“Larry, here, says it can be stopped,” he said, “but he didn’t tell me how.”
“What is that?” asked the chief quickly. “Another idea of yours, Donovan?”
Larry flushed a bit under the pallor of his weariness.
“It’s nothing that anybody wouldn’t have thought of, if they had seen what we did,” he explained modestly. “There is a big ledge of the shale at the top of the slide, as Dick has told you, and I guess it’s been weathering and crumbling for hundreds of years. What I thought of was this: if we could get up there some way with men and material and a cement-gun, a coating of cement could be shot all over the face of the ledge and so sort of seal it up and keep it from weathering any more.”
The grave-eyed chief exchanged glances with Goldrick. Then he said:
“I thought you were a machinist’s helper, and the like, Larry, before you came on this job. What do you know about cement work and cement-guns?”
Larry flushed again.
“It just happened,” he stammered. “Last summer, when the Brewster Electric Power and Light Company had trouble with that crumbling rock above their dam, I went out there one day and saw them shooting a new surface on it with a cement-gun. And the surface has stood and kept it from crumbling any more.”
Again there was a little silence in the chief’s tent. At the end of it Mr. Ackerman said: