Maxwell unbuttoned his wristband, rolled up his 246 sleeve. “If I can’t, I’ll know the reason why,” he remarked tersely.
“That’s the stuff,” laughed Danny, looking at Maxwell’s muscle. “I guess I don’t want to meet you out walkin’ after dark without a gun. But say, why don’t you swat the Bishop one, and get your pay?”
“The Bishop isn’t responsible.”
“Well, I’ll bet I know who is, dang him; and I’d like to swat him one for you, the miserable old bag-of-bones.”
“Never you mind, Danny; I can take care of myself.”
“Sure you can, and I guess you’re a laborin’ man all right, even if you don’t belong to the Union. Why don’t you get up a parson’s Union and go on strike? By Jove! I would. Let your parish go to––”
“Danny, don’t you think it looks like rain?”
“No, neither do you; but here we are at the stone pile. My! but how the fellers will grin when they see a tenderfoot like you, and a parson at that, shovelin’ stone. But they won’t think any the less of you for it, mind you,” he reassured his companion.
Maxwell knew most of the men, and greeted them by name, and when he rolled up his sleeves and began work, they quickly saw that he was “no slouch,” and that he did not “soldier,” or shirk, as many of them 247 did—though sometimes they were inclined to rest on their shovels and chaff him good-naturedly, and ask him if he had his Union card with him.
Shoveling stone is no picnic, as Danny and his fellows would have put it. It is not only the hard, obstructed thrust, thrust of the shovel into the heap of broken stone, and the constant lift and swing of each shovelful into the wagon; it is the slow monotony of repetition of unvarying motion that becomes most irksome to the tyro, and wears down the nervous system of the old hand till his whole being is leveled to the insensibility of a soulless machine.