THE MAN WHO THRASHED CARROTY DAN
"He could fight like a red, roaring bull."
--MOLESKIN JOE.
Sixpence an hour meant thirty shillings a week, and a man was allowed to
work overtime until he fell at his shift. For Sunday work ninepence an
hour was given, so the navvies told me, and now I looked forward to the
time when I would have money enough and to spare. In anticipation I
computed my weekly earnings as amounting to two pounds ten, and I dreamt
of a day in the near future when I could again go south, find Norah
Ryan, and take her home as my wife to Glenmornan. I never thought of
making my home in a strange land. Oh! what dreams came to me that
morning as I took my place among the forty ragged members of Red Billy's
gang! Life opened freshly; my morbid fancies were dispelled, and I
blessed the day that saw my birth. I looked forward to the future and
said that it was time for me to begin saving money. When a man is in
misery he recoils from the thoughts of the future, but when he is happy
he looks forward in eager delight to the time to come.
The principal labour of Red Billy's gang was rock-blasting. This work is
very dangerous and requires skilful handling of the hammer. In the art
of the hammer I was quite an adept, for did I not work under Horse Roche
on the ---- Railway before setting out for Kinlochleven? Still, for all
that, I have known men who could not use a hammer rightly if they worked
with one until the crack of doom.
I was new to the work of the jumper gang, but I soon learned how
operations were performed. One man--the "holder"--sat on the rock which
was to be bored, his legs straight out in front of him and well apart.
Between his knees he held the tempered steel drill with its sharp nose
thrust into the rock. The drill or "jumper" is about five feet long, and
the blunt upper end is rounded to receive the full force of the
descending hammer. Five men worked each drill, one holding it to the
rock while the other four struck it with their hammers in rotation. The
work requires nerve and skill, for the smallest error in a striker's
judgment would be fatal to the holder. The hammer is swung clear from
the hip and travels eighteen feet or more before it comes in contact
with the inch-square upper end of the jumper. The whole course of the
blow is calculated instinctively before the hammer rises to the swing.
This work is classed as unskilled labour.
When it is considered that men often work the whole ten-hour shift with
the eternal hammer in their hands it is really a wonder that more
accidents do not take place, especially since the labour is often
performed after a night's heavy drinking or gambling. A holder is seldom
wounded; when he is struck he dies. Only once have I seen a man thus get
killed. The descending hammer flew clear of the jumper and caught the
poor fellow over the temple, knocking him stiff dead.
Red Billy's gang was divided into squads, each consisting of five
persons. We completed a squad not filled up before our arrival, and
proceeded to work with our two hammers. Stripped to our trousers and
shirt, and puffing happily at our pipes, we were soon into the lie of
the job, and swung our heavy hammers over our heads to the virile music
of meeting steel. Most of the men knew Joe. He had worked somewhere and
at some time with most on the place, and all had a warm word of welcome
for Moleskin. "By God, it's Moleskin! Have you a chew of 'baccy to
spare?" was the usual form of greeting. There was no handshake. It is
unknown among the navvies, just as kissing is unknown in Glenmornan. For
a few hours nobody took any notice of me, but at last my mate introduced
me to several of those who had gathered around, when we took advantage
of Red Billy's absence to fill our pipes and set them alight.
"Do you know that kid there, that mate of mine?" he asked, pointing at
me with his pipe-shank. I felt confused, for every eye was fixed on me,
and lifting my hammer I turned to my work, trying thus to hide my
self-consciousness.
"A blackleg without the spunk of a sparrow!" said one man, a
tough-looking fellow with the thumb of one hand missing, who, not
satisfied with taking off his coat to work, had taken off his shirt as
well. "What the hell are you workin' for when the ganger is out of
sight?"
I felt nettled and dropped my hammer.
"I did not know that it was wrong to work when the ganger was out of
sight," I said to the man who had spoken. "But if you want to shove it
on to me you are in the wrong shop!"
"That's the way to speak, Flynn," said Moleskin approvingly. Then he
turned to the rest of the men.
"That kid, that mate of mine, rose stripped naked from his bed and
thrashed Carroty Dan in Burn's model lodging-house," he said. "Now it
takes a good man to thrash Carroty."
"_I_ knocked Carroty out," said the man who accused me of working when
the ganger was out of sight, and he looked covertly in my direction.
"There's a chance for you, Flynn!" cried Moleskin, in a delighted
voice. "You'll never get the like of it again. Just pitch into Hell-fire
Gahey and show him how you handle your pair of fives."
