Dinner-time came around; the men shared their grub with my mate and me, Hell-fire Gahey giving me a considerable share of his food. Red Billy, who took his grub along with us, cut his bread into thin slices with a dirty tobacco-stained knife, and remarked that he always liked tobacco juice for kitchen. Red Billy chewed the cud after eating, a most curious, but, as I have learned since, not an unprecedented thing. He was very proud of this peculiarity, and said that the gift—he called it a gift—was the outcome of a desire when young and hungry to chew over again the food which he had already eaten.
No one spoke of my proposed fight with Gahey, and I wondered at this silence. I asked Moleskin if Hell-fire was afraid of me.
"Not at all," said Joe. "But he won't put his dinner-hour to loss by thrashin' a light rung of a cully like you. That's the kind of him."
I laughed as if enjoying Joe's remark, but in my mind I resolved to go for Gahey as soon as I got the chance, and hammer him, if able, until he shrieked for mercy. It was most annoying to know that a man would not put his time to loss in fighting me.
We finished work at six o'clock in the evening, and Moleskin and I obtained two shillings of sub.[11] apiece. Then we set off for the store, a large rambling building in which all kinds of provisions were stored, and bought food. Having procured one loaf, one pound of steak, one can of condensed milk and a pennyworth of tea and sugar, we went to our future quarters in Red Billy's shack.
Our ganger built a large shack at Kinlochleven when work was started there, and furnished it with a hot-plate, beds, bedding, and a door. He forgot all about windows, or at least considered them unnecessary for the dwelling-place of navvy men. Once a learned man objected to the lack of fresh air in Billy's shack. "If you go outside the door you'll get plenty of air, and if you stay out it will be fresher here," was Billy's answer. To do Billy justice, it is necessary to say that he slept in the shack himself. Three shillings a week secured the part use of a bedplace for each man, and the hot-plate was used in common by the inmates of the shack. At the end of the week the three shillings were deducted from the men's pay. Moleskin and I had no difficulty in securing a bed, which we had to share with Gahey, my rival. Usually three men lay in each bunk, and sometimes it happened that four unwashed dirty humans were huddled together under the one evil-smelling, flea-covered blanket.
Red Billy's shack was built of tarred wooden piles, shoved endwise into the earth, and held together by iron cross-bars and wooden couplings. Standing some distance apart from the others, it was neither better nor worse than any of the rest. I mean that it could be no worse; and there was not a better shack in all the place. As it happened to stand on a mountain spring a few planks were thrown across the floor to prevent the water from rising over the shoe-mouths of the inmates. In warm weather the water did not come over the flooring; in the rainy season the flooring was always under the water. A man once said that the Highlands were the rain-trough of the whole world.
The beds were arranged one over another in three rows which ran round the entire hut, which was twelve feet high and about thirty feet square. The sanitary authorities took good care to see that every cow in the byre at Braxey farm had so many cubic feet of breathing space, but there was no one to bother about the navvies' byres in Kinlochleven; it was not worth anybody's while to bother about our manner of living.
Moleskin and I had no frying-pan, but Gahey offered us the use of his, until such time as we raised the price of one. We accepted the offer and forthwith proceeded to cook a good square supper. It had barely taken us five minutes to secure our provisions, but by the time we started operations on the hot-plate the gamblers were busy at work, playing banker on a discarded box in the centre of the building. Gahey, who was one of the players, seemed to have forgotten all about the projected fight between himself and me.