"A dollar and a half a day."
A dollar and a half a day! Surely a mere pittance; and yet the woman's
face was radiant with joy.
It was not long before Challoner found that his arms and back and
shoulders were perceptibly enlarging. At first it was merely at his
physical strength that he rejoiced; but this, in turn, soon made way for
a greater joy: he realised that his soul was surging back into his body;
he had driven it out, but it would not stay away.
From time to time, Challoner noted that the tamping was developing him
too much on one side. With the long broom handle, the weight down at the
end, his downward stroke had been a right-handed one. So now he tried
using force from the left side. And with that Challoner made a
discovery!
After many experiments it had been gradually borne in upon him that
light but incessant and vigorous tamping in one spot was more effective
than the heavy, battering strokes employed by the Italians. The stuff
was smooth and slippery when it first came in, and, consequently, all
that was necessary was something to induce the stones to slip gently
into solidity.
"If the tampers were only light enough," he argued to himself, "a fellow
could almost use two of them, one in each hand."
And so he tried it with the two tampers that were on the work; but they
proved to be too heavy. Then, one night, he made a pair of lighter ones
and experimented with them. It was too much of a strain; he could not
handle them satisfactorily. Somehow, the work needed the concentrated
effort of two arms.
All one night he sat up trying to figure it out. "And yet," he assured
himself repeatedly, "I'm on the right track." And so it proved. For at
four o'clock in the morning the idea came.
"I've got it!" he exclaimed, jumping to his feet. "A pump handle!"
A week later, Challoner rigged up a simple contrivance depending upon
strong leverage--one that would do the work of a man much more easily.
"It will do the work of _two_," he told himself.
But when Challoner had taken it to the works, the authorities refused
him permission to use it.
"This here is a real job. We haven't time to monkey with things like
that!" they told him with a sneer.
But Challoner was not to be turned aside so easily; and still he
persisted:--
"It will do the work of two."
Now it must not be supposed that Challoner was of a particularly
inventive nature; not a bit of it. Simply, he was a man of average
intelligence, working at a dollar and a half a day. His intelligence,
however, was superior to that of the men about him. Moreover, his brain
was independently busy, while his hands worked.
So now he rigged himself up a small trial mould, bought some sand and
cement and rock, and demonstrated the superiority of his pump-handle
contrivance with its strong leverage, its regularity and its strong,
steady beat, beat, beat, with two light tampers upon adjacent spots.
When they knocked off the mould, these same authorities found that
Challoner was right: this bit of concrete wall was as solid as if it had
been cut out of smooth azoic rock. So they called out:--
"All right, Challoner--try it on!"
Challoner tried it on the big wall. It worked like a charm.