"Held like a louse was Cassidy, until the train threw him clear," concluded Billy, adding reflectively that "he might have been saved if he had had somethin' in one hand to hack the other hand off with."
Joe told how one Ned Farley got his legs wedged between the planks of a mason's scaffold and hung there head downwards for three hours. When Farley got relieved he was a raving madman, and died two hours afterwards. We all agreed that death was the only way out in a case like that.
Gahey told of a night's doss at the bottom of a coal slip in a railway siding. He slept there with three other people, two men and a woman. As the woman was a bad one it did not matter very much to anyone where she slept. During the night a waggon of coal was suddenly shot down the slip. Gahey got clear, leaving his thumb with the three corpses which remained behind.
"It was a bad endin', even for a woman like that," someone said.
Outside the winds of the night scampered madly, whistling through every crevice of the shack and threatening to smash all its timbers to pieces. We bent closer over the hot-plate, and the many who could not draw near to the heat scrambled into bed and sought warmth under the meagre blankets. Suddenly the lamp went out, and a darkness crept into the corners of the dwelling, causing the figures of my mates to assume fantastic shapes in the gloom. The circle around the hot-plate drew closer, and long lean arms were stretched out towards the flames and the redness. Seldom may a man have the chance to look on hands like those of my mates. Fingers were missing from many, scraggy scars seaming along the wrists or across the palms of others told of accidents which had taken place on many precarious shifts. The faces near me were those of ghouls worn out in some unholy midnight revel. Sunken eyes glared balefully in the dim unearthly light of the fire, and as I looked at them a moment's terror settled on my soul. For a second I lived in an early age, and my mates were the cave-dwellers of an older world than mine. In the darkness, near the door, a pipe glowed brightly for a moment, then the light went suddenly out and the gloom settled again. The reaction came when Two-shift Mullholland's song, The Bold Navvy Man, was sung by Clancy of the Cross. We joined lustily in the chorus, and the roof shook with the thunder of our voices.
"THE BOLD NAVVY MAN.
"I've navvied here in Scotland, I've navvied in the south,
Without a drink to cheer me or a crust to cross me mouth,
I fed when I was workin' and starved when out on tramp,
And the stone has been me pillow and the moon above me lamp.