It was marvelous to see the way these men could handle loads of any weight and any shape on those little two-wheeled trucks. Nothing seemed to be too heavy, nothing too cumbersome to be balanced on a truck and wheeled away by one insignificant man. Hogsheads of tobacco weighing twenty-six hundred pounds were wrestled onto a truck by five or six husky men, and, once on securely, were trotted out unassisted by one consumptive looking Austrian.
At last Scott thought they were stuck on a crate of glass some ten feet long, four feet high and six inches thick which stood on edge against the wall and seemed too heavy to be moved by human force, but, he soon found, to his own humiliation, that he was mistaken. The loader, or caller, broke up with his steel freight-hook the cleats which held it, sized up the situation and called to Scott: “Break that out of there.”
Scott knew what that meant from watching the others. He stepped forward and with his foot on the axle of the truck drove the sharp blade deep under the edge of the crate. He then threw all his weight on the handles in an attempt to raise the load on the blade. The crate bobbed up a little but dropped back with a bump and jerked Scott violently up in the air like a cork. He tried three times with all his might but never got the box more than an inch from the floor.
At this point the caller interfered in a most humiliating manner.
“Better put some bricks in your pocket, boy,” he jeered. “Get out of the way and let a man get hold of that truck.”
That was a pretty hard thing to bear quietly from a man twenty pounds his inferior in weight, but Scott thought he would soon be vindicated because he did not believe that any man could budge that crate.
The caller drove his hook into the side of the car by way of hanging it up, grasped the handles of the truck and with a few quick jerks moved the crate out a foot or more from the wall. He then blocked the wheels with a chip of wood, placed his foot carefully on the axle, and grasping the handles tightly threw himself far forward over the crate. For one second he poised there and then threw himself violently backward with every ounce of impetus his muscles could summon to his aid. The handles went down within two feet of the floor and there seemed to hang in the balance. It was against the ethics of the shed to help him and all the men watched him struggle slowly and laboriously up between the handles at the same time keeping them down. With one final wriggle he gained the ascendancy and forced the handles to the floor.
“Here, Ole,” he called, “run your truck under there and get her balanced.”
Ole placed his truck, two men helped the caller let his handles slowly up and the great crate balanced serenely on the other truck.
“Here’s your truck, kid.” Then seeing the chagrined look on Scott’s face, “You’ll get on to it some day; it takes practice.”