A Man to His Mate

by J. Allan Dunn

Buckets of coffee, stews, and thick soups of peas and lentils, masses of beans with plenty of fat pork, these were what they craved after hours of tremendous endeavor. Despite the cold, they sweated profusely at their tasks, stripping off over-garments as they picked and shoveled or crowbarred out the rich gravel.

Peggy Simms worked with the rest, assisting Tamada, helping to serve with Sandy. Deming, and Beale, the man with the damaged ribs, were given odd jobs that they could handle: feeding the fires, washing up, or assisting at the little forge where the drills were sharpened.

Through all of it Lund was supreme as working superintendent. There was no job that he could not, did not, handle better than any two of them, and, though Rainey could see a shrinkage, or a compression, of his bulk as day by day he called upon it for heroic service, he never seemed to tire.

"Got to keep 'em at it," he would say in the cabin. "No time to lose, an' the odds all against us, in a way. Barring Luck. That's what we got to count on, but we don't want them thinkin' that. If the weather don't break—an' break jest right—as soon as we've cleaned up, we're stung. Though I'll blast a way out of this shore ice, if it comes to the worst. I saved out some dynamite on purpose."

"We ought to have brought a steam-shovel along," said Rainey. He was hard as iron, but he had served a tough apprenticeship to labor, and his hands and nails, he fancied, would never get into shape again.

"Now you're talkin'," agreed Lund. "We c'ud have handled it in fine shape an' left the machine behind as junk or a souvenir for our Jap friends. We've got to cut out this four-hour shift. Too much time wasted changin'. Too many meals. We'll make it one long, steady shift of all hands long as we can stand up to it, an' all git reg'lar sleep. I'm needin' some myself."

Rainey knew that neither he nor Hansen got within two-thirds as much out of their shifts as when Lund was in command, though he had given them the pick of the men. It was not that the men malingered, they simply, neither of them, had the knack of keeping the work going at top speed and top effectiveness.

But, with Lund handling all of them as a unit, it was not long before the shovels began to scrape on the bare rock that underlay the gravel at tide edge, and work swiftly back to the end of the U. The outdoors kitchen had been established on top of the promontory between the schooner and the beach, a primitive arrangement of big pots slung from tripods over fires kindled on a flat area that was partly sheltered from the sea and the prevailing winds by outcrops of weathered lava.

At dawn the men trooped from the schooner to be fed and warmed, and then they flung themselves at their task. The more they got out the more there was in it for them. But Lund was their overlord, their better, and they knew it. Only Deming worked with one hand the handle of the forge bellows, or fed the fires, and sneered.

Lund stood a full head above the tallest of them, which was Rainey, and he was always in the thick of the work, directing, demanding the utmost, and setting example to back command. His eyes had bothered him, and he had made a pair of Arctic snow-glasses, mere circles of wood with slits in them. But under these the sweat gathered, and he discarded them, resorting to the primitive device of smearing soot all about his eyes. This, he said, gave him relief, but it made him a weird sort of Caliban in his labors.