand," he said,
watching her closely.
On her face came the interested look that he so desired, and she
asked:--
"Will it, Laurie?"
"Like a rock," he assured her.
But Challoner was ignorant of the danger then, for he had not reckoned
with the human element in the character of construction. All he knew was
that he worked from morning until night at the cheapest of all cheap,
unskilled labour.
After a little while Miriam put out a thin hand and let it rest in his,
saying:--
"How much do they give you, dear?"