"Well, it was just a scamper all round. Yes, scamper and scamping. I had some good brickies then—militia chaps, smart, and they could stay. They made the rings grow; I forget how much we got in that night, but a good length, for the bricks ran short at one end of the tunnel, and we were close up to the face at the other end. No one that I did not want to see was about. After measuring, I found we were short at least twenty yards of bricks, and only about two thousand or so left, so I said, 'Lads, if you finish the ring by five o'clock, you shall have a quid amongst you; but do it, and keep the beautiful clean face on for all you are worth.'
"I looked a bit crafty at them, and they twigged the tune to play. I took old Bond—he was my ganger—with me, and said to him, 'How are we going to do the lining?' We can't fetch bricks from the other end, and I draw the line at timber to do duty as bricks. I waited, and the 'extra' profit string of my brain worked right, and I pointed and said, 'There is a heap of broken bricks and no one knows what; well, twenty yards of that won't be noticed if you take it equally all round; put that in, and dose it with cement, and rake it well on the top of the rings, and don't forget to finish the top nicely and clean to a hair if you have not time to fill in all of it. Keep the best stuff for near the finish, and enough bricks to make a solid strip or two, and I am otherwise engaged or tired-out till four. Wake me then; I'm off for a peaceful snooze.' Well, they got it all in, and nothing was known till—I won't name it yet, it must wait."
"I suppose the bricks you took from the brick-yard were tallied, and deliveries checked with the work done in the lining?"
"Yes; but there is tallying of all sorts, and, of course, the right amount of bricks were taken from the yard early next morning, but where they went is best known to the yard foreman, the inspector of brickwork, and the dealer; but as my partnership with them is now at an end, of course my memory fails me, and I am sorry I can't give you any more information in that direction. It grieves me to keep back anything from you, and is so unlike me."
"I don't want to hurt your feelings. All right, I understand."
"Talk about varieties of concrete, why we had sardine and meat tins, all sorts and sizes and weights and ages, tiles, ashes, bones, glass, broken crockery, oyster shells, and a lot of black-beetles and such-like shining members of creation. They all did their duty to the best of their ability. What else there was I would rather not try to remember, but it was not bricks."
"Don't trouble, I can understand. We are all pushed a bit for the right goods sometimes, and have to make shift; but it is hard, very hard, to have to do it."
"Well, I found out that the bricks were not quite so many as I thought, and for a 5 feet length, about 15 feet from shaft No. 7, they had to do with one ring of brickwork, and the rest, my patent midnight conglomerate. That frightened me, and had I known it at the time, I would have stopped the show; of course I would, you know me. I always draw the line somewhere."
"Right you are; although 'somewhere' is an easy-stretching sort of place, and there is not much of a fixed abode about it; but it can generally be found on a foggy night."
"It's my belief they did not put in enough cement mortar, and carry out my orders, which indeed was very wrong of them."