Gahey looked at me openly and eagerly, evincing all tokens of pleasure
and willingness to come to fistic conclusions with me there and then. As
for myself, I felt in just the right mood for a bit of a tussle, but at
that moment Red Billy appeared from behind the crane handle and shouted
across angrily:
"Come along, you God-damned, forsaken, lousy, beggarly, forespent
wastrels, and get some work done!" he cried.
"Can a man not get time to light his pipe?" remonstrated Moleskin.
"Time in hell!" shouted Billy. "You're not paid for strikin' matches
here."
We started work again; the fight was off for the moment, and I felt
sorry. It is disappointing to rise to a pitch of excitement over
nothing; and a fight keeps a man alert and alive.
Having bored the rock through to the depth of four or five feet, we
placed dynamite in the hole, attached a fuse, lit it, and hurried off to
a place of safety until the rock was blown to atoms. Then we returned to
our labour at the jumper and hammer.
Dinner-time came around; the men shared their grub with my mate and me,
Hell-fire Gahey giving me a considerable share of his food. Red Billy,
who took his grub along with us, cut his bread into thin slices with a
dirty tobacco-stained knife, and remarked that he always liked tobacco
juice for kitchen. Red Billy chewed the cud after eating, a most
curious, but, as I have learned since, not an unprecedented thing. He
was very proud of this peculiarity, and said that the gift--he called it
a gift--was the outcome of a desire when young and hungry to chew over
again the food which he had already eaten.
No one spoke of my proposed fight with Gahey, and I wondered at this
silence. I asked Moleskin if Hell-fire was afraid of me.
"Not at all," said Joe. "But he won't put his dinner-hour to loss by
thrashin' a light rung of a cully like you. That's the kind of him."
I laughed as if enjoying Joe's remark, but in my mind I resolved to go
for Gahey as soon as I got the chance, and hammer him, if able, until he
shrieked for mercy. It was most annoying to know that a man would not
put his time to loss in fighting me.
We finished work at six o'clock in the evening, and Moleskin and I
obtained two shillings of sub.[11] apiece. Then we set off for the
store, a large rambling building in which all kinds of provisions were
stored, and bought food. Having procured one loaf, one pound of steak,
one can of condensed milk and a pennyworth of tea and sugar, we went to
our future quarters in Red Billy's shack.
Our ganger built a large shack at Kinlochleven when work was started
there, and furnished it with a hot-plate, beds, bedding, and a door. He
forgot all about windows, or at least considered them unnecessary for
the dwelling-place of navvy men. Once a learned man objected to the lack
of fresh air in Billy's shack. "If you go outside the door you'll get
plenty of air, and if you stay out it will be fresher here," was Billy's
answer. To do Billy justice, it is necessary to say that he slept in the
shack himself. Three shillings a week secured the part use of a bedplace
for each man, and the hot-plate was used in common by the inmates of the
shack. At the end of the week the three shillings were deducted from the
men's pay. Moleskin and I had no difficulty in securing a bed, which we
had to share with Gahey, my rival. Usually three men lay in each bunk,
and sometimes it happened that four unwashed dirty humans were huddled
together under the one evil-smelling, flea-covered blanket.
Red Billy's shack was built of tarred wooden piles, shoved endwise into
the earth, and held together by iron cross-bars and wooden couplings.
Standing some distance apart from the others, it was neither better nor
worse than any of the rest. I mean that it could be no worse; and there
was not a better shack in all the place. As it happened to stand on a
mountain spring a few planks were thrown across the floor to prevent the
water from rising over the shoe-mouths of the inmates. In warm weather
the water did not come over the flooring; in the rainy season the
flooring was always under the water. A man once said that the Highlands
were the rain-trough of the whole world.
The beds were arranged one over another in three rows which ran round
the entire hut, which was twelve feet high and about thirty feet square.
The sanitary authorities took good care to see that every cow in the
byre at Braxey farm had so many cubic feet of breathing space, but there
was no one to bother about the navvies' byres in Kinlochleven; it was
not worth anybody's while to bother about our manner of living.
Moleskin and I had no frying-pan, but Gahey offered us the use of his,
until such time as we raised the price of one. We accepted the offer and
forthwith proceeded to cook a good square supper. It had barely taken us
five minutes to secure our provisions, but by the time we started
operations on the hot-plate the gamblers were busy at work, playing
banker on a discarded box in the centre of the building. Gahey, who was
one of the players, seemed to have forgotten all about the projected
fight between himself and me.
