“Frame up!”
Then while workmen proceeded to loop the “falls,” hempen ropes, of the hoisting derrick about the ponderous yellow rib which Tim had hauled from the shaping sawmill, he muttered to the visitor:
“Go round with you in a minute, Cap’n Bob! Just let’s get this half of a square frame in place first, so’s they can bolt her down! Whoops-ma-daisy! Up she goes!”
Up she went, indeed, the rich boy leaving Tim nosing blindly into the dry shavings and helping to steady her--the great rib--in the hoisting-tackle.
“I knew the lad had it in him,” was the foreman’s silent comment. “There’ll be no more thought of quitting; he’ll work overtime now, to stand back of Cap’n Bob--and his kind--to the last punch in him!... Steady her there--now!” he cried aloud, as the beveled frame hovered over the backbone-keel to which it would be bolted, and then settled down upon it, another rib added to the ship’s skeleton. “A mite more to the right! Hold her now!”
Ship-carpenters did. Two, leaping upon the stocks--the platform of protruding blocks, arranged cross and criss-cross, on which the skeleton rested--steadied the rib with their horny hands.
The boy did more--the boy who had cried out against Gloucester “going up.”
Aflame from neck to heel--bareheaded now--he sprang upon the protruding stocks, too, and, facing the yard, bent his back, his broad, muscular, young back, under that ponderous frame, so contributing his mite towards steadying it in place until it could be shored up--propped in its own place.
And it was then--then--to his own excited feeling, not to his conscious thought--that he became Atlas upholding Gloucester, supporting shipping--bearing up the World!
A cramped position! Well, presently every bone in him ached, and swelled, as it seemed, under the heavy pressure, although the half-ton rib, balanced upon the narrow keel, was still suspended in--supported by--the derrick’s falls.