“Haven’t dug up another of your bright ideas—about this shale business, have you?”
“Not the ghost of one,” Larry laughed. “It’s a lot too big for me.”
“Will Mr. Goldrick’s bulkhead notion work out?”
“I sure hope it will. I don’t see anything else to try.”
“But you don’t believe it will work?”
“I’ve just been thinking,” was the doubtful reply. “You know how the stuff acted to-day when we were tramping back and forth over it; every little move made it slide just that much worse. I’ve been wondering if the jounce of the pile-driver isn’t going to keep it moving all the time. I wanted to say something about that while the talk was going on, only it wasn’t exactly a cub’s ‘put-in.’ Besides, I didn’t have anything better to suggest.”
“Well, you just let the little old think-mill keep on grinding,” Dick—respecting his chum’s powers of invention but still making a good-natured joke of them—chuckled mockingly. “If you can wrestle out the answer to the shale slide, maybe the company will fire Mr. Ackerman and give you his job.” And with that he turned over and went to sleep.
For quite some time after Dick’s regular breathing proved that he was making up for the day’s hard work, Larry lay awake with his hands clasped under his head, staring up into the darkness and grilling over the problem that was his to solve only because he was trying to learn all that he could in this, the most exciting as well as the most exhilarating summer vacation he had ever spent.
The general manager’s telegram congratulating him upon his success in helping to extricate the buried tunnel force at Tunnel Number Two—he was promising himself that in the years to come, after he had really made a success of himself, he would have that telegram framed and hung up where he could always see it—was a tremendous honor; but in a way it carried a lot of responsibility—or rather imposed a lot.
He had had a bit of the same sort of experience in school, where he had early set a pretty high mark as a “math. shark.” Having the mark, he had found that he had to live up to it, and he now had a sort of lurking suspicion that he was in for the same kind of a struggle. Mr. Maxwell had said he was making good, and he would be expected to go on making good. But this shale slide, which seemed to be puzzling even the competent and experienced engineers, was miles beyond any “boy” effort, and Larry was sensible enough to appreciate that. But yet—and yet again——