"Is Gahey not going to fight?" I asked Moleskin in a whisper.
"My God! don't you see that he's playin' banker?" said Joe, and I had to
be content with that answer, which was also an explanation of the man's
lack of remembrance. Fighting must be awfully common and boring to the
man when he forgets one so easily, I thought. To me a fight was
something which I looked forward to for days, and which I thought of for
weeks afterwards. Now I felt a trifle afraid of Gahey. I was of little
account in his eyes, and I concluded, for I jump quickly to conclusions,
that I would not make much of a show if I stood up against such a man, a
man who looked upon a fight as something hardly worthy of notice. I
decided to let the matter drop and trouble about it no further. I think
that if Gahey had asked me to fight at that moment I should have
refused. The truth was that I became frightened of the man.
"Can I have a hand while I'm cookin' my grub?" Joe asked the dealer, a
man of many oaths whose name was Maloney, a personage already enshrined
in the song written by Mullholland on the _Shootin' of the Crow_.
"The more the merrier!" was the answer, given in a tone of hearty
assent. On hearing these words Moleskin left the pan under my care, put
down a coin on the table, and with one eye on the steak, and another on
the game, he waited for the turn-up of the banker's card. During the
whole meal my mate devoted the intervals between bites to the placing of
money on the card table. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost, and when
the game concluded with a free fight my mate had lost every penny of his
sub., and thirteen pence which he had borrowed from me. It was hard to
determine how the quarrel started, but at the commencement nearly every
one of the players was involved in the fight, which gradually resolved
itself into an affair between two of the gamblers, Blasting Mick and
Ben the Moocher.
Red Billy Davis came in at that moment, and between two planks,
wallowing in the filth, he found the combatants tearing at one another
for all they were worth.
"Go out and fight, and be damned to yous!" roared Red Billy, catching
the two men as they scrambled to their feet. "You want to break
ev'rything in the place, you do! Curses be on you! go out into the world
and fight!" he cried, taking them by their necks and shoving them
through the door.
Nothing daunted, however, both continued the quarrel outside in the
darkness. No one evinced any desire to go out and see the result of the
fight, but I was on the tip-toe of suspense waiting for the finish of
the encounter. I could hear the combatants panting and slipping outside,
but thinking that the inmates of the shack would consider me a greenhorn
if I went to look at the fight I remained inside. I resolved to follow
Moleskin's guidance for at least a little while longer; I lacked the
confidence to work on my own initiative.
"Clean broke!" said Moleskin, alluding to his own predicament, as he sat
down by the fire, and asked the man next to him for a chew of tobacco.
"Money is made round to go round, anyway," he went on; "and there is
some as say that it is made flat to build upon, but that's damned rot.
Doesn't ev'ryone here agree with that?"
"Ev'ryone," was the hearty response.
"Why the devil do all of you agree?" Joe looked savagely exasperated.
"Has no man here an opinion of his own? You, Tom Slavin, used to save
your pay when you did graft at Toward Waterworks, and what did _you_ do
with your money?"
Tom Slavin was a youngish fellow, and Joe's enquiry caused him to look
redder than the hot-plate.
"He bought penny ribbons and brass bracelets for Ganger Farley's
daughter," put in Red Billy, who had quickly regained his good humour;
"but in the end the jade went and married a carpenter from Glasgow."
Red Billy chuckled in his beard. He was twice a widower, grass and clay,
and he was a very cynical old man. I did not take much heed to the
conversation; I was listening to the scuffle outside.
"What did I always say about women!" said Moleskin, launching into the
subject of the fair sex. "Once get into the hands of a woman and she'll
drive you to hell and leave you with the devil when she gets you there.
How many fools can a woman put through her hands? Eh! How much water can
run through a sieve? No matter how many lovers a woman has, she has
always room for one more. It's a well-filled barn that doesn't give room
for the threshin' of one extra sheaf. Comin' back to that sliver of a
Slavin's wenchin', who is the worst off now, the carpenter or Tom? I'll
go bail that one is jealous of the other; that one's damned because he
did and the other's damned because he didn't."
"There's a sort of woman, Gourock Ellen they call her," interrupted Red
Billy with a chuckle, "and she nearly led you to hell in Glasgow three
years ago, Mister Moleskin."
"And what about the old heifer you made love to in Clydebank, Moleskin?"
asked James Clancy, a man with a broken nose and great fame as a singer,
who had not spoken before.
