That makes the life of stress and strife as suits the navvy man!
"Let her go, boys; let her go now!" roared Clancy, rising to his feet, kicking a stray frying-pan and causing it to clatter across the shack. "All together, boys; damn you, all together!
"Then hurrah! ev'ry one
For the bold navvy man,
For fun and fight are damned all right for any navvy man!"
Even old Sandy MacDonald joined in the chorus with his weak and querulous voice. The winter was touching him sharply, and he was worse off than any of us. Along with the cold he had his wasting disease to battle against, and God alone knew how he managed to work along with his strong and lusty mates on the hammer squad at Kinlochleven. Sandy was not an old man, but what with the dry cough that was in his throat and the shivers of cold that came over him after a long sweaty shift, it was easily seen that he had not many months to live in this world. He looked like a parcel of bones covered with brown withered parchment and set in the form of a man. How life could remain fretting within such a frame as his was a mystery which I could not solve. Almost beyond the effects of heat or cold, the cold sweat came out of his skin on the sweltering warm days, and when the winter came along, the chilly weather hardly made him colder than he was by nature. His cough never kept silent; sometimes it was like the bark of a dog, at other times it seemed as if it would carry the very entrails out of the man. In the summer he spat blood with it, but usually it was drier than the east wind.
At one period of his life Sandy had had a home and a wife away down in Greenock; but in those days he was a strong lusty fellow, fit to pull through a ten-hour shift without turning a hair. One winter's morning he came out from the sugar refinery, in which he worked, steaming hot from the long night's labour, and then the cold settled on him. Being a sober, steady-going man, he tried to work as long as he could lift his arms, but in the end he had to give up the job which meant life and home to him. One by one his little bits of things went to the pawnshop; but all the time he struggled along bravely, trying to keep the roof-tree over his head and his door shut against the lean spectre of hunger. Between the four bare walls of the house Sandy's wife died one day; and this caused the man to break up his home.
He came to Kinlochleven at the heel of the summer, and because he mastered his cough for a moment when asking for a job, Red Billy Davis started him on the jumper squad. The old ganger, despite his swearing habits and bluntness of discourse, was at heart a very good-natured fellow. Sandy stopped with us for a long while and it was pitiful to see him labouring there, his old bones creaking with every move of his emaciated body, and the cold sweat running off him all day. He ate very little; the tame robin which flitted round our shack nearly picked as much from off the floor. He had a bunk to himself at the corner of the shack, and there he coughed out the long sleepless hours of the night, bereft of all hope, lacking sympathy from any soul sib to himself, and praying for the grave which would end all his troubles. For days at a stretch he lay supine in his bed, unable to move hand or foot, then, when a moment's relief came to him, he rose and started on his shift again, crawling out with his mates like a wounded animal.
Winter came along and Sandy got no better; he could hardly grow worse and remain alive. Life burned in him like a dying candle in a ruined house, and he waited for the end of the great martyrdom patiently. Still, when he could, he kept working day in and day out, through cold and wet and storm. Heaven knows that it was not work which he needed, but care, rest, and sympathy. All of us expressed pity for the man, and helped him in little ways, trying to make life easier for him. Moleskin usually made gruel for him, while I read the Oban Times to the old fellow whenever that paper came into the shack. One evening as I read something concerning the Isle of Skye Sandy burst into tears, like a homesick child.
"Man! I would like tae dee there awa' in the Isle of Skye," he said to me in a yearning voice.