“Good at figures?”
“Yes.”
Macmillan grunted. “Get that steel tape and measure up the concrete laid last week. It’s a quarter of a mile behind us. The carpenters are taking off the forms. I’ve had it checked once, but a double count won’t do any harm—and we’ll see how much you know.”
He whirled abruptly on his heel and yelled something up to the engineer of the big electric shovel. Nash did not wait for further orders, but found the tape and tramped off down the gully in the direction indicated by the subforeman.
For several miles here the course of the future aqueduct lay along the side of the mountain, flanked deep with soil. This made the excavation work easy. Huge steam and electric shovels, working with the method and precision of a human hand, could dig a trench as swiftly as the carpenters could follow with their falsework.
The plastic mass of sand, gravel, and cement was poured into these wooden forms and allowed to harden for a week, after which time all the molds were stripped away. Then measurements were taken of the completed work, checked back through the different books, and finally O.K.’d by the foreman of the camp.
Nash found his task quite easy, and followed right at the heels of the carpenters as they stripped off the wooden molds, entering the cubic yards in his notebook. At four o’clock he had finished, and promptly returned to Macmillan.
“What you doing back here at this hour?” snapped the subforeman. “Get tired?”
“I’ve finished,” Nash replied.
“Finished? You mean you’ve checked up all that concrete?”