"Oh! that Glasgow woman," said Moleskin, taking no heed of the second
question. "I didn't think very much of her."
"What was wrong with her?" asked Billy.
"She was a woman; isn't that enough?"
"It was a different story on the night when you and Ginger Simpson
fought about her in the Saltmarket," cut in some individual who was
sitting in the bed sewing patches on his trousers.
"I've fought my man and knocked him out many a time, when there wasn't a
wench within ten miles of me," cried Moleskin. "Doesn't ev'ryone here
believe that?"
"But that woman in Clydebank!" persisted Clancy.
"Have you seen Ginger Simpson of late?" said Moleskin, making an effort
to change the subject, for he observed that he was cornered. It was
evident that some of the inmates of the shack had learned facts relating
to his career, which Moleskin would have preferred to remain unknown.
"Last winter I met him in Greenock," said Sandy MacDonald, a man with a
wasting disease, who lay in a corner bunk at the end of the shack. "He
told me all about the fight in the Saltmarket, and that Gourock
Ellen----"
"But the Clydebank woman----"
"Listen!" said Joe, interrupting Clancy's remark. "They're at it outside
yet. It must be a hell of a fight between the two of them."
He referred to Blasting Mick and Ben the Moocher, who were still busily
engaged in thrashing one another outside, and in the silence that
followed Joe's remark I could hear distinctly the thud of many blows
given and taken by the two combatants in the darkness.
"Let them fight; that's nothin' to us," said Red Billy, taking a bite
from the end of his plug. "But for my own part I would like to know
where Gourock Ellen is now."
Joe made no answer; he was visibly annoyed, and I saw his fists closing
tightly.
"Do you mind the Clydebank woman, Moleskin?" asked Clancy, making a
final effort in his enquiries. "She was fond of her pint, and had a
horrid squint."
"I'll squint you, by God!" roared Moleskin, reaching out and gripping
Clancy by the scruff of the neck. "If I hear you talkin' about Clydebank
again, I'll thicken your ear for you, seein' that I cannot break your
nose! And you, you red-bearded sprat, you!" this to Red Billy Davis; "if
you mention Gourock Ellen again, I'll leave your eyes in such a state
that you'll not be fit to see one of your own gang for six months to
come."
Just at that moment the two fighters came in, and attracted the whole
attention of the party inside by their appearance. They looked worn and
dishevelled, their clothes were torn to ribbons, their cheeks were
covered with clay and blood, and their hair and beards looked like mops
which had been used in sweeping the bottom of a midden. One good result
of the two men's timely entrance was that the rest of the party forgot
their own particular grievances.
"Quite pleased with yoursels now?" asked Red Billy Davis, but the
combatants did not answer. They sat down, took off their boots, scraped
the clay from their wounds, and turned into bed.
"Moleskin, do you know Gourock Ellen?" I asked my mate when later I
found him sitting alone in a quiet corner.
Moleskin glared at me furiously. "By this and by that, Flynn! if you
talk to me about Gourock Ellen again I'll scalp you," he answered.
For a moment I felt a trifle angry, but having sense enough to see that
Moleskin was sore cut with the outcome of the argument, and knowing that
he was the only friend whom I had in all Kinlochleven I kept silent,
stifling the words of anger that had risen to my tongue. By humouring
one another's moods we have become inseparable friends.
One by one the men turned into bed. Maloney having collared all the
day's sub. there was no more gambling that night. Joe sat for a while
bare naked, getting a belly heat at the fire, as he himself expressed
it, before he turned into bed.
"Where have you left your duds, Flynn?" he asked, as he rose to his feet
and extinguished the naphtha lamp which hung from the roof by a piece of
wire. I was already under the blankets, glad of their warmth, meagre
though it was, after so many long chilly nights on the road.
"They are under my pillow," I answered.
"And your bluchers?"
"On the floor."
"Put them under your pillow too, or maybe you'll be without them in the
mornin'."
