CHAPTER XXV 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.