Acting upon Joe's advice, I jumped out of bed, groped in the darkness,
found my boots and placed them under my pillow. Presently, wedged in
between the naked bodies of Moleskin Joe and Hell-fire Gahey, I
endeavoured to test the strength of the latter's arms by pressing them
with my fingers. The man was asleep, if snoring was to be taken as a
sign, and presently I was running my hand over his body, testing the
muscles of his arms, shoulders, and chest. He was covered with hair,
more like a brute than a human; long, curling, matted hair, that was
rough as fine wire when the hand came in contact with it. The
rubber-like pliability of the man's long arms impressed me, and assured
me that he would be a quick hitter when he started fighting. Added to
that he had a great fame as a fighting man in Kinlochleven. He was a
loud snorer too; I have never met a man who could snore like Gahey, and
snoring is one of the vices which I detest. Being very tired after the
long homeless tramp from Greenock, I fell asleep by-and-bye; but I did
not sleep for long. The angry voice of Joe awakened me, and I heard him
expostulate with Hell-fire on the unequal distribution of the blankets.
"You hell-forsaken Irish blanket-grabber, you!" Joe was roaring;
"you've got all the clothes in the bed wrapped round your dirty hide."
"Ye're a hell-fire liar, and that's what ye are!" snorted Gahey. "It's
yerself that has got all the beddin'."
Joe replied with an oath and a vigorous tug at the blankets. In turn my
other bedmate pulled them back, and for nearly five minutes both men
engaged in a mad tug-of-war. Hell-fire got the best of it in the end,
for he placed his back against the wall of the shack, planted his feet
in my side, and pulled as hard as he was able until he regained complete
possession of the disputed clothing. Just then Moleskin's hand passed
over my head with a mighty swish in the direction of Gahey. I turned
rapidly round and lay face downwards on the pillow in order to avoid the
blows of the two men as they fought across my naked body. And they did
fight! The dull thud of fist on flesh, the grunts and pants of the men,
the creaking of the joints as their arms were thrown outwards, the jerky
spring of the wooden bunk-stanchions as they shook beneath the straining
bodies, and the numberless blows which landed on me in the darkness
makes the memory of the first night in Kinlochleven for ever green in my
mind.
Rising suddenly to his feet Gahey stood over me in a crouching position
with both his heels planted in the small of my back. The pain was almost
unendurable, and I got angry. It was almost impossible to move, but by a
supreme effort I managed to wriggle round and throw Gahey head-foremost
into Moleskin's arms, whereupon the two fighters slithered out of bed,
leaving the blankets to me, and continued their struggle on the floor.
Somewhere in the middle of the shack I could hear Red Billy swearing as
he endeavoured to light a match on the upper surface of the hot-plate.
"My blessed blankets!" he was lamenting. "You damned scoundrels! you'll
not leave one in the hut. Fighting in bed just the same as if you were
lyin' in a pig-sty. What the devil was I thinkin' of when I took on that
pig of a Moleskin Joe?"
Billy ceased thinking just then, for a wild swing of Moleskin's heavy
fist missed Gahey and caught the ganger under the ear. The whiskered one
dropped with a groan amid the floor-planks and lay, kicking, shouting
meanwhile that Moleskin had murdered him. Someone lit a match, and my
bedmates ceased fighting and seemed little the worse for their
adventure. Billy's face looked ghastly, and a red streak ran from his
nose into the puddle in which he lay. He had now stopped speaking and
was fearfully quiet. I jumped out of bed, shaking in every limb, for I
thought that the old ganger was killed.
"A tin of water thrown in his face will bring him round," I said, but
feared at the same time that it would not.
"Or a bucketful," someone suggested.
"Stab a pin under the quick of his nail."
"Burn a feather under his nose."
"Give him a dig in the back."
"Or a prod in the ribs."
The match had gone out, no one could find another, and the voices of
advice came from the darkness in all the corners of the room. Even old
Sandy MacDonald, who could find no cure for his own complaint, the
wasting disease, was offering endless advice on the means of curing Red
Billy Davis.
A match was again found; the lamp was lit, and after much rough
doctoring on the part of his gang, the ganger recovered and swore
himself to sleep. Joe and Gahey came back together and stood by the bed.
"It's myself that has the hard knuckles, Moleskin," said Gahey. "And
they're never loth to come in contact with flesh that's not belongin' to
the man who owns them."
"There's a plot of ground here, and it's called the 'Ring,'" said
Moleskin. "About seven o'clock the morrow evenin', I'll be out that way
for a stroll. Many a man has broke a hard knuckle against my jaw, and if
you just meet me in the Ring----"
"I'll take a bit of a dander round there, Joe," said Hell-fire, and
filled with ineffable content both men slipped into their bed, and fell
asleep. As for myself, the dawn was coming through a chink in the shack
when my eyes closed in slumber.
FOOTNOTE:
[11] Wages paid on the day on which it is earned.